This iMaxi product with wings is probably slated as a gag that will humiliate that insane Apple fanboy/fangirl in your life who incessantly talks about Apple, Apple, APPLE. It’s fairly cheap to give away as a crazy gift, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with one. If you’re really, really keen on getting one, go on to their store here.

And just in case you haven’t seen one of my favourite spoof ads that came out hours after the launch of the iPad, here it is.

Here’s what I found really handy. (Of course I didn’t install ALL of them! Some are based on findings and recommendations by friends). They’re my unbiased reviews of apps I’ve found. Do feel free to share with others if you have favorite apps of your own.

Clock

Need to find out the time in various parts of the world? Use the in-built World Clock app that comes with all iPhones. Select the cities and countries you’d like to keep tab of and you’re all set. Simple and effective!

Google Maps

It comes installed by default with iPhones and it is simple the best application for locating where you are, restaurants and hotels nearby and so much more. It’s saved me on quite a few occasions. It’s already installed, so use it. The only downside is that you will need to be connected to the Internet to get access to it.

Airline apps – Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines

If you’re traveling a lot in the US, these airline specific apps will help you out to no end. For Southwest (my airline of choice! No, they don’t pay me a cent!), you can even make reservations, check-in for flights or get push notifications for special deals. On Alaska Airlines, you can check existing reservations, check-in and view flight schedules.

Booking-related apps – Priceline, Kayak, Travelocity

Find hotels, car rentals and airfares quickly and based on price. These sites compare various vendors and provide you the best possible options. You can even book via these apps.

Unit Conversion – MultiConvert, Currency

Coming from a country that uses the metric system, the US is a nightmare. From kilometers to miles, liters to gallons and shoe sizes that are non-standard! Convert more than 1,000 different measurement units with this nifty app.

And what about converting the cost of an item to your native currency? Is your mushroom soup really worth it? Or should you be buying the seemingly cheap Coach bag from the factory outlet? Find out quickly with Currency – the simplest and FREE app you can find.

Location based recommendations – AroundMe, Local Picks by TripAdvisor

Looking for something to do in your vicinity? Or, looking for great restaurants but don’t know where to start? Local Picks is a service that pulls up restaurants based on the extensive TripAdvisor database and displays it in a manner you choose. Sort by rating, name, distance or price. AroundMe helps find points of interest based on categories, such as banks, gas stations, hospitals, hotels and lots more.

Communication – Fring, Skype

Keep in touch with your office or loved ones with both these apps. Fring will allow you to connect to your existing instant messaging networks for text based chats. If you need to make free Skype-to-Skype calls, or cheap VOIP calls, use Skype and call from the nearest wifi hotspot.

Update your friends – Facebook, WordPress, TweetDeck

Who can live without Facebook these days? We all have an inherent desire to broadcast what we’re doing and brag about the sights and sounds to all those back home, right? Grab this app, and you can update your status and upload photos instantly on-the-go.

If you blog using WordPress, there’s also an app that connects you with your loyal readers. You can upload photos, approve comments and more. Finally, you can leave your notebook behind!

You do know what Twitter is, and you already use TweetDeck on your desktop/notebook, right? Continue using the same familiar software on your iPhone to broadcast your messages and keep in touch.

Travel Organization – TripIt, TripAssist by Expedia

If you’re traveling for a fairly long duration in different cities and hotels, whether for business, pleasure or your honeymoon, you’re better off installing one of these apps. They are gorgeous because they keep tabs on flights you have to catch, hotels you are staying at and more. They also help when you’re doing your pre-travel planning.

Weather – The Weather Channel

Nobody wants to get caught with the wrong clothes while traveling, or plan to go to the beach only to find it pouring! Avoid freezing to death and getting drenched by simply checking on the weather report before you arrive. Thus far, it’s been pretty spot on for us while on our travels. It’s not foolproof, but it does offer some guidelines to follow.

On the street I saw a small girl cold and shivering in a thin dress, with little hope of a decent meal. I became angry and said to God; “Why did you permit this? Why don’t you do something about it?” For a while God said nothing. That night he replied, quite suddenly:

“I certainly did something about it. I made you.”

For many months, I have been silently following a website that is interestingly called InvisiblePeople.tv. It is an interesting play on how humans shun away from looking at something they wish to eradicate from their minds. All too often, we walk quickly past the people begging on the streets, stealing a glance or two from the side of our eyes.

We’re afraid – that’s the truth. Afraid of being asked for donations, afraid to be caught staring, and worst of all, afraid to care.

This project heavily invests in social media and uses it to make the invisible people, visible. Mark Horvath, the man behind this project was once known as the Lizard Man of Hollywood Boulevard, when he himself was once homeless. Mark had strong media beginnings as a Hollywood distribution executive, but lost it all to drugs and alcohol. In a nutshell, thanks to the LA Dream Center, he was set right again and freed from the bondages he once had.

Today, he goes out to the streets armed with a small camcorder, mic, laptop and iPhone. Mark posts raw unedited footage (sometimes deemed too raw) of the people he interacts with as they share their homeless stories with him.

So, how exactly does Mark use social media? Sites that are frequently updated include: his blog, Twitter, Facebook, Whrrl, MySpace, YouTube, uStream, Vimeo and Flickr. They serve as his own broadcasting channels to reach out to the public and update them on-the-go. Through the true-to-life updates, he has caught the attention of many and this has served to further propagate the message and his mission.

Is there any magic to it? From what I see, there isn’t: it’s about being true to your project and being as transparent as possible. Picking the right social platforms is probably very important too, as you would want to target the relevant audience through it. Frequent updates help too, and we can see videos are uploaded very often on the InvisiblePeople.tv site.

With so many platforms to manage, I was very curious as to how Mark manages them and sent him a couple of tweets. Here’s his down-to-earth reply.

Stats to date: CNN reports more than 1,000 videos are watched per week on the Vimeo channels and the project has more than 10,000 followers on both his Twitter accounts (@hardlynormal and @invisiblepeople). Mark has been featured on Huffington Post, CNN and loads more media as a result of him being extremely social with a fantastic mission.

He’s raised sponsorship and donations from many companies amongst which are Ford, Hanes (they give out socks to the homeless) and Virgin Mobile. Truly, it’s a powerful testimony of how one man has shared the stories of hundreds of homeless people with the world and brought smiles to those who are in need.

More importantly, via social media, an entire movement has been formed, out of people who are more aware that these problems exist. To all those who are interested in making a difference, Mark in a very practical way asks them to start helping in their own neighbourhood. There’s little point in helping out halfway across the country when the problems are prevalent in your own backyard.

May the invisible become visible, via the power of social media.

Today, it is hailed as one of the first apps an iPhone user MUST install, as it allows you to message your friends for free. As their tagline goes, “SMS is so 2008″.

However, WhatsApp was limited to just the iPhone and that was rather, errr… limiting? But not anymore. It has now arrived in the BlackBerry App World and it will surely capture a significant portion of BlackBerry users, and quickly. I’m predicting my list of numbers in WhatsApp will rapidly double.

The app costs USD$2.99 and you can get it from here.

Preliminary comments that have been posted for the BlackBerry version are not very favorable, but hang in there, every alpha or beta release will have a few niggling bugs. Most comments state that it has a horrible UI, but I’m sure you can rest assured they will be fixing it soon. The first version for the iPhone was rather basic too, but today, you can even send photos and videos to your friends via WhatsApp.

And finally, no, I am not a shareholder of this software, but a totally unbiased reviewer of WhatsApp!

Find out what’s trending in a locality near you… but only if you are from one of these countries or cities. Twitter currently supports:

• Brazil
• Canada
• Ireland
• Mexico
• United Kingdom
• United States (filter down to: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, São Paulo, Washington D.C.

Here’s a comparison of what is trending worldwide vs what’s trending in different countries.

And if we look at different cities in the United States, some have similarities.

Note: The Apple Tablet / Slate launches in a few hours and no one in the UK is talking about it? :p

This could well be a move to allow for hot citizen journalism that is geographically specific. Just imagine homing in on a location where a sensation is occurring and keeping abreast of happenings there live.Will they eventually allow me to stalk the tweets from my neighbors?

To be honest, I’m more intrigued by the augmented reality applications out there for the iPhone. Have you seen Twitter 360? It’s SOOOO HOT! Here’s 2 screenshots of what it looks like.

I guess you could term it rather like channel surfing, or rather Twitter trend surfing.

I’m bored… let’s change the channel. Bzzzzt…

On January 16th 2010, the Malaysian Information Communication and Culture minister, Dr Rais Yatim stated the following, which was deemed as rather preposterous. This had the whole Internet up in arms against him, especially on the Twittersphere. Here’s an excerpt on what he said taken from The Star Online:

SEREMBAN: Malaysians, especially Muslims, must avoid being totally immersed in the internet culture, especially Facebook and Twitter, said Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.

He added that facilities like internet could not be accepted wholly because it was a form of business introduced by the West and “Malaysians were just users.”

“We are not saying that they cannot use Facebook or Twitter but when using such facilities they must upkeep the values taught by Islam, Buddhism or Christianity to maintain our culture,” he told reporters after opening a Seminar on the 1Malaysia concept here on Saturday.

He added that Malaysians who used internet services on social networking sites should be careful with what they see and hear.

“We must be strong in our believes and culture because the identity and image of our country depends on us.

“They are just selling Facebook, Twitter, L-Band and various other services, even through space, as a product but we do not do such business. We accept all this in a state of cultural shock,” he said.

3 days after Malaysians started ranting to one another in every form, they took it onto Twitter in a big way, with the first playful tweets by @bongkerz and a hashtag he coined: #yorais. This kicked of a flurry of tweets that resulted in #yorais becoming a trending topic on Twitter (this is rather significant, as it shows that it’s one of the MOST talked about topics on the whole of Twitter, and that’s quite a big achievement, really!).

With some leftover time on my hands, I decided to choose some of these tweets I particularly liked and highlight them in this video below.

This video was crafted with the aid of “a lot of Keynote”, some Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Quicktime Pro, Macbook Pro, mp3 music and time. Surprise, surprise, you can use Keynote to do a LOT of text animation and movement in a fairly short time frame. It’s built for creating slides easily and moving text, and the best part is, you can export it into .mov format which is perfect for Final Cut Pro to pick up and build on.

Do let me know if you enjoyed it.

As such, I decided to try and help expose the group to the current trends and what tools can be used for God’s glory.

Free eBook: Facebook for Pastors by Chris Forbes
Great book / DVD on presentation methodology: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

Images and videos for free, or at a low cost for church presentations / illustrations
Please bear in mind, I support respecting the copyright of the image owners and NEVER use something if the image owner does not approve.

sxc.hu (free images)
everystockphoto.com (free images)
istockphoto.com (microstock images at a low cost)
images.google.com (free images)

bluefishtv.com (videos from USD$1.99)
ignitermedia.com (videos)
36parables.com (videos)
openresources.org (free videos)
youtube.com (free videos)

Tools and toys that I shared about were:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Streaming video: live and pre-recorded
• Online payment gateways
• Blogging
• Email newsletters
• Online forms to email
• Slideology resources

Tips for pastors starting out on Facebook

• Culture shock, do not judge!
  - You may encounter information about certain members that you never knew before. Be calm, and reserve passing judgment on them. The main purpose of connecting on Facebook is to achieve true friendship.
• Treat each friend as a real person
  - Though it may seem like a virtual relationship, each person behind every account is a real-life being who needs as much prayer as a person who walks into your church. Pray for them as you would every member in your congregation.
• Don’t get sidetracked
  - Facebook can be pretty addictive, really! Be careful not to spend copious amounts of time looking through photos and watching videos, if you should be focused on other tasks. Facebook can be a great communications tool, and it can also be a HUGE distraction.
• Ask for help
  - If you get lost, don’t hesitate to ask your children or fellow congregation members for assistance. Nothing works best than human guidance.

Videos I used during my presentation

Statistics on the Internet (as at 2008)

What Twitter is all about

Random photos from my session with the pastors

Here are some of the pastors from FGA, KL, SIB KEC, Miri and beyond.

The slightly more tech savvy pastors. Grinning at the camera is Pastor Thomas from Penang.

Thanks for these two photos, @sivinkit.

Here’s a sample of bad, BAD slideology. They’re slides I designed back in the year 2000 when presenting ideas to prospects. Urgh… proof that you CAN learn design! (or marry someone who is better than yourself for a quick shortcut like I did!)

Before I share some of my slides, here are the resources I mentioned during my talk that are relevant for you.

Before I show all the photos I dug up, here’s mine (@TheBackpackr). My caption was, “1/1/2010: Grace and I started off the new year at our church, DUMC together with some 3,000 others. We gave thanks for the year gone by, our friends and family.”. The rest of my photos will be up on Facebook here.

And from Grace Tan my wife, also known these days as @ShootDiva. Her photos will be on Facebook here.

So, let’s cut to the chase… here’s what I found.

Thanks for participating: @BridalGlam, @annarina, @avrilchan, @qwertyjuan, @dannyfoo, @joycescapade, @yongschew, @andychin, @sochews, @sivinkit.

I do recommend using a dedicated site like a Facebook or Flickr album, Posterous, but not a blog as it becomes tedious to update and it will take precedence over your existing content. Also, Twitpic and Tweetphoto won’t really categorise your images, but sure, go ahead and use it if you really want.

I’ve listed #Project365 sites of people who have told me about their projects. Find them here.

Well, well, ladies and gentlemen… we are at the advent of yet another year. ’tis the time to make new resolutions and decide how we’re going to change for the better.

As I was perusing the Twittersphere (as I seemingly always do), I spotted a tweet by @GodsMac that talked about the idea of showcasing a photo a day of the life around you. He calls it Project 365. I thought, that’s pretty easy to do… and these days, with all the technology freely available, we can SURELY achieve that easily, right? (and yes, I may be dead wrong!).

Anyhow, I think I’ll give it a shot and use whatever means I have to share a photo a day with the world. I’m not going to go down the path of using a DSLR, but rather whatever implements I have (which probably spells out i-P-h-o-n-e). After all, setting the bar overly high will make it counterproductive, in my experience thus far.

I think I’ll stick with using Facebook to publish my photos, and once a month, I’ll create a montage of photos and post them here. This beats writing a diary (or even blogging, for that matter!).

Will you join me on this endeavour? So far, I’ve had some response from the Twittersphere on who will embark on this too.

Share your pictures with me (send me your URL whether Facebook / Flickr / etc), and I’ll be happy to highlight them here on a monthly basis too.

Here’s a few links to the homes of several Project 365ers. Leave a comment here if you’d like me to add your link here.

@andychin – andychin365.posterous.com

@annarina – Flickr

@astherlau – Facebook

@ben_israel – Facebook

@chaiyenw – chaiyen.blogspot.com

@chiayi91 – chiayi365.blogspot.com

Debbie Ng – Facebook

@edwintcg – Facebook

@ericcheong – Facebook

kankai – Flickr

@joycescapade – joycescapade.posterous.com

@leviasher – Facebook

@lucidconspiracy – lucid365.blogspot.com

@meiyingt – veraikon.wordpress.com

Mollytail – molytail365.blogspot.com

@petrinalee – petrina.posterous.com

@ProPhotoSafari – prophotosafari.com

@qwertyjuan – juan365.posterous.com

@rickrduncan – digitalredeye.com

@ShootDiva – Facebook

@sivinkit – Facebook

@the_boggler – Facebook

@TheBackpackr – Facebook

@yongschew – parenthood-adventure.blogspot.com

Here’s the typical “You’re not American” error that you may encounter. It actually says, “Your account is only valid for purchases in the Malaysian (or wherever you’re from) iTunes Store. Clicking OK will take you to this store.” But I am not PURCHASING anything! The app is FREEEEE! Gaah…

The requirements to start a US based iTunes account are a US based snail mail address and a US based payment mode (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover or a US based PayPal account). If you don’t have one of the above, you can’t start up an account, unless you follow the steps given below.

Before we begin, all you need is to “borrow” a US based snail mail address (don’t ask me where to borrow it from!) and have an alternative email account. Then, you’re set to proceed. After all, in this day and age, who doesn’t have access to yet-another-email-account! Here’s the cheat sheet with detailed instructions to follow.

#1: Start up iTunes. Sign out of your existing account, if you’re currently logged in.

#2: Scroll to the bottom of the iTunes Store.

#3: Set My Store to United States.

#4: Go to the search bar at the top right hand corner of iTunes. Key the name of a free application – Skype, TweetDeck or Photoshop will work.

#5: Click on the Get App button that should appear next to the free application you just searched for.

#6: A dialog box will pop up asking you to sign in or create a new account. Click on Create a New Account.

#7: Click on Continue at the next introduction screen.

#8: In the Terms & Conditions, make sure it states, “If the billing address of your payment information is not in the United States, click here“. If it does not say that, go back to Step #3. Accept the terms and proceed.

#9: On the next screen, enter the alternative email address of yours (make sure you have not signed up for an iTunes account with this address before), a secure password, security question & answer and date of birth.

#10: The next section presents you with payment options. Click on None.
(I know I’m going to get questions on why there is no option for None, so I’d better answer it here. You MUST go through steps #4 and #5 before you get this option).

#11: You’re almost done! An email has been dispatched to the email address you provided earlier, and you need to verify you have access to that account.

#12: Check your email and click on the link that is sent to you.

#13: When you click on it, your browser will redirect you to return to iTunes again.

#14: You will be asked to sign into your iTunes account. Use the new credentials you just created to login.

#15: And you’re done! Give yourself a pat on the back as you go to the comments section to tell me about your success.