Gadgets Galore

The information that Al Tompkins, Senior Faculty for Broadcast and Online at the Poynter Institute, gives you will almost literally blow your mind. Let’s start with Voice Base, an IPhone app that will record your interview or meeting and turn it into text and you can then send it to your email. Then there's Vlingo, an app for Blackberry, Android, and iPhone that allows you to search for information and dial without pressing a button, just using your voice. You can also post Twitter and Facebook status updates without typing; simply record your voice and the app will transcribe it and post to both social media sites. We also learned that later this year Sprint is releasing the first mobile TV phone, the Samsung Moment. That’s all I am revealing, but I know folks have been waiting for a TV phone and it is now upon us. Tompkins also introduced us to some new gadgets--for example, you can create a video with photos and a teleprompter through a program called Videocue Pro for the Mac. The last program he gave us was an Interactive Timeline. We watched Tompkins create a jazz timeline with dates and photos in less than two minutes and thirty seconds.

One last thought after seeing all these beautiful programs: I need a Mac.