We just launched a charity project called Indie Music for Haiti, which aims to help Haiti through the power of indie music. All donations will be going to Voice of Haiti, which was founded by filmmaker/social activist James M. Felter, and Haitian-American businessman/educator Eddy Remy.

Voice of Haiti funds and promotes environmentally friendly, self-sustaining community development projects in Haiti. They are also a conduit for other organizations, individuals, experts and resources that help meet the needs of community initiatives.

The concept for Indie Music For Haiti works like this:

• You can view videos or audio files submitted to Indie Music for Haiti. If you like a particular band, make a donation on their behalf.
• Bands and Musicians can upload music that they wish to contribute to the project, along with specifying a charity that they wish the proceeds from their online performance to go to. If you are an artists this is a great way to get publicity for your band, while promoting a great cause.

Our friends over at Asparagus Media and ServInt threw a benefit concert in Washington DC to kick the event off last month, and we worked to take everything they filmed that night and build it into a website. The charity concert raised $10,000 for Haiti relief and we’re hoping that the website will help to further those donations.

As an interesting side note, the website is powered by our open source project, MediaCore Video CMS. The homepage automatically updates with the latest videos submitted.

Indie Music for Haiti

I came across this stunning cinematic short titled “Nuit Blanche” this morning. The amourous slow-motion camera techniques, the subtle details, and the style of the piece just left me breathless. This is exactly how love at first sight should feel. Time stops. Fin.

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Today I discovered some fascinating statics from Focus Magazine on the state of the internet today. It is interesting to see that only 7% of bloggers are aged 18-24. When I saw this statistic I began to wonder if the medium is losing popularity with the younger crowd as Facebook and Twitter have gained momentum. It would be interesting to see this infographic plotted over the last 10 years to see how these statistics have changed. Were people aged 18-24 in 2004 blogging more than they are now?

Last year we kicked off our company environmental policy by donating 5% of our profits to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). Today, we are pleased to announce that this groundbreaking environmental non-profit has managed to protect 400,000 hectares of Canadian wilderness in 2009. Some of their major highlights include the huge expansion of the Nahini National Park, and the addition of a massive protected wilderness area near Ship Harbour, Nova Scotia (which is the largest protected area to be added to Nova Scotia in a decade).

Our heartiest congratulations go to all the staff at CPAWS who have worked incredibly hard this year to preserve Canada’s unique wilderness.

*Note: If you are interested in donating to CPAWS more information can be found on their site.

Print Society is an open, free virtual marketplace for prints and original artwork online.

Our goal is to empower galleries to sell more art, build relationships with many thousands of new art buyers online, and enable art fans everywhere to find and spread your art online while still giving your gallery complete control of your artwork. The power of the social web has been proven many ties over, and Print Society is making it easy for your gallery to take advantage of it, connect with art buyers everywhere, and build a following.

I just found this image from an incredible series of HDR photographs. For those readers who may not be familiar with HDR photography, here is a brief excerpt from Wikipedia on the technique.

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows. High dynamic range imaging was originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff’s detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s. The process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range, was first reported in 1993, and resulted in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was published in 1995 by Steve Mann and Rosalind Picard.[2] In 1997 this technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the computer graphics community by Paul Debevec. This method was developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Signed, Stuart, Nathan, Anthony and Melanie

“We took this as an opportunity to reinterpret the Christmas tree and its role as the traditional focal point for a communal space.” (via swissmiss)

I came across these stark and brooding advertisements while I was recently in Reykjavik, Iceland. What struck me was the bold nature of the imagery, and that they paint a picture of Iceland as an incredibly harsh place to live. I wonder how many tourists see these ads and then are compelled to move to Iceland. I know I was!

Technical Note: I took these photos on my iPhone 3GS and posted them via the Wordpress iPhone app.

Via: A Continuous Lean