Kinoma Notes

If you hang around tech­ni­cal peo­ple, you’ve prob­a­bly seen those com­puter books with the funny-looking ani­mals on front.

They’re from O’Reilly Media, best known for great books on every­thing from super-technical top­ics like pro­gram­ming, to their “Miss­ing Man­ual” series for the rest of us.

What you might not know is that O’Reilly cre­ates lots of really inter­est­ing video con­tent as well. Today, you can watch hun­dreds of O’Reilly videos on your phone with Kinoma Play!

Here are the new cat­e­gories now avail­able in Kinoma Guide > Providers > O’Reilly TV:

• Gov 2.0 Sum­mit 2009 and Gov 2.0 Expo Show­case 2009 — Want to see what hap­pens when you bring together gov­ern­ment and tech­nol­ogy thought lead­ers to reshape gov­ern­ment for the bet­ter? Here are 84 videos from O’Reilly’s 2009 Gov 2.0 conference.
• O’Reilly Con­fer­ences — 200 “best of” videos from var­i­ous O’Reilly con­fer­ences and events, includ­ing ETech, OSCON, RailsConf, Foo Camp, Sci Foo, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Sum­mit, MySQL Con­fer­ence & Expo and Expo Where 2.0.
• O’Reilly Inter­views — 50+ inter­views with notable authors, edi­tors, and inno­va­tors, includ­ing Tim O’Reilly, Sarah Mill­stein, Jason Fried, David Heine­meier Hans­son, Larry Wall, Pia Waugh, Nat Tork­ing­ton, and more.
• O’Reilly Web­casts — 140+ web­casts that put you in touch with experts from every area of tech­nol­ogy: pro­gram­mers, web design­ers, dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phers, social media gurus, iPhone hack­ers, open source maven­sand more. Each web­cast is a record­ing of a live, online event includ­ing Q&As from the audience.
• Tim O’Reilly — 34 talks and inter­views with the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who “watches the alpha geeks” to deter­mine emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy trends, and serves as a plat­form for advo­cacy about issues of impor­tance to the tech­ni­cal com­mu­nity. Tim is an activist for open source and open stan­dards, and an oppo­nent of soft­ware patents and other incur­sions of new intel­lec­tual prop­erty laws into the pub­lic domain.
• Web 2.0 Sum­mit 2009 — 40+ videos fea­tur­ing the intel­li­gence, inno­va­tion, and lead­er­ship of the Inter­net indus­try, gath­ered together in one place at one time. Watch inci­sive ple­nary ses­sions, frank onstage con­ver­sa­tions, rapid-fire “high order bits”, and Launch Pad, where vision­ar­ies and exec­u­tives from Inter­net busi­nesses present their unique per­spec­tive on the Web’s future-in-flux.
• All O’Reilly TV Videos — Browse through all O’Reilly Media videos, includ­ing those that don’t fall into one of the above categories.

Enjoy!

As usual this new Kinoma Guide con­tent is free for all Kinoma Play cus­tomers. It’s avail­able right now at Kinoma Guide > Providers > O’Reilly TV.

If you have favorite pod­casts, radio sta­tions, video streams or other media, send a URL and short descrip­tion to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for every­one to dis­cover and enjoy.

SomaFM is inde­pen­dent, commercial-free inter­net radio. We humbly offer that the best way to lis­ten to SomaFM is on the world’s best radio — Kinoma Play.

If you love music, you’re bound to find a favorite steam or two at SomaFM.

As I write this, SomaFM has 20 unique chan­nels of dig­i­tal won­der­ful­ness fea­tur­ing under­ground elec­tron­ica, chill­out, ambi­ent, down­tempo, lounge, space music, indie rock, alt.country/americana and more.

Check out the full list in Kinoma Guide at Radio > SomaFM, or with your web browser at somafm.com.

aac­Plus

A cou­ple of their chan­nels are avail­able in the forward-looking aac­Plus for­mat, the “new MP3” that enables higher qual­ity with smaller streams.

Kinoma is help­ing to pio­neer aac­Plus as the new stan­dard for mobile stream­ing, and we’ll con­tinue to work with SomaFM to bring even more of their chan­nels to you in this excit­ing format.

Got favorite pod­casts? Radio sta­tions? Video streams?

Send a URL and short descrip­tion to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for every­one to enjoy!

Kinoma Guide’s SKY.fm cat­e­gory is a great col­lec­tion of stream­ing radio sta­tions. There’s lots of gen­res, and yet the refined selec­tion makes it easy to find the kind of music you’re in the mood for.

We’ve just released a new Kinoma Guide update that adds all currently-available SKY.fm and DI.fm (Dig­i­tally Imported) sta­tions in all avail­able stream for­mats — includ­ing aac­Plus.

aac­Plus?

AAC is the standards-based suc­ces­sor to MP3. It offers far higher-quality than MP3 at sim­i­lar bitrates.

Kinoma Play is the only mobile player that sup­ports not just AAC, but also the even more-advanced aac­Plus and aac­Plus v2 (a.k.a. HE-AAC and HE-AAC v2) formats.

The SKY.fm streams are avail­able in both MP3 and aac­Plus for­mats. Even though the aac­Plus streams are 75% smaller (!) than the 96 kbps MP3 streams, they still sound great. Such a low-bitrate stream makes for great reli­a­bil­ity, even in very poor net­work conditions.

Wow, great! Where do I find it?

You can find SKY.fm in Kinoma Guide > Radio.

Got favorite pod­casts? Radio sta­tions? Video streams?

Send a URL and short descrip­tion to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for every­one to enjoy!

Good eeevening, boo-s and ghouls!

Your tim­ing is per­fect — we’re hand­ing out treats a night early this year. You’ll find them in Kinoma Guide > Fea­tured > Hal­loween Treats.

• Big R Radio Hal­loween Chan­nel — A stream­ing radio sta­tion fea­tur­ing songs like Ghost­busters, Elvis singing (You’re The) Devil in Dis­guise, Neil Sedaka’s Lit­tle Devil…you get the idea.
• Cov­erville Annual Hal­loween Shows — Spooky cover ver­sions of songs from some of the podcast’s annual Hal­loween shows, includ­ing Dead Man’s Party, Ghost­busters, The Theme From “The Mun­sters”, Mon­ster Mash, Thriller, and selec­tions from The Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show and The Night­mare Before Christ­mas.
• Hal­loween Atmos­phere — Play this stream­ing radio sta­tion for a spine-curdling sound­track to your Hal­loween activ­i­ties. (Dare you to lis­ten to it in the dark!)
• Hal­loween Radio and Hal­loween Oldies — More stream­ing spook-tastic Hal­loween radio.
• Thriller — Not only do you get the great cover ver­sion above, but you also get the entire offi­cial Michael Jack­son video opus. This scared the candy corn out of my sis­ter and me when we were kids, and it’s still fright­en­ingly fun.
• War of the Worlds — This is the entire 1938 radio drama­ti­za­tion that shocked the world and cre­ated nation­wide panic among con­fused lis­ten­ers, many who missed the warn­ing that it was a drama­ti­za­tion since they tuned in after lis­ten­ing to Char­lie McCarthy on another sta­tion. For those peo­ple, it felt like the begin­ning of the end.

Have a happy, safe Halloween!

If you love great pho­tog­ra­phy — images like they used to print in Life Mag­a­zine of old and National Geo­graphic — you will adore The Big Pic­ture.

The Big Pic­ture is a photo blog cre­ated by by Alan Tay­lor for The Boston Globe/boston.com. It’s an always-reliable source for high qual­ity, amaz­ing imagery, with a focus on cur­rent events, lesser-known sto­ries and “just about any­thing that comes across the wire that looks really interesting”.

In the past, beau­ti­ful pho­tog­ra­phy was con­sid­ered a poor fit on mobile, and in fact even the best mobile web browsers don’t do these pho­tos justice.

But Kinoma Play makes it so effort­less to zoom in, pan around and “fly though” the amaz­ing detail in these pho­tos that they retain a pow­er­ful emo­tional punch even on devices with smaller screens.

You can find The Big Pic­ture in Kinoma Guide at Pic­tures & Pho­to­casts > The Big Pic­ture. New pho­to­streams are posted every Mon­day, Wednes­day and Friday.

• The Big Pic­ture [Boston.com]