Apple TV and my Media Player

Well I took delivery of an Apple TV yesterday, and yet again, whoever designs the packaging for Apple ought to have an award, even the packaging was a delight to open.

The 1st job was to connect the Apple TV to my television, which was really easy, two cables, one HDMI and a mains cable, then came the setup, again, fairly straightforward, then onto the iTunes to set up Home Sharing.

So I had a working Apple TV system, I had downloaded the 'Remote' App from the App Store and had connected my iPad 2, a quick whiz round my iPad and I sussed how the AirPlay worked, I could remote control the Apple TV from my iPad, everything was looking rosy...

 

LoveFilm

My main driver for getting the Apple TV, was to use the LoveFilm streaming service from my iPad via AirPlay, I know I can use LoveFilm on my XBox, but why should I pay another £35 a year for the XBox Gold so that I can connect to LoveFilm, I have LoveFilm on my Smart Tv, but it runs Android and always falls over halfway through the film. LoveFilm has always worked on the iPad though, so my thoughts were, "why not use it via the iPad to the Apple TV", until it tried it, and guess what, the LoveFilm Player, does not allow the mirroring. This sucks!

 

Media Center

I also have a Freecom Media Player, which I bought several years ago, this is a 500GB NAS box, capable of playing films, photographs and music, via HDMI, straight to my TV. Looking at the functionality between, this and the Apple TV, there is no comparison, this evening the Media Player will be consigned to the office, connected straight to my laptop, via USB, and I will start the process of converting all my digitised films to the Apple TV format using my Aimersoft Video Converter Application.

It may take me a while, to convert all my DIVX and AVI films, but at the end of the day, I will have the luxury of having all my films, music, photos, and iPad functionality in one place - my armchair in from of my TV - Nivarna!

 

Next Steps..

Do I REALLY want to look at the AirPlay games?

Well here is a really good resource on all thing AirPlay.

Another thing I will be investigating is setting up Apple TVs connected to the projectors in our office meeting rooms, this could well be an easy way for people to present, I will just have to figure out if the subnets will be a problem...

Blogsy App for the iPad

I have just downloaded the Blogsy App for the iPad. We shall have to see how easy and how good the App is to post to my various Blog sites.

160 x 50	220 x 70

Copying pictures straight from web pages is really easy, very impressed with that, although it did change the font size...

Dragging a video direct from my YouTube pages was a cinch, how easy is this...

Dragging a photo from my Picassa account is simple too.

Wow, even uploading photos from my iPad is easy, I can see why people like this App!

 

 

 

TimeLapse Video

Now I am not a photographic geek, I like taking photos and video as a remembrance of an occasion like everyone else, this is why I love this App to do Time Lapse recordings.

I read a blog at the weekend where a guy had set up his Mac to take a time lapse video of a party, then at the end of the party he just uploaded the results to YouTube so that every one could see what went on at the part - cool I thought.

After a search in the App store on the iPad, I decided to give Quick Lapse HD designed by CodeCraft Technologies a try - it is possible to install the free App, but it only gives 3 seconds of recording, so I went for the full App as the cost is peanuts.

I was very impressed on how easy it was to get up and running, I have a gorilla mount for the iPAD, courtesy of a birthday present from my son, so I just attached it to the handrail in the atrium of my office and recorded the coffee bar for 10 minutes, I was very impressed with the results.

This was recorded in the App complete with soundtrack and uploaded direct to YouTube.

On the way home last night I attached the iPAD to the rear view mirror in my car and recorded my journey home, this time I took the recording and made some minor edits using the Video Editor App and uploaded that to YouTube, still pretty good for a 1st attempt.

So far I only have one grumble about the App, and that is if a notification/alert appears, the recording stops - this can be a bit of a downer if you have set the iPAD up to record a day's event and someone send you a calendar invitation an hour into the event.

The only thing I would like to see on the App is an idiots tool for setting the recording by 'Expected Recording Time' and 'Prefered Playback Time', at the moment you have to do some mental arithmetic to figure out the Timelapse Interval by the Frames Per second.

I already have a plethora of ideas where I can use this neat little App.

Mixing Sounds

I wanted to create a new welcome message for Halloween when people call my Service Desk, the question was how to do it using Cloud Computing from my Windows 7 laptop.

A quick google search brought up the kind of sound bytes I needed, this was a really easy site to pick up royalty free stuff - http://soundbible.com/

Next I needed a sound editor, I wanted something simple but with multiple channels - a quick search brought up http://www.aviary.com/ it was 'relatively' easy to use, I could import the sound bites I had downloaded from Soundbible and then record my own voice direct from my headset.

As you have multiple channels in the Aviary suite, you can adjust the different volumes and add extra effects.

I was very pleased with the result

Halloween.egg on Aviary.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Video Conferencing - getting the right ambience

The powers that be have just enabled MS Office Communicator for Video Conferencing at our site, which means that anyone with a webcam can join in Video Conferences from their laptops in their office, this is of course, great news, it means less travelling, less cost and better communications.

Having a Video Conference from my office did get me thinking though, now that I have participated in a few 'VCs', some of the offices are, well a bit crabby, there are papers everywhere, old computers dotted about the place etc. so I have decided to improved the quality of how people see me when on a VC.

The 1st job was to find an appropriate photo on ebay, I picked up a large beach poster for £6.  The poster is stuck behind my desk on the wall.

Getting the poster in the right place was a tad tricky, it needed two people, then I had to play around with the zoom function on the web cam, but eventually I managed to get the kind of result I wanted.

Now all I have to do is improve the ugly mug in the picture, and I will have the desired effect I was after - perhaps a George Clooney look would be better...

Jawbone Icon and Jambox on my PC

OK so I have been using my Jawbone Icon with my Avaya One-X Communicator for about a month now, and I am really loving it.  Gone are the Plantronics CS60 headset, the USB cable for it and the charging cable, that is another two wires removed from the desk.
The Icon is so small, it sits nicely on the edge of the keyboard, I still need a charging cable, but as it charges from a micro USB, I use the same cable to charge my Blackberry - cool.

So my next thought was 'how will the Jawbone Jambox fare with the One-X Communicator and Office Communicator on my Windows 7 laptop?'.
I decided to order one in for a test, if it was going to be rubbish I was sure I could find a good home for it.

Well on Thursday the package arrived, literally next day delivery, the packaging was so well designed I didn't really want to open it, but eventually I carefully peeled back the sticky back plastic and took out the Jambox.
This is really well designed and built, rubber top and bottom gives it a grippy feel with a mesh wrapped around the middle for a stylish look, it feels solid and looks minimalist - perfect.

I plugged it into the micro USB cable connected to my laptop, leaving it switched off, to charge, this was going to take about 2.5 hours so I went for a bacon sarnie and a coffee.
The first thing I did once the unit was charged was update it to the latest firmware via the MyTalk Jawbone Portal - the first attempt just hung at 1% but after unplugging and refreshing the portal, it saw the Jambox and took about 3 minutes to update - whilst I was on the portal I also renamed the Jambox.  Next I tried to pair the Jambox with my laptops Bluetooth, this was surprisingly easy, it immediately saw it as another headset and it also saw it as a Jawbone headset - I was a little worried about this, but it has proved to be perfect, here's why...

Now when I am using the Icon with the One-X Communicator, as soon as I turn the Icon off, the Communicator complains that it can't see the headset anymore, when I turn on the Jambox and it pairs, Communicator now sees the headset again - it doesn't realise it is a different device!  This means that when I want to make a conference call from my meeting table, I just turn the Icon off, turn the Jambox on and make the call - seamless.

Another set of cables and a Star Phone have now been removed from my meeting table. Next came pairing it to the iPad and Blackberry, both went very easily and even as I type now, Lynne is listening to Radio1 on the Jambox in the kitchen, via BBC iPlayer on the iPad.

I will need to run with it a while longer just to give it a stress test, plus see how far the Jambox can work away from the laptop, but the future is promising...

Converged Communications - who, why, where, when.

As much as ten years ago the buzz word in the telephony industry was convergence - no one was really sure what it was and what to do with it, it was a mixture of telephony and Instant Messenger in those days.

Riding my bike into the office in the mornings gives me a great opportunity to reflect on things, plus the oddest ideas just seem to pop into my mind, it must be something to do with wearing ear plugs and petrol fumes...  This morning I was thinking about conversations we were having in the office last week with Marketing and Communications people.

On one side of the fence we have the Marketer's (I always get this impression of a French gascoin, with feathered hat, sword, shouting "one for all..."), who want to 'get out there' and interact with the customers, and on the other side the Communication people, who need 'a strategy' before they will commit to interactions.

They are both right.  Yes we do need to interact with our customers.  Yes we do need a strategy.
But...

Who are our customers?

What medium do they prefer?

What content do they want?

Who is responsible for providing the content?

Who will do the 'interaction' thing?

Where does the return for the effort come from?

When is the best time to interact with the customers?

Who has the budget?

The biggest issue that an organisation faces, seems to be the possibilities for interacting with customers is expanding at a phenomenal rate, 10 years ago no one had heard of Facebook, it was Friends Re-united, 5 years ago no one had heard of Twitter, 2 months ago no one had heard of Google+ - so how can you come up with a reliable strategy when the playing field is changing on an almost daily basis?

The question I was pondering this morning is 'who will be doing the interactions'?  From the Marketer's perspective, they would need to interact with customers, should the Communications Department be the ones talking to customers?  In fact neither is the best option, most companies have already the perfect people for interacting with customers, those on the front line - Customer Services.  Our Customer Services Department already interact with our customers, by telephone and e-mail, all day every day - so they just need the tools to add the extra strings to their bow for Tweets, Video Calls, Hang Outs and whatever comes over the horizon tomorrow....