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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!
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Filtered by Category: Gadgets
A Cool Little $100 Video Camera.
My Canon video camera stopped working recently. It had a good run, lasting around 6 years, longer than I expect of most electronics with moving parts. Instead of replacing it with another expensive camera, I’ve bought a Flip Video Camcorder
The camera is about the size of a standard iPod and has a small USB plug that flips out on the side to easily import the movies you take into your computer. It’s light, made entirely of plastic, and comes with a small pouch to protect it from scratches. Their is some capability to zoom, but it’s done digitally, so the results aren’t great. Amazingly, the video is 640x480 pixels which means it’s same as standard definition television. There aren’t any tapes or discs to buy since all the video is stored on flash memory inside the unit.
It’s inexpensive enough and small enough to simply keep with you in your bag. The video is much better than I have recorded from a mobile phone or my digital camera that I use for still photos.
I recently went to see a show by The Loser’s Lounge when they performed a tribute to Fleetwood Mac. I shot some video with the FlipVideo Camera there to show you how the video looks. What you’ll see below is highly compressed because it’s undergone the YouTube process, but it may be enough to persuade you to part with $100 for an easy to use video camera. Come on, you know you want one
By the way, if you’re on a Mac, check out Perian, the free add-on for QuickTime that I mentioned in an earlier post. I needed it to play the raw files that I downloaded from the camera.
Gadgets • Object of Desire • Portfolio • Video • (0) Comments • Permalink
I Folded Up My Bike and Put It In My Closet: The Curve
Living in a New York apartment means never having enough space. Some people have bike rooms in their apartment building in New York, but mine doesn’t. What’s a person to do? One option is to just deal with it and find some way to hang a bike or just dedicate some of your precious floor space to a bike. Another way is to find a bike that you can fold up and put away when you’re not using it. That’s what I did.
The Curve by Dahon, selling for about $400, has 16” wheels, much smaller than typical bike wheels which are around 24”. With those smaller tires, it’s more difficult to go really fast. I don’t think that’s a problem given that I ride my bike in New York. It’s also got 3 gears which has been fine for city riding so far.
The Dahon site says the Curve will fold in about 15 seconds. I bet it’s more like 45 seconds for me, but I’m sure that will just take some practice. It weighs 25 pounds.
If this bike isn’t geeky enough for you, check out the post that holds the seat, it has a “hidden” floor pump to fill the tires with air. Cool.
Click the small images to view larger pics of the bike.
When You Stick an Ad in My Game, It Better Be Good.
Can you imagine Mario trying to save a big can of Pepsi for Princess Peach? Maybe if you complete the whole six-pack, you get a rare bonus Crystal Pepsi!
If you’re reading this at some distant point in the future, I sure hope you don’t find Mario World invaded by Pepsi, but the video game landscape has finally caught the notice of big advertisers. I recent read Is In-Game Advertising About to Take Off?, an article discussing how ripe video game players are for reaching with advertising. Gamers can’t really change the channel, TiVo a game to skip an ad, or take a bathroom break from a game so they can skip ads if they are incorporated into a game. They not only have to “watch” the ads, they have to participate in them. Reaching gamers “in game” is like shooting fish in a barrel. These gamers are also a highly sought after demographic.
I do work in advertising and I truly believe that advertising does not ruin everything it touches. When done well, advertising can be really enjoyable and that’s why Very Funny Ads is a great place to spend time. The thing I fear are the bad advertisers fumbling into gaming with arm loads of cash (thus getting their way) and ruining the gaming experience. The article does mention this as a challenge, but it’s one of the last things mentioned.
Another challenge is the need for advertisers to focus on the players’ experiences. “Advertisers have to be creative and provide gamers with tangible benefits from the ads; if they are just interested in displaying their ads, their efforts will eventually fail,” Parks Associates’ Cai told the E-Commerce Times. Techniques now being tested to tighten the bond between player and advertiser include special promotions, rebates, coupons, newsletters and text messaging follow-ups.
Getting advertising and video game integration right will take time and quite a few stumbles. If you take the typical number of commercials you see watching one hour of TV as an example, only a small percentage of them are actually good. Is this the same ratio we can expect from advertising integrated into video games?
Some thoughts come to mind in this area.
- Instead of integrating an advertising message into a game a person has already paid $50 for, a better solution is probably having extra levels or optional areas of games sponsored by advertisers, complete with parental controls to give parents the ability to block advertising from their kids if they choose.
- Perhaps the advertising can actually offset the price of the game. This was the promise of advertising invading movie theaters, but the hoped for discount never materialized for movie goers.
- I thought the Burger King XBOX 360 games were a really nice examples of gaming and advertising playing well together. The fact that they required you to purchase actual game disks made the delivery of the games a little clunky to me though. Now that digital distribution has come to consoles, this probably will cease to be a problem.
- Mobile phones, from a conceptual level, seem like an ideal place to let consumers spend some spare moments having fun while getting a brand message. The problem, at least in the US, is that the service providers and the phone manufacturers have so many different standards and restrictions, that reaching your consumer effectively becomes a huge burden.
Advertising • Gadgets • Games • Trends • (0) Comments • Permalink
Building a Wii from Legos
My favorite toy as a child, before I got my Texas Instruments TI99-4A, was my Lego collection. I could spend hours playing with Legos. I always seemed to run out of the bricks I needed before I could complete some grand project I envisioned, but I had a blast anyway. I wish I had photos of the stuff I built back then. Sigh.
Legos seem to be an obsession with a lot of geeks on the web. There’s a great site called Brickshelf where people post photos of their constructions.
Someone recently posted what I think of as high conceptual art on Brickshelf—a Wii constructed out of Legos. I loved the marriage of the two toys from two different periods of my life. I’ve reposted the photos below.
That’s geeky cool.
How a Geek Plays Piano