Pretty much everyone knows who Oprah is and how everything she seems to become an instant housewife hit. Today, she joined the latest craze to hit the web—Twitter. Welcome to the fray, @oprah.
But, Oprah’s first post violated time honored netiquette protocol by using all CAPS to get her message across! She even used poor grammar, adding extra spaces—not something that is usually done in the 140 character world of Twitter. Oops!
HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY .
But she quickly rectifies it, instead jumping to using no capital letters at all…
TechCrunch recently posted this video taken at Microsoft TechFest 2009. It is a demonstration of a technology similar to Microsoft’s own Photosynth. But, with a difference that opens the door to a game changing shift in live content delivery. Instead of taking several minutes stitching together static photographs into a three dimensional environment, this demo stitches live, dynamic video in real-time! Hence why TechCrunch labeled it “Qik Meets Photosynth”.
First, take a look at the demo. The cool part of the demo starts at about 50 seconds in and goes a little past 3 minutes. Watch at least that and you’ll be up to speed well enough to understand the following. It does help if you’re also familiar with Qik and Photosynth
Reading some of the comments on TechChrunch’s post, I found several people calling this “a solution without a problem” so I figured I’d give some potential “problems” this could solve. You just have to think about how this technology can be combined with other technologies we already have available, as well as how this kind of stitching technology can be evolved. Two game changing applications spring to mind immediately:
Sports and Live Event Broadcasting
Just think outside the box a little bit. Sure, they’re using camera phones in the demo, but that doesn’t mean you can’t scale up to using 1080p high definition video sources. Or 2K, 4K and even higher resolution sources for that matter. At that point you’d need extremely heavy computing power to do the processing, but it isn’t like we aren’t seeing the silicon showing up to provide the number crunching horsepower. Newspapers think they have it bad because of the internet, just think about the implications of every football stadium installing arrays of high definition cameras around the field. Traditional broadcast single-feed TV won’t be able to compete…
I finally got my blog upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress 2.7.1 today. I had been running 2.3 for ages simply because it worked. Quite a bit has changed and all for the better! Amazing that all the plugins I kept trying to work with suddenly all work perfectly now…
I also got Mindnasium upgraded and I intend to start working on it again soon. Sad that I only made three posts and let it die, but, like a phoenix, it shall rise again from the ashes! (Maybe…)
And I converted SynerGen’s site over as well. I had previously been running the SynerGen site on a custom backend of my own. Which was sufficient when only a handful of people needed access to post basic text only posts.
So, I might have fibbed a little. I said I was going to share blogs with you in my new “Read This!” column. But here it is, only the second post, and I’m deviating from specification. There’s a site I want to share this week that, while it does have its own blog, is more about sharing ideas through twenty minute speeches. These speeches are given by some of the greatest thinkers of our time at a gathering in California each year. People like Craig Venter, Aubrey de Grey, John Maeda, Jane Goodall, Jeff Han, Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking.
It is a good bit over exposed. I never can seem to get a handle on proper exposure on overcast days… Might have something to do with my distaste for the drab light that overcast days create.
And here’s the first one I made while riding through town on Thursday night. Simply a little “proof of concept”. It was just nifty getting to see it work. This one was underexposed, I should have been using my Rebel XT instead of my Pro1 to help in low light.
I just came across this post over at Engadget talking about an augmented reality project at MIT. It uses a handheld pico projector to display information about objects in front of you. I’ve been so focused on the use of head mounted displays for augmented reality that I never even thought about what could be accomplished using a pico projector. Since a picture is worth a thousand words I’ll refrain from trying to explain it, just watch the video!
My brother is currently in the trenches of high school and for his Economics class was assigned to interview a local business owner. He choose to interview me as a freelancer who is building an LLC out of Mind Kitchen Media. We got started in person, but unfortunately didn’t have enough time to do the whole thing, so he emailed the questions to me instead. I figured this tells a lot about how I think, so here are my responses to the interview.
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Business name: Freelance web design as Randall A. Gordon, sub-contracting web development to Vitaliy Mikitchenko; Soon to be partners of Mind Kitchen Media LLC
When was the business started: I’ve actively prospected clients since November of 2007; I’ve taken on various projects since the age of 16.
Names of owners: Mind Kitchen Media LLC will be owned by Randall A. Gordon, Vitaliy Mikitchenko and Marta McCasland
1. Describe the business
Although I work as a freelancer currently, I am in the process of setting up an LLC with a partner who, to date, I have simply subcontracted work to. Also in the mix is my fiance who is actively and passionately learning the ropes of the business both from and with me. As such I’ll mainly be speaking from the viewpoint of a soon-to-be LLC owner with insights from my work as a freelancer.
I seek out clients in the local area who I can assist by bringing their communications abilities with their customers and within their business up to date with what is possible using today’s technologies. This means I am far more than just a web designer. I have to be a multimedia maven who can take on many hats.
I have to understand how a business operates so that I am able to identify deficiencies and lay out plans to correct them. Sales and marketing are important to master, not only to get my own company’s name out there, but because the larger part of my work involves marketing and connecting a client with their customer base. Not to mention the very wide variety of talents that development for the web requires in today’s technology landscape.
Am I really trying to sell you stuff on my personal blog? Not really, this is here simply so I have a way to test out OpenX for use on some of my other sites. And I do test out referral program links here as well so I can get a feel for how each service works. So, I guess, enjoy the experimental ads? But, if you do click an ad, thank you!
