Dana Herlihey

Toronto was hit with a mild earth quake this afternoon. The Stitch Toronto office felt it at approximately 1:45, first with a slight tremor in the office, followed by walls and machinery shaking. Thinking the shaking was due to construction happening next door, Anna and I went to go check it out. Turns out, they had felt it too, leading us to conclude that we had just been in an earthquake.

I took to twitter and discovered other people around Toronto reporting shaking walls and buildings. #EarthquakeTO and #earthquake quickly started trending amongst my fellow tweeters, and a 15 second earthquake turned into a 15 minute twit-fest. As it turns out, there was a 5.5 earthquake along the Ontario – Quebec border that was felt all the way from Montreal to Waterloo. This city rarely ever feels earthquakes, so the novelty and cheeky humor of my fellow Torontonians made for some pretty hilarious reactions – the best ones taking a stab at the other most topical subject in Toronto – the G20. Read more »

At the Toronto office, we’re big fans of OK Go’s innovative music videos, and their latest video for End Love has our minds blown.  The video features not only some of the best time warping we’ve seen (just check out the quote from Gizmodo below) but also an awesome appearance from a curious Canadian goose.

How it’s done:

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.” (Via Gizmodo)

Dana Herlihey

This weekend I’m participating in The Ride to Conquer Cancer – a 2 day, 200 km bike ride from Toronto to Niagara Falls benefiting the Princess Margaret Hospital. Last year, during The Ride to Conquer Cancer, I kept friends and family informed of my team’s progress via Twitter. To be honest, there weren’t very many other riders using twitter as a means to update their progress. However, with the impressive increase in adoption rates of smartphones and social media tools in the past year, The Ride to Conquer Cancer has successfully embraced everything from Facebook, twitter, myspace, delicious, flickr and now – Foursquare. Read more »

Apple unveiled the super thin iPhone 4 at the WWDC (worldwide developers conference) yesterday. And while I secretly loathe my contract with Rogers – which will have me missing out on all the new hardware fun – I figured that since I can still get in on the iPhone OS 4 features, I might as well suck it up (kind of, I can’t help but be a little bitter) and comment on some of my favourite iPhone 4 hardware upgrades. Read more »

Although I don’t own an iPad, I was impressed with the Cloak – a case that allows you to prop up the iPad in in portrait, landscape, and typing stand positions. But what impressed me more was the site that was selling the Cloak, Quirky.com. Listed at the side of product’s information is bunch of names and the amount of money each person gets from sales of the Cloak. Read more »

We can’t stop watching the unauthorized biography of Mary Kate Olsen, Very Mary Kate. The web series explores the trials tribulations of Mary Kate Olsen (played by Elaine Carroll) as she attends NYU and copes with her sister Ashley (also played by Elaine Carroll) dating her body guard.

The videos clock in well under 2 minutes each, so it is easy to find yourself playing a bunch in one sitting. Here are two to get you started:

Very Mary-Kate: Moving Out from Mary-Kate Olsen on Vimeo.

Very Mary-Kate: Extension from Mary-Kate Olsen on Vimeo.

Today via LifeHacker, we noticed that Dropbox has added iPad support to their cloud storage system. The iPad’s been out for two weeks or so and already Dropbox is getting in front of that market – one that’s already selling faster than the ubiquitous iPhone.

Stitch Media uses JungleDisk for cloud storage – it’s the other major player in this space right now and it’s link to Amazon S3 was a major selling feature – completely scalable data storage with a reputable, redundant system. We’ve got over a terabyte in the cloud now and its been an amazing help for working with two offices in two cities. We’d be the poster child for JungleDisk if it weren’t for the fact that Dropbox seems to be sneaking around in our office. Read more »

Congratulations are in order for Stitch’s Anna Emmanouill who recently graduated WIFT-T’s Media Leadership Program.

The program focuses on media leadership and is run by WIFT-T and the Schulich Executive Education Centre. It features internationally-renowned speakers from the Schulich Executive Education Centre and high profile industry panelists.

Class of 2010