3SuperHeroes

Some mojo with that iPhone, baby

Mojobaby launched on Monday and generated a quiet buzz on LinkedIn when the Founder and COO, Scott Miller, asked for feedback. It's an interesting product that's pretty straightforward to use.  After opening a free (ad supported) account on the mojobaby site, just take pictures or videos with your cell phone and MMS them to mojobaby (your cell phone number identifies the pictures as yours). The pictures are automatically posted to your mojobaby blog site where others can comment on them. If desired, the pictures also appear on the configurable mojobaby player (above), which can be added to your blog or My Space account. Setup was so easy that the only technical challenge I experienced was figuring out how to configure my Treo650 to send MMS (multimedia) messages instead of the SMS (text-only) default forma

You can also use photos on your hard drive, but it's not as fun.  The first photo I sent was a picture of a banana slug taken while hiking last week with my son. The pictures on the player above were taken today by my wife as she passed by the Apple store in Palo Alto, California hours before the iPhone went on sale. Tomorrow I'll be sending in some photos live from the cub scout model rocket launch-a-thon in Livermore, California.

The potential business applications are really intriguing. Imagine real-time photos appearing on a company's blog during a big trade show to provide customers with a minute by minute twitter-style update on the show. A reporter could do the same for real-time photo-journalism. Viewers can comment on the photos back on the mojobaby website, which effectively gets a conversation going around the event as the activity progresses.

Any other ideas?

Custom Music

I'm having some fun playing around with and comparing two different music players and recommending them to friends to see their preferences.

Finetune is an Adobe Apollo-based music player in beta. What I really enjoy about finetune is the ability to develop, manage and share playlists consisting of favorite songs with the added benefit of social networking features.  You can email your playlists to others, embed them in blogs and social networking sites and add cover art (logo for your list). Finetune also allows you to search for other playlists that contain your favorite artists, listen to the playlist, comment back to the creator and tag your favorite finetune playlists and composers (my term, not their's).  It's a really interesting integration of community building and social networking inside a robust music player.  I'm also enjoying surfing the different channels. My playlist (1980's high school rock plus other stuff I like) is below. Let me know if you like the player and the music. 

A friend of mine recently pointed me to Slacker Web Player and I'm very impressed. Where finetune has users creates playlists from scratch, the Slacker Web Player's approach is different.  On Slacker, the easiest way to get started is to edit existing stations.  These stations can be from the list of "category" stations (warning, the comedy station is hilarious but not for the kids!) or by typing a favorite artist's name into the "artist station" search box and then voting up or down on the songs that are played.  Typing "Lynyrd Skynyrd" (continuing on the 1980's High School rock theme) yielded the song "What's your Name", then "Come and Go Blues" by Gregg Allman,  Next was "Leona" by Wet Willie (I conveniently "banned" it from the channel in a matter of seconds) which was replaced by "Call Me the Breeze" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.  In addition to banning artists from the play list, you can also skip up to 5 songs on the station while you're listening. Stations then remember your "banned" list and structure future playlists accordingly.

Slacker also has a "Desktop Radio" in beta for listening to Slacker Radio stations and music files that are already on the computer. No customization like skipping or banning songs allowed.  I'm looking forward to more info as this comes out of beta. I really enjoy Slacker when I am in the mood for a specific genre of music.  Kind of like satellite radio with the added (and I think really BIG) benefit of being able to influence the music selected.

Gizmoz Fun

Gizmoz launched it's service today, the same day they announced Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital. The site is pretty self-explanatory with options to upload your photo and create a "gizmo" animation from that picture or use a fun character from the menu. The gizmo is then used to create and share animated stickers with voice for blogs and profiles, build widgets and other cool things. Creating the gizmo from my photo actually took less time than searching for and finding my PC microphone (which in the end was not working as you'll notice from the mechanical voice used on my purple-haired friend below).

The instructions highlight the importance of using a photo where you're not smiling, not wearing glasses and very careful about shadows. The picture I used is a simple photo my buddy snapped this morning using my cell phone. After Gizmoz rendered the photo, the result was as good as any driver's license photo and better than Max Headroom. Because my microphone was broken, I typed in the text for my talking head message and let Gizmoz apply the voice. There is also a one-click process to post the gizmo to most social networking sites and blog formats including Typepad, the format I use for 3superheroes. The result is below.  I'm hoping to use this avatar on different social networking sites after I re-record with a functional microphone and my own voice.

There is also a contest on gizmoz.com for the best avatar and I'm going to seek advice from the younger set (kids) and put together a few funny examples using the talking soccer ball and skeleton. There must be a good knock-knock joke for a skeleton.

   
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