Dan Woolley was trapped under the rubble of the Haiti earthquake without much information about what to do.  He was in pain, but not sure of his overall situation.  He needed help, and believe it or not, it was just a finger slide away.

His iPhone.

Woolley used his iPhone as a flashlight (a totally under-appreciated function) to diagnose his foot as broken.

Then, he used the instructions from (a medical) app to treat the excessive bleeding from cuts on his legs and the back of his head.  Woolley used his shirt to tie off the three-inch gash that was opened on his leg and a sock to bandage the back of his head. He said he also looked up ways to stop from going into shock.

Woolley also used the notepad function to type out his last notes to his wife and kids, should he not make it.  But he survived and is back doing the talk show rounds this morning.

On a slightly more serious note, there are several iPhone applications on sale today with the proceeds going to benefit Haiti earthquake relief.

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You know, I get asked this all the time, so here are the instructions.

• Find the Youtube video you want.  
• Click PLAY.
• While the video is playing, goto the top of the page and open WINDOW–>ACTIVITY 
• Take a look at all the elements of that page (you may have to click the ‘carrot’ to display)
• Find the one that is still ‘moving’, i.e. getting bigger and bigger in size.
• Double-click on that item specifically.
• A new window will open up and the file will download to your harddrive.

The file will likely be a FLASH .flv movie, but you can convert it with Quicktime Pro or VLC or any number of other programs, converting it to an m4v for your iPhone if you want.

Here endeth the lesson.

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China’s CCTV has just released a new iPhone application that really blows away most other TV iPhone applications that I’ve seen.  Of course, there is this caveat–it’s all in Chinese, and pretty much not worth much to those who don’t speak Mandarin (with the exception of sports content), but the application is chock a block full of content from all of the CCTV networks, providing catch up of TV series, news clips, etc.  It’s amazing that so much content can be made available online, and should serve as a bit of a template for American television networks seeking to release mobile applications.  Of course in a country in which IP rights are more of an afterthought rather than the first thought, you can develop the cool applications first and worry about the rights issues later.

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From the about fricking time department, word has come from the TUAW that the much anticipated Slingplayer application for the iPhone has been submitted for approval with the overlords at Apple HQ. Slingplayer is a tool of many an expat used to ’sling’ back television content from a central location (i.e. their parent’s house) to their current assignment overseas. It’s also used by people in offices, geeks in college, and plenty of other folks who need to move their video content from one place to another (myself included).

When the iPhone first came out, we heard rumors that Sling would do an application, but that was off/on/only if jailbroken/on/off/on again, or something to that effect. There are already several other live TV apps for the iPhone that are out, but few that will have the functionality as basically getting your cable TV on your iPhone.

And this is the week I got rid of cable in the house. I think the Slingplayer is still in a pile of cables behind where the Comcast box once stood. Guess I have to rewire things.

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Although I’ve not gotten a stamp in my passport in about 18 months, in recent years I’ve spent literally hundreds of days overseas away from the convenience of my landline phone and US-based mobile. I’ve tried a wide variety of means to stay in touch, but I think I’ve finally come up with a formula that makes a bit of sense. And since the New York Times is writing about the same thing today now is as good a day as any to share my thoughts.

In the old days, I would take an unlocked GSM phone and simply buy a UK or DE or HK SIM card upon arrival in a new country, giving me a local phone number where I could be reached. Unfortunately this did not help me with making calls back to the US, which usually required calling cards (that ended up being quite expensive). Pay as you go also was quite expensive on a minute by minute basis. For example, a week in the UK would easily run me £100 in phone charges. And added to this is the fact overseas Pay as You go numbers often disappear after lack of use of 6 months or so (which is now an issue).

Now my setup is much cheaper.

First, Skype. I have Skype, Skype Out and Skype In set up. I have a phone number in London and one in Hong Kong that people can call and it will ring on my computer if my computer is turned on. If my computer is not turned on, then it forwards to a number of my choice. I can also use my iPhone and Fring should I be without a laptop (rare). Note, both computer and iPhone require an internet connection, but since I usually have that in the hotel it’s not really a big issue.

Second, the unlocked phone is still around. I usually have that as the recipient of my Skype calls so I don’t have to pay the massive data roaming charges using my US phone overseas. I also like the freedom to call friends ‘in country’ without having to pay roaming. But now that I’m not using it as frequently the costs have definitely gone down quite a bit.

So now for international calls, I will use Skype in the hotel which is only pennies a minute, and for local in country calls I use my country-specific mobile phone. For calls from other countries to me they are routed to my ‘device of the moment’ so people can continue to reach me on my consistent Skype In number and not have to memorize whatever pay-as-you-go number I’m using at the time.

During my last week in London, my phone charges were £10 total. Quite a savings.

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While poking around the app store yesterday, I came across a few new applications that have tremendous promise.

France 24 in the news section offer live streaming of the France 24 (think CNN of France). The buffering is pretty quick and the quality is not bad. France24 is a different take on some of the news out of Europe and this lets you watch them on your iPhone via wifi pretty easily. Free app and worth a download.

France24 is only on limited cable systems in the US, with service in Washington and New York that I know of. They had some great coverage of some stories like the Bettancourt rescue in Columbia and they also have some good culture shows from Europe that are worth watching.

TVU is p2p video streaming company that allows you to watch tons of content from around the world, some of which is probably not authorized by the copyright holder. The app is in beta and released, but will likely have a few new developments that will make it much more useful (such as widescreen, which I haven’t figure out how to use just yet. Lots of Chinese channels (as I’ve said before, the Chinese are light years ahead of the US on IPTV — light years). Amazing what developments can be done when DRM is not the first consideration.

We’re still waiting for livestation.com to come out with their app (in development) and I guess we are still waiting for the Slingbox app, promised for months and months (but no where in sight just yet).

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Next target, rock and/or roll..

When I published my thoughts on how the iPhone would kill Sirius / XM, I was linked in the Sirius XM financial messageboards (probably by some shorts). Needless to say some of the longs went after me screaming ‘this guy is a moron’ and some other harshness. Even today when I talk about how amazing it is to play radio on my iPhone, I get some radio purists come in an whine ‘but but but, HD radio is better because…’ or something like that. (It reminds me of the guy who told me mp3’s would never take off because they didn’t sound as good as CDs).

Anyway, SiriusXM are preparing to file for bankruptcy. Told you this would happen.

It’s not really the iPhone that is the killer, directly. It is the mountains and mountains of debt that were attached to Sirius. These guys borrowed BILLIONS to put their birds up in orbit. It just never made sense–NEVER MADE SENSE–to recreate the broadcast radio model up in space with a hugely more expensive infrastructure, not when a simpler hack together system is available to deliver more content easier (iPhone tethered to a car stereo). And with more and more 4G services being planned (wimax, LTE) I can understand why investors were running scared about satellite radio.

Sadly, a bunch of truckers are going to be really depressed. One of the strongest fan bases for satellite radio is long haul truckers who got their fix of news, information, music and even trucking stories no matter where they were in the USA. I suspect many of them are going to have some withdraw pains should the service shutter.

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I’ve been a pretty big fan of Livestation since I first downloaded a copy a month or so ago.  Now I’m even more excited as it appears Livestation will be ported to the Apple iPhone, bringing live video & tv to the iPhone.  The announcement will take place today here but I’m not sure when it will be released.  I know I want it NOW, like right NOW as other video options on the phone haven’t quite impressed just yet.

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Remember this name.

Ok, you’ll have to take my word on it until you see the video, but a company in stealth mode called Tonchidot / Sekai Camera did a demo at the Techcrunch 50 show in San Francisco and wowed the hell out of everyone. Basically, you take the iPhone’s camera and point it down a street. It picks up the GPS from where you are located and then coordinates with a server, telling you what each store is and what others have said about it (tags). You look down a street and it shows phone stores and videos and restaurants, and then you can read the tags associated with that store that other users have put on.

Imagine your iPhone as a ‘virtual reality’ viewer into a real life street. Aim the phone at a wall of phones and get reviews of the different phones and comparison prices. Aim it at a restaurant and read reviews from your friends.

There website is stealth http://tonchidot.com but that won’t last for long.

As soon as the demo video is up I’ll link to it.

UPDATE: Here is the video of the VC’s talking about it (about 1 minute in).

Here is the Demo Video:

UPDATE 2: A number of people are already asking what is the business model. I can see two right off the bat.

1) GPS based ads. Taxi cab signage companies do this. If a cab drives by a restaurant they display an ad based on the location. Imagine the same here. Aim down the street and get ads for stores that have sales and whatnot.

2) Military. The other market, back to my government days, is military. Imagine if you could integrate something like that with all the ‘red-blue’ data you get from various intel sources so you could aim the phone over a sand dune and get back a real time report ‘Six T-72 tanks-Engage when ready’ and another sand dune that said ‘Local Village–do not shoot’. Integrate electronic intel, drones, human intel all into one network viewable realtime over an iPhone device. The Pentagon would buy it by the truckload.

UPDATE 3
Tonchibot thoughtsA few thoughts on Tonchibot, one of the Techcrunch 50 presenters today.

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Steve Jobs doesn't need an anti-satellite missile to knock out XM & Sirius

I’ve already written a bit about my thoughts on the iPhone and how it will kill Satellite radio and a review of the iPhone radio applications, but Doc Searls is writing today about his similar experiences using the iPhone as the radio interface in his car. He raises a number of interesting points including:

4) The cell phone system will become a data system that carries telephony, rather than the vice versa we have now. The same goes for the Net at home as well. What we still have in both cases is dial-up: data piggy-backing on telephony or cable TV. In terms of provider priorities, that’s the way it’s been for awhile, but the flip is going to come, and the sooner we all adjust to that, the better.

5) The iPhone is less a phone than a platform for mobile Internet applications that start with telephony. Voice will always be the primary personal mobile communications activity; but it will be one application, or set of applications, among many. Radio is another of those applications.

Radio has had a decade of on again off again experience with the Internet and streaming, but it’s just never caught on due in large part to the ‘tethered to the computer’ experience that was required. People simply weren’t about to replace their clock radios with a PC and Internet radio devices just never could get a hold into the market (despite a lot of us trying). And on top of that, it didn’t work in the car (where many people do their radio listening). In short, the radio stations had it easy because it was so hard to listen to the competition.

But that’s over. The iPhone changes EVERYTHING. Yea it’s not the first to do streaming, nor is it the fastest of cheapest platform, but it is the first MASS MARKET adaptation of Internet radio to the car and other places that we’ve seen. You take all the Internet radio devices sold from when I came up with the idea nearly 10 years ago to now and you have less than the number of people who downloaded the Pandora radio application for the iPhone in the first six days. There are now nearly 4 million iPhones out there in the last year, with some of the free radio applications being the top downloads. It took XM six years to get to that number of subscribers. Who do you think is going to win the race for a listeners’ ears?

Quite simply, radio stations who are not paying attention will be radio stations who are out of business in the next five to ten years.

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