Here is an amazing Video from year 1979 where two visionaries talk about how they see computing will take shape in the future. They talk about LED, Plasma, eBooks, eBook Readers, Tablets and What not!!.. It looks as if they had a peek in to the year 2010!. The video is on Tom Snyder interviewing Durk Pearson (Scientist)and Jerry Pournelle(Science Fiction writer). MUST Watch!

Related posts:

1. Amazing image enhancing technique

Here is a video of the iPhone I captured with my Canon A610 Digital Camera. Just to show you how it works well with the GSM networks in India. Also see the demo of the iPhone Safari browser over the home WiFi network.

Related posts:

1. I have an iPhone – Thank you readers !
2. Upgraded iPhone from v1.0.2 to 1.1.1

Online Video

User generated content is now on an all time high and online video portals like YouTube and Revvr are fast becoming default destinations for Video content. Watching these videos on your PC is just matter of visiting those sites and making selections. Adobe provides a universal platform in the form of Flash and most of the video is streamed to you in real-time.

Video on Mobile

My first tryst with Mobile Video was the clipped ones I had on my Sony Clie SJ22 , a few years back. The video content needed time consuming transcoding operations and the results were not always stunning. After all it was a meager PDA!. Then after some time, YouTube transformed the way we perceived online video. Now I would want those Videos to play over my new Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone(O2 XDA II Mini). But that platform was not enough, not even my next smartphone – the Cingular 8125 Wizard with the Windows Mobile 2005. The embedded RealPlayer tried it’s best to stream content, but always resulted in choppy video – my slow GPRS connection was also partly to blame.

Now you have the revolutionary iPhone, and it has made online video experience on the Smartphones kind of a norm. How can Microsoft and HTC resist the call. They equipped their latest offering, the HTC Touch with a neat Streaming Application which works pretty well with the PIE(Pocket Internet Explorer) and the integrated TouchFlo user interface. At the same time, Google has started transcoding most of the watched video content to be viewable on mobile devices. Now we have a mobile version of the YouTube. Wait.. It’s still not the Full YouTube!.

Avot mV brings ALL of Online Video to your Mobile

Avot Media is a company, hold your breath, launched by a bunch of Apple veterans – who were earlier leading the engineering efforts at Apple Inc. to bring you the revolutionary iPhone!. These talented guys have ventured into bringing the FULL of Online Video Content over to our Mobile Phones – with their excellent offering – Avot mV. You point your mobile device’s browser to m.avotmedia.com or Avot Mobile Site to download the free application.

My Review Platform

I tested Avot mV on my Cingular 8125. It is a HTC Wizard Class device. I was running a cooked Windows Mobile 6 OS with the TouchFlo interface. I tested Avot mV over both EDGE and WiFi. While Avot mV was being tested, I had always couple of programs like the PIE and the default phone application running.

Avot mV Advantages

• Avot mV is a carrier independent service
  • That means You never pay for carrier-selected carrier-controlled content. You have the full of free user-generated media at your command. You choose what you want to see, for free. This is not the case with competitive product offerings like RockTV. They are always friends with the Carrier, forgetting you and me!
• 4th Grader UI
  • What did I Say?!. Yes, I meant -  even a 4th grader can easily launch the Avot mV and see the thumbnails of featured videos arranged neatly in 3 columns, further tap on the one’s s/he wants. Different video  ‘Channels’ brings you categorized content. Creating a favorites list is also very straight forward as in clicking a ‘+’ symbol. All in all, Avot mV features a no nonsense interface. The UI of Avot mV is best explained as a unified video portal with content from YouTube, Google Video and many others. The Search is excellent and spans over many content portals. I also liked the search being saved for future sessions.
• Sound Technology
  • Avot mV has patented-codecs being used in it’s mobile client application. The innovations on it, helps minimize the effects of network latency and low bandwidth. Do remember, Avot mV always streams the content directly from the content sites. It works like a media optimized Flash platform for Mobile Devices. The FlashLite from Adobe is a Joke!
  • I saw Avot mV working pretty decently on my regular EDGE connection on the road and at its best over the Home WiFi.

What could be done better ?

• No work on Nokia!
  • Presently all the 70+ supported platforms are either Windows Mobile Pocket PC or SmartPhone platforms. My Nokia E61 needs Avot mV. I hope in future they will support Symbian Series 60 v3 and UIQ devices.
• Thumbnail vows
  • The three column thumbnail view does not scale well on the landscape view. It could also do well with some local caching of the home screen thumbnails.
• Browser Integration
  • Wish if I could bring up Avot mV instead of the HTC Streaming Application whenever I click on a video link. I think this won’t be a big challenge for the engineering teams at Avot than implementing the ultimate dream of playing the video inline with the mobile browser.
• Audio/Video Sync
  • I got a few audio sync problems while playing some YouTube videos over the EDGE connection. Even then the Video played well.

Conclusions

I sincerely feel, Avot mV codecs should be licensed by major Smartphone OS providers, especially Google in future, for their upcoming Google Phone. It has the potential to be the best optimized streaming media platform on the mobile. For latest developments check out the Avot Blog postings.

Related posts:

1. Revived Cingular 8125 with Windows Mobile 6

Here is a Video demonstrating a paper presented at SIGGRAPH 2007 by researchers from Mitsubishi Electric research Lab and The Interdisciplinary Center & MERL.

  They demonstrate resizing / adapting / re-targeting / Continuous resizing of images.

Related posts:

1. Amazing Video on “Future Computing” from year 1979

I have had a quota overflow at my FlickR account recently. They would only allow me to see the recent 200 photos. That means very less as I have got used to taking frequent snaps on my mobile phone and Shozu -ing it over . Personal Media is one hell of a thing to manage. Call me a storage paranoid, I have duplicates of personal media thrown all over USB storage, FlickR, PicasaWeb, you name it!. After researching for quite some time I have finally signed-up for an Amazon S3 based Grid Storage Service. It works out cheap and reliable.

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

But Amazon S3 is designed NOT to be consumer facing service. You need to talk in terms of APIs with Amazon S3. Many have found this to be a great business opportunity and created many Amazon S3 Storage Tools. Jeremy Zawodny have done a good job of listing them, but I found a few more tools during my research and here they are – categorized.

Command Line Tools

S3Sync – S3 Sync is a cross platform Ruby Program that easily transfers directories between a local directory and an S3 bucket:prefix. It behaves somewhat, but not precisely, like the rsync program. John Eberly has an efficient way of using S3Sync with Jets3t. [OpenSource]

Quillen S3 Backup – Provides a very efficient chunking system which minimizes the amount of data that has to be transferred between successive versions of a file. Great bandwidth-aware solution for your Amazon S3 account. [OpenSource]

S3cmd –  is a command line tool to upload, retrieve and manage data in Amazon S3. [OpenSource]

Drive Letter Integration / Virtual File System

S3Fuse – helps mount S3 buckets as local resource on most Unix/Linux systems. Looks complicated to setup. [OpenSource]

JungleDisk – An excellent, rock-solid solution which works well on Linux and Windows platforms. The Virtual File System is realized atop a cache which makes life lot easier on slower bandwidth connections. Too bad that they don’t offer any other purchase option other than Amazon payments , which does not allow non US customers [Commercial]

S3WebDAV – This java based solution Provides a read+Write WebDAV interface on Unix/Linux systems for your S3 account. This WebDAV URL can be mapped to a drive letter for easier file operations. [OpenSource]

S3Drive - S3Drive is a Windows application that lets you access the Amazon web space as a local network drive. Apart from the ease of use, S3Drive is highly bandwidth aware and fault-tolerant. [OpenSource]

Browser Based / Online

S3Fox Firefox browser extension – Works very well just like an FTP client with 2 panes to operate with. Plus, You can setup automatic synchronization between local folder and S3. [Free]

Sync2S3 -  is an online service which helps you manage your S3 buckets and resources through the browser.  [Commercial]

S3Browse – You can use this website to manage your Amazon S3 account. [Free]

S3 Browser – is a server-side PHP application that lets you manage your S3 storage and data in it using a web browser. [OpenSource]

Cross Platform Tools

Jets3t ( Pronounced ‘jet-set‘ )  - is a Java based Toolkit, which is very actively under development. The toolkit provides Java programmers with a powerful yet simple API for interacting with S3 and managing data stored there, while the applications like Jets3t CockPit and Uploader allow anyone to easily manage and interact with their S3 accounts. [OpenSource]

S3Backup – S3 Backup is a fail-safe, encrypted online backup solution. [Commercial]

BucketExplorer – A very well designed Java based Application with extensive auditing options for your S3 buckets. [Commercial]

Service Related

Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress – Allows you to easily use Amazon S3 with your WordPress blog. S3 Bucket can be easily accessed from the WordPress admin screen. [OpenSource]

FlickR to S3 backup Tool – This is a minimal Python script to backup your FlickR photos to your Amazon S3 account. [OpenSource]

Conclusion

One thing to consider before you select your Amazon S3 Tool is the Integrity and Format of your data. S3 allows http-based access and encryption. Choose a tool or setup a mechanism yourself to encrypt your private data before you store them on S3. Your data should be retrievable even without any dependency on the tool. I chose Jets3t over everything else because I found it to be highly customizable and programmable, not to forget the excellent Cockpit.[

[Update]

A beautiful Amazon S3 Client for Mac OS X : S3Hub

Another useful freeware Amazon S3 Client for Windows : Cloudberry S3 Explorer

Related posts:

1. HOT backup your Outlook data securely and automatically with TrueCrypt
2. Build your own dotMac (.mac) Service
3. How to unlock the Kindle Global Wireless Browsing

No related posts.

If you are not familiar with it, the Clone Wars was an animated TV series that premiered on the Cartoon Network before the release of Episode III and after Episode II. It appeared in two chapters, the last chapter’s episode showed the kidnapping of the Chancellor and the beginning of Anakin and Obi Won’s ensuing chase, which is the event that occurred right before Episode III began. It covers the events that occurred between Episode II and III.

It was long rumored that Lucas wanted to create the series into a serial show. Seems that day is finally coming.See the Clone Wars trailer.

[tags]star war, clone war, trailers, movie trailers[/tags]

No related posts.

Webmasters.. Forget about the static adsense units. Interactive widgets are the future.

According to  Online Media Daily, Google will roll out Gadget Ads by the end of 2007. These ads would be interactive in nature and can accommodate dynamic advertising content based on the “user experience”. Google is even readying their Analytics package to track the performance of such ads.

Media companies will be watching this space with great interest. A new market of Gadget-Ads-Making is on the making. According to Zal Bilimoria, product marketing manager, Google. “Anyone who can build a Web site can have a Gadget Ad.” 

Related posts:

1. My third Google Wave – embedded

As promised earlier I am sending the Joost invites to everyone out there in that thread..

Oh boy.. that was really tough sending 150 256 invites by myself!

If anyone is missed out, please let me know.

Please consider subscribing to my RSS Feed

& adding my site to your Technorati Favorites

Further Joost Invitations are available at :-

Many Thanks!

No related posts.

Google (May) come out with a new feature like using your Adsense revenues for Google Checkout and Adwords.

I got this ‘Hint’ after I wrote to Google Adsense support about this possibility. Especially when my query did not address the Adwords.
Here is the transcript of the eMail:-

Thank you for your email. This feature is not available at this point in
time. However, we will keep you informed of any new features, like using
AdSense revenues for Google Checkout and AdWords.
For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center
for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on
the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).
Sincerely,
XXXXX
The Google AdSense Team

——————–

Hi,
I am an adsense publisher. Was just wondering whether can I combine my
Google CheckOut account and Adsense account. This would help me buy
things online with the Adsense money earned. Let me know if this is
possible.
Thanks and Regards,
Vinod Ponmanadiyil

If this happens, It would be really useful as I can forget about the arrival of the cheque, depositing in the bank, worrying about the Rupee conversion rates and other paper work.

I am sure this would also encourage even small publishers like me to invest some of the money earned publishing on to becoming a Publisher with Adwords.

No related posts.