Videos on-the-go

I'm now taking more videos using camera phones. This is a recent addition to my job as a technology reporter. While this technology has been around for some time, news organizations have not really used this innovation to do interviews and capture important events. This year, we have increasingly used video clips taken using a camera phone. The quality is not as good as broadcast TV. But it is good enough for viewing on YouTube, which has been the host of videos I send over to our editors.

Here's an example of a video I took while covering the Commission on Elections.

Tag that magazine

In the "spirit" of convergence, a Philippine magazine introduced a new marketing gimmick in their magazine. It involves taking "snapshots" (using a mobile phone camera and a special software) of a bar code-like symbol placed in the cover of the magazine. The Tag Mobile System (TMS) -- as it is called -- will take the mobile phone owners to a special website (a WAP site) that will contain other information and goodies. As this blog states, TMS is:

TMS is a convenient way to download any form of multimedia into your mobile by turning your phone camera into a barcode scanner.

Just imagine the possibilities. Magazines or any publication (actually the TMS works on websites too) can now push information via mobile phones. If you're using a smart phone, you could conduct transactions (say buy a product from the magazine or view more photos on your mobile phone). I remember an old article written by my editor Leo Magno years back. With convergence, content is now portable to any device/medium. With technologies such as TMS, content will be "spiraling" up and around all these mediums/devices. Thus he writes:

This consequently is redefining the word “media" as we know it. The flow no longer comes from a broadcaster’s or publisher’s point of view down to the audience, where the old communications model of sender-message-receiver is followed. Information flow in this day and age is no longer linear. With the participation of citizens -- the audience -- as both content consumer and producer, it has become multi-dimensional, spiraling up and around several evolutionary ladders of communications.