There doesn’t seem to be any limit to what you can do with technology apart, that is, from your imagination.
A South African company called mobicode is now offering concert promoters and other organisations the opportunity of selling tickets and vouchers via cellphone. There’s a whole lot more to the technology and you get the feeling that mobicode, itself, is still thinking of new things to do with it.
How it will work is when Sipho Public decides that he wants to take his friends to a concert that evening but, instead of popping along to the ticket office and standing in queue for hours, he gets the promoters’ number off of a concert poster and sends them an SMS.
The message says something like ‘four tickets please’ and, once the promoters have deducted the money from his bank account, they send him a bar code in whatever format his cellphone will accept.
All he then has to do is pitch up at the gig with the barcode displayed on the screen of his mobile. The doormen scan the barcode with an ordinary barcode scanner and their computer tells them that Sipho can come in and bring three friends with him.
The organisers could have offered concert-goers the opportunity of paying a bit extra to get free drinks, a programme, or a cap with the band’s logo on it. The same barcode that admitted Sipho and his friends could also serve to identify them to the staff at the bar and the souvenir stand.
mobicode has apparently licenced the technology from UK firm Mobiqa who hold South African Patent 2005/03057 for ‘Optimised Messages containing Barcode Information for Mobile Receiving Device’.
The technology was first used for a concert in the UK in June to sell tickets for a Guns n Roses show. It was also used to sell tickets for the Red Bull Rail Storm international urban rail snowboarding (whatever that might be) competition in London.
In South Africa, guests were admitted to the recent FHM Sexiest Women in the World 2006 party via barcodes on their cellphones. In the interests of research, I visited the FHM site (http://www.fhmsa.co.za/) and noticed that Durban-born girl, Carla la Reserveé, had won the competition.
Corblimey Charlie! I had no idea that such a person even existed but she did remind me that nature is much nicer than technology. Sighs eloquently for lost youth and six-pack.
As I’ve said, there seem to be many different things the mobicode technology can be used for, including sales promotion, special offers, and the like. Check out http://www.mobicode.co.za/ for more details
The whole mobicode thing sounds very feasible to me as long as your mobile’s battery holds out; “honest, I did have the barcode for getting into Carla’a dressing room”…
Monday, July 31, 2006
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Keeping control of pictures
Recently I came across a very good little program that will be just the job for many people who have got involved with digital photography.Picasa is supplied free by Google and is amazingly capable at organising and editing pictures. It is only about 5Mb in size and you can download it by going to http://picasa.google.com/.
When you first start it up it up it goes off and finds all the pictures on your computer so this might be a good thing to just before you go off to lunch. Once the process is finished, you are presented with a list of folders with pictures in them and seeing those pictures is as easy as selecting the folder.
You can then select a picture, or pictures, which you can then edit with some quite sophisticated but easy-to-use exposure and colour correction tools. You can crop and rotate pictures and apply a wide variety of special effects to them but the real bonus is that Picasa doesn't alter your original images at all, meaning you can't mess anything up.
Picasa has the facility to import pictures from cameras, card readers or scanners, send selected pictures as emails, backup pictures to CD-ROM, create screensavers, desktop wallpapers, and posters. There is an export feature which you can use to export pictures to a disk or flash drive to take to another computer or mini-lab for printing.
Last week I talked about blogging and a free service which allows you keep an web-based online diary to publish whatever its is that you have to say. On the subject of blogs, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, and I decided to see how easy it really was.
I spent half an hour setting up a FishNet blog where I’ll post past columns and anything else I come up with on the technology front. You’ll see past articles listed on the left and in the archives.
As it happens, Picasa makes it easier to publish pictures to your blog. You can publish a selected picture or pictures with one click of a button. Like this:
When you first start it up it up it goes off and finds all the pictures on your computer so this might be a good thing to just before you go off to lunch. Once the process is finished, you are presented with a list of folders with pictures in them and seeing those pictures is as easy as selecting the folder.
You can then select a picture, or pictures, which you can then edit with some quite sophisticated but easy-to-use exposure and colour correction tools. You can crop and rotate pictures and apply a wide variety of special effects to them but the real bonus is that Picasa doesn't alter your original images at all, meaning you can't mess anything up.
Picasa has the facility to import pictures from cameras, card readers or scanners, send selected pictures as emails, backup pictures to CD-ROM, create screensavers, desktop wallpapers, and posters. There is an export feature which you can use to export pictures to a disk or flash drive to take to another computer or mini-lab for printing.
Last week I talked about blogging and a free service which allows you keep an web-based online diary to publish whatever its is that you have to say. On the subject of blogs, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, and I decided to see how easy it really was.
I spent half an hour setting up a FishNet blog where I’ll post past columns and anything else I come up with on the technology front. You’ll see past articles listed on the left and in the archives.
As it happens, Picasa makes it easier to publish pictures to your blog. You can publish a selected picture or pictures with one click of a button. Like this:
There is a search feature which will allow you to search through the archives for that half-remembered link that you now need to consult so badly. You will also have the opportunity to leave your comments on the articles by clicking the comments link at the bottom of each.
Please note that you’ll have to verify that you’re a real person, and not a spam program, by typing in code letters which you’ll be given. Your comments will not show up on the story pages until I have checked them; abuse I can handle, but spam I can’t.
A Picasa web-based photo album service is currently under test and you will probably soon be able to publish pictures instantly to that as well. 
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Venting yourself on the world
I must have been among the first Durban people outside the university to hear of the Internet and to see the worldwide web and I was completely unimpressed.
This was in the early 1990s, when I had just started writing computer stories, and was given a quick introduction to the web during a visit to the computer department at UND [Durban University]. I didn’t think that they would ever amount to anything and I’m afraid that I made the same miscalculation when I first heard of blogs and blogging a couple of years ago.
Blog is short for weblog, a worldwide web-based diary, and blogging is the act of keeping such a diary. I was convinced that blogs would be a passing phase and that people would soon get bored with the novelty of writing down their thoughts and experiences and posting them for the world to see.
In spite of my gloomy prognosis, however, more and more people took to blogging so that there are now many millions of people doing it. A great number of blogs are probably of no interest to anyone except the family and friends of the blogger but there are also many which are extremely worthwhile.
Many newspaper and television journalists now keep blogs which are valuable supplements to their efforts in the broadcast and printed news media. Politicans are now using blogs to establish contact with their constituents as are companies keeping their customers up to date with new developments.
Getting your point of view out to the world was previously pretty expensive which limited publishing to the established media. Blogging has democratised things a lot and now any Joe Soap can bring his story to the attention of the world as happened, for example, when blogger Matt Drudge broke the news of the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I had heard that there were services which would allow people to publish a blog without knowing anything about website creation but I didn’t try them out through lack of interest. It was only a few weeks ago that a client needed a blog and I went into the matter again.
After a little research I ended up at http://www.blogger.com/ where I found, to my amazement, that you could set up a blog for free. Setting up a blog at Blogger is as easy as falling off a log and I don’t think it can have been more than 10 minutes or so before I had one set up for the client.
You get a wide choice of templates to choose from and, once that’s done, you get directed to a page where you can customise your blog if you want to. The Help feature is very good and explains clearly the implications of each choice you can make.
Adding entries to your blog is then as simple as signing in to your page at http://www.blogger.com/ and typing into what looks like a mini-wordprocessor and uploading any pictures you want to include. You use the same page to edit or delete your entries and comments left by visitors to your blog. I chose to use Blogger but there are many other options available. Why not give blogging a try?
This was in the early 1990s, when I had just started writing computer stories, and was given a quick introduction to the web during a visit to the computer department at UND [Durban University]. I didn’t think that they would ever amount to anything and I’m afraid that I made the same miscalculation when I first heard of blogs and blogging a couple of years ago.
Blog is short for weblog, a worldwide web-based diary, and blogging is the act of keeping such a diary. I was convinced that blogs would be a passing phase and that people would soon get bored with the novelty of writing down their thoughts and experiences and posting them for the world to see.
In spite of my gloomy prognosis, however, more and more people took to blogging so that there are now many millions of people doing it. A great number of blogs are probably of no interest to anyone except the family and friends of the blogger but there are also many which are extremely worthwhile.
Many newspaper and television journalists now keep blogs which are valuable supplements to their efforts in the broadcast and printed news media. Politicans are now using blogs to establish contact with their constituents as are companies keeping their customers up to date with new developments.
Getting your point of view out to the world was previously pretty expensive which limited publishing to the established media. Blogging has democratised things a lot and now any Joe Soap can bring his story to the attention of the world as happened, for example, when blogger Matt Drudge broke the news of the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I had heard that there were services which would allow people to publish a blog without knowing anything about website creation but I didn’t try them out through lack of interest. It was only a few weeks ago that a client needed a blog and I went into the matter again.
After a little research I ended up at http://www.blogger.com/ where I found, to my amazement, that you could set up a blog for free. Setting up a blog at Blogger is as easy as falling off a log and I don’t think it can have been more than 10 minutes or so before I had one set up for the client.
You get a wide choice of templates to choose from and, once that’s done, you get directed to a page where you can customise your blog if you want to. The Help feature is very good and explains clearly the implications of each choice you can make.
Adding entries to your blog is then as simple as signing in to your page at http://www.blogger.com/ and typing into what looks like a mini-wordprocessor and uploading any pictures you want to include. You use the same page to edit or delete your entries and comments left by visitors to your blog. I chose to use Blogger but there are many other options available. Why not give blogging a try?
One program displays all?
There are more and more different kinds of computer files every day meaning that you have to have more and more programs on your computer to view them especially if you often receive files from other people.
I still haven’t found a single program that can be used to view everything but I have found one that will let you view most picture files and play just about any video and audio format that there is. The program is called IrfanView (pronounced earfan) and, amazingly enough, is free for personal use. I first encountered it years ago when it was nice compact graphics viewer but I see that it has grown up quite a lot since then.
I had been frustrated by the fact that my usual graphics programs could not read the RAW files from my new digital camera and that the camera’s software could not display the files created in my graphics program. I read in an Internet forum that IrfanView could display both types so I went to www.irfanview.com and downloaded the program again.
As it turns out, it can’t display my RAW images yet but it seems that that someone is working on the matter and it soon will be able to do so. Those images apart, however, it does seem that IrfanView can display just about anything else.
It comes with a number of built-in tools which can be used to rotate, flip and resize pictures and make basic enhancements such as sharpening, red-eye reduction and colour and exposure correction. You can also apply a number of special effects such as a painterly effect or convert the image to black and white or sepia.
One interesting tool lets you create a slideshow with any number of pictures in it and then save them into a screensaver file or an executable file which other people can play back on their computers. It is decidedly unsophisticated but it will be all that most people will want and, as I’ve said before, the price is right.
IrfanView was developed by Irfan Skiljan, who was born in Jajce, in Bosnia, and attended the Vienna University of Technology. He does ask for pyment if the program is used commercially and for a donation of Euro10 if you’re a private user.I would be most intrigued to know what percentage of people pay for it; the percentage needn’t be very big seeing that the program has been downloaded a million times a month ever since 1993. You can get more info and download the program at www.irfanview.com.
I still haven’t found a single program that can be used to view everything but I have found one that will let you view most picture files and play just about any video and audio format that there is. The program is called IrfanView (pronounced earfan) and, amazingly enough, is free for personal use. I first encountered it years ago when it was nice compact graphics viewer but I see that it has grown up quite a lot since then.
I had been frustrated by the fact that my usual graphics programs could not read the RAW files from my new digital camera and that the camera’s software could not display the files created in my graphics program. I read in an Internet forum that IrfanView could display both types so I went to www.irfanview.com and downloaded the program again.
As it turns out, it can’t display my RAW images yet but it seems that that someone is working on the matter and it soon will be able to do so. Those images apart, however, it does seem that IrfanView can display just about anything else.
It comes with a number of built-in tools which can be used to rotate, flip and resize pictures and make basic enhancements such as sharpening, red-eye reduction and colour and exposure correction. You can also apply a number of special effects such as a painterly effect or convert the image to black and white or sepia.
One interesting tool lets you create a slideshow with any number of pictures in it and then save them into a screensaver file or an executable file which other people can play back on their computers. It is decidedly unsophisticated but it will be all that most people will want and, as I’ve said before, the price is right.
IrfanView was developed by Irfan Skiljan, who was born in Jajce, in Bosnia, and attended the Vienna University of Technology. He does ask for pyment if the program is used commercially and for a donation of Euro10 if you’re a private user.I would be most intrigued to know what percentage of people pay for it; the percentage needn’t be very big seeing that the program has been downloaded a million times a month ever since 1993. You can get more info and download the program at www.irfanview.com.
The trouble with E-mail
There was a time when I thought e-mail was the greatest technology that I had ever encountered.
I was fed up with the phone because it was getting harder and harder to get to talk to people. They were always away from the office, in meetings, or whatever, and contacting them, which should have taken you a few minutes, was now taking a couple of days on average.
E-mail was cool because it offered you the chance of firing off a message to someone with full details of what you needed to say to them. They would then reply whenever they had a quite time and you would have your answer without the stress of playing telephone tag for a week.
This was great until the less ethical sections of the commercial world woke up to the possibilities of fraud and advertising by e-mail. It was cheap to do and so you could send out e-mail in vast numbers and it didn’t matter if you had a tiny response rate.
At first there were comparatively few junk e-mail, or SPAM, messages and it sometimes felt like an honour when you had been targeted. In those days of not so long ago, people often read their SPAM messages for amusement and swapped stories about them, when they met for drinks after work.
SPAM has grown enormously since then and has very definitely stopped being amusing. I am nothing like the worst affected but I am now getting about 60 messages a day and, of those, I estimate only two or three are not SPAM.
Most of those are advertising various products but there always seem to be a couple which are designed to infect my computer with a virus or try and find out what my bank account number is.
The most frightening part of SPAM is that it works well enough for the spammers to keep on doing it. You wouldn’t have thought that people would be fooled by it but they are, and they have the same vote that you and I have!
I don’t know what the answer to SPAM is going to be but I have a feeling that we’re eventually going to have to pay real people (not software) to sift through our mail for us. In the meantime, however, I’ve been using a free program called Mailwasher which is available from http://www.mailwasher.net.I don’t think that it actually reduces the amount of SPAM you get but it does let you look at your messages and delete everything you don’t want before it gets anywhere near your computer.
I was fed up with the phone because it was getting harder and harder to get to talk to people. They were always away from the office, in meetings, or whatever, and contacting them, which should have taken you a few minutes, was now taking a couple of days on average.
E-mail was cool because it offered you the chance of firing off a message to someone with full details of what you needed to say to them. They would then reply whenever they had a quite time and you would have your answer without the stress of playing telephone tag for a week.
This was great until the less ethical sections of the commercial world woke up to the possibilities of fraud and advertising by e-mail. It was cheap to do and so you could send out e-mail in vast numbers and it didn’t matter if you had a tiny response rate.
At first there were comparatively few junk e-mail, or SPAM, messages and it sometimes felt like an honour when you had been targeted. In those days of not so long ago, people often read their SPAM messages for amusement and swapped stories about them, when they met for drinks after work.
SPAM has grown enormously since then and has very definitely stopped being amusing. I am nothing like the worst affected but I am now getting about 60 messages a day and, of those, I estimate only two or three are not SPAM.
Most of those are advertising various products but there always seem to be a couple which are designed to infect my computer with a virus or try and find out what my bank account number is.
The most frightening part of SPAM is that it works well enough for the spammers to keep on doing it. You wouldn’t have thought that people would be fooled by it but they are, and they have the same vote that you and I have!
I don’t know what the answer to SPAM is going to be but I have a feeling that we’re eventually going to have to pay real people (not software) to sift through our mail for us. In the meantime, however, I’ve been using a free program called Mailwasher which is available from http://www.mailwasher.net.I don’t think that it actually reduces the amount of SPAM you get but it does let you look at your messages and delete everything you don’t want before it gets anywhere near your computer.
Welcome
Welcome to my FishNet Blog. Here you'll find my columns (of the same name) as they appear in the Sunday Tribune newspaper in Durban, South Africa. You're welcome to leave your comments but please note that these will not appear immediately. I have set things up so that I can check them in case they contain spam; abuse I can handle, spam I can't !!
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