We’re 4 days away from being able to pre-order the new iPhone and my gadget lust is at code orange. Jules and I are still rocking 3Gs so spending on this upgrade is easily rationalized :). There are a lot of groundbreaking innovations on the device, but what I’m most excited about is the camera. To date, believe it or not, I’ve taken 1275 photos with the 2 megapixel camera on my trusty 3G. An unexpected side effect of having a “good enough” camera as part of a device that’s with me wherever I go is that I use all the time – mostly as a memory and inspiration tool. If I want to remember something, or I see something that inspires me, I snap a photo. Over time it just became a habit and I’ve found it so useful that I’d never buy a phone without a camera again.
The volume of pictures I’ve taken on my 3G shows that Apple definitely crossed the usefulness threshold (for users like me at least) with their first stab at putting a camera in a phone. The image quality is lacking, though, and there’s no real manual control and it performs horribly in low light. Apple did a heck of a lot to correct those issues with the 3GS, and even caught the attention of photographers with the improved sensor, an increase in resolution, low light performance and tap-to-focus. (side note: If you haven’t heard about Chase Jarvis’s new book “The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You” check it out…awesome iPhone photography)
And with this release, Apple’s shown that they’re still listening and has put even more useful features into the camera:
- Video recording in HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio and in-camera video editing with iMovie – I’m skeptical about what using this will be like, but how can you say this isn’t cool?
- 5-megapixel still camera – instead of uselessly increasing megapixels they’ve focused on putting in a kick-ass low light sensor, which will make much more difference to image quality.
- The new front-facing camera - finally I can take a picture of Jules and I when we’re out and about that I don’t have to re-take 3 times because all I got was the sky or “just” my stomach.
- Tap to focus video or still images – awesome for isolating your subject and blurring the background – this is the feature that made photographers go banana sandwich when the 3G came out.
- LED flash - huge – this sucker even stays on to light your subjects when you’re shooting video.
- Photo and video geotagging -neat if you care about this sort of thing, which I do because iPhoto’s sorting by place is awesome.
The New Camera + App
OK, so I’ve told you all that so that I can now tell you about this. Now that the iPhone camera is 17 new kinds of awesome, you’re going to start looking for apps, right? Only natural. Along with the “Best Camera” app, I’d recommend this one – Camera+. What’s different about this app is that it gives you lots of control and a much closer experience to an actual DSLR that the pros use. Plus the lightbox, zoom and custom filters are sweet and you can do some really cool “post-production” type of work directly on your phone. For $2.99, it makes the whole experience of using the camera way more than $2.99 cooler…check the video, you’ll see what I mean. If you end up buying it and loving it, you can thank Lisa and TapTapTap for their hard work.
Salton Sea Beach from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
For the past few weeks I’ve been tooling around the web doing research on DSLR cameras, many of which now shoot shockingly crisp, professional-grade HD video. I know that I just can’t ignore the trend towards video content anymore, and I’ve decided to start investing some time building that skill-set (with a long-term view). Don’t get me wrong, I love to write and still think blogging as a great way to reach audiences. It’s just becoming clear that staying relevant and succeeding on the social web requires injecting video production creatively and cheaply into the mix – and that goes for companies as well as individuals. When you strip it down to its core, the social web is fundamentally about people and story-telling, and in just about any side-by-side comparison, when it comes to story telling, video done well beats text almost every single time, and the barriers to entry (cost, learning curve etc) for amateur filmmakers has never been lower. That’s why you’re only going to see more pro-grade video on the web in the coming years. Huge numbers of amateurs are suddenly getting access to a new world. Read More
Restaurant owners are quickly discovering how to use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Yelp to their advantage and drive customers to their tables, but there’s a guy in Wisconsin doing it better than almost anyone else.
Joe Sorge, who runs a burger joint in Milwaukee called AJ Bombers, shot me a tweet yesterday to tell me about a Foursquare party they had this week that brought a flash mob of 161 Foursquare users to his restaurant. My eyebrows shot up when I read that number. 161 check ins in one day?! How could that be? There are only about three or four hundred Foursquare users total in Milwaukee?! Over 150 of them were in the same place, on the same afternoon?
When I called him up, Joe explained. They came to earn the highly coveted and elusive Foursquare “Swarm Badge” – something you can only get when 50 or more Foursquare users check in at the same place at the same time. I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently the promise of this coveted Foursquare badge can really draw a crowd. Read More
You know when the technology itself makes the most difference to how much engagement you get on the social web? In the very beginning, when it’s brand new to everyone. That’s when the alpha geeks, the 1% of the people that produce the most content online, temporarily ignore their other social networks to focus all their attention on the shiny new object. For just a few weeks following any major launch, you can build lasting relationships with the true online influencers by being a part of the action as they congregate on the new service in an excited feeding frenzy. If you’re there, and you’re as enthusiastic, helpful and engaging as they are, you’re seen as part of the tribe.
The engagement cycle is almost always the same on new social networks with a lot of hype (Google Buzz is a perfect example). The alpha geeks “follow”, listen and interact a lot early on when the community is still a small, tight-knit group of early adopters. They amass large followings quickly, and while they develop dense networks of influence, they are also less discriminating about who they interact with and “friend” because the frenzy is highly social.
Eventually they all hit a saturation point, though. The numbers get too big, their sense of true community dissipates and the initial excitement wears off. The second the enthusiasm for the shiny object disappears, they start spreading their attention out evenly again on the tried-and-true social spaces where they get a real sense of intimacy and personal connection. That’s why, in the long run at least, the technology doesn’t matter much and why focusing relationships to achieve long-term social goals is so important.
I’ve made these observations from interacting online and joining and leaving social networks for years, but I don’t have any hard data to back this up. It’s just a hunch, so I’m really interested to hear other people’s opinions and ideas on this or get pointers to any good examples. It’s sound long-term strategy to focus on relationships over technology, but if it’s the early adopter crowd you want to notice to you, there doesn’t seem to be a better time to get their attention than on someone else’s launch day. What are your thoughts?
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The ability to translate text directly from a photograph is a perfect example of some of the possibilities that emerge when you have sensor-rich mobile devices connected to cloud computing. Google’s shown that it’s possible, and that practical applications for mobile users might be just around the corner. How cool is that?
What’s happening in the background in this demo, on the simplest level, is that the prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text using Google Translate. Even in small chunks, you can see what a difference having a tool like this could make in a pinch, especially if you’re traveling in a foreign country.
According to Google, right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it’s not yet ready for release into the wild. I’m sure you’ll agree, though, that this demo shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. It’s exciting to know that soon your phone might be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language.
“All of our devices – our mobile phones, cameras, toys and media players – will become increasingly aware of where we are. Soon, geographical location, rather than broadcast schedules, will trigger entertainment experiences. Content will be tagged to places, and these will alert you to the proximity of your friends and people of similar interests” – Mike Walsh, Author of Futuretainment
The way we experience the web is moving quickly towards a standard where content is not linear, but relative. When content is linear, one piece of content leads us to another. But when the model is relative, any piece of content can be accessed via contextual triggers anywhere, any time and on any device.
Location is going to be a primary trigger that changes how we experience web content. In fact, it wont be long before a lot of the content that exists on the web will also exist as overlays to our senses as we move through the real world. Sound crazy? It’s not. It’s what the augmented reality movement is all about, and it’s coming fast.
A few days ago at TED, Bing engineers demonstrated that they are going way beyond Google’s Street View technology, using backpack cameras to capture pedestrian spaces, Flickr integration to provide a more diverse picture of a place over time, telescope data to allow people to get information on celestial bodies, and live video to show what’s happening in a place in real time. It’s pretty incredible. If you’re not impressed by this 6 minute demo, I’d take a moment to chew on what you’re seeing for a second, and consider for a second how evolved this still-young this technology is…
What Does This Mean For Us and The Web?
Well, first of all, putting content into context this way gives an unprecedented level of depth of information and understanding about place and our relationship to it. As Blaise Aguera y Arcas told Fast Company in a recent interview…
“If you want to explore, if you want to really understand more about a place, you really need to be able to get right down in there, and see if from the point of view that people actually experience it. As great as it is to use cameras on top of cars for building that visual trellis, that’s not the actual human perspective.”
With a layer of user generated content on top of maps we can look around and explore where we are with a completely new set of lenses.
- It’ll be social – other people’s photos and videos will give us a unique perspective of the history and social context of where we are,
- It’ll be personal – Our own location-tagged photos, videos and content can allow us to relive moments when we visit places that are meaningful to us.
- It’ll be educational – instead of having to read and learn in a linear way, you’ll be able to put yourself at the center of the action, in context of place (and eventually time).
Most importantly, the rise of the Geoweb will open up completely new categories for business and innovation. It’s not hard to imagine a variety of commercial applications for virtual augmented reality tours or rich entertainment, educational and social experiences. With consumers rushing to buy location-aware smart phones, expect to see a lot of movement in the mobile market for these types of experiences in the next few years. Exciting stuff.
You knew this was coming. Google about to start surfacing public web content from your friends and online contacts.
