Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Although I have a great love for Evernote, the loss of I Want Sandy is still fresh in my mind. Combine that with Wired’s report that Ma.gnolia suffered major data loss that was referred to as “catastrophic” and the closure of Google Notebook, one can’t help but wonder how safe it is to keep items in the “cloud”.
But… You didn’t pay for it!
This seems to be a recurring comment when such applications die. We didn’t pay for Sandy or Notebook, why should we be upset that they’re gone? Perhaps the internet has fundamentally changed the way we think of consumption. Just because we don’t contribute directly to Google or MSN or Facebook when we use Gmail or Live Messenger, doesn’t mean we’re not contributing at all. Without the network effect of many users congregating around a certain service, where would the ad dollars be?
On the flip side, just because you paid for a service, doesn’t mean it won’t go under. It happens in the physical world, the online world is no different.
Portability
When Google Notebook announced it would be discontinuing support for the service, Evernote quickly rose to the occasion to provide easy exporting of users’ Notebooks to Evernote. Perhaps the issue of service shuttering wouldn’t be as tragic if such movements were the norm, but what do you do when your data is lost, as in the case of Ma.gnolia? How often do you want to do a sync between Google Bookmarks, Delicious and Ma.gnolia? Especially considering their ways of tagging bookmarks are different? Is there a need for a common “standard”?
Looking forward
I feel a little more comfortable with companies like Google and Evernote because unlike Sandy which was a one man team, they’re actual companies with a team or teams of people. But that doesn’t put my mind totally at ease that one day, a cloud service I rely heavily on will lose stuff of extreme value to me, and I would have no idea what to do next.
What are you doing to safeguard yourself from such an occurrence? What would you do if Gmail lost half your emails? If Remember The Milk lost all reminders more than a month into the future? What if your videos chronicling your life over the last six months disappeared on Vimeo or YouTube? Do you avoid such situations entirely by still relying on paper and/or a local hard disk?
Tags: catastrophic, data loss, delicious, evernote, facebook, gmail, google notebook, i want sandy, live messenger, magnolia, msn, portability, remember the milk, safety of keeping data in the cloud, vimeo, wired, youtube
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Monday, September 1st, 2008
So I’ve been raving about the Flip Cam over on my personal blog along with some nifty videos of my travel so far, but I haven’t really talked about it much, so here comes my review.
I first found out about the Flip Cam from a Hack College video podcast and was immediately impressed. The best things about the Flip Cam are its size and ease of use. It’s about the size of a handphone and I’ve had it for almost a week and have not looked at the user manual once. You switch it on, press record and press stop. End of story. It’s so nice to have a no frills piece of equipment these days.
The one thing that I was a little bit hesitant about at first was the size of the lcd screen. You can see it’s pretty tiny, especially compared to what I’m used to on my 2.5inch Nikon D40x, 3inch Canon Ixus 860 IS and 3.5inch iPod Touch. However, with more use I’ve realised that the screen is meant for little more than making sure you have all the objects you want to capture in your view, because the Flip Cam’s video quality is so high that it takes care of the rest. In other words, as long as the object of interest can be seen on the lcd screen, even if it looks like an ant, you don’t have to worry.
Memory-wise, the Flip can hold an hour of video. At first I thought it didn’t sound like much, so I decided to keep all my videos on it and see how long before I run out of space. Fastforward a week later and I’ve barely used 10 minutes of video. Pretty amazing! That said, I don’t think you could go on a long trip without laptop to transfer stuff to because sooner or later you will probably run out of space.
The other thing that bugged me was the lack of batteries. The original Flip Video used AA batteries whereas the Mino uses an internal battery charged by your USB port. However, seeing as it’s unlikely I (or for that matter most bloggers) will go more than a week without connecting our gadgets to our laptops or computers, it’s safe to assume that the battery can be easily charged. And it only takes a couple of hours.
Brian also alerted me to the fact that the Mino has a omnidirectional mic attached compared to the older versions of the Flips. That means that it picks up sound from all direction, not just in front of the camera. That makes it great for interviews or running commentary as well (as you can see from my videos)
All in all, I think the Flip Cam is a fantastic piece of equipment. Sure my Canon Ixus 860 IS can take videos, but I’d much rather save the space for pictures, and use the Flip for dedicated video taking. It’s also much smaller which makes it easier to store in my pocket for quick retrieval. I think this is going to be a great accessory for the next Social Media Breakfast | Singapore, PodCamp Montreal and other fun stuff while I’m up here in Canada.
Until I can bring it home and show all of you in Singapore, you can check out my videos on Vimeo, where I’m now a proud member of the Flip Cam owners group!
Tags: canon ixus 860 is, conferences, flip cam mino, flip cam owners group, hack college, ipod touch, nikon d40x, podcamp montreal, social media breakfast singapore, travel, video recording, vimeo
Posted in Reviews | 10 Comments »
