CogBlogged Tagged ‘mobile’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate. So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity. It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure… The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an [...]

I’ve made my share of snippy jokes about the silliness of foursquare, of tweeting evert burger joint you visit or your latest new badge. That’s not to say there is not some potential in this geolocation app, it may just be waiting to be found. But take it on a simple level- you carry a device around which can sense where you are, and using foursquare (or its variants) you can “mark” your locations, see others that have been there. I put aside my criticism to last month as we learned from Beth Kanter how some museums were putting it to use (or see this strategy by a NY theater group and more ideas for museums), especially again, the notion of “listening” in social media. So check this out- in two steps you can generate a google map of your foursquaring. I had to try. It works (click for larger [...]

Harrumph to people who gave up on RSS readers and really are deluded that they can get all their news via twitter; its now my secret weapon of discovery. It was there I found in my techie feeds a story that my bank (Chase) has added the capability to their iPhone app to deposit checks. I had liked over the last year how they updated their ATMs to scan checks for deposits negating the need for deposit slips and envelopes. This is one more step. I already had the Chase app, and sure enough it is in there– well I did have to generate a new security code (shows you how much I use the app)… So it looks like you have to do photos of the front and back of the check, and there are limits to the service (no more than $1000 per deposit or $3000 per week). [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by theilr It’s been a while since I did some WordPress hacking, and today I think it showed. Like a good bone I could not let go of a niggling little problem, and then after going around in circles, I found an obvious way that was much more simpler than where I was headed. But there are things even learned in a few trips around the roundabout. Here’s where I drove around in circles today… for a while, I have been publishing web versions of the NMC Horizon Reports in CommentPress format at http://wp.nmc.org — this is very useful for publications since it allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, so they are tied at a more micro level to the content. (Yeah they are in the old CommentPress mode, I know I should be using the newer digress.it and am ready to publish [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ruben Bos I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory). But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one): The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are [...]

Found via a comment on an earlier post, Hugh Garry has a short video with footage shot at a music festival, overlain with a “narration” form his tweets at the event, converted via Speech to Text: As described there, Whilst making Shoot The Summer I’ve been thinking a lot about the capabilities of the mobile in film making and story telling. I Twittered my thoughts at the Cambridge Folk Festival then converted it to audio using my Mac’s text to audio recognition software. I then dropped it over clips filmed on my mobile phone. The results are quite interesting. It’s really not that complex a task, and to me, would make for an interesting assignment for a film/media class. More details at Telling Stories with Twitter. Add to the interesting pile, Shoot the Summer: ‘Shoot The Summer’ is a film documenting a summer of festivals shot entirely on mobile phones. [...]

My iPhone excitement is nothing new here, given how long it took me to get one, but there is wave after wave of discovery of new things, I am forgetting I have only had it for 2 months. But last night… I found an app that is, to me, explosive, in terms of opening potential for what a portable, networked, web connected media acquisition device can do. I am projecting the children of so-called “digital natives”, the ones that will make those natives seem foreign, will look back at our use of keyboard driven computers the same way I might look at a Victrola or a telegraph machine. So, first a tip of the blog hat, a linktribution to David Warlick for sharing in his post, an iPhone app called SnapTell. It is a visual parallel of one of the other most amazing iApps, Shazam, which lets you hold the [...]

Almost be sheer accident I just came across Qipit a service that allows you to take photos of sketches or whiteboards with your camera phone, email it to their site, and then have it available as a PDF or even be able to fax it. Chances are, you carry a cell phone with you everywhere you go. And more than likely, that cell phone has a camera. Qipit turns this handy device into a portable scanner, copier and fax machine, and the user-friendly Qipit service also works with your digital camera at home or the office. The patented image-processing science behind Qipit is complicated, but the concept is simple: use Qipit to capture and share anything written or printed. Whereever you’re at. Whenever you need it. I just quickly set up an account, and used my iPhone to take picture of a sketch diagram I have for some plans to [...]

Just came across TryPhone a site that offers web based interactive interfaces for a wide range of mobile phones. Seems a great way to see the features. And in the spirit of good embed-ness, you can put any of this in a web page. So before I do this, my own backl story. I have always been years behind in the latest phone tech. I use mine mainly for… calls, plus some photo/upload to flickr and a few posts to twitter. I am definitely a phone lagger. But believe me, after trying an iphone in the Apple Store last August in Chicago, the tempation has been hard to ignore. You want one, admit it. I want one, I admit it. So with some shame I mus admit that when offered to get a work paid iphone… I actually turned it down (for now). Why? Well, my previous one just died, [...]