If you’d like to purchase a print, laptop skin, iPhone skin, or t-shirt version of this art, feel free to visit my store.

With the release of HP’s Envy laptop line earlier this year, many consumers who had previously considered the old “Hewlett Packard” brand as being a fading Dell competitor began to see glimmers of brilliance. The knockout combo of form factor, power, and suave design mimicry allowed HP to parachute back into the international game to compete in elegance alongside Apple and some of Sony’s devices.

Now that the iPad is seeping into the market, HP has another shot to strike while the iron is hot by spending a lot of money to upgrade and prepare their purchased Palm webOS for everyday tablet use. Keep in mind that HP did a great job converting over Voodoo’s Envy for its current Envy line back in 2008. As long as they continue to pay attention to the details, I’ll be a fan waiting on the sideline before jumping straight into an iPad purchase- especially since webOS doesn’t ignore the valid existence of Flash, unlike the iPad.

HP Taiwan reportedly reaffirms pre-October launch for webOS tablet — Engadget.

HP Taiwan confirms plans for WebOS-based mobile devices

According to separate studies released by StrongMail and ShareThis, links placed in emails have a higher conversion rate than links placed in Facebook, Twitter, or web badges. Although emails tended to lead to a higher percentage of conversions (i.e. sales and subscriptions), email links also had the highest percentage of actual link ignores where users more often ignored email links.

Quick thoughts: one can conclude from the studies that email may best serve conversion-based goals where medium related trust weighs in heavily in the conversion process (ps duh), leaving user base expansion goals best served by socially visible links on facebook or twitter (pps duh). Also of consideration is the difference in a rich visual experience that each medium provides combined with the general assessment of the medium as a communication tool vs. an advertisement. It’s easy to see that web badges can appear in spaces that are typically shared with advertisements, leaving the medium (the badge + its real estate) as being more associated with advertising than communication. Twitter links are bare when it comes to a visual experience (hurting conversion opportunity as visuals serve an opportunity to further convince and sway).

I wonder why they didn’t study the link conversion opportunities in Google Wave? Just kidding.

Woman in Clouds in Appalachian Mountains

Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

Pearmund Cellars Grapes VA Winery

Oh the Remnants

I’m excited to post my newest work. It’s a collection of pieced memories from Helena AR, Scotland, Warrenton VA, Melbourne FL, Los Angeles CA, Estes Park CO, London, Bay St Louis MS, and Arlington VA.

Most of us have used the standard music players. Winamp is relatively light weight and has some really cool features such as Winamp Remote (full streaming web access to your entire music library from anywhere…including your mobile phone). iTunes is crisp, well thought-out, and works great with your iPhone too, but is almost ridiculously slow when run in Windows. And then there is the standard-shipped Windows Media Player. Microsoft has been attempting to up-the-ante on it for years now, but it’s just not that great and shows slow growth and improvement. Are there any other options worth taking a look at?

I’ve tried out many alternative media players and have been disappointed every time, crawling back to my Winamp/iTunes hybrid experience where I use one or the other depending on what I want to do. Until now.

I’ve installed and stuck with Songbird for a few weeks now. It can run on your operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux), it’s Free/Open Source, and happens to be a web-browser as well. If you enjoy using plug-ins on the FireFox web browser, you’ll love Songbird too. Songbird is a new favorite of mine for a few key reasons:

1. It has quality plug-ins. There are numerous useful plug-ins that make using Songbird more efficient and more fun.
2. It has an active developer community. Songbird is improving all the time- the community of developers actively resolves bugs, updates their plug-ins, and innovates the player.
3. It’s got an attractive, skinnable interface. In addition to being able to download “feathers” to change the look of Songbird, one can also install “Pure Player” which provides a great interface that is somewhere between the main player and the mini player.
4. The rating system will write to the MP3 tag instead of purely storing it in a local database. This is great for those of you who want the option to take your ratings with your files in case Songbird dies or you begin using another player that flexibly reads those ratings.

I’ve really enjoyed Songbird, but don’t want to forget to point out some of the weaknesses:

1. No CD-Burning yet.
2. Not light on the RAM.
3. Almost too customizable for tech-novices.

All in all, I think Songbird is a great media player to buy into. If you find any bugs, just let everyone know at their support site.

Consider installing Songbird and giving it a try. If you do, you’ll want to install my top 10 Songbird plug-ins listed below.

TOP 10 SONGBIRD PLUG-INS

• Last.FM Scrobbler – keeps track of what you listen to, recommends other artists, etc.
• MediaFlow – shows album art like iTunes above the library
• Smarty Pants – highly customizable tool for automatic playlist generation based off of a song selection
• Amazon Fetcher – grabs large album art for your MP3s
• Releases – tells you of upcoming releases for artists in your library
• Concerts – shows you if artists in your library are playing near you any time soon
• The Exorcist – helps to find and rid your library of broken/missing tracks
• SongbirdRemote – Allows you to control Songbird from your iPhone
• PurePlayer – not the mini size, not the full size…right in the middle
• LiveTweeter – annoy your friends with automatic notifications of what you are listening to!

The Urban Maypole

Fixing a major but unacknowledged bug in the operating system, last week’s iPhone OS 3.1 update has rendered most iPhones and all iPod Touches incompatible with Exchange 2007 servers that require on-device data be encrypted, a standard safeguard used by businesses.

In other words, Apple has fundamentally betrayed its iPhone users and the businesses that have either explicitly or implicitly supported the device.

Apple betrays the iPhone’s business hopes.

The Three Soliders Memorial in Washington, DC

View the Full Photo Gallery

Couple Kissing at WWII Memorial

Although the only version of the moon landing viewed by the public is the live broadcast view, John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist, has been on the lookout for high quality back up tapes of the footage. No luck so far, but they have released enhanced video that cleans up details in the live broadcast.

See the other videos for yourself over at NASA’s website.

NASA releases enhanced moon landing videos.

Venture capital and talk surrounding internet start ups is getting stiffer. This news is not surprising considering the state of the economy- online entrepreneurs need to take this as an indication that, as it should be, a properly market-tested BETA is essential to garnering attention for your initial funding. The article below confirms my recent discussions with a New York-based early stage venture capital firm that asserted, “we’re looking for funding too; we should be getting more capital by the end of the year.”

Venture capital keeps getting squeezed as an asset class. The second quarter of 2009 saw the lowest level of capital going into VC funds since the first quarter of 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association NCVA. During the second quarter, VC funds in the U.S. raised only $1.7 billion, an 82 percent drop from the second quarter of 2008, when $9.3 billion was raised. The amount raised is 63 percent less than than the $4.6 billion raised during the first quarter of 2009…

via The Squeeze Continues: Venture Fundraising Shrinks 82 Percent in Second Quarter.

The video below represents a new cutting-edge technology that again, reshapes our communications and challenges our control over how we communicate. We could say first their was virtual reality. Then there was Minority Report. Now there is Augmented Reality (reality augmented by technology with communication tools built on the web and displayed through a “window”…in this case, the window being an iPhone).

Before you watch the video though, take a moment to read my considerations on the impact of a new technology such as Augmented Reality.

It’s been pretty amazing- being able to track the journey of our two friends, technology and real life. Together, they’ve set a new path for future generations, across the world. Interaction with technology is becoming less of a real life-to-technology “option,” and more of a real life-and-technology culture. The difference is stunning, with technology’s precedence in our communication patterns growing.

Technology, with its significance and affectations, appears lighter or weightier depending on how involved you are with our current youth. Many parents with middle school and high school aged children know too well how a real life-and-technology culture creates awkward pains as our control over our method of communication changes. As a culture, we’re still figuring it out. More than 1/2 the people I talk to aren’t really sure even what to do with sites like Twitter. Is your TV your computer or your computer your TV? Overlap of technology and communications is confusing.

At this point in our developing relationship with technology, we must inherit a strategy to approaching whichever technologies settle down into the mainstream. A lot of confusion is caused when many of our typical mainstream users actually are exposed to and get their hands on cutting-edge-technology because of how accessible it is on the web. Until the technology becomes widely accepted, available, and explained we’re going to have friction with the way we interact with technology as individuals and as families.

This is a video of the first beta version of TwittARound – an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3GS. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of video see-through effect you see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away.

via i.document » Blog Archive » TwittARound.