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Author: ianjennings

Mote.io beta update!

Mote.io is an app that turns your phone into a remote control for websites. I’ve been working on the project for a little over a year and just released an app update today.

Want to get in on the beta? Sign up here:

https://mote.io/register

Thanks for being a part of the Mote.io beta!

Mote.io is an app that turns your phone into a remote control for websites. You’re on this list because you signed up for the Mote.io beta, thanks!

http://mote.io

Now with support for Hype Machine, Vimeo, Pandora, and Rdio, with more to come!

Control your favorite media sites with new remotes from Mote.io. More sites coming soon, including Grooveshark, Soundcloud, reddit, and more!

Download the updated app here: http://bit.ly/10noR4j

Find the new remotes in homebase: http://mote.io/homebase

Now more secure, all traffic encrypted over SSL.

Mote.io is now https only. Not only does it makes Mote.io more secure, but it also allows Mote.io to support https sites like Vimeo and more without breaking the internet.

Better reconnection logic

Now Mote.io detects things like network drop and we’ve made changes to better resolve connection issues. Hurray!

Various bugfixes

The app, extension, and website have all been updated thanks to all of your great feedback. Keep it coming! Just reply to this email or tweet at me (http://twitter.com/sw1tch).

New Mote.io community

Submit feedback and talk about Mote.io using the new community page.

https://mote.io/community

Thanks for being a beta tester! Want to get lunch?

Seriously, thank you. The beta testers have provided me with tons of feedback, suggestions, and spelling errors.

What sites do you want Mote.io to support? Do you plug your computer into a TV? A stereo? Want to build a game with Mote.io?

Let me know!

You can reply to this email or tweet at me for any reason. Want to get lunch or a cup of coffee? I’m in NYC, give me a shout.

http://twitter.com/sw1tch

[email protected]

More to come, including an iPhone app!

Updates to come include even better sync logic, more remotes and supported sites, and even an iPhone app! Stay tuned…

Mashable: Rutgers Project Mashes Instagram With Google Street View

Mashable: Rutgers Project Mashes Instagram With Google Street View

Rooster.am Trials Expiring!

This is a copy of an email I sent out this morning about rooster.am.

Rooster.am - Wake Up Calls with Facebook, Twitter, Google Calendar, and More!

Thanks for using rooster.am!

Rooster.am is an alarm clock service that calls your phone and reads aloud your Facebook events, Google Calendar, stories from The New York Times and more.

Rooster.am was created at the second ever HackNY hackathon (it was called Cock-a-doodle-do then) where it won first place! Within a week I turned the hack into a website, bought a domain, and then presented at the New York Tech Meetup.

Since then it’s been written about all over the internet – my favorite piece is from The Next Web.

Over the past two years the service has grown larger than I can imagine. Rooster.am wakes up more than 100 people everyday, and spends more than 45 hours talking on the phone per month.

I wish the service could remain free forever, but the reality is that it’s grown to cost me more than I can afford to keep it up and running.

Beginning January 1st, rooster.am will cost $5.99/month for everybody except you. Anybody who currently has an account can subscribe to rooster.am for just $2.99/month by clicking the following link:

Save ½ price by clicking here!

You’ll need to log in with your current account in order for this to work. 

I really thank you for supporting myself and this service. For those of you who have wrote (or called me up!), thank you. It has been tons of fun waking y’all up every day.

Anybody who does not wish to upgrade can continue to use the service until January 1st, 2013. I figure most people will want to sleep in that morning.

Thanks again. If you have any questions or would like to keep in touch you can email me personally or follow me on twitter.

Cock-a-doodle-do!
Ian Jennings

You’re receiving this email because you signed up for rooster.am in the past two years.

Hype Machine TV

I did a bunch of work on HMTV, and it just launched today. I made the dark theme, dropped in the hamster ads, and fixed up some javascript.

hypem:

NEW: HMTV

We’ve teamed up with VHX.tv to create playlists of music videos being shared by bloggers around the world. Watch and find something new!

Hack together Stripe after work

This post is about my new experiment: http://rooster.am

I’ve heard a lot of Hype about Stripe. I have monetized two websites in the past with the infamous Paypal buttons. 

Both of those sites have shut down since, but I did learn a lot about installing Paypal buttons. It’s probably the most terrible part of any website I’ve ever built

In one case, I resold ventrilo servers. The worst part of this was rigging a Paypal button to a server cpanel. I might have been 15 or 16 when I resold them. It’s a terrible idea. 

Anyway, today I decided to install Stripe after work on a two year old hack called rooster.am. It’s a two year old winning HackNY hack that uses Twilo and various APIs to give you an awesome wake up call: http://rooster.am/

I have been paying for rooster.am for nearly 2 years, making no money just because I thought it was fun. It turns out that’s not really a good investment.

So today I spent the afternoon installing Stripe. I’ve been learning a lot about Google Analytics while working at the Hype Machine and was inspired by Bingo Card Creator guy.

It was really simple. I was able to use their Javacript API and PHP library and paste something together in an afternoon.

Whats impressive about this is that I haven’t really modified this code since NYTM in 2011. I’m at least a version outdated of everything, including CodeIgniter and jQuery and Google Analytics.

I used their extremely simple libraries, stripe.js and php-stripe (in CodeIgniter mode). I only had to add one field to my database.

Everything worked as promised. Stripe has a cool “test mode” where you can try out your payments with fake credit card numbers that always return some kind of error on your app. 

I did this on a server that has no staging environment, no build or deploy scripts, no nodejs backends, no tests or mongodbs.

Strip makes it super easy to do one of the most daunting tasks in web development. Making integration simple is really important and a genius business model. 

Next I need to do some front end updating. Site isn’t even responsive :/

Present Yet Absent

The following is a response to a reading assignment for my class “Self and Society in Virtual Contexts.” We are to publish journal entries on a public blog found below. They must all include a haiku.

http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/virtualselvesrealhaikus

——————————–

Present yet absent
Augmented reality
We will be cyborgs

Baym spends the first two chapters summarizing the current state of technology in society. People on cell phones are annoying, dating happens online, the world is changing. Technology is a large part of our social lives and people are scared. We’re devoting tons of attention to our phones, and it’s hindering our social interaction. How can we be in two places at once?

There are thousands of engineers working hard on this problem and the answer is only a few years away. Technology is about to take an even larger part of our lives.

Phones just took the leap into the future, and now we’re constantly connected to the web with mobile data and push notifications. We have megapixel cameras, location awareness, video chat, and the entire internet in our pocket. These features are constantly chirping for our attention, and we are more than willing to oblige. Augmented reality removes the distinction between online and offline. No longer is our attention split between one or the other.

Baym asks “how can one be both present and absent?”

He uses the example of how rude it is for one to use their phone while at dinner. One is physically present but devoting their attention to a phone.

What actually defines where one is? I agree that one is splitting their attention between the real and virtual world. If you take your eyes off the phone and look across the table, you’re back in reality aren’t you? The phone is the underlying problem. Physical limitations mean we can only choose between one world or the other. We can’t attend to both the phone and our date.

Augmented reality combines the technology of your phone with a display in your eyesight. This could be glasses, contacts, or even an implant. Think of it as putting your iPhone screen into a pair of glasses. All of the things you normally see on your phone are now in your face. You can still see the world through the camera, but now your reality is going through one phase of post processing. It is augmented.

Now imagine someone sitting with a date at a table with augmented reality implants; both parties. Attention is still divided, but the consumption of information is more passive. Now SMS pops up in the corner of your vision like a Growl alert, but nobody else can even tell you’ve been pinged.

This kind of situation requires a new social norm. If it were alright to take your phone out at dinner, then I wouldn’t be writing this article and we probably would never see augmented reality. The idea that this screen is a window into a separate world is the limit, pulling out a physical object that represents “somewhere else” is rude.

What if “somewhere else” was here? What if we were both “somewhere else” and here together? What if we were always in two places at once?

If adopted, the merge of real and virtual worlds will overcome the current social dilemmas. In fact, I believe that these problems are merely an artifact of our iteration towards augmented reality. Technology is offering us great advantages and we’re having a hard time ignoring them.

With the adoption of augmented reality everyone will exist in both dimensions all the time. There is no comparing online identity with your offline identity, because now they are the same. You would see the world as you normally do, but with the aid of a computer. We will all be cyborgs navigating the real world yet consuming a virtual one.