Unboxing the MintChip
Royal Canadian Mint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Royal Canadian Mint(RCM) has sponsored the MintChip Challenge 2012 in an effort to attract developers to the idea of developing software for the MintChip and giving away their best financial application ideas, basically, for free (on the long-shot that you are one of the few who win).
Starting April 1st, 2012, they began mailing out physical MintChip developer kits for up to 500 contestants (which will likely be an order of magnitude more actual developers involved when you count those who will inevitably work on larger teams).
Since Digital Currencies and related technologies have long been on my radar as a major business opportunity area, as well as a personal interest of mine in terms of how they work, it was only natural to apply for a kit. Today, mine finally arrived!
Contained in the package:
- USB-microSD reader with MintChip software pre-installed
- 2 MintChip MicroSD cards (aka. the MintChips themselves)
- 2 SD-microSD card readers (paired with MintChips; one can act as sender, one as receiver)
- Brief instructions on how to find your $100 balance for each MintChip (but no URLs, of course!)
- The package itself has a punch-out Door Hanger on the back
Popcorn.js + Embedded Video = Semantically Enhanced Video Content
Popcorn.js is an incredibly useful framework for adding timing-based events and/to Semantic metadata to rich content.
Tear gas used against OWS protesters - Image via Wikipedia
According to Mozilla: “Popcorn makes video work like the web. We create tools and programs to help developers and authors create interactive pages that supplement video and audio with rich web content, allowing your creations to live and grow online.”
With it, you could even re-create VH1′s famous “popup video” or MuchMusic’s Video-on-trial effect.
Cross-Platform Social Media Sharing Tool
Image via Wikipedia
Social media has taken over the web (for now) and the name of the game is sharing, something legislation like SOPA and PIPA just didn’t seem to understand. Rather than figuring out a new economic model based on the reality of sharing on the web, that rewards this type of activity (which is essentially just a more trackable form of “word-of-mouth” advertising, the best kind of promotion for any product, service or brand), instead these legislative measures simply try to take us back to the stone-age by applying a “copyright theft” label to anything as mundane and innocent as posting a link to potentially copyrighted materials. Well, whether bureaucrats and greedy corporate execs approve of the idea or not, the culture of sharing that the internet has bred is definitely here to stay!
In these days of non-stop distractions and the constant bombardment of messages towards the average internet user, you (i.e. your website, or your brand) absolutely have to have a presence at least somewhere in the endless streams of information available via the leading social media sources. That’s not just the typical “Social Media marketer” hype but a sadly true statement. Believe me, I really wish it weren’t true, but just look at these figures and the infographic to the right showing time spent logged in to the major Social Networks and Social Media sites:
Here is where I should admit that I could have just started off this post with saying “use a third party sharing service” and been done with it. Let me clearly state now that yes, I do realize there are many services out there that can provide you this kind of utility out-of-the-box, within a few clicks and simply agreeing to their terms then completing the sign up. The two that come to mind are ShareThis and AddThis (both of which I have no personal interest or stake in, aside from having been a user of each in the past, on different sites).
However, with any third party service, you are effectively giving them access to your data, and depending on the amount of code involved in running their solutions, may also be opening up potential security risks by including third-party JavaScript. Last but not least, and most significantly, as with any third party service, you never want to rely on them too much. I’ve learned this the hard way, especially of late with Google’s increasingly frequent acquisitions of promising startups, which turn out to be buy-to-fry (as in buy to remove a competitor’s product from the market completely), or buy to discard (otherwise leave to collect dust or stop adding new features but keep a service running, in order to prevent any future direct competition). Two that come to mind are Aardvark (a community-powered Question & Answer service) and Apture (a community blogging and website enhancement tool), the former of which is still alive thus falls into the “collect dust” pattern, and the latter of which was discontinued to be integrated into the Google behemoth or lost to the annals of internet history forever.
Also, expect a similar post to this one discussing how to build a simple Apture alternative next month!
Sharing Tools and Badges are organized by content type below:
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iScroll with HTML5 Video and Pause/Resume
Image via Wikipedia
iScroll 4 is the latest version and release of an excellent content slider-type JavaScript component by Matteo Spinelli. While one may argue that content sliders are a dime a dozen, iScroll differs in the fact that it has full support for all the main WebKit for iOS gestures including pinch/zoom, pull-up/pull-down, smooth scrolling and screen orientation resizing; while also allowing customizable scrollbars, automatic carousels, and much more.
Out of the box though, the automatic scrolling takes some hacking to get working right with an interactive component (such as an HTML5 or Flash video player), as if you activate the scrolling on an interval, it will continue to scroll even when a user is trying to interact with some component inside the active list item. To get around this, you’ll have to temporarily deactivate the scrolling and then reactivate it when the user has finished interacting.
Here is an example, starting with the basic HTML structure:
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Parser for XMLTV format and SchedulesDirect data
Image via Wikipedia
For a long time now, I’ve been a paying customer of SchedulesDirect, and by that token their parent company Zap2it (now a Tribune Media Services company).
Recently, I’ve started publishing my own personal Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) here on BCmoney MobileTV in an accessible format:
BC$ EPG
One of the secondary goals of my MobileTV project has always been to be able to provide all XMLTV users a venue to easily access and conveniently plan/schedule their TV viewing via the web, on a variety devices (i.e. mobiles/tablets/desktop computers).
Soon I’ll be adding in a User Management feature that allows you to signup for SchedulesDirect and synch your account through BC$, and most importantly, protect your EPG and viewing data by your username and password (this is required to meet the SchedulesDirect usage terms and privacy policy).
I found that GET requests are not supported so technically the Tribune Web Service must still be following the SOAP 1.1 not SOAP 1.2 standard which specifies both GET and POST are acceptable as long as the SOAP request enveloppe is passed via URL.
Since that is not supported, you have to use POST and it also has to have the BASIC authentication information included in the header in the exact pattern:
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BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.