Fring 4-way Video Chat, Out of Beta

We first mentioned Fring in July of last year. They have been working on an application that rocks videochat on a handheld to something of a new level. Then earlier this month they released the Beta. If this is all new to you like it is to me, they designed an application that will set up a video chat room for up to four people at once. It’s available for both Android and iOS.


Fring released this promo video showing you the way this will allow you to connect with groups of friends to create unique personal moments of joy and beauty. It’s a fun little advertising spot and really does showcase the possibilities with this kind of technology. I especially enjoyed the short scene that implies you should take your friends with you when you’re peeing in public. It reminds me of a friend who would tweet their toilet shenanigans with alarming regularity, pun intended.
One thing I noticed…

Fringing? Really? It always bothers me when marketers jump forward like that and try mutate their own memes. It always looks and feels hokey and artificial. Listen up, let the meme pools do their work, that’s what they’re for. Google never wanted “google” to be an English verb (publicly anyway), that just evolved naturally out of the language.
Linguistic foibles and tangents aside, this app seems to be a similar tool to Cloudtalk, except Cloudtalk is more focused on asynchronous messaging, where there can be a significant time delay in response. Fring is more about synchronous messaging, where all parties are streaming the video data up and downstream at the same time. This is a good sign for the app ecosystems. These are similar, but slightly different applications that might be competing to fill a similar, but distinctly different, niche. Which do you prefer?

Nexus S smartphone works after soaring to 32K meters on a weather balloon

Folks from Google and some other space enthusiasts got together recently and ran an experiment with the new Samsung Nexus S smartphone to see just how well the smartphone sensors and accelerometers worked when the temperatures decreased. The test involved several smartphones and a trip to the stratosphere.


Engineers from Google and students from the University of California put the Nexus S smartphones into special coolers with GPS antennas on them, tied them to weather balloons, and then let them go. The balloons were able to reach 32,000 meters above the ground before the balloons burst and the phones started the plummeting decent.
The phones and their special coolers were brought to the ground using parachutes and the decent from height took 20 to 30 minutes. After the smartphones were retrieved, they still worked despite the extreme temperatures at the heights the balloons reached.