Three For Thursday - June 17 (positive disruption by: Tom Martin | New Orleans based Social Media | B2B Digital Prospecting

Let me start by thanking all of you that took the time to answer my Three For Thursday survey. The feedback was sooooo helpful. Basically you had this to say:

you like this series and find it more helpful than not
you like the fact that I cover a lot of ground and don't just focus on any one thing (iPhone apps for instance) but try and cover a broad spectrum of interests
you'd rather have me cover fewer items per post but bring a bit more context and depth to the coverage
many of you really, really, really like when I cover or find interesting iPhone apps ;-)

So the verdict is that I'm going to keep doing this every Thursday but I'll focus on covering one new find in more depth.

I think I'm going to change the name too... maybe to something a bit more SEO friendly. Maybe you can help me pick a new name? As my new company is Converse Digital -- maybe you can help me find something that helps promote that business a tad??? Let me know -- really would like to hear what y'all think.

In the meantime, here is this week's Formerly Known as Three for Thursday entry. And yes, it's an iPhone app. ;-)

The app is called iTimeLapse that is made by LannLabs and I can't remember how I found it but I'm glad I did. Basically, it gives you the ability to create time lapse videos using an iPhone (even a 3G which doesn't have video capability). It does it by taking snapshots at predetermined intervals and then stitching them together to create a video. You can even include music!

I gave it a whirl today. First by doing a time lapse video of my son Maes (2 1/2 years old) getting a hair cut. Here is the video.

Now this was pretty easy to do. I just set up the interval of shots -- in this case every 5 seconds -- and then set the amount of time I wanted to shoot. Conversely I could have chosen the number of pictures to take. Then I just sat there holding the phone real still. And presto, every 5 seconds, the phone would take another picture. Now I'm not sure where the pics are stored because they are not in the Camera Roll or Photo Library on the phone but they are stored. Then you simply select Render and here again you can play with your settings, like how many frames per second you want your video to render. The more frames you render per second, the more pics you need. You can also add music, which I'll share in the next video.

Once you're done and you're happy with your little movie you can upload to YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook by simply giving the app your username/password. Now I didn't try and upload to Facebook, but I did try unsuccessfully to upload to Vimeo. (update: I retried the Vimeo and it does seem that it worked but the video doesn't seem to format and be available for viewing immediately) My Vimeo account shows the app is connected but the videos I uploaded (and the app said they went up successfully) are still not in my Vimeo account. However, the YouTube worked like a charm, hence why you're seeing a YouTube embedd above.

All in all - pretty damn cool and very, very easy. Note - you'll probably want to put your iPhone on some kind of tripod if you every try and do a serious one of these.

Next, the app claims to allow you to do Stop Motion films. That's where you take a picture, move the objects in the picture a tad, take another, and so on and so on. When you're done, you paste them all together in a timeline and presto, a movie is born. Now the app says you can take manual pictures but honestly, couldn't get that to work. So instead, I set my time in between pictures to 10 seconds and got my budding filmmaker son Hayes to help me. We'd take a pic, and in the 10 second delay, he'd reposition the stuffed animals in our movie. When we were done, we rendered the movie with a click of a button and even added some music (the app gives you something like 6-8 music tracks to pick from) and presto, another movie. Again, we uploaded to YouTube and here is the result. Not bad if you ask me -- considering we did this in like 5 minutes.

Now I can certainly see some marketing uses for this -- if nothing else you could do some cool little videos and if you could add some custom music of voice over... could be neat. Or you could just use it as an excuse to grab a few stuffed animals, your 8 year old and crawl around on the floor imagining your James Cameron ;-) either way, this app certainly fits in the "pretty damn cool" category and should find it's way onto your iPhone if for no other reason than to give you something to do during really boring meetings.

In fact, if you download it and "video" your next boring meeting and send me the YouTube/Vimeo link - I'll post it here on my blog. Heck, if enough of you do it, I'll create an entire category because frankly, that could be hilarious.

Well that's it for the first "formerly known as Three for Thursday" post -- let me know what you think of the app and if you have any suggestions for a new name for this series.

Carry on.

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