Videos

Are cell phone photos the 110/disc/APS photos of our day?

Post published:March 11, 2014
Post author:philip

Kodak Disc Film and Camera

I've heard it said that the best camera is the one you have with you. Sure, any picture is better than no picture, but with cell phones today many people don't ever bother to bring a better camera, even if it's small and fits in their pocket. Obsolete Film Formats The reasons 110 film, disc film and APS film (known as Kodak Advantix, Fuji Nexia, etc.) were created were all more or less the same – to allow the creation of smaller cameras that used more convenient film cartridges. Cartridges of various kinds allowed consumers to take pictures without worrying about advancing the film, and take the film out of the camera without having to rewind the film back into the film canister. These formats were popular because 35mm film cameras were more complicated to use, and more prone to making mistakes (opening the camera before rewinding the film, for example). The biggest problem with these formats is that in order to make their cameras smaller, the size of the negatives are necessarily smaller than 35mm film. Smaller negatives means lower quality and higher grain. The last format APS, was the highest quality of these formats, yet still lower than…

Stephen Wolfram never disappoints…

Post published:March 2, 2014
Post author:philip

http://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik No one will come away from this video amazed at how humble Stephen Wolfram is, but that's not the point of the video. It's an introduction to a forthcoming programming language from Stephen Wolfram, named appropriately enough Wolfram Language, that attempts to build on the past 30 years of his work creating Mathematica, his book A New Kind of Science (humbly referred to on his site as Wolfram Science), and Wolfram|Alpha. It takes the knowledge and algorithms built in to Wolfram|Alpha and makes them available in a symbolic programming language. The demo is fairly entertaining (considering its topic) and it should be very interesting to see what is done with this language once it's available to the general public. For more information, see the Wolfram Language section of the Wolfram Research web site.

Jon Medved interviewed on recent Israeli exits

Post published:February 26, 2014
Post author:philip

Great interview with Jonathan Medved, on Bloomberg TV in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress (MWC), about Israeli companies and the many large exits recently, both acquisitions (shown in the graphic above) and the recent IPO of Wix. Last time I saw Jonathan Medved was actually in Barcelona at an earlier MWC when he was CEO of Vringo. Now he's running the very interesting OurCrowd crowdfunding firm, where accredited investors can invest a minimum of $10,000 into startups (a VC for the masses - or at least the accredited masses). Take a look: http://youtu.be/E1qae-vSoCc or view it on Bloomberg's web site.

What happens when you try to video mountain biking using your phone?

Post published:February 21, 2014
Post author:philip

http://youtu.be/jRDOzMYIXGo This is just a fun post of some video I filmed last week while mountain biking in my hometown of Modi'in. This trail is on a hill behind a major highway. There are a few things I'd like to point out about the video. I filmed it using an iPhone 4S mounted very securely to my bike using a machined aluminum Rokform bike mount that screws into the steering tube. The mount and the phone do not move at all. The blurry parts and wavy video that makes it look like I'm on an acid trip must have something to do with the CMOS sensor in the camera. A GoPro this is not. I don't know how current iPhones perform with extreme video situations like this, but I hope they're better. The stabilization correction is done using software called Elasty. It normally would remove the black edges, making the video rectangular as it was originally (losing some of the edges), but I think the rotating box is more dramatic and gives you a better sense of what the stabilization software is doing. Youtube added the extra black space on the left and right sides of the video, I guess…

What the heck are stickers? A half billion dollar and growing business…

Post published:February 16, 2014
Post author:philip

Viber Sticker Store

http://youtu.be/o5LKXDwpqPE I've noticed something when talking to friends about messaging. If they're not from Asia (yes, technically I live in Asia, but Israel is not Asian in that sense) they don't get what stickers are all about. Why would they really? In the United States, and I believe Europe as well, stickers are more or less irrelevant. I would venture to guess that most Americans think stickers are just fancy emoticons. Facebook added stickers to it's messenger app, but although it's called the 'Sticker Store' it appears they're all free. Perhaps this is a first step towards commercialization in the future, but I think if you get something for free you don't really appreciate it, and in this case it probably means most Facebook users ignore this feature. It's also, as I mentioned, viewed as just bigger emoticon. Viber, which just sold a couple of days ago for $900M to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, implemented a sticker store as its first monetization strategy, followed by connecting calls to the traditional phone network. Stickers, in fact, are available on all the major messaging platforms with the solitary exception of WhatsApp. See the nice chart from Mark Watts-Jones on the 10 ways…

The first public introduction of the Macintosh was in Boston

Post published:February 3, 2014
Post author:philip

In 1984, Apple famously announced the Macintosh on January 22 in the iconic Ridley Scott directed '1984' commercial during the Superbowl. Not well known is that the ad was actually shown a few months earlier to a group of computer dealers behind closed doors. The ad announced the imminent launch of the Mac on January 24th, 1984.The Mac was indeed introduced on the 24th, at the Apple Annual Shareholder's Meeting, and was to become available publicly hours later. Video of the shareholder's meeting was found on a Betamax tape in 2004, and released online in 2005. For a bit of history behind what happens in that video, see Andy Hertzfeld's great description on his folklore.org site called The Times They Are A-Changin'. The initial introduction was to Apple's shareholders who went to Cupertino, CA, and was not open to the public. The first public introduction of the Macintosh was actually six days later, across the country in Boston, MA. It took place at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society (BCS). BCS was run by a 20-year old college student, Jonathan Rotenberg, who had founded the society in 1977 at the age of 13. At its peak, it was the largest…

The end of paper?

Post published:January 23, 2014
Post author:philip

Google's Glucose-sensing Contact Lens (Google Blog)

Do the success of tablets signal the end of paper? I think we can never truly understand understand what the future will hold, even if we can predict its trajectory. Ray Kurzweil speaks often about how technology grows exponentially. Not only is technology progressing quickly, but the rate at which it is progressing is increasing. This is counter to how many people perceive it. This is best outlined in Kurzweil's paper The Law of Accelerating Returns. I bring this up because he posits that the 100 years of this century will see the equivalent of 20,000 years of growth at the growth rate at the turn of the century. In other words, even at the growth rate that existed in 2000, it would take 20,000 years to reach the equivalent growth if kept constant, compared to the accelerating growth that really exists and will occur in this century. So how will we consume the written word in 10 years? in 50 years? in 100 years? Can you perceive what the equivalent of 20,000 years of progresss will mean? One can argue now about the tactile difference in reading a paper book versus reading on an iPad, but what about…