I review the Griffin SLAP iPod Nano Watch. Yes, I am aware that I say “snap” various times and that the lighting is horrible, it was late when I filmed as you can see. When I was a child, I lusted over the Dick Tracy watch, thanks to Apple and the iPod Nano, we are one step closer to this reality. Watch the video above to see my review.

Now that weakness is gone and I am free to purchase an iPhone on Verizon’s robust network, so I may continue my cellular indentured servitude another two years.  However, I have decided for a variety of reasons that an iPhone purchase at the point would not be the best decision for me or my family.  Specifically, the timing is wrong, the pricing is high, and the competition is fierce.

Apple is notorious for releasing revolutionary new products and then significantly evolving them on a one to two year cycle.  This is a major reason why I refuse to purchase a first generation iPad when every fiber of my tech loving being desperately wants one.  The iPhone 4 has been out for a while now and it is no secret that this product is tweaked on a yearly basis.  Verizon will get their iPhone 4 in the middle of February and it will be old news by late Spring, early Summer.  Better to wait a couple of months to get the latest and greatest from Apple, especially since we have waited this long already.

Maybe I am cheap, or maybe my wife is monetarily cautious and I love my wife so I am frugal, but $299.99 (before tax) for a 32 gig phone seems a bit steep.  I could purchase a 16 gig phone for 100 bucks less, but I would be cutting my current iPod capacity in half if I do that.  Then there is the astronomical monthly data access fee, about 30 bucks a month on top of what I currently pay, which is substantial.  Assuming I can get over my parsimonious approach to cellular handsets the iPhone still has to deal with fierce competition from other devices.

While iPhone competitors were negligible in the first few years of the products life cycle, this is no longer the case.  The market has dozens of Android powered phones which have all the functionality of iPhone if not the je ne sais quois that makes users smile when playing with that particular handset.  I do, however, know that this iteration of the iPhone will not be 4G enabled which means it is actually a generation behind some of its Android competition in terms of internet access speeds.  Think of iPhone as DSL browsing while something like the HTC Thunderbolt 4G will be cruising along at cable modem speeds (if you don’t understand what that means I really appreciate you reading this entire posting).

I cannot believe I have come to this point after waiting so long for the magic phone to find its way to Verizon but I will not be purchasing an iPhone any time soon.

Full disclosure I own one share of Apple Inc. and a share of Google as well, I know I’m way to invested in these companies to objectively share my opinions.

Hello, I am China dinosaur factory. Hope that you know our product more.  Also hope that we can establish long-term cooperative relation.

User Manual

1. Examine all the interfaces.

2. Connected to the 220V AC power when all interfaces ready, turn the power switch and then products start to work.

3. There is an infrared sensors in the control box, it will going to standby when nobody come by after a regular working. When someone approach the infrared sensor, products will start to work—-make sound and movements.

4. Please check and maintenance products on a regular time to ensure it can work normally.

I’ve never wanted my own private island more than I do today. For those who would like to poke around more on this company’s website, their english-language address is http://www.zgfff.com/.  It is an afternoon well spent!

Gift cards are nice, but they scream out that you ran to the nearest 7-11 with no idea what to get the person. If you are still struggling to figure out what to get the geek in your life, but don’t want to battle through the crowds at the mall, try one of these options:

Magazine subscriptions – Much like the Jelly of the Month club, magazine subscriptions are gifts that keep on giving. Not only can you find a magazine to fit virtually any kind of person. The best thing is that you can order them online minutes before you see the person and it won’t make a difference. Check out discountmags.com and the magazine’s websites for massive discounts. Magazine subscriptions are not always something a person thinks to buy for themselves, so can be a great gift.
Might I Suggest: Wired, ReadyMade, Mental_Floss

Gift iOS Apps, iBooks, Videos, Music – A little known feature of iOS is gifting. You select the person you want to buy a song/app/album/movie/tv show and you can email them a gift certificate or even print one out with a redemption code. This is a cool little thing to put in a card to send to a person. Prices range from $0.69 to infinity.
Might I Suggest: Angry Birds, Infinity Sword,  Hipstamatic, Matt & Kim “Sidewalks”, Daft Punk Tron Legacy Soundtrack, Scott Pilgrim

Web domains – A web domain can actually be a really thoughtful gift for the geek in your life that seems like they have everything. If you know a person who didn’t have the foresight to buy “theirname”.com, this is a no-brainer.
Might I Suggest: Use Hover.com over Godaddy

Netflix – Believe it or not, there are still the rare people out there who don’t have Netflix and Netflix knows it. They offer a great gifting program where you can select how many months you want to give/how much you like the person you are giving it to them. For the geek who may have just gotten an iPad, AppleTv, Roku, or Xbox 360, or Wii this is a perfect compliment to their new toy.

Sirius XM Radio – With Howard Stern signing on for another 5 years and the company passing their 20 millionth subscriber, it is a good time to subscribe to the service.You don’t even need a radio to start using the service now, as they offer iPhone and web streaming. Even though there are a variety of free alternatives today like Pandora or Slacker Radio, there is something to having music and talk radio mixed by a professional dj and not a computer. Sirius offers a variety of gifting options.

Whoever said that must’ve never owned a smartphone. There are things that were ‘ha, it’d be cool if it actually did this’ features that I thought would never happen that are standard features of the phone. There are, as with any object, gripes, but they bother me far less than I expected them to. Indeed, my only real complaint is that it becomes something of an object of fetishization after a while. I find myself being distracted from a simple task on my computer, such as tweeting, or reading a forum, only to end up doing the same task on the phone.

Indeed, I’m typing up this post in the lovely WordPress Android app simply because I can. It’s not even a matter of not being near the computer; it’s upstairs, less than a hundred steps from me. Perhaps this is simply the euphoria of newly owning the device. It will, I hope, die down in the coming weeks.  At the very least, I hope WinAmp Android and Google Listen will free me to use my PSP for games again, instead of as an oversized iPod.

I can’t take full credit for this design, as I saw a small rough version of the ghostbusters logo as a wreath used in a GeekChicDaily e-mail newsletter. I loved the idea so much that I made my own much cleaner high resolution version for my iPad and iPhone wallpaper. As another holiday gift to you, the MDP readers, here are the files so you can show that you ain’t afraid of no Ghosts of Christmas Past/Present/Yet-To-Come.

iPhone Wallpaper	iPad Wallpaper

Click the thumbnail for a full-size version

In this edition of Outbreak Alert (where I analyze the newest meme going viral the web on a mission to become internet famous), I talk about something that is ready to explode through the internet like a diet pepsi full of mentos and this installment, we are talking about Conan O’ Brien. “Woah Brandon”, you may say, “hasn’t Conan been a viral sensation with a cult following for a long time?” and to you I say, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Conan O’Brien needs no introduction to those in the TNTML demographic. He is an inspiration to us pale tall Irish nerds since the mid-90′s and made a gigantic media splash when he was all but physically pushed from his dream job at The Tonight Show. What came next was a ground swell of internet support. The Conan crew had been active online with experiments such HornyManatee.com and posting behind the scenes videos on their blog, but had yet to totally embrace Social Media as a way to gain new viewers and not just talk to the ones they already had. When Conan’s supporters saw his job was threatened, the social web went bonkers.

Conan support pages like Team Coco (a nickname given to him on air by Tom Hanks) sprung up, he was in the trending topics on Twitter for weeks, yet he ratings failed to improve much except for his final shows.

When NBC’s contract said Conan could not appear on television in the months after leaving, he took to the web and began to test out the medium, joining Twitter and going on tour. During this time, Conan and his crew visited Twitter and Google to learn the ins and outs of the web. The whole time, his support grew in the social web and I don’t think its unfair to say that without his fans massive online support, he may not have winded up with the TBS show.

This time around, how Conan and his show are using the web is a case study in online marketing perfection. Leading up to the show’s launch, they set up a live video cam in their hallway doing bits for round the clock, gave away 1,000 t-shirts to the first people to reply on twitter daily, and posted youtube videos behind the scenes through every step of preproduction and answering viewer questions.

They also announced that full episodes will be posted on their website the day after they air. This is a key change to how the show views its viewers. TBS is owned by Ted Turner, the same man who owns CNN and Cartoon Network. CNN uses iReport to allow viewers to send in news video and information, while Cartoon Network owns the teen/20′s demographic with Adult Swim… Turner Broadcasting understands the web and that the young generations aren’t always tuning in to a live broadcast.

If you thought Conan was big before… look at the viral web right now and its plain to see that he is just getting started. The last few days, the web is returning to its previous Conan fanaticism. Even Yiying Lu, the creator of twitter’s Fail Whale, drew Conan into a Pale Whale. One of my favorite bits of the new Conan Wave has been Michelle Vargas’ Conan Intern Diaries:

Last night, it seemed like everyone in my Twitter and Facebook feeds were watching the first Conan show and based on the early ratings, Conan pulled higher ratings than any network late night network talk show, including The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.

We are just getting started Team Coco, this is our chance to truly prove that television can’t play by the same rules anymore.

The moment Steve Jobs held up the iPad during its announcement keynote, I said to myself, “Its the Hitchhiker’s Guide…” I don’t think I need to explain to readers of MDP that in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote about a portable tablet computer that connected to the collected known knowledge with a cover that read in big friendly letters, “Don’t Panic.” The only thing missing from the iPad was the cover. Thanks to MyCase Concepts, it is complete.

The MyCase Concepts Don’t Panic case transforms the iPad into Arthur Dent’s space and time traveling companion. Not only does it feature the iconic “Don’t Panic”, but also the black soft-leather like exterior. MyCase Concepts didn’t sacrifice quality for nerd-cred and after about a week of using it with my iPad, I am impressed with just how well thought out its design actually is.

As I have said in past posts, the official Apple iPad Case just doesn’t seem to offer enough protection or style to be worth the $40 price. This led me to make my own moleskine style iPad case, but I realize not everyone has the time and patience for such a project.

With the MyCase Folio Case, I feel like my iPad is more than secure from normal trauma such being thrown into a messenger bag or dropped on to a desk. Unlike some cases I have used, the iPad is fully enclosed inside a sleeve, so even when opened, there is some protection from drops. The sleeve has been cut so that the buttons and speaker are easily accessible. In my opinion, how the case feels in the hand is immensely important and because of this case’s internal sleeve and micro-fiber liner, the iPad gains a nice soft feel perfect for laying around with.

Functionally this case shines as well. For using the iPad in cases such as typing or reading the news at the breakfast table, the front cover turns into a stand with just enough of an incline. The cover can also be used to prop the iPad standing up, which is great for watching video on a table, or as I often use it, resting on my chest lying in bed. In both of these positions, a magnetically locked tab pops from the back to hold the cover in place so that it does not fall, a problem I have had with other cases. Magnets are also employed to hold the case closed, another feature that I have not seen in many cases and there seems to be enough material between the device and the low powered magnets that I feel fine.

I am a heavy iPad user (I am starting to notice I am actually using my iPad vastly more than my iMac) and this case seems to be able to take my abuse. Even though I have used it a little over a week, the case still looks like the day I got it.

Now the moment of truth, I have to admit that even though I fought it at first, the MyCase Concepts Case has basically replaced my custom-made Moleskine-style case. That case will not go unused, it still is a great conversation starter, but I have found in the right circles of nerds, having a case with “Don’t Panic” on its cover with big friendly letters is as well.

For much less than the official Apple case, the MyCase Concepts offers all the functionality and triple the protection. I highly recommend it for all your space/time/dimension hopping.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

The MyCase Concepts Don’t Panic Folio Case can be purchased here and as a special for The Modern Day Pirates readers, use the coupon code “pirates” for 5% of any order!!!

Disclaimer: The Modern Day Pirates were provided a complimentary review sample of this product.

All the stimulation you need, no coffee necessary.

This guy is seriously nightmare fuel anyways

Did I mention no more minecraft?

I’ll just leave this here...

Why not have a little fun with your files? There was a lot more to see at New York Comic Con than just comics, including awesome gadgets such as these MIMOBOT character flash drives.  We stopped by the Mimoco booth and talked with Jessica for a bit, so check out the video for a great introduction to the MIMOBOT line:

Mimoco offers several different types of USB drives, including:

• Original Characters
• Artist Crossovers
• Community Designs
• Licensed Characters|

While you can’t deny the appeal of a memorable licensed character, what impressed us the most was the use of community designs.  You can see similar concepts being embraced all around the internet, particularly with clothing, and there seems to be numerous benefits.  These sites tend to put out a quality product by crowdsourcing the task of uncovering artistic talent, with the result being compelling designs at a fair price.  We took home Dr. Knowledgus, who is an awesome little steam punk inspired scientist, one of the first community-designed MIMOBOTs, and we couldn’t be happier with him!

Even the licensed characters go beyond simply slapping a familiar face onto a product, though.  There are some genuinely creative uses of the Star Wars brand, where lifting the USB cap will reveal the faces beneath masks, such as Han or Luke hiding behind a stormtrooper helmet.  The best touch is that one out of every six Darth Vader drives will have the original Return of the Jedi style Anakin underneath the iconic hood.  Truthfully, the chase aspect of collectibles is extremely tired, but that still doesn’t prevent it from being awesome.  If the opportunity to purchase our own little pasty, wrinkled white man came along, we’d jump at the chance!  Also, props to Mimoco for choosing Lobot as one of their characters. Why? Because Lobot is the man, and he knows it.

Other licenses include Hello Kitty, Domo, Halo, and Happy Tree Friends.  MIMOBOT drives are available in a variety of sizes: 4GB ($35), 8GB ($55), and 16GB ($80), all of which can be purchased at the Mimoco online store.  Some specials to note are that the Lobot drive is a limited edition run of 1,000 pieces, and that the Han & Luke stormtroopers have a special edition run of 500 pieces.  These include special caps that allow Han & Luke’s faces to be seen with the cap in place.

Sure, you could pay $40 for a store-bought portable battery, but you’ll be left with a few caveats.  If it breaks, good luck repairing it.  If the battery loses its ability to hold a charge after a year, fat chance at replacing it.  Most of all, it’s just entirely too much to pay for something you could build yourself!

So here’s what you get with Minty Boost:  it’s sold as a built-at-home parts kit which costs $19.50 (available directly from Adafruit Industries), takes 2 AA batteries (which you can recharge and/or replace to your heart’s content), and best of all, is built inside an Altoids Gum container! (hence the name)

Alternatively, you can save even more money by purchasing the Minty Boost circuit board for $5.00 and finding the rest of the components on your own.  If you’re familiar with purchasing electronics, you’ll save a few bucks here. You’ll also need a basic selection of tools, including a soldering iron, in order to assemble the Minty Boost.  If you don’t have these at your hand, ask a friend, or head to Google and run a search to locate your nearest hacker space.

Once assembled, the Minty Boost will provide several hours of operation for your favorite devices.  We tested ours out in an iPhone 3GS and a Kodak Zi8, and it worked like a charm.  If you’re really curious to see whether the Minty Boost will provide the power you need check out their compatibility list.  You can even purchase adapter cables to plug in your DS or PSP.

Take a look at some photos from my experience building a Minty Boost:

With New York Comic Con coming this weekend, and the long days walking the show floor shooting video and interviewing creators that such an event entails, this little gadget will be put to some good use!

This past weekend, Brandon and I headed to Corona Park in Queens, NYC for the east cost debut of the Maker Faire. What’s that you ask? Think of a county fair, only instead of blue-ribbon pigs and grandma’s prize squash, think robots, D.I.Y. inventions, and all manner of other geeky crafts. Maker Faire is the home of the garage engineers, the hackers, and the offbeat crafters. Sponsored by Make Magazine and the New York Hall of Science, this festival evoked a mixture of the World’s Fair (held twice at Corona Park) fused with internet culture.

Here’s a sampling of the fantastic sights we saw:

• The Gun-Operated Alarm Clock: Let’s face it, nobody likes getting woken up.  Kudos to this maker who wired an NES zapper into his alarm clock, enabling a click the gun trigger to advance the alarm time by 1 minute. A great to take at your aggression on the buzzing box!



• More 3D Printers Than I Could Count: Evoking visions of Star Trek replicators, the age of home 3D printing is almost upon us.  If you can model it, you can build it out of plastic.  These are just about half of the Cupcake CNCs, a 3D printer sold as a build-it-yourself kit from local NYC company MakerBot.  Several other homemade printers were demonstrated, but the local Cupcake CNC owned the show.





• The Moonisphere: The sign at the site of the Moonisphere asked fair-goers to help in constructing the model, with the explanation: “In the distance is the Unisphere, a 120 foot wide model of the planet Earth made for the New York World’s Fair (a UFO crashes into it at the end of “Men in Black”).  We happen to be at around the scale orbital distance from the unisphere (approximately 3400 feet) and need the help of Maker Faire participants to build a 33 foot scale model of the Moon.  THE MOONISPHERE!”  This photo is from early on day 1, and I’d love to know how the project turned out:



• Fun Notebooks: One of the craft vendors present had an interesting process in which he binds notebooks with video game box fronts as the covers. I’ve seen this done with a lot of things (old book covers, VHS boxes, etc.) but never with video game boxes. He even hole-punched the manuals and inserted them in front of the blank notebook pages. Would be even cooler if he got those game manual style notes pages



• Life-size Mouse Trap:  I was extremely relieved that these carnies did not take a half-hour to roll dice and move around the board, collecting pieces of cheese and slowly building their machine.  They reached the child in us all by simply building the biggest contraption possible, and trying to make it work.  Just watch:
• Eepybird: The YouTube celebrity scientists where there doing their diet coke & mentos shtick, and we caught a show.  Overall, 108 bottles where used, and the empties were even offered up to kids as souveniers (complete with half-melted Mento at the bottom).  Mom must be thrilled!



• Easy Cheesze Printer: Why print your objects out of hard plastic, when you can use edible “cheese”?
• Rubik’s Cube Solving Robot: I was stunned at how this robot was able to take a Rubik’s cube and solve it so quickly.  Sure, I know there is an optimal solution for the cube, but it was impressive to see it implemented so well:
• Mean Cards: These things were hilarious. They are off-color in the same vein as someecards, but are not for any occasion, they are just mean. My favorite: “enough with the iPhone”, and on the inside “it doesn’t love you back (there’s no app for that)”
  



• Creative Bicycles & Chariots: What better way to travel than in a giant fish. I felt like I was in Ponyo:



• The Knitted Car: Unfortunately this car is not covered in sod (I had to touch it myself to verify), but that doesn’t stop it from being awesome!

An iPad dock for a one dollar? Find out how I found it.

On this episode of Internet Live!, we talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s potty mouth, the NYC tornado, and Chris Brown. Subscribe in YouTube!

As anyone with one of the newer video game platforms is aware (xbox 360, PS3, etc.), Netflix has most of their collection available to watch instantly through their “watch instantly” feature online.

If you’re not a gamer, it doesn’t make much sense to shell out $200+ on a video game system just to watch movies.  There are plenty of other entertainment platforms out there that can satisfy your needs.  As for myself, I quit video games cold turkey at the age of 12 when it started to take a toll on my grades.  I have a highly addictive personality and when I got a report card in junior high that was straight C’s (due mostly to “Final Fantasy III”), it was time to kick the habit.  Since 1995, I had some minor relapses.  “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” and “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” come to mind.  But I have largely been able to keep my addiction at bay in the last 15 years.

I wanted to avoid buying an xbox 360 out of fear that I would become a video game junkie again, lying in the fetal position in the corner of a room petting a video game controller.  I opted instead to purchase a Roku player.

The Roku player has three primary channels: Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand and Pandora.  On the Netflix channel, you have access to Netflix’s entire watch instantly album.  Every season of 24, Lost, Heroes, Weeds, the first two seasons of Dexter and a wide assortment of movies are all available.

With Amazon Video on Demand, you can purchase movies and TV shows via a permanent license to watch them instantly off of Amazon.com.  Usually, they are at dramatic discounts to their DVD counterparts.  Episodes of tv shows are also usually available immediately after they air for $1.99.

The Pandora station is self explanatory.  It plays your Pandora stations.  If you have a good sound system, it’s a good alternative to your computer’s speakers.

The little gadget sells for $59.99.  For an extra $10, you can get content in HD.

As a result of purchasing this relatively cheap device two years ago, I no longer have a need for cable television (I still have cable, my roommates watch it, but I could go without it and just get a cheap internet provider).  If If I want to watch an episode of a show that aired last night, I buy it for $1.99 and watch it on my tv in HD and own it forever.  I’ve watched shows like 24 in their entirety from start to finish without commercial interruption or waiting for DVDs to show up in the mail.  Unless you’re really into sports, why pay Comcast $100 (or more) per month for cable TV?

On this episode of internet live, we talk about Apple’s new social network Ping, Paul Allen’s love of suing, and Kanye tweet haters.

Mobile Wifi Hotspots (or Mifis to the cool kids) are devices that use the cellular data network to connect any wifi enabled device to the web. This means you can finally live the lifestyle of people in stock images, using your laptop in a park with headphones on with your friends. That’s real quality social time!

Up until this point the networks in the United States have really stunted what these hotspots could do with either bandwidth caps, prohibitive pricing, or both.

For example, the Verizon Mifi will set you back $40 monthly for $250MB of bandwidth or $60 monthly for 5GB. If you are even a normal web user who watches YouTube or listens to Pandora, you are going to burn through this pretty fast. Remember, this is a hotspot, meaning you can connect more than one device to it at a time. Sorry friends I am hanging out in the park with, I am close to my bandwidth cap.

Another option is to use tethering with your smartphone for mobile web. Both the iPhone and Android Froyo offer this functionality if the user is willing to pay $20 additional a month, but anyone who has actually done this knows that using a smartphone as a hotspot drains the battery extraordinarily fast.

Apple made an interesting play at hotspots with the iPad 3G, which gives your iPad access to 250MB for $14.99 or 2GB of data for $25. Unlike other devices, the iPad data is without contract, meaning you only pay for the data when you need it. This was a step in the right direction, but only worked on the iPad you paid for.

Enter Virgin Mobile’s new Mifi to really shake things up. The Sprint based Virgin Mobile has just announced a Mifi hotspot that will connect users to unlimited (that’s right. no limit, hence the “un”) data for $40 with no contract. For people that were on the fence about getting a MiFi, this is extremely tempting.

The lack of a contract means no recurring charge to the credit card bill and on months where you are very static, you don’t need to pay to keep the service. Most importantly, true unlimited mobile broadband means that a person can attach multiple devices without worry and not change their web habits. At $40, that is even competitive to use in the home to replace the landline internet. Mobile has virtually replaced landline phones, its only a matter of time before that moves to web too.

Even though Virgin Mobile was sold to Sprint last year and he has moved on to commercial space flight, I like the Virgin Mifi so much I am going to say that this was Richard Branson’s idea. Thanks Sir Richard!

]]> http://www.themoderndaypirates.com/pirates/2010/08/why-the-virgin-mifi-is-a-big-deal/feed/ 2 http://www.themoderndaypirates.com/pirates/2010/08/outbreak-alert-corgi-flop/ http://www.themoderndaypirates.com/pirates/2010/08/outbreak-alert-corgi-flop/#comments Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:47:31 +0000 Brandon http://www.themoderndaypirates.com/pirates/?p=5427

Welcome to the first edition of Outbreak Alert!, where I bring you the readers of TNTML the newest thing going viral on the web. On a mission to become internet famous, I analyze the current meme spreading through the web to see what we can learn from it.

I give you Corgi Flop. If you haven’t seen Corgi Flop, it features a little Corgi named Cooper in an adorable life vest jumping in for his first swim. It is one of the most watched videos on Youtube in the past week, amassing over 1 million views in the ten days it has been on the web. The video has been picked up by FunnyorDie.com and a variety of other sites.

Corgis are already famous world-wide as Queen Elizabeth’s dog of choice (she always has four of them), add water and you have a viral hit.

So what can we learn from Corgi Flop? Being as Youtube is about 88% adorable dog videos, I think it is safe to say if you have a dog, you should just keep a camera on him or her 24 hours a day just incase hilarity ensues. Once again the age old theory that if you want a hit, use children and/or dogs. The legendary WC Fields used to refuse to work with children and dogs, stating “Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.” Of course, this was in the days before YouTube.

The video itself is beautifully shot in HD. As more people get hd cameras, I find it exciting that the days of awful compressed video that looks like a Nintendo game will soon be behind us.

Anyway, prepare yourself for complete cute meltdown in five, four…

this post was initially posted on TalkNerdyToMeLover.com

The Hopkinson Report is hosted by Wired’s Marketing Guy Jim Hopkinson and covers how web and technology are changing the way things are promoted online. In other words, the kind of thing I know you guys love. What really makes the show is Jim’s unique take and delivery, which was once called “audio caffeine”.

As a long time listener and sometimes behind the scenes guy (I designed the website), I was honored to get behind the mic. I previously was interviewed on the show on my generation research on Episode 102, Generation Wired, but this time it was all me.

I delve further into my idea that Social Media is the new Rock and Roll in this episode. No matter what theNew York Times says about us twenty-somethings, we are completely changing the way business is done right now and its pretty darn exciting.

To listen to the episode click here!!!

Now what if I told you that new shoe technology has given us an alternative solution to this dilemma, as opposed to walking around with nasty bare feet all day?  Too good to be true?  False.  The company Vibram has created a line of footwear call Five Fingers which allows the user to feel as though they are barefoot, while still maintaining the protection from the environment that wearing shoes provides.  Think of it more as a toe sock with a sole.  That’s right; it’s a shoe that has toes!   Rather incredible to look at.  There is nothing but a thin (2-7 mm) rubber sole between you and the ground.  This enables the foot to flex while running, walking, or whatever you choose to do in them.  This also means that it becomes very dangerous to plant most of our weight on our heel as we are forced to with traditional shoes.  Instead of the heel, most of the weight is placed on the arch of the foot.  Miraculously, the arch coupled with the ankle, and knee, are the best set of shock absorbers to date.  A slightly bent leg absorbs much more shock and does less damage to the body compared to a straight, locked knee.  Read on to hear about my experience switching over to these new shoes:

I have been running in my Five Fingers for over 6 months and have yet to develop any sort of running related injury where as in the past I would have to take a few days to a few weeks off of training due to unexplained pain in my foot or leg.  The ability to train for months on end has been the best thing about these “shoes”.  I am faster, feel better, and have more endurance than ever before.

Vibram has many models of the Five Fingers.  The most popular model the is the KSO (Keep Stuff Out).  It utilizes a Velcro strap to literally keep stuff out and keep the shoe on.  I have been using this for running until today, when I upgraded to the running model, Bikila.  Here’s my review:

So I got the latest and greatest pair of “footy” shoes from www.citysports.com a few days ago.  All I can say is wow.  Not only are these the most comfortable things that I’ve ever had on my feet, but they actually STAY on my feet! Vibram has incorporated more of a “sole” design into the Bikila model which provides more cushioning for the runner than their previous models. Please note that there is still zero arch or any kind of other support, just added cushioning that allows the runner to have a more springy step whilst still being able to feel the ground and use the inner muscles of the foot. Honestly, it feels like I’m carrying around a rubber track on the bottom of my feet…and that’s when running on concrete. There is also a  polyurethane arch cushion which prevents rocks from impacting the oh so delicate arch. Great additions.

The first thing that I noticed when putting on the Bikilas is that there was little or no break-in period. I didn’t have to jam my toes into their respective slots, nor did my pinky toe feel smashed like it did when I first tried on the KSOs. Maybe this is because my feet were already used to how FiveFingers are supposed to feel, but either way, the “shoe” was significantly easier to get on my foot. This was partially due to a larger ankle opening. I fact, the entire opening is looser and more comfortable. Hell, the entire inside of the shoe feels like a velvet carpet that Aladdin could ride around Arabia! Its great! The looser ankle design allows for more comfort around the ankle as well as less pressure on the Achilles tendon, producing an even more natural running feel. The strap on the forefront of the foot is where things get awesome.

You may be thinking, “If the ankle is looser, how does this thing stay on my foot?” I have no clue, but it just does. The toe portion of the shoe fits much more snugly that the KSOs ever did. Uncomfortable? Not at all. Remember kids, the whole inside of the shoe feels like Aladdin’s carpet. The extra hug that the balls and toes of the shoe give to your feet is a much welcome one. The strap on the Bikilas (unlike the KSOs) provides no arch support and no pressure on the tendon, and is only there to make sure the thing stays snug around the front portion of the foot. With these features combined, you foot does not seem to slip and slide (ouch!) around the inside of the shoe. At high speeds in the KSOs, my foot would slip and I would feel both unstable and afraid to run any longer. Conversely, with the Bikilas, there is ZERO slip at a full sprint. I have absolute confidence in my foot. I would compare the Bikilas to a sports car shoe. Great for everything, both slow or fast. I have yet to put them through any serious cornering, but the few turns that I did take in them felt great.

I’ve been waiting for a shoe design like this for years. No more foot or leg pain. No need to take days or weeks off of training to heal from a running related injury. For those of you who own a pair of FiveFingers, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t, I highly recommend investing in a pair. Avid runners, it will change the way you run forever. Not so avid runners, it will improve your over all posture, strengthen your feet, and you’ll never have foot pain again!

I hope you join me in the bareofoot running movement!

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