Category: Technology

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General Photography Technology Travels

Berlin Day 4 – Technological Anarchism

Mouse, Vanesza and Aki.

Berlin is an interesting place. We spent all of last night at Fischladen where I left off last night. When we left it was morning. While Aki worked furiously on her work for Johnson Creek; Vanessa, Mouse and I discussed the merits of Wi-Fi, Twitter and technology in general in political movements, in particular the leftist “Anarchist” movement here in Berlin.

The German leftist movement has a fear and misunderstanding of technology. Wi-Fi in many places is not allowed and approached angrily. While 78 is legally owned and inhabited many individuals here are very much afraid of being identified for their political actions. Their fears, of course, are justified, many could and would be arrested if identified. However the group fails to mobilize and grow beyond it’s existing circles from what I can tell, most don’t even have cell phones either because they can’t afford them, or they believe them to be the tools of the establishment. Their numbers, while supported internationally are not as strong as they were right after the wall fell, and they likely won’t be again unless this group embraces technology. Aki and I cited examples of Mumbai and Iran to explain the values of it but the consensus is that it will fall on deaf ears.

Now please, do not interpret this as an endorsement of the actions of this movement or their beliefs, nor do I mean disrespect to their beliefs either. I am merely a guest here and these people are putting me up and treating me as one of their own. I believe that nearly any political movement has merits and from what I can tell, these are good people who want to life their lives free of political oppression and generally mind their own business, I cannot speak for all of their beliefs, only that I can say they feel very justified in them and truly believe themselves to be doing good to help society, as they see it. It’s sad to me to see their message and beliefs get lost or downed out because they refuse to adapt to modern technology.

An interesting side note, you’ll see that most of my photos from this trip do not contain people… weird seeing as I tend to focus on portraits quite often. This is because the men and women of “78” refuse to be photographed and the ones who don’t know me react angrily to me walking about with my camera at all. While I respect and understand this concern it saddens me as many of them are amazing, beautiful, interesting people who should have their voices heard and choose to hide their face so that they can fight another day, a concern that I’m not entirely sure how realistic it is.

New photos are up, check them out…

Until tomorrow.

Categories
Business Technology

FourSquare: Social Networking for the Social Drinker

A few weeks ago, I was in Austin, TX, for the South By Southwest Interactive conference. While there, through word of mouth, I heard about FourSquare.

FourSquare is a new service for smartphone users from the creators of Dodgeball, a startup purchased and then shelved by Google. FourSquare utilizes your phone’s GPS to “Check-in” to different places you go, see where your friends are, and allows you to “Shout” status updates to your friends. On the surface, it seems similar to other “location status” services such as Brightkite or Loopt. However, FourSquare goes a different route than its competitors; it emphasizes the social potential of location status by turning it into a game.

I was, at one point, a big proponent of Brightkite. While there were functions of the service that I did like, I’ve started to question more and more why I used it. “Who cares that I’ve checked-in to my apartment? Do I really want people to know where my apartment is? If I am going to restrict the visibility of my location—why am I even using this service, to begin with?” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a handy way for someone to stalk me and not much more.

FourSquare takes a different approach. It focuses on bars, clubs, and restaurants rather than just arbitrary check-ins to every location. It intends to connect you to your friends in a nightlife setting.

Although I’ve been using it since SXSW, it wasn’t until this weekend on a trip visiting NYC, that I really saw the potential of FourSquare. The service awards your “check-ins” in a variety of ways. For each check-in, you earn points, and you get bonus points for doing things like hitting multiple locations in one night. You can also unlock badges (yes, like in Boy/Girl Scouts) for accomplishing an objective, similar to many video games. Lastly, by checking into a location on multiple occasions, you can become its “Mayor” if you’re there more often than someone else. Each city has it’s own set of badges and Mayors (currently, there are 12 supported US cities.)

My FourSquare activity tells an amusing story about my trip to NY. According to Foursquare: I got “Crunked” on Thursday night bar-hopping through Brooklyn, earned extra points meeting up with my friend Tom (who saw where I was via FourSquare and proposed we meet up), and went on a 4 day “Bender,” which culminated in me becoming the “Mayor” of the Coyote Ugly Saloon Saturday night (yikes.) Hopefully, you can see why I’m enjoying this.

Something else that I really enjoy is the ability to build to-do lists of things/places you want to visit and view local to-dos that other users have posted. This allows for someone to craft their own adventures and come up with creative experiences. The service also includes a weekly leader board that lets you see where you rank among users in your community.

The result is a service that feels like a giant mobile web scavenger hunt that encourages users to challenge each other and compete.

Though the service is not without its flaws: Many bars and restaurants don’t show up in the listings, and there are many quirks to the website and application itself. Its creators have acknowledged that the service is still very much in development, and honestly, it sometimes feels like a very public beta. They’ve reportedly set themselves a June 1st deadline to iron out the kinks and get it working the way they want. Even taking all that into consideration, the service is very functional and very impressive.

Some things I’d like to see in future revisions:

  • More visibility to user profiles and to-do lists: I’d really like to discover new people to connect to. Right now, there are very few ways to do this. I wish profiles listed a clearer stream of what I did, when I did it, and what rewards my actions earned me. In 6 months, I’d like to know which 4 bars I went to that unlocked the “Crunked” badge.
  • Less walls between cities. It’s strange that I need to switch a drop down to see different sets of information for different cities on the website. I want the ability to see everything at once and also see my local updates. The walls are weird. They discourage people from being friends cross-city. My friend Frank has an account, but I’ll likely never see what he’s up to unless I switch my location to where he is. Sure local users should be prioritized, but just because I can’t get to Washington to meet up with Frank tonight doesn’t mean I don’t care.
  • Badges also suffer due to these walls. I like the idea of having different goals in different cities, but it seems silly that I’ve now earned the “Newbie” badge a few times and that I have to go out 4 nights in a row again to earn the “Bender” badge in Chicago because the one I earned was in NYC. Perhaps there should be global badges and specialized local badges?

These are just my 2¢. I’m excited to continue using FourSquare and to see where the service goes in the future. It’s genuinely a lot of fun. I recommend checking it out via their website: playfoursquare.com. An iPhone application is available via the App Store, and a mobile-optimized version of the website available for Android and Blackberry users for now.

Categories
Design Pop culture Technology

You and The Atomic Bomb

My friends, submitted for your approval on this fine New Years Day, is a pamphlet found in the attic of my parent’s house.

What you see is just part of a piece of 1950’s Cold War propaganda in the vein of such nonsense as “Duck and Cover.” This particular piece was produced by New York state in association with Time Inc.’s Life Magazine as a civil service and is bound by no copyright. A pamphlet like this one would have been distributed to help individuals prepare for “The Bomb,” which at that point many felt was inevitable. Nevermind the fact that in an actual atomic blast, these methods would do very little, if anything, to save one’s life. They both created and eased fear among the populous while fostering dependency and loyalty to the government.

To me, it’s an amazing piece of American history both from a psychological and a design standpoint.  My grandfather was a chemist and member of the Nassau Country Civil Defense Commission, and near as I can tell this was his, there may be more. If I come across anything else, I’ll post it as well.

Enjoy.

Categories
General Photography Technology

A month with the Canon G10


Just under a month ago the fine folks at Canon hosted a hands on event at Calumet Chicago. Excited at the chance to possibly get to play with the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II I happily trotted down to check it out.

Unfortunately they didn’t have the new 5D, however I did get to play with the new Powershot G10.

This was something I was afraid would happen. While the 5DmkII is a bit out of my spur of the moment price range… I did have the $500 on me to drop on the G10. Holding it in my hands I was instantly in love.

For those unfamiliar, the G10 is a significant upgrade of the intensely popular G9 point-and-shoot camera. Now, if you’re seriously into photography or just getting into Digital SLRs, you might be wondering why you should care about a measly point-and-shoot.

Because this is no measly point-and-shoot.

The G10 offers full manual controls as well as the standard point and shoot settings, Canon’s new noise reducing Digic IV chip, a variable aperture of 2.8 – 4.5, a 14.7 megapixel sensor and the ability to shoot RAW. The G10 is, in short: everything you would want in a basic point-and-shoot, in a much smaller more compact body.

My normal day-to-day camera has been a Rebel XTi since it’s release.. I’m never without a camera. Since my purchase of the G10 I’ve been carrying it around almost exclusively and I have to say, I’m in love. I have to say my favorite part about it is the ability to utilize the ‘Live View’ feature that will let me see what my image will look like using manual controls via the LED on the back of the camera. I can dial up and down to allow me to shoot in different lights and judge before I shoot in a much more accurate way. This is great for me as someone who does a lot of low light shooting. While the ISO 1600 setting is near unusable, the Digic IV chip does a great job of reducing the noise and makes serious strides by making ISO 800 a viable option for someone like myself. The 2.8 aperture doesn’t hurt either.

In closing, while I’m still waiting on the 5DmkII for more professional use, the G10 has taken over the role my Rebel previously filled as a solid and powerful day to day camera and it’s made me rethink my impressions of point-and-shoot cameras.  I love using it and I can’t stop showing it off.

You can check out some unprocessed images from the G10 to get an idea of how it performs and for yourself on my Flickr account.

Categories
Design General Photography Technology

A Photo Apart

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart Chicago, the conference for people who make websites. There I got the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people, hear some amazing lectures and learn more in two days than I have in a few years.

An Event Apart is a great way to refresh your thinking and get exposed to amazing new concepts in web design. I would recommend it to anyone who does any sort of web design or development work.

I’ve posted some shots of some of the presenters on my Flickr. Please feel free to check them out.

Many thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer for putting together a great group of speakers and an amazing event. I went last year and it was worth it, I’m glad I got the opportunity to go again this year.