Video: CTIA Wireless 2008 Quickie

Here is a very short (about 1 minute) overview of a panel discussion reviewing highlights of the recent CTIA conference in Las Vegas.

The panelists are:

Christina Lees, Product Manager, Wavefront
Luni Lebes, Chief Architect, Medio Systems
Razmig Sarkissian, Integration Manager, Mobile Distillery

Moderator is Michael Bidu, Executive Director, WINBC

Click the image below to view. If it sounds interesting to you, you can listen to the complete audio (length 20:40) of the discussion here (Right click to download.).

Video: Wireless Survey in 60 Seconds

Here's a 60 second version of a video that can be seen in full here.
Editing it down to one minute is obviously a bit of an experiment. Let me know what you think!
Michael Bidu, Executive Director of WINBC, gives a quick overview of the results of a 2007 survey of the wireless industry in British Columbia. The sector is healthy with over $1B in revenue and 6,000 employees. It has now reached a level of maturity where substantial investment is needed to fund the sales and marketing needed for the next stage of growth.

From MoMoVan, Mobile Monday in Vancouver, March 3, 2008.

Tags: momovan, wireless, funding, bc, survey

Podcast: Where Will BC's Wireless Companies Find $133M?

By now you've heard that our 2007 BC Wireless Industry Survey uncovered the need of BC's mobile companies to find $133M in financing over the next two years to fund growth and expand their markets. Where will that money come from? That was the main subject of the WINBC MoMoVan at the downtown offices of Fasken Martineau, March 3, 2008 .

The panelists were:

Steve Hnatiuk, from Yaletown Venture Partners. Yaletown is backed by major institutional investors in Canada and the US and invests the majority of its capital in early-stage technology companies in BC. They typically invest up to $2 million in the first round in any start-up they back and up to $6M in a company across multiple rounds. Every year Yaletown sees about 300 new companies seeking funding and invests in 3 or 4.

Jenny Yang, from the Business Development Bank of Canada, a crown corporation with $500 million to invest in early stage companies, especially ones in life sciences, advanced technology, telecommunications and IT.

Earl Hong Tai, from Telefilm Canada's New Media Fund for early stage start-ups.

Riz Kheraj, from NRC/IRAP, which helps small and medium tech companies by providing financial and other support. They have $13 million in R&D funds available to BC technology companies.

Michael Bidu, Executive Director of WINBC, moderator

Listen to the audio here (Right click to download).

Northern Voice 2008: Mobile Video Blogging

Chris Heuer and Roland Tanglao show how to stream video live from a phone, and discuss how it is changing the landscape for blogging. Lots of good interatction with the audience.
The session itself was (of course!) broadcast live from Roland's phone. This video is a mashup of Roland's stream, a GO-HD camera I had in the audience, and audio from a portable recorder stuck near the front of the room.
From MooseCamp at Northern Voice 2008.


Tags: nv08, northernvoice, northernvoice2008, mobile, live, video, blogging

Video: BC Wireless Industry Survey

Michael Bidu, Executive Director of WINBC, gives a quick overview of the results of a 2007 survey of the wireless industry in British Columbia. The sector is healthy with over $1B in revenue and 6,000 employees. It has now reached a level of maturity where substantial investment is needed to fund the sales and marketing needed for the next stage of growth.
From MoMoVan, Mobile Monday in Vancouver, March 3, 2008.

Tags: momovan, wireless, funding, bc, survey

Northern Voice 2008: Achieving a Personal Style

Some pithy comments by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, renowned photographer, writer and artist, on the role that lighting plays in achieving a personal style in your pictures. Starting with the lament that "right now we are going through the opposite of a renaissance of lighting," and that the world is becoming "Flickr'ed", he identifies both the biggest enemy and the holy grail of photography.
From the PhotoCamp session at Northern Voice 2008.

(A somewhat bigger version of the video is here.)

Piano Phantom

Just for fun, here's a short video I made to test some video sync software I am working on. It may not be obvious at first that there are several media streams being synchronized, but keep watching.

Northern Voice 2008: Best Compact Cameras

Tim Bray gives a quick survey of the state-of-the-art in compact digital still cameras in the PhotoCamp session at MooseCamp, Northern Voice 2008. Tim's talk itself is quite compact, as he cuts to the chase about why you would want to use a pocket camera versus an SLR, what the dream camera would be and how close you can get to that today. The links to the topics and cameras are gathered here.

(A somewhat better quality version of the video is here.)

Experiments in user-generated music videos

R.E.M. has done something innovative with their latest single, Supernatural Superserious. They posted 11 videos of the group performing the song and invited fans to mash them up into their own music videos. The results are here.

Some of the videos are pretty good. My favorite is actually only slightly connected with the concept, but especially after seeing some of the others it really grabs you (or me at least).

My own effort was just a technical exercise in synchronization. Still, it has some charm IMHO.

This is just the latest in band-encouraged fan videos, following on from a 200 contributor effort for a Shins video which was written up in Wired (which gets bonus points for a great headline).

Ultra-budget film-making

Kirk Mastin, a professional photographer, had a great idea on how to compare the quality of a cheap Flip Video camcorder with that of my beloved Canon XH A1, which costs about 20 times as much. He literally taped a Flip onto the side of an A1 and then shot a documentary with both of them simultaneously.

The results are fascinating. They are best viewed in the original Blip.tv form because they get cropped on Kirk's blog.

The Flip version looks not bad at all, even though it was cropped to get a 16:9 aspect ratio. Just shows that technique wins over equipment.

Northern Voice 2008: DOF and Gallery Hack

Derek Miller, with some help from Kris Krug, gives a quick intro to the concept of depth of field and how to control it. He then presents a neat hack to get photo galleries on your blog that look suspiciously Flickr-like. From the PhotoCamp session at MooseCamp, Northern Voice 2008.

Technical note: The image is a little dark because the lights were off in the room! Given that fact, the GO-HD did a pretty good job.

Northern Voice 2008: Modified Light Photography

Reilly Lievers of Blue Olive Photography gives a great tutorial on photographing people using flash and modified light. From the PhotoCamp session at MooseCamp, Northern Voice 2008.

Northern Voice 2008: Natural Light Photography

Miranda Lievers from Blue Olive Photography gives a great instructive presentation on making natural and found light portraits - what to look for when placing your subject(s), and how to get great natural portraits when you find the light. Well-illustrated with several excellent photos illustrating the concepts.

From the PhotoCamp session of Northern Voice 2008. A somewhat bigger and higher-quality version is here.

Northern Voice 2008: Enterprise Social

A well-attended session from Northern Voice 2008. David Orchard leads a discussion on the use of social software (especially wikis) within the enterprise. More notes here.

Technical Notes The first 45 seconds or so is audio-only, because I started the camera late. The video was recorded with an Aiptek GO-HD and the audio was recorded with a Zoom H4. This was literally the first time I had ever used the GO-HD and my camera work is pretty wonky in places as I was playing around with it!

DemoCamp: Scannerfly

Brendan Wilson demos Scannerfly, a Flash component that turns any webcam into a barcode scanner. Presented at DemoCampVancouver05. For a recap of the meeting, go here.

DemoCamp: Twemes

Rochelle Grayson describes how to track Twitter memes with Twemes. Presented at DemoCampVancouver05. For a recap of the whole meeting, see this TechVibes post.

DemoCamp: Localiti

Jason Murphy demos Localiti, a new concept for a web/desktop application that promises to redefine communication and messaging.

From DemoCampVancouver05. Read the meeting recap here.

DemoCamp: pul.se

Weston Triemstra demos pulse, a Facebook application that helps you keep track of your favorite bands and makes recommendations. This recording is from DemoCampVancouver05. A recap of the meeting can be found on TechVibes.

Nonlinear Learning, or Why I Don't Read Books Anymore

I had the good fortune a while ago to have dinner with Don Tapscott, a writer/thinker whose work I quite like. There was an awkward moment when I confessed that not only had I not read his latest book, but I doubted that I ever would. Don's a good writer and the subject area is interesting to me, but I just don't read books anymore. More precisely, sometimes I start reading them but I rarely finish. (I've had about 50 pages to go in Cryptonomicon for several years now.) And I do dip into books frequently, especially electronic editions. But read a book? Uh, no.

The reason has something to do with the fact there are so many other information sources that command my attention. I wasn't able to articulate this very well at the time, and now I don't have to because Scott Karp has clarified it admirably. The crux of his argument is summed up by these questions:

What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?

What if the networked nature of content on the web has changed not just how I consume information but how I process it?

What if I no longer have the patience to read a book because it’s too…. linear.

Yup, that's it (almost).

We home-schooled our three kids for many years. One of the key advantages of unstructured home-schooling over scheduled learning in a classroom is that you can take advantage of the "learning moment". There comes a time when the child asks a question or otherwise lets you know that she is receptive to hearing some information about a specific topic, right now. The amount of learning you can pack into that moment is incomparably more than what gets absorbed from a steady stream of linear information going by.

Call me ADD if you want but I prefer to think of our digital age as enabling a rich variety of learning moments. Mommy isn't around to answer my questions, but Wikipedia is. So is Twitter, Google, the electronic editions of The Vancouver Sun and The New York Times, Safari books online, my social graph, etc. etc. Sure I hop around from topic to topic and can't follow the bread crumbs back to where I started sometimes, but on the whole I am getting more out of it than by following a linear track. Much more.

I disagree with Scott on one point. I don't believe his (or my) style of thinking has changed. Human thought processes are naturally nonlinear and hyperlinked. It's just that now we have information sources that match. Physical books that are read from beginning to end don't fit.

Mathematician Up For Grammy

This article tells the wonderful story of how a mathematician helped restore a bootleg recording of Woody Guthrie performing live. Until recently no such recordings were thought to exist, but in 2001 one appeared. The problem was, it was recorded on flimsy wire that was stretched and twisted. The restoration was so good that the recording has been nominated for a Grammy.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080209/mathtrek.asp