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Vimeo Finally Hits Android

// January 28th, 2012 // 3 Comments » // android, cool

It’s no secret that I love Vimeo. I love that it’s so easy to find real, quality videos, without having to wade through all the incessant junk that’s on YouTube*. So, you can imagine that I love even more that Vimeo has a real live Android app now, so I can enjoy it on my phone.

The Vimeo app was announced just before CES, and it is quite fully featured. You can login to your account, view your own videos, and even download them to your phone. Here’s a bullet list from AndroidCentral of the other features:

• Quickly search for videos on vimeo.com
• Easily upload your raw footage in HD
• Pause and resume uploads
• Replace existing videos
• Edit title, description, tags, privacy and credits
• Share with Facebook, Twitter, Email or SMS
• Add your clips to your Groups, Channels and Albums
• Stats on daily plays, likes and comments

Pretty legit. If you have a tablet, it works great for those, too. I would highly encourage anyone interested in finding random but awesome videos to spend an afternoon wandering around in Vimeo. You won’t be disappointed. Here’s a link to my favorites, to get you started.

*not all content on YouTube is trash. It’s just that there is more trash than quality, which makes finding the quality stuff INCREDIBLY difficult.

Content Creation, Done Well

// August 29th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // blogging

I have many different hats that I wear in my current position as the Social Media Community Manager at RadioShack, but the biggest one is probably that of content creator. I’m responsible for the content that gets published via our social channels, including The Shack Blog, as well as our Twitter and Facebook accounts. With so many other brands/sites dominating the tech landscape, it’s vital that the content I create is unique and fresh, which is much more difficult than you would think.

That’s probably why this post from AndroidAndMe really stood out to me. It’s called ‘TouchPad mod: a wall-mounted Twitter stream. Come join us!. The HP TouchPad is a webOS-based tablet that suffered an unfortunately short life-span. HP essentially EOL’d it after a mere 6 weeks on the market. The price plummeted, and enterprising individuals began buying them as quickly as they could. There are a few projects to erase the webOS platform from the device, and instead get it to run Google’s Android platform.

None of that is really pertinent to this post, though. The impressive thing is that AndroidAndMe.com were able to take something that’s quite buzzworthy lately (the HP TouchPad) that has no connection to their core audience (it doesn’t run Android) and create a useful, entertaining post from it. I read the whole thing, and was really interested in how they accomplished this.

Even better, they integrated social media directly into the post. If you read the whole post, you’ll notice that there is a Tweet box in the middle with a pre-populated message allowing you to participate in the whole project (while tweeting all your friends about AndroidAndMe’s Twitter account, conveniently). It’s just plain brilliant.

They also integrated Ustream.tv to live-stream the whole thing, so you can participate on-the-fly and in the moment.

And all this around a discontinued product that’s not even directly related to their core readership. Brilliant. As you create content, the bar has been raised to take virtually any topic and make it interesting to your readership while also giving them plenty of ways to engage with and share your content with their friends.

Qik Keeps On Improving, Adds Premium Features To Android

// August 25th, 2011 // No Comments » // android, cool, Family, technology

When the whole notion of streaming live video from your phone to the Internet came around, there were basically two companies doing it – Flixwagon and Qik. Both got their start on Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones – in fact, I even live-streamed my wedding using Nokia N82s, the Nokia DT-22 tripod, and Flixwagon.

Unfortunately, Flixwagon is pretty much gone at this point, but Qik has continued to skyrocket in functionality and popularity. In the U.S., Qik has become the default video calling solution for most Android-powered smartphones, with even carriers such as T-Mobile and Sprint touting the app as being pre-loaded on the latest and greatest smartphones. The leap from video-streaming to video-calling has also proved to be a great move for Qik.

I use Qik on a daily basis now, especially with a new baby in the house – it’s super easy to video chat with grandparents, or with my wife when I’m away on business. There’s almost no setup required – when my mom asked about it, all I did was spell out ‘Q-I-K’ for her and 15 minutes later, she was video calling me from her Android-powered smartphone! She was able to download and install the app and get an account setup that quickly and easily.

I’m pretty jazzed for Qik, who recently announced that they have over 10 million users across all its supported platforms (iOS, Android, Symbian), and are bringing their Premium services to the Android platform, finally. Qik Premium is $4.99/month and offers unlimited video storage as well as the ability to record and send HD and 3D video (if your phone can handle it, of course). I’ll gladly sign up – more for the ability to show support to the company who keeps me visually connected with my family, but also for the extra features.

If you haven’t used Qik, I would highly recommend it. It’s brilliant, and it’s cross-platform, so Android users can easily call iOS users, and vice versa. Qik has also been purchased by Skype, so hopefully in the future we’ll see integration so that you can easily call your Skype contacts with Qik. I’m also hoping that Skype lets the Qik team build the next version of the Skype mobile application – Qik is MUCH better on a phone in terms of resources and power management.

Congrats, Qik, keep up the great work!

7 Tips For Better Swyping

// August 4th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // android, technology

I’m a huge fan of Swype. I’ve mentioned them here before, in how they address the thriving development community, but I also think Swype is an excellent example of a new way to input text that my kids will probably use. Thankfully, more and more Android-powered smartphones are shipping with Swype pre-installed, which is awesome.

If you’re not familiar, Swype is an onscreen keyboard solution that lets you simply draw a line to connect the letters in the word you’re trying to type, rather than hunting-and-pecking at each individual letter. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you’re there, it’s tremendously helpful, especially for typing while you’re walking or moving, as you don’t need to be quite so accurate.

However, one thing that I didn’t know is that Swype actually has a handful of other useful things you can draw on the keyboard to make things easier. Here’s a quick video from CNET highlighting a few of these cool shortcuts. I know I’ll be using them more, now that I know about them.

Are you a Swype fan, or do you prefer another keyboard?

Tablets Struggle To Be Shared

// July 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // android, Family, Mobile, technology

Tablets are finally starting to take hold in the marketplace, mostly due to the fact that we’re finally using an upscaled mobile operating system, as opposed to trying to cram a desktop operating system on them, in my opinion. Either way, one of the biggest issues is that of multiple users.

While most of my friends each have their own laptop, there are still plenty of households in the U.S. and abroad that have a shared machine with at least two different users. The tablet seems like it would be shared even more, due to the more portable experience (you can literally pass it around, as opposed to a laptop, which is a bit more involved to hand-off). Unfortunately, these mobile platforms that today’s tablets are being built on do not usually understand the concept of multiple users.

With Android, dang near everything on the device is tied to a unique username and password. Apps are downloaded, email, contacts, calendar synced, the list goes on. Apple’s iPad is the same way – purchases from the App Store are tied to a specific account, as is Facetime and other Apple services/apps.

Fortunately, that’s starting to change on both platforms, though it’s interesting to note the origins of the change.

As expected, on the iPad, multiple-user support is now available, provided you’ve gone down the back alley and jailbroken your iPad. The implementation is quite nice, as you can see in this video:

With Android, however, Google has been adding support for multiple accounts in various apps (Gmail, etc) one by one. The latest addition is in the newly-revamped Android Market. Users will find that they can easily swap between accounts with a handy popup menu, allowing you to have apps from more than one account installed at the same time.

Image via: Android Central

Of course, the Android solution isn’t full-on user switching, but it would be quite easy to have an option to confirm the user from the lockscreen, so that when you pick up the tablet and turn on the screen, you’re presented with a list from which you simply pick your name. A few seconds of loading and you would be presented with your customized experience, including homescreens and shortcuts and all.

Do you share a laptop/tablet in your home? How do you accomplish this right now?