Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’
Listen to the Web
Boston-based Vocalyze Media officially launched today, with a new brand, new apps and a range of integration partnerships aimed at revolutionizing the way people access social media and online content. The company’s flagship product, Vocalyze, is a mobile news and entertainment service that turns Tweets, blogs and and other written web content into real-time audio podcasts. The company also released today Vocalyze apps for Android and iPhone. Continue Reading
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CommentInstagram: Twitter for the visual set
Where Twitter is the domain of those with pithy brevity, Instagram is the social media forum for those a bit more visually inclined. Continue Reading
A Hipstamatic Halloween
A few Halloween treats from my growing collection of neighborhood Hipstamatic photos.
Happy Halloween everyone!
Hipstamania
A few of my creative and app-savvy friends turned me on the fun of Hipstamatic photography for the iPhone. While there are a few, the simply-named Hipstamatic was my app of choice when I decided to play.
Hipstamatic refers to the Hipstamatic 100, a camera designed in the early 80′s by two brothers in Wisconsin, Bruce and Winston Dorbowski. The history of the Hipstamatic 100 – and the contemporary love of all things Hipstamatic – is lovingly chronicled in a blog by the boys’ brother, Richard Dorbowski. He says that the Hipstamatic was born out of his brothers’ passion for art and photography, their desire to create an inexpensive camera that anyone could afford and use to record their special memories, and their ability to make things happen. It was modeled after a Russian plastic camera that Bruce had been given as a gift in 1972 and inspired by Winston’s love for his Kodak Instamatic.
After Bruce and Winston got the idea to make a plastic molded camera they worked 18hr days until they figured it out. They had a small cabin on the river that they used as their studio, and from dawn til dusk they would spend the day creating plastic sculptures, photographs, and paintings. In November of 1982 they would finally make a mold for the Hipstamatic A1 lens. By the end of the month they had made their first 5 Hipstamatic 100s.
The Hipstamatic 100 is very rare. Only 157 were ever produced since Bruce and Winston were killed by a drunk driver in 1984.
Thankfully, today we can recreate the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past with our iPhones. I love the saturated color and the grainy quality the Hipstamatic app produces. And I especially love that the finished image is rendered as a square photo with an old-fashioned deckled edge!
You can view a gallery of the best HipstaPrints from the Hipstamatic community of fans at The Big Hipstamatic Show.
Below is a small gallery of my own Hipstamania, mostly things that caught my eye that I wanted to capture in that moment. I haven’t yet experimented with the range of effects possible with changing “lenses” and “film” that are part of the Hipstamatic app, so expect more to come as I become more savvy. Enjoy!
Tracking & Alerting
At long last, here is the seventh installment of my series on on the “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010.”
Yes, I missed Tuesday – twice. I’ve been really busy working with a new client and the weather here in Boston has been amazing. In the eighties yesterday. My apologies, but blogging has taken a bit of a back seat. I’m back – I promise. Let’s have a Trend Thursday this week.
Previous posts in the series were Business Unusual, Urbany, Real-Time Reviews, (F)luxury, Mass Mingling, and Eco-Easy. Leading us here to TRACKING & ALERTING.
First of all, TRACKING & ALERTING is the new searching, as it saves consumers time, makes it impossible to forget or miss out, and thus ultimately gives them yet another level of control. Count on everything being tracked and alerted on (there’s more than FedEx packages!): from friends (MASS MINGLING!) to enemies to fuel prices to flights to authors to pizzas to any mentions of oneself.
Oh, and ALERTING, when done well, is of course the ultimate in INFOLUST: relevant information finding consumers, based on (voluntarily revealed) preferences.
This sort of information push is hardly new but it is interesting how the phenomenon has been transformed from something that most people viewed as an invasion of their privacy – if not an overtly nefarious effort to steal their identities and sell their secrets to pinko commie ad agencies – into a widely used and valuable service that people actively seek out and in some cases purchase – iPhone apps for example.
In the early days, marketing companies and data aggregators saw the value in collecting information about consumer preferences and buying habits for the purposes of pushing targeted advertising to audiences most likely to be interested in a particular product. and to selling the data to businesses so that they could push offers and information to consumers that was tailored to their particular tastes and brand preferences. Sound familiar? You would have thought consumers would have appreciated the ability to spare themselves from irrelevant crap but this particular trend didn’t exactly catch on quickly.
Speed ahead to today where we have Facebook and Twitter and mobile devices galore and everyone is using them for every purpose. My how things have changed.
iPhone Art
Having more fun taking photographs with my iPhone and Toy Camera app. This is a close up of the tail of one of the dolphins (in traditional iconography, this is how dolphins were depicted) from the fountain in Franklin Square in the South End.
My name is Angela Eloise and I am a freelance writer. That sounds as if I am copping to an addiction. I am. In addition to writing this blog, I also write a column about social media and I am at work on a series of essays that I hope to see in print some day. Cloud of Chaos was born from my desire to dance with the absurdity of life, to create a space where I could write and share all of the gorgeous, fun, snarky deliciousness I find spinning around me every day. What does a spinning cloud of chaos have to do with writing? Everything, as it turns out.
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