Phonetagger

Using Evoca, I left this message to test it out and review the service. Evoca makes it easy to post your audio content to the internet. Once it’s on their site, I can copy code and paste it into my blog, just like this! As an added bonus, they’ve set up phone numbers I can call in to leave my audio podcast message from Canada as well as the States. Right now they are only set up to automatically cross post to Blogger, but they promise to add cross posting my audio to other blog engines soon.

I like Evoca’s audio playing box, because it would fit in the sidebar of a blog post!

The Opera people are smart. They made a browser that works the way a mobile phone browser should. When you go to a website using Opera Mini, the request goes through Opera’s servers and the server optimizes the page for your phone so that you download an optimized version of the page you are loading. This means that your pages load faster and look better.

Besides having a great browser for your phone, they’ve set up an interesting community site where you can sign up and network with other opera users, get your mobile opera blog, and take a look behind the scenes look into the Opera Labs.

Opera Mini Cost: Free! Point your WAP browser to http://mini.opera.com

I first heard about ShoZu from Roland, Shozu’s number one fan. Roland should know, he’s shot thousands of photos with the cellphones he’s had over the years. Once I downloaded Shozu, I was hooked too. Shozu makes it easy to upload photos to Flickr, Buzznet, Textamerica, and Webshots.

If you shoot video on your phone you can set it up to email the video to your account over at Blip.tv or Buzznet where they’ll transcode your movie into Flash and splash their logo all over it. Blip is really the way to go, but they have not added mp4 to their list of usable formats for email upload so if you’ve got a super snazzy phone like the Nokia N70, then Buzznet is your choice.. For now over at Blip, the video you send has to be 3gp.

While at SXSW, i had a chance to hang out with Andy Tiller and we shot this interview on a Nokia N70 phone, and uploaded over the air with ShoZu. It’s 352 x 288 pixels and 560 kbits/sec. The phone records at about 4 MB. Here’s a link to the origional footage straight out of the phone.

While shooting this video we explored Nokia’s Director Application which has the capability to turn your photos into slide show movies.

If you want to share any photos from your phone, ShoZu is the must-have application. As a bonus, ShoZu also syncs your contacts and downloads any comments you get on your photos.

Cost: Free
Sign up online at http://shozu.com.

Watch the Video

Phonetagger needs sponsorship. We want to support innovative people and companies who would like to showcase their products or services or applications. For the first month as we build up our community of creative super-heroes who kick ass, we have a special low rate of sponsorship. You see, even creative super-heroes need support to maintain and develop a creative community of powerful videophone users.

Phonetagger is also open to other ideas. Are you a videophone manufacturer that wants to put your phones in the hands of creative users? Bring it on!

Do you have a kick-ass video cellphone application that rocks the house? Call 206-600-PTAG or 206-600-7824 and leave us a voicemail message telling us about it and why you love it.

I met the folks over at eyespot this evening and David Todd promptly shot an interview with me using his snazzy casio camera. David had it up on the internet within the hour. The audio is horrible during the second half. Tomorrow I’m going to hang out with them for a bit because they’ve told me that eyespot is a platform for remixing video and I want to remix this to just show the first half!
I also want to see if i can get them to publish straight to this blog from their website. As it is I had to send it to my email and then fuss with the source code. I also want to see if they can make it so that the video shows up on my page instead of on their website. The Eyespot guys were really sharp, so I can’t wait to learn more.

Click here to view the Video!

One really cool feature they have is the ability to share to a mobile phone. That means that if you find something on their site you like, you can shoot it off to a phone. Super cool!

In this video, Phonetagger finds two customized roomba robots playing pool. One of the robots is using it’s own robot intellegence and the other is controlled via bluetooth from a computer. Phillip Torrone of Make Magazine held this roomba chicken fight. It looked like the artificial intelligence of roomba cleaning robot was winning when I left the table!

I used blip.tv to host and post this video and even though the video isn’t super special, I’m happy with the way it looks on the page. Now I just need to get it configured so that it plays right here on the page! Bre Pettis recently interviewed Mike Hudack about some new features over at blip.
I shot this video with my Nokia 7610 which is a great phone, but I wish it had more resolution!

If you want to participate in the phonetagger project, take some video with your cell phone and send it to tag@phonetagger.com. It will go into a moderation queue and get posted to the site within a day!

The goal here at phonetagger.com is to create a community of video phone users who are making kick ass creative content!

Do you have a passion for acting like a chicken in public? Are you an air guitar rockstar? Get that videophone out and send in your videos!

Wanna become part of this cool video-making cellphone adventure? Great! In our next post, I’ll let you know how to submit your awesome videos!  If you see something interesting in the world, you need to phonetag it!