I was at the latest Mash Up event in London last night, all about Identity 2. It was a very informative evening, the panel were excellent, and it was well worth the trip. On the train on the way back I was reflecting on what was covered in the evening, and some of the comments around identity theft, anonymity etc. For some reason I got to thinking about VPEX (virtual personality extension), and figured that as our identity extends into virtual space, then there is no reason to expect that these extensions would not also be prone to parallel afflictions to those in the real world.
The panel’s closing comment was along the lines that privacy is fast becoming an endangered thing, and there is no way to hold back the tide. Seeing as our every move online is tracked and logged (somewhere), then surely that can lead in some to a real sense of “claustrovobia”, a fear of being trapped, of not being able to escape virtual surveillance. Our virtual personality cannot go out the door without being monitored, which leads to a sense of diminishing freedom. I am sure a more general set of virtual afflictions will one day be diagnosed and catalogued, but it seems that “vobias” are a good place to start. After all, we are moving into a whole new world and there are many unknowns to concern ourselves with.
I was very privileged to be invited by Microsoft’s Jason Langridge to demo miniMIXA today. This was at the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 Press Launch at Weber Shandwick’s offices in London.
From what I saw, Windows Mobile 6 looks absolutely fantastic for connectivity, email, look-and-feel, ease of use and so many other things. Jason also gave some excellent demos of a range of software applications, including Deepfish, and a superb business card scanner (Worldcard Mobile from http://www.penpowerinc.com/. The easy way you can filter and use email, get maps and information to local amenities, greatly improved improved outlook calendar and the new Windows Mobile Device Center (the replacement for Active Sync) etc seemed brilliant. I must admit, on the basis of what I saw today, I am looking forward to buying my own WM6 device!
When it came time to demo miniMIXA on WM6, I did it on an HTC Hermes device. This has a 300MHZ processor with VGA screen. I also briefly showed miniMIXA on an older WM5 HTC TyTN device, and explained that the exact same demo/performance I gave on the touch screen device was just as easy to give on the smartphone with keypad.
You can hear a mono recording of the actual demo/talk I gave HERE
The recording features my commentary throughout the demo. The demo mainly covered the MusicDJ mode, but I also gave a quick showing of the simpler RingtoneDJ mode. To go through all of the capabilities would have taken hours, rather than 10 minutes, so I concentrated on showing a live performance! The audio recording of the demo was made on my Micro BR.
There is a video clip of a screen capture of a similar miniMIXA performance now on YouTube, recorded at 22Khz stereo. This is a mix created with the more advanced MusicDJ mode, which is being used by the Slough Young People’s Center.
The video on YouTube also doubles as a quick tutorial on using miniMIXA++ and MusicDJ mode, as it is annotated to show how to do various things.
The audio output created from this mix was recorded to my Micro BR from the headphone output of the PDA, and the screen capture of the video was recorded on my laptop. I used Microsoft Movie Maker 2 to pull the two together. You can see the video clip below or link to it is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBP97NwG4nU.
Jason Langridge (Mr Mobile) of Microsoft UK runs a highly read blog. He has just said that miniMIXA is one of the coolest/greatest Windows Mobile applications that exist. Seems other readers of his blog also agree. Check out his blog entry here!!
