Category: Technology (page 50 of 60)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m writing about the Apple iPhone for Friday’s Republic, putting me in an august company of gushing fans. Reviews appeared today from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Newsweek. So far, everyone loves it, with some reservations.

Engadget has a run-down of the caveats turned up so far. Chief beef from all over: No AT&T, no iPhone. You can’t buy the device as a wi-fi enabled pocket-sized Macintosh with a video iPod and a 2MB camera — but without contracting for a cellular phone and data plan. On the plus side, the Applefied monthly plans are robust and reasonably priced.

Biggest unnoticed beef? Perhaps because fish are not aware of the waters they swim in, no one in the enblogged globe seems to have complained that, because the device is activated and synced through iTunes, you cannot use an iPhone if you don’t own a Macintosh or Windows computer. Lachrymose Luddites and Unix eunuchs need not apply.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

by Doug Quance

Associate Broker

Author website

Looking for the best web presentation possible

As the importance of video becomes increasingly apparent, learning to use this tool will be helpful in the successful marketing of median to upper-end properties.

I have been searching for a way to present video that would be better than the methods we often see in current use.

Apple Quicktime (mov) is a very good format, but its market penetration is not as high as other options like Windows Media Player or Flash.

Windows Media Player (wmv) is a good format… and it is widely used. Windows media can make a very clean video file when using very high bit rates… but the result is a very large file, which we would like to avoid.

Flash is the most widely accepted format right now. The trouble with Flash (in my experience) is that you get a boost in contrast that makes some of the subtle differences in shades difficult, if not impossible, to discern.

So what format should you use?

I have been busy learning some new (new to me, at least) video software over the last few weeks… and I’m almost into overload. While video production is a complicated issue – good web delivery of video doesn’t have to be.

Services like YouTube and WellcomeMat are great for a low-cost approach to hosting your video project… and they both use Flash.

But what if you want to kick the quality up a notch?

Well, then you might want to consider getting your own web hosting account that will give you the kind of space you need to host your videos.

Bringing a new player to the game

A recent entry on the scene is DivX… and it has some great features. The quality is very good; file sizes are small; and many DVD players can play this format.

As a test, I went to stage6.divx.com and downloaded Roger Waters performance of “The Wall” in Berlin. The video streams nicely on broadband, and the quality is very good – even in full screen mode.

I then brought this 699MB file into the TMPGEnc DVD Author to create a DVD of the performance. TMPGEnc created a 4 Gig set Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

First: YouTube on board. We’ll continue to do our listing videos in NTSC video. Anything less stinks in a broadband world. But we’ll do YouTube versions, too, for all the mobile phone vendors who will leap on this bandwagon.

Second: The natives are restless:

June 29 is the day many gear-heads have marked on their calendars as iDay, the release of what independent analyst Richard Doherty calls “the most eagerly awaited consumer technology device of the last 20 years.”

Since January, when it was first announced, the iPhone has captivated consumers, Wall Street investors and the media as the right product at the right time.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has positioned it as the most advanced meeting of the Internet and wireless technology, with an iPod thrown in for good measure. And it looks really cool, and unlike any phone before it.

For Apple, the release of the iPhone promises to effectively double the company’s revenue within just a few years, based on the worldwide thirst for cellphones. For consumers, the trick is going to be nabbing one of the early iPhones on opening day before stock sells out.

The iPhone is being sold only at Apple’s 200 retail stores, Apple’s website and nearly 1,800 AT&T (formerly Cingular) stores beginning at 6 p.m. local time across the country. AT&T says it will close its stores at 4:30 p.m. and reopen at 6 p.m. Apple would not comment on its plans. No pre-orders are being accepted. Fans are expected to camp out in front of stores for days.

Jobs has projected sales of 10 million iPhones within the first 18 months — worth more than $5 billion retail. Neither AT&T nor Apple will say how many phones initially will be shipped to stores. Doherty expects 1 million units to be available in the first wave. He predicts stores will be sold out by the time they close on June 29.

Third: What else you can do if you intend, like us, to sit on the sidelines for a while.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m in the process of cleaning my desk. Pause a moment and consider how big a chore has to be before it becomes a “process.” I did the lawnmower job yesterday (with poor Cameron hauling away the clippings, as it were), and I’ll tackle the finessing, the trimming and edging, in spare moments today.

But while I was working late yesterday, I had a blinding epiphany, a magical, mystical, miraculous method to keep my desk clean forever:

Would everyone please stop printing stuff!

I threw away half a landfill of Realtor association debris yesterday: Realtor magazine, the state and local newsletters, etc. I threw away two years’ worth of CRS membership directories, both still unopened in the boxes they shipped in. Miscellaneous Realtor magazines, direct-mail promotions I thought I might want to have a look at, the goofy workbooks they hand out at advanced-designation classes, etc. Piles and piles of paper — disorganized in the piles, but disorganized in essence, inherently non-searchable and thus inherently useless.

I thought about hanging onto the Realtor magazines, but why would I? I don’t have the time to give to everything I want to read on-line. I have almost zero time for printed books, which at least promise to repay their marginal time-cost in information density. (A marginal calculus of reading!) It could be that there is something in all those unread magazines that I cannot discover on the net. But, second-for-second of my time, I will learn so much more working the way I do now that I cannot risk wasting my time prospecting through random atoms for a nugget of gold that may not even be there.

And: Where paper is static and dead, in the net.world, good ideas get echoed. If anyone, anywhere dug up gold in a dead-tree artifact, I will run across that idea a dozen times over the course of a year on the net. The web is dynamic, self-correcting and searchable. Atom-based media are inherently inferior to electronic media.

That’s not all. Half of the dead-tree detritus I threw away yesterday was yammering about the fundamental religious virtue of being “Green.” Rationing is the Read more