Author Archive | David Spark

How To: Record, Publish, and Manage “A Video a Day” of Your Child (Part II of II)

David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of the media consulting and production company Spark Media Solutions.  Spark blogs regularly at Spark Minute.

This article is Part II of a two-part series about how to record, encode, store, organize, and share via online and DVD a video of each day of your child’s life. The first part, over at Spark Minute, covers the basics of doing the recording and storing the video. This article covers the second part, which is the daunting process of organizing and sharing the videos.

A year ago I decided to take on a seemingly gargantuan task.

I began shooting a video of my son every single day of the first year of his life. As of today I’ve shot (with the help of my wife), produced, shared online, and printed on DVD over 400 one-minute videos (some days I produce more than one video).

When I tell people I’m doing this they can’t believe it, because they immediately think of how much work it must involve. But in actuality, given the tools we have, the cost of disk space, and just some good pre-planning and organizing (the most critical parts), it’s really not that difficult. You just have to commit to it, and do it. The trick is to not make it too difficult on yourself, so you can do it easily without it being a burden. If it’s too hard, you’ll just give up.

No matter how busy you are, there is a way to record  a video every day of your child’s life, and manage all that video. Just think how amazing it would be if your parents had recorded a video a day of you (heck, a video a year). Wouldn’t that be incredible? I’m hoping it’ll be the same for my son.

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Yurbuds' Ironman Headphones are Great. If You Don't Do Anything Athletic

David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions.  Spark blogs regularly at Spark Minute. Read his recent article 16 Annoying Communications that Must End in 2011.

I go through earphones like crazy. I abuse them. I yank the cables by accident, I sit on the ear buds, I step on them. I’ve broken so many earphones that I purposely never spend that much on them. I usually can find decent ones for about $20.

Yurbuds Ironman SeriesAt the ShowStoppers event at CES I saw a new set from Yurbuds from their Ironman Series (retail $49.99). To promote the headphones’ athletic usage, Yurbuds had two Ironman athletes in their booth.

In addition to promoting them for athletic usage, Yurbuds advertises its headphones as soft, comfortable, and guaranteed to not fall out. I’m in agreement with two out of three. They are soft and they won’t fall out, but they’re not hugely comfortable. In fact, they’re kind of painful. After having them in for just an hour, my ears  became rather sore. Were my ears working out?

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TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Qwiki Creates Video Profiles on the Fly

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist that’s been covering the TechCrunch Disrupt conference for Yammer. Check out more of Spark’s coverage on Yammer’s blog.

Remember the search engine AltaVista? Ever wonder whatever happened to it? Nothing. It’s actually still a search engine. You’ve just completely forgotten about it and haven’t bothered to actually go to the site and check it out. But it’s still there and it still searches the Web. Why not take a look now?

The reason I mention AltaVista is because its cofounder, Louis  Monier, is also the cofounder of Qwiki, a very cool search application that creates video stories on the fly based on your searches. The technology incorporates open resources such as photos on Flickr and descriptions on Wikipedia to create its instant video slideshows. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, says Monier, explaining that this is just a first demo of a technology with lots more to come. Unfortunately I couldn’t coax that “more to come” out of him when I stopped by Qwiki’s booth before the service won the “best of show” award at TechCrunch Disrupt to get a demo of his application.

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SpeakerText: Search and Share Your Favorite Video Snippets

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist who’s been covering the TechCrunch Disrupt conference for Yammer. Check out more of Spark’s coverage on Yammer’s blog.

I’ve always felt that the failure of video online has been its lack of visibility. Over the past few years there have been a variety of techniques deployed to search and discover video. But generally, all the content that’s available to search is the title, tags, and description of the video. Some sites have tried to crowdsource the problem with visitors tagging videos. And others have tried to solve this problem through transcription of videos, such as Fora.tv. It’s a good solution for spoken word videos, but it fell short because the solution is isolated to one specific site and service. Everyzing (now Ramp) did an excellent job of transcribing audio and video content but it didn’t make it easy to share.

At TechCrunch Disrupt I saw SpeakerText, a far more useful “anybody can use” tool for video transcription and search that’s well integrated with social media. SpeakerText is a paid plugin that will currently transcribe your YouTube, Blip.tv, WordPress, Ooyala, and Brightcove videos and sync them with the content in the video, making it searchable via the text. Again, it’s only really good for spoken-word videos, but what I found most valuable is the ability to highlight a piece of text and share it via Twitter. When you do, it creates a shortened URL that goes directly to that portion in the video where the highlighted text is spoken. Watch the demo with SpeakerText’s founder, Matt Mireles.

Shameless plug: Enter Yammer’s “Workplace Communications Horror Story!” Sweepstakes for a chance to win a free iPad. Deadline is October 15th, 2010.

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BitTorrent’s Founder on Creating a P2P Live Video Distribution Model

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist that’s been covering the TechCrunch Disrupt conference for Yammer. Check out more of Spark’s coverage on Yammer’s blog.

I got the opportunity to chat with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent about his new project to create a model for BitTorrent that works for live streaming video. When you go live there are lots of new complications, said Cohen. Live video is erratic. Packets can shift from good to bad within an instant and you constantly need to monitor and shift away and back from the bad packets to the good ones and back again. This requires constant monitoring and distribution.

How can you do it all while maintaining an acceptable level of latency is Cohen’s main concern. Five to ten seconds is really the delay for broadcast TV so most people will accept that, but once you go over a minute it’s no longer considered a live stream. But if you can bring it under five seconds then you can create some really intriguing live engagement.

Shameless promotion:Enter Yammer’s “Workplace Communications Horror Story!” Sweepstakes for a chance to win a free iPad. Deadline is October 15th, 2010.

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Coolest Apps From AppNation

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of the firm Spark Media Solutions, which gives voice to companies by building their media network. Spark appeared on the last episode of Cranky Geeks this past week, and blogs regularly at Spark Minute. Follow him on Twitter @dspark.

A Couple weeks ago I attended the AppNation conference in San Francisco, an event for companies that create, distribute, and (try to) monetize mobile apps. (I was reporting on the event for Dice, the online job board for tech jobs). You can see a bunch of the videos I shot at the event at DiceOutLoud and DiceNews, but here’s a video showcasing some of the coolest apps I saw at the conference.

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A Video Recap of Appnation

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of the firm Spark Media Solutions, which gives voice to companies by building their media network. Spark appears on the last episode of Cranky Geeks tomorrow, and blogs regularly at Spark Minute. Follow him on Twitter @dspark.

I spent much of last week at the Appnation conference in San Francisco, an event for companies that create, distribute, and (try to) monetize mobile apps. (I was reporting on the event for Dice, the online job board for tech jobs). I shot a ton of videos at the event, but here are a few of my favorites.

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Gnomedex: A Gathering of True Geeks

I just got back from Seattle where I attended Gnomedex, reporting and shooting video interviews for Dice and Dice News. For those of you who haven’t been, Gnomedex is the brainchild of Chris Pirillo, the guy who started Lockergnome and who was the host of Call for Help on TechTV. It’s an annual tech conference that has no agenda, yet speaks to upcoming trends in technology and the Internet. Attendees purchase $300 tickets even though they don’t know what they’re going to see. Once Pirillo books the event, a theme eventually emerges. This year’s theme spoke to the power of the individual to create and affect change. There were speakers who made their own fan film, one who built censorship-evading software (Austin Heap), and a couple building a sustainable tech-enabled home in the country.

For my complete summary of the event, check out my article “The Cool and Not-Co-Cool from Gnomedex.”

And to give you an idea the geek cred that attends the conference, here’s a video of attendees and presenters answering the question, “What makes you a true geek?”

For more of my video coverage from Gnomedex, check out the YouTube videos on DiceNews and DiceOutLoud.

(Photo of Chris Pirillo: Derek K. Miller.)

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Video Demo of the Enigma Machine

This video is part of David Spark’s (@dspark) coverage of the 2010 RSA Conference on security. For tons of video interviews and articles from the conference, check out the summary of Spark’s coverage on the Tripwire blog.

Our good friends at the NSA had a booth at the RSA Conference, and the highlight for me was the opportunity to see, touch, and play with the Enigma machine. It was the same machine the Nazis used for code creating and breaking during WWII. The U.S. broke the Enigma code, but the Nazis never realized we had. Our ability to decode their Enigma-written messages helped shorten the war considerably.

I had seen these machines before, but I never knew how they actually worked. So I asked one of the NSA staffers if he could demo the machine while I videotaped it, but he told me he couldn’t be on camera. Since I don’t work for the NSA, I can be on camera. After he showed me how it worked, I shot a demo.

The Enigma machine had a series of relays of which at each point the letter that you selected could be changed to any other of the other 26 letters in the alphabet. In total, a single press of a key stroke could change that letter between seven to nine times. But the rotors on the Enigma kept shifting, so if I pressed the same key twice, it would deliver a completely different result. Watch the video to see how it worked.

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Will the iPad Follow the Failure of Voice Dictation Software?

[David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling and social media production company that specializes in live event production. He blogs at Spark Minute and can be seen regularly on KQED and John C. Dvorak’s Cranky Geeks.]

Thirteen years ago, in 1997, I wrote an article for Family PC magazine (a now-defunct Ziff Davis publication) about dictation software. That was the year programs such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM ViaVoice had turned a critical corner in their respective capabilities. No longer did you have to dictate in an unnatural slow paused pattern (e.g. “Take…A…Letter”).  You could now speak naturally (e.g. “Take a letter”) and the program would seamlessly enter your words with 90-plus percent accuracy.

At that point, myself and many others in the industry thought that voice dictation would be a game changer. The technology and publicity was fantastic. Actor Richard Dreyfuss was a staunch supporter, mentioning Dragon’s software on The Tonight Show. Voice dictation seemed like a perfect technological interface solution for human-to-PC communications. When we’re born, speech is one of the first forms of communications we learn, so let’s train computers to adapt to a human’s way of communicating. It sounded like a slam dunk solution, but there was one problem…

We’ve become comfortable communicating with keyboards.
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