I have had the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon for several months and one feature that I have used only once on the device is the video recorder. The reason: it SUCKS! The video quality was (just) ok, it was was audio that was the worst, most garbled, audio I have ever heard on a video recording device! No exaggeration, no joke. Hands down the worst!
A month or so ago I installed the CyanogenMod ROM (7.1.1) and the video recording was no better, so I was sure it was the fact that there is only one mic on the device (or something like that) and wrote it off as a hardware thing.
Weeeeelllll, for some reason this weekend I decided to go with an unofficial MIUI port. For starters MIUI is a totally different Android experience that lies somewhere closer to iOS.
Here’s the thing though: THEY FIXED THE AUDIO IN THE VIDEO RECORDING APP!
YAY! Go MIUI. I cant wait till ICS comes out for the thunderbolt, but until then… here’s to MIUI!
Some people in the tech scene have been questioning a few things about 1. TechStars and 2. the fact that TechStars will be on TV. I think this new trailer demonstrates some of the amazing learning and mentorship that happened during the program.
Series starts tonight at 9PM on Bloomberg.
Amazing Physics Video of the Week:
The Physicists Anthem. (really for the particle physicists out there)
This is a great video/song to get what those crazy scientists are up to at CERN.
Also great for karaoke, I just sang it with my daughter. Great bonding time!
Awesome Science Video of the Week:
Prof. Sir. M. Berry talks about my PhD dissertation topic, Singular Optics, the study of light with holes!
Some light in singular optics looks like a donut, some light bends around corners. Regardless of “what type” of light it is, it has points of zero intensity or phase which we can exploit to do cool shit. Like compute much faster than possible with 1’s and 0’s or make micro/nano machines move and bend to our will.
This is a great explanation, by a very smart man, on a cool topic (at least this shelby-er things so!)
Little children all over the world are asking one question today: “Where do web videos come from?”
My daughter asked me just that question this morning. So I looked into it and found some interesting things to tell her. But first, the setup…
At Shelby.TV our users sign in with Twitter and/or Facebook and we pull in, in almost real time (seriously, almost instantly), their feeds from each service, looking for links that point to video. We keep track of all the links that pass through what we affectionately call Arnold, our Link Processor. We also keep track of how many times we see each link. We see some links already >20k times each (in the 2-ish months Shelby’s been around in alpha while we are building her out). Overall so far we have seen ~1.63 Millllliiiiooooon links.
So back to the question: Where do web videos come from?
Looking at all those links there is no surprise as to which we have seen the most of. We’ve seen ~1.4M YouTube videos and that comes as no surprise seeing that they recently announced they have ~48 min. of video uploaded per minute and 3 Billion views per day.
The full data set is shown in the chart below. The number of “hits” is the # of times that domain passes through Arnold (remember he is our Link Processor).
Have you read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson? If you have, then this chart will look somewhat familiar especially when I tell you that the “OTHER” category is made up of 36 domains having between 1 and 36 videos. Thats a tail if I ever saw one! More to come on this in a future post…
[For some scale we recognized videos from the facebook.com domain name ~40 times and is the reason that bar is not visible on this graph. And for some more perspective we have seen video from Qik ~1,100 times.]
So the answer to The Question: YouTube, mostly.
I am excited to start learning more about how videos spread around the web as Shelby.TV matures and grows out of the private alpha we are currently in. Interested in learning more about what we are doing @ Shelby? Leave a comment below or tweet my way @henrysztul.
[P.S. If you are interested in reading about how the Long Tail relates to Quantum Mechanics read more here!]
Never would have seen this site (http://brulesrules.com/) without it being asked to be @onShelby, we’re not setup with Adult Swim yet, but someone already asked for it…
One of the reasons I love #Shelby (so far) is for the content that I am being exposed to that I wouldn’t have otherwise!
Simple technology to understand, presented in a clear way. Makes me get it without shoving it down my throat. Goes along with my theme today of “What is a good product”
Our “What we do video” on the new website. We worked with the guys at Epipheo on this, if you ever want to do something similar I HIGHLY recommend them!
Short answer… I don’t know. (and that’s ok, i believe no one *really* does) Long answer: Great products are those that give you a deep feeling that you are are truly connected to others. Tumblr, Bookface, Twitter, SoundCloud, rdio, Foursquare, and ahhh, the book.
You interact with a book on a personal level but you interact with others around that book. Books make people excited, sad, happy, scared. You develop a connection with the book but that connection enables you interact with other people wrt the book.
Does youtube give you that feeling of connecting with people? Maybe on a superficial level… But it definitely does not give you insight into a person like a blog post or a tweet does. It gives you a window into someones world but it doesn’t invite you in, invite you to site in the couch and stay awhile. Comments under videos are ment to give a greater connection to other people, but those are crap!
Video is an asset, just as the book was in the previous analogy. You consume video, you get emotionally attached, you develop a relationship. The problem is it does not enable you to interact with other individuals around the context of that video or that collection of videos in a meaningful way.
[random thought thrown in: Today more than ever I think a great product gives you a feeling that a friend is really a friend, not just another check mark on the wall.]
An idea Gary Vaynerchuk is pushing out recently is that we are growing stronger relationships to products (he says brands), so does that mean we are becoming friends with products? Isn’t that the next step?
I want a friend that can enable me to develop relationships around video. I want that product.
#shelby
[p.s. curious on your thoughts?]
“When I went to school, I, we studied the constitution. It says you have a right to say what you want to say, which means pray to whomever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. And it’s just not the government’s business to tell you what to say. You went on and on about Glen Beck. (The opening of the show focused on Beck.) He has a right to say anything he wants. That’s what great about America. And people say, well, in Saudi Arabia you can’t build a church. Yes. That’s the difference (between) being in Saudi Arabia and America. And I, it’s just plain and simple that. Whether you like the mosque or don’t like the mosque, you don’t have to go. There’s already another mosque down there within four block of the World Trade Center. There’s porno places, there’s fast-food places. It’s a vibrant community. It’s New York. (applause)”
Bloomberg also predicted that the controversy would go away after the elections, “This is plain and simple people trying to stir up things to get publicity and trying to polarize people so that they can get some votes. And I don’t think that most of these people who are yelling and screaming really care one way or another.”
I’m at #hackdisrupt and the 35th project to present FEED LIVE NOW!
UPDATE: not live anymore! not the best project i ever worked on but… see you at Disrupt this week!
You can now watch *live* C-SPAN on Boxee! Check out my seeSPAN app in the repository! Archive video content coming in next release… let me know what you think!
I cant stop saying Bob Loblaw in my head = problem
and I am addicted to Arrested Development! (and posting videos on this site seemingly!)
