I must have stepped into a time warp today while entering Bugis MRT station. I felt a weird sense of deja vu and realised I had travelled back in time a couple of months to April.

The large LCD display on the train platform greeted me with a familiar movie trailer I knew I've seen somewhere. If you can't guess from my snap shot from the past above, it was the movie Fracture. The show was to be screened in cinema's on the 19 of April. I must have travelled back to about the first week of April! Amazing!

Suddenly my whole sci-fi fantasy came to a screeching halt when I looked above at today's date: 27 June. My journey though time was over in about 10 seconds.

Now that I'm back to reality, I'm wondering why in the world were they screening a trailer for a film that's come and gone? I'd have assumed such digital signage have sophisticated systems for marketeers to buy time slots with to-the-second end-of-life settings so mistakes like these would not be made.

I've seen digital signage systems with amazing management software myself and to think that SMRT doesn't have it too is making me wonder.

As far as I'm concerned, there's no way the movie distributor would be paying for today's ad display, and the call to action wouldn't do anyone good, except I who had the pleasure of time travel. =)

Maybe it was a system fault or a programme coordinator's misjudgment, I don't know. But it sure did make for an interesting sight and a chance to think about digital signage technology.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZp75fWe-ss">

This Friday the above movie will open in Singapore cinemas island wide. And if you're like me, you'd be all excited about it. Even after all these fancy trailers it still amazes me how they managed to make a real-life movie of the Transformers.

And if you like a bit of nostalgia, check out the video below. That's Transformers episode 1.

Amazing isn't it how Transformers has... urm... transformed.

My lovely colleagues gave me a cupcake, a card, and a present. So nice of them. The technology team bought me lunch too. I don't understand why people like to take birthdays off, there's so much fun in the office!

One of my favourite lifehacks ever is by Marc and Angel called "Turn Google into Napster 2000". Basically they've used Google's "web command line" to narrow down and search specifically for .mp3 files from a certain artist or by song name. An example they gave was:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

I've liked this method of "finding" the music I'm searching for and it has worked well for me. There was also a time when I pondered creating a script to do this effortlessly, but I never got down to writing one.

Today I stumbled across someone who did. Not so much a script really, but a full fledged Web 2.0 app! Its called SeeqPod and automating the above is what it does best. The forward looking folks at SeeqPod believe that...

one day, everything will be 'playable'. Hence we have embraced the term 'Playable Search'.

The site works quite simply, just search and share. But for a music site, it sure is not as chic as Last.fm, Pandora, or finetune. But being a cool music site is not really its purpose. What I found really fascinating about SeeqPod is not its interface, but its index. Looking at the list of songs flowing into the page from various sources is quite an amazing sight on its own. My gut is telling me that about 90% of these songs are illegal not simply by SeeqPod's download/streaming, but how they got online in the first place.

But legal issues aside, it is lovely to see an old mantra at work in our Web 2.0 age: necessity is the mother of all inventions. Still holds true, and I'm looking forward to more lifehacks turning into web apps that save the day.

Since attending the iX 2007 conference's academic forum at SMU yesterday, I've been full of AIR. Adobe Integrated Runtime that is. That was basically the only thing new I got from the conference, all this talk about new/social media is nice, but I'm a sucker for new and cool tech.

AIR, according to Adobe's web site, is:

Adobe® AIR™, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

Think Java, just prettier and probably easier to code. (Argh! Flashbacks of my Java programming class emerging!)

Mike Downey, Senior Apollo Product Manager, Adobe Systems (pictured above) gave a really good run through of AIR and its possibilities. Since I heard of Apollo sometime last year, I knew something great was in the making and not till yesterday did I realise how fantastically close they've come to true "write once, run anywhere".

The first thing that came to mind when Mike demoed the useless (but cool) app, ApolloBook, was how similar it looked to Ceros's web magazine software. Then I thought, how cool would it be if we could have Monkey Magazine in an offline application that works on both the Mac and PC. This technology could transform Ceros into an alternate media distribution channel. Virtual news stands anyone?

There's so much hype now around this social media, but don't you think that too much of it is still made up of hypertext? I'm wondering if the future of media is more like Flash-based publications with rich experiences floating on AIR.

Other worthy links:

• Download AIR for PC and Mac from here.
• Good example of AIR in action on finetune. (Better than Pandora and Last.fm if you ask me)

Aside: Kevin mentioned in passing while doing his live video casting of the event that services such as Ustream.tv and Operator11 are perfect for mobile platforms because they store data direct to online servers and not onto the device. I agree and look forward to that day.

Ever since the army decided to ban the use of mobile phones with camera's from army camps, every time I go to a camp I have to live without digital communication for the duration of my visit, including today's IPPT (physical fitness) test.

I never really minded it really... until today when the lost my $700 phone! Well, almost.

After my test, all sweaty and completely pooped, I stumbled to guard room to exchange my tag with the number 33 on it for my phone that was suppose to be securely stowed in a small locker numbered 33.

I gave it to a young skinny NSF manning the counter who tried to find the key with the number 33 from a box. To both of our horror, it wasn't there! He took a quick glanced at me immediately thought of checking the lockers. Number 33 was open and there wasn't a phone in it.

I could see the fear on his face as my polite smile turned into a frown.

I tried not to show it, but I was freaking out inside thinking, "did he give my phone to someone else earlier in the queue?!"

He then asked me, "is your phone on?", wanting to call it to see which locker would ring. But I told him it was on silent (not even vibrate, just silent) and it wouldn't help if you called it.

Then he went back and got two other guards to try and open all the other locked lockers in search of my phone. I did tell them it was a black Motorola.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, the guard tried to smile at me and said, "Sorry, I think there's a mix up. Would you mind standing to the side and we'll clear the others first? It'll make it easier to find your phone."

Trying to look angry and fierce (as if it'll make things any better) I nodded and stepped aside. I was already planning on how to ask for compensation and imagining the trouble the kid will get into if I raise this issue to his superiors. I know how serious it is to make a mistake in the army, I've been there.

As my thoughts drifted on to worrying about how to call for a taxi or the fact that I no longer memorise anyone's phone number... to my relief, the found my phone locked away in another locker! And they still had the cheek to ask me to identify myself with my IC number as if the phone wasn't mine. Sheesh.. but I guess he was just doing his job.

At the end of it I was just glad they didn't give my phone away to someone else. I was actually more concern about some stranger accessing my SMS history, email, photos, and video on my phone. Not that I've got a "Tammy" on it, but still....

This experience made me treasure my mobile phone a lot more and realise how overly dependent I am on it. Its almost as bad as loosing my notebook or someone else finding out my Google Account password. Eeeeks!

Oh and by the way, I passed my IPPT. Woohoo!

Many of my clients and colleagues, based out of Singapore, often take on regional roles which requires them to travel a lot. This requirement places them on planes and hotel rooms in neighbouring countries very often, and every time the leave, the activate the dreaded triple "O" (aka Out of office) auto reply email.

After years in the corporate world, I understand the role of this automated response, but today I'm beginning to doubt its usefulness.

I've come to realise that 90% (my guesstimation) of the time the only form of communication people loose while taking a business trip is their desk phone. Email, mobile, IM, VoIP (Skype mostly), and blogs are all just as accessibly from wherever they are. Be it at the airport, in a hotel, or at a remote office.

So why is there still a need to leave an out of office message when it doesn't matter if you're in the office at all? Don't these auto-reply messages end up looking more like spam than useful information?

I'm increasingly making it a point not to leave such messages in auto-responders when I travel. I'll inform my colleagues, and my clients one off, but the rest of the world that needs to contact my via email really doesn't need to receive a piece of spam in return. At most I'll be replying from a different timezone or at worst a day or two late which really doesn't cause much of an issue since my mobile is always on global roaming for urgent matters.

I like this rendition of the future. Especially the part when copyright becomes illegal and there are no such things as ads. Maybe in the future, marketing will be about content creation and not controlled message dissemination.

Imagine this, instead of a series of TV commercials, companies will spend the money to produce a feature film.

Instead of hosting press conferences, PR uploads product reviews themselves on YouTube and blogs.

I can already hear people going "that won't work!", well it won't if we keep thinking marketing and controlled messages. Maybe its time to think content and information. If your product doesn't sell... hey, it's not my fault your R&D can't produce a "Purple Cow".

Update: Here's another video on the future of media in 2014. Once again they play on Google as "God". (Thanks Ivan)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bK63uSTTNs]

This so doesn't belong on my blog. But want to know how to make every corner of your office laugh? Send them this clip!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ]

VMware seems to be taking the competition with Parallels pretty seriously. I wonder if there's a difference between Unity and Coherence?

BTW, the pre-order of VMware Fusion is out today with a discounted price of US$39.99! Yay!

GA is expected in August 2007. That's what they say.

(VMware is a Hill & Knowlton client)