everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2006

  • Video editing fun with Remixer

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    Check out the latest out of Yahoo Research Labs. Save & edit your favorite clips from the SF International Film Festival, re-arrange, lay down a soundtrack and share.

    . . . developed in collaboration with Yahoo! Research Berkeley and the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University. Besides the online gallery, a selection of the best remixes will screen at Edinburgh Castle.

    I really look forward to coming back and seeing what people put together. Totally amazing! Remixer.

  • TechCrunch on Mapping Services – Yahoo “by far the best”

    Ok, a little shameless high-fiving all around for the folks behind Yahoo Maps. Here’s Frank Gruber on TechCrunch after comparing Ask, Google, Mapquest, Windows Live, and Yahoo:

    Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API options.

    Check us out at maps.yahoo.com/beta

  • VGA on a Cellphone

    vod904sh.jpgFollowing on my previous post on Tivo on the cellphone, if you’re going to do it, you’ll want one of these phones. True VGA on a phone has four times the resolution of the best screens out there as well as some other goodies:

    It offers a range of advanced features such as a 3.2 megapixel camera; a Motion Control Sensor (for playing 3D games), and a Face Recognition function that authenticates handset owners by sensing their facial characteristics.

    Another interesting feature is the ability to indulge in instant messaging with those in close proximity to you using Bluetooth.

    Love the IM over Bluetooth!

  • If you have a small screen, you need to be able to point it anywhere

    Russell Beattie has his Tivo streaming to his cellphone and says, “who needs Location Free TV or a Slingbox if you have a TiVo sitting there already? And all those $5 a month video plans? Forget it. This is awesome stuff.”

    Mass media is being sliced into ever smaller chunks. First it was the 200+ channels that allowed you to find something interesting. Tivo and the DVRs let you capture just what you wanted from the stream. Then video-on-demand let you dip into a large back-catalog of programming served up by your cable or satellite company. With video search and video archive sites you can now find pretty much anything online including regular network programming on places like iTunes if they’re going with the flow or Bit Torrent if they’re not. In this environment, the fixed video programming served up by the mobile operators feels constrictive.

    Pull in your favorite shows and have Tivo suggest what else might be interesting. Use the fat pipe of your cable to catch everything and the intelligence of your Tivo box to filter out to just the stuff you want. Use the cellphone to sample the cream of the crop while you’ve got some downtime.

    Orb DVREverywhere, check it out.

  • DEA agent shoots himself in the foot

    While giving a demonstration on weapons safety to a group of Florida schoolchildren, a DEA agent shoots himself in the foot with a pistol. The shocked class shouts “Put it down!” when he limps over to continue the demonstration with a semi-automatic rifle.

    Footnote: the man’s career is ruined as he becomes the nation’s laughing stock, is barred from future weapons safety seminars, and is too recognizable to be an undercover agent.

  • Julia’s Special Day

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    Today was Julia’s “special day” at her pre-school. I spent the morning with her and met her classmates (there are 15) and put faces to the names she sprinkles in her conversations. There was some singing and we identified the weather for the day. After 11 straight days of rain, Julia optimistically said it was “sunny” but we could see that she was just being relative – it was misting instead of pouring sheets.

    The activity of the day consisted of sorting jellybeans by their color into different piles, counting them, then pasting flowers that represented the jellybeans onto a sheet of paper. It was neat to see how each child approached the problem and how some were more effecient at sorting through the tasks than others. “Payday’s on Friday!” I said to one of them when she handed in her work but the joke was lost on her.

    Julia also, because it was her special day, got to pick out which toys would be set out for playtime. There are four boys in the class and they were clumped up in the corner and when Julia indicated with her “wand” that the box of cars would be set out, the boys all frothed, “oooh, caaaars.”

  • Micropayments

    I attended the HBSTech event on the Evolution and Future of Micropayments last evening in Mountain View.

    Presenting were:

    • Preston Roper, VP of Marketing, BitPass
    • James Hall, co-founder of FTVentures, a fund with deep experience in micropayments 
    • Peter Ashley, Director of Merchant Services, PayPal
    • KC George, Manager of Product Innovation & Coordination, Visa USA

    The session was not as interactive as I’ve become used to when attending other tech events in the Valley and was more of a "hold your questions until we’re done" affair but it still was very informative with lots of juicy snippets after the jump.

    (more…)

  • Create your first head with GenHead

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    Check out this tutorial on how to create a 3D head from two 2D photos. I never knew playing God was so easy. The company, Genemation, is also working on a new version of their GenCrowd software to generate, “thousands of synthetic copyright free photo-realistic heads by age, gender and ethnicity.” Something to do on the 7th day.

  • We want Spring

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    With all the rain we’ve been getting, our thoughts really pine for a good Hanami. That’s not me above but it’s exactly how I feel. More on getting prepared for Hanami over at PingMag, a great new site covering the art scene in Tokyo that Mark Dytham mentioned to me when he was recently visiting.