Spencer Higgins. Product photographer extraordinare…

Twenty six year-old Nicholas Di Genova is a madman in the studio, clocking an average of 18 to 20 hours a day at the drawing board. He’s at the forefront of a new wave of labor-intensive fine art that embraces its pop culture influences, from comics and anime to Star Wars. He’s had a string of sold out solo shows in both Toronto and New York galleries as well as participating in important international art fairs, even achieving the prestigious honor of having a piece picked up by the major American Museum the Whitney.

“The Photography Master Cup is a global online awards show recognizing excellence in color photography. This celebrated event shines a spotlight on the finest professional and amateur photographers and is presented by International Color Awards.

The awards Jury represents the most influential art directors, agencies, editors, galleries, and publishers from the world of photography, advertising and entertainment. Images are nominated and selected by Jury members who honor the finest images with the highest achievements in color photography.”

I want to thank Mike McDerment and the whole Mesh group for doing such a great job with the conference. I got a lot of grief from David Crow for doing my usual, swoop in, present, swoop out. But from the time I spent there and at the reception later, I was blown away with the other speakers and the caliber of discussion and questions.

It was great to hang out with Daniel Burka and Bryce Johnson and to meet Ryan Carson.

Here is my presentation. I included some speaker notes to try and make the screens somewhat meaningful. Enjoy!

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The Programs team has been working on a project for SunChips US (with our agency partner Juniper Park) and recently we went live with the first phase, the re-launch of sunchips.com. BrainFuel blog had this to say about the site,
I thought the SunChips web site was really classy. It embodies everything the brand is about and really has the right pictures and effects to go after that market segment.
Thanks guys. And check out that wheat! The New York Times also had a great article about the campaign in general.

On Friday, March 28 I will be speaking at ICE 08. Actually, I will be on a panel with…

Todd Henwood, Associate Creative Director, Publicis Modem
Warren Tomlin, Chief Creative Officer, Fuel Industries

It will be moderated by our BBF David Crow.

The topic…

CONVERGENCE: Interactive Marketing Channels
Interactive marketing has transformed over the last decade, as email, search and social media strategies become mainstays and new capabilities are offered by emerging channels. What does the near future look like as they innovate and converge, and how do you measure their success?

I promise I will bring my A game and make it is interesting as possible. And Crow always asks great questions.

I will also be part of the 1×1 sessions where you can sign up and get some mano a mano time with yours truly. If you sign up, I will bring my world famous chocolate chip cookies, so basically you have no excuses.

See you there.

David Crow has been nominated Toronto’s best tech evangilist by BlogTO.

I first met David when he was floating the idea of running a BarCamp here in Toronto. After 5 minutes of talking with him, I volunteered our office space and some cash to host it.

Since then we have done anything David has asked. You know that, whatever it is, it will be done with professionalism and a spirit of building a better community in Toronto.

We owe a great debt to David who has been a big evangelist of ours. He is very deserving of this award.

Can someone explain to me as a mobile professional why I would want to buy one of these ?

There’s been a buzz building on this for some time, but today, YouTube and Warner Music Group have confirmed that Warner will be posting its music videos on YouTube. The deal will see the two companies sharing the advertising revenue associated with pages where Warner content resides.

Arguably the most interesting part of the whole deal is that Warner is encouraging users to download and remix the videos. In the words of a Warner spokesman, they “want to lead by innovation” rather than litigation. That move is to be applauded, but as the Chevy Tahoe folks will tell you, user-remixed content can be a bit of a high-wire act.

A couple of questions come to mind immediately:

• Is this development the thin edge of the wedge leading to a pay-for-content model on YouTube?
• Either way, could there be a backlash against YouTube that opens the gate for another video sharing service that suddenly seems more “grassroots”?
• Will Warner really have the stomach to see what happens when you let users remix, say, a Paris Hilton video—and then unleash it on one of the most popular sites on the Internet?
• Will the sudden influx of image-conscious major artists force YouTube to serve up better-looking video (as opposed to the low-res mush they dish up now)?
• Will YouTube need to think about tweaking its tagline, “Broadcast Yourself”?

We’ll see how it shakes out. There’s definitely going to be a lot of ink spilled on this story.

It’s cool. Admit it: you think it’s cool too. Time Machine, one of Apple’s flashier new innovations for Leopard, lets you go back in the past, grab a document you’d lost—maybe you deleted or saved over it—and bring it back to the…umm…future. No flux capacitor or warp-speed slingshot maneuvers around the sun required. Here’s what I like about it:

• Automatic recovery—full or à la carte. Manually backing up your system is a hassle so most people, myself included, don’t do it. Restoring to an earlier entire disk image can be daunting because there are so many potential conflicts and interdependencies. You’re liable to cause a temporal rift in the time space continuum—only instead of the universe exploding, your programs might crash! Time Machine’s piecewise approach (independent histories for individual folders, applications, etc.) makes backup AND recovery totally ubiquitous and risk-free…er.

• Combines with search. The example given in the keynote was more about executing time machine with a filter, but now that they’ve got Spotlight really humming, it’d be amazing to see a Spotlight search results window go back through time. Now all you need to remember is that you had document X SOMEWHERE on your computer at SOME POINT IN TIME!

• It helps everyday users become better geeks! What’s under the hood is really an automated backup system with rudimentary version control. Pretty sophisticated stuff for consumers, but the interface frames it up well. Nicely demonstrates how much innovation can be squeezed out of problems that have been solved technically, but are still unsolved from the user experience perspective.