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. The article isn’t fully online yet, but will be available soon.
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 technology meeting old school “Timex Indiglo” (EL) backlighting plus Esquire Magazine style mass produced embedded Eink displays (which I have a working copy of at home). Now, we just need an NFC/RFID scanner embedded, and product packaging will be able to know who you are when you walk by, by reading your ID from the embedded NFC chip in your cell phone. Then, let the product packages change to suit your individual buying habits, as you walk down the isle. Health food shopper? The product packaging you see will tell you about how healthy it is. Shopper on a budget? Let the labels rearrange themselves to tell you about their value. (more…)
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 as my mobile phone. I’ve also ran into a number of tech issues, and general improvemments I’d like to make to my site. As I posted about yesterday, one of the big updates that will hopefully happen soon is switching to a Dynamic Grid CSS layout. (more…)
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.
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.
The Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippet Testing Tool
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 gestures that greatly enhance the functionality of Mobile sites. Google seems to be optimizing its mobile search results to deliver sites that deliver enhanced mobile functionality to the user.
For your reference, below are a few resources regarding Google’s treatment of mobile optimized sites.
Excerpt:
“Mobility is a ranking factor for mobile search, and not optimizing a
mobile site could make it more difficult to appear in competitive
nonbranded searches where mobility is a factor. Likewise, having an
optimized mobile site could make it easier to appear for competitive
nonbranded keywords where mobility is a factor.”
“As mobile search evolves and mobile ranking factors become more
prevalent, brands that don’t optimize a mobile site today will be busy
playing catch up tomorrow, building mobile links and paying attention
to mobile ranking factors to their site. Search engines look at age of
links and age of site when it comes to ranking because such factors
are hard to manipulate. Success in mobile SEO will be difficult if
postponed until absolutely necessary.”
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…
Looking out onto Gold Hill at the end of the day(more…)
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 looks great.
I’ve done a bit of “urban exploration” myself – here are a few recent ones:
A little over a year ago, I went with friends Chris, Nick and Polina to explore the abandoned, burning ghost town of Centralia, PA. The town lies in the coal mining area of Pennsilvania, and due to a mine fire burning underneath it for the last 50 years, is completely abandoned. The mines continue to burn, and will continue for the next 200+ years.
This week, Macala Wright Lee of popular industry blog Mashable.com ranked LVMH’s Fashion and Art Culture Site Nowness.com site in the top position in their 2010 wrapup of the 7 Stellar Examples of Branded Content from the Fashion Industry. It’s been great working with NOWNESS over the last few months on their SEO and interactive strategy, and very nice seeing them on this list. They consistently have compelling, original content, and as the article states, have always been setting the standard for fashion and art culture.
This past week my sister has been traveling through India. For her trip, I hooked her up with my SPOT Satellite Messenger. The SPOT Satellite Messenger allows her to “check in” via satellite and GPS, and automatically send a pre-defined list of email addresses a message telling us she’s ok, with her GPS location.
Since she’s been in India, she’s been checking in with her spot messenger – but none of the messages have been going through either to our SPOT online account, or emailed to the SPOT Check In/OK email list. She’s been using the SPOT correctly, and although India lies in the “reduced coverage zone” (SPOT coverage map), the SPOT messenger has been giving the blinking green “OK” envelope light.
Five years after the trip took place, I’ve finally gotten around to posting up the trip photos, videos, and Sean’s trip report.
Read the original trip post from 2006: Sailing in French Polynesia.
Skunkjuice has a novel concept, but even better tv spots (Spot One, Spot Two) for their new magnetic headphone connector cord. The cable uses a magnetic coupling to connect the cable to the jack, so that if any stress is put on the cable – snagging on a corner, pulled by your jacket, etc, the cable breaks free without damaging itself or your electronics. Very similar in concept to Apple’s MagSafe connector, or Belkin’s guitar cord. The real killer feature here, as they demonstrate in their entertaining tv spots, is the connectors ability to “daisy chain” and create an ad-hoc headphone splitter.
The two TV spots they have out are fun and sounds and look great. (more…)
This past summer Chris and I went exploring in Peru. During
the trip, we took a number of photos and videos. The photos
have been put on flickr, and now here’s a compilation of
all of the video clips from the trip.
I’ve decided I want to blog more. Rather than just thinking about doing it, I’m starting right now. I will be posting on this blog once a day for all of 2011.
I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.
If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.
In lieu of visiting my blog to see the latest post, feel free to subscribe via email – super easy.
