After jailbreaking, I installed Backgrounder on my iPhone. It lets you run things in the background, which the iPhone still doesn’t do (until 4.0). What I found was that some video recording programs will still record in the background and others will not. Of those that will, a couple will record everything displayed on your screen. Below is a video I made showing regular video, then my screen, then back to regular video. The whole thing was recorded using a iVideoRecorder ($0.99 in the app store) and Backgrounder. It was not edited at all and was uploaded to YouTube right from the phone.

As you can see, it was pretty simple to share my iPhone screen activity with you without the need for a computer. This is great if you want to, for example, show people how to take and edit iPhone photos on the beach or how well a navigation program works with a live demonstration. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

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The device pictured above is a USB PC to TV audio and video adapter from a company called Warpia and it’s designed to transmit the audio and video signal from your computer to a receiving unit attached to your PC.

Setting It All Up

The setup for this device really couldn’t have been much easier. Following some simple instructions, I installed the software from the included CD and then plugged in the USB PC adapter. After looking over the settings, I plugged in the A/V base adapter and hooked it up to the HDMI cable I borrowed from my DVD player (will connect via VGA, too). After a couple seconds, everything on my laptop screen was being displayed on my 42 inch TV as well. Check out the video of everything in action:

The refresh rate for video was pretty good, but could be a little better. Other than that, HD video came across as true HD and looked really good. All my applications refreshed seamlessly and I had a very clear picture.

Features and Flaws

One of the things I liked about this was that it’s treated as an additional display, so I can tell Windows to either Duplicate the display or Extend it. When I extend it, I get to keep my normal laptop screen just on my laptop, and a second desktop for the TV. A great example of how that’s beneficial presented itself the other night. I purchased a movie online for direct download and watched it on the TV over my wireless A/V connection. At the same time, I was able to tweet, read and respond to email, etc. from my original desktop. Pretty cool.

The SWP100A also comes with mounting screw slots on the bottom of the TV adapter and that end’s USB stick can plug in horizontally or vertically in case you want to wall mount it and keep it as flush as possible.

The only real concern this device presented was the heat it generated. The USB adapter can get pretty warm and the TV adapter gets downright hot. I’d have loved to see an on/off switch on the TV end of the setup. Not only would this help with the heat problem, but it would be a lot easier than having to unplug it and plug it back in every time I want to use it.

Conclusions

At $179.99, it’s not my cheapest device, but it’s cheaper than setting up another computer just for the TV and a lot, I mean a LOT easier. I went from sealed box to completed and in use in about 5-7 minutes. If you can handle the price, it’s a decent solution to get your audio and video from PC to TV in a snap.

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I was given a link a website about how to get views on youtube, where I could get YouTube Jump Start, software that promises to get you tons of “quality views” to your YouTube video without doing anything that could put your YouTube account at risk of deletion. Here I am a few weeks later, and I have some real numbers from a real video I submitted (mostly) just to test this out.

About YouTube Jump Start

As mentioned above, it’s designed to boost your YouTube video views, but how does it work and how much is it? The details about exactly how these views make their way to your video aren’t really clear, but the sales page promises “no bots” and “no proxies”, so we’re left to assume these views are all real people seeing your video. Today, I confirmed that these are, in fact, “real people”.

The program includes a couple different packages, depending on how many videos you want to promote, from $70 and $15/month (4 videos a day) to $100 one-time for 25 videos ($4/video). The upside is that this is for 200+ views per video, per day, “forever”.

When you fire up the program, you just pop in a video URL and it submits. It was a lot easier than I ever anticipated. It might have been a little too simple for my liking, actually, but as long as it does what I want it to, that’s fine.

Tons Of New YouTube Views

I’ve been on the web a long time and I’ve seen a lot of programs, scripts, and sites that offer to generate non-organic traffic for you. Organic traffic is the stuff that just happens when you have good content and people feel compelled to tell other people about it. This traffic is the stuff you have to help yourself get. There’s no shame in going after more traffic. In fact, you SHOULD be doing this if you’re serious about people seeing your content. In any case, I’ve seen a lot of promises to deliver traffic and a lot that have failed to deliver. This was not the case here.

For the first week (maybe a little less), I let my video ride on organic traffic and a couple tweets I sent out and it did pretty well on its own. As the initial views slowed down, I decided to kick in the Jump Start program, represented largely by the brown in the graph above. As you can see, it started delivering right away. Not too bad. It actually shows a couple points where it almost doubled my organic peak. That brown part of the graph is truly traffic YouTube can’t identify the origin of, so it’s not ALL from this program, but I think it’s a safe guess to say that about 95% or more is.

The graph above shows that the viewers seem to come from all age groups, and I also looked at the geographic location graphs, which seem to indicate mostly United states traffic, and that’s important to me. After a few weeks, YouTube Jump Start delivered about 4,000 to 4,500 views to my video.

Is This Valuable Traffic?

That’s debatable, really. First off, let’s think about what good non-organic traffic is. They sum up what I was thinking almost word for word:

If you have more views, your video will not only show up on earlier search pages, but will be recommended to others via YouTube’s related videos function. Your video may even be featured on YouTube’s Global Homepage! (if its worthy enough).

This, of course, is why I did my test. My video, as indicated in the first graph, did pretty well on its own, so it’s safe to assume that the video didn’t totally suck. Sadly, out of 5,000+ views, only 456 were “related content” views and 114 were from YouTube search. 261 and 69 (respectively) of these were from before I ran the program. What this says to me is that although I saw a ton of views to my video, I haven’t realized the benefit of the software in the ways I had hoped. Ideally, The software would get tons of people viewing my video and those people would share and rate at least a little. This doesn’t seem to have happened much, if at all. As for it boosting organic traffic within YouTube (related videos and search), I think almost all 250 or so organic views were as a result of the added traffic Jump Start gave the video. This isn’t what I’d hoped for, but it’s a lot more than I’d have without the software.

Conclusions

Everything really boils down to this question: Is the return on investment good enough? If you produce videos that are good enough and just need some help, this could work, but I don’t know if it will really generate the organic traffic that is most critical to success on the web. Ultimately, the best plan is to create killer content regularly for the best organic traffic, but this could give you a good, well, jump start.

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3D TVs With Skype

Maybe you’re thinking what I was thinking in the car on the way there… Can 3D stick around this time or is it just going to be hot for a while and die out again? It’s hard to say, but Panasonic is not only betting that 3D is here to stay, but they’re throwing in everything else just in case.

One of the VIERA CAST HDTVs I saw today, the VIERA TC-P50G25 Plasma (seen above for $1,499), included the ability to make video calls with Skype (requires an add-on camera), view YouTube videos, browse through photos on Picasa, view and stream movies instantly with Netflix or Amazon Video, and even peruse and update Twitter. To top it off, they threw in a weather screen with forecasts, Pandora radio, Bloomberg, and Fox Sports. You can even browse the web with it, which is probably why you can hook up a keyboard to one of the USB ports. Unfortunately, the demo played from a Blu-Ray disc, so it’s hard to say how the video streaming is and Skype won’t be available for use on VIERA CAST until June of this year. Regardless, it looks very promising. The geek inside me yearns to make a video call on a 50 inch screen without a lot of effort and that is a reality within reach. This model does not do 3D.

The PxxVT25 models, on the other hand, offer 3D and it looks awesome. To be fair, I haven’t seen any other 3D televisions first hand, so my basis for comparison is my 2D LCD and 3D at the movie theaters. That said, this blows my 2D away and makes the movie theater 3D seem a bit lacking. The first demo was with a movie, which looked great, but the real treat was the second demo I saw with some game playing in 3D. It looked incredible and the best part is that the games don’t all have to be made in 3D. There’s software that will make them work in 3D as long as you’re displaying them on one of these 3D TVs.

How To Watch TV In 3D

The televisions mentioned above display a 3D image, but where does that come from and how do you view it? Panasonic tells me they’ll have three channels loaded with 3D programming on DirecTV, and it sounded like 3D programming from other vendors will still work. All that’s left is those paper 3D glasses with the plastic red and blue lenses, right?

Not this time. This time, your 3D experience makes use of their special 3D glasses (TY-EW3D10). While I’d like to try the old paper glasses, I’m afraid these are the ones needed to make it work. They’re pretty cool and although the video doesn’t do the experience justice, you can see how they work below.

The problem is that the $150/pair price tag can be prohibitive, especially if you’re thinking about a family of four or five. They’re cheaper than some competitors, but still a bit up there. They definitely look $150 cooler than the old paper 3D glasses, though. I asked if Panasonic planned to bundle family packs of the eye wear and was told that it wasn’t planned yet but could happen as the consumer market accepts 3D more and more.

Cameras and Camcorders

In addition to all this 3D business, the tour included some new cameras of varying levels as well as video cameras. I honestly didn’t spend quite enough time with the video cameras, but it may have been due to all the time spent playing with the DMC-GH1K 12.1 MP digital camera. I’m not about to say I don’t like my Canon Rebel XTi because I love it, but the GH1K was wooing me with features I’ve been missing out on like 1080P HD video, a larger screen that swivels around, Live View, a more compact design, and a more widely used SD storage format (compared to the Compact Flash I use now). At $1499, it is almost twice what I paid for my camera, but still attractive.

Also attractive was the $399 DMC-ZS7K which more than a point-and-shoot, but not quite a DSLR. Every time I thought it had a lot of features I was shown one more. Personally, I’m looking to spend about half that on my next point-and-shoot camera but the feature list is enough to loosen up most any wallet. There’s the basics like auto focus and face targeting, but it also knows the difference between a face and, say, a cactus and adjusts photo settings the moment it makes the distinction. Better still, it can recognize specific faces and remember who it’s taking a photo of and label the photo properly. The 16X Intelligent Zoom was a nice surprise, too. The zoomed image wasn’t pixelated at all until zoomed all the way in and even then, it wasn’t much. Finally, the ZS7K records HD quality video as well, so I could replace my digital camera and my video camera with this one device.

The Touch The Future Tour

What I went to today was called the Touch the Future Tour. Panasonic is wandering around the country with all this cool stuff and showing people what all of it does. If you get a chance, the 3D is best seen in person. They’ll be dragging all their electronics to these cities next:

3/25 – 3/27 Philadelphia King of Prussia Mall – North Gulph Road
3/29 – 3/31 Minneapolis IDS Tower – 80 8th Street South
3/29 – 3/31 San Francisco One Market Plaza – 1 Market Street
3/31 – 4/2 Washington, DC Union Station – 50 Massachusetts Ave, NE
4/6 – 4/8 Dallas Grapevine Mills Mall – 3000 Grapevine Mills Parkway
4/6 – 4/8 Seattle Top of the Market – 93 Pike Street, Suite 307
4/7 – 4/9 Atlanta 595 North – 595 North Ave, NW Atlanta
4/12 – 4/14 Houston The Warehouse – 4108 Dupont Street
4/15 – 4/17 Miami Ice Palace – 59 Northwest 14th Street

Final Thoughts

Panasonic delivered more than I had planned for and showed off some really cool stuff. The new television offerings (3D and otherwise) were certainly giving me TV envy and I just bought a new LCD TV a few months back. The cameras (that I hadn’t really even gone to see) have me formulating evil plans in my head to convince my wife that I have two birthdays this year. I want it all, but would “settle” for any of the 3D TVs and the ZS7K camera.

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Xshot!

What Does It Do?

Those who have never seen an XShot usually have one of two reactions when they finally encounter someone using one. One reaction is to ask what it is, but more often than not people just comment on how cool it is. For those wondering what it does, the answer is easy. It extends the reach of your own arm by way of a telescoping pole that has an attachment at one end to connect your camera and a rubber grip at the other end to hold it. The result is a better shot in self-photos, making photos with the length of your arm in them a thing of the past.

How To Use An XShot

It’s too easy, really. Just screw the tripod mount into the adapter (found on the bottom of most cameras) and adjust the tilt to your liking (usually 90 to 110 degrees is good). Next, set the timer on your camera, extend, and smile. Now you know how to use it, but what about all the different ways you can make use of an XShot? There’s the obvious self-photo, but here’s a few more ideas:

- Photos with a friend
- Artsy photos from all angles
- Photos well above the crowd like at a concert
- Photos in hard to reach places (inside a wall, under the couch)
- Self-shot videos
- Unique perspective shots like from outside a moving car

You can see these last two in the following video:

Conclusions

Obviously, I love my Xshot! and Heather rocks for sending it to me. I’ve used it several times already and I’m sure it will get used a ton more at upcoming events. For about $30, it’s cheap enough to make up its purchase price before long and it’s compact enough for travel. It’s a great little accessory for anyone with a camera and if I hadn’t gotten one in the mail, I had already planned to buy one. You should too.

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In the incident I referenced above, my late night visitor had no way of knowing I was recording him because I hid the camera very well and it was dark and late. In this story, the star of the video, Willy Wu, walks up to a booth, picks up the contacts book full of information from potential clients looking for further contact from the company, leafs through it, and casually walks away with it. At any other booth, he may have gotten away easily in a show as enormous as CES. Unfortunately for Wu, the booth he took the book from was that of Swann Security, a global leader in security monitoring solutions. Now that’s just dumb.

According to the article, Swann staff caught up with the guy at CES pretty quickly and he handed over the book without hesitation, but then ran off. Eventually, they’ll catch back up with him, but the important thing here is that he didn’t get away with all that client data.

Have any similar stories? Share below.

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I love watching movies. I have a ton of DVDs and I’m pretty careful about how I treat them. Still, I’ve backed some of my movies up in the past with other software, so I am not unfamiliar with how it’s done. I was given the opportunity, today, to review some software that not only copies DVDs, but is also a Blu-Ray Copy Breakthrough. I don’t have a Blue-Ray player (although I should by now), but I wanted to give it a try anyway, so I did.

Why Should I Back Up My Movies?

Like CDs, DVDs are prone to getting scratched up. All it takes is for you to have a movie night and leave one out while swapping movies because the case wasn’t immediately available. The probability of scratched DVDs and Blue-Ray movies increases exponentially with each child you have in the house. At $15, $20, or more per DVD and Blue-Ray disc, it’s a good idea to back them up.

Copy and Burn Blue-Ray and DVD Movies

The core functionality of 123 Media Max is copying movies, so right after installing, I threw in my Napoleon Dynamite DVD and fired up the software. After choosing to copy a DVD straight, it prompted me for the media I wanted to copy, including my DVD in the list. The selection box was a little small, but I chose my DVD and it told me that my DVD may have copyright protection on it and asked if I wanted to look for a plugin that would get past it. I opted to look and seconds later, I was downloading Boooya to get around the copy encryption. After another quick install, I was copying.

In software I tried in the past, I had to run a tray application (all the time) before I even thought about backing up a DVD. Then I would run a second application to do all the work. I like that this uses a plugin that loads only when needed. After about 20 minutes, the DVD data was copied and I swapped the DVD for a blank DVD to write to.

After about 40-50 minutes total, I had installed both the application and the plugin, copied the DVD, and burned it to a blank disc. This was also faster than software I had tried previously and easier, too. I tried my new backup and before I knew it, that goofy 80’s kid was distracting me from my review.

Additional Features

123 Media Max has, so far, proven to be better than the software I tried in the past, but here’s where it slaps that other software around and makes it cry uncle (well, almost). After you’re done backing up all your movies, you can get more out of the purchase price by converting videos from one format to another and even downloading and converting videos from the Internet. In about two minutes, I told 123 Media Max I wanted to find video online, searched (within the program) for the Tron trailer, found it on MetaCafe, and downloaded and converted it to an AVI on my drive. The only problem I had was that it didn’t find videos on YouTube that I know exist. Hopefully that will be fixed in another version, but it’s pretty cool even without YouTube. Although I haven’t tried it, 123 Media Max also boasts the ability to convert from DVR and TIVO files as well, which I think is a great feature for anyone with one of these devices.

Conclusions

This software should copy your Blue-Ray movies while maintaining the great quality. In my tests, it performed great and did more than expected. If you don’t want to worry about losing your Blue-Ray or DVD collection, or find that they often get scratched up, 123 Media Max is a good investment for your collection at just under $70.

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TED – Sixth Sense Technology

This is a great video showing real examples of new technology that puts information in front of you as you need it. Very cool stuff!

PlayStation 3 – High-Resolution Image Enlargement Technology

I was fascinated about this technology when I saw it used in The Rosetta Project months ago, and I’m still excited by it.

TED : Wireless Electricity

We’ve been getting closer and closer to the day when we can just come home and throw our cell phone on the table and it’ll just start charging without the need for all those cables.

Liquidware Illuminato X Machina

I love to see stuff like this where the machines become more aware of their state and are then able to interact appropriately with other machines near by.

‘Tron: Legacy’ Trailer HD (vfx test footage)

If you’re old enough to remember it, Tron was a great geeky movie well ahead of its time and the remake has techies like me anxious. Check out some visual FX test footage.

Augmented Reality Business Card

Since this video (and a little before it), a lot has happened with Augmented Reality and we’re even seeing it pop up in iPhone and Android apps now. Still, this is a great example of its use.

TweenBots

This was an interesting social experiment in which little robots were set free in New York and people helped them find their way.

TED: David Merrill Demos Siftables

First Flight of the Terrafugia Transition (flying car)

The blogosphere was abuzz when this video hit the web. It’s a car that converts into a plane to fly and then back into a car again.

ArcAttack performs the Dr. Who Theme on Twin Tesla Coils

I’m not a big Dr. Who geek, but I loved this anyway.

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A good solution for this is an Eye-Fi card. This cleverly named device is a combination of an SD card and a Wi-Fi card. It actually uploads your photos as you take them (if you have it set up with a Wi-Fi connection in the area) or can upload all your photos when you walk in the house.

Getting Set Up

First thing’s first. Will your camera take an Eye-Fi card? They have a compatibility list, but you really just need to make sure your camera is SDHC capable. My DSLR (like most) does not take an SD card at all, and my wife’s Casio Exilim Z60 (the Frankencamera) has a dead battery, so I borrowed a friend’s Casio Exilim Z75.

To get going, I plugged in the USB card reader that came with my 4GB Eye-Fi Share Video. This was were I found my only gripe during the process. The reader is wide , so it blocks my second USB port. While inconvenient, this only needs to be in for a few minutes. With the reader plugged in, I slid the card into the reader and the typical Windows dialog opened up, asking what I wanted to do with this media. What was not so typical is that the first option was to use the software included on the card. New devices are a lot more fun when I don’t have to put in a CD, find drivers, or struggle in any other way to get going. The software installed and began with me creating an account on the Eye-Fi web site and setting up my wireless connection. My new account also required some configuration of photo and video sharing services. I set up my Flickr and Facebook accounts and then removed my card and put it in the camera.

The whole setup took about 10 minutes to get my account, wireless connection, and two services set up and the software installed on my computer.

Shooting and Sharing

There are two key ways the Eye-Fi can be used to make things easier for you. The first and probably easiest is to set it up once as described above, and just let it do all the work when you bring your camera home. This should happen even if you use it the second way, too. When the camera is on, it looks for that wireless connection you configured and automatically connects and starts uploading any new photos and video while retaining a copy, organized by date, on your computer. Here’s an example video showing how that works:

The second way the Eye-Fi can streamline your multimedia life is by uploading as you go. This is probably going to be less used by some people, but I think it’s even cooler. Let’s say you head to an industry event like Blog World. When you first arrive, you configure the Eye-Fi to use the event’s provided Wi-Fi connectivity. Throughout the event, you snap photos and shoot video, but instead of waiting until you get back the your hotel room to share, everything gets uploaded instantly to your selected account. This would work great on Christmas morning, too. Relatives who can’t fly in can experience everything with photos uploading as the presents are opened.

Whatever you do, you have the option of logging into your account to see photos and videos coming in and manage everything as it happens.

It also takes your privacy into account, which was a plus for me. When you set up a photo or video sharing service in your account, it asks you about privacy levels. During my testing, I had it uploading photos as I took them, but they were flagged as private in Flickr, so I was the only one who could see them until I reviewed and made them public. The user experience and small details were definitely not overlooked.

Win Your Own Eye-Fi

If you’ve read everything above and are thinking “I want one of those in time for Christmas”, you’re in luck, because they’re giving away 12 of them. Perhaps it’s for the 12 days of Christmas, but whatever you celebrate this time of year, you might get one of these things for free by just commenting on this post or sending out a tweet containing the hashtag “#eye-fi” with a link back to this blog post. Complete contest rules are here: http://izea.com/contest-rules-regulations/eyefi-contest-official-rules/.

Conclusions

In short, I love this device. It does what it says, but it does it elegantly and the setup is about as short and sweet as it can be. If you have an SDHC capable camera, this should be on your wish list for Christmas. That said, I noted two things that I’d love to see happen with the Eye-Fi. Mainly, I’d love to see this built into a Compact Flash card for my DSLR. My DSLR supports Wi-Fi, but not sharing to Flickr, etc. and it’s nowhere near as easy to get set up. I’d also like to see the ability to upload to up to three sharing sites concurrently. It would be great to be able to have my photos up on Flickr and Facebook instantly, for example. Over all, this is a great time-saving device, a unique gift idea, and decently priced.

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It turned up in the mail a week or so ago, and tonight I hooked it up to give it a shot.

HDMI vs RCA
I decided to use my DVD player as a test device to connect to the TV with my new cable. Before tonight, I had it hooked up via a traditional RCA cable. It’s a little harder to see it from a photograph, but here’s a side-by-side comparison (you can see a zoomed WAY in shot here).

You can tell a little from the above photo, but it’s definitely more evident in person. The video quality improvement was noticed even in the DVD player’s splash logo screen. I’m excited to now be able to watch movies with a little more clarity.

What about those expensive cables?
Although I’m finally starting to see the differences in having HD and better cables, I’ve never really been a stickler for these things. So to be honest, I’m not qualified to really say how this $12.99 HDMI cable might stand up to one of those well-branded (and you pay for it) cables. I can’t say if spending more money on an HDMI cable will get you a better picture (and by better, I mean enough that you’ll notice).

The website gives this assurance:

Optimized Cable Company’s cables are specially designed for hi-def video and audio signals for professional and home theater installations, using 1080p, 1080i, 720p and 480p. All of our cables are made using high quality cabling, shielding and jacket material. We use gold plating for increased connectivity, longevity and signal strength.

In addition, the literature that came with this cable points out that it’s HDMI certified at the same HDMI facility as Monster HDMI cables. I couldn’t find any information on that from either site, but I did find a 120Hz refresh rate HDMI (like the one in this review) Monster cable for $79.95. Does that cable offer a difference I can see with the human eye for the extra $67? I really can’t say without comparing side-by-side, but let’s just say I’m content with the cable I have here and will probably save the money when it’s time to buy another cable.

Conclusions
While it’s hard to come to a verdict on the benefits of spending more for a fancier brand name, this cable provided great image quality and made me a bit sad that I’ve had this new TV for almost a month and have been using RCA cables. If you have the option for HDMI, make the move. If you want to do it for a really comfortable price, check out Optimization-world.com.

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