I have been enjoying my JAMBOX by JAWBONE for a few days now. Really cool little piece of gear. But today I realised that the little rascal was actually having a good time all on his own. While I wasn't looking the little guy decided to get his groove on and dance to the beat. I discreetly caught the action on my iPhone and here it is in all its glory. Look ma, no hands.
Moving Music Jambox from Jehuda Saar on Vimeo.
So is this how I will finally do it: get my weight in check ? Cool video says it all.
OK, I'll admit it: the primary reason for showing this video here is the accent. It is without a doubt my favourite accent ever. Those of you who know me have heard me do the Dutch accent countless times. It just so happens that the product shown is really nice as well. These guys clearly got to work really fast after the iPad 2 announcement. Assuming I actually broke down and went for an iPad 2, I would give this little accessory a long, hard look. The company behind it is Miniot. Geweldig.
I had previously posted a story about Kickstarter and how it acts as a funding platform for creative projects. Here is a new one. The saying goes that the best camera you own is the one you have with you when you need to take a picture. For iPhone 4 users there now is a new way to carry your phone around: as a camera. The video explains it best and details are available on the Kickstarter website. Still about one month to go to get in on this one so if taking pictures on your iPhone 4 is your "thing", go for it.
Take a couple of 2 year olds, give them each an iPad and let them play around with it. Before you know it you realise two things (1) Apple owns these kids for life and (2) when this current crop of 2 year olds grow up I am not sure we will even be able to communicate with them anymore given our old-fashioned ways of doing things, out thinking, our language and whatever else is bound to change over time as they grow up and acquire skills we can't even start to predict. Check out these two videos and let your imagination roam a little. You'll understand what I mean.
You knew it was only a matter of time (and very little of it) before someone produced a music video using only iPads. Remedy Films apparently produced this clip in 25 hours: 8 hours in line to purchase the four iPads, 5 hours of filming and 12 hours of editing (they shot the whole thing on iPads but I have a feeling they used pro editing software after that). The result is not bad at all considering the limitations of the equipment. Chances are we will see a lot more of these homegrown projects as people start getting the hang of the hardware and more video-specific iPad software gets published. Should be interesting.
A few weeks before the actual release of the iPad 2 these Scandinavian guys seem to have gotten their hands on a top secret prototype model. This is actually a very cute video with a lot of cool masking effects to achieve the desired result.
Those of you who have seen the new iPad 2 promo video will immediately recognize where this spoof gets it from. Funny stuff.
As it turns out my predictions in a previous post were ALMOST on the money. The MacBook Pro line DID get updated today, LightPeak technology did make it in there, but no SSD or doing away with traditional hard drives...yet. Apparently the machines are a little lighter, contain a new chipset, have a new type of front-facing camera and are generally more powerful. Apple calls its version of the LightPeak technology Thunderbolt (after FireWire I guess it kind of makes sense).
Now we wait patiently for the March 2 announcement.
The rumour mill is working overtime. The latest one has to do with the MacBook Pro line. Supposedly on Thursday we will see an update to that line of computers at Apple. Most of the rumours stem from the fact that orders of new MacBook Pro laptops have been put on hold for a few days (imagine you buy a computer today only to find out three days later that a brand-new model came out).
As I mentioned in a previous post I have been using one of the new MacBook Airs these past few weeks. This baby is slowly becoming my favourite laptop of all times (and I have owned quite a few of these in the past 20 years). The general feeling is that the entire MacBook Pro line will take on elements of the Air line: whether it is the lack of hard drives or the overall thinness and lightness of these beauties.
But there is another rumour making the rounds. This one has to do with a new high-speed connection technology that might replace USB (1, 2 AND 3), Firewire (400 and 800) and who knows what else. A couple of years ago Intel revealed LightPeak. This technology is supposed to transfer data at 10 Gbps (compared to Firewire 400 at 400 Mbps, Firewire 800 at 800 Mbps, USB 2 at 480 Mbps and USB3 at 3.2 Gbps). Some people are speculating that the new MacBook Pro line might already have LightPeak technology onboard upon its release. Others still are somewhat negative about the technology in general since, contrary to the video appearing below in which we are told that LightPeak will use high-speed optical cable technology, it appears that the current "production" version will still be using copper cable, meaning the tech will be "compromised" for now.
Well, only 72 hours or a little more to go before all these speculations can be laid to rest. Somehow, however, we get a sense that if there is a hardware update this week, it won't just be a "speed-bump" of some sort. Stay tuned.
The crime movie genre has seen a rebirth of sorts with, for the past few years, a sub-genre most usually identified with Guy Ritchie's earliest movies: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. The guys over at SNL came up with the following fake preview for a "new" movie in that sub-genre. Hilarious stuff.
Don' you GO Rounin' ROUN to RE RO from Carl Jung on Vimeo.
Having now been on the road for a while, hopping on and off planes, I thought I would share this little telling bit from the 3rd episode of the always hilarious new BBC series "Come Fly With Me".
As I posted earlier, the Angry Birds addiction is still quite prominent out there in the mobile world (as well as on less mobile equipment ever since the introduction of Apple's App Store on the Mac with its own version of that famous franchise's game). So last week we heard of an interesting development: another famous iOS game, apparently the "Top Paid App Of All Times", Doodle Jump, will get a Hollywood tie-in. Universal have announced that the main character of their movie Hop will feature in Doodle Jump as a promotional download.
Now the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, will release a version of the game set in Rio. Why Rio you ask ? 20th Century Fox will be releasing a movie by that name and some of the characters from that movie will appear in the game as well. Check out the trailer below for more on that.
This new trend of Hollywood-iOS tie ins is interesting. While for now it seems to center on "games to cartoons" connections, it would be interesting to see what other forms such tie-ins might take. Other than that, so long as we get new birds to fling at pigs, who are we to complain ?
Some institutions just can't get rid of the "fax" concept. Here we are, deep inside the internet era, where so much gets done almost instantaneously whether via email or the web, at a time when communication is purely digital and immediate, and yet banks and other organizations are demanding that you confirm things by actually dialing a phone line, stick some paper into some sort of scanner and listen to weird beeping sounds to confirm that your communication has gone through.
And yet, over the past few years we have seen the internet step into the world of fax as well. Personally I have been using the efax.com system for a long time and have been very satisfied. In essence the idea is that sending a fax should be as easy as sending an email message, and receiving it shouldn't require more than checking your email inbox.
Recently however this innovative way of using the old-fashioned fax system has once again been rejuvenated. You guessed it: there's an app for that...as well. I had occasion to test the efax iPhone app yesterday. I took a picture of a document with my iPhone camera and proceeded to send it as a fax straight from my iPhone. I did not expect much. Great was my surprise when I realised that the fax came in as an extremely clear document, certainly not worse than had I sent it through a fax machine the old fashioned way.
So then once again we are in a position to take old technology, one that will clearly die off in the coming years only to be replaced by something way more exciting and new, and give it a new twist. Suddenly every person with a smartphone in his pocket becomes a walking fax machine, and one that, maybe surprisingly, works quite well.
I can just imagine musicians worldwide drooling over this little baby. While this product is still not out yet and the software still hasn't been approved by Apple, the idea that you could use your iPad as the "brain" for your music creation attached to a dock that happens to be a 49 keys full size velocity sensitive, drum-pad accessorized, USB/MIDI sporting keyboard with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at is going to fire up the imagination of a lot of people. AKAI's product webpage still states "Pending certification from Apple" and no price is shown yet so it is difficult to predict how successful this product will end up being however I am willing to bet that while this product is probably the first of its kind, it certainly won't be the last. Music is one field where we have seen the iOS environment take off dramatically and I have a feeling that we will continue to be amazed at the ingenuity of both hardware and software developers as things progress.
Check out this entry on jehudasaar.com for a video of some of the new features we should be getting soon on our iPads.
Back in December I described a project born on Kickstarter that turned iPod nanos into fancy watches. The products keep on coming, and today I found this cool little product by a company called iWatchz that I thought was worth mentioning because of the cool video they came up with. Enjoy.
Back when I tested the Amplitube iRig in the Summer I never imagined IK Multimedia would do much beyond updating the software every once in a while, add an effect here and there etc. But they managed to surprise me when I realised that what they had done for certain instruments, they were now going to do for the microphone. They just announced the iRig Mic and I, for one, am looking forward to testing this little beauty. Lately I have been doing a lot of vocal recordings and this little arrangement would provide a cool portable multitrack recording studio to take with me when I travel. If I get my hands on it anytime soon I'll post my impressions of it here or on jehudasaar.com
