From the TED Blog: “NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.” [via @greatdismal]
I got a brief look at the new OS for the iPhone yesterday and must say I was impressed. Copy and paste works smooth as buttah. And a bunch of other stuff I didn’t get to play with but the feature that made me squeal like a 12 year old girl was one I had not heard about. From the iPhone website:
“If you misplace your iPhone, MobileMe can help you find it. Log in to me.com to view a map that shows the approximate location of your iPhone. If it’s nearby, have it play a sound to help you find it, or display a message on the Home screen to help someone return it to you.
Your iPhone contains information you don’t want in the hands of a stranger. So if you lose your iPhone and displaying a message on it hasn’t resulted in its safe return, you can initiate a remote wipe and restore factory settings. If you eventually find your iPhone, you can restore your data by enabling your MobileMe account on iPhone.”
How about this option? If you know your phone is stolen and being used by the thief –or someone he sold it to– you turn the phone on and make it play a pre-recorded sound clip: THIS TURD STOLE MY IPHONE! Over and over.
My new phone arrives this Friday and I confess I’m a little giddy with anticipation.
PS: If you click the headline of this post it displays the “related posts” feature we added yesterday. One of which is from a year ago, titled: “Why no iPhone for smays.com.”
A thought-provoking column by Henry Blodget in the Silicon Alley Insider. Here’s his nutshell:
“As with print-based media, Internet-based distribution generates only a tiny fraction of the revenue and profit that today’s incumbent cable, broadcast, and satellite distribution models do. As Internet-based distribution gains steam, therefore, most TV industry incumbents will no longer be able to support their existing cost structures.”
According to Blodget, the TV business models for the past 50 years have been based on:
The vision behind Marco Brambilla’s Civilization was to take “hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven.”
Alrighty then. And where will we watch this video?
“The idea was this, when you go up in the elevator the content goes down and when you go down it goes up. Not unlike a ride film this project was designed to be synced to the moving environment of the hotel elevators in New York. We wanted to synchronize the footage to the movement of the elevator as best as we could.”
You really need to watch the video to get the idea. I found the link on William Gibson’s blog where he observes: “Stuff’s finally starting to look like the 21st Century. Next, your shower curtain.”
“As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here’s the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection
That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.” — Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish
“The new Ecamm BT-1 combines high-quality video and sound with complete freedom from wires. The new webcam integrates advanced technologies to allow video and sound to be sent through the air to most any Mac. The BT-1 streams 640×480 H.264 video and AAC audio to video applications such as iChat and Skype, taking advantage of Mac OS X’s rich media capabilities to provide a seamless wireless webcam experience.”
This rascal is about half the size of an iPhone. As for video and audio quality? We’ll take her for a test-drive in the morning down at the Coffee Zone.
So says a new report from social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed. From story at MediaPost.com:
“In one week in January, 97 million Americans viewed a streaming clip online — as many as are tuning into any major broadcast network — according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. active Web users ages 16-65. What’s more, with 72% of U.S. Web users watching clips online, Web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading “social-media platform.”
The “broadcast mode is dead,” said Tom Smith, managing director of Trendstream. “Now is the time for co-creation, user distribution and a true democratization of video content.”
And the new video-ready iPhone will just accelerate this trend. (via @malloryglosier)
This is a short but sad story about a once-great radio station. Let’s call it KXXX. It was, for many years, “the voice of” the community. Had as many as four or five full time news people back in the day. This morning one of our reporters called the station regarding a pretty good story in their community.
“The phone rang and rang and rang. No answering machine. Nuthin.’ So then I called the main office number. I got one of those automated answering systems. It told me to push this or that number for this or that person. There was no number to push for news. And when I automatically got the system operator, it was automated too. And it asked me to leave a message.” (sigh)
Press 1 for disappointment
Press 2 for despair
Press 3 for pessimism
“Twitter lets athletes speak on their own terms. “It’s going to be useful during the season, because after a game, I’ll be able to say my piece instead of just allowing different media outlets to portray me how they want to portray me,” said St. Louis Rams running back Steven Jackson, one of football’s prolific tweeters. Talk to any athlete or coach about the benefits of Twitter, and they’ll put message control at the top of the list. “In this world we live in now, everybody becomes media,” said Shaquille O’Neal, whose enormous following of more than 1 million has fueled Twitter fever in sports. “If something is going to be said, hey, it’s coming from me, it’s coming from my phone.” Journalists may lament athletes passing over the middle men. But honestly, what’s more interesting, a “we gave 110 percent” from the postgame podium, or a tweet like this from Shaq: “Dam manny ramirez, come on man Agggggggggh, agggggggh, agggggh.” — SI.com