by Amani Channel

I'm heading to Tampa, Florida for a couple of days to take care of some business. I have my second thesis defense at the University of South Florida, and tomorrow I'm scheduled to give a teleseminar with the Poynter Institute about producing news with with smartphones.

My mobile media journey started a couple of years ago when I used Twitter to share news from the field as I covered the 2008 Gulf Coast storm season for the now defunct HDNews. I don't know how many journalists were doing it at the time, but I found Twitter and hashtags (like #Ike and #gustav) to be a great way to share first hand accounts of what I was witnessing from the field during Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav, Ike and Tropical Storm Hanna.

I also used my blog to post the stories that we produced from the field and I shared footage that wasn't included in my stories. Oh if only the iPhone 3GS was out back then. The iPhone and other smartphones like the Android and Nokia models make it extremely easy to share video from anywhere. Other applications and sites like TwitPic allow easy photo sharing.

We all know that media can't be every. But people with these devices are everywhere, and it's changing the face of news and information. As an example, check out these pics from the Chile earthquake that were posted via Twitter.

Of course I can't share all of my secrets, but if you check out this Webinar, you should have a greater understanding of now TV news stations, and vloggers like myself are using technology to innovate the gathering of content.

WTTG Fox 5 in Washington DC, and KOB in New Mexico are doing a great job of experimenting with technology to enhance coverage.

I'll probably be posting mostly mobile videos, so keep it tuned to either my Twitter account, or check back here for the latest video updates.

Forgive the typos, I gotta board my flight!

To support electric vehicles like the Leaf, which will be available in Houston toward year's end, the city and Reliant are working to create an infrastructure that places charging stations in convenient locations. Reliant will also be developing a system of support, including home assessments, for people installing home charging stations. The stations will be compatible with other plug-in vehicles as well.

Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player. The team behind the app launched a major new release this morning.

The application aggregates live streaming and recorded radio broadcasts from across the US, displays their current and planned content schedules and now offers a search function that stretches across all those different types of content: live streams, podcasts and text show descriptions. It's a free app and the the organization that makes it hosts almost nothing on its own servers. The end result is a remarkable user experience that ought to be an inspiration for old media of every kind. It isn't perfect, but it's getting better fast.

Sponsor

The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (RPX). RPX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.

Two Ton Shoe didn't find a lot of success in the United States, but thanks to the long tail of the web Shapiro says they somehow found a big fan base in Korea. The band toured there and Korean bands have covered some of their songs. "I'm a Korean rock star," Shapiro says, "and I believe there's a 'Korea' out there for everybody."

About a year ago Shapiro says he called around all the major players in public radio and argued that they had a unique opportunity if they could collaborate and create a really strong offering. An organization called American Public Media decided to contribute the work they had done so far on their own iPhone app to Shapiro's project and NPR and Public Radio International agreed to lend their support to what would become the Public Radio Tuner, today renamed the Public Radio Player.

Funding Local Radio on the iPhone

Public Radio Player could facilitate that long tail experience for obscure local public radio content by making it far more available on the iPhone. But PaidContent's Rafat Ali worries that by freeing radio listeners all the more from their local radio station, the Player could sever the loyalty and fund raising connections that keep public radio alive.

To that concern Shapiro has two interesting responses. First, he says that survey data shows most users prefer listening to their local stations on the app, along with a variety of favorites from elsewhere.

Even more interesting is the project's collaboration with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls. Searls is at Harvard's Berkman Center now, developing a framework for what's being called Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - a customer-based response to the business paradigm of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The VRM project and Shapiro's RPX are developing ways for Public Radio Player users to track what they listen to on the player and make financial contributions to the radio stations they've consumed from the most.

Shapiro says that part of the project faces a major roadblock from Apple. Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can't even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn't want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there's tax complications, the platform's standard 30% fee for payments isn't tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

For now the app is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding is up for renewal now. Shapiro says that a second round of funding would be used to create "showcase apps that would break new ground and create new technology." He says the company is particularly interested in technologies that represent a hybrid of digital and broadcast. "With radio," he says, "there is still a tremendous amount of reach that you don't want to give up on when you move into the digital space."

Fixing the App

That hybrid paradigm is very well represented by the new version of the Public Radio Player. The previous version, called Public Radio Tuner, was one of the most popular free apps in the iPhone store but it didn't really work that well. Radio streams got dropped a lot. That's no longer a big problem with version 2.0.

The new version of the app tackles the problem of dropped streams by making the buffering settings much more sophisticated. Remember, the App doesn't host any of the audio, it just points to the live streams or podcasts stored on public radio stations' own servers. Project manager Matt MacDonald says the app now determines what kind of bandwidth the receiving phone has, then buffers the inbound stream accordingly before serving it up to listeners. The end result is a radically more usable radio app on wifi, 3G or Edge connections.

It's still not perfect; this like every app is at the mercy of AT&T's wireless network, but dropped streams appear to be much, much less frequent than they used to be. The interface sometimes hangs when loading menus, but Shapiro says that with the new release today bug fixes are a top priority and though crash reports are appearing infrequently, they are being closely watched. "Just shake the phone," he jokes. "Then it will work better."

More Than One Kind of Content

The new app brings a whole lot more radio to your iPhone. In addition to pointing to hundreds of radio streams, RPX has co-ordinated a number of different sources to pull show schedules down to be stored locally on your phone. "Scheduling data has been a big effort," Shapiro says. "It never existed in one place and is still a moving target."

A company called Public Interactive (recently acquired by NPR from Public Radio International) has a metadata tool that originally captured music playlists but now publishes radio show schedules as well. NPR and many station websites also display schedules on their own websites. PRX aggregates all that data, stores it on your phone, syncs it with the radio stream links and then checks for changes each time you launch the Public Radio Player app.

Having the particular show that's playing displayed along with a station name makes a very big difference in the user experience.

The 2.0 version of the app also includes support for "on demand" or podcast listening. Hundreds of podcasts are navigable by featured shows, category or alphabetically. Podcasts are integrated into some of the show schedules as well. When listening to a streaming station, you can view the rest of the day's schedule and see what other shows will be broadcast later. Then you can choose to listen to previous recorded editions of those shows. It's a pretty seamless experience.

Search is No Small Matter

The new search functionality integrates all of the above, letting you search for keywords or topics and finding both recorded and currently live shows that match your search. MacDonald says the company used an open source program called ThinkingSphynx on the back end, worked closely with the NPR API team and is still working on teaching local radio stations about the importance of standards-based content titling. Listening to streams and podcasts on iTunes or an iPod may not have been so difficult with incomplete file names, but show a radio station how broken its content looks in a dynamic iPhone directory and the message comes through loud and clear.

There have been other efforts to index all the public radio streams online; Public Radio Fan is the most notable and is more international, but is less sophisticated and is based on the desktop and browser. (After listening to some international broadcasts via Public Radio Fan it's hard not to be a little disappointed with even Public Radio Player's extensive but exclusively US menu.)

As a media technology, Public Radio Player offers a unique blend of content aggregation, focus on both real time and recorded content and extensive data integration on the back end. All on the iPhone. Its design and performance continue to improve. It's a very impressive offering in terms of content delivery; if it can find a way to use the new platform it's on to transcend the public radio paradigm of on-air pledge drives, that would really be remarkable, wouldn't it?

Jake Shapiro says that offering Public Radio Player on other platforms, including a web interface, is a logical next step. You can follow the project's progress on the Public Radio Player blog and download the application here.

Filed under: iPhone, App Store

Despite their much-admired situational awareness, even NYC subway veterans sometimes get confused about where to find the nearest station -- and if you're a first time visitor, fuggedaboudit. For iPhone 3GS-enabled residents and tourists, it's about to get a lot easier: acrossair is offering an NYC version of the Nearest Tube augmented reality app, New York Nearest Subway.

Hold your iPhone flat and see a 2D map of the entire system... then lift it perpendicular to the ground, and the heads-up display mode shows you floating icons representing nearby stations, complete with line legends and walking distances. For anyone who's ever walked to a faraway subway stop only to realize that there was a much closer option, this is incredibly compelling. No word on price yet, and the app is awaiting approval; as noted, this app will only work on the 3GS, as the magnetometer is used to determine the direction the phone is facing.

If you've got preferred apps for navigating public transit in your city, pipe up in the comments.

[via Gadget Lab]

Continue reading Reality doesn't get more real: 2 iPhone views of the NYC subway

TUAWReality doesn't get more real: 2 iPhone views of the NYC subway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Cheap Trick is releasing their new album on 8-track!

The target is radio stations that tend not to play new songs by old bands. Manager Dave Frey said in the Globe and Mail, The 8-track is something that'll sit on their desk for a while, attract some attention.

This is a great example of a word of mouth trigger.

A one-time promotion or ad gets attention for a moment. You need something that will sit around and start conversations again and again. When someone sees it they will ask "What's that?"

More from the Globe story.

Thanks to Rick Muirhead for the tip.

Television, the platform, is having a bad year. There are lots of reasons: the economy, consumer control, audience fragmentation/atomization, etc. On the other hand, Television, the art form, is alive and well with more (albeit different kinds of) projects in production than at any time in history.

That being said, the long-term viability of big budget television is the cause of much angst. If audiences continue to atomize, can any given show make enough money to justify producing it? If consumers continue to transcode things they want to watch, edit out the commercials and make them available for free over the public Internet, will sponsors be willing to pay? If the most popular productions are the most pirated productions, is there any real future in production? Can free, advertiser-supported, Internet television continue with a fraction of the advertising avails and audiences of its broadcast counterpart?

One of the underlying issues is scarcity vs. ubiquity. On a closed network, any moment of time is a scarce resource. On an open network, no moment of time is a scarce resource. The immutable law of supply and demand tells us that we will never be able to charge for anything that is ubiquitously available. At least, that's what the rulebook says.

However, I think the solution to almost all the problems related to consumer control of personal media consumption has been staring back at us from our television sets - we just didn't see it.

Most people schooled-in-the-art will tell you that live programming such as news, weather, sports and events are, for all practical purposes, TiVo-proof. This isn't strictly true, but if something is emergent, and the results are important, people tend to consume the media in real time. This almost always includes the associated commercial messaging. You can, of course, leave the room, talk to someone, play with your computer or do anything else you might think of during the commercial breaks but this has been true since the '50s. So, like I said, for all practical purposes, the commercials will play out.

Until consumers started to record television, TV was a real time device. No matter when the programming was created, it is always broadcast at specific times in a linear fashion. DVRs have changed that. When Jeff Zucker says, The number one show at 10pm is TiVo, he's not kidding. This is the current state of the art but it doesn't have to be.

We have entered the super-digital age and now all television is digital. So why are we still broadcasting combined, fully finished, masters in real time? We don't have to. It would be much, much better to serve individual streams of data that could be combined by the receiving technology to create custom formatted, device-specific pieces of content.

What?

Let's walk it backwards for a second:

Problem 1: There are far too many devices that can play back video for anyone to deal with. I produce MediaBytes, my daily news feed, in 46 different formats and I don't cover even a tiny fraction of the consumer electronics devices that are out there.

Problem 2: There are far too many places to obtain copies of any piece of video.

Problem 3: It is very difficult to measure who is watching, where they are and what else they may be doing.

Problem 4: Location and time of day are critical data points for the proper contextualization of message management.

The Real Time Data-based Digital Television Solution:

Break the data down to its component parts and broadcast them separately. So, text, graphics, music, script, metadata, voice-over, picture elements would all be packaged as individual data streams and made available in real time.

Next, the industry adopts the Tom Sawyer Paint The Fence Paradigm. This calls for the creation of a database (for the content), APIs (application programming interface) so third party developers can get at the data, an SDK (software development kit) so third party developers can license (and pay for) their use of the content, and some modifications to the current commercial trafficking networks and measurement tools.

The immediate result would be thousands of passionate, interested parties jumping on the opportunity to create thousands of virtual DMAs with virtual networks that could all be advertiser supported at scale.

Of course, anyone could still record a finished piece and have their way with it. But, imagine a broadcast world where television stations were broadcasting digital data feeds and economically motivated third party developers were crafting consumer interfaces that our industry simply will never be able to afford to create. Consumers who can obtain an emotionally satisfying media experience are far less likely to spend their valuable time looking for workarounds.

The concepts of relevance, engagement and conversations all become meaningless when developers with enlightened self-interest are your partners. The business rules surrounding this kind of data-based, content distribution would require developers to build measurable messaging into the platforms they support. Partners who make money when you make money and lose money when you lose money make great partners! Stations and Networks would transmogrify into their true digital counterparts platforms.

You can think of it as a real time Apple App store. Throw in a little real time web (like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and you've got a serious media offering.

Studios have been wholesalers for years. They sell their programs to Networks who, in turn, package the shows for consumer consumption. It is abundantly obvious that Networks cannot afford to create all of the packaging that consumers now require (or are willing to pay for). We need a better, more cost-effective way to serve audiences that are growing in diversity and getting harder and harder to aggregate.

Problem 1: Too Many Devices get third-party partners to pay you to modify your content to work with them.

Problem 2: There are far too many places to get video turn the weakness into strength by getting third parties to pay you from all of the nooks and crannies of the media consumption world.

Problem 3: It is very difficult to measure who is watching, where they are and what else they may be doing computers love data, build this functionality into the platform and the SDK.

Problem 4: Context is king yes it is, and what could be more contextual than having a passionate partner create an application that is specific to a consumption form factor?

Real Time Data-based Digital Television is a viable solution. Broadcasting real time data in component parts can be achieved today with just a little bit of political will. Steve Jobs and a zillion other Silicon Valley companies have demonstrated how easy it is to create a passionate, motivated army of third party developers. To me, the answer to the television industry's marginal cost, marginal gain problem has been staring us in the face since the transition to digital was announced. I just didn't see it until now.

Shelly Palmer is a consultant and the host of MediaBytes a daily show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy Awards). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.netFor information visit www.shellypalmer.com

I want to once again thank those of you who arrived here via this Money Magazine article about families who are living without credit cards.

If this is your first visit to my site, welcome. I hope you will take a few minutes to read a bit more about me and about how and why I live without credit cards. Now, today's post -

According to this article - some gas stations have stopped accepting credit cards! Why? From the article:

The National Retail Federation says gas prices point to the unfairness of the system: Gas stations are paying more in interchange fees because the price of gas has gone up, while the cost of processing credit or debit cards remains the same.

Credit card companies charge gas station owners (and all other merchants who accept credit cards) an interchange fee - usually about 2% - each and every time someone uses a credit card to purchase gas. Apparently, gas station owners have grown tired of sending credit card companies a cut of each sale - and some have gone to a cash only' policy.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with these changes, it might be time to start carrying a little more cash around, just in case you find yourself in an area where there aren't any gas stations that accept credit cards. (There are also interchange fees associated with the use of debit cards. I'll assume that a station that has stopped accepting credit cards has also stopped accepting debit cards, as well.)

For those, like me, who live in rural areas, this could be a very big deal. In our small town, there are only four or five places to buy gasoline. Personally, I use my debit card for most gasoline purchases, but I'm going to start adding a bit more cash to my Gasoline' envelope. (For those of you unfamiliar with the envelope system - a great system for managing your cash - I have created a video detailing what it is and how to use it.)

I'm sure that most stations will continue to accept credit cards. But, those who are traveling with children - or going out of town to unfamiliar places - you might consider keeping a few more greenbacks on hand, just in case.

Side Note: While I found this article very interesting, in my own experience, I've found that several gas stations appear to be encouraging the use of credit cards and discouraging the use of cash. Many now require that users pay at the pump' or prepay inside' when using cash. So, while the article is interesting, I'd really love to hear from my readers. Have you experienced this in your area? Are gas stations where you live going to a cash only' policy. And, if so, how has (or will) this affect you?

In a first-of-its-kind deal, players of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto IV video game from Rockstar Games will be able to shop for MP3s as they play.

Radios have been a part of the Grand Theft Auto series that has always entertained, cause, really, who doesn't like to commit crimes to a soundtrack? According to Yahoo Games, this time, as you drive around Liberty City, if you hear a song you like, you simply will get out your cell phone and dial ZIT-555-0100 to mark the song, as well as receive a text message with the name of the song and artist. Additionally, if you're registered with the upcoming Rockstar Games Social Club, you'll receive an email with a link to purchase the song on Amazon's MP3 store.

Ronn Werre, EVP, EMI Music's Sales, Licensing and Synchronization unit. We think giving players the ability to identify and buy their favorite tracks from Grand Theft Auto IV's popular radio stations is a great new music discovery tool for fans and an innovative new revenue stream for artists. The game is going to feature over 150 tracks, with some of them being original tracks made specifically for the game by artists such as the Greenskeepers and Nas, as well as rare tracks from performers like Elton John. Since none of the songs from the game are playable outside of actual game play, this should make it far easier for you to enjoy your favorite song to kill by any time you want.

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