3SuperHeroes

Punk'd on April Fools Day

I got punk'd on Tuesday, April Fools Day, by one of my staff. I expected an email with the annual careerbuilder.com top 10 list of practical jokes (I like #3 this year, but #7 just seems more familiar) and I should have seen this prank coming, but I didn't.

It was a pretty hectic day with its fair share of fires when I received an IM requesting emergency feedback on a new technology proposal from a product development team. My security expert then started walking me through a seven slide presentation on Write-Only Memory or "WOM" (yes, I know, but I was busy and gullible...) code named Peak Creek and why it's good for software companies. Here's slide #3.

As a guy with a Electrical Engineering Degree who studied device physics, the "can be carved and shaped with household tools" should have been a red flag.

Nope.

And then the "if power is low, user rubs on hair" bullet should have knocked me to my senses.

Nope.

While the next three slides showed ridiculously low cost projections and glowing press quotes, I was still going strong.

It wasn't until I saw the product picture on the last slide, which looked surprisingly like styrofoam packing material, that I knew I had been taken for a ride and should check the hallway for Ashton Kutcher.

By the way.....  I looked for him, too.

Nope.

I'm now soliciting ideas for revenge on April 1, 2009.

Gizmoz in Movies

I wrote about Gizmoz clips a while ago, and they announced a new feature this week that was worth a quick try. You can now inject your 3D facial avatar into movies. The list of movie options is small but growing. Below is a quick example which took me 15 minutes to create and here's the URL if you want to send to friends or blackmail me in a few years.

http://www.gizmoz.com/widget/3469151_be_a_star

I'll see if anyone believes it during my next trip to Asia.

Get your own at Gizmoz.com

Mashups 101

This post is unusually long because I am using it as a mashup tutorial for my organization at work. So.... please get comfortable.

I attended mashup camp in Mountain View, CA this year with expectations that it would be similar to last year. This was Mashup camp #4 and similar to previous camps this was a get together for people across the US interested in combining data from various sources in order to deliver a more complete service or product. Kind of a "sum is better than the parts" thing for developers, corporations and venture capitalists.

Mashups have come a long way in just the past year. Here is a quick tutorial starting with a definition and ending with a discussion regarding why mashups matter and what are the big questions

What's a mashup?

A mashup can go by many definitions and I prefer to think of it rather broadly. A mashup is a combination of data or content that when added together is greater than the individual value of it's parts. The wikipedia definition of a mashup discusses the music mashup, the video mashup and the web application mashup.

As mentioned on previous posts, I enjoy experimenting with different web music players including FineTune, Slacker and Pandora. I'm waiting for a music player that has channels for music mashups. For now, when I'm in the mood to be "sound challenged", I check out the latest music mashups on MashupTown. Page halfway down on the left and click on "Greatest Hits". The song "The Doors Take a Walk Down Sesame Street" combines music from The Doors, lyrics from Sesame Street and the Macarena dance thrown in for extra fun.

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?

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.

   
  Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips

Jawbone Fever

I have two Plantronics 510 bluetooth headsets for my cell phone.  I'm not quite sure how I wound up with two, but I'm glad I do and they are the last I will own.  I'll be sorry to see them go when they break, but yes, they will eventually break.  And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.  As much as I swear by the noise cancellation and long battery life of the 510 it just keeps breaking. 

The two I have now are #4 and #5 in the last 18 months.  The boom swings around and snaps the internal wires leading to the microphone so that I can hear everything in my ear but nobody can hear what I am saying.  Some of my co-workers really enjoy this "mute button" on my phone.....  but I think I'll pass. 

Happy Cosmonauts Day!

Today is the 46th anniversary of the first manned earth orbit by Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.  His mission lasted one hour and 48 minutes, about the amount of time it takes me to feed my three boys dinner or fly from San Francisco to LAX. 

In honor of Cosmonauts Day (and this link is worth viewing for the ads and links alone plus I never thought that Pravda would be an AdSense licensee), here is a list of a few kid-friendly sites that are being added to the K9 web filter on my eight year old son's notebook computer.

CharlesInSpace: Cub scouts of America informed us of this great web site to track the adventure of Dr. Charles Simonyi as prepares for and then goes on his 14 day mission.  This mission is much more interesting and educational than the failed "three hour tour" that I studied as a kid.  Today is Day 6 for Charles.  There are also some very nice links to other science sites under the "Explore" tab in the "Kids Space" section of the website. 

San Francisco Symphony for kids:  The school librarian turned my son onto this site last week in preparation for a field trip.  Kids can hear different instruments, listen to several different channels on a radio and learn music basics including rhythm, harmony, beat and tempo.  It's really well done.

Noisegames:  This web developing company based in Winterthur, Switzerland, outside Zurich, offers a set of really nice games for music lovers, big and small.  One of their games was recently highlighted on Yahoo! TV's show, "The 9".  Each game lets the user create free-form songs by mashing together some music and some preset words or rhythm.  My favorites are "showersong" (click on the hot and cold nobs) and pc punk.  Drum dog allows for some end-user customization which should be a fun exercise with the team at home  These are going to keep the kids going for hours. 

Ask for kids:  I looked around for a kid-friendly search engine because my son is curious and wants to explore.  Standard search engines are pretty scary for adults, never mind kids.  This one passed my basic test of "what happens when you type in words of high interest to young boys..." and I don't mean 'baseball'.

Superbowl Radio Ads

I had the luck of spending Superbowl Sunday with my eight year old and 15 of his friends.  No, we were not in front of the television.  It was his birthday party at Pump It Up in Sunnyvale, California.  One kid did not attend after he confronted my wife in the school yard one morning and professed his amazement that a birthday party could be scheduled during the Superbowl.  Everyone else had a great time, including the parents.

The game is sitting on my DVR's hard drive waiting to be watched.  An interesting side benefit of not being home to see the football game was that I was forced (OK, nobody really FORCED me) to sneak out to the car and listen to the action on KNBR radio.  Marv Albert and Boomer Esiason were a fantastic team, broadcasting the game with great enthusiasm and accuracy for the radio audience.  I had not listened to football on the radio in a while and it was a real treat.  No kidding.

The biggest thrill, other than listening to Marv Albert yell every time there was a turnover, was the advertisements.  Much has been written about the Superbowl TV Ads and several companies quickly posted ads for more post-game watching and voting.  There have even been radio reports about the television ads, especially the new phenomenon of "user generated content" exemplified by the Doritos ad and Alka Seltzer jingle contest. 

Favorite Electronic Toy: Back to the Future

My favorite toy of all time when I was kid was the Radio Shack “50 in 1” electronics kit that I received from my parents when I was seven years old.

First of all, building a lie detector, a crystal radio, many solar-powered projects and a buzzer to practice Morse code was pretty cool. It was the beginning of beautiful relationship with electronics that lead many years later to an amateur radio license. I mean, Tinkertoys may be fun, but anything that caries a warning label about electrocuting yourself has a “my parents finally TRUST me” feel to it. Secondly, I am partial to any electronics toy listed on a company’s website under the heading, “educational”. So far, we have three boys age 8 and younger and no video games in the house and no intention to fill that so far un-noticed void.  Lastly, a gift with a title including the phrase “50 in 1” sounds to a young boy like a gift that keeps on giving. For a parent look generous is an added bonus.

Of course, I received this gift quite a while ago. Some quick research has yielded the next generation of this toy that put me on the path toward engineering student and a person who appreciates the art of all fine circuitry. Radio Shack has a modular block system called the “Electronics 303 Snap Kit” that includes basically the same components as my old “50 in 1” kit except no wiring required. All the reviews are highly positive with the potential exception of some younger children.  One 5 year old found a creative way of getting the electric rotor caught in his hair and now has a buzz cut.

Then there is what looks like the king of the all-inclusive kits: the Microcontroller Kit from Thames and Kosmos. This kit takes the cake for adding sophisticated thinking to young minds with a programmable microcontroller and IR sensor to download code from your PC. I can hear the questions from the kids already: “Daddy, tell me the story of how you had to wait until college to program EPROMS and couldn't send your code over wireless to your computer.” While you’re on the website, check out some of the other cool science products for kids.  I think I'm going to ask my wife for the solar kit.

Treasure Hunting with the Boys

As my wife has explained several times in her blog entries, we have an almost 8 year-old boy and twin almost 4 year-old boys. The inside of our house looks like the 1971 Pontiac GTO in the high school parking lots of our youth. There are some worn seat covers and the paint job has patches of white plaster and dents that remind me of bondo on a fender. So in trying to come up with a fun hobby to spend time with the kids, the number one objective was something where they explore outside the house rather than jump on the furniture and glue themselves to the floor inside the house. A friend recommended geocaching and it has proven to be a fun family treat.

Geocaching is basically organized treasure hunting for all ages with treasure boxes, or “caches”, of varying sizes hidden in public areas (not private property) all over the world The GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates of these hidden caches are documented on the geocaching web site. It was started in May 2000 with the first cache hidden in Beaver Creek, Oregon.  Today, there are over 33,000 people worldwide who have registered on the geocaching website. With more than a quarter of a million active geocaches in 222 countries, there is no shortage of potential family treasure hunts. Many of the hidden caches are easy to locate with a standard GPS device (I purchased mine at REI in Redwood City) but there are caches accessible only by airplane, kayak or with scuba gear if you feel especially adventurous.

What makes this an especially great activity for parents and kids in the bay area is the sheer number of hidden geocaches in our own backyard. So far, my kids and I have uncovered 16 of these hidden prizes in neighborhoods all over Menlo Park, Palo Alto and Redwood City.  Our first cache was in downtown Palo Alto.  Some of our next discoveries were at a park in Redwood City with a World War II tank, near the ducks outside the Menlo Park library, in a sculpture near the Palo Alto main library, on a walking bridge over highway 101, two in Suburban Park, three in different parks within Menlo Park and one on a bridge over San Francisquito Creek. Yesterday, we found one in a neighborhood tree (we live in Menlo Oaks) and in a park in the Willows. We are having trouble finding the one located in Holbrook Palmer Park and in the underbrush of Flood Park. 

All in all, geocaching has been a great way to get the kids out of the house and “searching for hidden treasure” in their own back yard.