Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Ooops forgot to blog about Mobile Camp Vancouver 2 unconference (topics and sessions decided the day of, all welcome from users to hard core devs to artists and sales and marketing folks!)

Here are my session ideas

• • session on SIFT Mobile Muse social media aggregator for SMS, video, photos, etc
  • Bug Labs - my Bug arrives in late September, app brainstorming session
  • BIKUX - linux stamp/beagle board/crazy apps on a portable connected solar powered Linux computere brainstorm session (e.g. games and geo apps)
  • Reinventing Nokia mobile  - Brainstorming session on cool things Nokia could/should do in light of the iPhone, Android, etc - I am going to Finland on September 8th for a Nokia Conference and might be able to give this feedback to them directly

As well i'd like to work with John Biehler, Parveen Kaler and others on some iPhone sessions:

1) state of jail break
2) tethering
3) app development commiseration (that NDA s*xors)
4) what's on your iPhone i.e. fav apps

See you all on Saturday September 6th at WorkSpace in Gastown!

 

Details have yet to be finalized, but it looks like I'll be going to a Nokia Mobile workshop (paid for by Nokia, including carbon offsets!) September 10-14,2008 being organzied by Nokia's WOMWorld folks. Sounds like fun. Maybe I can lead a session on Mobile Muse and SIFTTool.

Here's a portion of their invite:

QUOTE

It's taking place in September between the 11th and 14th, and will be the first of its kind hosted by Nokia. We're contacting everyone from creative's, designers, video producers to open source software bloggers and mobile tech pioneers. There will be a number of workshops that'll see discussion with participants, and with Nokia guys, about the future of different online arenas and mobile technology. Workshops that we hope you'd like to join in with and make yourself heard.

END QUOTE

In the meantime, time to start my travel research. If anybody has been to Helsinki, love to have the following questions answered by a Helsinki person:

1. Where can I get a pay as you go SIM Card with several gigs (2GB or higher) of data so I can blog, flickr, youtube, et with my Nokia N95-1 while at the workshop?
2. Can somebody recommend the best place to rent a bicycle in Helsinki? I am a "born again" bicyclist who's been commuting to work for 16 months 5 days a week and who has taken thousands of photos from an N95 and uploaded to Qik while bicycling. So I'd want to do the same in Helsinki.

I rode in the June 2008 Vancouver Critical Mass bike ride (check out my Mobile Muse Channel with pictures, videos and text as well as my partial Nokia Sports Tracker map of the route as well as flickr pictures which I can't get into the Mobile Muse Channel since there's no RSS feed) and streamed video live using Qik from my Nokia N95, like I did for the Vancouver Car Free Festival. Only this time I didn't use WiMax just Edge

Some observations and comments:

1. The ride is quite the phenomenon. As a 3-5 days a week bicycle commuter; it was quite liberating to "take over" the streets and cycle with impunity (if you were in the middle, not so in the back) and be a 1st class citizen (for once!) on the road rather than feeling the need to maintain a constant vigil for cars not seeing you and running you over. Is this a form of civil disobedience or are we just Critical Massh*les? To be honest, I fluctuate between both.
2. Lots of people taking digital photographs and using their cellphones and taking video but nobody doing this live. Imagine 5 years from now when everything is live!
3. My Io Gear power unit Nokia N Series power connector is flakey! Aaaargh, too late to return it too.
4. The N95 really isn't designed for streaming video live over a cellphone network from a bicycle. The S60 interface is designed to be used with one hand while standing still and the phone itself is not designed to be mounted on a bicycle. I would love for Nokia to build a mobile cellphone streaming device but realistically making my own with something like the Bug from Bug Labs (hopefully I'll get mine soon) will (eventually) be the way to go

Had a blast bicycling and checking out Car Free Vancouver 2008 from Commercial Drive to the West End to Kitsilano and back to Commercial Drive (we skipped Main Street since it didn't start until 4p.m.)

Here's some of the media we created:

1. My Vancouver Car Free Vancouver 2008 Videos (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
2. Jean's Videos - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 , 11, 12
3. JMV's Videos - 1, 2
4. JMV's Pictures
5. My Pictures

Nokia Sports Tracker data is missing! (mine didn't turn out i.e. most of my track is missing since I had to reboot the phone thereby losing my GPS Track, aaaaargh! Jean hasn't posted his!)
Things that were Great

1. The weather! Perfect!
2. Jean's McGyvered bicycle mount - although I am investigating using the N95 ProClip Motorcycle Mount, anybody know whether it will work on a bicycle?
3. The event itself. Rockin' great time at all venus. Great food, great happenings (e.g. mojave, Paul Jarvis' band, Japanese food, African Drum circle, etc)
4. Qik was rock solid. It just worked and buffered when we lost connection.

Things that weren't so great

1. Rogers Portable Internet combined with FreeTheNet combined with splash screen = FAIL (or at least it seemed to fail a lot more than during our 2 dry runs during today's bike ride, actually we did stream a lot more video than I thought). Next time I suggest EV-DO card from Bell or a HSDPA card (i.e. something designed for mobile connectivity, Rogers Mobile Internet is designed to be portable NOT mobile) plus a travel router like the $170 Cradlepoint CTR500 EVDO/HSDPA 3G Router . I am a supporter of FreeTheNet but again it's designed for non mobile use.
2. My IOGear Mobile Portable Power loose connection with my N95 caused me to run out out of power at one point - Jean's N82 had no problem so probably an issue with my phone, not the IOGear power.But probably points to the fact that the Nokia power connector wasn't designed to be connected horizontally for charging. I'd prefer a micro USB / mini USB for charging personally
3. Nokia Sports Tracker's 1998isms (I realize it's beta but if they had used Drupal or any modern system they'd get these things for free) - i) Bad URLs that end in .do instead of being clean ii) no search feature iii) no tags iv) no RSS for tags
4. Qik's tags have no RSS feeds

Wearing my Mobile Muse 3 technical evangelist and Fearless volunteer hats, I'll be riding my bicycle with Amy Walker, publisher of the fabulous Momentum magazine about all things bicycling, as part of Car Free Vancouver 2008 starting from the Fearless Mobile Booth on Commercial Drive at 12 noon Sunday June 15, 2008. We'll ride to all the other Car Free Vancouver venues (Main Street, the West End and Kitsilano) and stream video live from my bike to the internet.

Check us out at:

• Fearless's Mobile site (where we hope, tech willing, to display a stream from my bike and from a car in a sort of "car versus bike" video mashup)
• My Qik Car Free Vancouver archives which currently has our dry run videos and after the event will have the archive of my live stream
• My Nokia Sports Tracker site which shows our Car Free Vancouver dry runs (dry run June 8, dry run June 11 stream 2) on a nice zoomable Google Map

How you can help:

• Come on down and participate! It's free!
• Take photos and videos and blog about it and tag it: cfvd08

Finally for techies, here's a diagram of how the technology works!

In preparation for a "car versus bicycle" streaming video showdown on Car Free Vancouver next Sunday June 15, 2008, Jean (Jean's blog post has the background and lots of useful info, read it!) and I did a dry run early this morning.

Our config was:

1. helmet mounted N95-1 for me and N82 for Jean
2. N95-1 ran the following software
3. 1. Qik - streamed video live over EDGE
   2. Nokia Sports Tracker

Our videos and GPS Tracks:

1. My video - also below
2. My GPS Track and map
3. Jean's GPS Track and map

A question: Anybody know of software to stream in real-time GPS coordinates in RSS, KML or Atom over WiFi or 3G or Edge from a Nokia phone?
Some observations and comments:

1. Helmet mounted video is more stable BUT on the whole not great because everytime we check our blind spots, the camera moves which is more disconcerting than the jitter from a handlebar mounted phone. I think as Jean noted, we'll move to a handle bar mounted solution like a Gorillopod for the real Car Free Vancouver on Sunday June 15, 2008
2. A bluetooth microphone with wind reduction like a the Jawbone would probably result in better sound

My video:

Rodger Lea of Mobile Muse and UBC gives an overview of large displays and the other speakers at the UBC Large Displays Workshop held on March 29, 2007.

Ah the mobile photo chain of pain. Although I whinge :-) constantly about the state of software on Nokia N series phones, I can't recommend any other phones if you are serious about about putting your mobile phone photos online (uploading them to your PC through the USB and Bluetooth chain of pain is very unpleasant as Igor describes and really is not worth it!) and want the minimum amount of pain. ShoZu has its problems (like an issue with thumbnails on Series 60 V3 phones which I am unclear as to whose "bug" it is: ShoZu's or Nokia's) but by and large it just works. Get an N Series phone with wifi, a flickr account, install ShoZu and upload photos automagically for free when you are in your fav WiFi hotspots. Until the iPhone comes out this is as good as it gets; Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola etc either have lousy cameras and/or software or only work with the less than optimal Java version of ShoZu.

FROM Software Matters | Mobile Muse:

QUOTE

Consider my D900. It takes decent pictures in bright environments, but getting them to the computer is anything but trivial. Find them on the phone (photos can only be saved on its internal flash memory), copy them to the memory card (painfully slow), insert the card into the PC card reader, import into Picasa. Sounds complicated? How about this - every time I move the pictures off the device, it starts counting them at "1". Eventually, multiple pictures with duplicate names are produced, causing even more confusion. Often I don't even want to create pictures because of how much work is involved in using them (and we're not even putting them on the web yet, just copying to the computer)!

END QUOTE

I just tried to upload the 148MB MPEG-4 video taken with my Nokia N93 from yesterday's Vancouver League of Drupalers meeting and it failed with this error: "Problem getting information from upload form. " I guess there's a limit? Say 50MB or 100MB? (which is typical and reasonable; AFAIK only Google videos allows over 100MB videos in my experience).

I tried to do the right thing and read the docs but none of the links work. i.e. guidelines, terms of use, faq and forum

All are 404 except faq which displays the questions but no answers in Firefox 2 on Mac.

It would be great to see a follow-up post about this because it'll be a very cool thing to have working!

FROM Getting Mobile Movies Onto Your Phone:

QUOTE

Pocketcine provides a way for you to transfer data from your computer to your phone (or potentially other people's phones) using WAP. Our Phone Uploader service is free, although you will incur data charges with your carrier. We downloaded a 500kb movie to our phone for $0.15 cents. You send the image, sound, application (midlet) or video to our server and then use your phone's browser to download the media file to your phone.

Click here to use the service now.

Jim Udall actually used part of the code we have on our site to build his mobile services platform. What is particularly useful about Jim's software is that it will query the phone requesting a file to download and transcode the video in the right size and format. He has also developed code that allows you to put a button on your website, making the whole process of downloading to the phone much faster and simpler. Unfortunately the service is not yet available on a commercial basis.

END QUOTE

[Cross posted from MoMo Van]

Mobile Monday Vancouver May 2006 last night at Take 5 was an eclectic potpourri of topics and very lively conversation. Here are my highlights:

Matthew Snyder of Nokia is a former big wig of Nokia Search but has now moved on to other cool projects in Nokia. His current job is in Helsinki but he's based in Vancouver! Talk about a commute. He was a lively and fascinating conversationalist. Matthew demoed the Nokia/Yahoo Search app on his N70 together with some cool Canadian local integration which has not yet been released but I can't wait until it does. And I hope Matthew will start blogging!

Jim Pick showed off his 2 (!) Nokia 770s that he picked up when he was living in Berkley. The 770 is an awesome WiFi mini tablet (would be better if Gizmo and Skype were bundled!). I really wish it was sold in Canada. Anyways Jim who recently moved back to Vancouver has worked on the ARM port of Linux, Xen Virtualization and the Kaffe Java virtual machine. Jim's a great addition to the mobile community. Welcome back Jim!

Carlo of Upside Wireless discussed their SMS related work with the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale and plans for the IPIPI SMS engine

Duff Gardner of New Media BC's Mobile Muse project gave us the skinny about the upcoming mobile related talks at Vidfest (I wish there was a schedule for Vidfest 2006 that I could link to, but until then here's the Vidfest 2006 Speaker list) as well as some insight into the new World Centre for Digital Entertainment that New Media BC is working on.

Patrick Payne, ex of Mobile Operandi/Mophone/3GUPLOAD and Ericsson, was also a lively conversationalist. He spoke about the Wireless lab that will be part of the World Centre and the plans for taking MoMoVan to the next level after learning from the mother ship at the Mobile Monday Global Summit May 8th and May 9th, 2006 in Helsinki, Finland.

Speaking of the MoMo Summit, Steph Rieger (who along with Bryan has done 99% of the MoMoVan organizing, I just pontificate and blog :-) !) will be there with Patrick and is also hoping to learn from the MoMo Mothership. She and Bryan also discussed Flash Lite as well their ideas for a Bluetooth server.

I of course pontificated about the greatness of ShoZu (my ShoZu pics and videos) the N70 Nokia Blogger Relations program and how I was saving for my own N93 dream phone (3x optical zoom, 30fps video!)

John Goodall of LiteFeeds (a cool mobile RSS reader) made a brief appearance and then mysteriously left (work or family called I bet). Come back John!

Finally, we spent a long time discussing the next MoMoVan which will be Monday June 5th at a venue to be determined and what the next phase of MoMoVan looks like. If you are interested in helping shape and influence Mobile Monday Vancouver, it's never too late. Sign up for the Yahoo Grooup MoMoVan group and get your skin in the game! Looking for organizers, speakers, and sponsors! Looking forward to hearing from you!

See you in June!