Indeed, GMail Video Chat is Disruptive!

I was telling everyone to use it the first day it was released.

It’s a 6th sense.

This article describes my thoughts on it very well:

Google’s video chat plugin is another subversive move by the “search” company. Forget its market share and focus instead on its underlying message of cross-platform ubiquity. Those of us who are deeply addicted to Gmail and its growing toolkit of Labs addins are inexorably migrating from Skype and iChat to the new service. Whoever controls the console wins, and each new adopter, whether on Mac or PC, pops up on my traffic control screen in realtime.

It’s easier to click the icon and select video chat than reach for the iPhone, easier than bringing up Skype, and beats iChat by being cross-platform. Skype has a much richer user base and business penetration, but GVideo is easier to visualize. It’s analogous to Twitter’s asymmetrical Follow cloud as compared to Facebook’s much broader reach. The dynamics of peer authority trump ubiquity. This is the dominant economic pattern of the recovery.

No Qik

After many unsuccessful attempts, I cannot figure out how to jailbreak my iPhone 3G w/o losing my network connection.

So sorry I can’t qik from my iPhone anymore.

Now I feel quite handi-capped w/o the jailbroken iPhone.

I hope someone fixes it soon because I find that it’s practically useless …

- Cannot Qik

- Cannot Download Karaoke Videos.

Google Gears for Wordpress

Just enabled Gears for this blog.

Pretty good. I haven’t had a change to test it out but definitely a good feature.

Offline editing… holy grail for web apps!

Restoring my iphone

after upgrading jailbroken iphone to 2.2, it crashed

it’s been a week

haven’t used my iphone much

that’s why I’ve not qiked much either.

can’t wait for it to be restored!

More Places Smoke Free!

Just saw this on TV. This is good!

With effect from 1 January 2009, more places in Singapore will be smoke-free. 

• Lift Lobbies
• Markets
• Multi-storey & Basement Carparks
• Hotel Lobbies
• Ferry Terminals
• Playgrounds
• Exercise Areas
• Non Air-conditioned Shopping Centres, Shops, 
Factories & Offices
• Within 5 metres of Entrances & Exits

Life is getting better in Singapore…

And You Thought Americans were Hardworking?

Reading this bicker about Europeans taking 2 hr lunches and Americans working hard is pretty funny to me.

I don’t mean to disparage the working habits of my American friends but if you come to Asia I think it can generally be agreed that Asians work way harder.

But then there will also be debates about quality of life. So I shall not go into too much detail.

Americans take lots of summer breaks too. And being in temperate areas the Winter months are pretty useless because the sun sets at like 4pm so people go home early.

In Singapore, being always Summer, people work long hours throughout the year.

But I’ve also learnt one thing: It’s not about how hard you work because obviously America does have a significantly greater achievement in Science and Technology.

To each its own!

Internet FAIL at Conferences… Nothing New

Reading about this Internet FAIL at Le Web reminded me of how our previous UnConference 2007 in July 2008 also suffered problems with intermittent Internet.

NCS OneSurf provided bad internet, still charged us and provided no-recourse even after the event was over.

Luckily iCell meshed in Wireless@SG as a backup. And we got a couple of 3G Starhub MaxMobile dongles.

Locations really need to learn to catch up with the Internet world. Venues that have adequate infrastructure are quite difficult to find.

Luckily some of the best place are actually in the Universities in Singapore because many of them are already used to 95% penetration of laptops since 5-6 years ago. In Uni, just about every student brings a laptop to lecture theatres. Being a daily requirement means that many of the lecture halls are equipped with one power socket per seat, lan ports per seat and wifi.

But not all lecture facilities are good for conferencing though… argh…

Stupid Immigration Forms

Was in JB last sat.

You know those stupid country immigration forms?

I wonder who checks through those.

I fill it up with my normal handwriting, which is bad.

Afterall, I’m becoming a cyborg already hence the deteriorating handwriting — I prefer to type.

So anyway, under “Occupation”, I submitted

…

…

…

“Housefly”.

The immigration officer let us through…

Anyone wants an iCamera?

I was thinking what would be the next big product that Apple could introduce and disrupt the industry.

Has anyone thought about creating an Internet enabled camera?

One that can auto-upload your pictures to the net. One that you can play games on it while you are wasting your time on some long bus ride?

Thats right, how about an iPhone minus the Phone and with a souped up Camera and flash? I think that would be so cool! Many people already carry a digital camera around but somehow they have really lousy UI.

The biggest problem with the current crop of digital cameras is that it just takes too much time to make pictures go from being captured to where you really want them to be.

This is the current workflow:

1. Take pic

2. Gonnect USB, batch download into iPhoto

3. Batch edit.

4. Batch resize.

5. Upload Flickr, tag pics

6. Upload Facebook, tag people

7. Zip and mediafire the high res stuff to friends who ask for it.

When I use my DSLR, the process is exacerbatingly long because each pic is 3.5-5mb. That means after every photo session it is a really long and tedious process.

How I wish it could be like this:

1. Take pic

2. Make Basic Adjustments on Camera

3. Assign each pic to a bunch of macros: i.e. Upload to Facebook, Upload to Flick, Email to Person (with autocomplete from FB friend list or gmail contacts), Archive to Laptop.

4. The camera will automatically perform all these actions whenever it senses a WIFI network. It will be able to store a sequence of hundreds and thousands of batch actions and just process them in the background without user intervention.

I think such a workflow would be really idea. Then people can really focus on what really matters: taking good pics and make decisions on where the pics should be right on the camera. 

It would be really useful because somehow everyone has some kind of free time like sitting on the bus or train. That kind of useless downtime can be better used arranging, editing and sharing photos.

Mundane tasks should really be taken over by algorithms and performed seamlessly in the background.

That’s why I feel it would be really great if Apple could consider make some kind of iCamera that is aimed at disrupting the current crop of digicams. Digicams need to be sucked into the IP crowd.

Most importantly it would be a great platform for AppStore. And we can depend on smart developers out there to address the needs of customers by creating great apps that help do workflow routing to the smartest.

Anyway if you’re interested in automating the workflow of your current iPhone camera, check out this uPoze app!  It detects the latest photos taken and can auto upload them. Now isn’t that what we call a photo stream?

vlc4iphone – Another good recomendation for iPhone Apps

Here you go, another of my recommendations:

Get vlc4iphone for your jailbroken iPhone.

Check out the LifeHacker review for more information.

It’s good shit!

What’s cool about it is that I can find like ALOT of streams for it and it streams without skipping unlike the FlyCast radio thing you get in the AppStore.

There are also a few Chinese/Cantonese channels out there. There’s even a stream of Malaysia’s 98.8 FM. It’s going to be one of my favorite apps now.

If you have an unlimited 3G dataplan, this app works really well. I can tell you a few scenarios I’ve tested it through already:

1. Driving at high speeds on urban roads and highways. Haha.

2. Driving through super mega cannot see the road in front of your rain.

3. Walking through the malls of Singapore, above ground, undergroudn.

It just doesn’t loose connection at all!