in my life i have to keep up with lots of small tasks – and i don’t necessarily need help remembering to do them, just need a running track record of if they happened or how many times it happened during the day. did my lawyer call or respond to my email, did i email my lawyer, how many cigarettes did i smoke, was i able to speak to my son this morning, did i go to bed before 12, etc…

all of these things together define my daily routine and then turn into: why is this situation happening?

now if i had a small app that asked me these questions every day, and i could respond with a yes/no, or a number indicate if the response applied to today or yesterday – i start to gain some quantitative data about how my life is going. why was i having a bad week? well, i had 5 cups of coffee every day and went to sleep after 12 most days. at the end of the week I can assume that I have to cut back on coffee and go to bed earlier – or my week will be bad.

I could keep a diary – but that is another thing to do.

if there was an app that allowed me to set some basic questions – and the app asked me daily, then i am keeping a diary of statistical data without the hassle.

the interface would be simple – question and answer, day that it pertains to (today or yesterday), room for a small note to explain further if needed, and a way to dismiss the question all together: something like ‘i am done tracking this’ which would remove the question from the que.
A review, which should be sent weekly, should look at all of the data i am tracking in a calendar and quantitative view. with that data i could hopefully gain some insight into my habits and make some changes for the positive.

so this would be sort of a daily diary twitter style – not a bunch of thoughts written out that i have to go back an re- read, but conscise data in a graph that shows instances per day and their outcome. simple really – a quantitative overview of my habits and their results.

I want to get to the end of the week/month/year whatever and say (with coffee for instance) – i had an average of 3 cups per day, and i was OK – but in sept i moved to 5 per day and started having bad weeks. the 3rd week of sept i started smoking 6 cigarettes per day, probably because i was having bad weeks due to the extra coffee.

if twitter is a concise insight into my thoughts, then this would be a concise insight into my habits.

The Deets:

the app should naturally start on the web, with an xml output that could be used for mobile and desktop versions.

users could sign up – set their initial questions (public/private) and possible responses, and set their question delivery method and time. (cakePHP)
links to livst.at/nathan would see my public questions and graphs
desktop app in air gathers questions from web api and has ability to display at a set time
mobile versions (android,iphone) should be quickly following
widget to embed on my blog/facebook for a particular question or set of questions
api ()
all answer methods should be aware if the daily set has been answered – i.e. my android phone would not ask me if it checked the db and saw that i already answered (by desktop or email). so i don’t get a bajillion popups all asking me the same thing.
public questions and responses could be autoposted to twitter

how will it make money: ads, silly. then sell to yahoo. Profit!

I have started working with Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework. To get started I hunted down some examples to see how others dove into it – and found a few great ones, but most that relied on previous sprints. As you may or may not know, OSMF is still in prerelease which means that anything could change, and for traits that is exactly what happened between sprint 7 and sprint 8.

This change (along with some others) made many of the examples that i found not work – including a good one from @lisamarienyc on the adobe forums that I thought was best.

So I rewrote some portions and the resulting code is below:
questions, corrections, comments, and suggestions welcome.

package {

import flash.display.Sprite;
import org.osmf.events.LoadEvent;
import org.osmf.events.MediaError;
import org.osmf.events.MediaErrorEvent;
import org.osmf.events.MediaErrorCodes;
import org.osmf.events.MediaPlayerCapabilityChangeEvent;
import org.osmf.media.MediaPlayer;
import org.osmf.media.URLResource;
import org.osmf.net.NetLoader;
import org.osmf.traits.LoadState;
import org.osmf.traits.MediaTraitType;
import org.osmf.video.VideoElement;
import org.osmf.utils.URL;

public class OSMFExampleTwo extends Sprite {

	//our local flv to be played
    private const PROGRESSIVE:String = "trailer.flv";  //path to your progressive flv here

    private var _player:MediaPlayer;
	private var _video:VideoElement;

    public function OSMFExampleTwo() {
        trace("initialized");

		//create a new media player
		_player = new MediaPlayer();
        _video = new VideoElement(new NetLoader(), new URLResource(new URL(PROGRESSIVE)));

		//add an event listener to the video element to catch netstream failed errors
		_video.addEventListener(MediaErrorEvent.MEDIA_ERROR, onLoadEvent);

		//add an event listener so that when the player is capable of being viewed we can add it to the display list and watch
		_player.addEventListener( MediaPlayerCapabilityChangeEvent.VIEWABLE_CHANGE, onViewable );

		//add a new video element to the player
	   	_player.element = _video;

        }

	   //if the event fails - what comes through:

        private function onLoadEvent( e:MediaErrorEvent) :void {
           trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): recieved a media error event');

		   var errorCode = e.error.errorCode;
		   	switch (errorCode) {
				case MediaErrorCodes.STREAM_NOT_FOUND:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): there was an error finding the file that was specified');
					break;
				case MediaErrorCodes.PLAY_FAILED:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): playback has failed');
					break;
				case MediaErrorCodes.NO_SUPPORTED_TRACK_FOUND:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): there was no supported track found');
					break;
				case MediaErrorCodes.FILE_STRUCTURE_INVALID:
					trace('ERROR (onLoadEvent): the file structure is invalid');
					break;
			}
        }

        private function onViewable( e:MediaPlayerCapabilityChangeEvent ) :void {
            if( e.enabled ) {
                addChild( _player.view );
                trace('player view');
            }
        }
    }
}

betaPoint is a collection of my ideas for the past year of working in the midst of the social and video technology in the new york tech scene.
Now that i have a year’s worth of ideas – i would like to take all of them and allow you to vote on the best. I will take the top 3 and make 3 month sprints on each of them to get 3 proof of concepts in 2010. I will be asking for feedback, and some help on each of the works but first we have to decide the winners!

I know I have said this before, but there has to be a single point of consumption for all of these social networks and updates.

A single place that I can go to that aggregates all of the updates and feeds of my friends, news outlets – and it should provide an xml that is consumable by others – for a fee.
I would also like to take this a step further and request iphone and android mobile apps that can consume this xml and provide device specific options for notifications based on user defined groups or individual users. For instance – if a message comes through from mom, I can choose that there be a notification instantly cause it is mom. Or I could choose that I get notifications if there are 5 new posts by mom. Or I could get notifications when there are new posts in the ‘people I love’ category, of which I have added mom as a member.
I would also be able to view all of these in one place – so opening the app I could go to see ‘moms’ updates only by clicking the individual tab and selecting mom (perhaps since I check hers so often or if I choose to do so she could be a favorite so she is easily found) or i could click the tab for the category i made called ‘people i love’ and see all of the updates from the sources in that category.

this app should be intelligent as well, duplicates should be removed (in case there is someone like me who has their twitter tied to their facebook status), pics and videos should be fetched, websites that are refrenced should have a thumbnail, rss should be downloaded for offline reading on mobile devices.

this app should be a single source for all updates, and be accessible and consistent on mobile, web, and desktop.

good ex. of the need and the suggested solution:
http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2010/02/this-buzz-is-killing-me.html

working with ad operations with a small to medium publisher has allowed me to see an opportunity in the way of providing ad statistics in a way that is easy for the operations person to gather and the advertiser to consume. We are receiving 3-4 requests for statistics a day for basic things such as the number of impressions and clickthroughs – but we also provide a detailed set of reports for amount of video viewed (in quarters), sections that the user clicked to go to the site, which video was playing when the click happened, etc…

all of these events are sent back to our servers to be aggregated and when an advertiser calls to check on them  – we create the reports and send them on which can take a few hours and some custom made scripts to gather.

What if there was a third party to do this for us though – an independant company that would offer ping, clickthrough, and quartile creation, spitting out a short url tied to each event. The advertiser could enter the details: event title, location in the creative, and other metadata – and once the ping was saved the system would return a shorturl to record the event.

Once all of the events for a campaign were created and saved, the system should provide a comprehensive pdf or spreadsheet with the ad events that may be emailed to the publisher or the creative team to place into the creative.

to solve the need for up to date statistics on a particular campaign the system should, on an hourly or bi hourly interval, gather all of the pings that had been sent back to the system and generate an xml document based on the returned data that all parties can see.

the final leg of this is a desktop air application that would fetch the latest event info and present it in raw and graph format, allowing the advertiser the ability to keep up with how their ad is doing on any given network in almost real time. This application could be custom branded to prvide the publisher with additional marketing in the form of desktop real estate.

the business difficulty here is defining the end consumer: is that the publisher – a service that they would buy to provide their advertisers with greater insight into advertising performance on the publisher’s network and a little marketing? perhaps the advertiser: so they can keep up with the statistics across multiple platforms, or even the creative agency – so that they can provide their advertising customers with the data?

in the end, this seems like a relevant and necessary application, no matter who is charged for it…

is omniture an innovator in this space?
(http://www.omniture.com/en/)