No, don’t smash your phone on the ground out of frustration. While in some cases there is nothing that can be done about poor reception, dropped calls, fuzzy connections, and data interruptions — short of changing carriers that is — other times there may be some ways to improve your reception and reduce dropped calls. So CellPhones.org has put together an infographic chart, aptly named “Why Your Cell Phone Reception Sucks,” to help you identify the problem in order to be able to fix it.

Cellphones.org

Infographic of what happens when content hits the front page of DIGG or gets shot out through Twitter and is swept through the currents, eddies, tidal flows and whirlpools of social media space.

The makers of the schematic Infographic World describe this project thus:

Cool Visual Marketing Graphics for Social Media

To influence the buzz in social media you have to have a good campaign. Infographic World experts help you develop a cool visual marketing graphics to enhance social media presence.

The one-time high-tech gadgets of James Bond films no longer seem impressive compared to those gizmos we now use in our everyday lives: the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, compact flash drives not to mention the digital communication solutions like email, Twitter and Facebook. While we anonymous citizens take these modern miracles for granted, criminals embrace technology with a zeal that’s in stark relief to the capabilities of the secret agents of Her Magesty’s Secret Service. So, MI5, the British intelligence agency, is laying off older staff who are flummoxed by today’s high tech wizardry.

No Mr Bond, we expect you to use wi-fi: MI5 pensions off spies who can’t use I.T.

Why have President Obama and tainted superstar golfer indorser Tiger Woods been spliced together?

This photoshopped photo of Tiger Woods in the Oval Office with President Obama is meant to conjure the fallen stature of both public figures. Obama is labeled as the 2009 Peace Prize Winner and the caption for Woods reads 2009 Piece Prize Winner. Congrats to the photoshop artist for the comic timing of the layout — having the vision to put Tiger on the right for the punch line. Having the good common sense to know that people in the U.S. of A. read (those who read) left to right. Not to dampen the creativity here, but the image seems to be associating the ethical quandaries of the quagmire in Afghanistan with the morality dialogue manifested by the Tiger Woods transgressions. Certainly two notions that are not close at all on the ethical spectrum.

More Tiger Woods Affairs:
Transgression, Transgression Top Google Trends from Tiger Woods Affair Apology

19.20.21: 19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st Century.

The mission of 19.20.21 is a multi-year, multimedia inititiative to collect, organize and better understand population’s effect regarding urban and business planning and its impact on consumers around the world. This 5+ year initiative will deliver results via 5 channels: web (including mobile), television (broadcast and cable), print (magazines, books and atlases), exhibits and seminars (virtual and onsite). This project will include 10 worldwide partners.

19.20.21

Four letter dot com site by Entourage Star Adrien Grenier goes live: SHFT.com

The Domains is tracking the recent history of LLLL.com domains being deployed by major players like Microsoft with Bing, AOL with JSYK and the hilarity that ensued around NBC Universal’s purchase of SyFy.com for a quarter million dollars (seems the original owner of SyFy felt ripped off). Today  its Adrien Grenier, star of the HBO series Entourage (he plays Vince) who is also a bit of an eco-celeb which is what SHFT.com is all about.

TheDomains

Out With the Old: The Problems with the Big City Pictures Favicon Design

The old Big City Pictures favicon was pretty much slapped together and in desperate need of a refresh. It was basically the bcp logo sliced down to a square, cropping the design at the edges, with the word mark removed from the cross streets. The fat, tall cross street just looked blank and empty and the business of the logo detailing didn’t translate well at all when scaled down to micro-mini favicon proportions.

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In With the New: Refreshing the bigcitypix favicon image

Graphic designer Johanna Abzug who also recently did the holiday styling for big city’s logo took on the task of cleaning up and revamping the bcp favicon. She and George Spyros used the old e-mail digital workflow to get the job done. George doodled off a back-of-the-envelope sketch to get the ball rolling.

December 15, 2009 3:02:40 PM EST
George Spyros: BCP ICON / FAVICON

Maybe the 2nd one that looks like window panes or the 3rd that has the depth. Main idea is to make symmetrical and square.
Once we have it, we’ll have the 2D art and then treat that like an iPhone App icon with gloss.

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Creative Work

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Mashable is reporting that the future off iTunes may be on the web. Apple recently acquired web-based music service Lala which allows users to stream their song media from a single location in the cloud. We agree that this would be great to be able to access one’s tunes from a mobile device, web browser, et al, however just because Lala charges as little as 10 cents per tune does not mean Apple intends to follow suit. The gravy could simply be in leveraging Lala’s preexisting architecture and brand rather than using the property to reinvent the price model that iTunes, to the dismay of the recording industry, has already unhinged once before.

What’s the difference between these two pictures?

An invitation to a fundraiser for the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) cordially invites folks to a pre-holiday swap meet. The invite graphic on the website features “photocopied” text from a dictionary with a definition “swap meet n. An informal gathering for the barter or sale of used articles or handicrafts.” Underneath are kitschy images of items that might be brought and traded at such an event: shoes, antique chair, coo coo clock, woven picnic basket, a pistol — hold it, a gun? And next to that is a dart board, but with the barrel of the revolver pointed toward it, the iconography can unconsciously suggest taking aim at a target.

We wouldn’t have noticed this splice except that the invite from the email we received has removed the gun and target in favor of a glass, crystal decanter or perfume bottle of some sort as well as an abacus and pepper grinder.

We guess the thinking was that no one wants to receive a gun in their email, er, blast. We can just hear the creative notes and discussion around this:

A: we don’t want people showing up with a gun!
B: it’s not to be taken literally, it’s kitschy…
A: better safe than sorry, we’re a government-funded arts organization.

Ah, the creative process.

Yeah, with the ability of the lipstick-wearer to forward the sullied collar to the aggrieved wife or girlfriend. The simple answer to the question of why anyone sneaking around would put themselves at risk by sending sexually explicit texts to their lover is easy to answer: tech ignorance.

Although most e-mail users have come to understand that messages remain on their computers even if deleted, text messages are often regarded as more ephemeral — type, hit “send” and off it goes into the ether. But messages can remain on the sender’s and receiver’s phones, and even if they are deleted, communications companies store them for anywhere from days to a few weeks. AT&T said that, at most, it saved text messages for 72 hours while Verizon said it saved them for 5 to 10 days.

Duh! So these folks are either of a generation that is older (Senator John Ensign, Tiger Woods) and therefore is befuddled by new-fangled technology, or of a younger tech-savvy generation who however may not as yet possess the maturity or presence of mind to consider the potential consequences of their sexting actions.

More interesting in the article is research about people’s relationships to their cellphones. MIT professor Sherry Turkle says that unlike with computers, consumers have a deeply personal connection to their cellphones, where they keep contact lists and family photos.

They carry them in their pockets, next to their skin…People feel it is an extension of their body and mind. Like Peter Pan, we do not see our electronic shadow until it is pointed out to us. We assume it is not there.

Text Messages: Digital Lipstick on the Collar