Tag Archives: iPhone

The latest miracle of news gathering is here!

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Want to really appreciate how amazing it is that you can take and send photos from your mobile phone? Check out this educational film from 1937, which explains how photographs were sent across the wire:

It’s actually wildly fascinating (and gets pretty “technical” in the middle).

If you didn’t know the film was from 1937, it wouldn’t sound entirely out of place today when talking about snapping and sending photos on iPhones, Flip Cams, or Blackberrys to frame a news event as it unfolds:

“Every available development of science and engineering has been utilized to get the story to the reader in the shortest possible time.

It is only a matter of minutes after a news event has occurred before newspapers all over the country are carrying pictures that tell the story more graphically and completely than the printed word. Pictures sent from any location, by simply picking up a telephone.”

What once was old is new again…

Skip the business cards and use Contxts

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At last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit I met the lovely Joyce McKee, a marketing events and trade show professional who’s working her way through Chris Brogan’s material at TrustAgents101.com.

She asked me if I had a business card, but they were buried in my purse back at my table. I told her she could text my name to 50500 and Contxts would send my info to her phone. It turns out she had never sent a text message before, so I walked her through the process. D.J. Waldow caught it all on his iPhone:

Contxts is a great tool if you don’t have business cards on you or don’t have an iPhone with the crazy-cool Bump app. Check it out!

Steve Garfield’s Video Experiment at IMS09

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Two days, 70 speakers, 20+ hours of content… Inbound Marketing Summit was excellent and my brain is still processing everything I tried to jam into it this week. I’ll let things marinate for a bit and post my reactions to certain sessions and my overall impressions of the conference in the next few days, but I wanted to share my video from Steve Garfield’s “Video Experiment” Thursday.

Garfield is a pioneer in video podcasting and spoke to the IMS crowd about mobile video broadcasting, citizen journalism and Jimmy Fallon (they’re buds, sorta). Garfield invited anyone at IMS who was capable of shooting video to come to the front of the room with their device and record. I used my point-and-shoot camera, a Canon PowerShot SD1100.

It was very “meta”, very echo chamber and very absurd, but fun to do nonetheless.

Here’s the video Steve recorded from his iPhone on the stage (with my new pal Nate Riggs in the screen shot):

And here’s what I recorded:

To Europe, Courtesy of Social Media

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I’m on vacation right now. While you’re reading this, I’m off exploring museums, architecture, parks and cafes. Monsiuer Mengel and I are spending two weeks in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. And in large part, it’s due to social media. Here’s my guide to European Vacation, social media-style.

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1. Win free airfare by entering a blog contest

Yes, be jealous. We flew business class on OpenSkies from JFK to AMS courtesy of tickets I won from travel blog Gadling.com. The site was celebrating its anniversary by giving a pair of tickets away. All you had to do was leave a comment on their blog post and one commenter was randomly selected to win the tickets. That just happened to be lil’ ol’ me!

2. Start following various travel resources on Twitter

Over the past few months, I’ve been following accounts such as @raileurope and @visitholland. Both were helpful in offering information that allowed me to plan and make decisions about our trip. If I happened to notice a tweet about something I wanted to do or read more about on our trip, I would favorite the tweet as a way of bookmarking. A week before leaving, I went back and read through those favorited tweets and made some notes. I also enlisted help from local Albany twitterers for suggestions on the best way to get down to JFK (turns out this is the fastest and cheapest option).

3. Read travel blogs and bookmark content on Delicious and Evernote

I regularly read Gadling, Budget Travel’s This Just In and the New York Times Travel section/blog. Anytime I came across an article offering tips, advice or deals on the cities we were visiting, I bookmarked them via Delicious and tagged them as Europe. Sometimes I chose the “Do Not Share” option in Delicious, just so I wasn’t constantly sending out random articles via FriendFeed. Before the trip, I logged in to Delicious and sorted by the “Europe” tag, printing and highlighting any specific information I wanted to take with me. I also had a few conversations with friends who’d been to Amsterdam and captured their suggestions in an Evernote file that I can refer back to.

4. Check out hotels using TripAdvisor and Hotels.com review boards

We’re quite lucky in that we’re staying at a friend’s empty apartment while in Paris, but I needed to book hotels for Amsterdam, The Hague and Brussels. I relied heavily on the TripAdvisor message boards to make sure I wouldn’t be checking us in to a filthy hotel in a seedy part of town. (Sometimes there’s a reason for seemingly good hotel deals.) I also cross checked the amenities listed for each hotel with reviews done by people who had actually stayed there (is breakfast really free? Do they have WiFi in the rooms or just the common areas?).

5. Use Google StreetView to get the lay of the land

The apartment we’ll be staying in when we get to Paris next week is a bit out of town, near La Defense. We located it on Google Maps and then used the StreetView function to find restaurants that our friend recommended, find a nearby grocery store, and determine what landmarks we need to look for to point us in the right direction when we pop up from the Metro.

6. Pack some good old fashioned guide books

Since I don’t have an iPhone (wah), I can’t take advantage of this totally slick Amsterdam app that would tell me what to see, where nearby restaurants are, what museums are open, and more. So I’ll have to count on Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, and some printed e-mails with recommendations from friends to help us plan out our days. But hopefully next time I head to Europe, it’ll be with an iPhone that can calculate exchange rates, pull up Metro maps, tell me current museum discounts and even translate French on the fly. Someday.

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So, that’s how I got here. I’ve scheduled a few posts for while I’m gone, so hopefully you won’t miss me too much. And I plan to check in every now and then with the laptop to see how everyone’s doing and share a photo or two. I trust y’all to hold down the fort.

Until I get back… Vaarwell – Tot ziens – Au revoir!

Image via Flickr user pedrosimoes7

Blogs on paper at 35,000 feet

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I spent last weekend visiting my cousin in Pittsburgh (GREAT city, btw) and neglected to grab my book out of the pocket of my carry-on when I gate checked my bag. After about 10 minutes with the SkyMall catalog, I decided I’d had enough of virtual reality glasses, adult-sized footsy pajamas and portable neck traction devices, so I grabbed a copy of the in-flight magazine, US Airways Magazine.

usairwaysI started flipping through it and noticed that a lot of its content was pulled from blogs and other sources on the Web. A two-page business feature included excerpts from Harvard Business Review. Later in the magazine was a complete reprint of the first chapter of a forthcoming marketing book, Lynda Resnick’s Rubies in the Orchard. As I kept reading, I realized that essentially none of the magazine’s content was original. Just about the entire thing, except for one feature and some crossword puzzles, was repackaged from existing content and dropped into the magazine.

I flipped back to the front to read the editor’s letter I had initially skipped over. It turns out that the March 2009 issue of US Airways Magazine was part of a redesign to merge the “immediacy of the web with the convenience and quality of print magazines.” (Read the full letter here.) What was even more interesting this paragraph:

The great thing about magazines is — strange as it may sound — their technology. Think about it: You’re holding an amazing device. You never have to load software, protect it from viruses, reboot it, or even plug it in. And you never have to wait for a page to load. You don’t have chaff, you have editors — real people who know what you want, do the selecting for you, and check the facts. If magazines were just invented, experts would be crowing about this cool new contrivance.

The magazine now pulls most of its content from the blogosphere and presents it to passengers in an “amazing next-gen device” (aka words printed on glossy paper and glued together). Editors check the blog content for accuracy. The Web site simply says ”Contributors: The experts at Harvard Business Review, bloggers in the know, and more.”

Effectively, US Airways Magazine has eliminated the need to have writers on staff, or even hire freelancers for all but one feature story a month. I’m sure most bloggers and book authors would salivate at the chance to have their content featured in this space – I admit that I read the entire excerpt from Rubies in the Orchard and will probably find the book and read the rest of it. (It’s about the strategy behind bringing POM Wonderful juice to market.)

I can’t decide if the strategy is lazy or brilliant. It’s probably some of both. And seeing as how the airline was charging for water on flights up until two weeks ago, it’s likely due to financial constraints, as well. I’m actually surprised that airlines haven’t started charging passengers for a copy of its magazine. Is the future of journalism simply fact-checking and reprinting other people’s content?

Ultimately, I think airline magazines will quickly reach irrelevance when WiFi becomes more ubiquitous on flights. Who will want to read magazines when you can check e-mail, surf the Web, chat with your Twitter friends, make calls via Skype, or watch streaming TV or movies? Especially when you can do it on laptop, iPhone, or Kindle… which actually are amazing, next-gen devices.

What do you think? Check it out at www.usairwaysmag.com

Image: Flickr user caribb