Tag Archives: mobile phones

360 Degree Photos in an Android Phone Camera

I’ve been playing around with the Google Camera app that lets you take immersive, Google Street View-like pictures (Google calls them photo spheres). You make a photo sphere by taking pictures all around you and then letting the app stitch the images together. Sometimes the stitching is pretty good, sometimes there are a lot of weird artifacts. Here are some photo sphere pictures of our library and my office that I took yesterday and today. If you download the pictures, they don’t have that interactive immersive effect that you see when you view them on your phone in the app or when you view them in Google+.

Here’s an video showing you how to take pictures in the photo sphere mode of the Google Camera app:

As you can see from the video, you can upload these to Google Maps so that when someone is viewing a place on the map, they’ll be able to check out any photo spheres that are affiliated with that place (more details here).

I haven’t found a way yet to embed a photo sphere in your own site; it seems like you have to click over to a Google website that hosts the image to get the interactive and immersive experience. If there is a way to embed the images, they’d be fun to add to the library website.

 

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Tech Sharecase, 14 September 2012

NFC (Near Field Communication)
We watched this video to learn more about this new technology that is increasingly being found in new smart phones.

The video shows how small tags that look like little stickers can be programmed to communicate with NFC-enabled phones and transmit messages or commands to the phone.

Mobile Device Usage at Each CUNY Campus
We took a look at the latest annual “Student Experience Survey” (pdf) from CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research to see data on what technologies students use regularly (see table 6a, which begins on page 22). We were surprised that 74% of Baruch students report regular use of a smart phone, a number higher than what we had expected.

LibGuides
We shared a number of hacks and workarounds for LibGuides.

Make the tabs for a page taller by inserting the HTML tag <br> in between two of the words in the page name:

For an example of a guide with tall page tabs, see Sandy Roff’s recent guide to European history.

We also talked about the custom fields that we can add to the template for all librarian profile boxes. Those fields could include things like space for a biography, recent publications, courses taught, etc. The admins for our account can set this up. For details on what’s involved in setting it up (just a few minute’s work), see this help guide from Springshare: Additional Fields – Profiles in LibGuides.

If you want to link to a specific box on a specific page, you can get the URL for that box by following these steps:

  1. Click “Edit” in the top right corner of the box you are interested in and then select “Edit Box Info” from the sub-menu that appears.
  2. In the “Edit Box Info” window that opens, click the tab labeled “Box Link and Embed Code”
  3. The URL for that box should be the first thing shown on the tab you’ve opened. Copy that URL and use wherever you want to send your user straight to that specific box.

If we want to republish a box on some other web page (such as a page on the library website), you can just grab the embed code that appears in the same place you get the box link.

Finally, we looked at the way that you can use an image instead of text for a link. When you are adding links in a “Link Box” you can use the HTML for an image in the “link title” field:

So on the “Managing the Sources You Find” box on the guide for undergraduate honors theses, the link for Zotero doesn’t just have the plain text “Zotero” but instead an image found on the Zotero website. You can find the URL for an image you want to use this way by going to another site with the image you want and then right clicking on the image; after you right click, look for a menu option labeled “copy image location.” That will grab the URL for the image that you’ll need when you are adding the link in your LibGuide.

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Baruch Student Cell Phone Carriers

We recently polled our students about their cell phone service carriers. Here are the results based on 3,437 respondents:

T-Mobile = 36%
AT&T = 30%
Verizon = 21%
Sprint = 9%
Metro/PCS = 2%
Nextel = < 1%
Other = 2%

We will be using this data to improve some services on campus. I will update this post with the details.

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Tech Sharecase, 8 October 2010

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Ellen Kaufman, Mike Waldman, Kevin Wolff

Barcode Scan Apps for Phones

We talked about a blog post from Boing Boing detailing how one used book dealer uses barcode scanning app on his phone to identify profitable items in thrift shops.

Copyright and Course Reserves
There was some discussion about recent decisions in the course reserves case at Georgia State in which three publishers alleged that the library had infringed copyright. We looked at the blog posts on the LibraryLaw Blog and the ARL Policy Notes blog about the case.

E-textbooks
We went over the business model that Flat World Knowledge offers in its e-textbook service. Relatedly, in future meetings of the Tech Sharecase, we hope to have more discussion of online learning objects that might supplement or replace altogether textbooks in certain classes.

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Tech Sharecase, 18 June 2010

Attendees
Saad Abulhab, Joanna Cruz, Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, Ellen Kaufman, Wilcina Longdon, Jin Ma, Louisa Moy, Christina Muniz, Peter Philips, Ryan Phillips, Ester Ramos, Michael Waldman

Baruch iPhone App
We watched a screencast from the developer of the forthcoming iPhone app that is being designed for the Office of Student Development. There are placeholders in certain sections where library services and resources can be added. This app is being designed primarily as a student recruitment tool.

Microsoft Office 2010
If you are a faculty member, you can go to the CUNY Mall within the CUNY Portal and download for free the latest version of Microsoft Office, which was just released this week. The license is for home use only and not for work PCs. It is very possible that this fall, though, our work computers will get upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010. The 2010 version of Outlook (and the earlier 2007 version) has a built-in RSS reader, which will work once we get our Exchange server here on campus upgraded this summer.

Pew Report on Use of Social Media and Mobile Devices Among Teens
We took a quick look at the recently released report from the Pew Internet and America Life Project that about how teens use mobile devices and social media.

Online Education
This fall, the statistics department will use online course content developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative for its intro statistics course. We also discussed briefly the large library of video tutorials created by Salman Khan and published on YouTube. Over 1400 videos are available; most of the videos are about science, math, finance, economics. Here is a sample video on balance sheets:

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Tech Sharecase, 5 March 2010

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur, Ryan Phillips

Mobile Phones
We looked at a report from Gartner that predicted sales of mobile phones with touchscreens are expected to rise 97 percent in 2010. We also wondered if we were able to track how many visitors to the library’s website came there on mobile devices. There is some data to that effect in our library’s website statistics if you look at what browsers and operating systems were used by site visitors, but the data isn’t as complete as we’d hoped it might be. We also talked about how much we know about the extent to which Baruch students have adopted the latest cell phone technology.

Ebooks and Ebook Readers
After looking at a graphic from the New York Times comparing the “economics of producing a book” in print vs. electronic, we had a discussion of our school’s Kindle experiment and what we might do with the Kindles after the semester is over. One idea that was floated was what it might mean were we to load public domain editions of books that are required reading in undergraduate courses (especially ones that are part of the general education curriculum).

We watched a video from Flat World Knowledge about their “open textbooks” that can be freely read online as well as purchased as a file download or a print-on-demand book.

Video Collections
We looked at the way that the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University has created a “Toolkit” site where screencasts are collected. Each video offers an embed code, making it easy for instructors and librarians to deploy the videos on course websites, course blogs, etc. The embed codes are for the hosted webservice where the video file actually resides (YouTube, etc.). It doesn’t appear that the videos are locally hosted on the Toolkit site.

We also browsed the collection of screencasts that have been uploaded to our library’s YouTube account.

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Tech Sharecase, 30 October 2009

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Randy Hensley, Ellen Kaufman, Louise Klusek, Ryan Phillips

Google Discover Music
Talked about new Google Discover Music service in which search results are more socially based and about October 23, 2009, radio story from On the Media, “Charting the Charts,” which noted how Billboard is waning in influence and new services are appearing that measure music success differently. One such services is Band Metrics that ranks popularity not by sales but by an aggregation of metrics, including social ones. Search is changing the economic model for music rankings. Big Champagne offers another service that measures rankings using social aspects. What is a credible or reliable metric is shifting from authorities like SoundScan or Billboard to services that look at social use of media.

Google Social Search
This experiment from Google looks at who is in your social graph (your collection of online friends) so that it can present you with search results that are refined by content that your friends have posted online.

Google Reader
We looked at the way that people who use Google Reader can friend others who use the service and share notable feed items with each other.

Google Site Search Tool
The Baruch College website today unveiled its new site search engine powered by Google. The library website will be changing its search site software to Google soon as well.

2D Barcodes
Following up on Arthur’s comments on an earlier blog post here, We talked about 2D barcodes, QR codes, and their potential uses by colleges and libraries. We looked at the barcode service from ScanLife and the video about how Case Western Reserve University used ScanLife codes.

Mobile Websites for Libraries
We talked about various strategies for creating library websites that would render well on browsers in mobile phones.

Amazon Kindle vs. Barnes & Noble Nook
While talking about basic differences between new Nook reader coming out in November, we also discussed the Kindle loan program at North Carolina State University and how the service also offers patron-driven acquisitions (hear all the details about this on the Library 2.0 Gang podcast from September 2009 in which Orion Pozo from NCSU was interviewed).

TinyURL vs. HugeURL
TinyURL is a well-known service that will shrink a long URL with a brief one that redirects you to the original site. HugeURL is a funny spoof that turns short URLs into obscenely long ones.

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