2009-09-08 00:00:00 | Anecdotes Business Marketing

New content opportunities / Creativity / Students

Sometimes I am asked to give guest lectures at universities. Today, many universities have creative media or new media oriented study programs.

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2009-08-19 00:00:00 | Anecdotes History Mobile

Top traveling iPhone apps (extreme mobile traffic rates)

Many years ago I had a bet that I could IRC from the beach in France. I placed my Palm and my Ericsson phone so the infra-red eyes could see each other. I dialed my ISP. 9600 Baud. I launched the IRC client and logged into my favorite channel. It was slow but fun. Until I got my phone bill…

So much has changed. Smart phones. 3G internet. Much better coverage. Great apps and services. Today I use an iPhone. These are my favorite vacation apps:

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2009-08-12 00:00:00 | Anecdotes

High Def

2006. I was asked to demo H.264 HD content to a crowd of broadcasters, cable operators and telecom operators.

Cable companies had just broadcasted the 2006 world soccer games in High Def. It was the first public HD broadcast. MPEG-2 over DVB-C, 19Mbps. They had been able to ship around 10000 HD set top boxes. At that time, H.264 was not that known. The industry still thought they were going to broadcast HD in MPEG-2 at around 15-20Mbps.

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2009-07-30 00:00:00 | Anecdotes History

Pardon my French

1998. Before broadband, we had to let our live encoders use dial-up modems to upstream to our streaming servers. We had eight encoders.

The venue had a telephone system so we had to dial a ’0′ to dial outside the building. But the telephone network caused dropped links. We asked the IT manager to switch our lines to direct outside lines.

We set the encoders to auto redial every xx seconds and went for dinner. When we came back, all encoders still reported disconnects. And we had to get on air within 15 minutes…

So I called the manager but he claimed that he immediately had switched the lines. Then I heard an encoder dial in. And a very, very angry voice came out of the modem.

We had left the extra ’0′ in the dial scripts. Eight encoders had dialed to an existing number in French Guyana every few seconds, for over 1,5 hours… excusez moi! :-)
 

2009-07-30 00:00:00 | Anecdotes History

The C64

The late eighties. One day, I went to a store with some friends. They sold C64′s on their media floor, connected to a huge TV wall. I typed in some code I had written on a paper.

The computer kindly asked visitors to enter their name. And then printed their name with a lot of foul language. Visitors angry. Staff members did not know what to do.

Because we had locked all keys with peak or poke codes. We had fun.