Archive for the 'Technology' category
Seattle MindCamp Half Way Point
April 30, 2006 2:19 pmIt’s midnight: Seattle Mindcamp is officially half over and it has been pretty interesting so far. It started with lunch at noon, after which, we introduced ourselves and described our interests in only three words (mine were media, technology and beer). After the introductions, the group started to sign up for sessions. Within moments, the conference was literally born on a blank sheet of giant butcher paper. The first session I attended was on MindMap, an idea organizing tool from Mindjet. The second session I checked out was on social networking as it pertains to mobile devices. It was an interesting session, but I’m not all that enthuised about using my cell phone in such ways… at least not today. The next session I attended was my favorite so far - RFID Toys. It was a great session explaining RFID and its uses. The session presenter had RFID chips implanted in his hands (see Pieces of Crap #5 in the podcast feed).
After that session, it was time for dinner. We had a delicious spread of chicken and fish - very tasty. After dinner I spent some time chatting with folks and then watched a short documentary called “Invisible Children.” A fairly sad story about the trials of children in Africa. After watching the movie, I rolled out back where I witnessed a hard drive being completely melted into oblivian in a slow explosion (I forget what chemicals were involved…). Needless to say, data will not be recovered from that drive.
Now it’s past midnight… and I’m parked on the floor doing a little blogging. Images are available on Flickr.
Over all rating: Seattle Mindcamp 2.0 is a raging success.
At NAB this year it became very clear that reality television is changing the tool sets used in video production. In scripted programming, the ratio of shot footage to used footage was traditionally fairly closely alignedl. With a script, one would generally only need a few takes of any given scene and it was fairly obvious which of the takes would be used in the final production. Reality programming has flipped the scales on that model. Hours upon hours of footage is now recorded in order to squeeze out a singe episode of 30 to 60 minutes. Likewise, where the script was once the blueprint of a program, now the footage often dictates the script that gets written.
When any model is turned on its head, opportunities arise to create new tools. Many of these tools emerged at NAB this year. Content management systems that allow for logging, scripting, annotating and categorizing footage came out of the woodwork from most of the big players. An interesting demonstration by Avid showed off some tools designed to help script writers organize footage in manners that allow them to appy the shot content to a traditional story arc (hook, conflict, resolution, etc.).
Traditional methods of writing and telling a story… “You’re Fired!”
So Much for 411
March 30, 2006 10:40 amTextPayMe - The Future is Now
March 15, 2006 10:42 amHow often are you in a situation where you are dining with friends, the bill comes, and all of you want to pay on a card? Don’t you wish you had an easier way to share funds back and forth other than “spotting” each other until the next time around? Finally, there is a way. TextPayMe is a new service that allows for you to easily send money from one person to the next using text messaging… right from your phone. Certainly, you can imagine the multitude of scenarios this could support as time goes on.
