A few weeks ago I was standing on the sidelines to cheer on a couple of friends running the Chicago Marathon. They both did very well!

While I was waiting for them to pass, I snapped this photo on my iPhone 4 of a guy wearing a tutu, which just seemed comical in the context of the race.

I uploaded it shortly thereafter from my iPhone to Facebook. Within minutes, a friend of mine spotted my Facebook post and commented, “I know him! That’s awesome!!!”

She tagged him in the photo, which notified him instantly. He responded, “I would have stopped to pose if you asked. What mile were you at? Thanks again for getting it. It’s fantastic.”

We had a bit of conversation and are now friends. This breaks my rule of Facebook friendship, which requires that I have spoken to you in person for at least 60 minutes, but I felt like making an exception.

I have to say as long as I’ve been on Facebook, this is one of the crazier small world moments I’ve had. With more than 45,000 people running, I took four photos and got one of someone two degrees of separation from me. And with Facebook, in a matter of hours I was connected with him.

Maybe oddballs just run in similar circles and another oddball caught my attention.

As we enter an age of facial recognition technology, things like this will become more commonplace. In this case, however, I’m not sure what tech could have recognized the tutu guy.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

You may have noticed a new kind of square barcode popping up all over the place, which are most likely QR codes. Actually there are a few different kinds of barcodes, but they all have the same basic purpose – using your smartphone’s camera to access information encoded on anything in the physical world.

I think of this as putting hyperlinks on any surface you see – anywhere. This is huge.

It’s the best thing I’ve seen bridging the real world of signs and paper to the virtual world of Web and mobile. With the right app you can transfer information such as contact data from a name tag or view the trailer for the movie review you’re reading. The possibilities are endless and they aren’t limited to scanning the physical world since you can scan a code on an LCD monitor and take the information with you.

Earlier this week I noticed an otherwise unmarked white cargo truck with QR codes on the back and sides. I didn’t get a chance to scan the code to see if it was a subtle marketing experiment or used for logistics tracking, but I did get the picture below.

In addition to seeing these pop up in magazines recently, I saw one Tuesday night on a Dance Flight program by DanceWorks Chicago, who recently became an Astek client. The link goes to an extended program with videos and other multimedia material you can’t get on paper.

Try scanning the QR code above. I use QuickMark on my iPhone, which works quite well scanning screens and paper. You can download QuickMark here.

Social media writer and consultant Rachel Yeomans recently posted an article spotting a QR code on Facebook for Net-a-Porter’s new mobile site:

For an example of the Microsoft Tag, which I think is a bit too colorful to be practically incorporated into most branding, I scanned an ad from the current issue of Entertainment Weekly (yes, someone else in the office has a guilty pleasure). Scan the code below to view a YouTube trailer for The Green Hornet on your mobile device. You’ll need to download a tag reader free from Microsoft.

If you’re envisioning a world in which we all wander around scanning each other for information, well, you’re probably not too far off. But this is all an interim step until the technology becomes so ubiquitous that we don’t even need our phones to do the scanning. At that point privacy and social concerns will take over the conversation from technology.

You can generate your own QR code to try out the technology. Post a comment if you’ve seen some interesting QR codes out there or think of any great uses for this technology.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Everyone who takes and edits photos (isn’t that everyone?) should check out Picnik. This service is going to give Adobe Photoshop a run for its money. It’s by far the most comprehensive and easy-to-use Web-based photo editing software I’ve ever seen. I like that you don’t have to have an account to try it, which makes it easier to sample. Integration with popular photo-sharing and social networking sites makes it a breeze to use in those spaces. I’m glad someone got this right as it’s been needed for many years.

We’re looking at their API feature for integration into our future projects. But don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web

We’ve certainly never installed a camera this deep!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Technology, Web

I just had a scary thought. Some day the social networks will be used to mine friend groups for advertising opportunities. Who hangs out with who, where, what they did, what was said. Maybe even what they wore in the photos or videos that are posted. What they were drinking, eating, etc. Facial recognition can be used to tie people to places, let alone the popularity of GPS devices and phones.

We tend to think of advertising as direct and in our face. The good thing about this is that it often makes it easy to discern and ignore. If technology advances to the point of allowing advertisers access to all the private details of our social lives, creative marketers will use this information to target us more directly. While in many cases targeted advertising is good in a consumer culture as it offers services we need, often we find ourselves fending off services we don’t want or need. Worse still is the likelihood of giving into to services that we are convinced in an instant to want but really don’t need at all.

The only way to fight this is to leverage the power of social media and community feedback to establish some safety in numbers. It’s a consumer culture, after all, and as consumers we have the ability to dictate how companies market to us, especially if they’re using our social networks to do it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, General, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

This is really quite odd. I just noticed that some photos I pulled off my iPhone last week (December 30, 2008) are showing up in iPhoto after more recently taken photos. A closer look reveals that it tagged the photos for December 30, 2009. I guess my iPhone was even more excited to reign in the new year than I was!

To fix this in iPhoto is simple. Just select “Batch Change…” under the Photos menu. Change the date to the correct one, and it will modify all the photos accordingly. I typically check the “Modify original files” box since I’m correcting something permanently.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Technology

I was trying to share seven photos (22MB) with some family from a recent trip to Austin, TX. This is just slightly beyond the capacity of most email systems, so we need to look at other ways of sharing the photos. I didn’t really feel like posting them on a public photo sharing site like Flickr or even MobileMe. Since I know that the recipients are also Mac users, it seems like a perfect time to use the Public folder on my iDisk. Seems…

It took me several years to join .Mac (now MobileMe) as it was always one major feature short of being worth it. The photo gallery automation with iPhoto (part of Apple’s iLife suite) is fantastic. The automated backup is okay. The iDisk has been disappointing. It’s sluggish compared to FTP. And the ease-of-use that should accompany a solution built into the desktop is compromised by the non-responsiveness of the folder. To a user, it needs to behave nearly identically to other folders or you’d better make it look like something else so they don’t have unrealistic expectations.

One of the inherent issues with networked file servers is that of file permissions. This pertains to which users have access to the files at all. But it also relates to whether or not computers on the network think the file is in use. If another user is accessing the file, it won’t “release” it to another user. The problem is when a user is done with the file, or has logged of the network, or whose computer has crashed. Sometimes the file isn’t properly released for use.

Last night I was having a slew of issues uploading these seven photos. Access denied, copy aborted, etc. Eventually it just hung with a Finder status bar until it actually crashed the Finder altogether. I logged back in this morning, rebooted the machine a couple of times. Only on the second reboot was I able to delete the half-uploaded folders and finally upload the new complete folder without error. What a pain!

I’ve been experimenting with using MobileMe for offsite backups as well. So far, I’m not impressed with the inefficiency of zipping up all your files for upload every time a backup is scheduled rather than only uploading files that have changed since the last backup.

I’m on a MacBook Pro with the latest version of Leopard. 4GB of RAM. Shouldn’t be having these issues. Am I alone? I’m really hoping I just hit Apple at peak load time (makes sense right before Christmas).

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Andy Swindler Categories: Technology

Bill Gates shows us why geeks hire professional models in all industries, including computer software sales.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Technology

Back from Greece and ready for action!

My PhotoBank worked fine on the trip, but my dad’s didn’t work at all. It seems that SmartDisk has been bought by Verbatim, who continues to service the product. I tried to get it replaced or fixed and didn’t get very far with Verbatim. My dad’s perseverance finally paid off and he got it replaced. It seems to work fine copying from memory cards, but the real problem here is getting the thing to work reliably as a hard drive on our Macs. SmartDisk chose to format the hard drive in FAT32, which ostensibly would make it more cross-compatible (Mac’s and PC’s can both read and write FAT32), but it will not consistently mount when plugged into a Mac.

I have a PC here I can use in the rare case of actually needed to recover photos from it, but it’s frustrating to see something labeled as Mac compatible that doesn’t really work well with a Mac. Anyone know of a better product in this area that’s come along? It seems like a huge market. But, like any kind of backup that’s not automated, your memories are still at the mercy of you remembering to back them up.

The Hyperdrive looks pretty solid, though it’s considerably more than the PhotoBank. Maybe you get what you pay for. Does anyone have any direct experience with this device?

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget