I’m about to save you some time, and make your mobile videos a lot more interesting.

If you have any interest whatsoever in filming anything at all on your iPhone, you need to buy Video Camera from i4software.  All the creativity they did not use when thinking up that name was spent making an amazingly simple but powerful app that lets you edit video while you film it, compile clips, create transitions, add music and credits and then share it with a single click.  All from your iPhone.

Here’s a test video I made within the first 5 minutes after I bought the app.

The point is not that this is a great film.  It’s not.  The point is that the film is 2 minutes long and took about three minutes, total, to make.  Then I uploaded it to YouTube, right from the app.

You can even use multiple iOS devices and combine the clips into a single project.  There are some helpful tutorials to get you started here.

Video Camera (I’m guessing the developer’s dog’s name is Dog) costs $8.00, which is a lot in app dollars.  But it’s a screaming bargain when you see how easy it is to make and share videos.

The experience is not perfect.  I had some crashes, especially when re-editing a saved project.  The audio import function doesn’t play well with iCloud (the iCloud based songs show up on the list but cannot be imported).

Video Camera will record in 1080- be sure to go to the settings and increase the quality right away.  But my video exported to YouTube in 360p.  That’s not good enough.  I could probably import the less compressed video via my iMac, but that sort of defeats the purpose.

There’s some work to be done, but for quick and easy video projects, Video Camera is just about perfect.

If you don’t think SOPA and PIPA will affect you, you are wrong.  If you aren’t adding your voice to the millions who oppose these bills, you should.  Now.  Before it’s too late.

Learn.

Sign.

Write.

Scream, yell, stomp your foot.

Be heard.  Make a difference.

Not this.

I hope trying to fix Yahoo doesn’t turn the latter into the former.  So I’m going to help.  You want to fix Yahoo, here’s an easy place to start.

News.  Stay with me here, Scott.  I’m serious.

I’m neither a Yahoo lover nor a Yahoo hater.  I don’t and won’t use it for email or web searches.  I do like (and pay for) Flickr, but that’s not a big enough application to be a flagship product.

What I like best about Yahoo is its news.  For whatever reason, I find myself reading current news at or via Yahoo more than any other source.  Either via My Yahoo or the news headlines I have programed onto my start page.  I just like the way Yahoo news stories are presented and formatted.

Much of my news was, for many years, consumed via My Yahoo, until I capitulated  to iGoogle (and specifically the Google News widget there) sometime last year.  But still, My Yahoo is much more user friendly.  Among other reasons, because it doesn’t put your stock portfolio in micro, barely readable fonts.  But like many Yahoo products, it seems like it’s being ignored into oblivion.  In fact, much of Yahoo news is being ignored.

For example, at the bottom of many Yahoo news pages are so-called “Editor’s Picks” articles.  I noticed these hard to miss British flag boots months ago.

The problem is that the same story has been an “Editor’s Pick” since June 23, 2011.  Those are some lazy editors.

It doesn’t give me much incentive to click through to those picks.  Not very sticky.

I think Yahoo could be a real player in the personalized news aggregation space, if it would devote some time and resources to My Yahoo and its news offerings.  Microsoft can’t market its way out of a wet paper bag when it comes to online offerings.  Apple doesn’t care about being an online news source.  Neither does Amazon.  The Huffington Post isn’t very appealing, presentation wise.  iGoogle is butt-ugly. Google News is nice, but not very customizable.  Contrary to what some people would like you to believe,  Twitter (follow me via that link) sucks for news (actually in general, including for news).   There seems to be an opportunity here.

So, c’mon Scott, go for it.

And as my payment for putting you on the right track, please don’t kill off Yahoo Pipes.  Still the most under-appreciated thing on the internets.

Today comes a mind-boggling- at least to me- related development.

Microsoft is allegedly thinking about paying retail sales people a bounty on each Windows 7 phone they sell:

According to Paul Thurrott, Microsoft has put together a $200MM war chest of cash to help promote Windows Phone 7, and is willing to pay store staff between $10 and $15 bounty for each Windows Phone 7 handset they sell, depending on how many units each person sells.

Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time (which is a position taken by some commenters in the Cult of Mac post linked above).  Maybe the hidden agenda is everywhere.  Maybe every retail store is a just a  giant carnival with con artists barking out snake oil offers to unsuspecting marks.  But, damn, I hope not.  Whether this is happening everywhere or just in the case of struggling smart phones manufactured by companies with lots of cash to burn, it stinks.

It completely invalidates the entire concept of the in-store recommendation, at least from the customer’s point of view.

There is simply no way you can compensate someone for making a specific decision and expect that person to be unbiased.  Even if you’re the most honest person in the mall (the whole wide mall), your recommendations will be impacted by a bounty.  Your level of honestly only affects the degree of the resulting bias.  Shoot, if someone recommends a Windows 7 phone because he thinks it is the best handset on the market, even that recommendation is tainted by the bounty.

Let me put it this way.  If this sort of thing is truly widespread, then shoppers need to treat retail stores with the same skepticism they treat carnival games.  It may look like a simple game of shooting a ball through the hoop to win a giant teddy bear for your girl, but the hoop, the ball and the entire setup is designed to put you at a disguised disadvantage.

At a bare minimum, sales people should have to disclose up front that they will get a bounty if you choose a certain item over another one.  Even that is wrong.  But at least then you’d know to stop wasting your time in search of an unbiased recommendation.

Rather than try to circumvent the buying process, why doesn’t Microsoft give a bunch of phones to sales people, so they can see for themselves how good they are?  Maybe come up with a better advertising campaign (I’m sure there are Windows 7 phone ads, but I can’t remember seeing any of them).  Win the game on the field, so to speak.  The craziest thing is that, by most accounts, Windows 7 phones are very well designed.  As a committed iPhone user,  nothing would make me happier than some competition to keep Apple on its game.  Someone needs to take up the role of contender, with the demise of the Blackberry.  In fact, it seems to me that Windows 7 phones could take a huge bite out of Blackberry’s market share based on Microsoft’s Enterprise penetration alone.

I wonder how the owners of these stores will react to this?  Will they stop this madness in its tracks?  Will they require disclosure?  Will they demand a cut?  Are the hardware manufacturers buying their cooperation by subsidizing salaries?  What a confusing web of cross-purposes.

At the end of the day, it’s just one more reason to shop online.  One more problem for bricks and mortar stores to deal with, which is the last thing they need.  Whether they know it or not.

That is bullshit.  Period.

If someone wants my business, whether it’s an online store, an allegedly mom and pop operation or a gigantic retail chain, there are only four things that matter:

1. Give me a decent price.

2. Give me good customer service, before and after the sale.

3. Don’t waste my time.

4. Sell me what I want to buy, not what you want to sell me.

Of these four things, having the absolute lowest price is probably the least important.  My time is, figuratively and literally, worth more than the few bucks I might save by pricing every possible source.  For the same reason, numbers 3 and 4 are very important.

Amazon is the undisputed leader in all four.  The Apple Store is the best of the bricks & mortar crowd.  Home Depot is pretty good at it, particularly when it comes to getting me in and out quickly.

Show me a needlessly long line, and I’ll show you a place I’ll never be again.  Make more than a nominal effort to upsell me and you’ll never see me again.

When someone is more focused on what they want to sell than what I want to buy, things are about to get ugly.

Forbes has a must-read article that puts much of this in perspective, using Best Buy as an example.  I shop at Best Buy now and then (on the rare occasion when I need something immediately), and have not personally experienced these issues.  But if I did, I’d likely never go back.

Among the store-killers in that article:

But my friend decided to buy some other blu-ray discs.  Or at least he tried to, until we were “assisted” by a young, poorly groomed sales clerk from the TV department, who wandered over to interrogate us.  What kind of TV do you have?  Do you have a cable service, or a satellite service?  Do you have a triple play service plan?

This would drive me completely bonkers.  Or more directly, to Amazon.Com.

More gospel:

But this is hardly customer service.  It’s actually getting in the way of a customer who’s trying to self-service because there’s no one around who can answer a basic question about the store’s confusing layout.  It’s anti-service.

There’s only one rule retailers need to impress on their employees: If customers can more easily get what they want elsewhere, they will.

Sure, “easy” includes price, but it includes a lot of other things too.

I can handle the demise of TechCrunch.

What really gets in my craw is the systematic dismantling of my one-time favorite television blog- TV Squad.

At some point, I noticed that AOL, who acquired TV Squad as part of its Weblogs acquisition, had rebranded TV Squad as AOL TV.  That was certainly an omen of bad things to come.  But for a short while, business seemed to go on more or less as usual.

Lately, however, I have noticed an onslaught of Huffpo branding and vibe, as TV Squad-cum-AOL TV is once again rebranded as Huffpost TV.  A name is a name, but the vibe is a buzz kill.  Lots of quantity.  Less quality.

And now this.

An article about the upcoming TV mid-season shows.  Only not an article really- more like an exercise in needless clicking.  You could offer to tell me all about the secret to eternal life and infinite wealth, and I would not click 39 times to read it.  Really.

I don’t want this.  I want the old TV Squad.  I’ll settle for the old AOL TV.  I’m not going to get it.  But I’m not going to read Huffpost TV either.

Anyone have a recommendation for a good TV news and episode review blog?

I was all excited to read today that Google’s music store is open for business.  Though I love me some Apple, I do not love iTunes and do not buy my music there.  Historically, I have bought almost all my music from Amazon.  Those purchases get downloaded into a folder that is monitored by Google’s Music Manager, and then uploaded to Google Music, my current clear favorite in the musical cloud.

At least as it relates to managing and accessing your existing music.  Most of my actual music listening is done via Spotify.

So, I ran over to Google Music and started surfing the Music Store.  Other than a general dislike of the omnipotent Android name and logo (don’t own an Android device; tried one and found it underwhelming), it looks OK.  I decided to give it a try, and buy a great old record by Tandy.

And things went horribly wrong.  I had a major problem logging into the Google Music Store.  Clicking the Purchase button takes you to the following screen.

Clicking the Continue Button takes you to the following screen.

Clicking the Sign In Button takes you to the Google account sign in page.  Once you sign in, you end up back at the Continue screen.  Clicking the Continue Button takes you right back to the screen above.

Over and Over.  See how easy it is to access and link to Spotify?  But I digress.

Maybe this is some sort of a cookie-related thing.  Or maybe, but surely not, it’s another Google Apps thing.

So I logged out of my Google Apps account and tried the same thing with my old regular Google Account.  Thankfully for my karma, the same thing happened.  So I tried on another computer.  Same thing.

Maybe these are just opening day kinks.  I hope so.

If not, there’s always Amazon.

However, once I experience[d] Dragon
[D]ictation and in series Siri, I realized that there may be more to voice recognition software than I first thought.

I am very excited about Dragon Express, the new $50 application for Macs. I am dictating this blog post using Dragon [E]xpress.

You can see the corrections I had to make. As you will see, Dragon Express does an excellent job of capturing my voice. This is especially impressive, given my southern drawl.

I don’t know how much I will use Dragon Express, but if these initial results are indicative of its capabilities, I expect how we I’ll use it fairly often.

I wish there was an easy way to insert URLs, or at least placeholders for links.

So far, I have to give Dragon Express in the phones a thumbs up.

I don’t wonder about any of that.  Here’s what I really want to know…

DOES ANYONE REALLY WANT TO “CONNECT” WITH A BRAND?

Is there someone sitting down at his or her computer this very moment thinking “I wonder what Target is doing?”  Or “I think I’ll tag General Motors in a meme.”

I think it’s stupid to (capital F) Friend a non-person on Facebook.  I’m  (capital F) Friends with one cat, and the Guy on a Buffalo band, but that’s about it.  I don’t really want to be (capital F) Friends with my grocery store or the pizza place down the street.  I go out of my way to avoid contact with people trying to part me with my money.  I sure as hell don’t want to volunteer to be marketed to.

This whole connecting with a brand business is nothing more than a desperate attempt to recreate the dying traditional advertisement business.  It’s a volunteer brigade of allegedly easy marks cleverly compiled in the name of targeted advertising.

So, is there anyone out there who doesn’t have skin in the game who really wants to “connect” to a brand?  If so, please tell me why.

But it’s not going to replace Facebook, for me or anyone else.  Mainly because, as far as I can tell, there are no non-geeks on there.  I have asked quite a few of my IRL friends if they use or have heard of Google+.  Roughly half say they have heard of it.  None of them- that’s right, zero- use it.  That may change a little over time, but not in any meaningful way. There’s nothing compelling enough about Google+ to cause the non-geek herd to migrate from the familiar confines of Facebook.

We geeks can fawn over Google+ as much as we like, but until it gets traction with the non-geek crowd, it will be just a side show on the path to the big blue tent.

Google+ is replacing something, though.  Sadly, not Twitter.  Nothing would improve the quality of life on earth quite as much as if we could go back in time and prevent Twitter from being created.  Maybe that’s how Terra Nova will end. 

So, Google+ is not the new Facebook.  Or the new Twitter.  It’s the new blogosphere.

Fear not, this is not another Gatekeeper thing.  Granted, it could be, inasmuch as most folks on Google+ seem to have their circles populated on a slope (in the circles of those down the tech/popularity/whatever slope and having circles populated by those up the slope).  But no one cares about that sort of thing anymore.  We’re more into shares and retweets and asking Siri if she can open the pod bay doors.

With Google+ brand pages now enabled, there is a mad rush to set up shop in this new blogosphere.  There are some limitations that prevent the digital land barons from collaborative empire building, but many of those limitations will likely get worked out over time.  It’s sort of like when early web developers had to grind out websites with Front Page Express and whatnot.

The hope for Google+, as the new blogosphere, is that it becomes such a good platform that it attracts the sort of content that gets it past the realm of slide rules and pocket protectors and into the realm of college buddies and teenagers.  In other words, lots of big media sites operate on a blogging platform, but are much more like CNN than some nerdy online diary.

First the nerds, and then the soccer moms.

But limitations, challenges and good intentions aside, the boundaries of Google+ are being determined right now.  Google+ users, much like early bloggers, are busy staking out their territory.  Circles are both the new Bookmarks and the new RSS.  Selective sharing and privacy settings are the fences of this digital frontier.

Mostly, it’s just chaos at the moment.  Which isn’t always such a bad thing.  The tale will be told when we see how (and whether) things come together into some semblance of a coherent social network.  And whether Google makes the correct, but hard, choice to keep Google+ from turning into another digital Tupperware party where sellers in friends’ clothing create thinly disguised ads in the hope of selling goods and services to the theoretical consumer.  Twitter is a brilliant business because it legitimizes spam and takes a cut for the house (by monetizing the page views as it is delivered and consumed).  Twitter is also boring for those who aren’t drunk on the Kool-Aid, for the same reason.

I hope Google+ becomes better than Twitter and the blogosphere.  Only time will tell.

It’s always interesting to watch a new platform and technology that supports it evolve.  There’s a lot to like about Google+.  And there are some issues- many of which seem familiar to long-time bloggers.

Meet the new blogosphere.  Hopefully not the same as the old blogosphere.