Wearing my Mobile Muse 3 technical evangelist and Fearless volunteer hats, I'll be riding my bicycle with Amy Walker, publisher of the fabulous Momentum magazine about all things bicycling, as part of Car Free Vancouver 2008 starting from the Fearless Mobile Booth on Commercial Drive at 12 noon Sunday June 15, 2008. We'll ride to all the other Car Free Vancouver venues (Main Street, the West End and Kitsilano) and stream video live from my bike to the internet.
Check us out at:
Fearless's Mobile site (where we hope, tech willing, to display a stream from my bike and from a car in a sort of "car versus bike" video mashup)
Flickr finally added video today.Yay! Only 90 seconds and 150MB per video (and requires a pro account to upload videos) but you can tag, geo-tag, add videos to sets and use the flickr privacy system (and there will be a video upload API, yes!). Other than taking videos at conferences and events like DemoCamp and Mobile Monday, I really use video for family stuff which is on my private family flickr account (for those of you who care about my public flickr account, don't worry, i will soon have many videos of me bicycling through Vancouver :-) to join my 36000 and counting photos!). So having flickr support video will be a great way to share videos via flickr's guess pass to my non-flickr-using family. Now if only you had access to the original video, flickr video would be complete! Feature request to the ShoZu folks: support upload to flickr once the API comes out and support the full 150MB over 3G and WiFi!
Broke my GorillaPod last week bicycling up Clark Park, aaargh. What should I do ? Buy the SLR sized GorillaPod (and use it with my N95 and N93, I wouldn't tempt fate and use with my Canon 20D) or buy a proper bicycle mount? Or hack my own mounting system (e.g. from MAKE and Mark Boyd)
Don't have much spare $ and not much mechanical aptitude so leaning towards the former!
Could somebody tell me how durable the SLR GorillaPod is?
Today I tried out flixwagon, "a stream live from cellphone" competitor to Qik. I did a "Carcast" direct from my N95 (mounted on the empty passenger seat with my Gorillapod) as I drove from Gastown to the Viaduct (12 minutes). Impressive!
What Flixwagon seems better at then Qik:
Better buffering
More "Ajax-y" website
What Qik seems better at then Flixwagon:
Non Cheesy look and feel. I could live without the little flixwagon icon moving about before the video is shown and the "too cute" flixwagon smiley icons.
Higher Resolution. Qik seems to be higher resolution the flixwagon. Qik is 320x240, Flixwagon seems to be lower resolution
Better URLs. There seems to be no flixwagon equivalent of qik.com/roland. If it's there I couldn't find it.UPDATE: it's there! found it by URL hacking, no obvious link when logged in, my page is indeed flixwagon.com/roland
Anyways the proof is in the video and both Qik and Flixwagon are evolving at a rapid rate, so let the competition continue!
Check out my flixwagon "CarCast":
The current alpha (so fix it please ASAP :-) ) version of Qik hangs forever if the WiFi Access point you have configured is not available. Here's the steps to reproduce this:
Configure Qik to access a WiFi access point e.g. "Raincity Studios"
Walk out of range of the WiFi Access point
Start Qik
Voila! It hangs forever
Other than this bug, I am pretty happy with Qik. It's a great service.
The above photo shows my "bicyclecast" setup (Gorillapod + N95 + DT-22 Tripod Adapter + my bicycle). It worked for only 6 minutes of my 30 minute commute to work (bug? limited buffering capacity? EDGE too slow?). And was fun. The GorillaPod doesn't keep the camera too snug on the bike but it's low budget, cheap and cheerful. Someday I'll have the money to buy a proper bike tripod camera mount like the pros use for Tour de France videos!
Check it out: qik.com/video/13888 recorded live from my bicycle (the hardest part was fastening the tripod and the phone onto the bike, music courtesy of my N81 Musicphone)
Want to speak or lead a discussion? Then fill out the speaker submission form (speaker submissions close Monday December 10).
Got an idea for a topic or discussion but don't feel like speaking on it or leading a discussion? Then check out our Call for Ideas (we've seeded the list with two initial ideas: microblogging and mobile blogging but these are just examples!) and add your own idea and rate others' ideas!
Technology willing, Dave Olson and I and his awesome cast of hockey pundits will be doing a live Canucks Outsider webcast using ustream.tv Saturday at 5p.m. Pacific to coincide with Game 6 of the Canucks/Dallas Series. Dave and the gang will be commenting live on the game on video over the internet!
Fingers crossed that there won't be a Game 6. If there's no Game 6 we'll still go live for a couple of hours as I am sure we'll have tons to say about the quest for the Stanley Cup.
[Gear help: If anybody has a 4 mike mixer and a couple of mics, I'd love to borrow them for our 'cast. Contact me roland AT rolandtanglao.com or call me at 694 729 7924 OR leave a comment].
Calling all hacker types. Interested in videoblogging? Come to Super Happy Dev House and we'll do a mini super happy vlog house (inspired by the recent super happy vlog house) and vlog the hackers. RSVP by editing the wiki. See you there!
SHGODH is a community hackathon-type-event in Vancouver on Friday, May 11th, 1pm to 1am. All hacker-types are welcome! Please RSVP below so we have an idea of how many are coming.
UPDATE: For those who are academically "challenged" like myself, you don't need high grades in school or anything academic like that. It's all about contributions, need, a high quality blog post, video blog or podcast and diversity!
According to dictionary.com, bursary is "British English"! Is this true? For those who are British English challenged, a bursary is the same as a scholarship. We've received several interesting applications already! Apply today and see you in February!
This year Northern Voice is offering six travel bursaries of CAN $500 each. The organizing committee will be awarding these bursaries based on a number of criteria, including:
* The contributions you can make to the conference * Your level of need * The quality of your submission * The diversity you might bring to Northern Voice
We’ll announce the recipients of the bursaries on February 2nd, 2007. The bursaries will be paid out via cheque mailed out to recipients or picked up on the day of the conference.
To apply, write a blog post, or record a podcast or video blog post describing why you want to come to Northern Voice. Then submit it via our travel bursaries page.
Some great news about Northern Voice 2007 (which I am one of the organizers of):
Speaker Submissions: The Deadline has been extended to December 1st as Lauren wrote. You don't have to be famous or a professional conference presenter: we're looking for both fresh and experienced voices who wish to present or chair a panel on topics related to the blog-o-sphere, videoblogging, podcasting, virtual worlds like Second life, the two way web/read write web/web 2.0, blogging 101, podcasting 101, etc. It's all about the abstract. If it's well written and topical, your chances will be much higher. Submit today!
Registration is open now! Pre-register and save $10. That's right it's only $30 for a single day and $50 for both days as opposed to $40 for one day and $60 for both days at the door. I bet we'll sell out like last year so pre-registration is recommended. Register now!
Have you ever wanted to know how you can create your own video hosting site allowing users to upload video, automatically convert it to FLV, and display it for the world to see? A recent post at Daniel's Random Mutterings (DRM - how clever) explains exactly how to do this with open source tools. Using a Djano CMS system, FFMpeg for the FLV encoding, FLVtools2 for writing meta information, and FlowPlayer for embedding the SWF file you'll have everything you need to get started. The code is pretty straight forward and a great starting point. Now go forth and create your new video distribution empire.
Globe Telecom, the leading telecommunications operator in the Philippines, and Nokia, today announced that Globe is the first operator in the world to offer their customers a fully integrated mobile online sharing experience with Nokia Nseries phones.
Without the need to download or install any additional applications, Globe customers can now upload their photos and video clips directly from their compatible Nokia Nseries device to G-Blogs, Globe's mobile blogging service. The first devices to support this feature are the Nokia N93 and Nokia N73 multimedia computers.
YouTube Mobile Uploading doesn't work in Canada, *sigh*. Well at least it doesn't work with Fido (in my experiments anyway. I'd love to be proven wrong) since Fido MMS can only handle 300K and most videos are at least 1MB.
YouTube announced a new feature today that allows uploading of videos from a mobile device that supports Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Users need to create a moblie profile before uploading videos. Sign up here.
I use my camera phone to upload pictures directly to Flickr all the time (yesterday’s banana-yellow ridiculous rental car, for example). If my phone had the ability to create video, I’d be using this for YouTube all the time, too.
