ajit verghese

Apple’s Hidden Gaming play

According to this article in Businessinsider.com, the iPhone will be the primary driver of growth within the mobile gaming industry by 2014 - as the PSP & Nintendo DS have reached their growth potential and the ability to purchase games on the iPhone immediately via the App Store will be the future of gaming.

As an iPhone and DS user, there is an appeal in both devices and a use for each in gaming. iPhone games are tremendously fun - and the most successful games in my opinion on the device are ones which are simple and allow you to play for a few minutes on the train during your morning commute, or while you are waiting for a few minutes. iPhone games are like Tasti D-Lite - not filling, but fleetingly delectable - and I find myself playing a game on the iPhone in just these situations.

DS games are usually more complicated - have longer game play - and are more immersive by nature. With an actual gamepad - the playability for me is unmatched. And yes you can argue that the iPhone has the ability to emulate the buttons of the the DS, however it is a totally different type of game play and I appreciate the tactile buttons when playing a game that requires more than just guiding planes down the runway.

The convenience of the iPhone and the ability to download low cost games on a whim make it compelling.

However I think that Apple MIGHT have a larger gaming play in front of them.

With the dearth of AppleTV units out there (predicted sales of 6.6 million Apple TVs by the end of 2009.^[96]) I could see Apple use this install base to create an in-home gaming platform which utilized the AppleTV to download and store the games sold via iTunes while using an iPhone as the ‘controller’. With the iPhone 3Gs, Apple could use the accelerometer + magnetometer. In theory, the accelerometer already gives both X, Y and Z location data - albeit linear information as Z values are not Yaw but whether the phone is Face up or Face down. To get true yaw in Z requires a compass value which the magnetometer can offer. (via tuaw.com ) Fear not older iPhone users - a simple add-on like the MotionPlus Wiimote accessory could solve the problem. Perhaps there is even a way to provide an accessory that would work with older iPods.

Or of course we could KISS and have a wired or wireless adapter that plugs into the USB port of the Apple TV console.

Either way, mark my words - Apple’s gaming pursuits aren’t limited to just its mobile devices.

How to Download & Edit Videos from Qik

(image courtesy of http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com)

Two weeks ago I attended the 2009 Babson Forum on Entrepreneurship & Innovation where I had the chance to attend many great panels and hear several wonderful keynote speakers.

I recorded and streamed the Corporate Entrepreneurship panel via Qik.com on my jailbroken T-Mobile iPhone.

The panel featured keynotes and Q&A by Mark Atkins, CEO of Invention Machine (Babson MBA alum)  & Anand Vengurlekar, Managing Director of Stoic Brand Consultancy. I recorded both keynotes in one large file with the assumption that I would be able to download the video from Qik.com and edit the file to my liking. Bad assumption on my part.

I spent a portion of my day trying to download the videos - all my usual tricks didn’t work, including the always-reliable Keepvid.com. Apparently there used to be a ‘download link’ but it is not working according to the powers that be within Qik.com.

I finally stumbled on this post which gave me the beginnings of a workaround.

You can go to your RSS feed - http://qik.com/username/latest-videos. You have to enter your own username in that url to download your videos. However, at the moment only public videos can be downloaded through this RSS feed

I went to http://qik.com/averghese/latest-videos and was given an RSS list of videos in flv format. I quickly renamed and saved the flv file to my desktop and opened it up with VLC - the greatest open source video player that plays everything. The video played perfectly. I then opened up FFMPEGx, the greatest OS X video converter and tried to convert the video from the FLV format to any iMovie compatible format.

No luck.

I assumed that the video itself may have had a corrupted header, so tried to fix it by using FLVMIDI and injecting meta data into the header. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to make a difference to FFMPEGx or Sorenson Squeeze and I couldn’t convert the FLV to any other format.

A lot of research, and command line hacking ensued. Not very fun.

The solution ended up being using www.zamzar.com - an online video conversion site - which allowed me to upload my FLV file and then have it be automagically converted and then emailed to the fake Mailinator address I provided.

So I finally have a great video in .mp4 format that I am able to edit and modify. I’ll post both the videos later - but I now know how to deal with editing Qik.com videos post event. Perhaps I should have inserted a <geeking out> warning at the top of the post.

</geeking out>