I am not a big fan of Twitter. I don’t follow anyone and don’t have an account. Perhaps if I was from a younger generation, I would. After all, I am sure my buddies and I would have one or two jokes being shared, while moving from pub to pub (although, they would all need to be expunged prior to employment).

And of course, as with all technology, companies seek out new uses. Sony has just announced a lifelogging application that uploads to Twitter.

The lifelogging device, which was prototyped in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, is equipped with a camera, an acceleration sensor, a GPS, etc to record the activities of a cat.

Using the data collected by the acceleration sensor, etc, the device deduces the activities of a cat such as walking, sleeping and eating.

The device can be used with the Twitter service and automatically posts comments in accordance with the activities. The lifelog data is first transmitted to a PC via Bluetooth, and, then, comments are posted on Twitter. For example, it is possible to automatically post a comment like "This tastes good" when a cat is eating something.

Now, I love animals. I live in a family of animal activists. At one time we had a dog and four cats at the same time. And it runs in family. My son is on a school trip and he called last night and said they were at the Humane Society and he donated all of the money he had left because it is for the animals.

But knowing everything my cat does? Pass.

Looks like the spring update of XBOX live added MKV support. I was surprised, you can now watch your .MP4 files and full HD MKV files natively within the Media Center XBOX shell.

Too bad they didn’t fix the flaw that is seriously making me consider Apple TV …. You must be logged onto XBOX Live (with an active connection, you can’t be logged into your profile) to play media content. If your internet is acting funny, it will ask you to redownload the patch.

So one positive, one negative.

I was in the Powermat booth and they had some pretty cool demos going on. Their technology is moving from a shell that you put on your device to power charging integrated into the battery. This is a huge change (the rep mentioned that is will be available Q2) and makes the technology incredibly compelling, I can’t stand all the chargers. Especially if you think about their car holder – drop it into the holder and you comply with the law and charge the device without plugging in.

They also demonstrated where they are going with appliances. The below appliances have no cords, just a charging station built below the counter top. No cords, that would be nice.

Every year at WMC (this is my 4th or 5th time), my favourite booth is the NTT Docomo booth for two reasons:

1. They only seem to ever send Japanese booth people who speak virtually no English. That makes me laugh.

2. They always have the wackiest and coolest stuff.

This years winner for most questionable handset innovation:  For people who think that aluminum, carbon fibre, or gold just isn’t good enough … the Wooden handset!

How do they do that? Well with 3D Compression Technology of course:

This year’s wackiest – Eye-Controlled Earphones. I kid you not. The man stood up there moving his eyes and shifting from song to song. Of course, it makes you wonder – what happens if you look at something quickly, will the song change? Or if you are reading a book and listening to music, will it keep fast forwarding? It also wins the award for most humorous demonstration. Watching the man below, I can read his mind ‘I got my PHD to do this?’.

It would appear that other carriers are also getting in into the ‘out there’ R&D business. Telefonica was demonstrating the ‘State of Mind and Mood Analysis for eHealth’ application. By closely monitoring involuntary facial movement, it could determine my present state of mind. The blue and green shading is my ‘aura’.

Despite the fact that I was just off a plane, had slept 3 hours in the last 36 and was uber-jetlagged, I was still measured as calm and in a good state of e-health. I asked her if she had red people (high anger, etc.) and she said occasionally. She then asked me to think of someone I really didn’t like, or who I hated or who made me super mad to try and get me to read red. I honestly couldn’t think of anyone that I bear a grudge toward or am angry with at this point in my life (which, upon reflection, is a fantastic thing .. life is good was my e-reading)… So she reverted to a video of Obama.

She showed him as he presented on the national deficit and the state of the economy. The aura is not a happy one (note all the yellow).

A few cool viewings.

Eric Schmidt was a keynote at WMC and during his presentation the team demonstrated the new Google Goggles product. The product takes a photo and using recognition software, will do a web search. For his presentation, they took a few landmarks in Barcelona and executed the web search.

The next step was the big wow. The product has integrated Google’s translation software and OCR capabilities. He took a photo of a menu that was in German, it brought up the Google translation page and with a touch of a button converted the menu from German to English.

“Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it’s not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we’re hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go. “ mentioned Hartmut Neven on the company’s blog.

That was WOW.

A mobile show wouldn’t be complete without a totally wired car or two. The first car I came across was the Alcatel-Lucent LTE car. Interested in 100MBPS down in the car? Well this is the car for you.

I said to the guy manning the car (who must have been part of the project), ‘Is there just the one?’. Indignantly he responded, ‘Just one, do you know how long it took to build this concept car?’. The back seat LEDs give a snippet of your choices in a fully wired car, a few more choices than your run of the mill Dodge Caravan.

The loaded Audi concept car was a bit more to my liking.

I was underwhelmed by the Garmin Asus concept car (smile).

A lot of press has written about the hugely expensive Avatar movie that came out on the 18th. Estimates range from $300-500M to make and market the movie.

We saw it as a family a few nights ago. The experience was like my first viewing of Jurassic Park, you just sit there and are amazed by every single scene. After watching that movie, I cannot imagine any experience or story that cannot be made to look life like and real.

On the 3D side, I would have been just as impressed without the 3D gimmick. While it was cool, it wasn’t required.

Amazing move.

I have been playing with the Blackberry Application World lately and the different apps that are available. One of the coolest is Maratick, a list making product.

This weekend, instead of heading out to do Christmas shopping this weekend with a piece of paper – I did it with my Blackberry, and it was super easy ticking things off. Cool app.

Too the Apple fans who keep pinging me every time they see a reference to an Apple product on the blog.

1. I do not use the iPhone. I think it is an amazing phone (My boys have requested one), but I need a keyboard. I also love the iPod that clips … just wish it worked with Media Player.

2. I don’t have an Apple PC. It isn’t out of scope, but I have Windows 7 running on all the machines and am impressed. We will see, maybe if one is ready for Evergreening.

PS: That being said, I am using my first non-Windows mobile device – the Blackberry 9700 and RIM has done one heck of a good job. Still a few nuances that I am not use to, but it has come a long way and is well integrated into Outlook, and the industrial engineering on the device itself is really impressive.

I have always thought about putting in a home projector system, bigger is better has always been my TV motto and with 3 boys playing on the XBOX split screen – a projector definitely fits the bill. The problem has been the house, you must have the right place for it. In  England and in our last Canadian house, we never had the space. Now we have that place.

What is unbelievable is the price. I remember a few friends doing it 6 years ago and paying $6-8K for a high definition projector. Now, for $2K or less you are getting remarkable quality. Case in point, the new Panasonic PT-AE4000U. It has everything including 1080P output. A review:

The AE4000 announcement is dramatic. Though its spec sheet does not look revolutionary compared to last year’s AE3000, the AE4000 is in fact a superior projector in almost every way. Certainly it surpasses the AE3000 in image quality. And it is even more fully-featured than its predecessor. But what is most stunning is the price. Last October, a mere twelve months ago, the AE3000 was released with street prices close to $3,000. This month the AE4000 comes to market at $1,999. This aggressive move will force other manufacturers competing in the home theater projector market to reassess their pricing levels.

Since the AE4000’s picture quality not only surpasses the competitors in its price range, but rivals and in some cases exceeds that of "high-end" models selling for five times the price or more, it warrants a solid 5 stars for performance. Since it has more features than any other home theater projector ever built, 5 stars is not even enough to illustrate its distinction in this category. Similarly, its ease of use is unrivaled-perfect color calibration out of the box in Cinema 1 mode, smart menus that are easy to navigate, lens memory to accommodate 2.40 super widescreen without an anamophic lens-no other projector has all of these things, and most have none of them.

All of this adds up to a remarkable value proposition: at a street of $1,999, we’ve simply never seen this much performance at this price. Panasonic has been extremely tight-lipped about this product launch. Until now many thought the company was dropping out of the home theater projector market. Today’s announcement makes it clear that they are here to stay. The Panasonic PT-AE4000U will be one of the hottest selling home theater projectors of the fall season, and we enthusiastically give it our highest recommendation.

Not quite ready to get it done, as this requires more planning (screens, seating …), but this definitely makes the decision easier! In the meantime, I rented some equipment for last weekend as we held a birthday – 11 boys on 3 XBOXs. So cool. Much better than the pong I grew up with.

I watch TV my laptop regularly. The shoX speaker is a fantastic device for getting sound out of a laptop – much deeper than the built in speakers.

If you are travelling on Air Canada these dates you will see the PowerMat ads. I just acquired one and will be playing with. I love the fact that there are no cords, not unlike the Palm Pre’s wireless charger (you just drop it onto the base and it charges). This technology has been around for a while, nice to see that it is finally becoming commercially viable. I definitely need less cords ….

I watch TV via my XBOX 360. A friend shared a little tip with me about DVDs. If you want to store your DVDs on a hard drive and watch it via your XBOX, follow these simple steps:

• Decrypt it via tools like Slysoft.
• Copy the content (VOB files) to the drive.
• Use this KB article to make a few Vista changes to enable the feature.

Think of this, you can store 200 DVDs on a $100 1TB drive.

Awesome.

I had the good fortune to attend Mobile World Congress again this year and was not disappointed. A few of the highlights that I was able to catch between meetings:

• The Toshiba booth was filled with innovation. They unleashed the TG01 – their new big screen phone. Hands on, it is an amazing device with video quality off the planet. They also displayed a phone form factor with a Bluetooth keyboard (basically held together by the leather case for travelling). Interesting concept devices.

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• As always, one of my favourite booths was NTT Docomo. They showed the below children’s phone solution with GPS tracking and problem notification and mapping.

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf

• Panasonic was running a large screen TV off of one of their phones. Not sure of the application, but very cool. Maybe while in a hotel room? The guy to the left looks impressed.

• Last, O2 had a really cool demo of Surface going. Video below.

If you are technically inclined, you know that CES is on, the big Vegas show where the manufacturers roll out their new technology and Engadget has been doing a stunning job of covering it. A few that I have found interesting:

• Toshiba embedding Windows Media Extender technology into their new AV products.. This is a very interesting move. Imagine buying a DVD player and being able to stream the pictures, video and music from the PC through the DVD player to the TV or stereo. Now if a company like Denon would do that, it would be even cooler. The Yahoo news is also interesting with their gadgets on a TV. The routes to the TV continue to proliferate … XBOX 360, HDMI out on the laptop. Many choices. I came across this video, which is the history of Media Centre for the TV – past, present and future – interesting watch.
• It may be time to upgrade to the latest Harmony remote. I still remember being in the office one day and a guy on our team had been over to their office and seen this new product, the Harmony remote control. A year later, Logitech bought them. Best remote I have ever used.
• Of course, Windows 7. Beta is out. Interesting overview here. You will be able to download it Friday here.
• Our boys love building things and I can see how Kodu, the new XBOX LIVE game creation program, will be a huge hit in the house.
• This is not a CES link, but I really need to get to a demo spot to try these ‘Video eye-wear’ devices.
• I played with the new line of HP TouchSmart PCs at the Costco the other day. These are very slick devices, with the touch interface and a huge 22 inch screen. Great for a kitchen or dorm room. I remember my first 22 inch monitor, it weighed 150 lbs and cost $2300.
• They are also posting about MacWorld or something?
• MSN has a few other neat gadgets from CES including the WowWee Spyball (A little odd) and the Powermat (which I can totally see in my house).
• DIVX announced full HD and H.264 support.

Over the holidays I acquired some new tech. First and foremost was the Canon Speedlight 430 EXII. I made sure it was the first present opened so that I could capture all of the pictures with perfect lighting (although the comments of ‘Wait a minute guys, don’t open anything else until Dad figures out how to turn it on’ did not go over well. And then of course, disaster struck. A Duracell Plus AA blew up in the flash while we were in Paris. That battery is now on it’s way to Germany courtesy of P&G for testing and a report (which better result in their replacing my brand new flash as I can hear it corroding in the battery department as the second pass).

The second was a wireless router upgrade. This is an interesting one. In the UK, the walls are very thick in the homes. Plaster is alive and well. Which means that getting a connection from floor to floor or even from room to room is almost impossible. At one point I tried to hook up the XBOX 360 with wireless but could never get a good enough signal for video streaming. In the end I resorted to Ethernet over power. But I still was not getting the speed that I truly desired (The broadband provider has a ADSL2 router that I was using, but it always seemed flaky and using XBOX Live lead to challenges (i.e. NAT issues)).

What is amazing to me is the choice. 54mbps, 300mbps, N, N+1, 2.5GHZ, 5.0GHZ, dual band. Plus the reviews are all over the map. CNET says one thing and while Trusted Reviews says another. In the end, I ordered the Belkin N1 Vision after much humming and hawwing for four reasons:

1. Reasonably consistent good reviews.

2. N+1 for coverage for long life (I hope).

3. The LED was reviewed by many as handy. I agree, nice to see download and upload activity at the push of a button.

4. Gigabit Ethernet ports.

And in the true spirit of technology, the day that I buy it they announce the next version at CES with one more feature – dual band. I am not returning it ….

I read a story a week about a company or government entity that has lost a laptop and is freaking out because people’s privacy, key company or government data is now gone and at risk. The Daily Mail just sent a note to all of their journalists and freelancers about how all of their bank information was lost on a laptop:

The letters went out to journalists and other freelancers employed by Associated, which also publishes the Mail on Sunday and Metro, and regional newspaper publisher Northcliffe. Both are owned by parent company Daily Mail & General Trust.

Those affected were told their name, bank account number and sort code had been lost. The letter, from the group finance director, Simon Dyson, also advised them to consult a government identity theft website for advice. He apologised for any annoyance and inconvenience, saying the "incident was inadvertently caused by a technical issue".

When heading to a conference the other week, I received one of those famous emails with the word ‘ACTION’ in big letters in the subject. The email was quite simple: you have been identified that you have a laptop, you are running Vista and you are heading a conference so encrypt your drive using Bitlocker (drive encryption). There was a little euphemism in the email where they ‘offered to help you’ with this process at the conference with IT staff on hand (which really means, there are no excuses).

A quick search on the web served up these stories (there are hundreds)

• US government loses hundreds of thousands of tax data files
• Agilient loses 51,000 employee’s data
• E&Y loses 243,000 credit cards data
• Royal Navy loses data on 600,000 people

Scary.The Privacy Rights Clearing House reported last month that 40% of reported private-sector data breach events in 2006 were due to laptop theft. Gartner Group came out with an interesting read on cloud computing this week – highlighting the security challenges ahead.

Nice thing, I didn’t need IT. It was one click and it was done. I am now secure.

I love to take photos for a simple reason, they are our family archive.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me is that photography has changed dramatically. Before, a great photographer had to be – a great photographer. There were very few tools to change a photograph and those that were available were very expensive and out of reach of most people (e.g. airbrushing a photo). But with the creation of digital photography and the RAW format, it is less about being a great photographer and much more about being a great digital photo editor. The tools are unbelievable.

I have been using Adobe Lightroom (which is between Adobe Elements (entry) and CS3 (pro)). It is a good mid-level tool. In the new version 2 beta they have added the ability to spot change picture parts. It is amazing what you can do with a photo in only 5 minutes. Check out the below.

The original: Not bad, but washed out sky and the sign is ugly.

As the photo is in RAW, I can pretty much change anything. So I changed the ISO setting (exposure) to accommodate for daylight. An automatic setting in Lightroom – and out comes the sky. But now the stones are too dark.

Using the spot highlighting, I quickly (3 minutes) brush the exposure on the stones and grass. But now the grass looks washed out.

So I take the paint function and jack the saturation level up and quickly paint over the grass (1 minute). But that sign looks ugly.

Use the spot removal feature to paint out the sign and the little fence. (1 minute). Compare the beginning and the end. Amazing.

Five minutes work and a dramatically different picture and there is still a lot more that can be done.A good example here. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time.

I guess just like with music, it is becoming less about how great a singer or player your are as great engineering can change everything. This must mean a crisis of identity for many ‘old school’ photographers.

What really amazes me, is that anyone can now do it at a very low cost. The Canon G9 point and shoot ($500) shoots RAW giving you the utmost flexibility, the large file size is no longer an issue thanks to $20 2GB storage cards and computer tools are inexpensive.

Amazing. Another industry being changed by computers. When you add in a GPS phototracker that allows you to capture your trip and sync that with your pictures – well, the opportunities are endless.

For my Apple fanboy friends. You know who you are.

I am a big fan of Western Digital external hard drives; 1TB for £120 is a bargain especially when I am converting our home movies and every hour of DV is 14GB.

On the weekend one of my drives was acting funny, I moved it from one computer to another and it would not recognize. After futzing around with it and testing it on multiple computers I finally called tech support with the following results …

I called into European tech support and listened to a polite Dutch lady letting me know ‘that they are sorry about ze delay, ve will be with you in a moment’. After a short time, a French bloke picks up ….

FB (French Bloke):  ‘Hello, how may I help?’

ME: ‘ I have a WD My Book Pro II and Vista will not recognize it. Using both FireWire and USB. I have tested it on 3 different computers, I don’t think the USB or FireWire is sending out a signal’

FB: ‘Well, zen it is broken. Send it in’

ME: ‘Pardon?’

FB: ‘Send it in. It must be broken’

ME: ‘Uh, don’t you want to trouble shoot it or something?’

FB: ‘Well, vee could do zat wasting about 30 minutes of our time at vich point ve vould both recognize zat it is broken and you would send it in. You plug zees things in and they either vork or don’t. So it must be broken, send it in’

ME: (I start to laugh) ‘Well, don’t you want me to try pressing the reset button at least? Or something? It isn’t a hard drive, it is a chassis with dual drives and I assume some form of electronics board in there as it supports RAID so at least it should recognize it via USB. Plus, the blue power light is on’

FB: ‘Et has a reset button? Iz it a big button?’

ME: (laughing again): ‘No, it is a little pinhole on the back’

FB: ‘Well, zen you should press it. And if that does not work, send it in. Vile you do dat I will go grab a drive so I know what you are looking at’

ME: (I pull out the firewire cable and plug in the USB again and for some miraculous reason, Vista picks up the USB connection and finds the drive) ‘Ah ha! It worked. Looks like the USB is working again!’

FB: ‘Vell, zat is good. Looks like I was wrong. Have a nice day’

I hung up and broke out laughing. Truly the weirdest call I have had to date.

There has been a lot of press and Internet activity on XOBNI over the last few weeks. After the 10th person mentioned how cool it is I finally installed it. I have to admit at first, I was taken back by the interpretation of the information in the Outlook info pane after it installed and indexed my machine.

I viewed myself. Seems that I send emails to myself at very odd hours (I will send myself actions or notes to be recorded in GTD). Someone also commented that I send emails at some very early hours. To me, it just looks like I have a lot of mail flowing in and out all the time ….

I like the always on access to profile information around the individual who sent you the mail (their phone number, quick click to an appointment, wicked search and the other random tidbits. The conversation thread is interesting as it show historical data (but threading was added in Outlook a while ago). Interesting little gadget.

As an aside, looks like they don’t want to be bought .. yet.

It is interesting to watch the broadband fair usage debate evolve on the web. The debate on torrent shaping is raging in many geographies, with Bell Canada throttling P2P applications, Virgin UK trialing broadband caps based on usage at different times (when you hit the limit, your link is throttled for the rest of the month) and there has been much talk about the BBC iPlayer in the UK which has been a smash success while raising the ire of broadband providers as it shifts the viewing load from over air or via a TV subscription service to the Internet.

It is the fight that consumer advocates call net neutrality and broadband providers call fair usage. What becomes very interesting in this debate is that more than media is shifting to the web. It is not simply about people downloading copyrighted music or the latest bootleg movie. It is more than that. A few examples:

• I have been doing a lot of work around figuring out our digital memories. How do I properly capture our adventures on photos and videos. I upgraded Pinnacle Studio to version 11 online which came with a digital download. The size of that download? 2.5GB. The amazing thing is that the download was unbelievably fast. Under the bandwidth with usage limits model, I would be cooked for the month. Of interest, while doing the download I had to reboot my router as I lost all Internet connectivity for some mysterious reason ….
• Live Messenger has an amazing file sharing function. I often take my picture or video folders and simply drop them into the sharing folder with family. These folders can be as large as 2GB. What happens there?

This debate will get hotter as we watch applications evolve (software and services), new services like the BBC iPlayer launch and Internet penetration increase – after all, only 20% of the worlds population is on the net. One could hypothesize that something as simple as web cam penetration and usage will have a dramatic impact on this debate.

Personally, I always buy the top packages. I am fine with a higher price as my disposable income (and time) has shifted to the Internet over the last decade. I want a high level of service, a guaranteed quality of service and will pay the premium – but for that price I will resist throttling.

This will be an interesting debate. It has just started.

I have been reading about GPS enabling your camera. There are multiple ways with the easiest appearing to be GPS synchronization. The device sits on your pack and tracks your movements and the time. When you sync the data with your camera pictures, it will map the location data to the picture via the time stamp, with full support of RAW and various commercial photo applications (Adobe, Flickr).

There seem to be 2 market leaders, Sony and Phototrackr. A comparison of the 2 found here. We will see how well it works with their software, in a worst case scenario this is a generation one, bleeding edge investment on the way to a market that will expand.        

Just a matter of time before the GPS is embedded in the camera.

Update: In what can only be considered an uncanny coincidence, I came across this article describing Microsoft’s newly released free Pro Photo Tools that enable geotagging. Download it here.

From the article:  "That’s because geotagging, done well, enables people to find photos by searching for the word "Paris" rather than sifting through folders with obscure filenames like IMG_5829.jpg or squinting at hundreds of image thumbnails. Until the still-distant day when computers can recognize your Aunt Polly or the Grand Canyon, geotagging holds potential as a way for people to get a handle on ever-growing digital photo collections."

What I am trying to sort is how I would leverage this (Flickr being an obvious first choice and it may be easier, but it does not appear to automatically reference the GPS data). I see someone has figured this out way before me … Adobe Lightroom also has the GPS metadata field included, which is what I have been using for photo editing.

The blog on the Microsoft pro photo site has an interesting article on CSI using Photosynth (another cool app I have to play with when I get some free time) and the 2.0 update of the Expression tools.

A friend put me onto Expressions. I have been using the encoding tool to convert MP4 video into a more generic format so that it is broadly consumable across every device.

I have been using a Lenovo laptop for a year now and am thoroughly impressed, great machine. The interweb is aflutter with discussion of their new ultrathin the X300. Their Mac spoof ad made me laugh … watch it here.