Multimedia and more

OK, here is a little tidbit a few people might not know about me. Back in my first year of college, I was a computer science major. Then, journalism stepped in the way.

I was taking photos for the campus newspaper part-time, which seemed like a whole lot more fun than programming classes. So, one afternoon I switched my major from computer science to journalism. Newspapers seemed a lot easier to do than programming, and the male-to-female ratio was a little bit better in that department. I never thought I would have to touch a lick of code again.

Fast forward a few years, then lo and behold journalism is all about multimedia and suddenly coding skills are in high demand. I guess those 10 months of intro to programming classes really paid off. But now I’m finding, maybe I should have stuck with the programming gig after all.

I had this very thought a few weeks ago when Apple announced the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone. As soon as heard the news, my first inclination was “I gotta do that.” It turns out, Apple software is based on a programming language called Objective-C. I took a peak and was utterly delighted to learn that ObjC is quite similar to another programming language called C++ that I had to make friends with once upon a time.

I actually went out and bought a book on ObjC and it has very quickly brought me back to common phrases I once cringed to hear, like polymorphism, inheritance, pointers and methods. (I can hear echos of liberal arts majors running away screaming)

OK, so all of that aside, here is the million dollar question: What should I program? So far, I’m successfully mastered the “Hello World” program (a program that displays those respective words). Apple has a ton of really great documentation and coding samples of how to do things like take advantage of location aware functionality, etc. They just released a program tool called Interface Builder, which is essentially a drag-and-drop program builder. It makes the coding part much easier for a novice such as myself. I’m ready to go, but where should I start?

Here are a couple of ideas I was throwing around:

• Location aware app that will tell you nearby services like shopping, theaters, gas stations, etc. Maybe I can connect it to http://www.everyblock.com/ ?
• A journalist toolbox, that will offer you Computer Assisted Reporting tools at your finger tips. Everything from where to get a person’s home tax records to how to file a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA). Maybe I can store it in the phone’s mysql lite database.
• RSS aggregation program that will give you headlines from a variety of sources (I’m sure this someone else already has done this. It’s pretty easy to do.

Any more ideas? What do people want out of their iPhones?

Apparently a new feature from diet.com is making the rounds and becoming quite popular. The latest is that you can text message the name of a popular restaurant followed by a menu item to “D-I-E-T-1″ or 34381, and it will return all of the nutritional facts of that item. News of this feature has gone viral and has already appeared on several news reports, numerous talk shows and radio stations. I first heard about it on the radio, and now I’m seeing it on digg and other Web sites.

I have to admit, the service works pretty well. It’s free except for the cost of the text message your carrier charges (most carriers give an allowance of text messages). In a test I text messaged “carl’s jr. six dollar” and got back information that their Six Dollar Guacamole Bacon Burger was 1117 calories. That’s not counting the fries or the large soda. Pretty soon I was texting the name of everything I’ve eaten in the last couple of weeks. (I didn’t have the six dollar burger in case you were wondering)

This type of feature isn’t anything new. Lots of organizations are using texting services to get or return information, including Google’s new 411 service. Just text your search query to “G-O-O-G-L-E” or 466453, and it’ll return local info. (Ex. “sushi 94720″ will return sushi restaurants near UC Berkeley).

Local KITS Live 105.3 San Francisco uses text messaging to get responses from listeners to polls or song requests. The DJ will ask a question like “Text in your favorite place to vacation” and within seconds the messages come pouring in. It’s crowd-sourcing at it’s most immediate form.

It seems the only people who aren’t using a text messaging service are news Web sites. At least, I haven’t seen any. A few will provide “SMS alerts” but even then, I’m not sure I want give the power to a company to send me text messages all day about a range of topics I can’t control, dwindling down my monthly 250 text message allowance. I’d rather have the query-answer method any day.

Why is it that the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times can’t be the one to provide me with directions to restaurants or the latest movies playing via my cell phone? Google wins again.

The New York Times Research and Development Lab have come out with a really cool idea for getting the newspaper right on your mobile phone. They developed a product using hacked Radio Frequency Identification chips (RFID) whereby you can transfer data to your cell phone seamlessly.

The idea, once it’s fully developed, would work like this: Set your mobile phone on an area of your desk that has a special reader pad. The pad signals your computer and takes you to a site that would allow you to download RSS feeds, news stories, blog, personal notes and even directions to say a restaurant right to your phone.

The RFID part of it is more of a gimmack, the real beauty is in the software. Making it simple to, well, put the newspaper on your phone. There are a ton of programs right now that will technically do that, but none with the beauty and simplicity as this one. And one thing software developers are quickly learning these days is that User Interface is everything.

Their idea was so cool, they won the Yahoo Hack Day London 2007 competition. (I admit, I didn’t even know that was going on)

They are going to have the software ready “very soon” on their Web site ShifD.com.

Watch the video of them explaining their product far better than I could in this blog:



The Guardian reported recently that the BBC will be making its iPlayer software available on the iPhone and iPod Touch in the coming weeks. Many blogs/rumor sites are reporting that this is undoubtedly linked to Apple announcing its Software Development Kit (SDK) release at the end of February.

The iPlayer is simple enough. Stream all of the BBC content on the Web. Everyone is pretty much already doing this, except, the BBC is actually looking ahead to the future. They are trying to make their content available in as many venues as they can. Very soon everyone who owns an iPhone in Europe will know they can watch BBC content on their iPhones, and the BBC will undoubtedly see a jump in traffic. If they play their cards right, they will start offering other services to iPhone users like movie times, weather, stocks, etc. all through widgets or programs.

Now I use Apple’s iPhone as a reference, but I’m really speaking of mobile devices in general. I like to use the iPhone because I think it does serve as a rather interesting barometer given its popularity and capabilities (not to mention Google recently announced that iPhone searches on the internet are 50 times more than any other cell phone).

Pretty soon, the mobile computing platform will become ubiquitous. Some say in five years, others in two years. But no matter who you talk to, they all agree that mobile devices are the future. I’ve said it before, people today are in love with their cell phones. It’s their lifeline to the world, their method of personal communication. Now, it’ll be used as a platform for mass communication. The only question unanswered is who will be leading the charge? A Silicon Valley startup, or a news company?

I recently attended a conference on the transformation of National Public Radio to a more “webcentric” news operation. We were not allowed to blog the event since it discussed internal matters, so I can’t go into specific details. But let’s just say that the entire experience was educational.

One aspect of this discussion which really caught my attention was the talk about NPRs mobile Web site. I am somewhat of a mobile smartphone fanatic. I’ve owned virtually every generation of smartphone OS since they came into existence.

Windows Pocket PC 2003

Starting with the tiny Audiovox’s SMT 5600 which ran Windows Smartphone software, a gigantic Pocket PC brick phone that ran Windows Mobile 2003, the once ubiquitous Treo 650 running Palm OS software, a T-mobile DASH which also ran Windows Mobile Smartphone 6.0, then finally the Apple iPhone.

So, hopefully without sounding arrogant, let me just say I’m very familiar with the mobile Web browsing experience. I’m also familiar with the benefits and drawbacks of 3rd party mobile software (more on that in a future post), and having perused thousands of forum posts, I also have somewhat of an impression of what mobile users want in mobile web content.

I mention NPR because their mobile site is quite impressive. It’s both WAP and iPhone compatible, it delivers the news, photos AND an innovate method for delivering streaming content: a phone call.

That’s right, the Web gurus over at NPR basically thought it would be incredibly difficult to build several streaming media services to accommodate all of the different mobile platforms out there (which is somewhat true) So their website contains a linkable phone number that can be called. By “linkable” I mean you can click the phone number and on most phones the link will initiate the phone call. On the other end is a recording of the top headlines.

Kudos for the unique method of problem solving. This definitely has 100% compatibility with all mobile phones. However as a daily mobile media consumer, I have yet to use this feature more than once. I just can’t stand to waste my precious minutes listening to news headlines — even though a majority of my conversations are mundane, and in all likelihood, pointless. I feel that a good amount of people will feel the way I do.

You don’t want to place a phone call just to hear the news.