2013/01/25
2013/01/21
Permaduino makes your Arduino projects permanent (video)
Arduinos are fun to tinker with, but there's one problem. Once you've built something cool, you pretty much have to tear it down to use your board for another project. Sure, you can always buy multiple Arduino boards or proto shields, but what if you want to turn your creation into something a bit more permanent and a lot more compact? Say hello to Permaduino, a small battery-powered Arduino prototype board that just launched on Indiegogo. It features an Atmega328P (natch), two AAA battery holders with a 3 to 5V DC-DC converter (up to 180mA), a 25-column breadboard with VCC and ground, plus FTDI, AVR-ISP and USB interfaces. Best of all, Permanuino conveniently fits inside a standard 8mm videotape case (as long as you don't mount large components on that breadboard). Interested? Hit the break for the Indiegogo link and campaign video.
when.eng("eng.perm.init")Mobile Video App Montaj Makes Editing As Easy As Shaking Your Phone
The latest entrant into the mobile video segment is Montaj, a new app launching next week which seeks to be a kind of “Instagram for Video.” Montaj was founded by Demir Gjokaj and Dan Long, a couple of New York-based entrepreneurs who had originally been focused on making a more engaging travel site. Key to that experience would be video, but they had to tackle the video problem first.
The idea behind Montaj is to make videos actually watchable and shareable. Not a new idea, and one that’s seen startups like Socialcam and Viddy already try to tackle. The problem is that video can’t be made good just by throwing a filter on it, like Instagram. Instead, there’s gotta be a bit of editing involved. More importantly, shots have to be bite-sized.
“What would it look like if we made movies like Hollywood?” Gjokaj told an audience in San Francisco this afternoon. He explained that over the past several decades, the shot duration for Hollywood movies has fallen from 11 seconds down to below five seconds over the last several years. Montaj seeks to emulate that. “Your audience wants you to shoot less and pick up the pace.”
Unlike startups which have come before it, Montaj forces you to break videos down into five-second clips, which can then be stitched together. Once you’ve either shot a bunch of short clips, or you’ve assembled short clips from videos already in your camera roll, the app lets you storyboard, select a song, and add a new filter. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can just say, “Screw it,” and shake your phone.
With each shake of a phone, Montaj brings up a new song, a new edit, and a new filter, according to Gjokaj. But what happens if you don’t like a clip order or a song or the clips the app has chosen for you? The app lets you change all that on the fly. You can trim clips, rearrange them, import new clips, change the song, or change the filter. Ta-da! The app does the work you don’t want to, and then you can refine videos as much as you want to.
Once a video is created, users can share it out on YouTube, and those videos are by default created as an unlisted video. Those videos can then be made public in the future. Those video links can then be shared through Facebook or Twitter, and they can also be downloaded to the user’s camera roll.
There is a little bit of a community aspect, with users able to view videos that their friends or other users create. But you’re not trapped in the Montaj community, as you can be in Socialcam or some of the other so-called video sharing apps. That’s because Montaj doesn’t host its own videos, but relies on YouTube for hosting.
What about monetization? While Montaj isn’t monetizing any of the videos that users create now, but it plans to work with brands in the future. By licensing its technology, Montaj hopes to enable brands to work with customers, who would presumably make awesome videos on the brand’s behalf.
Montaj will be launching on January 22, for devices that run iOS 6 — that includes the iPhone 3GS and above, as well as the iPad. The startup is working on an Android version, which it expects to launch in the second quarter.
For an example of what can be done with Montaj, check out the video below:
Make & Share better videos more easily, right from you phone. Founded on the principle that anyone should be able to make better videos more easily, Montaj will soon be in the hands of anyone with an iPhone - Stay Tuned!
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2013/01/17
Facebook Graph Search Makes Privacy Seem Selfish
The subtle impact of Facebook Graph Search is that when you share openly, you share for the benefit of mankind. And when you don’t, or share to just a few people, you’re robbing the world of your knowledge, recommendations, and content. The question for each of us now is whether we prioritize our contribution or our privacy.
Facebook’s mission has long been “making the world more open and connected,” but until now, Facebook’s service has been better at connecting us to our friends.
The news feed and Timeline deliver what we post to people who already know us. Sharing was about self-expression — offering up a digital representation of who we are. What we shared could end up helping people, but we got a narcissistic boost from all those Likes and gained social capital in the process. Sharing wasn’t entirely altruistic.
Graph Search creates a potential audience for our content who we’ll never meet. Your Like of a gentle dentist or a tranquil park, your photo of a historic landmark or must-see event could influence decisions of people for the better. But you won’t know that. Your aid falls outside your network to those who stumbled across your donation via Graph Search.
This redefines our relationship with the Facebook share box. There’s suddenly a reason to share even if you can’t immediately foresee how or to who it will be valuable.
Those warm, fuzzy Likes and the chance to make people think you’re an expert might make you share things you thought your friends care about. However, the fear of getting zero Likes and annoying your friends may have discouraged you from sharing things that could assist someone eventually. A broadcast to the news feed was simply the wrong medium for your local dentist recommendation.
But if there were a way to take a quiet action that would be indexed by Graph Search, you might be much more willing to donate your advice and experience to Facebook. The problem is this doesn’t really exist. The closest approximation would be to publicly share something and then hide it from your Timeline. But that won’t actually hide Page Likes from the news feed, and people may not care if their addition to the graph can be pulled by friends who visit their Timeline. They just don’t want it pestering their friends from the homepage. Facebook needs to build this quiet contribution.
Why? Stow the cynicism for a moment and remember there are souls out there who really love to help others. While there are badges and elite status, altruism is the foundation of thriving communities like Yelp and Wikipedia. Not coincidentally, Facebook Graph Search challenges Yelp because it too can attract and offer up recommendations. If Facebook makes it easy to lend a hand, people will. Its graph could flourish, the world might find it truly valuable, and Facebook could turn it into a business that supports further innovation.
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There is also a potential dark side to Graph Search — a chilling effect on sharing. When Facebook launched the news feed in late 2006, 750,000 of its 12 million users joined a group protesting the feature. They claimed that while all the stories in the news feed were only shown to people their authors allowed, it violated their “privacy through obscurity.” The effort that was required to find something on Facebook before news feed was protection enough. Despite concerns, people eventually grew to cherish the information stream.
Facebook went through another round of grumbling when it launched Timeline. Suddenly old posts could be dug up much more easily. But again, there was a degree of protection from employers, family, and romantic interests thanks to the friction of browsing through years of content in search of something offensive.
Graph Search’s efficiency penetrates the armor of friction to discovery. A recruiter doesn’t have to comb years of Timeline. They can search for photos you’ve taken in Cancun. They can search for “people named Josh Constine interested in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.” And soon Facebook plans to index posts, meaning all your status updates and links can be dredged up.
Some people have nothing to hide. But for others whose identities aren’t necessarily aligned with their bosses or their parents, Graph Search could be a nightmare. Others still just don’t care about helping out. They’re not going to go to the trouble of Liking their favorite dentist in case it might assist a friend or a stranger. And finally there are people who just feel uncomfortable sharing so openly.
There’s nothing wrong with being any of these. If you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine, and it’s your choice. But now that Graph Search exists, it’s a choice you have to make.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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