Nokia Developer Blogs

A Hit with the Kiddos: Spice Labs Success Story

OviPublisherSuccesses — 2011-09-28T22:33:35Z

In 2009, Spice Labs was founded with a vision to create easy to use, engaging and relevant applications for mobile phones. The company’s app Kiddo won an award at the Nokia N8 Hackathon at Nokia World 2010. As we gear up for Nokia World 2011, we’ll take a look at the app’s – and the company’s – success since that award. Milestones in the Nokia Store include combined downloads of more than 9.6 million for their many applications, including the Hangman app crossing the one million download mark in just a few months.

The Kiddo Experience

The Spice Labs Kiddo app was born from personal experience. Many of the company’s founding members have young children at home, and they’ve all fallen victim to those kids snatching their mobile phones right out of their hands to play games or search for other interesting content. Although the kids had fun playing with their parents’ phones, there was actually very little content designed just for them – something to keep them engaged, educated and safe. Spice Labs – as parents and as developers – stepped in to fill that gap.

One of the early results was Kiddo, an anytime, anywhere digital tutor for mobile phones. The app is designed not only to entertain your kids, but also to familiarize them with educational basics like alphabets and numbers. Kiddo uses vibrant graphics, sounds and music and interactive elements to create an experience young people love; and includes a child lock option for the parents’ peace of mind. Users can even customize the Kiddo experience by adding their own voice to the app.

“As a mobile application developer and mother of a 2-year-old, I consider myself very fortunate to work on projects where I can bring a dual perspective to the table – from the creator and the end-user,” said Arunima Shekhar, project manager at Spice Labs. “I believe in the adage that the best products are made when developers are solving their own problems – necessity drives invention. That’s why it was a no-brainer for me to join the Spice Labs team and work on Kiddo.”

Kiddo is an education tool as much as it is an entertainment experience. Spice Labs focus groups have found that 60% of kids who participated in a learning exercise with Kiddo registered a significant gain in the efficiency and speed of learning, memorization and pronunciation of words. In addition, approximately 10 per cent of the kids studied were able to increase their vocabulary compared to peers not armed with the Kiddo experience.

“The results we have seen are amazing. What started as a way to keep peace at family dinner is now being used as a serious teaching aid,” said Prashant Singh, Spice Labs product manager.

Based on their experience using the graphics, sound, multimedia and touch interface of Nokia mobile phones and smartphones, Spice Labs is now looking to expand their content portfolio for child-friendly apps and casual games.

Developing with Reach
The Spice Labs Kiddo app, which is available globally on Symbian^3, S60 3^rd edition, S60 5th edition, and J2Me devices was developed using a mix of Qt and native Symbian programming. The development team was able to exploit the processing power of Nokia phones and their touch-screen capabilities.

“Qt has really been a blessing for our developer team as it has allowed us to keep the majority of our design and development independent of the underlying hardware and platform variations, meaning we freed up development bandwidth and creativity to get our developers back to what they do best – writing awesome apps,” said Prashant Singh.

With just three designers and five developers, Spice Labs was able to develop the first version of the Kiddo app in just two weeks. From there, Nokia helped the company overcome one of their key hurdles: reaching the right set of users.

“Nokia offers a huge reach in terms of geography and demographics. If you can think of a cool app idea, chances are there will be a sizeable potential user base with Nokia. Nokia was a must for us,” continued Singh.

In addition to consumer reach, Spice Labs also took advantage of the vibrant Nokia Symbian developer community and the developer support system at Nokia Developer, which they found to be very proactive and supportive throughout the development cycle. Through local sales unit (LSU) and global spotlights the company also saw huge upticks in downloads – 6-10x increased downloads from an LSU spotlight, and an 8-10x increase in overall downloads from a global spotlight.

“This is the kind of support that’s missing in other platforms,” concluded Singh.

Spice Labs is a 40-person division of S Mobility. Their Kiddo app is available to download for free in the Nokia Store.

My video Interview at Mobile World Congress 2011, Barcelona.

im2amit — 2011-03-07T20:22:05Z

Launching Anina Backstage News Application in the Ovi Store

slimpixi — 2009-07-24T20:03:27Z

It is a glorious day today, sun is shining and I'm on the front page of the Nokia Ovi store! Get up and get your phones out and support me with some comments and ranking for my Backstage Fashion Model Application. Download it and follow along with me on my next adventures! I'm off to China for a job on Saturday so stay tuned to your mobiles for some backstage action. No idea what will happen--off the plane and into action! Hopefully there will be wifi along the way in Narita Airport and Detroit (doubtful).

Entering an app in the Ovi store is no small feat--I have to say it's not the easiest of the 3 platforms out there. However, considering the amount of Nokia users out there, it is certainly the largest. I am very grateful to my friends Robin and Flash at mippin, without whom I would never have gotten approved (so many settings in that store! To be expected since there are so many devices in so many countries). I'm very excited to see what this will do for me in terms of visibility, I'm not sure how many women there are in Ovi. Lets wait and see! So far it's favorable reviews:

Features I really like about the Ovi Store: Website online is excellent, clear and clean. The ability to send sms to your friends to download the application sure beats all the other platforms. The mobile site is also in classic excellence for mobile devices. Very clear, very good search and very easy to navigate to.

NeuSenseEngine : Multi-Point Touch Screen Engine for S60 5th

neois — 2009-03-03T11:25:13Z

Hi,

Resistive Touchscreen is not possible to make Multi-Touch service? I don't think so. Please check this video!

NeuSenseEngine is a Multi-Point Touch Screen Engine for S60 5th. It allows user to Multi-Point touching on the screen even it's a resistive type. However, this engine has some limitation. The point's position has to be fixed and you can't move your fingers around to make service like picture zooming in/out.

Incidentally, I also found some of similar thing to NeuSenseEngine from Symbian Freak. You should check it. It's quite cool and interesting game. ;)

(From Developer from Symbian-Freak Forum)

Cheers,
Sittiphol Phanvilai

NeuBoard Touch, an Image Manipulation Engine for Series 60 5th edition

neois — 2009-02-03T15:54:40Z

Hi All,

It's me, Sittiphol Phanvilai. Hope you all still remember me. :)

Today I come to show you my 5th "Neu" project series. Its name is NeuBoard Touch, an image manipulation engine for Series 60 5th edition. Let see it.

Now it's still only engine and not full featured application yet as you can see in video. I'm thinking for some new cool applications that will use this engine. ;)

See you again so soon with 6th Neu project. :)

Best Regards,
Sittiphol Phanvilai

NeuScreen v3 : Multi-Touch Screen using Nokia N95

neois — 2008-12-14T12:56:14Z

Thanks for a lot of positive feedbacks all of you gave to my project, NeuScreen v2, the project that changed normal TV screen to Multi-Touch screen using only N95 and a pair of IR pens. Please know that I'm so honor with that great success.

Today I come to show you the newer version of this project, NeuScreen v3. Old features have been improved and new cool features have been added. No more IR pens in this version because it has been improved to IR gloves which is much more practical for real use.

OK. Let see it!

Thanks to Nokia for making high quality Symbian Phone like N95. From its abilities, I must admit that I can't call it as "Mobile Phone" no more, I have to call it as "Mobile Computer". It has Sensitive Camera, Graphic Acceleration Chip, OpenGL and High Performance CPU. All of them allow developer to make great things more and more. I think that is more than enough to be Mobile Computer. Are you agree?

I'm deciding to publish it as open source project in Q1 2009 to make all of you enjoy this technology by your own hand. I will inform you again via Forum Nokia Blog that time.

Hope you enjoy!
Sittiphol Phanvilai
NeuVex Group Founder

Widgets in Budapest

geri-m — 2008-11-21T20:54:50Z

This week I have been at the Forum Nokia Event in Budapest (HU). On Wednesday there was a Code Camp on Widgets which was given by Riku Salminen.

As “in my former life” I studied media technology and dealed a lot with website I was quite excited about widgets, which I have never worked with before. I was really surprise how easy and fast the development of Widget is. This was actually the first time I also was confronted with enhanced JavaScript that is also used in AJAX.

To get more family with the technology I developed a widget to query the online portal of the federal railways of Austria (ÖBB). In order to make the query easier for the user, he can select out of predefined train stations to start and end the journey. Then the query is sent to the website and gives the next three trains that the user can take. Among the participants of the Code Camp a N85 was given to the developer of the best widget (voting by audience), which was actually me. ;-) Thank you Nokia!

You can download the first prototype from the FN Wiki. Please remember, that this is a prototype and therefore there is no guarantee that the application is working properly. It should just give you an idea how widgets are working. As it was also my first widgets, there are several components that could be improved from a software engineering point of view.

Mobile magic

lpvalente — 2008-10-09T14:14:50Z

If you think you've already seen everything one can do with a N95, then enjoy this, hehe:

Mobile Surround Sound

mopius — 2008-09-01T11:27:46Z

3D Sound on current mobile phones might mainly be a marketing gag – like the sound effects found on Nokia phones like the N95. It certainly does sound nice to have your ringtones swirl around and it works surprisingly well. But of course, it’s just simulated surround with two small speakers that are close together.

It will certainly be interesting to have technology from Dolby integrated into phones, like it was demonstrated at the CTIA Wireless in 2008. However, there is no precise information about future roadmaps or products.

What the students Stefan Damm and Arnold Ahrer from the Mobile Computing-department of the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria) created is a small solution to enable real surround sound through mobile phones - called Mobile Surround Sound.

It works by using four different mobile phones, which have to be placed into the corners of the room. Essentially, the phones are turned into speakers, albeit with a bit more intelligence than the usual speaker. A central control PC is connected via WLAN to the phones and is able to control them in real time.

Once all phones are connected, the PC starts the sound on all phones at the same time. The user can now move the sound source on the graphical interface of the server. This automatically adjusts the volume of the different speakers, thus leading to the impression that the sound is moving around in the room.

Also great to put your phones to good use if you've already got too many of them ;-)

The application was developed by Stefan and Arnold as a small project for the Interaction Technology course during the summer semester. It is written in Java (Server) / Java ME (Client) and is available for free (open source).

As seen on TV and stress relief

coultonp — 2008-07-16T13:49:48Z

Last night the BBC aired a program (can be seen here if your really interested) hosted by Physicist Brian Cox which featured some of my work (nice N95' shots) and some from my colleagues in Infolab21 and apart from elevating me to the exalted tile of ‘Boffin’ its gives me a excuse to show one of my favourite projects of 2008 I had undergraduate Drew Jackson working on. The title of the project was Lancaster Bomber (in honour of the famous WW2 aircraft named after our fair city) and it’s a game whereby we recreated the Lancaster University campus to allow me to fly around and shoot at the buildings in my very own Lancaster Bomber. Here comes the stress relief if you watch the video from the BBC you will see my workplace Infolab21 and if you then watch the game you will see me blow it up in the game (after a nice flying manoever through the underpass which is were our buses depart from )which after a hard day can be deeply satisfying.

Interestingly the models of campus were made using Google Sketch-up (didn’t quite have enough time to finish all the detail for the whole of campus but that can be done later) and transferred to Dark Basic to turn it into a game. This proved to be a remarkably flexible solution ( especially as Drew hadn’t done any 3D modelling before) and meant we could use the models in a variety of forms on different platforms. My limited experience of flight simulator controls shows up in the video so I am planning to replace them by using an N95 instead.

NeuPen : N95 Touch Screen

neois — 2008-07-08T11:52:45Z

Hi,

It's time to reveal the secret behind my 4th "Neu" project, an N95 Touch Screen project. It's hardware development project like my Neu360. Please see the video below.

YouTube:

DailyMotion:

- Sittiphol Phanvilai

4th "Neu" project : N95 Touch Screen!

neois — 2008-07-04T08:48:05Z

Hi,

It's impossible to use Touch Screen on Nokia N95? If you think so, please see the video below with my 4th "Neu" project.

YouTube:

DailyMotion:

- Sittiphol Phanvilai

Neu360 : The Secret Behind Magic

neois — 2008-07-03T20:53:29Z

Hi,

It's time to give you the secret behind Neu360.

This is an hardware development project. However as I said, it's not a big project so please don't hope too much ^^".

Please see the video below.

YouTube:

DailyMotion:

See you again tomorrow with another "Neu" project.

- Sittiphol Phanvilai

Neu360 : Magic on N95?

neois — 2008-06-22T15:43:17Z

Hi,

Today I come to give you some information about my new "Neu" project. Let's see the video below.

I can't tell you now what it is but don't too serious on it. It's not a big project. ^^

Mobile Control of Your Inner Rabbit

coultonp — 2008-06-19T19:58:00Z

This is part of a project looking at novel interaction possibilities through so called internet toys. The project was developed by one of my new PhD students Kate Lund as part of the learning process for Widgets and because my colleague Reuben had bought a Internet Rabbit some time ago and its been gathering dust whilst we thought of an interesting project. Basically in its current form it provides a mobile WidSets Widget for sending messages to or controlling (flashing its lights or waggling the ears) your own, or someone else’s, Nabaztag Internet Rabbit as shown in the following video.

These internet toys are intriguing as the are purely a fun item but I know there is a huge community around these rabbits and my kids love sending messages to me through it. It also shows given the right tools and suitable APIs mobile widgets can produce new mash-ups and tap into existing communities very quickly. Finally, I know that many readers wont have a Nabaztag but for those who do I hope the widget provides a means for discovering your inner rabbit.

NeuScreen : MultiTouch Screen Engine using Nokia N95

neois — 2008-06-12T13:55:06Z

Hi all,

It's me again, Sittiphol Phanvilai. Thank you very much for very great feedback with my NeuTouch. I can't explain how happy I am. :)

Today I come to show you my new research project I just finished developing yesterday. It's called NeuScreen, a multitouch screen engine using Nokia N95. No more any other computer need. Sound similar to NeuTouch? Yes, but this project requires no box. Moreover, you can interact directly with tv screen.

Million words can't describe one picture, so please see the video demonstration below by your own eyes. Hope you like it.

If you have any comment or suggestion please feel free to leave comment here.

Best Regards,
Sittiphol Phanvilai
Bangkok, Thailand

PS. Sorry for bad English accent in video. If you don't understand any words don't hesitate to ask me.

Video in YouTube:

Video in DailyMotion:

NeuTouch : MultiTouch Engine using N95

neois — 2008-06-03T16:37:14Z

I just finish developing my new research project named "NeuTouch". It's MultiTouch engine using real time image processing on N95. Everything operate on N95. No other computer device need.

This is video demonstration I made. Let see.

Video Podcast Roundup

wmseto — 2008-05-15T12:04:59Z

I regularly enjoy watching video podcasts on my N82, usually while on my train commute to and from work. Mostly I download them with the Nokia Podcasting application, or sometimes with another computer when there's no WiFi around then copy the videos to my N82 with the USB cable.

Here is a roundup of the video podcasts that I watch including the RSS Feeds that you use to subscribe and download the shows,

DL.tv: Video podcast about things in your Digital Life, for Tech fans, by Tech fans. Hosted by Robert Heron. Robert is very knowledgable about the various High Definition technologies ranging from HDTVs, to Bluray, and often discusses HD on the show.
RSS Feed: http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/ziffdavis/dltvipodpspvideo

DiggNation: Weekly show discussing some of the top stories from social news website Digg.com. Hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/diggnation/feed/quicktime-small/

Tekzilla: Weekly show answering your tech questions and helping find solutions to with your problems. Hosted by Patrick Norton and new co-host Veronica Belmont
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/tekzilla/feed/quicktime-small/

The Totally Rad Show: Three friends discussing the latest in movies, video games, and occasionally TV or Comics. Hosted by Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/trs/feed/quicktime-small/

The Digg Reel: Weekly show covering some of the most popular videos from Digg.com
RSS Feed: http://revision3.com/diggreel/feed/quicktime-small/

Smartphones Show: Video podcast covering the latest Smartphones and the Smartphone industry. Hosted by Steve Litchfield
RSS Feed: http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/sshow/sshow.rss

RocketBoom: Daily Video show covering a wide range of topics with a comedic presentation. Hosted by Joanne Colan
RSS Feed: http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/tele_daily_enclosures.xml

Cranky Geeks: Weekly show covering the tech industry from a cranky perspective. Hosted by John C. Dvorak
RSS Feed: http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/audioblogs/crankygeeks/cg.ipod.xml

Driving with The Guru: Come hitch a ride with the Symbian Guru as he discusses the latest Symbian and S60 news and devices.
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/symbianguru/drivingwiththeguru

These video podcasts can be played on the Nokia N95 8GB, N82, N95, N93, or N93i.

If this isn't enough videos to keep you entertained for hours, Revision3 hosts a few other video podcasts. Also DL.tv and Cranky Geeks have recently started to be made available for download in 3GP format, (15 FPS, 320x240 resolution videos) that can be played on a wider range of mobile devices, such as the N81 8GB.

Do you have other video podcasts that you enjoy watching that I missed? If so leave a comment so I can check them out! If I like the show I might add it to the above list.

TRANSFORMATION AGE -- PBS TV DOCUMENTARY ON 360FASHION AIRING ACCROSS USA NOW

slimpixi — 2008-04-26T10:56:29Z

YOU CAN WATCH THE 360FASHION SEGMENT HERE! Tremendous databases, wireless communications and the miniaturization of electronics provide opportunities to make major changes in the way people work and live. The Transformation Age explores the office, the marketplace, media, finances and our digital lives as they take new forms and remove the barriers of time, distance, wealth, education and even age. THE OFFICE The way an office looks and operates has changed dramatically in the past 50 years, and information technology - for better or for worse - has made a lot of those changes possible. Offices contain people who oversee or design products and services, market them and handle finances. I.T. continues to reduce the role of people in some of these functions while simultaneously reducing the importance of location. Anina Trepte is a high tech globe-trotting fashion model who practically runs her 360 Fashion company and web site with her cell phones. BROADCAST TIMES ON PBS ARE HERE

Mobile Game Controllers: Problem Solved!

mopius — 2008-03-18T17:08:47Z

Play all the games you want on your mobile phone using mobiPad.

The article „Ten plausible things that would be really cool on N-Gage“ recently suggested that a Bluetooth game controller should be released for mobile phones. It’d greatly increase the way you could play your games.

There have been several attempts at building dedicated gaming controllers for mobile phones. One recent example is the Zeemote JS1, which is a small Bluetooth joystick that you can easily take with you. Another controller more closely simulates a traditional gamepad layout.

While these solutions might be good, there are some logical issues that might be problematic in real life:

Some controllers require a specific SDK in order to use them on the phone – currently, not many games support such proprietary SDKs, making the adoption of those controllers some kind of a hen-and-egg problem.
You have to buy extra hardware that you can only use for mobile phone gaming. Most likely, only very few will consider themselves as hardcore phone gamers to go into a shop and buy gaming hardware that they can only use for their phone.
Compared to game controllers for game consoles, the controllers for mobile phones are selling at much lower volumes. As prices usually go down with volume, you’ll not get the same bang for your buck / the same build quality for a dedicated mobile game controller.

mobiPad

All of those three issues are solved by the new mobiPad application developed by the students Alexander Erifiu and Mario Grammer at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria) at the department of Mobile Computing.

In a nutshell, mobiPad allows controlling your entire phone with the Nintendo Wii™ Remote. This includes all games that you might have installed, as well as the rest of the phone like the media player. Essentially, the Wiimote is turned into a high quality wireless controller for your phone.

Tests have shown that it’s not the best way to simulate digital keys (pressed or not pressed) using analogous motions of the WiiMote. As a consequence, you will usually control the games using a traditional d-pad. In contrast to the predecessor WiiConnect / WiiRider (which allowed controlling a motorcycle game by using the Wiimote as a virtual handle of a motorbike – free download at symbianresources.com, the new mobiPad dropped support of motion control in favour of utilizing all keys as well as the d-Pad of the Wii Remote for optimal control of every game.

Another very interesting aspect is the recent ascent of touch screen dominated phones. A touch screen makes it impossible to play mobile games that have not been specifically designed for it. This situation is true for most of the currently available Java ME games, and already applies to most of the SonyEricsson UIQ-based phones – the keypad does not feature a joystick and the buttons are difficult for gaming due to their two-letter-input method. While this is a great feature, it just isn’t optimal for mobile games. Through mobiPad, you can play any standard game on those phones as well, no matter if they have QWERTY-keys or no keyboard at all!

Summary & Download

Grizzle Dizzle is a free Java ME-based Bluetooth multiplayer-game that was also developed by Alexander Erifiu, Mario Grammer and Kristin Ließ.

Getting back to the start of the posting, you can see how this solution solves the issues with dedicated mobile game controllers described above:

You don’t need an SDK for using the Wii Remote to play games. Just start mobiPad and connect it to the WiiMote. The application will be active in the background and transform the wireless control input into simulated key input.
The Wii Remote is of course no specific mobile game controller. Use it at home for your console, put it into your rucksack when you’re planning to travel and want to have a better gamepad with you.
Due to the enormous experience of Nintendo producing game controllers and the huge volumes, the build quality of the controller is great and the price tag is good considering this.

Alexander and Mario have released mobiPad as Freeware (donations are welcome), you can download it from their dedicated web site http://www.mobi-pad.com/. If you're searching for a new game to play using the Wii Remote, try Grizzle Dizzle, which was created by the same developers and Kristin Ließ, who did the wonderful graphics!

mobiPad is available for S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3.x. The current version (1.0) is Symbian Signed and has been tested very thoroughly, but due to the nature as a non-commercial research project, it might not be 100% bug-free. Please inform the developers of any issues you might encounter. Future versions might also include the possibility to define a custom key mapping. This mostly depends on your feedback!

ShakerRacer: Real RC car controlled with the N95 acceleration sensor

mopius — 2007-11-27T21:34:40Z

Since the API to read the data of the acceleration sensor of the N95 has been released a short time ago, a lot of applications using it have been released. Some examples are the original moving ball-application from Nokia, the light sabre or Accelerinvaders. It’s finally possible to reach a bigger target audience than a few months ago when we released CarMeter and gBoarder, which were only supported by the Nokia 5500 Sport.

Control a real car in a natural way by tilting your phone!

Now we wanted to take the acceleration sensor of a mobile phone to the next level and use it to control something literally “bigger” than an application that is running on the phone itself.

The result is called “ShakerRacer” (thanks to Adam Montandon for this great name!). Stephan Selinger, one of our professors, bought a normal RC car for about €90 and “tuned” it. Not in the traditional way, but instead he replaced the standard remote control component with an own microcontroller and a Bluetooth-module.

Using the Python module aXYZ from cyke64, it was possible to write a small application that translates the movements of the N95 acceleration sensor to commands that can be understood by the car. This enables you to go as fast as 30 km/h by just tilting your phone!

It is a bit similar to the control scheme of games like Excite Truck for the Nintendo Wii, with the huge difference that it’s now in real life. Another idea that has a bit in common is GroundSurf where a skateboard can either be controlled by your own movements (like the Segway) or with a PDA through a Bluetooth connection – but through the stylus on a touch screen and not intuitively like it is possible with acceleration sensors.

Of course connecting the tile of the phone with a real toy car involves you as a player a lot more than the traditional controller ever could, making it a lot of fun!

If you’d like to see it in action, check out the short video that we have made available at YouTube. Enjoy! As usual, you can find more information at symbianresources.com.

James Bond would have loved it...

VIDEO EDITOR COMPETITION WARNING

slimpixi — 2007-10-25T17:32:44Z

i saw something at the smart phone show that really made me worry for nokia. motorola has created a top of the line video editor, that surpasses the nokia video editor that i have been using forever. until now the only good video editor was by nokia, but this video editor in the moto smartphone, was amazing!
text overlay, background color change, transitions comparable with windows movie maker, text animations, and many effects options. i made this video with the demo software.

if moto come out with this powerful of a video editor, all those youtube like services are soon going to be filled with amazing mobile videos. i hope this post will get the attention of the platform builders!

What I Do Not Know About Electronics - Episode 2

Nokia Ron — 2007-07-17T23:31:13Z

The definition of a boat is something you put in the water than keep putting cash into until it sinks. Buying a Wide Screen HDTV was not as bad as a boat, but one thing just led to another. After I finally, had all the electronic components bought for my home theater I found I had store rebates worth almost a thousand dollars. Store rebates take about 6 weeks to process so you won’t buy something get the rebate then return it. It also forces you to buy all the extras with cash and then spend your rebate on other items.

My other item was a dish washer. I hadn’t had a dishwasher since she threw me (old joke). I did not need one, I would take a few minutes every other day and wash the few plates and pots and be totally happy. However, after walking though the Best Buy store there was very little else I wanted so I purchased a fine dishwasher that takes almost as much time to rinse and load dishes as it does to just wash them in the first place. Wait you just can’t put a dishwasher in a kitchen. I have to tear out my current sink and drawers create a brand new cabinet and a new cabinet top, not to mention wiring and plumbing for it. Oh yeah and of course a garbage disposal to add to the Dishwasher. Now my decision to buy a big screen TV is costing me over $5,000. I didn’t want to buy a house just a TV Set.

But there is one more thing about owning a big screen TV that I had not taken into account, people may come and if they do, they need to sit comfortably, and that was not possible on the old sofa couch. With a new couch I think it is all complete, each end has a lazy boy recliner and the middle pulls out to a bed. TV looks good and all is well, A few lap tables and I think I’m all set for under $10,000 I’ve finally paid for my $2000 (minus rebate) Wide Screen TV.

Ron (what do you mean I need a Nintendo WII?)

We++ Mobile Social Software

coultonp — 2007-07-17T12:01:10Z

A while ago I blogged about an application (m3Dcam) Will Bamford and I had come up with that allows users to create their own 3D photographs on their mobile and upload them to a community site. As I said at the time the project was meant to be a bit of fun and I was expecting fairly minimal interest for a number of reasons

1. You need 3D glasses to view the result (I now carry a pair with me at alltimes !)

2. The users bares the cost of the up-load

3. The cost is more than a single picture as we split the image between eyes and colour planes.

4. Its fun but not really a social activity

Despite this we have had over 650 uploads and if you Google m3dcam you get literally hundreds of hits and my first blog has be viewed over 1100 times.

I am reminded by of something Howard Rheinhold said in his book Smartmobs “The ‘Killer Apps” of tomorrows mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices”. Whilst I would not completely agree with the influence new hardware might play I am minded to think that given this example predicting social practices in the area of mobile social software is going to be tricky and success could come from the strangest of places

BTW the site now supports colour images as shown and there is a handy flash viewer that Will has created which allows you to practice how best to do the alignment.

What I Do Not Know About Electronics

Nokia Ron — 2007-07-16T21:56:12Z

I know so little about electronics that I absolutely feel out of touch with modern civilization. One thing I found out is you can’t buy just one thing that does it all anymore. I recently went to buy a new HDTV 1080i television and that led me to buy a surround sound system which led me to buy a new DVD player because my DVR was just not enough or something. Of course with that you also need a special surge suppressor and quality lighting. Anyway I’ve finally got it all down to just 8 different remote controls, well actually it is down to 5 and I don’t use 3 of them too often.

As for the lights, the way I see it, on or off is all that is needed, heck it worked just fine that way for a hundred years why not now. It sets behind the TV and reflects off the wall. I figure if I want it dimmer, I need to paint the wall black or something. There are TV’s that come with their own lights around the screen, but my kids prefer to have the room pitch black to watch a movie. In my day my mom would always tell me that sitting in the dark and watching TV would hurt my eyes. Obediently and afraid for my sight, I never did it and now I wear glasses, thanks Mom!

The other remotes run the VCR, well it doesn’t really, I’ve not ran a VCR tape in 2 years since I got a DVR but hey I might want to watch some of the hundreds of tapes I have on VHS (including the complete works of Dr. Who). Let’s not forget the hundreds of Beta Max tapes I have in a closet, just being sure that the better tape would beat out the stuff they put porn on. Now I apparently need to decide if I want Blu-Ray or HDDVD, why not just put it all on a Flash Drive and let me use it on any thing.

The other remote I don’t ever need is for the DVD player because I never rent movies, I never use it. Still sometimes the kids come to visit and they want to see “The Little Mermaid” or something on the big Screen. I can get rid of it once I figure out all the controls on Surround Sound remote but it just isn’t worth it.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of what I don’t know about electronics coming soon.

Ron