I consider myself to be fairly confident with audio visual equipment and computers. I am consistently amazed at how complicated modern home equipment is to set up and operate. We have a TV, a disc player, a PS3 and all I wanted to do was to hear the surround sound than each is capable of producing via a set of 5 speakers and a sub-woofer. I found the Onkyo HT-S6305B product that sounded perfect for the job and tried to set it up yesterday but although the actual sound was amazing, it made the equipment so difficult to use that I had to give up and put it all back in the box.
It is supposed to have a universal remote controller which can be programmed to operate the TV and the disc player as well as the amp itself as well as numerous other components too. Sounds good but this universal remote means working out how to get from one thing to another which is impossible. If I can't work out how to do it, how will anyone else in the family work it out?
It is also supposed to have a feature that works for late night viewing. The main thing I was expecting was a reduction in output of the sub-woofer as it is this that thunders through the house and disturbs people who have already gone to bed. I switched this feature on, turned down the volume and the bass was still blasting out! The only way to get rid of it was to physically reach behind the sub-woofer and turn it down with the volume knob. I don't consider this to be the most sophisticated solution to late night TV viewing.
All of these items have hundreds of settings within their respective set-up menus which makes for millions of different combinations of settings to get right. I couldn't even just turn off the amp and rely on the TV volume for late night viewing because when you switch off the amp, it switches the TV off as well.
I'll probably end up having another stab at this another day but looks like having to leave printed instructions next to the TV so everyone can switch from one thing to another. Surely not necessary.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Playstation 3 multiplayer features
I have finally started to take a closer look at the new PS3 we got at Christmas as a 'family' present. One aspect I'm not thrilled with is the way it handles multiple players. I am new to this so shoot in a comment if I've got this all wrong . . .
To start with, the Playstation 3 allows us to all have our own logins. We quickly got started by setting up each person with a login. We also have several games including Start the Party, Blur, Aragorn's Quest and Sports Champions. All of these games allows more than one player to take part either at the same time or by taking turns. They also support the 'trophies' feature which means that you are awarded bronze, silver and gold trophies as you progress through the games.
At this point, I am stupidly assuming that you can use the login accounts to play against one another in the multi-player games and because we have already named ourselves in these logins, the games should allow you to pick from a list. When playing the games together, the trophies would be awarded to each player's login account as they earn them. Well, the PS3 doesn't appear to do this. You can only sign into one login at a time and the other logins/players/family members are nowhere to be seen once a game is started. All the trophies that player 1 earns (i.e. the player who has logged in) are allocated to their account but all the other players, despite having an account on the console are referred to simply as Player 2, Player 3 etc. and do not have their hard earned trophies stored. To make things more complicated, you also need to set up a login to the Playstation Network which requires an email address and numerous additional passwords and user IDs. This allows people to play online with anyone in the world. All this is very clever but we don't need to play with the rest of the world - we have the rest of our family to play with. Short of buying a PS3 console for each of us and then connecting to the PSN, we cannot play and keep track of our scores, achievements and trophies when playing with each other at home.
I am told there are a few games which support an offline multiplayer feature but there aren't many. So here is the scenario. We all play 'Start the Party' as a family with 4 players. Each time we start it, we have to register the user photo and voice ID when I feel we should be able to store this once as part of our named console login account. All the data regarding the game should then be available; high scores, last level completed, trophies earned etc.
I expected more from a 3rd generation games console and foolishly assumed this kind of basic stuff was par for the course. It seems that in the fight to offer ever impressive graphics, sound, levels, options and other stuff, the original point has been lost. This seems to be a console designed for a lonely single person to own rather than a family of 6. Have I got it wrong? Let me know. Maybe there are other consoles which actually work and I've bought into the wrong one (XBox360 or Wii??).
To start with, the Playstation 3 allows us to all have our own logins. We quickly got started by setting up each person with a login. We also have several games including Start the Party, Blur, Aragorn's Quest and Sports Champions. All of these games allows more than one player to take part either at the same time or by taking turns. They also support the 'trophies' feature which means that you are awarded bronze, silver and gold trophies as you progress through the games.
At this point, I am stupidly assuming that you can use the login accounts to play against one another in the multi-player games and because we have already named ourselves in these logins, the games should allow you to pick from a list. When playing the games together, the trophies would be awarded to each player's login account as they earn them. Well, the PS3 doesn't appear to do this. You can only sign into one login at a time and the other logins/players/family members are nowhere to be seen once a game is started. All the trophies that player 1 earns (i.e. the player who has logged in) are allocated to their account but all the other players, despite having an account on the console are referred to simply as Player 2, Player 3 etc. and do not have their hard earned trophies stored. To make things more complicated, you also need to set up a login to the Playstation Network which requires an email address and numerous additional passwords and user IDs. This allows people to play online with anyone in the world. All this is very clever but we don't need to play with the rest of the world - we have the rest of our family to play with. Short of buying a PS3 console for each of us and then connecting to the PSN, we cannot play and keep track of our scores, achievements and trophies when playing with each other at home.
I am told there are a few games which support an offline multiplayer feature but there aren't many. So here is the scenario. We all play 'Start the Party' as a family with 4 players. Each time we start it, we have to register the user photo and voice ID when I feel we should be able to store this once as part of our named console login account. All the data regarding the game should then be available; high scores, last level completed, trophies earned etc.
I expected more from a 3rd generation games console and foolishly assumed this kind of basic stuff was par for the course. It seems that in the fight to offer ever impressive graphics, sound, levels, options and other stuff, the original point has been lost. This seems to be a console designed for a lonely single person to own rather than a family of 6. Have I got it wrong? Let me know. Maybe there are other consoles which actually work and I've bought into the wrong one (XBox360 or Wii??).
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Sunday, 5 December 2010
The new rules of Marketing and PR
I have been reading this book by David Meerman Scott a lot recently. It explains how marketing and public relations used to be quite separate concepts but have blurred into a new set of rules which combine marketing and PR together in a new online world of communication.
Marketing - old rules
- Marketing simply means advertising (and branding)
- Advertising needed to appeal to the masses
- Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message
- Advertising was one-way: company to consumer.
- Advertising was exclusively about selling products
- Advertising was based on campaigns that has a limited life
- Creativity was deemed the most important component of advertising
- It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers
- Advertising and PR were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement criteria
Public Relations - old rules
- The only way to get ink and airtime was through the media
- Companies communicated to journalists via press releases
- Nobody saw the actual press release except a handful of reporters and editors
- Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to write a press release
- Jargon was okay because the journalists all understood it
- You weren't supposed to send a release unless it included quotes from third parties, such as customers, analysts and experts
- The only way buyers would learn about the press release's content was if the media wrote a story about it
- The only way to measure the effectiveness of press releases was through 'clip books' which noted each time the media deigned to pick up a company's release
- PR and marketing were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement techniques.
The new rules of marketing and PR
- Marketing is more than just advertising
- PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience
- You are what you publish
- People want authenticity, not spin
- People want participation, not propaganda
- Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it
- Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web
- PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. Its about your buyers seeing your company on the web
- Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. Its about your organisation winning business
- The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media
- Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content
- Blogs, online video, e-books, news releases and other forms of online content let organisations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate
- On the web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Tweather - an idea
Maybe the best potential use for this idea is to produce a live or near-live weather site based on people's tweets from all over the UK about what the weather is doing NOW.
Using a standard set of data in a specific order, people could publish what the weather is like where they are. If all the data is gathered and brought together using a mapping service, a weather map could be produced that changes dynamically with the tweets. Not so much a 'weather forecast' but a 'Tweather forecast'.
This has the potential to give accurate, minute-by-minute data on moving weather fronts and could be a useful source of information. A belt of rain moving across an area would be tracked and mapped and it may even be possible to predict where that rain will fall next - a true tweather forecast!
Tweets could be vastly simplified using applications that simply require the user to tap a weather icon on their screen - the time, date and location would be automatically added.
~23:58 ~05/11/10 ~Essex ~Chelmsford ~Light Rain
Friday, 5 November 2010
A quick note about police helicopter tweets
 |
| QH99 Essex Police Helicopter |
http://twitter.com/#!/list/beaker9/police-air-support
For the most part, these channels exist to tweet regular updates on flights undertaken and I thought how great it would be for all these to conform to a common schema. It would allow these and any future ASU twitter channels to be combined from their respective RSS feeds into a UK composite. Here are the four examples of typical fight reports:
@Cheshirecopter
5 Nov 20:25 - Search for 2 people who had run from the scene of a burglary in Lymm. Open areas were confirmed to be clear.
@SEASU_Copters
S1465 22:45hrs 03/11/10 - Durrington - missing person search. Areas checked with no trace, enquiries to continue.
@EMASUhelicopter
Heli activity Leics - http://helicopter.leics.police.uk/where/
@helicops
01:00 01/11/10 Search area near Manor Way, Cardiff, for male wanted in relation to a robbery.
EMASUhelicopters doesn't seem to routinely tweet individual flight operations and when it does, it links to a website. The other three do and they follow virtually the same pattern with only subtle differences which I think could easily be standarised.
We have the date, time, location and operation details as 4 distinct aspects. I would suggest as potential standard format to follow could be:
1. Time: 22:45
2. Date: 03/11/10
3. Location1: Cheshire (represents the force area)
4. Location2: Lymm (more localised within that force area; suggest the main town or village)
5. Details1: Search (operation type from a standard list of agreed types)
6. Details2: Rest of the details of the flight
7. Link: optional - could be website, twitpics etc.
So a typical post could be:
~22:45 ~03/11/10 ~Cheshire ~Lymm ~Search Missing person. Areas checked with no trace, enquiries to continue. http://bit.ly/flightdatalink
By carefully formatting the tweets, they could be interpreted via the RSS feed and re-combined with other similar feeds.
This concept could be an interesting development of Twitter in its own right. The publication of 'Twitter Schemas' that people can use for specific types of posts could allow a more sophisticated opportunity to combine data together, moving things on from the rather basic hashtag method. Maybe a hashtag at the end to denote the 'schema type' could be used? #ASU
As usual - all views welcomed! :¬)
Added - November 5th 2010
Just remembered a fifth police ASU channel which is no longer operating. @suspol_heli
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)