With AT&T facing lawsuits for not delivering MMS features at the iPhone 3GS launch, they kind of had to do something. I’m not sure if I’d be satisfied by this video if I were among the plaintiffs, but I think it does a good enough job. The stat about 300% annual increases in mobile data use is pretty powerful. I’d heard it a dozen times before*, but because I wasn’t in Austin for SXSW iPhone meltdown, I don’t have quite the same appreciation as some do. AT&T added capacity then, and they seem to have been scrambling elsewhere too.

iPhone users are said to be six times as likely as anybody else to watch video on their phones, and if WiFi aggregator JiWire’s report says anything about cell data, the iPhone has certainly changed the game. JiWire’s Mobile Audience Insights Report shows that over 97% of the devices on their network are either iPhones (about 56% of the total) or iPod Touches! And all the way back in 2007 in Britain, iPhone users were 33 times as likely as other phone users to send or receive more than 25MB a month.

It will be interesting to see what happens to other carriers as they get devices that encourage use as the iPhone has.

*Actually, I hadn’t heard the 300% stat specifically, just inspecific reports of increased usage.

Okay, I don’t want to watch all the movies depicted in this 100 year overview of film special effects, but I did just add a few to my Netflix queue.

The full list, according to the description in YouTube:

• 1900 – The Enchanted Drawing
• 1903 – The Great Train Robbery
• 1923 – The Ten Commandments (Silent)
• 1927 – Sunrise
• 1933 – King Kong
• 1939 – The Wizard of Oz
• 1940 – The Thief of Bagdad
• 1954 – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• 1956 – Forbidden Planet
• 1963 – Jason and the Argonauts
• 1964 – Mary Poppins
• 1977 – Star Wars
• 1982 – Tron
• 1985 – Back to the Future
• 1988 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• 1989 – The Abyss
• 1991 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day
• 1992 – The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
• 1993 – Jurassic Park
• 2004 – Spider-Man 2
• 2005 – King Kong
• 2006 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• 2007 – Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• 2007 – The Golden Compass
• 2008 – The Spiderwick Chronicles
• 2008 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Liam Lynch explains the origin of the video, but what was Dan Deacon thinking as he recorded the audio? Of all the free MP3 downloads he offers, Two Friends from the Acorn Master album may be the most, um, listenable.

Thanks to daily songsmith Corey B (Corey Blanchette) for the tip.

I’m simply in love with this video. Watch through the credits to see a bit of how it’s made.

[I]n theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.

via John Beales.

Well, not ‘leaked,’ but just in time for the new Transformers movie, Patrick Boivin has posted this video of Bumblebee breakdancing.

Also in line with movies, here’s Bruce Lee p0wning Iron Man:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In line with yesterday’s discovery of the Viddler WP plugin, Riffly Webcam Video Comments also supports video or audio comments within WordPress:

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

The service is advertising supported. We cover all the costs for bandwidth, servers, and maintenance. Optionally, we also offer Premium Riffly accounts that provide you with additional benefits, such as advertising removal, control panel access, analytics, and much more.

The Viddler Wordpress plugin promises to “Enrich your site’s commenting experience by enabling video comments….” Users can record direcly from a web cam or choose a video they’ve previously uploaded to Viddler.com.

Viddler evangelist Colin Devroe has it on his site, where I can see it requires would-be commenters have a Viddler account. That last bit is too bad. I like Viddler, but I can’t force my readers to like it and get accounts as a prerequisite to commenting.

Doesn’t everybody need a PocketTorch? It’s a “safe, practical tool,” they say. More amusingly, the list of suggested uses includes: melting your cache of gold, scaring grandma, lighting illegal fireworks, dental/lab work, and making friends jealous.

I can’t explain my fascination with putting flowers into the In-Sink-Erator, but the sink does smell like flowers afterwards.

Music is Evil by Beads.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote it, but William Shatner did it best. Watch the video now and download the MP3 for future enjoyment.

Thanks to Vasken for pointing out the video.

Here are the lyrics so you can try this yourself at home:

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
Its lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think its gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Mars aint the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact its cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I dont understand
Its just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man

And I think its gonna be a long long time…

First it was 100, then over 500 complaints about the Matrix-style (that means fake looking) kung foo action in Volkswagen’s new ad.

I really don’t know what I’d do with a tablet, but it’s still plenty interesting to see this ModBook come together. On the other hand, if there’s anything to the earlier rumors of an Apple tablet, I hope it leads to some sort of large-screen iPhone-like device.

Perian: “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture

The LGPL-licensed QuickTime plugin installs easily on Mac OS X 10.5 and does what it promises. FLV videos (such as those you’d sneakily download from YouTube) open just like any other QuickTime vid, and you can easily export them to other types.

A while ago now I bought a Aiptek GO-HD 720p from Amazon for cheap. The FotoRamp review was helpful; links to actual raw video convinced me; but this video review was absolutely no help at all.

You can’t track the brand on Flickr; but a search reveals a few photos (one, two), a video, and even some photo panoramas (one, two) assembled from the video. You can see my own test videos here (note the link to the raw video in the description of each).

The camera works well with both iMovie and iPhoto. Upon plugging it in, iPhoto launches and prompts to import all the photos and video. The video is available in iMovie from within the iPhoto library browser. Though most video gets delivered online (and at resolutions somewhat lower than HD), the additional resolution allows you to zoom in on sections of the recorded video seeing much quality loss in the output. This video, shot on the Aiptek and edited in iMovie, demonstrates:

Update: my biggest complaint with the camera is the lens’ limited wide angle ability. This might not be a problem for others, but it was enough of an annoyance for me that I built my own wide angle add on lens for it.

Tankmen is funny, no doubt, but I wonder what it means when we’re deeply embroiled in two of the longest running armed conflicts of US history that we find it so easy to make comedy about war.

Light-Paint Piano Player from Ryan Cashman on Vimeo.

After stuffing yourself with too much Thanksgiving dinner and the tryptothan kicks in, there’s some time when all conversations seem to work like this one from Martin Wilson.

Supposedly this is more real than it looks. See how it was made.

DGENERATE NATION – Skate With Me from DGENETICS on Vimeo.

Google yesterday introduced video chat to the web-based version of it’s Google Talk app (think GMail), but doesn’t appear to interoperate with any of the many existing video chat apps, iChat and Skype tops among them.

The TechnoViking will have you scratching your head for the first 90 seconds, then ROFLing for a while. Not enough yet? Watch him dance to “It’s a Piece Of Cake To Bake A Pretty Cake.” This one claims to be the original, and though the sound is bad the video quality is much better than the others.

Thing is, now that you’ve watched it a couple times, did he stop a pickpocket or admonish a groper at the beginning?