megaphone
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Spotify's podcast hosting service went down because of a lapsed security certificate
All shows hosted on Megaphone were unavailable for several hours due to the slip up.
Spotify's latest acquisition will expand its ads tech to third-party podcasts
Spotify will let third-party podcasts use its ad tech thanks to its acquisition of Megaphone.
ICYMI: Translation megaphone, live-caption headwear and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-819626{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-819626, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-819626{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-819626").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: A crowdfunding campaign to help the hearing impaired pairs a Google Glass-like head display with a mini-computer to create real-time closed captioning. International travelers who are impaired after a 14-hour flight will get some love at Japan's Narita International Airport with a megaphone that can translate Japanese messages into Chinese and English. Finally, gym rats will probably be into this Kickstarter for a towel (The Towell) which will give you a towel with a pocket and a magnet and that's about it, all for about $40 US.
megaPhone iPhone stand is rubbery, battery-free amplification
Here's another quickie for you from CES. I've seen a few physical amplification attempts, some good, some bad. The megaPhone from iSimple sort of sits in-between. It's a little rubbery megaphone for your iPhone which provides some acoustic amplification of your iPhone's tiny speaker. There's a port for the sync cable, and you can use it in portrait or landscape position. How does it work? About as well as you might imagine. Enough to boost the sound a bit, but not so much that it'll fill the room or anything. Still, it's small (basically you can squish it) and if you need a bit of a boost in your audio without resorting to something like this, the megaPhone may be worth the $14.95 to you. I could see using this to placate the kiddos while waiting for food at a noisy restaurant, and I'm sure there are plenty of other uses for it.
Megaphone, a big honkin' amplifier for your iPhone
There are a lot of powered amplifier docks for the iPhone and iPod touch, and sadly most of them are lacking in beauty and originality. Italian design firm en&is is bucking the trend with a unique unpowered amplifier that is a large, swooping ceramic horn. The Megaphone ranges from €399 for the black and white models to €599 for the gold version. A hand-crafted wood stand holds the Megaphone in an upright position, and a user just needs to set an iPhone into the dock at the top to hear tunes blasting out of the bottom. It's a beautiful take on a passive amplifier and would make a nice holiday gift. Check out the video below for details.
iPhoneDrive becomes MegaPhone, gets R/W Notes access
After getting C&D'd by Apple (a special moment in any Apple Developer's life), Ecamm changed the name of their iPhoneDrive product to MegaPhone. Today, I had an early peek at their new product and was delighted to find that it supports the creation of new notes and editing of existing notes on the Macintosh end. This is great news. Megaphone takes a feature (Notes) that was utterly and completely useless and turns it into a pretty cool way to carry around to-do lists and other text files with you. And there's even a way to get around the hideous Marker Felt issue: When editing a note, use the Edit > Fonts menu to pick a less eye-bending choice. You're still limited to the standard iPhone choices (Helvetica, Courier, Arial, etc) but you no longer have to deal with the M.F. font. The new version also adds batch delete for SMS and phone call logs so you can free up some memory if you're running against the iPhone's log limits. Power user tip: Drag an HTML file into the window with the other notes, and MegaPhone adds it as a new note. The iPhone interprets and displays the HTML properly. I tried it out with one of my 3000-word O'Reilly articles with lots of code and headers and it worked fine (no way to click a link though -- but it will load images and online div sections from the web, according to Ecamm). There is a demo of MegaPhone available, while a full version will cost you $19.95.
The "MegaPhone" that towers over 5 feet tall
We all love our 9mm slimphones these days, but sometimes the need for a celly big enough to bear hug just overcomes us all. Enter the "MegaPhone" by SysOpen Digia. This beast from the east is a 5'7" fully functional handset with real buttons as big as a fist (we think, anyway) and a very, very large color screen, although the rez may be a little blocky. This unit appears to have S60 inside it for use by customers who no doubt will be drawn to a life-size handset that actually works as a functional prop. Now, can it make calls? Doubtful, but we'd love to see a comparably sized Bluetooth headset for this puppy.[Via textually.org]
