RebelVox – Morphing the Phone call, Voice mail, Text message

A nice intro to a company that has rethought the approach to making “phone calls” by taking advantage of presence information. It is exciting to see an evolution in the metaphor of communication.

Watch 10 min video click here

Buzzword watch: “Missed Rendezvous” When two callers miss each other while leaving voicemail or listening to a voicemail greeting.

High Definition Camcorder – Canon Vixia HF11

Santa Claus was good to me and picked out the exact High Definition video camcorder that I would have picked for myself this Christmas. Recently, a few friends had asked me why I selected … I mean, why Santa selected that particular video camera. My response…

The Canon Vixia HF11 (which will be surpassed in February by the new cameras that Canon just announced January 2009 at the Consumer Electronic Show) is a great all-around camera for my personal video needs (family video, children sporting events) as well as some light video production work (shooting video of speakers and for my video podcast). My main reasons for selecting the HF11:

• HD. I mean really, high definition video on a consumer camera is so much better than standard definition on a consumer camera. The first crop of HD consumer level camera were nothing to get excited about, the image processors were poor, the video was muddled, the media was often tape-based.
• Selectable frame rate depending on the desired effect. A “cinema mode” at 24 frames per second progressive scan, as well as 30fps Progressive and 60fps Interlaced. Video buffs will tell you that Canon is using a technique to simulate these modes and that they are note “true” which is technically true. However, this is a consumer level HD camera and I wouldn’t expect that level of performance, yet.
• Hot shoe for shot gun mic. The connector on the top of the camera makes it easy to connect the Canon shot gun microphone which is a must for those school performances that you shoot from the back of the room.
• Microphone in jack ( handy for the podcasting and production work )
• 100% SD memory recording. Fewer breakable parts, faster transfer to computer for post production work.
• Additional slot for SD media which complements that internal memory. Canon does sell another version of this camera that is exactly the same except it doesn’t have any built in memory. The built in memory means that you will never forget to have memory with you (pardon the irony of that statement please).
• Up to a 24Mbps recording bit rate – the best bit rate that you can get for AVCHD. Companies are still refining their video compression algorithms but generally speaking, the higher the bit rate, the better video quality. The encoding format that is emerging for high definition video is AVCHD and the best bit rate that is supported in the format is 24Mbps. Some previous generations of HD video cameras only support up to 17Mbps.
• Good enough image sensor (the latest Canons have denser image sensor – more pixels – but a 3.2 megapixel image sensor is good enough for HD video and I don’t need/want a 8+ megapixel image sensor to use the video camera as a still camera.)
• Canon Digic image processing. Good color reproduction and below average noise in the video.
• Built-in light for illuminating low-light situations.

Of course there are other considerations when making the jump to HD video. If you plan to do your own editing you need a computer with adequate horse power. In addition, HD video eats storage space for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Make sure that you have a plan of how to store and back-up all that data otherwise you will find your computer’s hard drive is full with video.

So far I’m very pleased with Santa’s selection and I’ve been putting the camera to good use.

Pew. The Internet in 2020 – Hang On

To prep for some over-the-holiday thinking on the future of communications, I downloaded the latest Pew Future of the Internet survey “Future Of The Internet III,” a study released on 12/14/2008 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and was pleased with the amount of perspectives they gave me to digest. Predictions are a tricky business but Pew has come up with an approach that is a combination of “Wisdom of the Crowd” and extended commentary which yields some consensus while leaving room for dissenting opinions. I have only scratched the surface of the report (it’s 100+ pages) and haven’t thought through the implications on my project but wanted to share a couple highlights and some comments.

Mobility is where it’s at.

Pew survey consensus: Mobile phone/device will be the primary connection tool for most people in the world.

Comment:  Where I think this prediction is a little misleading is that “most people in the world” don’t have access to the kind of infrastructure that we do in the US and therefore a mobile phone/device is likely the only device within reach for the developing world.  While I certainly see a lot of potential for mobility services, it is also important to remember that wireless doesn’t go everywhere and though it is often perceived as a panacea for providing connections the technology does have limitations.  My view is somewhat skewed by my years of working for companies that provide wired connections, and I continue to see long-run advantages for wired networks.  At the same time a wired network benefits from the augmentation of wireless local access.

Incremental network improvement, not complete replacement.

Pew survey consensus:  Improvement to the infrastructure of the Internet is more likely to occur through incremental improvement and not a complete replacement.

Comment:  Although many of the technologies that make the Internet possible are quite old (Ethernet, TCP/IP, DNS) and have weaknesses, it is unlikely that there will be a movement to establish a new Internet.  To do so would be a costly endeavor, and would cut off the largest benefit of today’s Internet – the number of points that it connects.  The most valuable part of any network is the number of potential connections that it makes (Metcalfe’s Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe’s_law )

Protecting content will remain challenging

Pew survey consensus:  The digital economy will still struggle with charging for content, illicit use of copyrighted material and monitoring the use of content.

Comment:  From the view of knowledge workers this issue is an important one.  While it certainly is an issue that the media industry has struggled with as music, TV, movies have become digitized – it is an issue that increasingly impacts many people outside the media industry.

Touch it, talk to it, love it.

Pew survey consensus:  Our primary means to interact with technology will be touch and speech.

Comment:  User interface sure could get a lot better.  The mouse/window interface was the last big advance that I can think of and while it is better than the command line world for most functions it is still clumsy. 

 

I’m looking forward to digging in deeper to the research and to balance the perspectives here with Grown Up Digital the latest book by Dan Tapscott discussing the Net Generation.

New tools can deepen connections

A request

I have a request. Take 5 minutes and write a paragraph/list about what your friends should know about you – anything that you believe is recently relevant. Email the paragraph/list your friends right after you write it.

The reason for my request

I have been playing with some of the tools in the “social media” space (blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, podcasts) and paying close attention to how others are using those same tools.  I am amazed by how many ‘little’ things I have learned about my

Nicest wrong number message ever

OK – This one is a little out of the ordinary for my blog, but it was the best place that I had to share it. I was going through my old voice mail messages the other day and came across a wrong number message. Usually, if someone misdials, the message is a quick hang-up or a message for someone you have never heard of. This guy seemed sincerely sorry that he dialed the wrong number. Take a listen.  Click here for wav file. 

I think I find this message interesting because it is the exact opposite of what we have come to expect, but there is no reason that we should not expect this kind of behavior. Next time you misdial, be nice.

A Really Nice Podcasting Set-up

Recently, one of my clients asked for a budget proposal for setting up a recording studio specifically for podcasting. As part of their 2009 budget planning process they needed a placeholder amount for equipment, software and hosting. The podcasts could include anything from interviews to readings to announcements/programming information. I modeled a lot of the choices after Leo Laporte’s set-up which is outlined in the Kevin Rose visit http://revision3.com/systm/podcasting/ Although I couldn’t go wild on the budget, they did want a set-up that would be very solid, something they could grow with and grow into. Below is the list that I put together for them which provides for a very good recording solution at a very reasonable price ~ $6K. While some of the equipment

eMail Filters – One tool to cope with eMail

Last week I posted a 123Hints.com segment on eMail Filters. There were actually two segments; a primer on email filters (what they are, how they work, why they are useful) and a segment on how to set-up email filters within Apple Mail. I had a lot of fun creating the primer presentation in Keynote and trying to eliminate the use of bullet points within the content of the slides – an idea that I got while watching presentations from Merlin Mann and Craig Syverson during my trip to MacWorld 2008. The intent of this visually oriented presentation format is to break away from

Signal-to-noise, FriendFeed and my personal hang-ups on sharing info

I recently got an email from a good friend and former classmate who has been following my various posts and projects. He asked why I wasn’t using FriendFeed – a service to aggregate all the various social media services like blogs, Flickr, Twitter, etc. into a single feed for people to follow. I told him that I haven’t used FriendFeed yet out of two concerns (neither very well thought out) – over-whelming / low signal-to-noise ratio and a struggle over how public I want to be with my Internet life.

Over-whelming / low signal to noise ratio
Currently I only have a couple

Web tools: RSS & RSS Readers

There are so many new tools available on the web these days that it is hard to keep track of them, let alone to figure out what problem they actually solve for you. One example of such a tool is RSS or Really Simple Syndication. I just posted a video on my 123Hints.com web site & podcast that explains RSS and how to use a tool like Google Reader to take advantage of RSS.

RSS has been around for several years but is still catching on. While there are many applications for the technology, on example that resonates with most people is keeping up with news & blogs. Traditionally, if you wanted to check out the headlines at The New York

Helping libraries capture & share content

I had a great meeting last week with the Douglas County Library systems regarding the “content” that they produce. In my previous post What content did you create today – but threw away?! I discuss how all of us create content as we live our daily lives and with a very little amount of effort this content could be captured and shared with others. Granted, most of this daily life content isn’t interesting to a mass audience, but there is someone that it might be interesting to – so why not capture it and share it?! Millions of people do this every day with Flickr and other web 2.0 sharing services.

My meeting with the library explored the types of content that they capture and what they don’t capture.