That said, onward with the awesomeness:

After re-confirming that I am, indeed, the mayor of all 3 MicorArts checkin locations (sans MicroArts SA of course), I started to explore this tool and realized I could use it to find out some awesome stuff that I can trot out to possibly get brands to pay more attention to foursquare and to start maximizing the value of the foursquare opportunity they’ve got in front of them (while helping to grow foursquare at the same time [which, in case you don't know me, is something I'm passionate about]).

Let’s start with Planet Fitness. Take a look at their foursquare analytics. Over 400 venus have been registered with more than a third of those venues having 50 or more checkins. That kind of active check in distribution is similar to Starbucks! Granted, there are over 16,000 starbucks venues registered and Starbucks is a foursquare sponsor, but still- there is a reason they are a sponsor- because people love checking in at Starbucks. And you know what, Planet Fitness? People love checking in their too- so why don’t you step up and recognize? I know you’re atleast aware of foursquare. But think of how great it could be to formally make foursquare part of the Planet Fitness experience! As the video in that link shows, being mayor of your Planet Fitness is awesome, and desirable. Us foursquare users who are also PF members know this. But Planet Fitness, you could harness this desire and bring it to the rest of the smartphone-toting Planet Fitness members (and potential members!) and create so much demand you’ll have to create new franchise rules to accomodate it! Ok, I can’t guarantee that kind of demand :P – but think of the possibilities!

The other brand I wanted to highlight is, Cumberland Farms. Take a look at their foursquare analytics. The check in distribution is similar to McDonalds’ foursquare analytics – about a quarter of the 314 Cumberland Farms venus have had 11+ check ins. WIth only a slightly higher distribution of checkins in their favor, McDonalds embraced the Foursquare Day movement (and heck, they even became an early adopter of Facebook’s yet-to-be-launched location based service). But where is Cumberland Farms with their location based services…ahem…foursquare strategy? While I have to hand it to them for their pretty fun and effective Facebook page, I’ve got to say: Cumberland Farms, look at the numbers! You have a great Foursquare opportunity in front of you and you need to take advantage of it! Here’s an idea- how about free chill zone for the mayor? (disclaimer: I’m toooootally the mayor of my Cumberland Farms- but that’s only a small reason why I want Cumberland Farms to jump into foursquare :) ). Atleast experiment with it guys–at the very least, I’d like to see some participation in next year’s Foursquare Day. The opportunity is yours to make happen!

So, what about you? What brands would you like to see take advantage of the foursquare opportunity? Let’s talk about it and perhaps we can make a game plan for how we can get them involved!

I want to preface this by saying that Mozy is a great organization, has a great team, stellar tech support and was there for me when I needed them. However, after almost 2 years of using Mozy I switched to Crashplan. Note that I stopped using Mozy at the end of 2009, so Mozy may have fixed or improved upon the issues I had – they may have also been completely unique to me. Now, personally I think the merits of Crashplan make Crashplan a choice over Mozy alone, but I want to share my experience as to why I switched to give context and transparency to why I recommend Crashplan. Also note – this is no way supposed to be a solid, comprehensive review of either product. I just want to relate my experience:

I started using Mozy in March 2008, for my Mac at home. This proceeded months of wanting Carbonite to come out for the Mac and finally something new showed up on the radar, Mozy. Finally! Easy online backup, I was sold. It rocked, it worked, it backed up automatically over night. BUT, it slowed down my Mac – an iMac 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB ram. Perhaps my iMac was just never fast enough for it, but it really hogged ram and CPU. I figured this was because it was a beta (at the time). I was a fan enough though that I had Mozy Pro installed on our Windows servers at work to have them backed up online (I don’t believe Carbonite had a ‘pro’ version available then). Though performance wasn’t an ideal, like at home, it was all scheduled to run at night – so realistically performance wasn’t a huge deal.

Mozy released updates over time that sped it up, but it seemed to never go fast enough or be a system hog. Then at work the servers stopped backing up reliably. We had to worry about them every day as a result- “Was the back up running?” It was not fun at all. We went through several tech support calls, remote desktop sessions and trouble tickets to keep it working. It would work for a few weeks, then break. Meanwhile at home Mozy was starting to really crawl and slow things down. Then the home backup often just didn’t happen for whatever reason. Tech support was helpful and gave me things to try and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I was fully invested in Mozy at this point [I had backed up lots and lots of data with them!], so I worked hard to make it happen every day, reinstalled several times and eventually just gave up on trying to make it work. I made myself a note to find an alternative because at home and at work we just couldn’t hang with it any longer. We limped along with Mozy for a few weeks until finally the todo list item of finding an alternative got priority.

In finding an alternative I looked at several options including Carbonite (finally available for Mac) and Crashplan. I wanted Carbonite to be the one (as it’s what I originally wanted) but unbelievably, Carbonite does not support backing up data from external drives! I looked at Backblaze and one other and their performance wasn’t much better than Mozy’s (and I was beginning to think that it was just my Mac). BUT then I took a look at Crashplan and it blew me away. Like the competition it had tons of features, some that the others don’t even dream of (like local backup and network backup to a local drive). But UNLIKE the competition it was clear that the programmers behind this product had built it in an incredibly efficient manner. Crashplan ran like a dream. It was incredibly smooth, didn’t slow down my computer, even when backups were running. It enabled me to backup in the middle of the day without issue – and when we installed Crashplan Pro at work we were pleasantly surprised to discover that the excellent experience I had at home translated.

So – why Crashplan? It doesn’t hog system resources, the online (web) and offline (app) interfaces are smart and easy to use, the feature set of Crashplan is rich and powerful, it backs up external drives and most importantly it works, and it works well. Oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s one of the cheapest solutions out there? I’ve been using it for several months now without issue on both Mac and PC. For me Crashplan is the clear winner and I can’t recommend it enough – and after a little Googling it appears I’m not alone here.

Both Mozy and Crashplan (as well as the others) offer free trials, I encourage you to try them all. If you are already using online backup or are looking for a solution I’d love to hear what you use, what you’ve tried and why you like it, please share!

I first heard of Foursquare from my usual news-source: Twitter. I think it started showing up in my stream over the summer last year. I downloaded it, played with it, but wasn’t in one of the covered cities so I didn’t think I’d be able to use it meaningfully. It seemed interesting, maybe something to check out later.

It wasn’t until I was at IMS09 and I was figuring out lunch plans/who was doing what when Rachel Levy (THE Boston Marketer) said “looks like a bunch of people are all checked in at Five Guys on Foursquare” that I realized Foursquare was going to stick and take off. That evening at the #IMS09 Tweetup at the Twenty8Restaurant I loaded up my Foursquare app on my iPhone and Rachel showed me how to make using it fun and awesome.

Then I was psyched for it, I totally got it and I wanted it to show up in MY town and wanted all my friends to start using it- last month that happened. That was almost 3 months later and I had almost given up on Foursquare and even with the announcement I didn’t pick it up right away again. But then someone new joined us at MicroArts – Monica Wright (SEM ninja and all around badass) and she showed up in full Foursquare mode and immediately my Foursquare habit started in earnest. Now I’m hooked and I’d like to get you hooked too. Because the more people who use it, the more fun it is!

What’s the fun of Foursquare? Some highlights: First, it turns life into a game (complete with awards and points to keep score). Second, it lets you connect with your Internet and real life friends in new and interesting ways (”Oh I didn’t know you went to xyz too!”) and gives you plenty to talk about (”I’m taking over as Mayor of XYZ, whatcha gonna do about that?”). Third it helps you coordinate and find your friends if ever the need should arrive (see my earlier example). But there’s another point here that is a real game changer: because you can post a note when you check into a new location on Foursquare you can now give a new location-context to your Tweets and Facebook status updates.

For example: Are you at the Red Sox game? Check in on Foursquare and share your thoughts about the game – it’ll tag your Tweet with your location so you don’t have to explain that you’re at the game – it’ll just be evident that you’re there. Just got a hookup from the drive through at Dunkin Donuts? Check in there and share the love. This means going from tweets like this:

“I’m at the Red Sox Game – terrible call! Anyone seen anything like that before?”

To

“Terrible call! Anyone seen anything like that before? (@ Fenway Park) http://4sq.com/123456″

And taking tweets like this

“Fun! I’m at DD in Portsmouth and just got an extra donut hookup. The Portsmouth DD staff rocks!”

To

“Fun! I just got an extra donut hookup! These guys rock! (@ Dunkin Donuts) http://4sq.com/abcdef”

Now, that may not seem like a huge change, but #1 you don’t have to explain where you are and #2 your Tweets contain a hyperlink to a page for the location you’re tweeting from that lets people know exactly where your experience just took place and who else is there too. It makes everything much more conversational and natural – when you’re at Barnes & Noble talking to a friend you don’t have to remind them that you’re at Barnes & Noble when you’re talking to them to help them understand the context of your conversation. Foursquare enables Twitter and Facebook status updates to be just that much more conversational and natural. This makes the entire experience richer and conversations more meaningful. It makes the whole “social network thing” more fun.

To underscore the importance of this concept I’d like to point out that Google made sure to build this feature into it’s Google Buzz service out of the box for mobile users. Anytime you post from your mobile on Google Buzz it asks you to tag your post with the place of business you’re currently located at based on your current location. Google got it right by adding location tagging to Google Buzz – it’s one of the reasons why I’m addicted to Foursquare and it’s going to help propel Buzz’s adoption rates sky high (which is already happening!). As a result I expect Twitter (or Facebook[!]) to ramp up whatever plans they may have had to make a move on Foursquare, or on adding in that functionality to their systems, ASAP.

So, does any of this interest you? I hope so. Foursquare is more fun when more people you know are on it, so get the app and give it a try today! If you’re not ready to jump on the Foursquare love train then why not? Either way I’d love to hear your thoughts…

I really like the video’s closing – paying tribute to the Airbus A320 and how it stood up to the test and performed when it needed to. Something else to celebrate- another hero of the Hudson.

Posted on Kontain.com [Time-lapse Footage of Flight 1549] from David Martin on Vimeo.

I will probably be writing more about Aliens in the future – the movie gets better and better upon each viewing – but the reason I wanted to post today is because I received a link to this by email:

An honest to goodness SERIOUSLY DETAILED replica of the Pulse Rifle from Aliens. Only $899.95 or 6 easy payments of $150. Christmas present for me? eh? EH? You listening interwebs?

So without further ado- my contribution to Star Wars Uncut – which you should seriously investigate if you haven’t heard of yet!

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 467 from Walter Elly on Vimeo.

So did you spot the easter egg in the end? There’s 22 scenes left that still need to be filled, will you do one too? Maybe I should do another…

What follows is my writeup about what went on last night at the SpookUp Tweetup the latest in a series of New Hampshire Tweetups from @NHTweetup. My friend Christine Major is the driving force behind these Tweetups and I’ve had the opportunity to help in the organizing and helping to host the last few events and it’s been a blast!

So without further ado, the writeup:

I arrived early for setup at the Red Hook brewery, who graciously provided an awesome venue for the Tweetup, to find @CMajor and @schneidermike on the scene and quickly got to work decorating and putting up skeletons and Twitter graveyards (be sure to check out all the gravestones at the bottom of this post!) and signs and other Tweetup necessities and SpookUp awesomeness.

Time flew by and before I knew it I was at a nearby Wal-Mart buying lighting to ensure we could turn the room lights off for ambiance but still see the beer in front of our collective faces (pardon the phrase). When I arrived back it was getting close to showtime and things were looking AWESOME – @DeKoning had arrived and was setting up a projector to show Visible Tweets from the Tweetup Hashtag (#spookup) and TweetUp co-host @McSalina and her colleague Brian were there to get the welcome table ready for prime time. Brian helped me setup the lights and we were good to go. It was showtime!

I started off the night by joining @schneidermike as he hosted a live broadcast of his @BelchingMonkey show – and got to try some fresh, delicious Red Hook brews and discuss the finer points of hoppery and brewery-y. It was awesome and you can check out the insanity for yourself as he recorded the whole thing, including appearances by @costavidafred @girlgamy @cmajor @kelsandiego and @kellycash. Needless to say I’ve become an even bigger fan of his show!

Shortly after I went in on some yummy food thanks to @MicroArts (where I work), @Vital_Design (who rocks) and @Ballards (your party supply headquarters!). I grabbed some food and met up with @tarakaiken (dressed as the Twitter bird who I #FAIL’d and thought was the cookie monster) and Scott and Kira (dressed as a plug and socket(!)) and a few other Tweeps. Then, while the party was just getting going I promptly spilled my food all over the floor. Fortunately the tweeple were their to guide me “using the napkin would be a good choice [to clean it up]”

And, thankfully before my #foodfail became national news, it was announced that it was time for the Portsmouth Thriller Dancers to perform!

Thanks to @RichdPhoto and @portsmouthtweet for the videos!! @BelchingMonkey also broadcast the Thriller Dancers event live! They were so awesome that the crowd demanded an encore, so the thriller dancers took the stage again and invited everyone to come join them– @CMajor and I were brave enough to dance with the spooky zombies and did our best to keep up with their awesome moves- it was SUCH a great time, what a “thrill” to get to dance with the thriller dancers!

Then it was back to the tweetup and the focus quickly turned to costumes as there was a contest to win! My favorite costume was @Sarah_Wallace’s Plinko game costume – (which I won “500″ from [how do I collect my winnings Sarah?! :)]) and we encouraged everyone to twitpic THEIR favorite costumes to help encourage the judges so I totally did so by taking a twitpic of her costume – how cool! Other costumed that rocked included the Tara’s Twitter bird, the Vital Design construction crew and @StakitaMay as Michael Jackson – but there were so many more awesome ones, the TwitPics from Twitter tell the story: Captain Jack Major and Salina Vampire, Zombies!, Duffman, and more!

So who won? A zombie did! They had AN AWESOME zombie costume and it totally deserved to win for best costume. It also happens to have been a really, really, REALLY good thing that a zombie won, because there were alot of zombies there AND IF WE DIDN’T GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANTED WE WERE ALL GOING TO DIE! …. ok just kidding, we weren’t under threat of death.. we were under threat of UNDEATH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In addition to best costume we also had a raffle with some AWESOME prizes thanks to sponsors @PattiFousek @PortsmouthTea @portcitycoffee @swalesphoto and @redhooknh – @CMajor has the scoop on that and more so be sure to read her writeup too!

After the awards were given out I discussed JUST how awesome the Portsmouth Thriller Dancers were with @mesimos, @SullivanBC and @portthriller mastermind @TeraByte240, checked out the SpookUp Graveyard with @DaveCriswell, @CostaVidaFred and @PortsmouthReg and had more awesome Red Hook beer and hung out with even more awesome tweeple.

Towards the end of the evening @PeterGetman from @MicroArts dropped by [after a long day/evening in Boston] and promptly bought a round of beer for everyone who wasn’t ready to call it a night yet and we rocked the SpookUp until the awesome @AmandaTelfordnNH was ready to take the keys to the @RedHookNH foyer back (and leave us to our own devices).

All in all an amazing, awesome, FANTASTIC TweetUp and one of the coolest Halloween events I’ve partaken in. I’m psyched that it was such a success and so glad everyone came out! Please share your comments, pics and vids and link me up to YOUR writeup too! Be sure to check out the spoooky SpookUp Graveyard below! See you at the next Tweetup!

So if you’ve already found this then awesome, please say HAI in the comments- but know that more is to come :)