Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com With almost a season-like quality to it, the tech industry follows a cycle. New products are released in late summer, research and development throughout fall and winter, and spring and summer is all about hype. So what is the hype medium of choice? Giant conferences. Since the release of the original iPhone in 2007, tech conferences have been the fuel for the application developer fire. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. However, the game changer was third party app developers. Twitter, Evernote, Swype — these and many more smartphone must-haves started as small-scale apps, and the next thumb-powered wonder app might be generated because companies like Google and Apple piqued programmers at a conference. Conferences such as South by Southwest are legendary for launching Twitter and Foursquare, but as Apple’s recent developer conference shows, these massive tech venues might also be an app’s downfall. Apple used its conf...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com In film fanatic circles, much is made of the “Golden Age” of cinema, i.e. the 1930s and 1970s. Films from these periods, such as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Godfather,” respectively, are considered the pinnacle of celluloid expression, and the entire movie industry seemed to be enraptured with artistic meaning and bravura storytelling. As wonderfully nostalgic as that sounds, being a cinephile myself, I personally find no era of film more exciting than the one we are living in right now. Why? Technology has leveled the playing field. For roughly $1,000, the most rudimentary pieces of filmmaking can be had with non-linear video editing and prosumer cinematic cameras. Around the turn of the century, applications such as Media 100, Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s Premiere Pro started to proliferate across the independent filmmaking community. These programs allowed amateurs to digitize their footage and manipulate it by dragging a...

15 months ago I left the journalism world, this was a really hard decision. Growing up I routinely watched the nightly news while my mom prepared dinner. I quickly fell in love with the storytelling aspect of a journalists life and the fact they were reporting on something different practically every day. So following my dream to be a rockstar, my life's ambition was to be a reporter.  In route to that dream I carried a videocamera with me practically everyday, worked for a few news radio stations, PA'd at local CBS is San Francisco and eventually became a small town reporter and T.V. Producer. So why did I drop the dream? Two reasons: my mortgage and the hope to one day provide sole support to family, so my wife can be a stay-at-home mom (her dream). While I may be out of the journalism game at the moment, there is a simple way to keep the dream alive; freelancing. Back in February, I applied to the local alternative newspaper, Cityview , for a freelance tech col...