Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin       Issue # 2008-06b

            Superman Week news

Flickr comes to BlackBerry & adds space-time
 This is a little like having your camera on the Web! Flickr Photo
 Uploader for BlackBerry Smart Phones (reviewers: Terrell Karlsten
 mailto:terrellk@yahoo-inc.com 408-349-5528) offers more than just
 a link to the online service; it identifies the point of origin
 of its photos in the time-space continuum. This free software
 works inside the phone to time-stamp & geo-tag (on GPS-aware
 handsets) photos. It adds tools for resizing photos, for
 organizing them (with titles, tags & descriptions), for uploading
 them to a Flickr account (free for up to 100MB/month in up to 3
 photo sets, or fee for extra space) & for sending e-mail, text or
 PIN messages with a direct Flickr link to your photos. If all
 that's missing from this picture is a BlackBerry in your hands,
 ask Ms. Berry for a hand. Contact: Victoria Berry, RESEARCH IN
 MOTION (Waterloo, ON) 519-888-7465x73663 mailto:vberry@rim.com
 http://rim.com

Even next-gen iPhone is a barfly
 No matter how cool the handset, you can't use it for voice or
 data connections unless it sees enough signal strength, so it
 doesn't go without hanging around bars. Wi-Ex gear gives any PCS
 or CEL phone more bars to hang around by snagging signals where
 they're the strongest (often a window or outside wall),
 amplifying them, then bringing their boosted selves to where the
 phone is. That's useful in a home or office, a hotel room or a
 car & Wi-Ex offers models for each, all reviewable now. Ask the
 ladies. Contact: Sharon Cuppett, WI-EX INC. (Norcross, GA)
 770-239-5475x6380 mailto:scuppett@wi-ex.com http://wi-ex.com
 AGENCY CONTACT: Deanna Anderson 404-759-1890
 mailto:danderson705@comcast.net

Tekkeon iPod charger doubles as a portable cradle
 This is a very clever design: the Tekkeon MP1140 myPower for iPod
 ($70) manages to fit a high-capacity lithium polymer rechargeable
 battery into the back of a portable iPod cradle. It's more dock
 than cradle, including analog audio line out & USB (sync only) &
 Firewire (sync & charge) connections, an optional charging port
 if you have other gear that needs a boost, a slide switch power
 control & a belt clip. It almost triples iPod playback time,
 adding up to 15 hours for video, 80 for music. It's reviewable
 now. Contact: René Williams, TEKKEON, INC. (Tustin, CA)
 949-360-7770 mailto:rene@tekkeon.com http://Tekkeon.com

LED lighting can move from operating to capital budget
 Studio lighting has always involved a lot of operational costs,
 from ongoing lamp replacements to large amounts of power
 consumption to air conditioning costs to remove the heat they
 generate. With Litepanels LED-array lighting, most operations
 will go more than a decade without replacing anything, power
 consumption drops more than 90% & there's negligible heat
 loading. That means that even in a bad broadcast economy,
 stations today can shuffle the books a bit to replace studio
 lighting with Litepanels as a capital equipment expense & in so
 doing, significantly reduce their operating expenses. On a
 smaller scale, the same kind of thinking in a camcorder or SLR
 hot shoe can make sense for the people you reach. Ask Ken to set
 you up with a Litepanels Micro ($300) for review & amaze yourself
 with its brightness, lightness, battery husbandry & cool.
 Contact: Ken Fisher, LITEPANELS, INC. (North Hollywood CA)
 818-332-3070 mailto:ken@litepanels.com http://LitePanels.com

Zoom to keep up with summer
 Ponder the sounds of summer: small fry splashing in a pool or
 playing in the yard, tweens talking about their friends or their
 games or movies they just saw & even teens in their daily
 role-play games. Childhood passes quickly enough & summer seems
 to speed that up, but you can keep up with them if you Zoom. A
 Zoom H2 or H4 handheld audio recorder snags those sounds onto an
 SD card & lets you transfer them to a PC where you can edit them,
 share them with relatives, burn CDs to charm or embarrass the
 kids later & more. Ask Mark. Contact: Mark Wilder, SAMSON
 TECHNOLOGIES (Hauppauge, NY) 631-784-2200x142
 mailto:mwilder@samsontech.com http://SamsonTech.com

Droplet shutter butter
 When we emphasize their codec's role in making locked-frame-rate
 real-time 2-way video work over cellular bandwidths, we may be
 drawing attention away from other attributes of the challenge.
 One for example is that the API for many significant handsets
 affords programmers no access to control significant attributes
 of the camera, like the shutter. In some cases, that potentially
 means a wait for future handset O/S upgrades (assuming the vendor
 is willing to make them). Ask John. Contact: John Ralston,
 DROPLET TECHNOLOGY (Menlo Park, CA) 650-688-5762
 mailto:ralston@droplet-tech.com http://droplet-tech.com Agency
 contact: Evan Kennedy (Terpin) 310-821-6100x116 evan@terpin.com

Special Report: Bridging the Red Zone
 In football, the Red Zone is those last few really hard yards
 just before the goal line. In home connection services like cable
 TV or networking or digital phone, they often talk about the
 "last mile" meaning the last several miles between a house & the
 network connection point closest to the house, whether copper or
 fiber or whatever. We want to come even closer, defining a
 connection "Red Zone" as whatever it takes to get coverage
 through the wall & to the device, regardless of whether the wall
 is a house, an office, a vehicle or the outdoors. One really good
 example of two different approaches to one particular Red Zone
 challenge is getting to a cell phone when the tower can't. One of
 those two approaches is to add WiFi to the cell phone; the
 transition between cellular & WiFi for data or (with some
 carriers) voice is seamless. The other approach is femtocells,
 essentially a miniature cell tower with a very limited bubble of
 coverage that uses the Internet to link to the cellular networks.
 Each has benefits; WiFi in the phone works best for a single user
 who is often in places with good WiFi but bad cell coverage; a
 femtocell works best in a single location that needs enhanced
 cell signals for multiple phones that don't need to have WiFi
 support. At every level, both WiFi & cell signals are best
 thought of as finite bubbles & the task of getting the bubbles
 where people need them is much more appropriate than getting the
 people to where they can touch the bubbles. There may be more of
 a role to play for PowerLine networking, which makes it easy to
 add WiFi access points without tearing up the walls. We have yet
 to see (it may be out there, but we can't find it) a
 consumer-level router that can take in a wideband (like cable or
 DSL) data connection, offer more than a few wired ports plus a
 robust WiFi bubble plus a PowerLine network connection. There are
 many situations where getting connected comes just short of
 happening & we think the act of bridging the Red Zone is one that
 we'll be watching for clever new products to do.

Special Report Bonus Review: Fake Call
 Many of you will love Fake Call & many of you will hate it. This
 clever BlackBerry application does a very good job of making the
 phone look & sound like it's getting a call. You can set your
 incoming-call spoof screen to use any number & any name, specify
 any ring tone (custom or your standard) & even specify audio to
 play back when you push the "answer" button. Set a delay time,
 start its countdown & try to look surprised or annoyed when the
 ringtone sounds. Bottom line: if there are meetings you'd love to
 dodge & you can get away with that, this is a clever way to
 invite yourself to exit.

Special Report Bonus Review 2: Brain Manual
 "Your Brain The Missing Manual" (MacDonald, Pogue Press/O'Reilly)
 reminds us a bit of the old Rowan & Martin's Laugh In TV show -
 you're expecting something enjoyable & occasionally you get it,
 but in between are stretches that weren't all that much fun. The
 book tries to be an operator's manual for those of us who own &
 operate wetware between our ears, which is a very fun premise.
 The author does what he can to take a light approach while
 covering such things as anatomy, nutrition, sleep, aging,
 illusions, gender, memory, etc. (all in the context of the brain,
 of course). We wanted to enjoy this more - we tried to enjoy this
 more - but at the end it was one of those "That's nice" (pat on
 the head) half-hearted A-for-effort projects. On the other hand,
 if you have older kids who aren't eating right or sleeping
 enough, for example, this book might be a fair way to help them
 understand the errors of their ways (because you'll never meet
 anyone who doesn't think his or her brain is special & worthy of
 special attention). Bottom line: this book is about as fun as any
 useful discussion of the brain & its role in development &
 behavior can ever be.

Special Report Bonus Review 3: PocketDay
 In the earliest days of the Today Show (with Dave Garroway, Jack
 Lescoulie & J. Fred Muggs), the background of the set was a
 memorable US map, divided into time zones, with 4 evenly spaced
 analog clocks showing the current time in each. We've been trying
 for decades to get something like that going in Windows & finally
 got Sidebar doing something like that under Vista, all in a
 column. When we learned about a BlackBerry application that could
 do 4 clocks across as just one of its features, we immediately
 got in touch to review it. It's got a lot more than clocks.
 PocketDay ($35 per person, transferrable to new handsets) gives
 you a status page that lets you keep track of those clocks,
 weather (in up to 5 locales), unread mail or messages, pending
 appointments & a ton more plus do searches. Search options
 include Google (Web, Local, Images or Directions), Wikipedia,
 movies, reverse phone, package tracking, flight status & drink
 recipes. You can set it up to show you your stocks or scores or
 RSS feeds. Each of these types will collapse or open when you
 click the space button & many will go to additional level of
 detail when you click the trackball; weather, for example, offers
 a 48-hour forecast, a 7-day forecast a satellite map or (US only)
 a radar map. Bottom line: This is the handiest, most complete &
 thorough dashboard we've ever seen on a mobile device & one we
 readily recommend to any BlackBerry user.

Special Report Bonus Review 4: Portal
 It seems like half a life ago that Half-Life hit the PC gaming
 universe; Portal is a newer release from the same publisher,
 Valve, through both the Steam online platform & The Orange Box.
 Portals are pathways that you create one at a time with a
 gun-like gizmo; when you pass into one you come out the other.
 The game is a series of 3D physics puzzles you have to negotiate
 (sometimes as automated guns try to shoot you), with some
 amusingly offbeat running commentary spoken by an electronic
 observer. If you've been playing games long enough, this is
 something like Sierra's "Incredible Machine" but evolved enough
 to up the ante. Bottom line: the game is original, good-looking,
 fun, intelligent, creatively challenging & a blast to play.

Special Report Bonus Review 5: Flip Mino
 We keep saying about still cameras that the specs don't matter
 for the camera you don't have with you; come to think of it,
 that's behind a lot of cell phone photography. The subject now is
 video cameras & while there's a video mode in the new BlackBerry
 Pearl models, we were surprised & delighted with the video
 quality from a simple little handheld video camera almost exactly
 the size & shape of a Pearl - meaning it's much more likely to be
 in a pocket when we're out. The new Flip Mino is a handy little
 shooter that does a nicely competent job of snagging up to 60
 minutes of MOV-format video (not sure if it stores it that way,
 but that's the way it comes out. One of its cleverest features is
 a switchblade-style flip-out (why they call the brand "Flip" of
 course) USB-A connection for charging it (a white LED stops
 blinking when the charge is complete) & for viewing/editing its
 video (it auto-installs a variety of utilities when you first
 plug it into USB). We kind of like that it rewards old-school
 steady-hand walk-&-shoot video very nicely with very natural,
 very controllable shooting; being old school, we'd rather push
 the camera forward a bit than use its 2X digital (not optical)
 zoom & its relatively wide-angle lens is good for that mode of
 shooting (though it does not have wonderful macro
 characteristics). We also just discovered (from son Ian, 21, when
 he got a glimpse of it) that this has an enormous "have to take
 that out" appeal to that age group. At its $180 list, it's less
 money than most camcorders, with obvious compromises on features
 trading off for economy & convenience. Bottom line: for all of
 those moments when you wish you'd snagged something on video, the
 Flip Mino makes that a lot more likely to happen.

Special Report Bonus Review Correction
 Traffic Vizzion, reviewed last issue, is $29 (not $25) per
 year.

Explaining our role with RIM
 Research In Motion (the BlackBerry company) is one of the newest
 sponsoring clients here but what we're doing with them is a
 little different from what we do for others, and we owe you an
 explanation of their purpose & the ethical lines we've drawn to
 define what we will or will not do. Our task for RIM focuses on
 the third-party consumer (not enterprise) applications that run
 on that cool little platform; the more you're aware of them, the
 more likely the public perception of BlackBerry can escape the
 corporate closet & resonate in consumer space. RIM is willing to
 make handsets (but not, alas, service) available to those of you
 who don't have a BlackBerry & want to try some of these wares;
 we're also including separate contact slugs within each item to
 let you get in direct touch with the vendor. If you've been
 reading here for the past year or so, you're aware that Marty
 long ago learned to love his BlackBerry & that he sees it as the
 poster child for helping make any reporter more productive. In
 that light, we already reviewed (not always glowingly) dozens of
 the applications now getting covered in the sponsored items; we
 choose items to review based in part on their usefulness to
 journalists (our entire readership) & in part on things that we
 think significant enough that our coverage can help provide a
 litmus test for your own interest in them. Finally, as we
 occasionally disclose here, one of our ethical standards is to
 not include a sponsor's products among those we review. At this
 writing, RIM is a sponsor & the third parties (ISV Alliance
 members) are not. So we will not be reviewing new BlackBerry
 handsets, but we will continue to review interesting third-party
 goodies that run on them or work with them, whether or not those
 wares are from ISV Alliance members. One bit of even more useful
 info for you: we're rapidly growing our press-contact info on
 these companies, so if you want to ask Marty his take on any
 given category & get those wares to you to review, it's getting a
 lot easier. Contact: Martin Winston, NEWSTIPS (Novelty, OH)
 440-338-8400; mailto:marty@newstips.com http://Newstips.com

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