Last week, I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Below is a video of some footage that I took on the floor. Unfortunately, my microphone adapter broke so I was not able to hold any interviews - gotta get that fixed for next year!
Also, I've embedded a list of Tweets that I shared if you weren't following the action last week. Check it out! If you can't see the tweets below, click here.
Do you own a Nintendo Wii U system? If so, a new app named TVii is available to you. The app promises to integrate your cable with internet streaming services such as Hulu and Amazon Instant Video (Netflix is arriving in early 2013).. It's a great attempt, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Ideally, the service should allow you to search and browse for shows that you like and easily watch new or old episodes regardless of where they actually reside. In practice ... it has a few kinks that need to be worked out.. The interface is SLOW when accessing content, since it actually closes TVii and launches a separate Hulu / Amazon app to watch the content. All in all, it takes a good minute of waiting, which is just too much in this era of tablets. Many people would rather just pick up a remote and get instant gratification.
If you can't see the Hulu and Amazon video below, click here.
Nintendo does a much better job with its Sports application, which allows real time tracking of basketball and football, complete with social networking integration.
I went to college for electrical engineering, which means that I made a lot of things blow up and risked electrocuting myself on my daily basis. Unfortunately even though I grew up as a geek, college was the first time that i ever interacted with one of these devices.
Luckily, parents today have much greater choices to engage their children in the wonders of electronics. Littlebits is an awesome device playground for young children that I wish I had as a kid. As a matter of fact, I'll likely order one and review here because it looks very cool, and much more user friendly then what I had to use ten years ago.
If you can't see the video below, click here.
One thing I really hate about airports is never being able to find an open outlet to charge your devices. There's always one random outlet located in a far off gate. To top it off, its usually not near a seat, so you have to sit on the dirtiest floor imaginable.
Another thing that disappoints me about most airports is having to pay for Wi-Fi. After paying for the cost of a ticket, transportation to the airport, baggage checking fees, and the ungodly price of horrible airplane food, I hate having to pay another fee.
Check out how St Louis Lambert Airport ranks in outlets and Wi-Fi in the video below! If you can't see it, click here!
Yup, it's me. High school was awesome.
I've been a huge fan of MIT's online OpenCourseWare initiative. For 10 years, MIT has made several of its engineering courses (and a few others in the Sloan business school) available online free of charge. Impressively, it was more than just a few PDFs - there was lecture videos, lab notes, problem sets, and exams. It was truly an interactive way to learn for those of us proactive enough to seek out information online.
Now, Harvard and MIT are teaming up to offer free online courses. Similarly, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganan are also planning to offer free online courses. The two groups are using different companies, which will bring the competition needed to truly flesh out the best way to offer information online. The best thing about these efforts is that they will be actual courses, which will be graded either by professors, peers or crowdsourcing. While I doubt that you'd be able to use these for any actual course credit outside of the involves university, it's still a great idea. Just think about what this can look like a generation from now.
Hopefully, universities will be as inventive as TED, an educational video site, is when it comes to interactive educational video. They've just unveiled a great way to mix and match segments of videos as well as add annotations, quizzes, and other parts to create a product customized for a specific audience. This is great because sometimes it can be a pain to send someone a video and mention what part they should pay attention to - with this solution, the video itself can be as brief and contain the relevant text itself. Cool stuff!
Here's to using technology to help improve education! And for free!
