I am fresh back from a couple of days in the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. My wife had a business trip and I tagged along, a good fortune I have with the work-anywhere capability of the Internet. I made several observations during the trip, and they will comprise my next few blog posts.

The accompanying photo is of the Mary Tyler Moore statue that stands along the Nicolett Mall in downtown Minneapolis. It was placed by the TV Land network and is similar to the one of Bob Newhart at Navy Pier in Chicago. I took the photo a day after I walked by the statue and didn't notice it, as it blends into the landscape of the former Dayton-Hudson department store behind it.

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A little less than a month ago was the first ever Looptopia, an all-night celebration of art and culture in Chicago’s Loop. Where there were critiques and complaints about the crowds and the lack of capacity to meet the almost doubling of the expected crowds, I see this as an opportunity for an even better Looptopia 2008!

As I joined family and friends and traversed the many venues, I had my camera in hand and captured photos and videos of the event. Rather than just send around links to Flickr and YouTube, I decided to build a micro Web site around them… because that’s what I do!

Check out Looptopia Memories. Tell your friends. And help it grow – I am looking for links to photos, videos and stories from the night to add.

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I read on the Mashable blog this morning about the release of version 9 of the Netscape browser. What? They still make a Netscape browser?

Netscape was the original browser, born from the original NCSA Mosaic graphical browser created at the University of Illinois. Then along came Microsoft, and Netscape fell by the way. AOL bought it, then spun off the codebase to the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox was its new offspring. I am simplifying this story, but trying to make the point that Netscape has become the forgotten one.

As a Web developer who may have users of Web sites I develop, I will download and try it. Of course I will run it on a secondary workstation, just like I do Internet Explorer 7. If I haven’t said it before, I am loyal to Firefox and its sibling the Thunderbird email program.

Let me know if anyone reading will be installing Netscape!

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Is it getting better for Palm? Apparently so, as today it was announced that the mobile device manufacturer sold a 25% stake in itself to Elevation Partners, a private equity firm who counts as one of its partners Bono, the lead singer of U2.

This announcement makes it a beautiful day for Palm, as not only are they getting some star power, but some horsepower in management. Apple’s former top hardware engineer Jon Rubenstein, who ran the iPod division for 2 years, will walk on to the Palm board as Executive Chairman. My guess is he had nothing to do with last week's announcement of the already much maligned Palm Foleo which may be destined to be a lemon.

If you look at the corporate history of Palm, it seems like it still hasn’t found what it’s looking for. Take the spinoff of its software division, the manufacturer of the Palm operating system, then to only license it back from its new owners. You have to wonder with repeated moves like this over the years where did it all go wrong?

As a loyal Palm user until the end of the world, I take pride and welcome this move like a summer rain. Hopefully today’s announcement will be like New Year’s Day for Palm, and not a day too soon with the announcement of the Apple iPhone’s release on June 29. If Palm doesn’t act soon, it may be stuck in a moment that it can’t get out of.

Ok, now tell me how many U2 songs I referenced in this post!

(The accompanying photo is a picture of Bono I snapped from Google Images with my Treo 680, then I took a picture of the Treo with my digital camera.)

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Last Friday I had 2 appointments, and like most entrepreneurs they were at coffee shops. Each shop offered WiFi, with their own access method and process – which is more of the norm than the exception today.

My first stop was Caribou Coffee who offers free WiFi, providing you buy something. The barista will give you a code upon request that you will need to enter into the default Web page that comes up when you log into your computer. The code is only good for one hour, but you can get another code upon request. My guess is that it is at the discretion of the staff, and buying more should help you get a new code.

Starbucks was my second stop, and they use T-Mobile’s HotSpot service. As I am a T-Mobile customer, I pay an extra $10 a month for HotSpot on top of the $20 I pay for data service for my Treo smartphone. If I didn’t have T-Mobile or its data service, I would have to pay a daily fee under $10 or a monthly fee around $30.

Before I left for my meetings I saw this article on the cost of unused WiFi service, and I could relate to it. Had my meetings been elsewhere, I may have had to pay a different way, or not at all if I went to a forward-thinking locale. There is certainly money to be made from Internet access, and it makes sense to be forward-thinking for how you yourself will use the Internet and plan ahead as to where you go and how you connect.

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