The iphone has revolutionized mobile phone technology not only in the United States but also in the world. Now with the 3G available in 57 countries and coming soon to 23 countries, the iphone is increasingly becoming a mobile phone of international acclaim.  The benefits and advantages of the phone are available for your reading pleasure on the Apple website.

But the iphone is more than just a phone. It is a tool for effectively and efficiently managing the complex demands that span every facet of our hectic lives. It’s a way of life. That’s right, a culture – the iculture.

At ArcStone, we have embraced the iculture and bask in its glory on a daily basis. Almost half of the employees have iphones and they constantly rave about them.

Nick Longtin, a connoisseur of Indian cuisine once commented, “I love Tandori chicken. I bet you can even Tandori a shoe and it would taste great.” The idea Mr. Longtin is espousing here is that anything (edible or not) preceded by Tandori gives it major credibility. This same analogy carries over to the letter “i.” Placing i in front of mundane words like phone and culture give these words a whole new meaning. To illustrate this concept, let’s delve deeper into the linguistic significance of the letter i.

I  is the ninth letter of the greek alphabet, called iota. As we all know, the word iota in modern English is a noun meaning the smallest amount or part imaginable. It stands to reason that the idea behind the iphone was to enable users to achieve maximum efficiency with the smallest amount of effort.  It is no surprise that then that it combines three products in one: a phone, an ipod and a breakthrough internet device.

In the fast paced society and culture we live in, where time is of the essence, we expect everything microwaved and ready for consumption or use with minimal effort. The iphone helps to achieve this delicate balance between speed and accuracy which results in huge time savings.

The next time you hear the words iphone, iway or iculture remember that it’s an invitation to live life by design and not from crisis to crisis.

In my ongoing series on on-line advertising faux pas, anomalies, and general weirdness, I have come across quite a few examples of what I call “competeverts”. Competeverts are ads placed in a page where the content of the page expunges about a company in direct competition with the advertiser.

One of, if not the finest, example of this was on Gizmodo today. As you can see from the screen capture above, Blackberry took advantage of some prime advertising real-estate on a iPhone article to advertise its competing device.

With opportunities like this, it’s no wonder ad dollars are transitioning from print to the web.

Well, it’s June 9th. We can expect the announcement 10 am PST (noon here in Minnesota). Will the new iPhone go on sale today? Tomorrow? This week?

Will it be cheaper than ever?

Will I buy it in white, black, or red?

Will it be thinner, sleeker, more beveled?

Will it have solar panels?

Will Twitter crack under the strain of the anticipation and excitement?

You can check WWDC 2008 live blogging coverage over at CNET for news as it comes in…

What it do, world.

Oh man, oh man. My Kanye shades arrived!!

Driving with these on is not a crime because looking fly and committing a crime can never occur in conjunction with one another.*

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*ArcStone Technologies, Inc. and the author are not responsible for the accuracy or reliability of any information, data, opinions, advice or statements made in this post. Word.

Two or three holiday seasons ago, everybody was buying battery-operated toothbrushes for their loved ones. I didn’t get one (I guess no one cares about my oral hygiene) and I still use a manual brush.

Now gift-givers have another opportunity to give the gift of clean teeth. The latest toothbrush technology has evolved to the point where toothpaste may no longer be necessary. The Soladey Titanium Toothbrush runs on saliva, light, and a titanium core.

Here’s a description of how it works from Soladey.com:

Soladey looks like an ordinary toothbrush, but closer examination reveals a titanium (metal) ionic conducting rod, which runs through the replaceable bristle head and into the handle. This rod is the secret to Soladey. It’s made of a patented solar conducting material that allows light, by photoelectric activity, to be converted into a natural energy source which kills the harmful bacteria in your mouth.

The downside? You have to shove a light bulb in your mouth in order to activate the cleaning process. And make sure you have plenty of spit.

If you’re into marketing, compare the Australian Soladey site with the US version. In America, nothing encourages good hygiene like a bodacious babe weilding titanium toothbrushes.

Whenever hawk migration season comes around, my Dad says, “I want a pair of binoculars that tells you what bird you’re looking at.” Not a bad idea. I’ve heard even the most avid birders bemoan the difficulties of identifying “little brown jobs” (LBJs), a catch-all name for any of the thousands of small brown birds which are indistinguishable to the vast majority of us.

Star identification is undoubtedly astronomically more difficult than decoding the minute variations of LBJs. There are billions upon billions of stars, and unless you have access to the Giant Magellan Telescope, they’re going to look pretty darn similar to one another.

There is no longer a need to be intimidated by the million twinkling lights in the sky. The new Meade MySKY Sky Navigator is a silvery-gray gun-like apparatus with Nintendo-esque red buttons that you can point and shoot at the sky to learn about the cosmos.

It’s not a telescope; it’s a GPS system and database. You can hook it up to Meade’s computerized telescopes to have your telescope automatically align to where you point your star gun.

I would have loved this gift when I was a young’un. If you really loved your star-loving kid, you’d buy it — just don’t look at the price tag.

There have been a lot of rumors about Google releasing a mobile phone. Well folks – they’re not gonna do it, they’re just going to give away the software for you to create your own phone. I’m calling mine the _Phone.

Available as of yesterday, programmers can download Google’s SDK for Android. Android is Google’s open source mobile phone operating system. This is probably a very good strategic move for Google – remove obstacles for accessing its applications, making it very, very easy to work within Google’s burgeoning framework of applications from Google Docs to Google Maps….

Anyway – I’ll let Sergey tell you all about it.

Comcast can’t seem to do anything right. Between disrupting user traffic, sleeping on the job, and angering Congress, Comcast is getting one black eye after another. They should take some pointers from Woot, who recently recovered from an inventory glitch beautifully.

Excerpts from an email to customers:

A decision has been made without you on your recent Brown Zune order from the 22nd. I will be transparent about this-I can only hope it meets your approval.

Yesterday, as our warehouse wrapped up the Zune shipments, an unexpected shortage of brown Zunes was reported…
We made the emergency call to substitute BLACK Zunes to complete your shipment.

We have included a bonus: A Microsoft Zune Travel Pack has been shipped with your order…These are new retail boxed and carry a Microsoft MSRP of $99.99.

Not only is Woot making good on orders at their expense, they are also including a gift worth $100. Way to turn lemons into lemonade, Woot — I have a feeling you just gained some customers for life.

Part blog, part polling system, Oobject picks topics of interest and lets users submit their top picks, sort of like a pageant of gadgets. Sometimes the lists are full of beautiful things, old things, or just supremely weird things.

Each day a new topic is highlighted for users to peruse. I urge you to take a look, there is a good chance you’ll see something you never knew existed.

This weekend I spent some quality time in front of a scanner archiving important documents (yes, in Wonderfile). Our office scanner rarely gets any use these days. With PDFs, vector art, high quality stock art, and the growth of digital photography, using a scanner is becoming a dying art.

A few people however, have found new uses for these once proud members of a digital artists arsenal. After all, a scanner is essentially a giant digital camera with a ridiculously slow shutter.

Check out Mike Golembewski’s website for some really cool scanner based photography. The motion of the environment coupled with the scanners movement creates truly unique and incredible imagery, and at very high resolutions.