Below is the answer I posted in response to the question “Will nav systems on cars  become commodities or will they be replaced with apps?” on Quora.

Sounded interesting to me. I mean happiness is a core strategy for everything that I do on my life, after all. I’m a believer that love conquers all, positive thinking is powerful, mind over matter, etc… (yeah, all that foolishness). I also know myself to be susceptible to taking things for granted. So I decided to challenge myself to try this gratitude journal and see what happens.

It changed me…. and more importantly my children.

Although I didn’t stay very disciplined in using the gratitude journal beyond a few weeks, the sheer fact the I was confronted with thinking positively everyday about what I’m thankful for was enough to leave a mark on me. I thought about how lucky I am to live where I live, feeling safe and warm, surrounded by people that love me. To quote Mike…  “I’m a lucky man.”

One night at dinner, I was telling my inspiring wife about the gratitude reflection activity. She’s a clever one and suggested we should all express our gratitude at dinner each night. So we started that night and each of us, including my 6 & 8 year olds, each said three things we were grateful for during that day.

We’ve been saying our “thankfuls” at dinner for over a year now. We’ve also added to it by saying three ways we helped someone else each day. I love this and feel proud to be teaching my children this personal reflection technique.

I am a lucky man! I’m especially lucky to now keep my core life strategy (be happy and appreciative) in my mind every day.

Anyway, the point here is that by simply asking yourself an often-overlooked question, you can make improvements and realign to your core strategy. This applies in personal (see above) and business activities.

As business leaders, do we remember to ask the fundamental questions that explore alignment to our firm’s core values & strategies? For example, do you know whether your company prefers faster time to market or quality? If you do know the answer, do you remember to explicitly ask about it when reflecting and making business decisions?

Perhaps this is a bigger concept than what I wanted to post about. What I’m getting to is that perhaps a simple checklist (hat tip to the checklist manifesto) of questions related to your core corporate strategy could help your firms get back to and apply the most important and essential criteria that makes it unique and competitive.

While I was in India, I decided to only bring my iphone 4 and leave at home the camera, video camera, ipod, etc.?? Sounded like a good idea… one device instead of 4.?? It turned out to be an excellent idea.?? While I was gone for 4 weeks, I took something like 1000 pictures and it was really easy to delete the bad ones in real time.?? I had also gotten some apps which made it really easy to turn my random photos into compelling short movies.?? In fact, over the course of four weeks, I created and published about 25 short videos to youtube.?? With the help of some handy apps right on my iphone, I could pull together photos, add my own background music, create the video clip, and upload it to youtube… often during the same day.?? Pretty close to real time.

So, here's the scoop on those handy apps and how I used each one:

• AutoStitch for creating amazing panorama pictures.?? You take a bunch of photos that overlap, open up AutoStitch, select the photos, and presto…. create one big panorama.?? I used this app countless times as I was visiting lots of tourist places, captured rich street scenes, and even team meetings.?? It seemed to work from pretty much any group of overlapping pictures.???? TIP – remember to save your panorama photo before closing the app.
• Splice was my primary app for creating videos. I really loved the flexibility of this program and for $1.99 its hard to beat (now its only $0.99 I think).?? You can add title pages wherever you need them, insert both videos and pictures, and add different transitions.?? Once you add photos, you can resize/crop the image, set the duration, and even filter the image to be black & white, sepia, or a few other styles.?? Video clips you add can be trimmed although its a little challenging sometimes on the small screen.?? After you have added the files you want to include in the video, you can then make some adjustments to the audio for your new movie.?? You can add music to the background of your movie from your ipod library or the splice library.?? Volume can be adjusted for the audio you add as well as audio on the individual video clips.?? There are some built in sound effects you can add (like applause, door bell, etc.), although I didn't really use them very much.?? You can even record your own voiceover track if you wish (I didn't).?? Once you've added everything you like, preview your new movie.?? From preview mode, you can add borders to the movie and also export your final movie to your iphone's photo library.?? Right now there is no HD export feature but I found High to be adequate for my purposes.?? From photo library you can send your new movie to your youtube account as well.?? TIPS – Splice doesn't auto-capitalize text when adding titles.?? You cannot rename the Splice file names.?? If your phone is on the mute setting, watching the preview will result in no sound.
• iMovie from Apple is nice for creating videos but at $4.99 its expensive and lacks the flexibility found in Splice.?? However, there are a few nice things about the iMovie app.?? I really liked the slow pan feature (a la Ken Burns) for photos although its a little difficult to set.?? I mostly used iMovie to create 5-10 second video clips which panned across a panorama photo.?? I could then export that brief clip to my photo library and add it to my main movie in Splice.?? iMovie claims to have HD export capabilities but my test of HD export from iMovie vs. high resolution export from Splice didn't provide any overwhelming difference in quality.?? iMovie does have some cooler templates for easier video creation with built in background music but I found it lacked the flexibility found in Splice (such as adding titles when/where I liked, etc.)
• Adobe Photoshop Express is a handy app for modifying individual pictures.?? It has some great features for cropping, fixing brightness, adding borders, etc.?? It also has some excellent effects built in (such as a Warhol-style 'pop' effect).?? With that said, I didn't use this app very frequently since Splice already gave me the important resize/crop feature I needed for modifying my image files.?? This app is good for the occasional picture you want to edit.
• Youtube is where I sent all my finished videos.?? Once in youtube, you can then login and change the privacy settings if you wish.?? For example, I made all of my videos 'unlisted' so they are public but can only be accessed if you know the URL… poor man's security.
• Posterous is my favorite blog platform.?? It's sooooo easy.?? You can simply send email to a particular address with file attachments or even the URL of your youtube video and they are auto-magically transformed into posts.?? Very nice.?? Also lots of connectivity with other social networks (twitter, facebook, etc.)

Good luck!

Very simple output from Photoshop iPhone app. Like how easy and simple to make pics more interesting.