Archive for the 'gadgets' Category

KozCast3

Wow! There seems to be no stopping me now! I’m on a roll!

Another podcast for ye.

Today I talk about OPML PLUS RSS TO THE POWER OF USERS and what I am trying to do to make life easier. Also thoughts on the perfect podcast device and mobiles in podcasting.

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So what happened at CES?

Well, to be honest, there really wasn’t that much to write home about! Seriously, over the last two years since I last went to Vegas for CES, there really weren’t many new innovations at all (in my field). My connectivity in the hotel was restricting the secure access I needed to complete the moblog system (though, now I am in Boston I have nearly finished it).

There were a couple a devices which caught my eye, which I’ll post about shortly. Also a few ‘crippled’ devices which really could have been alot better thought through.

And don’t get me started about the iPhone/ApplePhone. First glance was ‘MMMMMMMMmmm!!’. Now after deeper research, I think they are making a whole load of mistakes with it. God knows what they’re going to do when it hits Europe re: carrier lockin etc. Not to mention all the other crippling I have since learned of.

It looks sexy for sure. But Apple really have no idea about mobile smart phones. Nokia still lead the pack, in my opinion. And they have more MP3/MP4/3GP players in people’s pockets than any other manufacturer out there.

When I get an N95 in my hand, expect to see a real world multimedia, moblogging, mapping version of the blogHUD system to appear very soon after! 😉 oooh yes!

I’m going to be in Boston for the next10 days, with a possible short trip out to Vermont to see the snow with the podcast.com gang. One of my legs is totally knackered from all the walking around – ThromVegas?

Another highlight of being around CES, next to ‘the other show’ was that I got to see Ron Jeremy and Larry Flynt up close, near the entrance to the ‘other show’, where the silicon wasn’t in people’s pockets, but slap bang, front and center on the chests of the slew of plastic girls wondering around the place! heh.

Also saw Jenna Jameson walk past with full entourage – she’s so short!! Never seen her ‘movies’ though, but I expect she looks taller lying down! 😉

Viva Las Vegas! CES here I come!!

Lock up your gadgets!!!! Kosso is coming to Las Vegas!!! 🙂

I should be leaving home here in about 9 hours then off over the Atlantic andf the USA to Las Vegas for CES 2007! Hurrah! Last time I went there is was 2005. We had different gadgets and new ones which had promise which held truee till now. Here’s pic of my packing last time, when I went on behalf of the BBC 😉 Here’s the moblog I did from there last time!

I have been working on an upgrade to the camoby concept for stuff to do with podcast.com and bloghud.com  – It’s working nicely so far and I plan to use it to create a feed of text, images, aufio or video while at the show and around about.

This year, CES will be all about the CONTENT which can get on the gadget I saw a couple of years ago – as well as the new ones.  😉 I cant wait to see everyone again! And I do like a bit of BlackJack!
I’ll let you know the feed when I have it all set up finally. I’m still building it! 🙂

I am taking a little less with me, as now I have a better system written 😉 I’ll tell you all about it when I get there 😉

This, tied with the other stuff I have been cooking on the podcast.com upgrade will be very nice indeed, if I do say so myself. Different. Useful (hopefully), fun and informative.

See you on the other side!! 🙂

BlackJack is a Samsung??

Wow. Then I’m not surprised to see that RIM is suing Samsung for calling their new device the ‘BlackJack

I saw the ads for this recently, while over in the States : I thought it was the new BlackBerry! I didn’t even notice the marque, while the phone was being flipped around like a deck of cards.

Well, well, well. It looked nice, that’s for sure.

BlackJack is my favourite Casino game by far.

[ My initials are J.A.C.K and I like to wear black. 😀 ]

3D News with RSS

For Vista, when it comes out, here’s an app/widget from Microsoft called UniveRSS.

UniveRSS is a showcase application that demonstrates the use of several WPF features, 3D animations, data binding, and data visualization. Currently UniveRSS uses the RSS Feed Store managed through Internet Explorer 7. Later versions will allow you to manage the Feed Store from within the UniveRSS application.

It looks very nice and very much the type of thing I envisage in Second Life, when (and if) we get html on a prim surface. With all the available data bindings and communications we have at our disposal there, it should be faily easy to build this in the Metaverse.

Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.

Official Second Life blog picks up RSS NewsScreens and blogHUD!

So, there I was last night,hanging around on the ‘RSS Platform’ in Nooribeom, watching the fearsome news of the ‘Real World’ fly by, when none other than Hamlet Au, the ’embedded journalist’ in Second Life (though not at Linden Lab any more) on New World Notes dropped by to check out the BBC NewsScreens I set up here. There’s a CNN one nearby too, by the way – next to the ‘River of News’ 🙂 The screens read a list of feeds and loop through them, 10 stories at a time.
The good thing about the BBC News ones are the feed content has specific limits in the text entries. I happen to know that this is due to the journalists having to write stories which can run across many platforms. They have strict limits to the amount of characters for the headline and description text. This increases their value. On platforms with different text and size/resolution constraints, Flash is excellent at dealing with this, as you can embed fonts and that it is a ‘vector-based’ format, meaning you can stretch it any way you like and you will not lose resolution. At any size, if you do it right.

Second Life and the LSL scripting language presents many opportunities for an old skool web hack createc like myself. I frequently tell people that SL makes me feel as excited as I did when I first saw the web over 10 years ago. 😉 And no, it wasn’t for all the adult content (though be aware that most technology developed for the adult industry ends up revolutionising the mainstream in some way) it was for the ability to communicate with other people all around the world. Connect them. Network with them. And even meet them sometimes. (I’m still great friends with a couple in New Jersey who were the first people I met through the internet 12 years ago, through a mutual appreciation of the band ‘The Stone Roses‘. I met my partner online too. 8 years ago!)

With easy tools to publish content, media, whatever you want to call it, along with easy ways do consume, organise, filter and rate it it, there you have it. Bingo moment. Democratisation of media. Open mashable consumption by an constantly evolving , iterative audience.

I heart feeds. 😉 Thanks Dave.

Want to build an ‘OPML Tree’?

How Microsoft could win the portable player game

I think this looks like a great product.

I hope it can read an RSS feed directly over that WiFi (like a PSP can)! So I can download podcasts too, over the connection (like PSP can).

As well as wifi connectivity (for download) the killer app, for me, would be the ability to record AND upload too. This could be based on something like Nokias old uploader api (which was very easy to implement in any scripting language). Or a simple/simplified ftp client.

If they (MS) offered storage too, along with their desktop client/shop/aggregator based on the account, then they would have it all wrapped up.

Location agnostic consuming and publishing – desktop or mobile device – listening, viewing, subscribing etc. All synced up the next time the device links to the desktop. Full of real statistics, linkage and relevance.

Bingo! You’d have it all.

THEN if your reading AND writing/publishing tools support the core content and organisation XML standards for podcasts of RSS and OPML, PLUS additional support for microformats such as FOAF etc AND OTHER community APIS (though this could be done by any developer community or group of widgetwelders)

If Microsoft did this, they would win – imho

By ‘closing the content loop’ (by effectively flipping one end and connecting it to the other) – publish to receive : AND discover/navigate : subscribe , it would be like APple where things ‘seem’ to be locked in, they wuold have the opportunity to turn the whole network inside out, exposing all the data needed – all the ‘neural’ connections – all the paths, all the people and all the content.

This would ‘connect’ the owners of such devices to eachother, creating the community feel, but also prove they are not going to create a ‘walled garden’ of content – for devices that don’t know (much) about anything else.

[given that i am talking about ‘open’ podcasts here – user generated (argh) – as opposed to music/video/protected shopping/purchases with their own DRM.]

You don’t have to be able to read the ZUNESTONES to see it. Do you?
================
ps: When are Google or Yahoo! going to produce a device? They should! 😉

pps: people who know me personally, will know that I am a huge love love and passionate user of gadgets. I have been on this crusade for a while. 😉

Take Me To The River!

For anyone out there interested in Dave’s River of News concepts, please come and have a read of this, over on my OPML powered blog. I think it’s very important and hopefully will be very, very helpful in giving this simple genius concept more data to play with and feed from.

🙂

When I first met Scoble

It was just over a year ago when I first met the Scobleizer!

And in honour of that, here’s the first time I spoke to him. Dave Winer, while in Florida on a beach gave me his cellphone number, so I called it via Skype from London then hooked the three of us up for a goofy chat which we uploaded for a podcast 😉 Those were the days :)))

Origami is childsplay

Now, I’m not in the habit of posting links to videos of young girls playing with toys, but this time I’ll make an exception. WhatIsNew’s Lora has posted a video interview she made with her 12 year old, after spending the day playing with the TabletKiosk Origami mini-tablet PC.

This is great! And this is why I think this device is going to make a huge impact to alot of people. Not just kids. There are ‘executive’ models on the way and the one in the video is one of the prototypes.

Very impressed with the corner-placed thumb keyboards for input without the stylus while holding it in both hands.

Also, I can’t wait to try some of my fullscreen Flash kiosk applictions on that device! Cool!

Bonus: Hop on over to channel9 and watch Otto Berkes, who is the architect (now general manager) behind the Ultra-Mobile PC team, code-named Origami, give Scoble all the nifty details.
Excuse all the double-entendres! 😉 Heh.

Hey check out the metachannel9guy!


Who is this ‘kosso’ anyway?

I am a 'Createc'. A creative technologist, entrepreneur/ hacker/ geek. Worked on building things on the web for over 12 years.

Used to work at BBC News interactive and created the publishing and delivery systems for video news to get distributed on huge screens in major railway stations around the country.

I left the BBC to become CTO / sole-lead architect/developer at podcast.com for three years.

I have now left them to build a start up a new system called 'Phreadz', which is a 'Social Multimedia Conversation Network', integrating everything that is 'V.I.T.A.L' to us on the web. Video, Images, Text, Audio and Links.

I built the whole thing my myself. I programmed every line of code and positioned every pixel. I'm looking forward to attracting an hiring new members of the team to help me out! :)

There are currently over 1000 happy and helpful beta testers on the system so far and one client of a white-labelled solution.



kosso's flickr stream

May 2024
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