The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.
Twitter Music, which is set to arrive in the wake of key competitor Facebook overhauling the music section of its News Feed, shows Twitter taking new steps into becoming a full-fledged media company. The app acknowledges the key role music has played in drawing new users to the service -- particularly younger, mainstream users. Pop stars have some of Twitter's most popular accounts, with followings in the tens of millions. The TwitterMusic account has 2.3 million followers -- not a bad perch from which to launch an eponymous app
wireWax is a new service (still in beta) that takes the concept of YouTube annotations and makes it much better. On wireWax you can build interactive tags into your videos. Each tag that you add to your video have another video from YouTube or Vimeo or an image from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram. A tag can also include an audio track from SoundCloud or a reference article from Qwiki.
What makes using wireWax different from using the YouTube annotations tool is that clicking on your tags (what YouTube calls annotations) does not send you outside of the video you're currently watching. This means that you can watch a video within a video or view a picture or listen to a different audio track within the original video. When you click a tag in the original video the video pauses and the tagged item is displayed.
Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”
Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”
One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.
Developers cannot ignore Android. The old mantra of releasing on iOS and then eventually hitting Android needs to be rethought. Google also needs to step up its game. Google Play is a mess and Android has a very big problem with piracy. Android the ecosystem still sucks, but Android the mobile platform is winning.
Well,
that was quick. Right after yesterday's surprising announcement,
Sony flew its yet-to-be-released NEX-VG10 camcorder into London just in time for
today's showcase event. Naturally, we had to get our hands on this shiny baby,
and boy we were impressed. In case you missed the news, this snazzy device is
the world's first consumer HandyCam with interchangeable lens, meaning you can
share E-mount lenses with your young NEX DSLRs, or take advantage of
the abundant A-mount lenses with the help of an adapter (which will cost you
extra, mind you). Likewise, there are also hot and cold shoe mounts on the mic
shaft to cater your current camera accessories. Read on for our thoughts on the
rest of the camcorder -- we've put together a little sample clip for you at the
end as well.
There
isn't much to complain about with this $2,000 (and, sadly, possibly £2,000 for
the Brits) piece of kit in terms of appearance and ergonomics. We like being
able to hold it by either the seemingly solid body (using the strap) or the mic
shaft, and both ways provided comfortable grip without much fatigue due to the
light weight (even with the bundled lens). We were also able to quickly master
the jog-dial control next to the 3-inch screen, but for this price, we expected
a touchscreen interface as well to make life easier. As for the bundled F3.5-6.3
18-200mm lens, we found that zooming required a bit more effort than we liked,
so thankfully there's auto focus mode -- just like any ordinary camcorder -- to
save us from further wrist work with the focus ring. We must also point out that
unlike the Olympus PEN,
this Sony camcorder didn't pick up any mechanical noise from its lens auto
focussing; otherwise, this kit totally wouldn't deserve such price tag.
Of
course, what we really care about is the picture and sound quality. All is
revealed in our sample reel below (remember to enable HD playback mode), but in
brief: stunningly accurate colors, sharp 1080/60i picture, and impressive audio
sensitivity (notice how the mic was able to pick up conversations from afar; you
can also enable just the front mics to minimise background noise). You may
notice some shakiness while we were adjusting the lens -- we'll blame it on our
lack of practice from the little hands-on time we had. Regardless, the NEX-VG10
certainly lived up to our expectation, and we look forward to hear what the
filming hobbyists think of this prosumer-level camcorder when it comes out in
September.
Update: commenter
aim120 dropped us a link to Sony's own sample clip. Enjoy!
Adobe has released an embeddable video player that plays HTML5 native video in browsers that support it, and falls back to Flash in browsers that don’t.
It’s cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don’t support Flash. Using Adobe’s new player, these devices can show videos in web pages without the Flash plug-in.
App of the Week: Find My iPhone
By Doug Aamoth on November 23, 2010
The free Find My iPhone app locates any of your connected Apple products running the latest iOS 4.2 software and displays them on a map.
if your device gets lost or stolen, download the Find My iPhone app to an iPhone 4, 4th-generation iPod Touch, or iPad and sign into the app using the same MobileMe credentials that you used on your missing device.
You'll then see your forlorn iPhone on a map and can remotely lock it, delete all the data, or send a message to the screen asking for it to be returned. If it's lost somewhere in your couch cushions, you can also have it play a loud two-minute alert sound even if it's been set to silent.
A revolution in Flash game production. An amazing new way for man to interface with machine. The beginning of a new tomorrow. Never before has the world witnessed such a collection of AS3 files. We put it all in the new flixel 2. Groups to help organize game objects, quad trees for faster, more accurate collisions, a cleaner API, plus all the old flixel classics: animated sprites, tilemaps, and particle emitters. Most importantly, flixel is still completely free for personal or commercial use
Display Hundreds of Objects at Once
Create Tilemaps from Text Files or Images
Generate and Emit Particles for Hot Effects
play Positional, Streaming, Looping Sounds
Scroll Objects or Groups in Parallax
Text Display, Buttons and Mouse Cursors
Save Games, Math Utiltities and Collisions
Pure ActionScript 3 is Fun and Free!
EmbedPlus is a simple and free to use web service. You can play only a specific portion of the video in your site. Your site visitors might also want to zoom in or slow down specific parts of the video while viewing it. All this is now possible if you embed videos with the help of EmbedPlus.
Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. If you want to lead a team or be a part of one, with an eye towards leveraging social media, it’s good to examine which roles people can play as part of that team. Marketing your site means putting the right people in place.
This paper investigated the use of special eyeglasses designed with a built-in video camera and microphone for the purpose of recording classroom activities from the point of view of both the professor and the student. The aim is to eliminate the need for dedicated video recording in the classroom. This paper reviewed the various techniques used to record a lecture and highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of each. It also presented 10 activities from the point of view of the student and the professor, which may play a role in improving students' understanding of the lecture. The videos produced by the professor and student cameras were reviewed in terms of their effectiveness and usefulness with regard to the 10 activities. The results were analysed and conclusions were drawn based upon the findings of this study.
Looking at the abstract, it's indeed powerful if this kind of special eyeglasses is available in the mass market. Then again, due to my limited capability, access to the review for this research is not possible, as such, thus wouldn't know the actual effectiveness & usefulness of this study. Hopefully, details of similar studies done elsewhere may be available over internet in future.
The Games Businesses Play with Customers
Boomers and Generation X will remember the days when the Yellow Pages was the encyclopedia of local business. Now services such as Foursquare bring the Yellow Pages alive. Add to the fact that the people we know and trust share their experiences and endorsements or critiques with every checkin, we’re given access to something quite remarkable. Additionally, businesses are given a special opportunity to learn more about the people who are checking-in and also about those who are not. Foursquare offers a powerful set of business tools that can help local businesses, chains, destinations, you name it, more effectively connect with the people who can not only keep them in business, but grow it as well.
An alternative when working with Google Apps when uploading videos to YouTube is an issue with the Acad Staff.
Beginning this week, you’ll be able to go beyond simply playing your videos within Google Docs -- you can now insert your videos into Google Sites, embed them anywhere on the web, and caption them for your viewers.
Capture the flag. Hide and seek. Marco Polo. These location-based games brought hours of fun to many of us as children. Then video games came along and suddenly the only location you played in was the living room. Now this shift is coming full circle as innovative mobile games are using geo-location, image recognition and augmented reality technologies to combine the real and virtual worlds.
Twitter Music will be coming very soon in April
