techNOcool

We've all been thinking and talking about mobile phones a lot lately, so I was excited to get the chance to attend a hands-on session at the ELI Annual Conference last week about using mobile phones to stream live video.

We were using a service called PocketCaster from ComVu.com. The service is free right now, while it's in beta, though it's expected to be about $5/month when it goes out of beta. In a nutshell, it works like this: You sign up for an account and then you download a small application to install on your phone. You also get personal web space to stream your video to. When you want to stream video you pull up the app on your phone, make a couple of selections and you're off and running. Anyone who knows the URL of your webspace can see your live video.

You can stream the video from your cell phone using either wifi or internet service from your cell provider. We used Nokia n80 cells phones (about $400 retail) that didn't have any cell service, so we were connecting using the wifi in the hotel.

In reality, there seemed to be about a 15 second delay, so "live" is a relative term. You can also archive video that you stream live, to be viewed later.

You can see some of this in action. This blog has a link to video that was taken during one of the ELI sessions and then archived. You can see two things here: that it doesn't do so well with lots of movement and that enlarging the video from a cell phone is not a great idea!

Here's a better example. This is live video streaming from a cell phone on a window ledge in Vancouver. Press the play button to start viewing the video. Note: for some reason, you need a PC to view this. There is apparently a mac hack available, but I don't know what it is.

It's not clear yet what the educational applications of this are, but it would be great to have one of these phones on hand here to help us figure out how this could be used in education. According to the presenter, by 2011 25% of cell phones sold will cost less than $20, and there will be a camera on the $20 phones. If we start researching this now, we may be ready by 2011 to help faculty put those $20 cell phones to good use!