Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 8:20PM Boing Boing, advertising, rss in Advertising, Blogs, Digital Media, Media Sunday, March 18, 2012 at 12:21PM My single biggest takeaway from SXSW was all the talk about battery life. Every single person. All the time. People changing plans because they needed to recharge their phones. People walking around with chargers. People who were chargers. Mophies galore. People uninstalling apps that would drain power. People putting phones into airplane mode in areas of weak signal. People borrowing other phones so they didn’t have to waste the power on their phone.
This is the way I live my life, almost every day, with the iPhone 4S but I don’t use a Mophie Juice Pack or any of its brethren.
I got a Zagg Sparq last year - an external battery with two USB ports - for two reasons:
Friday, March 16, 2012 at 9:23AM 
Sparrow for iPhone was released yesterday and by all counts (including my own) it's great.
The one complaint that some people seem to have is that it doesn't support Push Email. I've rarely used the Push Email feature in the iPhone mail client due to the major suckage of power from the battery.
However, that doesn't mean that I don't want to be notified of new email.
I use Google Apps Mail (Gmail with my own domain name) and the connection to that service is plain ol' IMAP. Built into the technical standard for IMAP is something called IMAP IDLE mode.
Basically, if your mail client supports this feature of IMAP, you'll receive notifications when you have new mail. Of course, the iPhone Mail app doesn't offer this (and neither does Sparrow) but that's OK: for a couple of bucks, you can purchase a third-party app that can do this for you.
Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 12:11PM 
I'm really happy to invite you to join me at the Seventh Annual Small Business Summit on Tuesday, March 6th, in New York City.
The Summit is NY's premier event for small business owners, entrepreneurs and business professionals looking to network (500+ attendees), learn from experts, meet with exhibitors and win great prizes.
At the Summit you'll...
Tickets are $149 until Feb 24th, then they go to $199 - BUT I've got a special deal for you.
Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 2:41PM 
After seventeen years of being a one-dog household, we decided to double our dog ownership.
We adopted a ten-year old chocolate Cocker Spaniel named Oreo whose owner was moving from a house to an apartment and couldn't take him. Given our history with rescue dogs, we know that it's typical for older dogs to be passed over for adoption since most families want younger dogs or puppies.
We didn't want to see him spend the rest of his life in a foster home (or worse) so we decided to welcome him to our family. He's a great dog and gets along well with our Lucy, a four-year old, black and white, parti-colored Cocker Spaniel.
Oreo has a microchip but we don't know who the vendor is, so we can't find the registry. That means that the old guy definitely needed new dog tags.
I started poking around the Interwebs and found a few interesting things.
You can get pet tags with QR codes!
Unlike many of the silly uses of QR codes that I see, this is a brilliant use of the technology: find a pet, scan the QR code on its tag and find out all about them including their owner's name and address, eating habits, favorite activities, medical history - the works.
One thing really bugged me, though: the only QR code pet tag solution I could find is managed by one company: PetHub. I tried creating profiles for both of our dogs but I found the service slow and buggy.
Plus, as a person who calls himself "half-geek, on my mother's side," I knew I could do better, so I did. ;)
Here's how.
Dog Tags, Dogs, Pet Tags, QR Codes, pet adoption, pets in Communication, Gadgets Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 1:43PM I'll be a guest on Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio talking about Podcasting for nonprofilts.
Join me - you'll be able to listen live or grab the podcast next week.
Monday, December 26, 2011 at 9:47PM 
My son loves to read, so my wife and I decided to get him a Kindle Touch for Christmas.
He recently turned nine and we think that he's responsible enough to care for an eReader - and what better way to demonstrate our confidence in him than to surprise him on Christmas day?
The problem that we had (as do many parents of young children) is the lack of parental controls on Kindle devices.
Kindles have gotten cheap enough that they can serve as suitable replacements for kid's books without breaking the bank (or a kid's back) but they're still designed with adults in mind: one-click purchases for books, games, apps, movies, music and audiobooks. (Sorry, Amazon, but that doesn't work in our house.)
So, I set about figuring out how to handle this with our son.
Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Digital Media, Kids, Kindle Touch, Parental Controls, ebooks in Digital Media, Ecommerce, Gadgets, Tech Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 4:43PM 
I ordered a pair of prescription sunglasses from Eyefly.com through a great deal on Living Social. ($49 for a complete pair of glasses, shipped.)
That was pretty cool, but this is even cooler:
While browsing for glasses on Eyefly, you can take a photo of yourself with a webcam. The site uses software that will automagically place a 3D rendering of the glasses on your face so you can see how they might look.
Monday, November 21, 2011 at 3:58PM 
A while back I wrote a post about my experience searching for pre-paid mobile broadband. I ultimately chose Virgin Mobile USA as my provider but one thing that bugged me was that I had to use the MiFi 2200 mobile hotspot since there were no drivers for their USB dongles for OS X Lion.
I've always known that the MiFi could be tethered to a Mac using its USB cable, but I also thought that the drivers for Lion weren't available.
As it turns out, I get the best of both worlds with the MiFI.
Either the drivers were recently update during an OS X Software Update or I just plain missed the fact that you can tether the MiFi 2200 to your Mac running OS X Lion. (At least using 10.7.2. I haven't tried to tether using earlier versions of Lion.)
The process is simple:
Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 9:10AM 
Starting in January, you'll be able to watch live HD TV on your Boxee Box using a new USB dongle from the company.
Announced today, the device will cost $49 and will enable you to view live HD channels from your local broadcasters - ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX with no monthly fee as these are over-the-air (OTA) HD channels produced for your local market.
Boxee, DVR, HD Broadcasts, Live TV, OTA Broadcasts, TV, Television in Digital Media, Gadgets, Media, Tech, Video 
