The lettrs mobile app converts mobile voice, data and pictures to digital letters in the cloud and paper post letters.  It allows busy people to dictate, organize, and deliver letters, helping to revive a more thoughtful mode of personal communication.  With the lettrs mobile app, users can:

• Type or dictate a letter on their iPhone, using more than 20 themes covering modern, vintage and artful digital treatments

• Choose to deliver their letter in a hand-addressed, wax-sealed and scented envelope from the lettrs postal center

• Use their iPhone camera to upload a handwritten letter and deliver it via the lettrs system

• Preserve and share a hand written letter via the unique lettrs fridge.

The lettrs company has already been featured in the WSJ, NPR, CBS, Mashable, Brit, Forbes, and MotherNaturesNetwork for reviving and reinventing letter writing for the digital age.  Needing only one specific identifier of an individual (such as an email address), a person can send a letter anywhere in the world, all from the lettrs mobile app.

BlissDom is the premier conference for women who find and express their bliss by publishing online.  BlissDom ’13, the ninth conference held in Dallas, Texas, from March 21 to 23, 2013, is a welcoming oasis in the ever-changing blogging world.  Speakers and panels featuring the best blogging, public relations, and social media pros will be gathering to mentor new and old friends alike.

Nuggets I gathered from the conclave of digitally savvy women were:

• Wanna be an awesome business?  Treat everybody as if they have the influence of the NYTimes.
• Marketing is not a task… Marketing is a VERB. (action)
• The secret to social media? 75% of your tweets should be replies.  Be community!
• How to write great content for the web:

1. Ditch corporate speak
2. Use contractions… write like people talk
3. Dumb it down
4. Don’t be cute
5. Write for the audience
6. Make it scannable
7. Minimum of 300 words… Maximum of 600 words. 
8. Be interesting, helpful, relevant, timely 

• Although you write for yourself, and your blog is an outlet of self-expression, without people caring about what you say, you will never be considered a top blogging professional.  The first thing you want to do is learn more about who is reading your site.  Research their profiles when they comment, look at your analytics stats to see where they are geographically.  
• What are they going through? How can you help them achieve what they are seeking from your words and images?  Try to define early on what kind of relationships you want?  Passers-by or deep, repeat visitors?  Do you want to be their best friend or expert they’ll turn to for advice? 
• Readers relationships influence your personal brand as if you position yourself as an expert it can lead into other channels, such as books and TV appearances.

Looking forward to next year’s conference already!

With mobile devices being ubiquitous now, what is designed as a manmade object is only concrete when people are using it.  That extension of yourself feels natural and normal so physical design shouldn’t get in the way of the desired action and result from the device.  The enabling, and yet disrupting, way our behavior has been permanently changed through the use of voice and natural gestures has removed the need for buttons and cords to immerse the user into a physi-digital feedback loop.

Digital interaction designers make it about the content not the “chrome” (the physicality of the device).  The stories, movies, music, and emotions stays with you as the device fades away to the point where holding a particular mobile device will soon morph yet again.   Almost every thing in our world—from roadways to pacemakers to refrigerators— will be enabled with sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects and linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.

Digital interaction and user experience defined in 18 minutes:

Many blog posts have been written about list of apps… apps for engineers, apps for entrepreneurs, apps for education, apps for the frazzled mom.  Here’s a new list outlining my favorite iOS apps that allow me to collect and curate objects of all kinds on my iPhone and iPad.

Dropbox for file collections

Evernote for blog post ideas, lists, and meeting notes

Artfinder for masterpiece collecting

Captio for collecting your thoughts via email

Bump for contact collections

DayOne Journal for collecting your memories

Epicurious to collect your recipes

Instapaper for reading collections

Soundhound to collect your music

Pinterest to collect recipes, fashion, nail polishes and more

Snooth for wine collecting

Kindle for book collections

Outfit Diary for wardrobe collections

Vincent Van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853 and began drawing as a child.  He continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life.  In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints.  His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers,portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.

In 1873 he traveled to London where he worked as an art dealer. It was not until 1883 that he began to paint, going on to study later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.  Before settling in Arles in the south of France, in 1886 he visited Paris, and it was here he met the artists Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat.  All of whom would greatly influence his work.

Van Gogh spent a brief but intensive decade working as an artist before his life was cut tragically short at age 37 through suicide by gun shot.  His work went largely unrecognized during his lifetime. The artist lived impoverished, dedicated exclusively to painting. His works in still life, landscape and self-portraiture are now considered among the most important contributions to modern art.  Van Gogh is known for his intense and expressive use of color, and his experimentation with painting techniques and materials. However, accounts of his traumatic life and bouts of mental illness have dominated, and sometimes misguided, views of his work.

In The Church at Auvers, he paints the church as if its bricks were shifting, and the path meanders past as if a stream of lava.  The building is reminiscent of scenes from the northern landscapes of his childhood and youth.  A certain nostalgia for the north had already been apparent in his last weeks at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.  He is clearly suffering from hallucinations.  This painting is one of the seventy works van Gogh painted in the two months before his tragic suicide on 29th July, 1890.

Bereft, $2000

Somehow this one will be hard to part with… Inspired by a fashion editorial spread for Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garcons.  Isn’t she captivating?

Sad, but with a twinge of a Mona Lisa smile?

A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.  Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde movement.

Rising quickly to great critical and public recognition in part through Saatchi’s patronage, Saville has been lauded for creating conceptual art through the use of a classical standard—figure painting.  Although Saville’s chosen method is quite traditional and seemingly outmoded, she has found a way to reinvent figure painting and regain its prominent position in the context of art history.  Known primarily for her large-scale paintings of nude women, Saville has also emerged as a major contemporary artist.

Her blatantly feminist subject matter, of obese and sometimes faceless women with vast bodies, partly originates from a trip to America.  It was while studying at Cincinnati University in Ohio that Saville’s lifelong fascination with the workings of the human body began to affect her artwork.  Much of her work features distorted flesh, high-caliber brush strokes and patches of oil color, while others reveal the surgeon’s mark of a plastic surgery operation.

While Saville has dedicated her career to traditional figurative oil painting, her painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens.  Her paintings are usually much larger than life size.  They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body.

Early this year the professional art community already voiced the idea that this growth cannot continue forever and is bound to slow down.  This quarter, those forecasts are coming true.  Unlike last year, when the world’s mass media reported a new sales record on Chinese art objects on a monthly basis, 2012 has been not that fruitful in notable deals.  Moreover, art market participants increasingly talk about the fact that all the positive trends of the past related to China has been nothing more than a “bubble”.

In March 2012, in her speech presented in Maastricht at the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), which is the largest and most respected art fair in the world, art economist Dr. Clare McAndrew stated that the majority of deals made at Chinese art auctions are never paid for.  It is noteworthy that the data from the sales at such art auctions are used as the basis for various ratings. “It is one thing to announce a multimillion dollar deal, and quite a different matter to actually close it,” she pointed out, “The buyers do not pay, and thus, China is not the leader of the art market.”

In an article recently published by Forbes, Abigail R. Esman makes a statement not only about the false nature of the Chinese art market, but also makes her own investigation.  In her opinion, the Chinese government is the prime beneficiary of the art market “bubble.”  Her conversations with Chinese art dealers led her to those conclusions.  Based on the information that she received talking to the art dealers in China, Esman writes that the country’s largest art auction house in Beijing – Poly Auctions – is a part of the Poly company, which in turn is related to Poly Technologies, the main arms producer for the Chinese Army.  Thus, according to Esman, with the help of a defense industry producer tied to the Chinese army, the government creates an image of a prosperous Chinese economy, which in theory should attract foreign investors.

Look Mickey

• A key figure in the proliferation of the Pop Art movement, Roy Lichtenstein is the subject of this fall’s retrospective at The National Gallery of Art. This particular Lichtenstein work, Look Mickey, was adapted from a 1960 Disney comic. October 14, 2012–January 13, 2013
• Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptural renderings of her own body parts have an unsettling, pseudo-medical quality—but don’t let the heebie-jeebies stop you from checking out The Museum of Modern Art‘s display of her radical work, which includes her most important pieces from 1955 through 1972.  October 7, 2012–January 28, 2013
• We typically associate Picasso with bold colors, but this October, the Guggenheim will host a large-scale survey of the Spanish master’s black and white works, including paintings, sculptures, and sketches. October 5, 2012–January 23, 2013
• The Tate Britain‘s exploration of Pre-Raphaelite painters includes moody works from lesser-known masters like Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones and Henry Wallis. September 12, 2012–January 13, 2013
• And speaking of Raphael, the art world seems to have this Italian Renaissance painter on the brain this fall. A special exhibition at the Louvre will showcase lesser-known works he produced in Rome near the end of his life. October 11, 2012–January 14, 2013
• We immediately think of Monet‘s water liliy paintings or Degas‘ ballerinas when someone says Impressionism, but apparently, the painters were also known for the unusual care and attention to detail with which they represented fashion.  This fall, “Impressionism and Fashion” at the Musée d’Orsa will showcase some of the movement’s most stylish renderings from 1860 to 1880. September 25, 2012—January 20, 2013