Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

Szanuje tylko jeden typ nagród. Te, które dostajemy dzięki głosom klientów. Tak właśnie stało się wczoraj – czytelnicy magazynu Mobility zdecydowali w głosowaniu internetowym, że zasłużyliśmy na Złote Belle Mobility w kategorii PrePaid (oferta na kartę) i PostPaid (abonament). Bardzo, bardzo, bardzo dziękuję za każde jedno kliknięcie. Gdybym tylko mógł postawiłbym każdemu z Was piwo [...]

Doceniona w niezależnych testach dziennikarskich nawigacja NaviExpert w Play doczekała się kolejnej wersji. Najważniejsze zmiany, które wprowadza nowa wersja to m.in. inteligentne sortowanie punktów na liście ostatnio używanych. W praktyce oznacza to tyle, że punkty znajdujące się na głównym ekranie, nad menu aplikacji są sortowane nie tylko według kolejności ostatniego użycia, ale także lokalizacji i [...]

Kochani polecam Wam dzisiejszy tekst w Rzeczpospolitej (wersja na rpkom.pl ). Nasz szef marketingu Bartosz Dobrzyński przedstawił w nim wizję nielimitowanego dostępu do netu po LTE. Lubię ten koncept bardzo, ale musimy poczekać jeszcze na LTE Czekamy jak na szpilkach na wyniki przetargu na częstotliwości 1800 MHz. Może ktoś z Was wie przypadkiem kiedy [...]

Rok 2013 Play rozpoczął od wprowadzenia nowej ulepszonej oferty postpaidowej w postaci FORMUŁ: S, M i L, które są kontynuacją gorąco przyjętej przez klientów w roku ubiegłym, FORMUŁY 4.0, czyli oferty zryczałtowanej z nielimitowanymi połączeniami do wszystkich sieci w opłacie miesięcznej za jedyne 79zł. Ponieważ jest to kolejna ciekawa innowacja marki Play do jej wsparcia [...]

Kto obserwował dziś Facebooka, na pewno już się dowiedział, że do końca dnia można złapać fajne bonusy za doładowania Jakie benefity można otrzymać? 50 SMS-ów za doładowanie od 5 do 10 zł 50 minut za doładowanie od 11 do 25 zł 50% więcej za doładowanie powyżej 25 zł Bonusy sumują się! Z każdego można [...]

Od jutra obowiązywać będą nowe ceny wybranych modeli: Windows Phone 8S by HTC Samsung i8160 Galaxy Ace II Samsung i8190 Galaxy S III mini Samsung S6500 Galaxy mini II   Szczegóły w cenniku

Lepiej późno niż wcale To był fascynujący rok. Niejeden obserwator rynku przewidywał, że w 2012 roku nic ciekawego się nie wydarzy  Zapewne niektórzy z was oglądali nasze podsumowanie 2011. Dużo się od tego czasu zmieniło W telegraficznym skrócie: Myślę, że największym sukcesem jest utrzymanie wysokiej statystyki przejść z numerem do PLAY.  Wprawdzie nasz [...]

Zobaczcie koniecznie infografikę z danymi na temat aplikacji 21 WOŚP.

Films have been around a long time, probably a lot longer than you think. The first moving picture was taken way back in 1882 by Étienne-Jules Marey, while the oldest surviving film, the Roundhay Garden Scene, was shot in 1888.

Of course, movie making has changed immeasurably since those bygone days. Nowadays, practically anyone with a mobile phone – and there are over six billion mobile phone subscribers on this planet – can make their own garden scene. Happily, mobile phones are also being used to film much more than tea time frolics. One organization doing this brilliantly is World Film Collective (WFC).

On a mission to make a difference

World Film Collective, brainchild of filmmaker Alice Bragg, has a very simple mission: to teach young people, with limited access to employment, education or training, the craft of mobile phone movie making. Once the films have been produced, they help distribute them through new media networks to audiences of thousands across the globe. Inspired by theatrical pioneers such as Augusto Boal from Brazil, who used theatre to promote social change with his Theatre of the Oppressed, World Film Collective is quite literally changing the world with mobile technology.

Smartphones for a smart cause

One company helping them accomplish their mission is Nokia. Not only has Nokia been the world’s biggest manufacturer of digital cameras since 2008, but with smartphones like the Nokia 808 PureView, it’s also at the very cutting edge of mobile camera technology. When you combine Nokia’s amazing tech specs with the passion and creativity of World Film Collective, you’re pretty much guaranteed to make waves. The most recent example of their collaboration was for World Aids Day.

Making mobile movie magic

The challenge: To better inform the people of Cape Town about how to avoid HIV, and how to live with the virus. To do this, the Kaltcha Pioneers, a group of five South African teenagers, were equipped with Nokia 808 PureViews. The task they were given was to create a daily five minute show throughout November, everything from short movies and music videos to discussions and short documentaries. Without mobile technology such a challenge would have been impossible. The Kaltcha Pioneers, however, were a spectacular success. But don’t just take our word for it: check out one of the their short movies, called Private Lives, which gives a unique insight into the everyday life of people living with HIV. 

Marketing for the masses

Making mobile movies is only one part of the challenge. You also need to make sure people see them. The Kaltcha Pioneers mixed local television, Cape Town TV, with social media distribution. Active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Mxit, they managed to reach over 1.5 million people. What’s more, they’ve carried on using these channels to promote their message and put out new short films. But what exactly encouraged these township kids to start making a difference, using mobile tech to change people’s lives in local communities? Here’s the answer, in their own words.

With organizations like World Film Collective empowering disadvantaged kids around the globe to share their stories, mobile technology can truly change the world. The question is, which stories most need to be told? Let us know your suggestions in the comments below.         

Who do you reckon is responsible for—deep breath—MP3 players, Nokia Music, YouTube, Napster, Rhapsody, Windows Media Player, the early retirement of the CD and the mini-disc, and (gasp) both the alleged death and the reinvigoration of the music industry? Karlheinz Brandenburg, that’s who—inventor of the humble MP3 music file.

The Moving Pictures Experts Group

MP3, or MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III to the mega-boffins, is a patented encoded format for digital audio. MPEG stands for Moving Pictures Experts Group, an international collaboration of engineers founded in 1988. One of the things these coders were first interested in was a phenomenon called auditory masking, which is all about using one sound to render another inaudible. The MPEG researchers wanted to use this to help develop efficient compression tools, or codecs, to apply to full-motion video and high-quality audio in digital form.

First they built a huge, refrigerator-sized machine, nicknamed ‘the helicopter’, that could squeeze a sound file down to just 8% of its original size, but that wasn’t especially convenient; they needed an algorithm that could replicate the same effect—and that’s where Karlheinz Brandenburg comes in.

MP3 is served at Tom’s diner

Brandenburg, part of the MGEP team, had been a PhD student at the German University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the 1980s, when one of his professors instructed him to work on the conundrum of how one might transmit music over a digital ISDN phone line. The trick was to compress it without spoiling the auditory experience, and Brandenburg’s test-case wasn’t Beethoven or Wagner, but folk-singer Suzanne Vega’s pop song Tom’s Diner—a song he’d heard by chance from down the corridor.

The nuances of Vega’s voice on the a cappella track meant that Brandenburg’s new algorithm had to be really, really good at picking out which parts of the sound could be discarded without ruining the listener’s experience. Of course, after listening to the song several thousand times, he cracked it. So Brandenburg’s work, first at Erlangen, and then as a post-doctoral researcher at AT&T-Bell Labs, became the basis of what we’d recognise as modern audio compression systems.

Incredible shrinking music

So what does that mean for us, and for the music industry? Well, the genius of the MP3 is that its algorithm lets you massively shrink the amount of data needed to represent the original audio recording, while still making it sound authentic to most listeners. That means that while it almost always sounds just as good as the older recording formats we’d gotten used to, it’s also easier to store and to transfer—hence, today, you can carry a whole music library around on your portable player or your smartphone.

74 hours of tunes

The Nokia Lumia 920, for instance, has the capacity to fit up to 74 hours of music on there; a CD could only ever manage 74 minutes. So long, CDs! Online music file-sharing and quick downloading has become ubiquitous, and streaming services like Nokia Music are starting to replace radios. And it’s all thanks to Karlheinz Brandenburg, though he’s reluctant to take all the credit, insisting that ‘I know on whose shoulders I stand and who else contributed a lot.’

A genius and modest to boost? Our hero!