Chris Betcher

There is an advertisement on TV at the moment for an Australian car insurance company that encourages drivers to download an app to their phone to find out who is " Australia's Best Driver ".  When you download and install the app it starts by asking you a few questions...  your name, gender, email address, home address, etc. Then it keeps track of your driving using GPS location, timestamps, speed tracking, etc for at least the next 300km. In fact, it even defaults to an autostart mode so that you don't have to remember to turn it on. Every so often it will check in with you to make sure that you are in fact the driver of the trips it's been tracking. Then it scores your driving style in an attempt to find out who is the best driver in Australia. Think about it. As well as knowing exactly who you are, it knows how fast you're driving, when you're driving, where you've been, who was driving and how long for, and even what your phone was doing as you dr...

I've been travelling a fair bit lately .  Although much of it has been within Australia, I've just spent the last few days in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, for the Sitech Champion Schools Conference , and I'm writing this from in the hotel foyer. New Zealand is starting to feel a bit like a second home lately... this is my fourth trip here in the past 12 months. Aussies and Kiwis have a friendly relationship. Aside from the obvious opportunity to take shots at each other over the cricket and the rugby, our two countries get along amicably well, and the trip across the Tasman is something that feels more like going interstate than international.  It's easy to feel at home in NZ. About 12 months ago I was here for last years Champion Schools Conference and some readers of this blog may remember that I came home to a $1000 phone bill for international roaming. That was a saga in itself , and much was said about it both here on the blog and on Twitter and Facebook.  While I sho...

There are moments when I really like my iPhone, yet others that frustrate the heck out of me. I finally got one a couple of months ago when my carrier, 3 Mobile , finally got the iPhone, long after nearly every other Australian mobile telco. This surprised me, since 3 Mobile were the first carrier to bring 3G services to the Australian marketplace about 8 years ago, so I was expecting that when the iPhone 3G was released in Australia that 3 Mobile would be one of the first to carry it. Not so. Until the iPhone, I was a relatively happy user of a Nokia N95 8Gb . As phones go, the N95 was a pretty impressive piece of hardware... it did a lot of things well, including an excellent 5MP camera, decent voice recorder, VGA quality video, GPS and the ability to install a reasonably impressive number of third party apps - nothing like the thousands of apps in Apple's AppStore - but it had quite a few that I found useful, including Gravity , and excellent Twitter client, and Geocache Navi...

Imagine this scenario... you are suddenly diagnosed with a life threatening disease, something very dangerous but quite curable if you have the right information about how to do so.  Your doctor knows that there is an answer to your serious problem, but cannot recall what drug is required to treat it.  He remembers reading something about it a long time ago, but can no longer recall the exact name of the drug. He reaches towards the mouse on his computer, and begins to click a link that will take him to the online medical directory where he will find the answer he needs to cure your condition. "Stop!", you declare.  "That's cheating!  If you can't remember the name of that drug without looking it up, then what sort of doctor are you?  I want you to just remember it without looking it up." Of course, I imagine that if this situation were real you would be only too happy for the doctor to do whatever was required to find the cure for your disease.  You wouldn...

Geocaching is a great way to combine a bit of fun technological geekery with some good old fashioned go-outside-and-get-some-fresh-air action. I spent an afternoon with Lauren Sayer, who was visiting from Melbourne, using our GPSs, iPhones, Flip Videos and other techy toys and went geocaching around Sydney. If you've never tried it before, geocaching is essentially a treasure hunt where you go looking for a hidden treasure (more correctly known as a geocache) which someone plants and publishes on www.geocaching.com . It's a simple enough concept... once you sign up on the site, you enter your current position and it will tell you what caches are hidden nearby. You then just pick one that sounds interesting, enter the cache coordinates into your GPS and navigate to the hidden treasure. It sounds simple enough, but once you start to allow for the real-world factor it does start to get a shade more complicated. GPS devices will tell you where you are but they have limits as t...

My daughter once performed at a large choral event where she sung a solo piece. It was the first time she had performed in front of a sizable audience and the first time I had any idea that she had real singing talent. As a father, it was a beautiful thing to see, and I was very proud of her. Naturally, as a proud dad I was there with my video camcorder in hand and taped the entire performance. The event was over two evenings so I also went back the next night and taped it again, then took the two pieces of footage, dumped them into Sony Vegas and made a two-camera montage of the performance. It's still on YouTube if you want a look. Although I was present to see her perform twice, my strongest memory of that event is the video that documents it. I do recall sitting in the hall with the other people and thinking how awesome she sounded live, but what I see on the video has, over time, become the more pervasive memory. Likewise, back in 2004 we did a 3 week trip through Central...

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Dp4qe3Ishhw#" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Coming soon. This little girl. And millions more like her. Curious. Smart. And not afraid of technology. Let me rephrase that... Not only is she just "not afraid" of technology, she will expect to grow up in a world where technology comes in the form of easy-to-use devices that just work seamlessly to let her do things. She represents a generation of children for whom access to such technology is as basic as access to air, food and water. Look at her as she plays with this device... she didn't read an instruction manual, she isn't waiting for a training session in how to use it. As she grows up she won't necessarily know or care how these things works, only that they lets her do the things she wants to do. She interacts with technology but probably doesn't even think of it as interacting with technology. ...

As an existing customer of 3 , Australia's first 3G mobile phone network, and an avid user of Skype , I was interested to see this new product just about to be released here in Australia. It's a 3G/Wifi enabled phone that lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls over wireless LANs. Given that I spend all day at work, and all my time at home bathed in the radiant glow of wifi the ability to make free calls is pretty attractive. I'm assuming that it reverts back to a standard GSM phone when you wander off the grid, and switches back to wifi when you get back into a wifi zone. I need to read the fine print of course, but it's an intriguing idea. While it's not exactly an iPhone (far from it) it certainly looks interesting and suggests that the already competitive mobile phone business is about to get a whole lot more heated in the next 12 months. There's been no word from Apple as to when the iPhone might land in Australia, so this push by Skype and 3 might ...

I mentioned in a previous post that the average cell phone these days can do SO much more than most people ever discover. This revelation struck me when I saw someone demonstrating a video clip they made from footage taken on their phone's camera. What this person didn't realise was that some phones can not only shoot the footage, but can also edit it as well. I won't repeat the list of stuff that can be done - you can go read the other post if you really want to know more - but I was surprised at just how simple it is to throw a short clip together. To put the theory to the test, I went to watch my kids play tennis today and took some footage with my phone. (Well, mainly of my daughter... my son kept telling me to go away. Fathers can be so embarrasing!) I shot 6 or 7 clips, then used the phone's editing software, called VideoDJ, to trim each one, add titles and transitions, place the clips in order, and render a final movie. I could have added music in the back...

In the leadup to the release of Apple's iPhone there was a great deal of talk about the device, mainly on MacBreak Weekly and the Apple Phone Show ... both excellent podcasts that set a real benchmark for quality when it comes to the podcasting medium. There was tons of pontificating and prognosticating about the iPhone, and how it would change the cell phone market forever. All that aside, one of the theories I heard over and over was that most people never actually tap into the full capabilities of their cell phone, with a huge majority of people using their phone just to make phone calls. Imagine that! The idea that most people never really explore their phone's capabilities really hit home to me the other day at a conference when I saw a demonstration of a video made by a guy from footage he had very proudly taken with his phone. It was a few shots edited together with some music under it, and I asked the question at the end "Did you edit that on your phone?...