I heard of qik.com a while back and been wanting to try it out but unfortunately it was not available for Windows Mobile phones. To summarize it in one line: the site allows you to stream live video from your phone on the net.

Why is this so cool? If you think about it, a major part of having family/friends close to you geographically means that you get to know about the small details of their lives as you have frequent interactions which provides this wonderful aspect. You know, small seemingly unimportant details that we feel there is no time to share or are simply not important enough when we are thousands of miles away from each other and chat over the phone/skype/chat etc.

With my (3G) Nokia and Qik installed on it, all I need to do is send a text msg to whoever I want to share a visual moment with, be it when I am at a concert, our baby doing something cute or some other share-worthy event happens, and they can get on qik site and watch it live (with ~10 seconds lag). It also gets recorded in case you want to see it later. No more a need for a web cam connected to computer with internet connection.

And here is an actual example of a situation when it was very useful : When being at a pool with our daughter Carmel, I sent a text message to my parents telling them they can get on qik.com which they did back in Finland, and they were able to enjoy Carmel, seeing her splash and laugh in the pool, *live*. Alternative to this would have been to record it on the phone or other camera, download it to a computer, upload it to youtube.com, send an email to them to watch it which at best would have been a few hours after the event; not anywhere as good as watching something live and feeling you are part of it.

It’s been a while since my last post and multiple reasons for it. Primarily because other things in life have higher priority (e.g. our daughter Carmel who just turned one). But I have also noticed that my initial purpose for this blog which was to note down items, links, thoughts etc that I suspect I would want to come back to (and be reminded of the context) and the same time share with whoever that might find it interesting are being served through other means, be it I posting on Facebook or sharing through (Google) reader which enables me to still track things down. These channels enable better distribution, quicker feedback and since far from majority know how to subscribe to a RSS feed or care to do so sometimes it’s quicker to just do things in those forums.

Still, there are many instances where I do wish I had something on my own blog, so to all my 22 subscribers  out there (according to feedburner.com), I will be posting a bit more frequently going forward.