So, for work we put together a pretty sweet (well, I may be biased) video on how to use the USB to DVI I’ve mentioned before. We hosted it on addamonitor.com, my little brainchild. I have to give props to MJI Jackson for the great looking shadowbox effect. Anyway, I’d recommend you check it out.
Has it been a while? Yes, yes it has. So it should say something that I’m coming out of the woodworks to write again. It should indicate that I’m pretty stoked about something and think it’s worth mentioning.
The big news? Tesla’s regular production on their roadster begins today. The timing is perfect, with oil hitting record-high prices and global warming becoming a greater threat. Tesla represents a fueling force in the paradigm shift that needs to happen for people to progress technologically. It’s what I love to see.
Their full press release on the production can be found here.
Oh, you can get Singles on iTunes. But most of them are songs. I guess there’s an artist or some person named ‘Adele’ - and apparently Apple is out to get her hooked up. The image and text implied to me that this boy-haircutted and poorly-makeuped artist is looking for a date, is completely ‘FREE’, and is iTunes’ “SINGLE OF THE WEEK.” Congrats Adele and good luck on your date!!
So I just got back from an exhausting trip to CES. CES is always fun, but my feet will be mad at me for a week. A lot of what you see is kind of the same old same old and some stuff has a high propensity of becoming vaporware (stuff that’s cool to talk about but never really comes to fruition) (like a charging device that doesn’t use wires, but who knows…).
Somewhere in between, though, there are products that are both very cool and very practical. I’d classify Polaroid’s new Freescape Digital Media Exchange as one of these. Polaroid probably doesn’t see the same attention as one of the big exhibitors (like Panasonic, who was highlighting a 150″ flat screen TV - just gaudy), but I think they had a product that, if word gets out, should be a hot seller.
The Freescape system is a DVR that records TV shows in high def. It stands out from similar products, though, in three main ways.
First, it will do near-instant synchronization to an iPod or your PC (via WiFi). The iPod conversion idea is amazingly clever. In under 1 minute, it can encode and transfer a 1 hour TV show to your iPod through a built-in iPod dock. That means you can watch *any* of your shows you record and are no longer at the mercy of whether or not Apple has your favorite show. Plus, you’re not paying $2/episode for shows you get for free. Genius.
Second, remote access via the Internet. The unit gives you the ability to connect to it from anywhere you have an Internet connection. It also does a fast MPEG4 compression at VGA resolutions (which still looks like a standard TV signal) that lets you download your recorded TV shows from anywhere in the World. It’s kind of like TiVo and Slingbox hooked up and had a kid.
Third, no monthly fees. At an MSRP of about $500, it’ll take a while to pay for itself, but it’s still neat. The Freescape system uses an open directory of show listings that is 100% free. That means you never pay that $5 to $20/month subscription fee like with other DVRs.
Pictures below courtesy of Polaroid:
Now, I don’t agree with the advertising to get people to visit Vegas, but I do make the occasional trip for work. I just got back last Friday after a very informative PubCon 2007. As part of the trip, Joe Morin, a Pubcon evangelist and president of Boost Search Marketing, put together a “Bloggers’ night out” - tempting us with some tickets to great shows in reply for an honest review of the night. What a great idea!
The Show
Some friends and I who were attending the show were able to get in to see Blue Man Group, a quirky hard-rock meets silent film era entertainment show (you can’t well call it a play). I had a great evening - it was really something of a sensory overload at times, but was just a great show. Blue Man Group, if you’re not familiar with them, is a hybrid percussion-comedy troupe. The three men with silicone wraps on their heads don’t say a single word during the performance (or when you meet them afterwards, for that matter). But even without words, you’ll laugh and smile until your jaw just hurts.
Worth Seeing
With the flood of advertising for myriad shows in Vegas (and there are PLENTY of shows in Vegas), I probably never would have picked Blue Man out of the deluge of other options. I’m glad I got the tickets though, because it’s taken its place as a show that I will now recommend to friends and family who might be looking for something to do in Sin City.
Family Friendly?
Speaking of Sin City, there are plenty of shows I would never feel comfortable taking my family to. Blue Man Group doesn’t fall in that category. The noise from the band (it does get pretty loud) might bother smaller children at times, but that’s about the only offense of the show. The comedy is slapstick and very three stooges (sans the ‘yuk yuk yuk’) in nature, just as innocent and possibly more funny.
Thanks
A special thanks goes out to Joe Morin for hooking us up with the evening (just being a nice guy - the world needs more of that). Also, as a note, I did get the tickets for free by writing the review so if Matty Cutts is out there keeping note, it’s been officially disclaimed.
A company in Massachusetts has thrown in their 2 cents on the future of online shopping. Kinset, founded in 2006, has built a very basic 3D platform custom fit to the needs of online retailers. Basically, they’ll take a product feed and throw them into a 3D store that each retailer gets to design.
Their first major partner is Brookstone, which now advertises the ability to shop in a 3D world on their site. This seems like a pretty lofty achievement for the young Kinset, especially after you experience the Kinset interface for the first time. Let me give you a rundown:
The Good
Potential, potential, potential. I think the idea is great. No matter how easy online shopping can be, it’s still almost always a pull market, meaning that the customer goes knowing what they want and then hunting it down and price shopping. Kinset opens the door to push marketing online - where you have users who just plan on shopping as a leisurely experience and don’t necessarily have their purchase in mind. In some regards, it reminds me of the StumbleUpon vs Google argument. People go to Google looking for something in particular (and it’s great for that), but when you don’t know what you want, you hit Stumble! and not Google.
The Bad
A few biggies here for me:
1) The UI needs some aesthetic touchups before it’s really ready for mass-market appeal. People get so much out of a shopping experience with regards to pleasing the senses when in the real world - colors, easy-to-navigate stores, smells, sounds, touch, etc. When all you really have to work with is sight and sound, you better make it darn good. Kinset falls short here.
2) Learning a new UI for people who don’t know it. Having played my fair share of 1st person games, I adapted pretty quickly to the movements and view changes (although I kept wanting right mouse click to jump when it just brings up a menu). But to someone who doesn’t have the same background, I could imagine this would be a frustrating experience.
3) Long download/setup/update times. Kinda speaks for itself. I’m on a few T1s here at work and had a long download time. After initial setup it’s not too bad, provided you don’t have a required software update. I can’t imagine dialup users realistically accessing this, though.
4) No social interaction (yet?). Don’t know if these guys have heard - but it turns out the Internet is a very social medium. I don’t want people’s avatar’s standing in my way when I want to see the newest movies out on DVD, but it’d be nice to know I’m doing something other people are doing. I’d like to know I can ask them if they’ve ever seen The Prestige and what they thought of it. Add people interaction, limiting the number of people in a given store/server.
The Ugly
1) Client crashing issues. I think most of these have been resolved, but I did have the client just sporadically kapoot on me. Kind of frustrating when just playing around, but probably really irritating when you’ve just finished 2 hours of online virtual shopping.
2) Uncomfortable load times walking into a store for the first time (or the second, or third). Plus, no matter how many times you walk into that store or how recently you did, shelves are all empty until you stand near them for a significant amount of time.
I hope the guys over at Kinset are listening since I think that their technology could be the start of something beautiful. It needs some serious work, but it’s got lots of potential.
The Jawbone: a Bluetooth headset strong enough for the military but pH balanced for humans. Seriously though - this is the next big innovation in mobile phone technology in my mind. One of the biggest drawbacks of Bluetooth headsets is that they pick up everything around you just as well as they pick up your voice. The Jawbone changes the rules on that.
The Jawbone has a little nub that sticks to your cheek (right near your jawbone - coincident? I think not.) that detects what is actually being generated by your person. It then takes anything that’s not you and silences it out. What’s the result? Well, as much as I hate throwing YouTube videos down here, this one is really pretty necessary.
Video and image below. As always the Jawbone Bluetooth Headset is available at Sewell Direct.
Note: The video did some funky distortion-action on my front page - so here’s a link for you instead.
Some recent developments led me to a whole new level of “wow that’s a cool product” regarding the USB to DVI High Res adapter. We got the latest model in today - the one capable of resolutions up to 1600×1200 (so it can drive a 20 in. display).
That’s neat. But what’s really cool is that, when coupled with some recently updated drivers, you can actually use more than one with a computer. I just finished playing with 5 displays at once - one on my laptop, one off its DVI port, one off my docking station’s port and two off of the USB to DVI adapters. The performance was great. I opened some sample business documents (as well as a YouTube video) and they all loaded fine on any of the displays. There is a minimal lag time when dragging a window from one display to another, but virtually none while working on a single screen.
While I couldn’t get it to show the 1600×1200 resolution as an option while driving two screens, I’m assuming it was because of the multiplication of the screens. So, maybe I’ll figure that out for another day. Maybe not. Either way, it’s way cooler than the low res version for the ability to drive multiple screens regardless.
It’s also a slick graphite color, which I really enjoy. Pic below.
The USB to DVI High Resolution Adapter retails at Sewell Direct for $150.
This is, by far, about my favorite StumbleUpon discovery to date. I don’t know if Anywhere.FM is unique in what it does, but it’s certainly the easiest to use and enticing option I’ve come across.
What is Anywhere.FM? It’s a free music backup service. Basically, you upload your music to an easy-to-create user account (hint: they don’t even verify your email address). It then gives you a very simple music player (laid out almost identical to a very popular music-playing software by Apple). Since it’s flash based, it’s happy with Windows or Mac, Firefox or IE - whatever. I imagine it would even work well on an iPhone or an iPod touch when in range of a WiFi signal.
Why would you want to do that? You’ve already got a music player on there. Well, say you have an iPhone w 4 gigs of storage but you own 8 gigs of music. You keep 4 on your iPod that you listen to most often, but can quickly connect to your Anywhere.FM account for the other 4 gig that just don’t fit there.
An even better practical application is if you want to be able to listen to your music (and the same library nonetheless) anywhere you happen to be on a computer. You load your customized page from any internet connection in the world and instantly have access to high-quality backups of all your music.
The player does have a system for tying into other people’s libraries by subscribing to their “radio station” - basically you don’t get to pick the order you listen to things in and can’t browse by song, but you do get access to their full library. The long and short of it: very cool stuff. Check it out.
Here’s a new toy we just recently got from Addlogix: the InternetVue 2020. Basically, it’s a way to stream whatever’s on your PC to your TV/projector (for presentations, watching videos, etc.). Now, this idea certainly isn’t new - we sell tons of the pc to tv converter at Sewell. What really stands out about this device is that you can connect to it remotely without any hardware on the sending side. For example, with the wireless PC to TV converter, you need a box by your PC that sends out the signal and then one by the receiver. This is a problem if you’re wanting to make a laptop acting as the video source that you want to keep portable.
The InternetVue 2020 uses a software interface to mirror your computer’s screen on the target display. This means that, provided you have the software installed, you can display the video from any computer on your network via LAN or use the player’s built in 802.11g antenna to stream over WiFi.
The downsides? Not too many. The display resolution isn’t fantastic (running it over component cabling on a high def projector, we could read text, but it certainly wasn’t very clear and not practical). It would work very well, however, for streaming videos or powerpoint presentations. I did hit a glitch with some video formats not displaying (just black on the screen). I’m assuming this is a codec issue and could probably be solved if you put more time into it than we did… but we didn’t. For example, it would play live flash-embedded videos on pages (eg. YouTube), but I couldn’t get it to play a DivX-embedded AVI or a standalone flash player (FLV Player) correctly.
The InternetVue 2020 is available from Sewell Direct.
