THE DREAM IN ACTION

For those of you who are still Windows “die hards” (I can’t imagine why?) it will become harder and harder for you to stick to your guns. As Apple’s MobileMe makes people’s digital lives easier and easier to manage it will become increasingly impossible to ignore the superior UI that Apple is offering and are continuing to improve.

Click the image to check out more of what Mobile me has to offer.

Are you using MobileMe yet?

The pictures say 1000 words. For a play-by-play go to

chilirec is like TiVo for internet radio. You log in, choose your music that you want to record, and within about 5 minutes you have music that has been recorded for you off the internet. chilirec then stores the music in “your personal space” on the web and you can return to listen to it whenever. This service is totally free, however, it is questionably legal (just like this entire genre of services). For you say.no.radio’ers the quality of music is subject to the web radio stations. If you can find good indie channels you will probably be able to record, save, and listen via chilirec.

One awesome feature of the service is that you can actually upload a copy of the playlist you create on chilirec directly to your ipod and listen on the go! No need to be tied to your comp. Awesome. chilirec is still in beta release so check it out.

How it works

for more cool music stuff check out say.no.radio

post inspired by TechCrunch

I’ve just added the MyBlogLog widget to ActionsTalk. Be sure to join the community so that you can know who else reads ActionsTalk and we can begin to connect.

I once again feel obligated to apologize for my post bashing the Twitter faithfuls. It is truly an awesome and affective web app! I am now fully on board and would encourage any of you who are not yet sold to try it again. It took me two tries to see how useful the tool could be. I’ve met some awesome people on Twitter and have had some great conversations with existing friends via Twitter.

The next step at least in my head is, how I or others can use Twitter in the workplace? How can Twitter contribute to Enterprise 2.0? Well, Tara Hunt author of horsepigcow.com tells you just how companies can make good use of tweets in the professional environment. Twitter is legit, jump on or get left behind!

Post compliments of BlakeSamic.comTwo new applications I’ve been impressed with are Piclens and Animoto.

Piclens is a plugin for Firefox that lets you view photos on the web in a new, completely immersive way. Once you have it installed, it integrates with all the major photo sharing sites: Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Smugmug, etc. With Piclens you can view sets of photos on a virtual wall, and fly through them with a drag of the mouse.  It can make the most boring Facebook album seem interesting.

Watch the demo here, then download it — Trust me.

Animoto is a new site that lets you create amazing videos by combining a group of your photos with some music. I’ve never seen an auto-generated slide show come out so well! You can make the videos for free if you go with a length of 30 seconds, and it’s cheap to make a longer one (~$4). After your video is complete, you can embed it on your website, Facebook, etc. As I sift through 1000’s of pictures from my time in Europe and try to put a video together, I’m thinking it makes a lot more sense to have Animoto do it for me. I would be very surprised if Animoto doesn’t get bought up by Google or Yahoo (think Flickr integration…) in the near future.

Here is my first crack at an Animoto video

This is a project is a collaboration between the Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. This video is yet another example of an awesome application of a mash-up of technologies. It will be fun to see the final product.

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

April 3, 2008

I’ve recently download the instant message aggregator Pidgin v2.4.1.  Here are a few findings:

I like…
With an impressive power of customization, Pidgin comes with all the good stuff provided by the former Gaim. The text-only version that they call Finch (birds…get it), the app allows you to chat with your buddies from a command line same as in the graphical environment (not a huge fan of this). The default config is updated to go to system tray, I guess in older versions you had to do this manually. Nice improvement.
Not so much…
What I don’t is that there aren’t really any themes, the UI is very simple (this might be better, haven’t made up my mind). Where this is really going to need some work is the face that webcams are coming on all machines. Dell has them coming on the new E-class and Macs have had them since my gramma was 12. Get with the program, updated needed.
The rest…

Pidgin is an instant messaging client compatible with a variety of platforms, supporting a wide range of protocols and offering the possibility to log in to multiple accounts simultaneously. It comes with many popular features, such as file transfer and typing notifications but it also brings up unique ones, and a pretty large plug-ins collection. Overall awesome product and probably the best of its class. Blue ribbon.

Got it…

I know this is not exactly a cutting edge post or download on my part. Pidgin has been out there for a while however, I haven’t found a need until recently I’ve been fine with Gchat. Now this is better.

This is 3 parts creepy and 5 parts amazing. This video puts a robot project by Boston Dynamics on display. I can guarantee that you will be impressed by this. Most especially by the ability of this robot to correct its near fall on the ice (half way through video).

Again I apologize for all the videos recently but I’ve been watching more thus finding more amazing things to share.

The Nokia Research Center is working with the Cambriage Nanoscience Centre to develop nanoscience technologies that will bridge the latest and greatest in emerging technologies with the ability to benefit the end user. The idea behind this is (I know I say this a lot) absolutely market changing. This will change the word “product” forever. This technology allows the end user to combine many products in one. From watch, to clothing, to cell phone, to food tester, to health/bacteria scanner, and so on, this design/concept has the ability to do, it would seem, almost anything!

Here are some of the other many benefits of the technology:

• Newly-enabled flexible and transparent materials blend more seamlessly with the way we live
• Devices become self-cleaning and self-preserving
• Transparent electronics offering an entirely new aesthetic dimension
• Built-in solar absorption might charge a device, whilst batteries become smaller, longer lasting and faster to charge
• Integrated sensors might allow us to learn more about the environment around us, empowering us to make better choices

See some other pics.

This movie is a bit long but it will show (with drawings) some of the capabilities of these technology applied to products that will change the end-user (US!) ’s life. This will truly blow you away…

click to play

I apologize for the feeling that ActionsTalk has been very Gizmodo’esk’ but I’ve recently been super excited about new technologies that I’ve been exposed to. Enjoy.

This video of a home made alarm clock found on Engadget is a brilliant example of finding a problem and building a solution. Exactly the type of thinking we like to promote.

This video is…

• A really great idea
• This is taking the morning wake up to a whole new level.
• Far over my head technically.
• Very very interesting.

My friends and I are always trying to think of completely new ways to do things. It’s tough. Sometimes it seems like new ideas are running out but companies like ManagedQ are proving that theory wrong. Thank God.

ManagedQ has completely redesigned the search experience. They are currently using Google search results (with some hopes, it sounds like, to not always use Google) but delivering them in a totally new way, visually. Right now Google’s search results appear in a list from most relevent to less relevant. In order to see the page you have to click each link and wait for it to load. ManagedQ removes that click for you by displaying your search results in little screen shots of each page.

I really think that this idea is revolutionary. I am very easily excited about new ideas and start-ups like this but sometimes you just have a gut feeling. This idea is one of those that I think Google would just love to consume.

Another great idea that ManagedQ incorporates is the “topic” bar on the left. It categorized related topics by person, place, or thing and as you scroll over the topic it tells you which of your results paged included that topic. In the example here I’ve search “surfing”. The number one person result for this search was appropriately “Kelly Slater” (indisputably the most famous surfer in the world… after all he did date Pamela Anderson). Next, the pllaces related to my search were Costa Rica and California. With the exception of Hawaii I think they nailed it again.

Here is the founder David Stat discussing why he started ManagedQ and some of the thought behind it.

Search hasn’t changed in a decade. Result quality has improved, but what you see has not changed. The search interface has remained stagnant at the command level, So why not a search application, rather than create a search engine, we can sit on top of the results of any search engine. Currently we use Google.

I would encourage you to begin to use ManagedQ for various searches and see if this visual search results method is appealing to you. Keep in mind you are getting the same results that you would receive on Google except now you are add free. (We may discuss how Google is allowing this to occur in a follow-up post) Please comment your opinions of ManagedQ and their new search presentation here on ActionsTalk.

Space Data Corp, a company out of Arizona is working on using hot air balloons to create wireless internet service. This service is focussed to provide internet to rural folks and truckers on the highways. This idea is slowly gaining an audience. Nobody in that audience is more welcomed than Google.

2 nights ago I played Guitar Hero for the first time and let me say, it is worth the hype. I know I’m a little behind the “gamer” trend here and I know that it has been out for a while. However, this game is FUN! I felt a little Asian because I was pretty good at it right away. It’s a game that you can have fun with because you don’t have to be awesome in order to have fun, but if you are awesome (RW) then you can up the level and make it really challenging with bridges, power chords and the like.

For all the parents out there looking for a good Christmas gift for someone between the ages of 8 and 40, look no further. Mom, if you are reading this…I want one! I played the game on NintendoWii with the wireless guitar and I felt like I was on stage. When it comes to choosing your character I recommend the chick with the black bra and torn jeans. If you play guitar hero let me know where you are in the game and your thoughts…

I purchased the SCH-u740 (see image) two weeks ago and now have had some time to play with almost all the features it has to offer.  What makes the phone special at first glance is its 2 way flip feature. For normal phone calls it flips open vertically just like the Razor or any other flip phone, however, for speaker phone, text messaging, or internet use, it flips horizontally providing the wide-screen and full ‘qwerty’ keyboard.  This feature is phenomenally designed, and as long as the hinge stays in tact, very well engineered.  The phone and the hinge seem very durable, and although very thin, it seems tough to standard wear and tear.  The phone’s camera is quite impressive aswell allowing for different lighting levels and flash strengths, although I have not yet figure out the zoom feature.

The only negatives I have found with this phone thus far is how tiny the key pad actually is. To fit the number pad and the full keyboard they really had to squeeze. I would not recommend this phone for the elderly (sorry Dad) as it would be very tough to read the keys.  With the standard two-year agreement that almost all wireless phone companies now require the only true test of this phones quality will be the test of time. But, for now, job well done Samsung.  I’ll keep you posted. 

What phone are you using?