Utah Tech Spotlight featuring MediaPort

Today's meet-up of the Utah Tech Spotlight featured local company MediaPort. Held on the upper floor of the Bohemian, drinks food and fun were had by all. The featured company MediaPort provides a kiosk based digital media delivery system. You can purchase and download your media to any mobile device or your purchase can be saved on a CD. According to the presenter, sorry I can't remember his name, MediaPorts digital media costs about 38% less than what you can buy at Wal-Mart. I assumed he meant less than physical disks. It's hard to get much less than $0.88 per track.

As with any digital media discussion DRM was a topic discussed. It seems the DRM is delayed; meaning you can download the media to your device and immediately start using it, but once you sync to a PC the DRM is written to the local disk. Unfortunately they don't support any Apple products. Not their fault of course, but does eliminate 100 million portable music devices. If they could work out a deal with Apple they would have an exploding business.

Some of the people I recall seeing at the meet-up were Jason Alba, Matthew Reinbold, Steve Spencer, a few more from Twelve Horses, several from Media Port, a guy from a company called BounceBase.com, sounded interesting. I also met another young guy whose company is BlastHosting.

Here is a link to a few pics (sorry the quality sucks, next time I'm using the digital cam not the phone).

Thanks again to Steve Spencer of Twelve Horses for putting this together and the other sponsors, UTC and EO.

read more...

NASCAR to display Virginia Tech logo on cars

According to a post on Planet Blacksburg, NASCAR officials have been given permission to place a VT logo on its cars for the next three races at Phoenix, Talladega and Richmond. I think this is pretty cool.

read more...

Mowser = Mobile Browser

I don't want to jump on the Mowser.com band wagon just yet. I've only discovered the site and have been doing some spelunking with it. One of the reasons I am excited to see this project is because of Russell Beattie. I followed Russ for a long time as a blogger on Mobile technology. No else even came close. I was sad to see him go. But excited to see that he has finally gotten something going in the space he loves.

Quickly Mowser.com basically makes a website readable in a mobile browser. Gee, just the other day I was complaining that browsing websites with Mobile Internet Explorer on my MDA sucked. Well, this is supposed to be the solution to that problem. I'm browsing as I type this. From what I can tell it strips out your template CSS and graphics and uses a Mowser version. The documentation states that you can include a CSS file in your templates header that will be used instead of the Mowser default. That's pretty cool.

I tried laura.moncur.org, digitalthom.com, chrisbrogan.com and vergenewmedia.com. Everything worked fine. I really wanted to see how vergenewmedia.com responded since it has a lot of video embedded in blog posts. I clicked on a couple of the videos but none of them worked probably a limitation of my MDA.

All in all if you are looking to get content on your mobile via a web browser (no matter which one) Mowser is looking to have a lot of potential. I'll continue to follow up on this great technology.

ScreenCast Demo

read more...

Catch 22 Worst LOST Episode ever!

I'll say it. Many of you are thinking it. The April 18th, 2007 episode of LOST, Catch 22, was the worst episode I've watched. It was pointless, meaningless, had no substance, had no value, didn't move the story along, introduced a new character (I thought we were past that) and just didn't capture my attention. It was boring. And I hated it.

read more...

Will you accept mobile advertising?

Advertisers are ready, and once the storm gets rolling, that thing in your hand, cell phone/PDA/CrackBerry, will be the largest target audience since the advent of TV. Billions of users. Even those that don't have TV probably have a cell phone. Advertisers know this, and they are ready to start sending out en-mass.

My thought is this. If I get a few SMS ad messages, I can delete as easily as spam. But if it's something more than that, like an app the carrier installs on my phone, then I have a problem. Or lets say a 10 second ad before your call is connected, that would be so bad I would throw away my cell phone.

CrunchGear talked about GPS advertising. It sort of reminded me of a SciFi show I once saw (can't remember the name), that was playing ads on billboards based on who you were, even using your name in the ad, as the person walked down the street. It was a preview of things to come.

While I believe in a free market, I don't believe in advertisers having access to my mobile just because they can. I knew a guy once who was siphoning satellite with some DIY home brewed receiver. He was able to get all the channels free. He said as long as I have to watch pay channels with ads then I'll watch them for free. Not sure where he is with all that but I can understand his frustration. It's part of the reason I hate to read magazines.

read more...