Technology That Empowers Me

I'm around technology all day. I have a laptop, a PDA, several desktops, cameras and so on. But there are a few pieces of technology that empower me. My T-Mobile MDA empowers me the most. It gives me the ability to be connected just about anywhere.

1. I have mobile Internet. This allows me to check my email account via GMail, track my calendar with GCal, read my RSS feeds with Google Reader, visit web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. However a majority of web sites are not PDA friendly and are useless to view. This is also true for video. Trying to stream video is nearly impossible. Great services such as vTap are starting to change this.

2. My MDA has a built in MP3 player, Windows Media Player, that allows me to listen to all the music I want, and because I have a large storage card I can have dozens of songs available at all times. I can even watch videos, but I can't watch many because of quality issues. But this isn't really an issue for me because I don't watch a lot of video on my MDA.

3. The ability to stay in touch with my teenagers via SMS is invaluable.

4. View PDF and Office documents. One of the reasons I decided to go with an MDA instead of the Dash is the ability to edit Office documents. I spend a lot of time writing Word documents and tracking projects in Excel. It's nice to be able to use the file on my MDA and on my Laptop.

5. I've recently started storing more photos on my MDA. I used to have a whole bunch of pictures in my wallet, but it didn't seem as cool as being able to show more recent photos of the Family, events and just plain cool pics. So I took the photos out of my wallet and put them on the MDA.

There are more reasons my MDA empowers me. One I hope will give me even more utility is Skype. It's shaky on my MDA, but I know the technology will get better. This opens up a whole new world including mobile podcasting. Now if there was a mobile version of Audacity I wouldn't really need a computer any more.

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The Jazz Show #32

Listen to my latest podcast, The Jazz Show.

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Track of the day: Opportunity by You Say Party! We Say Die!

You Say Party! We Say Die!
"Opportunity" (mp3)
from "Lose All Time"
(Paper Bag Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

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Please come to the October CodeAway

If you live in the Salt Lake area and are into coding, or gaming, or just hanging out with those that are, CodeAway is for you. The next event will be on October 6th. See more about it here.

CodeAway is really cool. It's very casual. There is no agenda. Do what you want. You might even get TheDruidXpawX and Laura to bust out some karaoke.

Come by, show us your projects, work on your projects, talk shop, what ever. Bring some food to share if you can. We'll even be having arts and crafts time. See you there.

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Mobile video with vTap

I picked up a link today from Steve Rubel on a service called vTap from Veveo. I'm always looking for new technology for my T-Mobile MDA, especially video. vTap is a video service that basically streams from their server to your mobile device through their application. It's not web based its actually installed on the mobile device. I didn't really care for that, but if it made watching Video easier I was willing to try.

After downloading and installing the application I immediately started clicking on all the videos they had available. Problem; none of the videos would run. Some error kept popping up. I thought woah, this can't be good. First impressions in this game mean a lot. I could just as easily uninstalled the app and moved on.

Coincidentally there is a feedback link on the menu and I thought, cool, I'll email the problem and see what happens. It wasn't long before I got a response back from their Customer Support. The person asked me if I would be willing to help them figure this out and I said sure. After giving them the details of my device and the error, I received a message telling me they had discovered a problem with the T-Moble 3G network and they were working on a fix. I was told I could use WiFi in the mean time, and yes, the WiFi part worked fine.

The next morning when I checked my email I was excited to see an email from vTap telling me they had resolved the problem and would I mind downloading the latest version and giving it a go. No problem, I downloaded and installed. Clicked on a video from the list and it worked. Videos were streaming and it was great.

My first impressions of the video were not too good. The quality was so bad I couldn't make out any text on the screen and the whole frame was sorta blurry. So again I fired off an email to vTap to see if there was something I could do. This was my fault. I didn't spend enough time looking at all the settings and was directed by vTap to increase the quality of the video through the configuration screen. Once again, problem solved.

In the end, video isn't very fast on the 3G network. It wasn't bad, but there was a lot of buffering during preview. vTap said it was a good idea to maybe pause the video when first starting for a few seconds to let enough of it buffer before pressing play. That worked most of the time. But this isn't their problem, it's a problem with the network. And the higher the quality the worst it got.

vTap has some potential. I sure appreciated the quick response to my problem. I'm not real sure what the end game is for them. You can search for videos by key words but I'm not sure how large the database of videos is. I'm not sure if it just goes out to the web and uses your key words and sends back a list of videos? I need to find out more, Mostly because I may look at this service for delivering videos for PropertyVOX.com.

What are your thoughts on this type of technology? Check out vTap today.

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