Kevin J Edwards

Webcasting live from Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF 2011) on Monday, September 12, 2011 @ 10am PDT – San Francisco, CA.

IDF is where people from every part of the technology world gather to hear about Intel’s latest advances and witness its vision for the future first-hand. With hundreds of sessions, keynote presentations from top Intel leaders, and a strong set of sponsoring organizations from across the industry, IDF provides a rare chance to engage and learn across the entire compute continuum.

For over a decade IDF has been Intel’s premier conference, helping to shape the direction of tomorrow’s technology. Attend IDF 2011, and see where tomorrow’s technology will take you.

Bookmark this page, or embed this player on your site/blog. We’ll update this player with the live webcast on September 12. We’re now showing highlights from Research@Intel:

IDF2011 Live from ConnectedSocialMedia.com:

Part1 of 4: Dreams, Work & Gansta’ Geeks – will.i.am and Brian David Johnson

From my Monney Car Audio in Redwood City Yelp Review:

Price: 5 out of 5
Friendliness: 5 out of 5
Service: 5 out of 5
Knowledge: 5 out of 5

Monney Car Audio is located at:
2001 Middlefield Road
Redwood City, CA 94063-2830
(650) 299-9991

I had a great experience with this place. Really, just as perfect for service as you can get.

I stopped in on a Monday and explained that I had just purchased a car and really wanted iPhone integration. The owner let me walk around and browse to get a feel for the place without sales pressure.

After telling him what I wanted, he gave me a nice low-priced simple solution. Kind of a “start here” solution. It was pretty inexpensive, but I wanted to find out what other options there were, and if I could possibly afford a killer system.

I was walked through all the options all the way up to the top of the line. I can’t emphasize enough how “no-pressure” there was on this. There was no BS “you need this” or “you have to add that”. He listened to the things that mattered to me, and finally suggested a couple of different models for me to chose from. Not once did he try to upscale me on things I didn’t want or need. For example, the speakers were just fine.

I asked how soon I could get it installed, and he said I could come by the next morning at 10am for same day service. This was great, and I told him I wanted to do my homework and come back if still interested. Still no pressure, he said I could come by or call if I had any questions.

I did a ton of research. I printed out everything I wanted and what the cheapest prices were online. I read online reviews on the products I was interested in, and all the tips and tricks for getting the best out of them.

The next day I returned, much later than when I said I would, and he greeted me warmly. We went over the pricing, and everything seemed perfectly fair and reasonable. My car is a Mercedes, so I really wanted to make sure the work done was first rate.

Here’s where they really deserve a top score: He knew all the insides and outs of both my car and of the stereo. All the research I had done online that was very specific to my car and stereo was all stuff he knew like the back of his hand. I can’t emphasize how important this is. You can have your equipment installed by someone who’s reading the instructions, or you can have it installed by someone who not only reads the instructions but also researches online all the details and issues others have had and has done enough work to know how to do things right. Monney does.

I had other equipment I wanted pulled. Monney was able to do this and still have the car look like new. I really appreciated the attention to detail here.

Although I was really late, it wasn’t a problem. I was offered a ride and a rental car while they worked on it. When I returned, the stereo was perfectly installed without problem and Leo himself went through how the stereo works and waited to see if I had any questions. One problem was with my iPhone itself (Bluetooth), and he knew how to resolve it quickly.

I couldn’t be happier with all of this.

The quality of the work was top-notch.
The in and out was incredibly fast.
They were very knowledgable and friendly.
The *total* price for what I got was better than what I found when I shopped around.

The bottom line, is that there’s a reason why this shop has been so successful in this location as long as it has.

From Connected Social Media, it’s Inside IT:

The Tomorrow Project – New show with Intel Futurist Brian David Johnson is now being syndicated on Connected Social Media. Really cool stuff coming up!

These videos can be downloaded on ConnectedSocialMedia.com

These can also be downloaded on iTunes

Cool stuff happening at the Intel Science and Technology Center at UC Berkeley

Connected Social Media will be broadcasting live from Research@Intel on Tuesday, June 7, 2011. Here’s the player. It’s currently showing clips from last year, but will go live with new coverage on June 7.

For years now, it’s been unfortunate that Eye-Fi doesn’t make a Compact Flash (CF) version of their Eye-Fi camera cards for professional DSLR cameras that lack the consumer appropriate SD card slots.

However, the latest Eye-Fi cards do work with proper SD/CF adapters in CF based DSLR cameras, at least the set of items I have work fine:
Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera

Eye-Fi Pro X2 8 GB Class 6 SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-8PC

SD/SDHC/SDXC to High-Speed Extreme UDMA mode CF Type II Adapter support 16/32GB and over 64GB Sells for under $15.

I think the key to making this work is the adapter. Not all adapters are created equal, and this one appears to be pretty fast, and doesn’t block the WiFi signal. I’ve seen numerous comments from others saying the Eye-Fi won’t work in the Canon 7D, or other DSLRs that are CF based. Hopefully this clears up some confusion, especially when it comes to what’s needed in a Compact Flash Adapter.

The SDHC Eye-Fi card has a max speed of 6MB/s (48mbps), which is too slow for 1080p on the Canon 7D, but plenty fast for taking pictures (either not in burst mode, or for short bursts).

The Direct Mode of of the Eye-Fi works great, and is really easy to set up if you understand the basics of what an ad-hoc network is. Better yet, the Eye-Fi app is free for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

Pictures transfer really fast over 802.11n between the Eye-Fi and your iOS device, but will also transfer just fine over 802.11b/g.

Images that get transferred show up in the Eye-Fi iOS app and in the “Camera Roll” photo album. The Eye-Fi app is multitask and push enabled, which means you can have images stream over to your iOS device automatically, and get little badge alerts when they arrive.

It gets better…

You can set up your social networks and photo services like Facebook and Flickr with your Eye-Fi account, so images can go directly from your camera to your iPhone and then over 3G be sent automatically to the sites you want. This also includes having them sent via FTP to your blog or website. All of this can also be manually or semiautomatically set up.

A nice companion app would be Adobe Photoshop Express, also free in iTunes. You can use this app to crop and apply all kinds of effects before uploading to wherever you’d like.

If you think about the workflow here for a second, it’s really pretty cool. Imagine being somewhere and having that perfect scene for a nice Facebook profile update. You can take the picture with your DSLR, transfer it quickly to your iPhone, crop and adjust the image, and then upload to Facebook over 3G, or pretty much anywhere with any number of apps and services.

This could also work well for client previews. Of course if there’s WiFi at the location, you don’t need to be in Direct Mode (the ad-hoc network) and can send the images even faster by going directly to the Internet from the camera where a client could be reviewing the shoot in progress.

I would imagine the other Eye-Fi X2 cards work as well, and that they work in the Canon 5D MKII as well has other DSLRs. I’ll be testing other CF cameras out as I get access to them. Meanwhile, the Eye-Fi X2 Pro is working well in other SDHC based cameras such as the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V and the Canon SD4000is.

Actually, most of this trip was around Europe, and it mirrored much of the trip I took in March with my iPhone and rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com.

Besides going into Africa and the Canary Islands / Madeira, there were a couple of differences between this trip and my Europera 2010 Tour. One difference is that I traveled this time with my girlfriend who decided not to rent a SIM from iPhonTrip.com (she came to regret this). By having her tour with just her AT&T SIM, we were able to see the differences very clearly.

Another difference was that we both had iPads with us along with the iPhones. As before, I also had my MacBook Pro. I was able to tether my iPad and my MacBook Pro to my iPhone using the rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com, and a few times also let my girlfriend tether her iPad and iPhone to help save costs.

Additionally this trip was different in that we traveled by boat, car, and ship in addition to taking the train like the last trip. Here’s the map of our trip:

You can see, we traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Venice, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Genova, San Remo, Monaco, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez, Marsaille, Arles, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Gibraltar, Tangiers, Seville, Lisbon Cádiz, Seville, Casablanca, Agadir, Gran Canaria, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Madeira, and Frankfurt.

This trip, there were only two times that I could not connect with my iPhoneTrip.com SIM:
1) The Chunnel (under water tunnel between England and France).
2) While SCUBA diving a ship wreck in the Canary Island.

So ya, other than not working under water 😉 I was always able to get a connection, more often than not, a much better connection than WiFi at the hotels.

I could connect in every other country. The data rates were all incredibly fast. In the end, I used multiple Gigabytes of data, and it cost me thousands of dollars less than what my girlfriend spent using international roaming via AT&T.

While the money savings was great, and significant, the connectivity was what I really cared about. I can’t make trips like this unless I can connect at all times and work on the go. Whether it was compiling a report in Rome, or having a conference call as I crossed the Straight of Gibraltar, I was able to work along the way without having to pause my trip so I could run back to a hotel and work.

I mentioned the driving aspect of this being different. The issue here is that connectivity while driving across foreign countries is extremely helpful for navigation as well as translating foreign signs and finding good places to stop to eat.

One thing that’s really fun when using the iPhoneTrip.com SIM is that “it just works”. You can look at your iPhone and watch the carrier logo just automatically switch over.

This was another magnificent trip that I couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like without my iPhone along with the rented SIM from iPhonTrip.com.

If you’d like to see the photos from my iPhoneTrip check out my photo albums on Facebook.