Our Man Inside

Thinking Digital does the conference model really well. It’s a humane accessible version of TED. Small enough to be friendly, big enough to attract the innovators looking for and sharing new ideas.

The Do Lectures do something amazing between a campfire chat and an intimate mini festival. It’s still the most amazing ticketed event I’ve been to and I feel would be extremely difficult to emulate if you were ‘in it for the money’.

SXSW Interactive calls itself a festival but feels to me like the bloated physical manifestation of Facebook. I love the festival model but when it grows for the sole intention to create more profit it becomes monstrously corporate at the expense of heart and soul. If it’s participants can’t see the added value because nothing stands out as amazing on a menu of mediocre. Then it’s just a shanty town of billboards, populated by the bewildered.

If I was going to create something right now, I’d do something similar to the Elevate festival. Set in Graz, Austria, events were ran in all kinds of places from community spaces to the caverns of a hollowed out mountain.

It would start after a lazy breakfast, late enough for conversations and epicurean enjoyment of a shared meal. With more panels than stand up speakers, the audience could see who could talk around their field and not just about their field. A hefty chunk of panel time was given to the floor with statements encouraged as much as questions. The audience switching effortlessly from voyeur to participant.

After the political, environmental & musical discourse came the DJ’s and bands filling laser lit carved rock walls inside the mountain. The music, conversations and partying continued till dawn.

Once again the spaces either side of the timetabled events held immense value. The panels and talks merely catalysing the social side.

We naturally connect with those around us. It doesn’t need to be timetabled in. In fact some people loath the pressured expectation that in between sips of coffee you will be reciting your LinkedIn profile to whomever you can corner or collar in those precious 15 minutes.

I’m not saying the conference model is dead, I just think there is room for more of the intimate festival feel. Less herding from room to room, more of a flow around the attractions.

If you’re looking at assembling a quick and easy gathering of people in order to impart information in a day, then maybe the standard conference model is still for you. Although longevity in the conversations and connections is where I feel value lies.

If you want the ideas planted in the panels and talks to germinate within in your participants minds, let them socialise organically. Take the time to make the space.

Why have a flash of inspiration when it can strobe.

A friend in Kenya emailed me today and told me of a plane crash.

Writing about the death of a pilot I’ve flown with once is bad enough. But now to write about another so soon. Well, I don’t know what to think.

Statistically flying is meant to be pretty safe. The chance of an average American dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11 million. Compared to one in 5000 being killed in a car accident.

These people I knew who died were far from average. Mike Neranzic was an Airship pilot. One of very few. I only spent a little time with him but his passion and skill were obvious.

Captain Moses Lelesit flew a Husky up to three hours a day for the Kenyan Wildlife Service and I was lucky enough to hitch a ride from a dirt airstrip at the Manyani Training School in Tsavo, over to Wilson Airport in Nairobi.

Moses Lelesit was Maasai and proud. Above the game reserves the usual aviation rules don’t apply. Using every inch of airspace he flew surveillance missions on the look out for ivory poachers, as well as watching the migration patterns of the animals.

Sometimes he would have to fly a few feet above the ground. I got to experience this myself. Incredibly exciting yet I always had total confidence in Moses’ skills.

On the trip across Tsavo we were airborne at a thousand feet when Moses called back to me asking what I loved about Africa. I told him the people. Everyone I had met had been amazing. He then asked me if I had any regrets. I thought this a strange question but replied that I would have like to have seen Rhino’s in the wild. We had seen so many animals but the ever elusive, and ever more endangered Rhino had evaded me on every trip I’ve taken into Africa.

He was shocked I’d not seen any. Then he turned to me, smiled, and threw the plane wildly to the left. We banked losing a few hundred feet instantly and he headed in the direction he thought Rhinos might be.

His trained eyes could see animals long before I could even distinguish a tree in the vast expanse below. In no time he was pointing to a large lone Rhino grazing in a clearing. He gained a little height then either cut the engines or dropped to revs to nothing. We were silent. Gliding over the wilds of Africa. Our shadow getting larger, our faces pressed against the cockpit. I followed his gaze and under a tree I saw a family of Rhino, minding their own business oblivious to our presence as we swooped past like a giant bird of prey. Then, I’m sure they heard us as Moses let the engine roar once more and we regained hight before adjusting our course for civilisation.

This was his domain. His playground and I could tell how happy he was to be sharing it.

I will never forget that moment. That day. There are only a few of these moments in my life where I’m conscious that this time may be the only time of it’s kind. That I need to absorb all sensation in order to recall this moment to my children.. grandchildren.. whoever will listen.

I grabbed Moses by the shoulder and shouted thank you.

The email I got today was short. It said:

“mailin to let you in on the unfortunate demise of our pilot cpt lelesit, the one you held an interview with during our combat first aid  course in manyani…he died doing what he loved best…”

Y-Cam Bullet IP camera

I got sent the Y-Cam Bullet last year and then when I moved home it found itself into a box, only to be re-discovered last week.

Cables, adapters, wall/ceiling mount, power lead, optional sun visor etc, all  come in the box.

What's in the box

I had already purchased a Y-cam S in black over 2 years ago (the older model without the micro sd card slot). I used it as a night vision baby monitor and at the time I remember it wasn’t the easiest device to set up as the Mac software from Y-Cam was pretty shoddy.

The new setup application for mac seems to have fixed this and I had the Bullet unpacked set up and operational in a little over 5 minutes.

Having used the smaller Y-cam S in the past I was expecting decent build quality but was a little surprised at the size. It was bigger than I expected and when unscrewing the front to insert the micro SD card I could see the size was not just a result of it’s sturdy IP66 weather proof external case, but this also had to house the chunky Infra Red diodes that give it is night vision capabilities.

So, what can it do..?
It does all the things you would expect from an IP camera. You can view and listen into what ever it is pointing at in real time, from anywhere in the world, through a computer on the web, or a smart phone. There is also a nifty little iPhone app that also works on the iPad.

It has motion detection that you can set up to trigger recording from movement in various regions of it’s sight. When motion is detected, the camera can email you a photo of what’s going on, or record the video to an internal micro sd card that you can view when logged on to the camera’s web page. You can also grab snapshots and record video whilst viewing through the browser.

Screengrab taken through the browser in total dark

It’s IR-cut filter enables true/day night operation so daytime colours are pretty good, it also has power over ethernet (PoE) and as yet un-explored by me (as it is still PC only), 2-way audio. I’d love to be able to talk through the camera from my Mac as this would open up all kinds of possible uses.

Snapshot taken with the iPhone app & reduced to 500px wide

I had a play with the app and whilst viewing you can grab snapshots with a click of the button (see image above). The snapshots drop into your iphone photos gallery. It’s a pretty simple app at the moment and I’d love an update that would enable remote recording and push notifications instead of email. I get a ton of emails a day and would not necessarily see an email notification that the camera had been triggered. I am thinking some kind of ftp push to app hack could be done but not needed if the guys at Y-Cam just update the app. I’m sure more sales would be generated as the great reviews for a fully functioning app rolled in.

(This test clip was recorded through the camera, downloaded remotly through the browser, looked fine on the computer, but seemed to have the audio scraped on upload to youtube.)

The Y-cam records video at a maximum frame rate of 30fps at 640 x 480 with the frame rate automatically adjusting with your internet connection. Stills are taken at the same resolution although I have reduced them to 500px to fit this blog column.

Although I have only used the ethernet connection during set up and then wifi from then on, the camera also has a Digital I/O and 2-way audio connector should you have a more complex monitoring system you want to plug it into.

I like the fact that adding an internal microSD card to the slot enables a local back up option should you not be continually recording the footage to an external hard drive. This also means you can use the camera on it’s own in a remote location and later view the footage via a mobile device with a MiFi, or plug the camera into a PC. This way it is effectively a self contained detection and recording device. As long as it’s powered of course.

As far as I remember there was only PC support originally but now things seem to work much better on a Mac with the video viewed using Quicktime and the motion detection settings adjusted in the browser. This does have to be adjusted using a flash enabled device though so using the iPad for fine tuning the camera is not an option. Once again perhaps a future app update will open up this functionality.

Should you want to get imaginative and use the camera for video conferencing, the Bullet supports up to 16 simultaneous remote users with password protection.

At time of writing the Y-Cam YCBL03 Bullet IP Camera is £270 on Amazon and looking at other options with similar specs, this appears to be the best value for money.

Apart from all the fun to be had just playing with tech like this and of course the usual security uses, I have a couple of other uses in mind. One would be front door monitoring when I’m locked away in my garden office and expecting visitors or post. The other is for the camera to be a kind of digital babysitter for my semi-independent Grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s

I’d like to monitor the times when she uses the kitchen and taylor her care accordingly. The carers at the moment visit three times day but my Gran never seems to be hungry when they are there. They told me that if they knew exactly the time she wanted food and assistance (as She can’t remember) then they can adjust their visit times. With the camera setup temporarily in her kitchen, it can be programmed to record all motion and this would log what my Gran is doing and when. No need for an internet connection as the footage could be stored internally on the microSD card. The footage could be used to see exactly what my Grandmothers needs where and when.

Ideally if a long term solution was needed, via an internet connection my Gran could talk to me through the video camera and me back to her from anywhere in the world. This would need Y-cam to sort out the two way audio feature for the Mac user. If you have any questions on this or the latest developments, perhaps connect on twitter with @YcamSolutions who seem very pleased to answer any questions and who have helped me out immensely with any queries I’ve had.

In Conclusion:

It’s a serious camera worth the money with lots of browser based functionality capable of dealing with all kinds of projects.

I’d happily recommend any camera tech from Y-Cam but take a look at the whole range to ensure you are not buying something over spec’d for your needs. For some of my planned projects the £100 cheaper Y-Cam YCB003 would probably suffice. That said, the Y-Cam Bullet is a solidly built professional IP surveillance camera that works well both indoors and out, night and day, in all weather. It’s great value for money with more features than I’d personally use. I love access via the iPhone app, but it is simple and I’d like to see more app development to cater for the increasing number of Mac users and those working from mobile devices.

Y-Cam Bullet

While visiting friends in the village of Belton, Leicestershire, I experienced a street party …

I took photos on my FujiFilm X100. It’s super discreet and having the fixed lens makes you work that little bit harder to get in close while all the time allowing you to really get to know the focal length. This helps to make ‘shooting from the hip’ less of a hit and miss endeavor.

The street party itself was a sight to see. So many had put in so much work to make the celebration a success.

Me.. Well I can take it or leave it. It made for a fascinating social study though.

I have a very feint memory of a street party to celebrate the Queens silver jubilee  in 1977. It was before I was even at school. I like it when  communities pull together for something that isn’t out of necessity or some kind of emergency. Villages can do so much when they collaborate.

We may never know the Impact social media had in shaping our new rather bewildering government.

Maybe it reached a lethargic non-voting population and changed their minds. Perhaps it taught the party campaigners to engage with more mobile tools in order to rally their troops. Maybe all it did was introduce other channels of communication to the mix.
All I know is it certainly played a part.

Perhaps now with new Natural Language Processing tools for measuring our online sentiment we will finally get an idea of how much of an impact these new media tools are having in the mindset of the general voting public. This is both amazing and scary to me. We seem so desperate to know yet many of us are just having fun. Playing with tech as tools.

It was @Ilicco and Reuters that though it was OK to let the geeks loose with tech in close proximity to the leaders of our parties. And as the security perimeters thinned with each encounter, Brown to Cameron to Clegg.. we would try out more tools and techniques experimenting ways to bring the outside conversations in and to share the conversations we had with everyone. There were times when Ilicco wondered how much trouble we may or may not get into. That said.. I don’t think he ever stopped having fun.

Some of these groundbreaking platforms championed by @Sleepydog lived only during this extreme period of change. His coders would use zero’s and one’s like lego. All the bits are now back in the box. Till next playtime.

It was a social media playground like no other. Mobile phones verses the HD stream. Political pundits verses the twitter stream with in many ways the geeks given free rein.

I’m not sure if we will ever again see such a massive change in communication in such a short space of time. Not to the extent that Reuters championed. It was the beach on which the waves of old and new media crashed ..and we all got wet.

Now everyone and their dog is a ‘Social Media Expert’ the air is muggy with hot air and opinion claiming the right and wrong way to engage using real-time web tools.

In the words of Yoda, “Do or do not… There is no try.”

Participation is the key and feeling free enough to play allows you to subconsciously learn from your mistakes.

The people who were both in the rooms and working remotely in these projects are too many to mention. Perhaps they would like to link in or comment their experiences below.

Some names of note were: @Ilicco, @Sizemore, @Sleepydog, @Loudmouthman, @Kate_Day, @SolobassSteve, @benjaminellis, @MarkJones, @CliveFlint, @Sophiebr

The unquantifiable nature of all this will be just a memory next time round. The tools are coming and although I feel we are a long time away from totally understanding the impact from this kind of exchange, we are getting closer all the time.

If I’m honest it’s the metrics that excite me the least.  Let the practitioners experiment, explore, dance around new ways. For every ten people willing to show the way, there will be ten thousand wanting to sell you the map.

“When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.” ~ Alan Watts

I am @Documentally on Twitter and mostly blog on http://Documental.ly

P.S Lets remind these guys what they promised the people..

My friend Phil wrote to me from Kirkuk, he’s researching this story on the Arab-Kurd situation. It’s slow going, but he summarises it all with one sentence. No one wants to compromise, there’s a low level war already underway and things could get more dangerous in a year or two. All sort of grim.

Rainclouds over Damascus by Phil Sands

For months now he has wanted to get a photo agency together. It’s a collaborative effort between himself, his brother Chris Sands and Emma LeBlanc.

They wanted to start a small independent photo agency (called Makoto) specialising in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – the places they live and work.

The idea grew out of a certain frustration over the photography of which we see more and more, particularly on the internet – Images divorced from context, divorced from the world and, in fact, divorced from any real meaning they might otherwise have had.

Too often photos are not even captioned, and those that are don’t always seem to offer enough explanation. They reduce everything to the 125th-of-a-second that the photo was taken in, without offering any of the before or any of the after.

Without this, the images become very disposable. With the glut of photos out there, it just becomes a morass. Click, click, click your way thoughtlessly through to the next link, the next meaningless photo. Everyone seems preoccupied with the image that punctuates the ‘breaking news’ too concerned to be first to really care about the story.

It’s the opposite of what journalism, or photo journalism, or documentary photography – whatever you want to call it – ought to be.

Calligraphy in Syria by Phil Sands

Phil talked to me of how the conception of ‘Makoto‘ gleaned inspiration from the book ‘Vietnam Inc‘ by the late Philip Jones Griffiths. A man I was fortunate enough to meet at The Frontline Club a few years ago. He says.. “What makes it so important is that his photos were accompanied by these incredible, searing, passionate, insightful explanations. He gave the context. That’s one of the reason it was all so powerful.  In that book Philip Jones Griffiths sets out the marker that we should all aspire to, the standard to aim at.”

I have to agree. The internet should not become a medium for shoving out more photos, at a faster rate, skimming ever more over the surface. It should be a way of accessibly going into more detail, of accessibly providing deeper insight. Micro/rapid blogging still has a place to disseminate but micro blogging should not mean micro context.

Makoto is also something of a reaction against parachute journalism, which has been really rammed home with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A decent number of photographers who were in Iraq for the war (the war that hasn’t actually finished) have now packed up and gone to Afghanistan, as if somehow one war is interchangeable with the next, as if the Afghans are the same as the Iraqis.

There’s surprisingly little commitment to sticking with a story. It’s as if everyone has Attention Deficit Disorder. Either that or photographers are generally on a mission to collect as many visa stamps as possible in their passports.

Makoto wants to make a point of not being like that; Chris Sands has lived in Afghanistan for coming up on five years. Back in 2005 it wasn’t remotely trendy but he was there, doggedly chipping away at his work. Learning about the people and the place. It’s now grabbing all the headlines but presumably it won’t be in a year/two/three/four from now. But he plans to stick with it. Similarly Phil Sands his brother arrived in Iraq in 2003. He has stuck with it since.

I feel that by concentrating on a place, by trying to specialise, it’ll pay dividends in the breadth and depth of their work, in the details. In a simple way that might show through in a photo essay that has images in it spanning two or three years, not one week or one month.

Return of resistance fighter bodies Yarmouk Camp Syria By Phil Sands

There’s also a matter of respect. If you are reporting on a place properly, you come to care about the issues, about the people. It’s hard to walk away from that and, if you’re doing your job properly, perhaps you can’t or shouldn’t walk away. That’s also an old fashioned journalistic axiom that is being abandoned – live on your patch. Try to live as close to the story as you can. How many times are Syria stories reported from Lebanon? One British newspaper used to report Afghanistan from Pakistan, for God’s sake, even though the British Army was (and is) at war there. Why not just report everything from London and have done with it?

So, context and commitment. These are their goals. Time will tell if they succeed in coming anywhere near hitting them.

I remember getting Phil an old Nikon 301 and giving him a five minute lesson on ISO’s before he flew to Iraq for the first time. He has worked wonders with that camera and every camera he has had since.. A wordsmith using pictures the right way.

But that’s the other thing about their photo agency. The key idea is that the narrative behind the photos is as important as the photos themselves. In journalism, what’s the point in a technically perfect photo if it’s just hanging in isolation; at that point it’s just an art object.

We need to know the back story. The subtext. We need the ‘why’ answered. The nasty, irritating, all-important why; that thing that no one much bothers themselves with these days because it just to much like hard work to understand. Again, if the photographer doesn’t understand that, how can the photographs hope to portray it?

This is the reason each photo essay on the site is an essay. They start with a written explanation that anyone looking at the stuff should read. The words say the things the photos cannot. And each photo is captioned. Not in some narrow sense of saying what the picture shows, but by putting it into a context – putting it into a place within the wider narrative whole.

The site is at www.makotophotographic.com Please spread the word.

If we are to protect ‘quality’ journalism when we need it most, we need more sites like this.

I have had a personal wifi hotspot of sorts for a while now. A 3 mobile 3G router and dongle have been taking up a large space in my tech bag whenever I am out and about. If I am near a socket it runs from the mains. If I am mobile or in the middle of nowhere I use a Power Gorilla. It has given me internet access on trains, in cars, at festivals and when in my top box, even on my motorbike.

Although not that compact, it has been an affordable solution as regards to getting a 3G internet connection shared across all my devices, no matter where I may be. With an ever increasing bag of gadgets to lug about though, I’m always looking for ways to minimize my tech burden.

The moment the Novatel MiFi 2352 personal wireless hotspot came through the door I knew things had just got simpler, easier and much more compact.

The Website lists these features:
• Connects up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices simultaneously
• Computers, PDA’s, cameras, music players, personal and game players and more
• Rechargeable Lithium Ion Battery
• GPS- enabled
• Advanced internal antenna system
• NovaSpeed® capable
• Auto-install and auto-connectivity
• 10M (30 ft) range of network coverage

So far I love it. Whether I’m using it with my iPhone, laptop, camera enabled with an Eye-Fi card or all of them together! It takes up little to no space, weighs next to nothing and makes it really easy to give the gift of a wifi connection to those around you, no matter where you may be.

I look forward to the possibility of a future device that can take multiple sims and auto select the carrier with the fastest connection or perhaps even allow streaming across more than one network.

For more information on the MiFi 2352 and other Personal WiFi Hotspot devices by Novatel Wireless, check out their website at http://www.NovatelWireless.com

So here is what the fuss is all about. Finally a low cost hand held HD video camera with a microphone input. I’m yet to get my hands on a Kodak Zi8 for a proper test but I had a quick fondle for a couple of minutes behind the Kodak stand with Jenny Cisney at NYC 140 Conference.

In the dark shadowy corner I shot this very quick video in 720p as the SD card I had to hand was not high speed and couldn’t cope with the fat data rate of the 1080p setting. The camera feels good in the hand. Well made and similar in form to the Zi6.

Already I can see the low light ability is better than that of the previous two models but more importantly I am looking forward to plugging in an external mic and seeing what kind of audio quality is possible.

The specs are as follows:

• Full HD 1080p video
• Built-in image stabilization
• 2.5” color LCD
• Swing out the USB arm to upload, share, and charge
• 5 MP 16:9 widescreen HD still pictures
• Built-in software for editing and uploading
• Compatible with PC and Mac
• Record up to 10 hrs of HD video (20 min per 1 GB at 720p HD at 30 fps) with SD/SDHC card up to 32 GB
• Face tracking technology
• External stereo microphone
• HDMI cable included

I’m thinking that finally camera producers are beginning to understand the importance of decent audio.. more important than picture quality in my opinion. It’s too soon for me to express anything other than relief at the mic input with the Kodak Zi8, but I feel with devices like the Zoom Q3 on the horizon (which is effectively a high quality audio recorder with a camera on it), I feel the goal posts have been moved and video blogging devices are entering a whole new era.

If you suffered watching the video with all the beeps in.. Now you can watch the uncensored version.

There is more information on the Kodak Blog.