Safety First
Most of the time, I don’t think a whole lot about my safety while I run or bike. I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’ve never had a serious problem. But running, and especially biking, is not without risk.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire divx The obvious risk comes in the form of a few tons of steel and glass strapped to 4 wheels – cars, trucks, and traffic in general. America unfortunately, isn’t the most enlightened place when it comes to respecting bikes and pedestrians. For the most part it’s fine, but there’s always the random inattentive driver or even worse, the driver thats upset you’d have the audacity to run or bike on an actual road.
The not-so-obvious risk are numerous as well. What would happen if I fainted from heat exhaustion like this guy
? What if had a heart attack or stroke? What if I took a spill in a remote place on my bike and was left unconscious?
I’m generally not a panic-inclined fellow, and I realize that most of the scenarios above are statistically improbable. However, when you solo run 12, 15 or 20 miles in all sorts of severe weather over the course of several hours, it makes you think about things like this. What if something happened to me? I’m 8 miles from the nearest phone! Thankfully, there’s a simple answer and it’s called Road I.D.
I picked one of these I.D. bracelets up a few weeks back and couldn’t be more impressed with the product. The concept is simple. It’s a lightweight bracelet that holds an engraved plaque with you vital info on it. My name. Emergency phone numbers. Blood type. Allergies. You get the idea.
I’ve been wearing it on all of my rides and runs and I can think of more instances where it would come in handy as well, such as extended backpacking trips or traveling abroad. If a bracelet isn’t your style, they have a bunch of other options as well. Check out Road I.D. It’s a simple thing that may end up saving your life
sometime.
And before you ask, this isn’t a paid posting for Road I.D. I just think that it’s a great product from a company that decided to do one thing and do it very well.
Skateboarding is Not a Crime, Finally.
A disproportionate segment of my adolescent life was spent doing one of three things: Skateboarding, talking about skateboarding, or watching skateboarding videos. This was back before the internets, when skateboarding culture was still misunderstood and seen as a general menace to civilization akin to the Russian paratroopers in Red Dawn Rosemary’s Baby dvd . To be a skateboarder in the late 80’s, you needed some sense of entrepreneurial spirit to practice your craft. To skate, you generally had three options.
First, you could go to the skateparks. The Turf
Skatepark in Milwaukee and Rotation Station in Rockford, IL both benefited from receiving large chunks of my minimum-wage earnings. These places were a skater’s paradise, but the true benefit of going to the parks was usually the people you met. You’d connect with other kids who shared the same passion you had for riding around on a plank of wood with four wheels. Turf’s “Elvira” pinball machine and exquisitely curated jukebox were perks as well.
The Haunting dvdrip Secondly, you could build your own terrain. I had the benefit of living in the countryside, where one of my close friends just happened to have a huge, empty barn laying around. A couple summers, dozens of trips to the lumber yard, and a few hundred hours of work and we had ourselves a veritable private skatepark. A forty-foot wide, masonite-sheathed, private indoor skatepark in cold, snowy Wisconsin. My childhood was closer to heaven than I’ll ever be again.
buy The Forsaken Lastly, you could skate the streets and hope you didn’t get caught. This was by far the most popular option.
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Luckily, communities across the globe are now realizing that skateboarding is actually a viable sport. And like many sports, it requires the proper environment to practice it. I’ve heard rumblings for last few years that a group of young skateboarders, Tosa Skateboarders United White Christmas movie (TSU), were working on a proposal for a skatepark in Wauwatosa, the city I moved to a few years ago. Well, apparently they’ve been working hard, and through the right channels. I just read today that a plan has been selected for a brand new public skatepark. It’s an amazing design by the Site Design Group, which specializes in design and construction of action sports terrain. Click the image above to see a larger view of the plan.
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TSU has been working with the community to plan the new skatepark, which will be located in the newly-expanded Hart Park,
in the heart of the city. They’ve really done their homework and have held community meetings to discuss the plans, get feedback from citizens and involve people interested in the project. It’s a great example of a small group of passionate citizens pleading their case and the municipality listening and responding. This is the kind of project that makes paying property taxes worth it.
Pleasantville dvdrip The question is: will my 30-something year-old body be up for it now? I’m no spring chicken anymore. I mean, this is the same city park where I play tennis with my wife and start my marathon training runs from. That being said, it’s great to see this type of thing happening in my own back yard.
Rise of the Mobile Web
Earlier today, Hanson Dodge Creative launched the first iPhone-optimized site that we’ve created for one of our clients, Trek Bicycles. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I invite you to pop over to the site
and take a ride. We’re really excited about the new site and are fortunate to work with forward-looking clients who engage us on projects like this. These are the types of projects that make being a designer or developer worth it.
Yesterday, the New York Times published an interesting article
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that spoke about a spike in Google’s traffic on Christmas, ostensibly from users who had just received iPhones for the holidays. The traffic from iPhone users eclipsed that of established, entrenched mobile OS providers. Here’s the really interesting part of the article:
“The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.”
So, with just 2 percent of the market, the iPhone already registered higher web traffic volumes than platforms that when combined, hold 84 percent of the current market. From my design-centric point of view, I can only deduce that people with existing smart phones do not use the web functionality of their phones and that the interface design of the iPhone makes mobile web browsing a viable, if not liberating option.
We’ve seen the same trend. In fact, it’s even more pronounced than Google’s numbers. In our own traffic logs, and in some of our clients’, we’ve noticed a meteoric rise in of the number of iPhone and iPod touch users. Overall, we’ve seen iPhone and iPod touch users, with .2 percent of traffic, register an order of magnitude higher than the next closest OS – Symbian, coming in at .02 percent. This is an unscientific look at the numbers, but it does seem to indicate that the iPhone is in a league of its own when it comes to mobile browsing.
For those of you who love lists, here’s how we see the OS traffic levels shaking out currently. Again, the jump to the iPhone and iPod touch was an order of magnitude from the closest competitor, Symbian. Any platforms not listed were below .01 percent of traffic.
- Windows
- Macintosh
- Linux
- iPhone/iPod
- SymbianOS
- Danger Hiptop
- Playstation 3
- Palm OS
- Nintendo Wii
- Sun OS
- Playstation Portable
Joy Ride: End of the Road buy For me, this project was the first one that really made me believe in the future of the mobile web. I’ve been designing for the web for a decade now, and although I’ve done my fair share of mobile projects, none of them ever felt like a viable substitution for a full browser-based experience. The iPhone is changing this, and will hopefully pressure other mobile platforms to improve the browsing experience for its users.
Your Product Sucks!
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In our industry, looking back at the year can sometimes be a lackluster trip down memory lane. Not only with our clients but the entire marketplace where we “fight the good fight” everyday. We try our hardest to break through the clutter, build equity or establish lasting value for clients by creating points of difference that effectively position a product against the competition…. Blah-blah-blah – insert tagline here for another forgettable foray. 2007, however, introduced us to a very memorable product worthy of review: the iPhone.
Its a Free World… full movie The cellular phone industry had absolutely no point of difference, no true demand beyond utility, only the lesser of existing evils with me-too product and even lesser-loved service providers, Apple once again proves the critics wrong with the introduction of [another] phenomenon, the iPhone. Let me pull the curtain back– our job as marketers is not rocket science, although science is involved. It is proven that you feel before you think. While you rationalize, persuasion comes after an emotional connection and is limited to address needs, which is much less powerful than creating the emotion of want. After all, the “I want that” reaction is a much more desirable position for brands to be in when it comes to the price-value equation and the optimum position for the battle of consumer loyalty and company profitability. Nobody needed an iPhone; they just wanted one and were willing to pay for it. Great marketing didn’t create this demand or influence this decision, it aided in clearly telling the story of a great product, which in turn makes for great marketing.
E-commerce Makes It To the Boardroom
According to Michael Lombardo, author of “the Leadership Machine,” “There is enormous complexity at the leadership level of organizations today.” Lombardo’s work suggests that in addition to setting goals, building strong teams and keeping an eye on cash, today’s CEOs and company presidents need to be more sensitive to diversity issues, learn to think differently and drive innovation, and they need to be more directly involved in managing the challenges of e-commerce.
E-commerce? Wow! Part of me thinks it’s about time. After all, Forrester Research has been projecting continued double-digit growth in e-commerce for years. They go as far as to say that, on average, e-business will represent 10-15% of the typical business’s revenue opportunity within the next three years.
Design Trends in Cycling
It’s been a few months since I attended Interbike 2007 in Las Vegas which, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is one of the largest bicycling industry trade shows on the planet. All of the big bicycle manufacturers are there with their new bike line-ups for the coming year and all of the accessory and clothing manufacturers vie for the attention of bike dealers in hopes that they’ll pick up their product lines. It’s a great opportunity to see what’s going on overall in the industry and peep the newest innovations and products before they hit the general consumer. It’s also the perfect place to notice trends that will shape the industry for the next few years. Since the show, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the trends I see in bike design and marketing.
Change in the bike industry traditionally starts on the fringes and then gets picked up by the mainstream market, so it’s fitting to look at some of the smaller players in the field to see where they see opportunity for new products and ideas. Passionate, small players are the ones willing to take risks, so its interesting to see what opportunities they see in the market. The following report is my unscientific, off-the-cuff observations of developing trends in the cycling industry.