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>> Social networking, online video, and brand promotion
Over the last couple of weeks I've been watching an interesting project unfold as Samsung run a promotion here in Australia called "Samsung People". The promotion has been carefully designed to use the power of social networking to increase awareness of their brand and particularly of a new product, the MX10 video camera. I'm not involved in running the project in any way but I am involved as a contestant, so I've been able to see a bit of what happens behind the scenes as they put all the pieces in place and it certainly makes an interesting case study of how companies are starting to use social networking for marketing purposes. This particular promotion has several stages, each designed to encourage people to use their own social networks to get others involved and therefore exposed to the brand. The basic premise is to promote the Samsung MX10 video camera, which uses a memory card instead of video tapes or hard disk and is designed to be very simple to operate. Samsung wanted to spread the message that this camera is ideal for people wanting a basic camera to post video diaries, put video online on sites such as YouTube, and generally communicate with their friends and family. So they hired a promotions company who equipped a number of staff with the MX10 and sent them out into the streets of Sydney to talk to random people and ask them the question "where is your mind?", recording the interviews and posting them on a special "Samsung People" website that they set up for the project. They also invited people to enter a competition by answering the "where is your mind?" question online at the Samsung People site. The next stage was selecting ten finalists from the people who entered the competition, and this is where the social networking effect really kicks in. They gave each of those ten finalists an MX10 camera and video editing software, with instructions that they have to keep a video diary until the end of the competition period at the end of August. The rules state that finalists are only allowed to use the camera and software supplied by Samsung, and the video diaries must be hosted on the Samsung People website. Finalists were each given a username / password so they can log in and upload new diary entries whenever they want to. During this stage of the competition the public can view the video diaries and vote for the finalist they think should win. This obviously means that it's in the contestants own self interest to promote the competition as much as they can, and reach out using their social networks (both in the real world and also online using sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn) to get as many people voting for them as possible. This turns the contestants (and, to some extent, their first and second degree friends who will want to help their friend out of loyalty) into active promoters of the competition. Each contestant's vested interest in winning the competition becomes their motivation for promoting it, and, in turn, promoting the company behind it. Very, very clever. Of course, *I* have a vested interest because I'm one of the ten finalists! The grand prize is quite significant (a trip for two to Tokyo, New York, and London) and I'd love to win it, but quite apart from that I'm fascinated by the way the competition has been engineered to maximise exposure for Samsung. There are some serious technical problems with the way they have implemented the diary system itself, but as a concept it's very interesting and probably a good indicator of the sorts of promotions we'll see more of in future as companies start to gain some understanding of what web 2.0 and social networking actually means. So please vote for me! I'll send you a postcard from London if I win ;-) Oh yeah, and you can find the competition site at www.samsungpeople.com.au.
>> Into the final round for Samsung's vlog competition
Woot! I just heard that I'm one of the 10 finalists in the "Samsung People" video blogging competition, which means they'll be sending me an MX-10 flash camcorder in the next day or two and then I need to spend the next 6 weeks creating a video blog using it. The ultimate winner will be decided by a public vote for the most interesting vlog, so when the time comes I'll expect YOU to be voting! Yes, I'll be in the intarwebs examining the packets with a magnifying glass just to make sure. Now I just need to find a bunch of things to do little videos about. I can feel some serious hardware hacking coming on... ;-)
>> Replacement for the NSLU2?
One of the most interesting little devices in the last couple of years was the NSLU2, which was originally intended to act as a "head unit" to connect USB disks to a network so they can be used as network-attached storage. However, it very quickly became a favorite geek hacking platform because it's basically just a tiny Linux-based computer. With ethernet, 2 x USB ports, flash memory, and very low power it was great for connecting random devices up to a network. But now they've stopped making them, and I'm in mourning. So I've spent quite some time hunting around for an equivalent device and I can't find one. The closest thing would be something like a wireless access-point that's been modified to run OpenWRT or a trimmed-down Debian, but then I'd be paying extra $$$ for the wifi hardware (that I really don't want) and they don't have regular USB "A" connectors. Any suggestions, Lazyweb?
>> Old friends and superconductors
Back when I started year 7 at St Michael's Grammar one of my classmates was a kid from Latvia named Viktor who arrived speaking very little English but rapidly picked it up and became one of my best friends during my school years. He then moved to Germany and due to certain circumstances that I can't go into I lost touch with him and had no idea where he was for about 19 years.
Then thanks to the miracle of Facebook we found each other again a few weeks ago and discovered we were living only about 30 minutes apart so we got together for a BBQ where we had a great time swapping stories about the missing years.
One of the little bits of memorabilia that Vik had on file was this article from "Computing Australia" magazine published on October 12th, 1987:
(Click it to see a larger version)
The relevant article is the top one about the kids making a superconductor, but I was so amused by the fact that it was right above the OS/2 update story that I didn't trim it down!
In typical journalistic fashion they not only got the school wrong in the photo caption (it was students from St Michaels, not Upwey High) but also got the names all mixed up. That's me right in the middle with the Elton John glasses and the enormous hair, and Vik is just to the left with safety glasses on. And yes, that's liquid nitrogen that Helen is pouring out of a thermos flask without wearing gloves - you'd never see that today!
I loved that project. It was done outside of the regular school program with one of our physics teachers just keeping an eye on things, but otherwise we were left to ourselves. We were given access to whatever school facilities we needed and the teachers turned a blind eye to us not turning up to class while we babysat the material in shifts during the cooling process. I even fell asleep in one of my classes after being up all night logging the furnace temperature every few minutes, and the teacher just let me sleep with my head on the desk and then woke me up when it was time to go to the next class.
One of the raw materials (either Yttrium or Barium, I can't remember which) was quite hard to obtain and we had to get it shipped down from some university in NSW. I went off to Spencer St station with one of the other students to collect the parcel that had been sent down by train, and it felt like we were Mission Impossible agents. Exciting stuff when you're a 16 year-old geek.
One of the tricks to making 1-2-3 superconductor is controlling the cooling curve very accurately, so one of my contributions was writing a little Basic program on an Apple IIe to generate a table showing the optimum temperature at regular intervals so we could read the actual furnace temperature with a thermocouple and adjust it during the 14 hour cooling cycle. We set shifts and sat there for hours watching the temperature and tweaking the furnace to make it match the optimum cooling curve.
It was all worth it in the end and definitely one of my happiest memories from school.
>> Using a Canon HV30 with FOSS tools
I've been having fun with the HV30 but had a bit of trouble getting footage off it. The camera is a bit light on when it comes to bundled software: basically MacOS and Windows tools for getting still images off it, and that's all. No video editing software at all. Even though I personally prefer to use open-source software whenever possible there are still times that I resort to starting up a Mac to get something specific done. This was one of those times I assumed that it would just be easier on the Mac so I fired up an old Power Mac G4 with iMovie. Epic fail. The Mac was only running MacOS 10.3.9 and the version of iMovie included is too old to support high-def video, and it wouldn't even recognise that the camera existed at all. It would probably have worked with iMovie2 on MacOS 10.5, but that's extra $$$ I don't have. Turns out I already had everything I needed on Ubuntu and shouldn't have even bothered starting up the Mac! All I had to do was plug the camera into the FireWire port, put it into playback mode (but not actually start playback), and:
dvgrab -f hdv -advgrab then starts the camera automatically and saves all the clips to disk as .m2t files. The "-f hdv" tells it to use high-def mode, and the "-a" is for auto-split so each clip on the camera is saved as a separate file. If you don't get any output check permissions on /dev/raw1394 and put yourself in the group with r/w privileges and you should be all set. FOSS wins again!
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