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Posts Tagged ‘reader’

The future of advertising? Microsoft Tag Reader for the iPhone

January 11th, 2009

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Microsoft’s second application for the iTunes App store is one exclusive for the iPhone by using the in built camera. Using technology similar to bar codes the Tag Reader will decode a specific Microsoft rendered tag and follow the action. Whether it’s taking you to a web page,sending you a text message or starting a phone call the opportunities are endless especially for advertising. You can make your own tags now at http://tag.microsoft.com/

Can you imagine if this kicked off how the world would change? Everyone would be connected somehow and advertising would take on a whole new level we wouldn’t be seeing the eye candy of billboards but the companies focusing on how easy it would be to pull us in to their online stores. You could be checking up on opening times of a shop over Christmas maybe by just taking a photo of the tag, or maybe getting a list of all their customer helplines. Whatever the future holds it definitely will be more targeted towards the customer.

If you’ve downloaded the application check out my favourite one, can you guess?

Posted in App Reviews, Tools

Tags: app, iphone, microsoft, reader, tag

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New SD/MMC/RS-MMC USB card reader

September 8th, 2008

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With all these flash based card devices around nowadays most home consumer level computers are coming with multi-card readers built in. Some new laptops are gaining this luxury, although it is something Apple has chosen to omit from it’s Macbook notebook range, and not knowing when I’ll be upgrading in the future I thought I’d get a USB reader as I bide my time. Now I didn’t want a fully fledged, steel cased, multi-card, indestructible one as some seem to be but just an SD HC reader for my camcorder specifically. After seeing the wide range on the internet I turned to my old friend eBay. Now I thought the days of bargains were over on the auction site with a saturated user base however I managed to pick up exactly what I wanted for just 3p – Yes that includes postage from Hong Kong. Bargain – job done.

The downside is I’ve had to wait 9 days to receive it but it has eventually got here, true to the word of the eBay seller. It supports SD HC cards, which was my key requirement, and also matches the silver scheme of my Powerbook and other office equipment. Theres not much too say really about it’s process but the first time I plugged it in I did hit a bit of a hiccup. From my experience you have to have the SD card plugged into the USB device before you plug it into your computer. Not only does it work perfectly but it can also help not to corrupt the card although I am not too sure on the latter. Surely it is safer and recommended to do this and obviously to eject the USB device before you unplug your SD card.

Well I’m chuffed with a device that works at such a low low price and I’ll be using it quite often because it saves all the trouble with power cables and USB cables on my camcorder. All I have to do now is take out the removable storage and plug it into this little reader. Simple…It makes me wish all life was.

Posted in News, Reviews

Tags: 32gb, camcorder, canon, card, device, flash, fs100, mmc, new, reader, rs, rs-mmc, sd, silver, storage, usb

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32 GB SD HC Card. Yes they really exist

August 23rd, 2008

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Yes so many of you know I just bought a Canon FS100 Camcorder and with many electronics moving towards flash or non moving parts media I thought I should expand mine. Now SD cards have been around for years but the new version (2.0 you could say) is the SD HC (High Capacity) cards and they can have larger storage; the biggest so far at 32gb.

Now this is where some confusion arises -- SD and SD HC cards are not entirely compatible with everything. For instance an SD card reader may not work with an SD HC card unless it specifies and these problems are hard to see. The confusion starts because they look the same but they work slightly differently with different device firmware to get that extra space on the card. I hope the manufacturers start to make it clearer on the packaging but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Regarding hardware and card readers it seems the market was a bit slow on picking up SDHC support. At the moment I know of only one reputable internal SDHC card reader and that is the PEAK All in One Reader which I could only find on eBay here but also google it to check. I’ve heard some good reviews from it but if you’re not wanting to fiddle inside your pc, or have a laptop (I’ll answer to both of those) then a usb card reader may be easier. Now there are tons of these on the market including SDHC compatible ones so be careful to choose the right one, but for your money the Sandisk MicroMate USB card reader looks good as well as the Integral SD reader. I’ll be buying one in the next couple of days and I’ll let you know what happens as it’ll be a lot easier this way with my camcorder not having to plug the beast into the usb every single upload.

Anyway I checked the internet a month ago and saw this 32gb SD HC card come out mid-August for £59.99. Yes you read that right -- £59.99 and thats a lot of money for such little memory nowadays when I could buy a 750gb External Hard Drive for the same amount. However the beauty, and large cost, comes from the fact it’s so small and there is no difference in size of a 1gb SD card to a 32gb SD HC card. With this installed in my camcorder I can get 7 hours and 13 mins of footage! Now that is amazing on such a little card! That’s amazing really and it seems larger cards are on their way soon as with all the sectors used on an SD -HC card we could see memory of 2048 GB! I can imagine next year this same card will be about £29.99 if that with electronic prices dropping so much in the past few years…oh well I can say I had one first.