Play, Live, Work, Enjoy.

They say there's an app for everything on the iPhone… unfortunately there is no app for spam filtering. Yes, I've figured out the whole "send your mail to Gmail and get it from there" thing… and after some tuning I think it might be a decent solution.

Regardless it has me thinking about how digital technology affects our daily lives, how we're transformed by it, and how some of our analog habits may be transposed by it. Case in point worry beads (Komboloi)… worry stones, your car keys, or whatever you tend to fidget with while you're thinking, contemplating, or just idle (not that there's every time to be idle in this day and age). I've found myself comparing the deleting of spam to this type of ritual fidgeting. The act of checking email itself is addicting enough, but the ability to do something useful (though futile) like deleting spam with a repetetive swipe of the finger makes it cross that digital-analog devide.

I'm working on compiling a series of these "Digital Transformation" comparisons for a personal project. If you have any that you've thought of, drop me a line.

Local tech firms try to branch out

Broader services combat downturn

Amid the recession, some local tech companies are still finding ways to grow.

360 Professional Services Group, a Web development and design company based in Amherst, recently hired its 14th employee. The company was started in 2005 by three young men whose own employer was shutting down.

While many businesses might be anxious about their prospects this year, 360 PSG is looking forward to steady growth. The company is sticking to its strategy of catering to small-to medium-size companies and nonprofits that want to create effective Web sites, and then help those customers update and expand their sites’ services over time, said Joel Colombo, president and chief executive officer.

[ Hit the jump to read the rest of the article… yes… the part about us is just another paragraph or two down…. ]
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