May Thinkup Talk posted
New Thinkup Talk Site
Thinkup Talk, the live, interactive podcast about Thinkup, has its own site now:
www.thinkuptalk.com
March Thinkup App Conference
Thinkup #3 March 9th, 2011 by Thinkup
Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and some developers join me to talk about Thinkup App. Try it!
Thinkup Talks: Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and a Cast of Thousands
The Thinkup Community assembles on the second Wednesday of the month to talk about our favorite project. Join us live sometime!
Thinkup Talks #2 January 12, 2010 by Thinkup
Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and some developers join me to talk about Thinkup App. You should try it soon.
Triple play: Freebox Revolution v6
Triple play has arrived in our home. Here’s the description of my day yesterday. First, Internet access was cut off. Normal, since I changed ISP, but what was abnormal is that I got it back at nearly 3 times faster download speed very shortly after, when I connected our new Freebox v6. I was expecting more of a hole in the connection and had a 3G+ key ready just in case.
Unboxing
Nothing to see here! Three boxes, each with a diagram of hookup on the inside lid:
- Freebox modem, router, server.
- Freebox player (set top box)
- Power supplies for the above which also connect the two via Ethernet at 200Mbps
I opened up the boxes, plugged in the server and powered it up. It has a LED readout that enumerated the steps it was going through in powerup, connect, syncro. I went upstairs and hooked up the player to our TV, using the included HDMI cable. That alone sets the box apart from most of the gear I’ve bought. There was a second Peritel cable in case you have an older TV with no HDMI. I love HDMI for its combining of audio with the video.
Setup
As soon as the modem was plugged in, it went though its paces and I played with the Macs connected to it via Ethernet cable. It happend that the box router comes set with the same unroutable local address I use, 192.168.1 but the gateway was set to 254. I use fixed IP addresses on most of my equipment, so I had to first use DHCP on one to find the gateway. Once I did this, I could switch the computers back to manual fixed IP and set up two other important devices, our SIP phones.
Phones
Full telephony is part of the triple play, so I plugged the Siemens Gigaset S675IP in to the phone connector on the router as if it was a “normal” phone. It’s not: the Gigaset is a DECT/SIP hybrid, it connects to a phone line and has 6 SIP accounts. Our are set to providers in the USA and conference servers like ZipDX. I needed to reconfigure both the Gigaset DECT and the Polycom IP650 desk phone to talk to the new router IP. Both phones were now working.
WiFi
Setting up WiFi was a matter of generating a key, and might be the only daunting thing to a non-techie. However, I got through it and copied the very long string to USB. One thing I never found was a way to copy that key to the iPods,. It had to be typed in manuually; This was probably the longest operation of the day.
Media Server / Set Top Box (above)
Firing this up went through some configuration. First the screen resolution and trim, which is automatic. Then the detection of terrestrial digital TV channels. Finally I was ready with the full menu (see image below). I briefly tried terrestrial, which worked, but sucks because we don’t have an outside antenna. The digital TV over the Internet is perfect. Further, I was able to download a file at something like 15MB/s while watching TV. But then I moved to the media part.
Network Attached Storage
At first I was confused by how to connect to the server part, since there is a 250 gigabyte drive in it. Older versions used ftp, which I was ready for, but couldn’t find. It took my hours to realize that this box works as Network Attached Storage (NAS). Here’s the amazing part: it just appears as a drive automagically on Macs and even the Windows 7 laptop. I immediately copied some AVI over to it and lo and behold, it plays these better than my Macbook connected to the TV did on VLC.
Blueray / DVD
I’m not a Blueray fan, we don’t even have a full HD TV, so I didn’t try it and don’t care. However, inserting my American DVD in the unit gave me the “wrong region, fool!” error. I’ll have to look into the possibility of a hack, but I fear the region is in the firmware. Not about to mess with that. I put in a DVD I made here, which works in normal players, but it had no audio. I guess for now, we’ll have to keep the deregionalized DVD player we have.
DECT Phones
The unit has a built in DECT base. I haven’t tried this yet, I’ll be back to edit when I do. If you already have a bunch of DECT handsets, this might be a good way to go.
Remote control
It’s rubbery and a bit too much Philippe Starck (tarte à la crême du moment) for my taste, but it works.
The Internet access speeds are about 20Mb/s which is great, although I’d have liked an upload speed increase, too. It’s only a hair faster than the 768Kb/s we had before.
Build “Call Me” Web Widgets for Any Web Page
“Call me” buttons have been around for a long time but still have not taken off. Zingaya enables voice calls through any computer, right from a web page without downloading anything. The button for your page is built on line in a few minutes. Using Zingaya’s user-friendly interface you can leverage some great features:
- Cost-effective, rapid deployment
- The button has the text you wish, size and color are adjustable
- The widget can be limited to use on particular sites (domain names)
- Call recording can be enabled and automatic
- Voicemail can be used, playing a file you upload to your account
- A single widget can call several phone numbers at once
- A complete call history is available
- Multiple widgets and multiple lines on an account
- Calls can be routed via SIP or Skype, or to regular telephones or cellphones worldwide
- e-commerce sites can implement “Call us now” buttons in minutes
Call me buttons would be a good addition to existing customer support/sales channels for any website doing business on the Internet. They allow you to support customers worldwide, where toll-free and callbacks are usually country/region specific and can be costly and time-consuming to set up.
Zingaya technology is Flash-based, which brings up a few caveats: It will not work on mobiles without Flash (notably iPhone and iPad). Flash sometimes causes problems on Linux and the Flash player must be a recent version. Adobe’s Flash Privacy Settings.
Musicians’ Online Visibility
Internet visibility.
Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.
Your tunes.
Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.
Soundcloud
After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.
Posterous
One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.
Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.
There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.
Summing up
If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.
Talk About Thinkup Conference
Here’s our initial live conference to discuss Thinkup with users, developers and anyone who is interested.
Conference start time in your time zone - Thinkup Talks Talkshoe Page
Two ways to participate in the live phone meetup: (note that if the conference is not in session, you’ll get a polite message telling you just that)
Method 1: Use a SIP client such as Blink (available free for Windows, Mac and linux). After downloading and installing Blink, click on the plus icon at the lower left of the program and create a new contact with this information:
Here is a Blink install video tutorial.
SIP Address : 7463#31431#1@proxy.ideasip.com
Display Name : Thinkup Talks
Group : Talkshoe
The SIP Address is the only important information you need. The other two are just names you will see on the contact list. In the SIP address, the #1 part is a an anonymous guest id. If you’d like to be easily identifiable – which makes it easier to have a coherent discussion, you can join Talkshoe free and use a PIN. The PIN is seven digits long and can be a phone number you can easily remember. NO ONE can see your PIN.
You can also just type in the SIP address in Blink or another SIP client you may already have, such as X-Lite, SJ-Phone, Telephone, or SIP Communicator: 7463#31431#1@proxy.ideasip.com
Note that “Bonjour” needs to be the account you call from. (Top left below the colored LEDs)
Change 0123456789 to the PIN you set for your Talkshoe account, or to 1 if you want to be anonymous.
Method 2: Regular phone. If you have unlimited dialing or another inexpensive way of using an ordinary phone, call
425-906-3916
If you have a Talkshoe PIN, you might prefer to call Talkshoe directly. In that case, you’ll need to enter all the codes:
Dial (724) 444-7444 then enter code 31431# then YOUR_PIN # (or 1# to remain anonymous)
Questions? See you on IRC #thinkup
30 Million+ Wine Labels in Circulation Use AVIN code
To find out more about the AVIN please visit http://AVIN.cc
The AVIN code is a unique technology that solves an enormous challenge facing the wine industry, clean data. Andre Ribeirinho, of the website Adegga.com, has been working for 3 years to create an open standard for wine information and has recently achieved the milestone of having 30 million wine bottles labeled with the AVIN.
Like an ISBN for books, each vintage of every wine is assigned a unique number that consists of 13 digits preceded by the letters AVIN (ex: AVIN6452997073019), which includes various data points including wine name, region and varietals. This unique code is currently free for wineries to register and is guaranteed for life. The key benefit to using the AVIN is that there is no longer need to dispute the wine’s origin, spelling of the winery name or various other key factors.
“The AVIN is poised to change the wine world as the ISBN did the publishing world. Ask any book publisher whether they can survive without the ISBN. I highly doubt that you’ll find many people believing they could” says founder Andre Ribeirinho.
By becoming a central repository for information, AVIN helps to address internal wine trade issues as well as having customer marketing benefits. Over 25,000 different wines from around 7,500 wineries have already had an AVIN registered.
Wine retailers, importers, writers and also competition organizers can resolve numerous inventory queries by confirming wine details against the single information source.
The AVIN also has consumer marketing benefits. Wineries can print matrix barcode on the labels to create a dynamic and interactive wine buying experience. For example QRCodes permit smart phones to scan and extract information from the wine label itself, displaying this information on the customer’s phone but also with the possibility to link to awards, articles and stockists.
“Wine buying has always been a confusing process for the consumer. Today with the AVIN and QRCode technologies consumers can access information about the wine they are thinking about buying without having to guess” explains Andre.
The AVIN is currently setting up a Board of Directors to both manage the project and ensure the data remains free and accessible to all users into the future. Currently, any winery can head to http://www.avin.cc/ to create an AVIN code for their wine within minutes. For developers and individuals interested in using the AVIN in their wine related businesses, go here: http://www.avin.cc/api-documentation/ for more information.
“We believed that the AVIN would prove to be a good tool to make it easier for our customers and consumers to search/ to find online information about our wines, in this age of information.” Carrie Jorgenson – Cortes de Cima Winery
Social Media, SEO and the Vegematic
What do social media and the Vegematic have in common?
Ron Popeil would say, “How much would you expect to pay for lessons in social media? $500? $800? More?” More, apparently. I see one about to happen, offered for close to $1,000. So, what do you get for $1,000?, Well, you’ll listen to talks, the content of which is largely available free. You’ll hear pitches for companies presented as “talks” or “tutorials”. You’ll get to hang out with a few people who know what it’s all about, but most of the people there will be the marks, the punters, people who have paid $1,000 to hang out with you.
