Month: January 2011
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Metered Internet? Hopefully Never in the USA.
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Recently, Canada’s Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved the usage of metered, or “usage-based” internet. This effectively allows carriers to put a cap on how much bandwidth users may use, and charge basically however much they want for bandwidth after an allotted amount. In terms of the future of the internet as an open channel for…
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NYC’s January Snowpocalypse
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This past week, and ongoing up to now, NYC has been in the midst of a major snowpocalypse. Last week when the blizzard started at about midnight, I suited up and did a lap around the West Village with my camera.. here’s the scene.
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Temple Emanu-El, NYC
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Temple Emanu-El is the largest Jewish synagogue. This past weekend I had a chance to go inside for services.
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What Do Users Want from Mobile Sites?
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A quick re-post from Econsultancy today – they did a brief study on what users really want from a mobile site – and found out that it really depends on the type of site, and what the user is after. Some brief findings: Overall Web users prefer a mobile optimised site for shopping and browsing,…
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Ongoing Playlist: Music Videos
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Inevitably while surfing the web, I come across a lot of media – including music videos. Over the years I’ve been collecting an ongoing collection of interesting music videos in a YouTube playlist. A work in progress….
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Shopping App’s Use For Geo-Location
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A quick thought on using a mobile phone’s GPS in a novel fashion for an online retailer. Nowadays basically every mobile phone has a gps chip in it, and all smart phones can provide location data to the apps they run. Recently I was asked by a client about ideas for possibly reaching out to…
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Maintenance: FourSquare Day Party Pictures with RNO in GoaG
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Cleaning up on some older blog posts that never got published for whatever reason. A while ago I took photos at the FourSquare Day party. The photos were picked up by Guest of a Guest. Shooting parties like this is always fun – even if I have to put my gear in peril by using…
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Lonely Planet: Japan
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My favorite types of books to to buy are travel guides, because that means I’m going somewhere. Today I bought the Lonely Planet Guide to Japan. Cheers! (posted from the WordPress iPhone app.. which gets 2 out of 5 stars.)
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Doug Ritter Clarifies The SPOT Satellite Messenger Check-In Procedure
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Recently I wrote a brief rant regarding the checkin behavior of the SPOT Satellite Messenger. I’m a bit confused and dissapointed that the device would give a green “checkin confrirmation indicator” when in fact it has not confirmed the checkin was successfull. To get a little perspective on the story, I wrote to survival expert…
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Research: The State of Global Mobile eCommerce
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“mCommerce” – Mobile eCommerce has been picking up significant amounts of steam lately, and consumer confidence has been rising. Recently I put together a set of info for my office on the latest mCommerce stats, Here are a few of the key bits: Opera just put out an excellent study on mobile commerce. Opera State…
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Video: Energy & Dynamic Braking Demo from GE
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Amazing video for GE Ecomagination demonstrating differences in the energy contained within different objects. Great filming, graphic overlay, titles, music Energy: you can’t destroy it, but you can certainly waste it. That’s what most motorized vehicles do, including trains. Usually, the energy generated when you stop a moving vehicle is dissipated as heat, and is…
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Morgan’s Rock Featured in Departures Magazine
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In this month’s Departures Magazine, Morgan’s Rock Ecolodge is featured in the article on Nicaragua. I visited Morgan’s Rock a few years ago, and had a great stay. It’s great to see the great photography from around Nicaragua, and read about the country. My family has been there a few times in the past years.…
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Does Standardization Breed Innovation?
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A recent email conversation I had with colleagues at Morpheus Media started off with Google Places, but evolved into a talk about standardization. Lately, there’s been a new network, protocol, standard or service cropping up what every week on the internet. Whether or not this increased diversity is good or bad for innovation is the…
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“Ascent – Commemorating Shuttle” Launch Documentary
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Ascent – Commemorating Shuttle is a new video from the NASA Glenn Research Center, and shows off incredible, slow motion footage from launching the Space Shuttle. This is possibly the most interesting collection of launch footage I’ve seen yet. Most of the footage is captured from “engineering cameras”, which site at strategic points on and…
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Maintenance: Posting L2 Luxury Interactive Conference Notes
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In June, 2010 I attended the L2 Mobile Clinic at the NYU Stern School of Business. The Mobile Clinic is an intensive workshop that examines mobile’s implications, platforms, and best practices. The objective is to enhance participants’ fluency in brand-driven mobile marketing and commerce efforts. Academics and practitioners lead the group through a series of…
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The Future Is Near: Light Up Cereal Boxes
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When inductive power meets the grocery cereal isle, you get light up cereal boxes. These prototype boxes built by Fulton Innovations use embedded, inexpensive electronics to draw power from the shelf they’re sitting on, and then power light up displays. In relation to other recent products, it’s like “Powermat” or “Energizer Inductive Charger” inductive power…
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How This Blog’s WordPress Theme Works
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At the beginning of this year, I decided to try writing a blog post every day. So far, I’ve managed to keep up with hit, but it’s been no easy task. For a post to happen every day, I’ve been spending much more time in the WordPress interface, both on my desktop computer, as well…
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Web Design for Desktop & Mobile Consolidated Compatibility: Adaptive CSS3
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The fluid grid layout methodology is an emerging method for making websites instantly and optimally accessible from any device, with any size screen. Hopefully, we’ll start to see wider spread usage of these new features in CSS3, so new websites are designed with this kind of functionality in mind.
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Using Microformats and RDFa with eCommerce
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This was originally written in response to a question from my team at Morpheus Media. Lately we’ve been discussing on our team the use of Microformats and RDFa. There’s recently been a significant rise in industry attention to these emerging formats – earlier this year Google released its Webmasters Rich Snippets Testing Tool.
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Google favors mobile optimized sites in their mobile search results
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Recently, a client asked me about Google Mobile Search Results, and how the algorithm works to prioritize results aimed specifically at mobile users. In general, I believe that Google favors mobile optimized sites in their mobile search results. There are a number of usability features, such as location base services, screen real estate, and touch…
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Photos from New Years in Telluride, Colorado
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This past holiday season, my father and I spent time in Telluride, Colorado. We got in a couple great days of skiing and snowboarding, among other things. Photos from the trip…
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Andrew Wonder Explores the NYC Underground with a Canon 5Dmk2
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This past week, urban explorer Andrew Wonder released his Undercity video on Vimeo. In it, he and Steve Duncan explore NYC’s hidden subway system. They take major risks and climb into the active tunnels, and eventually make it to the abandoned city hall subway station. The entire video was shot on the Canon 5Dmk2, and…