Qik: Yikes, Is That A Reality Show in Your Pocket?
Posted on April 30, 2009
I used to dread it when my wealthy aunt dragged out the magic lantern, put up the screen and proceeded to torture us youngsters (and I am sure our less-traveled parents) with fuzzy slides and stilted stories about her encounters with the pigeon pocked monuments of Europe. Now, thanks to the internet, we have tedium on demand…or as it is on demand and we might not choose to demand it, we can choose spontaneity and entertainment instead. And that fun, these days, could just come from the little device that has become our love it/hate it sidekick, our mobile phones.
Qik is a game changer in video. It is a free software program that works on almost any video-capable phone, that enables you to broadcast live video on the internet for the world to see: to your own free video page, to YouTube, to MySpace, to almost any place your cyber pals lurk. It also stores your video on line, so those who are asleep while you are mugging your way through the Montmartre can watch it later. But Qik’s possibilities are endless, like catching an evil-doer in the act and storing the evidence online before he can wrench the phone from your hands. I spent some time with Rishi Malik of Qik.
Most Qik video is not ready for prime time…yet. It is not the fault of Qik, but of mobile phone manufacturers who use poor quality cameras and codecs (the software schemes that process video). My wife’s Samsung Blackjack delivers passable video while my Blackberry Bold is virtually worthless. Rishi’s Nokia produced a good picture. But Rishi says the future is HDTV. Samsung has a phone (the Omnia HD) that shoots 720p high definition television, which, if your carrier can handle the bandwidth, should look just fine on that big Plasma TV you went into hock for.
» Filed Under Video, Gadgets & Cameras, Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
The Hello Kitty Gate
Posted on April 22, 2009
Gate C3 at Taipei International Airport with a play area and piped in music that is not to everybody’s taste…unless of course you are a nine year old girl…or my daughter, who is 32.
» Filed Under Photography, Taiwan | Leave a Comment
Charles Darwin Meets Gilbert and Sullivan
Posted on March 27, 2009
If it ever comes to your neighborhood, as it did ours last night at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center, see Richard Milner’s “Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert.” Milner combines his love of musical theater, especially Gilbert and Sullivan, with his scholarship as an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History to do Darwin in song. He wrote the lyrics himself and manages to pull them off in a number of vocal styles: Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Jimmy Durante’s “Inka Dinka Doo” and Maurice Chevalier crooning the love song “If You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish,” even something vaguely resembling a Blues Brother. It is 80 minutes of rollicking edutainment.
Milner wouldn’t play well communities that still believe that “Father Knows Best” and that man walked with tyrannosauruses or probably even with some free marketers who foster the principles of Social Darwinism, the notion that anything unproductive should be allowed to wither…or worse. That doesn’t jive with the complex ecological and social dependencies Darwin and his successors studied and proved.
Darwin probably never sang about his studies of finches and barnacles. Unlike Milner, he was said not to be a very funny guy.
Here is a video story about Milner produced by the New York Times:
