Make group video calls with up to 10 people

You can now use Skype to make group video calls* with up to 10 people – letting you bring even more of your family, friends or business together, even if you’re cities or continents apart.

Note that everyone in a group video call now needs to be running this version, so if your friends, family or colleagues are using Beta 1, they’ll have to upgrade before you can include them in group video calls.

A refreshed user interface

You’ll notice that the new-look Skype is sleeker, neater and crisper than before, and they’re proud of the work our interface designers have done to refine and mature the interface for this version. They have also added Skype Home, where you can follow your contacts’ mood messages, set your profile picture and mood message, receive account notifications and learn more about using Skype.

Better stability and quality

They have made improvements to call quality when making group video calls, as well as fixed a number of bugs affecting stability, so your calling experience should be smoother than before. This version also includes automatic call recovery, which should help automatically reconnect Skype calls that are interrupted due to network problems. They have also made a number of other housekeeping fixes since the first beta – but please bear in mind that this is still a beta version, and so there may be the odd bug remaining.

* Group video calling is currently available as a free trial. For group video calls, everyone in the group video call will need Skype 5.0 Beta 2 for Windows.

(from skype official blog)

Well none of them are in the market, except for the Samsung Galaxy Tab that can be seen on sale on Germany for nearly 1000 usd.

There was also a lot of talk about wepad, also in Germany but I don’t think it is there yet. What it is sure is that this is about to boom. The Samsung android tablet runs froyo 2.2, has 16 or 32Gb and cameras. And it is much samller than the iPad.

Take a look at the comercial. It looks very good:

• iOS 4.1 now and iO4 4.2 by November (free updates) also for iPad (so multitasking by November). It will include wireless printing from iPhones, iPods touch and iPads, and AirPlay, to stream your music videos and photos over wifi.
• New iPod touch: very flat, with retina display and HD video recording (2 cameras). Like an iPhone 4 (with facetime) but without the phone and very light and slim.
• New iPod Nano, running iOS… just a squared screen, small but awesome.
• New iPod Shuffle (back to the origins).
• New Apple TV. 1/4 of the size of the current one for $99. Running sort of iOS but no app store. No internal storage. A4 chip and connected to Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and mobileMe. You can buy  rent HD movies for $4.99 and shows for $0.99. Amazon has already responded with the same prices but for buying the stuff instead of renting it.
• iTunes 10. New logo (with no CD in it) and Ping, a sort of social thing for music. I don’t know if they want to kill MySpace… You can update you iTunes to 10 if you have jailbroken iPhone. No problem.

Radial engines are used in aircrafts having propeller connected to the shaft delivering power in order to produce thrust its basic mechanism is as follows

Steam engine Principle

Steam engine once used in locomotives was based on the reciprocating principle as shown below

Sewing Machine

Maltese Cross Mechanism

this type of mechanism is used in clocks to power the second hand movement.

Manual Transmission Mechanism

The mechanism also called as “stick shift” is used in cars to change gears mannually

Constant Velocity Joint

This mechanism is used in the front wheel drive cars

Torpedo-Boat destroyer System

This system is used to destroy fleet in naval military operations.

Rotary Engine

Also called as Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine has a unique design that converts pressure into rotating motion instead of reciprocating pistons

(from world of technology)

The article written by The Seattle Times Rebecca Teagarden is titled “Tiny apartment shows the value of a good fit” and talks about Steve Sauer’s 182-square-foot Seattle condo which shows the value of a good fit, from the soaking tub built into the entry floor to the “video lounge” tucked beneath the “cafe area.” Sauer shopped Ikea for many of his home’s furnishings, such as a little table, and used tabletops to fashion cabinet fronts.

Photos by Benjamin Benschneider of the Seattle Times

Steve Sauer watches television in the video lounge, which has seating for two. The horizontal band around the condo, accenting the powder-blue walls, is coated with blackboard paint.

Saurer’s says, “What I really wanted was one place with exactly what I needed and wanted. Quality is more important than quantity for me, and extra space only a problem,” he has written, describing his nearby too-big-for-him, one-bedroom condo.

Sauer relaxes in the cafe area of his 182-square-foot condo. “I was worried as I filled in all the upper spaces that it would feel cramped, but it didn’t,” he says. The window is at street level. The little table is Ikea. It has a glass top that swivels open, providing storage.

“I wanted to compress my home to squirt me back out to the community,” he says, taking inspiration from dwellings in Scandinavia and Japan, places where space is dear. “That was one of the philosophical reasons. I want to be able to shop daily, not store a lot and eat really well.”

Sauer checks his messages at the dining table, which includes a leaf to expand for company. The undercounter refrigerator is Frigidaire, from Lowe’s.

When Sauer couldn’t find the things he needed, he designed them and built them: The stainless-steel shower caddy, towel bar. For other pieces, “Ikea came through again.” Lighting, cabinet pulls, and butcher block for shelves, the table top and cabinet fronts. The rich flooring, Brazilian walnut, was installed by Matt Messenger. A bureau from West Elm fit to 1/8 of an inch, and so it was ordered.

Sauer designed the tiny condo for two. Just inside the door is the bathroom to the left, and a soaking tub inserted into the floor and covered with a 3form Chroma panel.

“My dream is to put 300 of these in a building and not have it be a tenement.”

Read the Seattle Times article here.

One bike is tethered to the ceiling for storage. Steam heat comes from the building’s system. The ventilation chimney runs across Sauer’s ceiling, and was easy to pipe into. “It was passing through here anyway.”

The bathroom wall is covered in 1-inch tiles from Tiles for Less. Light filters into the room through a 3form Chroma panel, shared with the kitchen. The ceiling is tempered glass meant for a table top from Ikea. The toilet is Philippe Stark for Duravit. Sauer designed and manufactured the stainless-steel shower caddy and towel bar.

The video lounge is tucked beneath the cafe area and next to the dining table. “All along the way this project’s had good chi, so that’s good,” Sauer says. The bureau is from West Elm. “It fit to within 1/8 inch. It was a nice find. I didn’t want to build another piece of furniture.” The floor is Brazilian walnut.

(from tinyhouseblog)

The idea is to handle messy inboxes, by applying rules. Take a look at the video:

This is a small tip that can be helpful for those buying stuff via internet.

When you are done with the transaction and you have the receipt on the screen, what do you normally do? Well in most cases you print it out, then you don’t know if the printer is on, if there is paper… then you don’t know where did you put it once it is printed… or in some cases you just ignore the scree because they will probably send you an email confirmation with the receipt or bill, so you can always go to

your email and look for it… and if you are lucky you find it.

Well, if you are on a mac when you are in the receipt page, you just click command+P, like when printing, and in the PDF button on the bottom left corner you will find an option called: Save PDF to Web Receipt Folder.

If you do click that a PDF will be created with the current screen (not just what you see, all of it!) with the title of the page. This in a Web Receipt folder in your Documents folder. Very very handy.

It is not something I use. I choose Save PDF to Evernote, where it is saved into my Evernote, where it is OCR so it becomes searcheble and it is also stored on the web, but if you don’t use evernote the Save to Web Receipt foder is a very good option.

Browse movies, from great documentaries such as home to films nobody knows because probably they don’t have any rights, or they are so old that they have expired.

Anyway, take if there is nothing on TV, it is good to take a look. You might enjoy an old Jacky Chan movie ;-)

WHAT THE FUCK IS MY SOCIAL MEDIA “STRATEGY”?

It is like the bullshitr generator that I have mentioned earlier but with “social media” terms.

It is inspired on:

WHAT THE FUCK SHOULD I MAKE FOR DINNER?

Initial targeted clients were people like plumbers and electricians, but we can definitely see tech-minded farmers at the market relying on this sort of system, along with craftmeisters who shun Etsy and prefer to sell face-to-face. A single account can also cover up to 50 users, meaning an entire sales team could be equipped with these devices. Intuit’s site provides lots of data on transactions and the like, but for the full ability to reconcile to invoices and track payments you’ll need to use Intuit’s QuickBooks suite, either on the PC or Mac.

The big question is, of course, what it’ll cost you to use the thing. $179 up-front is hardly a small commitment, and a further $12.95 per month makes the minimum cost quite a bit higher than Square, which offers free hardware and no monthly fees. Likewise, per-transaction fees here are between $.30 and $.34, double the $.15 fee of the Square. However, Intuit and mophie will take a smaller chunk of the overall payment: 1.7 percent usually, though that could climb as high as 3.7 percent depending on the type of card being used. That compares favorably to Square’s 2.75 to 3.5 percent.

Whether this is a value proposition for your business depends largely on the size and frequency of transactions you plan to receive. But, there is one definite advantage Square has over this system: compatibility. This case, which encrypts every credit card number before it gets to the phone, will only work with the iPhone 3G/S. We’re told an iPhone 4-compatible version is in the works, but it’s anyone’s guess when that will show up. We do, however, know that this current version is available now in Apple retail stores and will be hitting Apple’s online site in the very near future. So, go on now. Get paid.

(from engadget)

Google voice is not available outside the US so it is not usefull for me. Instead, using your phone you can use Fring out, which is cheaper than Google voice.

Anyway, is Skype sleeping?

Check out the video from Google:

Hello all Apple fanciers, you may get something new and interesting for your portable devices! Each sticker here features a perfect combination with the same element- apple, therefore you’ll find all them perfectly suit your iPod and iPhone. Yups, it’s time to pay more attention to the back of your “Apple”!

Selling Price: $3.90-$13.90

Buy it here

(from inewidea)

In practice, shuffler.fm sits as a music control bar at the top of each blog page, providing controls to skip back or forward, pause the playback, switch genres, or email, Tweet, or “Like” a track on Facebook. Like what you’re hearing? The blog post likely centered around the artist, song, or event from which it came is right there in your browser tab. You get free music, a good vibe from patronizing smaller-scale music blogs, and you don’t even need to create a free account to listen.

Shuffler.fm is a free service, and seems to require only a browser with Flash capabilities.

(from lifehacker)

Chances are you already know Steve McCurry as the man who took one of the most iconic photos of our time. It was of a 12-year-oldAfghan refugee girl who’s piercing green eyes told us her harrowing story. The image itself was named as “the most recognized photograph” in the history of the National Geographic magazine and her face became famous as the cover photograph on their June 1985 issue.

Beyond just that one photo, McCurry has shot over a million images spanning 35 years. More than anything, he is one of a few that has that amazing ability to capture stories of our shared human experience. As he says “Most of my images are grounded in people. I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. I try to convey what it is like to be that person, a person caught in a broader landscape that you could call the human condition.”

Looking through his large body of work, we get to experience fantastic faraway places we can only dream about visiting. It’s in his incredible photos that we feel connected to the world at large, appreciating our similarities and our differences, our cultures and our histories, and our past and our present in a truly unique and everlasting way.

Afghanistan

Yemen

Tibet

Cambodia

India

Burma

Eastman Kodak let McCurry shoot the last ever produced roll of Kodachrome transparency film. The film, known for its rich saturation and archival durability of its slides, was discontinued last year. The roll will be the subject of an upcoming documentary by National Geographic. Can’t wait to see it.

Steve McCurry

(from mymodernmet)

Ohlife is a free online diary, compleatly private. They even log you off from the site often, which is good.

So, what is what makes ohlife special?

It is simple, neat, beautiful. Every day, at the time you wish, it send you an email saying: What have you done today?

You just answer the email and voila, it goes into your diary. It couldn’t be easier. Just responding to an email. Even with photos if you wish.

Downside? Well, I have tested it for a couple of days only, but there is no calendar so you can navigate easily to other years or months. You have to scroll…

Also nice that in the web you can edit your entries.

Give it a try. It is free.

Google has added bicycling directions, lanes and routes to Google Maps, meaning you no longer have to drive, walk or bus to get directions. And we can tell you, bicyclists are excited.

Before now, the only option to cyclists to get even remotely appropriate directions, was to use the walking option, but this would still ignore bike trails. Google has heard the pleas of cyclists and, from first look, we have to say that the feature is well implemented.

We gave it a test to see if it would put us on some of Austin’s more bike unfriendly streets, but it managed to chose some good alternative routes and stick to the bike trails when it could. The directions got a little wonky when we threw it a few curve balls, but we expect this to happen with any mapping service, especially one still in beta. But, as we’ve learned, you can’t just gomindlessly follow directions, lest you end up in a lake.

The new feature also includes a “Bicycling Layer”, which shows bike paths and bike-friendly streets with or without lanes. Three different lanes appear in the layer.

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

According to Google, it has also taken steps to avoid uphill and long downhill routes, busy roads and even busy intersections. Google says that it even takes hills and other factors into account when calculating your trip time. “Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill,” Google says in its Lat Long Blog.

Google worked with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to bring more than 12,000 miles of biking trails to its map, along with bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. Google makes sure to point out that the feature is still in beta, so feel free to tell Google the next time you find yourself on a crowded, shoulder-less highway because of Google Maps.

And for those of you headed to fair Austin this week, make sure to take a look at the new feature, because it includes all of Austin’s numerous bike trails and bike lanes. If you’ve never been to Austin for SXSW before, bicycling is the way to get around town and now you’ll know how to get there.

(from readwriteweb)

I try to keep keep all my inboxes to zero. Whatever I have in my inbox requires action. Once the action is taken, and action could be just answer quickly, then I archive them.

I have unified inbox, meaning that my inbox has emails from 5 different accounts.

I have the following folders on all my accounts: inbox (sure…), Waiting For, Read Review, and the rest of achieves. I don’t have them by people but rather by location. I go up to 2 levels of depth, so something like this:

• inbox (aiming to zero, only things that should have some action)
• read review (things want to read but are not urgent so I don’t want them in my inbox)
• waiting for (air ticket for tomorrow, a delivery yet to arrive, etc…)
• friends
  • local (I don’t live where my family is)
  • home (my friends in my home country, school, university…)
  • abroad
• family
  • wife
  • mum
  • kids
  • other
• work
  • waiting for (sometimes I mix private email with work stuff… bad bad)
  • job 1 (if you do have more than one job, then here)
  • job 2
• personal
  • key stuff (sort of starred items, email with driving license, passport, tax, passwords)
  • statements
    • bank (if you receive a lot of e-statments then create a folder with statements, then bank, telephone, electricity, etc…)
  • jokes
  • travel
  • shopping
  • newsletters
  • other

Then some tips to manage large amount of email:

You can keep your responses short and add a signature following the http://three.sentenc.es/ tips.

“Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.

three.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be three sentences or less. It’s that simple.”

Example signature:
——————————————–
Q: Why is this email three sentences or less?
A: http://three.sentenc.es
——————————————–

Alternatively you can add “Sent from iPhone” under your short responses.  People don’t expect long responses when you’re on your phone.

Sure, count on me!!
Sent from iPhone.

If you do really have an email problem you can create a ‘VIP’ filter.  Add your boss, close friends and family. Flag them red and throw them in a separate folder. This is the first place I check every morning.

If you are using Gmail or Google apps and you are giving away your email address to a lot of sites you try or places that potentially can spam you, they you can give your regular email +name of site or group or whatever, example: yourname+namesite@gmail.com. You can then filter those emails into a specific spammy folder you check periodically.

If you are using apple Mail or similar program and you really can’t cope with the inflow of emails, you can create a filter that auto-responds to all unopened emails > 14 days old w/the following message:

Your email (below) is now 14 days old and has not been opened.  To minimize email buildup your email has now been placed in the archive.  Should you still require a response simply respond back and you’ll automatically be added to the priority queue.  Thank you.

Good luck

Currently the map shows the location 0f over 12,000 caves and 361 grottoes. As well as displaying the location of caves the map includes geological overlays for America, Australasia, Europe and the Poles.

If you click on any of the plotted caves on the map you can get further details and links to any relevant websites about the selected cave.

Adobe Illustrator, the industry-standard vector graphics application, is the tool you use when you need flexible, scalable vector graphics such as logos and artwork that will be printed in various formats, mediums and sizes.

Illustrator’s huge array of digital drawing features makes it a favorite amongst illustrators and print designers, but for those just starting out, the application can be intimidating. To help set you on your path to Illustrator mastery, here are some great beginner-level Illustrator tutorials that cover the fundamental tools and techniques.

If you have tips for aspiring Illustrator pros, share them in the comments below.

1. Getting Started in Illustrator

First thing’s first: You need to familiarize yourself with Illustrator’s graphical user interface. This quick and easy-to-read tutorial talks about Illustrator’s workspace, pointing to areas such as the Tools panel, the Status bar, the Artboard where you craft your vectors, and so on. It also touches upon how to create your first Illustrator document, as well as the different items you can find within the Tools panel.

2. Illustrator’s Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide

The primary drawing feature of Illustrator is the Pen tool. If you have aspirations of becoming an Illustrator ninja, you’ll need to have a strong command of this tool. This Illustrator tutorial from Vectortuts+ (a leading vector graphics tutorial site) covers all the things you need to know about this powerful, but oftentimes daunting, tool.

The tutorial covers the concept of Bezier curves, which are used to draw shapes with smooth curves, the need-to-know keyboard shortcuts, and even provides a practice sheet that you can download and import into Illustrator to help you practice your vector-drawing skills.

3. Fun with Illustrator’s Blend Tool

The Blend command is deceptively simple in function. It takes two or more shapes or colors, and then blends them together smoothly. But as this Illustrator tutorial will show you, the Blend command is a very effective feature for crafting stunning graphics effects quickly and easily.

4. Adobe Illustrator Tips: Live Trace

Live Trace, which appeared in Adobe Illustrator CS2, is a game-changer. Before Live Trace, an artist sketching an art piece using pen/pencil and paper would have to scan their work into Illustrator, then spend hours manually tracing it with the Pen tool and other Illustrator functions.

When Live Trace was introduced, this process was made simpler through automation, saving you precious hours. From sketch drawings to photographs that need to be converted to vector graphics — Live Trace is an excellent option to try. This tutorial goes over the process of using Live Trace by using a stock headshot photo, discussing how to execute Live Trace, the various options, as well as showing off a handful of examples of where Live Trace has been used in existing artworks.

5. Illustrator’s Type Tool: A Comprehensive Introduction

Illustrator is also a popular graphics application for print designers. From logos, business cards, and brochures, all the way up to posters and large billboards, Illustrator can help you make flexible and scalable designs.

A big part of print design is quite obviously text. This Illustrator tutorial will help you begin to explore the Type tool. It covers ways you can set text on vector paths for unconventional text flows, talks about the associated panels such as the Character and Paragraph panel, and provides useful keyboard shortcuts.

6. The Power (and Ease) of Patterns in Illustrator

Using patterns allows you to make repeating graphics. Experimenting with patterns can lead to excellent artwork that looks like it took days to complete.

Creating custom pattern brushes and applying them to vector shapes is covered in this Illustrator tutorial.

7. Mastering Illustrator Effects

Effects in Illustrator allow you to add all sorts of wonderful graphic treatments to your artwork. From applying 3D effects to creating faux colored pencil looks, this set of Illustrator features will let you rapidly enhance your work with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’d like to discover the abilities of Illustrator effects, check out the above tutorial, which discusses various processes — such as Roughen and Scribble — as well as the Appearance panel, which allows you to modify applied effects, among other helpful tips.

8. Everything about Gradients

The Gradient panel in Illustrator is a wonderful feature for applying color and pattern gradients to your work. Gradients allow you to stylize your graphics such that they have smoothly blended fills or strokes.

Learn everything you need to know to get started with gradients from this tutorial, which discusses topics like applying gradients, modifying the angle and direction of the gradients, saving gradient swatches, and more.

9. The Stroke Panel

In Photoshop, a sibling of Illustrator, strokes (creating an outline around the edge of an object) seem like an afterthought. But in Illustrator, where your vector paths take center stage, the stroke feature is very important to master.

This Adobe Illustrator tutorial covers the use of the Stroke panel in creating vector objects.

10. Pathfinder: Explained

The Pathfinder panel is a popular time saving feature for working with shapes and paths. This panel is a collection of commands that allow you to unite, divide, and subtract two or more shapes, among other functions. Utilizing these commands gives you the ability to draw complex vector graphics using basic shape tools.

Learn how to use the Pathfinder panel with this excellent Illustrator tutorial.

11. The Power of Smart Guides in Illustrator

Don’t have a steady hand? Having trouble drawing shapes that align with one another? Smart guides give you snapping features that will enable you to draw objects more accurately.

Explore the fundamentals of Illustrator’s smart guides through this beginner-friendly tutorial.

12. How to Make a Custom Illustrator Brush

Brushes in Illustrator are a quick way to save objects that you will reuse later in your projects. Art brushes, for example, take a vector object that you’ve drawn and allow you to then apply those objects later as strokes or fills of other vectors.

In this step-by-step guide, you will discover the awesomeness of custom brushes in Illustrator.

These 12 tutorials will set you on your path to Illustrator mastery. If you’ve had success with other tutorials not on this list, let us know about them in the comments below.

This series is supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe, Ben & Jerry’s new line-up of Fair Trade and frozen iced coffee drinks. Learn more about it here.

(from mashable)

Then take a look at this. I’m sure you’ll like it…

You can buy this at this etsy shop. It cost $45.

I tried looking for images of New York.

Google may be synonymous with search, but some of the search functionality in its Apps products is sadly lacking — if you want to search for something in Google Docs, Calendar, or Gmail, you’ve had to do it from within its respective app. Today, it’s getting a bit better: Gmail has just launched a feature that lets you search for Google Docs and Sites directly from within Gmail. You can activate the new feature under the Labs section of Gmail settings — it’s called ‘Apps Search’.

Apps Search also activates another cool feature: when you make a typo in a search query, you’ll get a “Did you mean” suggestion. I’m not entirely sure how typo correction is related to Apps Search, but I’ll take it.

Hopefully this is the start of a new trend — it would also be nice if you could search for Google Calendar events from within Gmail (and vice versa).  Google also recently released the headache-reducing multiple accounts feature, which lets you hop between multiple Google accounts without having to repeatedly log-out and back in.

(from techcrunch)

Halfway towards 2015, a lot more needs to be done to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Ahead of the United Nation’s 25 September High-level Event on the MDGs, which will identify gaps and determine how to accelerate progress toward the MDGs, theUN has launched a blog to stimulate the discussion on how to make the most of the upcoming 7 years. Have your say!

Take a look at the google earth map or to the map they have online to se realtime progress towards the goals. We are 5 years and 134 days away from the “D” day. Still a long way to go. Unfortunately the site is not very well maintained. Google earth link does not work and map displays data old from 2007…. petty.

They just updated the iPhone app but it is still not working. Nothing on the web yet.

A lot of questions though: How are they going to use Places? How are they going the manage check-ins? They said they were partnering with Gowalla and Foursquare but I cannot see how. Is Facebook going to kill this two successful startups?

Here from the official Fring blog:

If you want to be 1st to try the latest and greatest features, keep reading.

fring is hosting an exclusive preview for its new fringOut service (sorry, the preview version 4.4.10 is only available on Nokia, other users stay tuned). fringOut lets you call any landline or mobile in the world for almost free all from your mobile phone.

So, now you can call your friends who are not yet on fring. Call Abbey in Atlanta, Bob in Berlin, Clara in Cambodia or David in Dehli, for ‘almost-free’.

As always, chatting, calls and video calls to other fringsters and other internet friends is still completely FREE.

If you have questions about fringOut, you can check out our FAQ, our TOS see ouruser guide or drop us a line.

CafeScribe Features

Notes in MyScribe are done as overlays, so that they stay in context. Notes can also be shared, including in groups, which according to Isabella Hinds means that students can “have a dialog about the book while they’re reading.”

Groups may be created not only inside the classroom environment, but as part of the purchase of an eBook. The buyer can see who else purchased that same eTextbook, and choose to create or join a group around the book. Follett has observed that many students are creating study groups around books.

Groups are also very useful for instructors, who can create a group for their class. Hinds told us that this enables instructors to “enrich the core book with content or comments that they find valuable.” They can also better engage with students and ascertain whether students are really learning the material. Teachers can encourage students to ask questions, via the notes feature.

One of the main features of MyScribe that Hinds pointed to is maintaining pagination, which helps in group collaboration and also syncing eBooks with paper books.

eTextbook Market & Future

Currently there are about 10,000 books available in CafeScribe. Hinds said that Follett represents all of the major Higher Ed publishers, including the 5 largest.

The product is being used today by about 400 education institutions across the US. Some are using the product heavily, while others have just a few courses that utilize it. The product is currently being introduced in Canadian stores, but there are no plans to extend outside of North America.

As for its future, CafeScribe is making a push towards mobile – in particular the iPhone, Android, and iPad. It recognizes that students use a variety of devices nowadays, so it wants to go beyond the PC market. Whether CafeScribe can tackle eReader devices will, as noted above, depend on iPad pricing going down and eReader functionality going up.

Other companies in the eTextbook market include CourseSmart (which we reviewed in readwriteweb last August) and VitalSource.

Students & Teachers: Are You Using eTextbooks?

A study in May by OnCampus Research showed that 74% of students still prefer to use a printed textbook when taking a class. The Seattle Times also reported in May that eTextbooks are “flunking.” So clearly, eTextbooks have a long way to go. On the other side of the coin, eTextbooks are expected to 1 in 5 textbooks by 2014.

Much of the problem at present seems to be that eReaders are either too expensive (e.g. iPad) or not functional enough (e.g. Kindle). Those issues certainly seem solvable by 2014.

If you’re a student or teacher, we’d love your input in the comments about your use of eBooks – or if you don’t use them, why not?

(from readwriteweb)

With Crowdmap you can collect information from cell phones, news and the web, aggregate that information into a single platform and visualize it on a map and timeline.

Nothing to Install

Your site is hosted on our servers, so you have no installation to worry about. Instead, just choose a name and start customizing your site.

Interactive Map

One of the most powerful ways to visualize information is via a map. Choose a location and start plotting reports, information and other data right away.

Dynamic Timeline

Track your reports on the map and over time. You can filter your data by time and then see when things happened and where, as it’s also tied to the map.

“Real Time” Data Tracking

The admin area of Crowdmap has analytical tools for you to make sense of your incoming data in real-time.

Their goal is that you’ll use UberCab when you need a car service.

If you want to use it yo can use your iPhone app or SMS to request a black car limo service within a matter of minutes, for about 1.5x the cost of a taxi, with one click iPhone requests, with location based dispatch, with on demand limo service and in app billing – no cash needed.
Take a look at the video. It is quite an idea.

Give it a try, it is free.

You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. And you can record thoughts for later by leaving notes.

Imagine relationship management built into your email. For free.

I installed the plugin in Safari, Chrome and it works fine. The problem for me is that most of my contacts don’t have a social life… so the right column is empty, which is still better than to have it with ads.

I used it with google apps.

Give it a try, it is a good idea.

Going out on a trip? Would you like to have a web with all the prepaid phone plans around the word, which, by the way, you can contribute to?

It is there, in a wikimedia way: Pay as you Go

Google Chrome’s auto-suggest will automatically narrow down your bookmarks for you by adding a simple character to your keywords:

If you have a lot of bookmarklets or are simply running out of short keywords and want to better leverage your browser’s auto-suggest, you can add a tag character to your keyword.

e.g—a script bookmarklet that sends the page link in Gmail can be keyword: \mail

This is easier to remember and does not cause potential search collisions in Chrome Omnibar or Cybersearch Mozilla add-ons. In addition, some browser configurations will see the rarer tag character and show your bookmarklets in the url bar as suggestions.

This is especially useful when you “drill down” into sites as described in ourkeyword bookmarking feature. The further you go into the hierarchy of a web site with your keywords (i.e. using “lw” for the Lifehacker wiki, using “lwf” for the feature section of the wiki, and so on), the more likely you are to forget what the keyword is. As you type it out with this method, the auto suggest will narrow down your selection to help you remember. It’s simple, but very effective when the number of keywords in your arsenal gets a bit overwhelming.

(from lifehacker)

The iPhonesque open source OS oriented towards netbooks has more than just an incredibly sexy interface, with an App Store-like selection of over 700 apps (going on 1,000 before the end of the year) – giving users access to everything from Spotify to DropBox in a simple click. Jolicloud has also blended in a bit of social, allowing users a practical way to discover the best applications out there according to what their friends download and rate. Does that mean that the days of the unused Windows desktop icons are over ? Even better, users with the “Anywhere OS” installed on multiple computers automatically have access to all their applications and from whatever machine they’re on – definitely practical for when you are also transfering all your data entirely from one computer to another. Gotta love the cloud.

The Paris-based company is definitely aiming to make waves in cloud computing with its futuristic approach to operating systems, building its vision on the idea that tomorrow’s desktop computer market will be a combination of high-end Macs or netbooks – with not much in between. For anyone without the dough for a Mac, well, they’re probably going to shell-out no more than a few hundred bucks for a netbook. Thus, Krim could ultimately be banking on anyone without a Mac. Oh, but Jolicloud actually runs on a Mac as well.

Plus, that doesn’t mean Jolicloud is necessarily aiming to wipe out Windows either. Users can actually install the OS alongside Windows and use Wine for Windows-only products on the virtual desktop.

The start-up took $4.2 million from London-based Atomico Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners last summer and should be introducing their Freemium business model sometime soon. For now, everything is entirely free and given that the number of users supposedly increased by 50% within the first day of version 1.0′s release, I figure I’ll finish with one last thought (which also happens to be the company’s tag-line): you don’t need a better computer, you need a better operating system.

(from techcrunch)

Google has added a new feature to Gmail: the ability to save file attachments by simply dragging-and-dropping them onto the desktop. If you hover over the file icon or the “Download” link for any attachment, you’ll notice the new text prompting you to drag the file to your desktop to save.

We just tried out the new feature, and we have to tell you: It’s really as simple as it sounds. There is one caveat to saving file attachments via drag-and-drop, though: The feature is only available in Google Chrome.

Google has been adding more drag-and-drop functionality to Gmail in recent months. Back in April, Google launched the ability to add attachments to e-mails via drag-and-drop. In May, Google gave Gmail users the ability to add images to e-mails via drag-an-drop.

(from mashable)

All praise the zipper: the ubiquitous, maintenance-free, no muss, no fuss fastener that trumps both buttons and Velcro! Zippers operate smoothly, silently and safely day in and day out, often in close proximity to our most sensitive bodily parts yet they rarely – “There’s Something About Mary” excepted – cause us anxiety or grief. These 10 toothy examples of zany zipper art illustrate the mix of appreciation, admiration and YKK-stamped tabs by which society holds these fascinating fasteners.

Zippered Walnut

(images via: Ellen Rixford Studio and WebMD)

Artist Ellen Rixford knows how to grab one’s attention, as this zippered walnut shells, er, shows so well. The walnut is actually crafted from clay, is 6 inches long and is highlighted by an industrial zipper. Rixford created this striking image for a drug company advertisement… perhaps regarding a non-surgical treatment to replace testicular surgery.

Juming Museum’s Zipper Lotus Pond

(image via: BIG art)

Fly fishing anyone? Get your rod (and reel) to Taiwan, where the lushly landscaped grounds of the Juming Museum are graced with a most unusual pond. Designed by respected Taiwanese artist and sculptor Ju Chun, the Zipper Lotus Pond was completed in 2009.

(images via: My Confined Space and Broccoli City)

Sharp eyes may notice that the zipper slider carries the logo “JU-JUN”. It’s not clear exactly what the artist’s intent was in using this logo though the similarity to his name may offer a clue.

Zipper Tongue

(images via: Stylelist and Snopes)

When zipping your lips isn’t enough… yes, this is a photoshop. Not completely though, the zipper hardware was added to an actual “lingua bifida” body modification for a Worth1000 photoshop contest. Considering the increasing number of bodymods that have crossed the Net of late, we may yet see an actual zippered tongue some day. You just won’t see it in my bathroom mirror.

Life In The Fastener Lane

(images via: Pixyard, TACO and Telovation)

This group of images highlights zippers that have been painted or otherwise integrated into streets, avenues, boulevards and other paved pathways. One might ask (in a Seinfeld-esque voice),“What’s the deal with zippers and roads?” Perhaps artists note some correlation between the role of roadways in society and the functionality of zippers on an individual’s clothing. Or, maybe they just need sufficient space.

(image via: Impact Lab)

While paint and chalk make sense for roadway artwork, more obtrusive installations such as the Big Zip above are best suited to sidewalks and soft shoulders. Pedestrians and bicyclists may disagree, however.

Sebastian Errazuriz’s Zipper Dress

(images via: Britannica and Newslite)

Guys who already have trouble “unwrapping” their dates aren’t going to be thrilled by the Zipper N3 dress. Designed and created by 31-year-old Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuriz, the intention wasn’t to facilitate hanky panky but instead provide women with a so-called “credit crunch dress” that can be adapted to form over 100 different styles. Errazuriz used 120 zippers to make the dress, which he hopes to have mass-produced by a major clothing firm.

Amalia Versaci’s Upcycled Zippers

(images via: AmaliaVersaci and Amalia Versaci – ETSY Shop)

Amalia Versaci has got a name made for fashion and indeed, the Rhode Island School of Design grad focuses her creative energies on clothing and accessories. Her special emphasis is on the zipper, however, and her designs often employ zippers and parts thereof in original yet appealing ways. Versaci has taken a special interest in vintage and upcycled zippers, taking inspiration from the shapes and designs popular when zippers were as new, exciting and futuristic as Velcro is today.

(images via: Amalia Versaci)

Hear no evil with Amalia Versaci’s zipper slide earrings! I SAID, HEAR… ok, we’ll move on. Upcycling vintage zipper slides and adding today’s colors, tones and shades adds up to an attractive combination well suited for today’s New Traditionalists.

(images via: Amalia Versaci)

Jewelry isn’t the only purpose Versaci dedicates her zipper creations. Above are magnets made from heavy-duty YKK industrial zipper slides and collages crafted from vintage zippers still attached to their backing fabric strips.

Hirotoshi Itoh’s Grinning Stones

(images via: ScienceBlogs Bio-ephemera)

Part of the fascination of fossils is that what’s been locked in rock for countless millions of years is suddenly displayed before your very eyes. Hirotoshi Itoh’s zippered stones are something like that, except weirder. From skull-like grinning boulders to congealed coin purses to a soupcon of seashells secreted in silica, Itoh offers a glimpse into the heart of rocks whose concealed treasures are revealed with a mere casual zip.

(image via: Jiyuseki)

Creepiest, of course, are Itoh’s granitic grinning stones. Funny, I don’t recall Han Solo smiling as he gazed out from Jabba’s imprisoning block of Carbonite… unlike Itoh’s mouthy marbles, I guess he just wasn’t into it.

Benoit Lemoine: The Zip Tape Experiment

(images via: Benoit Lemoine and Design-Milk)

The cool thing about zipper tape is that it can be used to reveal heretofore un-noticed shapes and structures that COULD be zipped but aren’t. Forked tree limbs, bipod street lights, anything that conforms to a Y-shape (don’t get cheeky now)… just zip it! Benoit Lemoine has made somewhat of an artistic career for himself being the Banksy of Zipperdom, an odd avocation if there ever was but hey – someone’s gotta do it.

(images via: Stupid.com)

A variation on the zipper tape Lemoine chooses to use is Popped Zipper Tape, which makes your parcel, package, briefcase or whatever look like it, well, popped a zipper.

Karen L. Davidson’s Zipper Mosaics

(images via: Zipper Mosaics by Karen L. Davidson)

Winters are long & cold up in Minot, ND, and residents have come up with some interesting ways to avoid cabin fever, snow blindness and the like. One of the coolest (sorry) ways to get through those frigid months – the ones with an R in them – is Original Zipper Art as practiced and promulgated by Karen L. Davidson. From pins to plates to Christmas Trees and more, Davidson knows how to make a zipper do tricks that’ll bust your buttons.

(images via: Zipper Mosaics by Karen L. Davidson)

Davidson takes advantage of the wildly diverse color palette bestowed upon today’s plastic, polyester and metal zippers by manufacturers, thus avoiding messy paints and volatile solvents. A bonus is that the colors are either baked on or mixed into the zippers’ substrates. Designed to be long lasting from the start, Davidson’s zippers do the same for her art!

Zipping Across The Ocean

(images via: Asiajin)

Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki set out to make a big impress ion at the 2010 Setouchi International Art Festival, and one would have to agree his zany zipper motorboat helped him succeed in spades. Suzuki must have noticed that the long, radiating wakes left by boats on smooth water look a lot like zippers unzipping… well, somewhat. In any case, inspiration led to construction and the result was the world’s only Zipper Motorboat. Here’s a short video of Suzuki unzipping Neptune’s fly:

Zipper Motorboat at SIAF 2010, via Shumiyama

(image via: Funny-Potato)

Zippers: where would clothing (and zany art) be without them? Buttons and Velcro have their good points but zippers are faster than buttons and they make a cool sound; not that painful ripping sound that so irritated Morty Seinfeld and doubtless many others. The Art of the Zipper simply completes the zipper’s long interaction with modern society by meshing the functional with the creative. Not much more to say… so I’ll zip it.

(from weburbanist)

The Taxi Fare Calculator was developed by Ricky Brundritt as a submission to the King of Bing Maps competition.

The app is available at the Bing Maps website right now. Just pick a region (results are best within a major metropolitan area, such as New York or London) and type in two addresses. The app gives the shortest route and a fare estimate based on normal rates for cabs in the area. The pick-up charge, time charges and by-the-mile costs are all factored in where applicable.

This tool should prove helpful to users who want to save some cash by comparing routes or who need to make sure they have the money on hand for a trip they intend to take.

Taxi Fare Calculator is one of many apps being considered for Microsoft’s King of Bing Maps title. The winner will soon be selected by a panel that includes CNET’s Josh Lowensohn, Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling and Directions’ Joe Francica. Expect the announcement to show up on the Bing blog August 20.

The Bing blog already features a few other candidates along with Taxi Fare Calculator, including World of Football, Random Location, Ricky’s Data Viewer, Apo-AT, Festivals de Theatre, GeoSalesTax and Microsoft Regional Directors. You can use some of the candidates in Bing Maps right now.

Microsoft has been using this competition and other initiatives to tout Bing Maps’ development API and snazzy Silverlight 4 bells and whistles. This product needs to compete in a market already dominated by more entrenched applications such as Google Maps and Mapquest. It’s not easy to beat the reigning champions, but Foursquare integration and apps such as the Tour de France map and the street level stargazing feature are as likely to offer a formidable challenge as anything we’ve seen.

What do you think of the competition apps so far?

(from Mashable)

Just go to http://jailbreakme.com with safari in your iPhone and slide the bar. Jailbreaking your iPhone now just as easy as this…

Why should you do that?

Well, first now it is legal, you can always restore your iPhone if you prefer, and you get cydia, like an appstore with software you will never find in the apple app store, such as my-wi which converts your iPhone into a wifi hotspot using your 3G, or have voip calls via 3G, or have sms delivery reports, or shortcuts for bluetooth, or you name it.

I’ve seen some people reporting that when they did the JB the had issues with mms and facetime. The same people by restoring and applying the jailbreakme again, fixed the problems.

Did it work for you?

Back in August ;-)

Want your app to talk to Twitter? There’s a button for that. Want your app to use text-to-speech? No problem. Use the GPS? Piece of cake. Or so says Google, who had tested the app for a year prior to launch with groups that included “sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergrads who are not computer science majors,” reports The New York Times, who broke the story this morning.

Does that list of testers sound a little odd to you? “It’s so easy a high school girl can use it!” Or a nursing student! (A profession still dominated by women, mind you.) In any event, the point The New York Times was making is that Google App Inventor is so easy anyone can use it; they just came about that point in a somewhat sexist way.

Official DIY App Highlights Difference Between Apple and Google Philosophies

But DIY app creation tools aren’t new, nor are they unique to Google Android. However, apps like these usually exist as third-party applications, not ones that are officially launched and blessed by the company whose software they support.

For example, in Apple’s ecosystem, there are a number of DIY apps that let non-developers create and submit iPhone applications to the iTunes App Store without needing to know Apple’s own development language. Last year, we profiled over a dozen of these services, ranging from the templated creations made with Sweb Apps to the more robust app builders from Appceleratorand Rhomobile.

Unfortunately, third-party Apple tools are always just one step away from being knocked out of existence, thanks to Apple’s ever-changing software developer kit license. Earlier this year, Apple famously updated its terms to specify that only applications written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript would be permitted in the iTunes Store. The move was a swipe at Adobe, and the intended victim was Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone packager, a tool that would have allowed Adobe developers to code for Apple’s platform with Flash. But in Apple’s zest to kick out Adobe, other application developers were fearful as well that they, too, would be affected.

Google: Anyone with an Idea is Welcome Here

Google, on the other hand, is taking an entirely different stance than Apple. Instead of locking down its App Market, barring entry to anyone but those who know how to code in the languages it specifies, Google is embracing “openness,” saying anyone with an idea is welcome here.

To function, Google’s App Inventor uses the Open Blocks Java library for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and derives from thesis research by Ricarose Roque. It’s also closely related to the Scratch programming language – a language, notes Forrester Research principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond, that was banned on the iPhone.

Yes, that may mean a bunch more “junk” applications, as TechCrunch rightly points out. But it could also mean more great applications, too. Or maybe just more of everything. Like Michael Gartenberg, partner at Altimeter Group, quipped on Twitter this morning: “…look how much damage those WYSIWYG word processors and graphics programs have done.” Damage? Like a Web where everyone can publish?

Those interested in signing up for App Inventor can do so here.

(from readwriteweb)

We drink beer from bottles, but even with a small single-serving wine bottle there is always a glass – so why not combine the two in to one and save everyone some hassle? These plastic glasses might not go over well at a formal dinner party, but for a toast-on-the-go or quick picnic they could just be the perfect table(-free)wares.

One inventor did just that, and then founded Wine Innovations around the concept. Though his yogurt-style, peal-off lid initially did not go over well with potential investors it ultimately has led to booming sales in Great Britain.

Think about it: sports games, large celebrations, all without the worry of broken glass underfoot and with the easy-carry advantage of walking around with non-spill, pre-filled glasses of wine. Hopefully they can do not just red and white but sparkling wines as well, since these would be ideal for something like a sizable New Years Eve event.

Whether this one-use disposable partyware is a step in the right direction in terms of sustainability is another question. Still, the units can be recycled, and surely it is at least a better design than handing out both miniature bottles and plastic cups (as they do on airplanes, etc…) for wine.

(from dornob)

The apps [iTunes link] are divided into six sections containing more than 500 searchable listings, complete with venue information, photos and editors’ reviews:

• Neighbourhoods: Browse all listings in a single neighborhood
• See & Do: Major sites, museums, parks, farmers markets and other attractions
• Places to Stay: Organized according to location, price range, type (i.e. fashionable, family-friendly or classic), and a key feature (gym/spa, internet access, etc.)
• Eat & Drink: Mainly high-end sit-down restaurants with some exceptions, like a well-known knishery and an East Village dumpling house
• Shopping: Features an array of products, including apparel, home, records and electronics from high-end to outlets
• Nightlife: Bars, music, dancing and other venues for late-night entertainment
• Word of Mouth: Recommendations from celebrated New Yorkers like designers Oscar de la Renta and Paul Smith, nightclub owner Amy Sacco and architect Carlos Almadada

The list of venues is well-curated; there are enough to appeal to a relatively broad array of tastes without being overwhelming. Users can bookmark interesting listing by adding them to a to-do list and share them via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail.

What’s most impressive about the apps is their Augmented Reality functionality (pictured above). Simply point your phone in a direction and it will bring up images of nearby attractions, which you can narrow down by type. You can also use GPS to pull up venue locations on a map.

The apps contain a number of other neat little features as well, including a handful of guided audio tours and magazine articles, a travel journal, a Flickr-integrated personal photo log, a timeline of the city’s history and essential travel information about local customs, transportation and the location of tourist offices and so forth.

What’s more, Condé Nast Britain promises to update the apps’ content every four months free of charge.

The only major drawback are the prices, which are hard to justify when free apps like restaurant-finder Urbanspoon also come with many similar features (although Urbanspoon’s Augmented Reality functionality is admittedly more basic and many users would rather read a review from a food editor than from the guy next door). In all fairness, Zagat’s TO GO app [iTunes link] also costs $9.99, but then it has a key feature Condé Nast Traveller’s does not: the ability to make restaurant reservations. It also covers almost every major U.S. city in one app.

(via mashable)

This is big. Now if you have an iPhone 4 you are not obliged to use FaceTime alone, calling only to other iPhone 4 users using wi-fi.

Now you can call using 3g, and the thing I wonder is if you can call a PC running skype. That would be  big for me. I could call my mum in Spain and have a video call. I hope you can do so because in their official blog they put it this way:

Face-to-face video calls with friends on their Droids, Nokia (Symbian S60) and other iPhones

For those (like me) that have an iPhone 3GS, it does work as well. It uses the rear camera, so impossible to see your caller at the same time he sees you, but good enough for people, like me who has a baby and the grandma wants to see him (again if you can call a PC).

For the time being I just tested the test call. Quality was pretty bad compared with FaceTime videos I see around.

Another big thing (to be tested because I am a bit hesitant about the functionality in general) is multitasking. In principle it can run in the background, and uses push to notify new call.

They have also added twitter and facebook, but who wants that?

Good work Fring.

Soho OS

The Time

The company has already begun putting the money to good use. As noted in the initial post, “the interface could certainly use a UX overhaul,” and it got one, and a new logo to boot. With a new color scheme, layout and consolidation, the new interface’s look & feel is softer, more pleasant on the eye, and more convenient to use. A definite improvement on the interface we previously reviewed.

Soho OS also beefed up communications features with video chat, SMS, VOIP, voice messaging, as well as improved conference calling and broadcast emails.

I really like where Soho OS is going but would like to see them charging a tiered service fee rather than rely exclusively on cutting commissions off their 3rd party integrated services. There’s no shame in charging your customers kids, especially if you provide them with clear value. Tattoo that please.

(from techcrunch)

Inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s book What Would Google Do?, Oracle has prepared a new white paper that outlines 10 ways retailers can profitably navigate today’s competitive landscape, which is marked by transformative consumer technologies as well as profound macroeconomic changes.

In his book, Jarvis reverse-engineers the success of Google and offers a prescription for success in a new economy that Google itself is helping create.

Titled “New Rules of Retail,” Oracle’s new white paper draws on Jarvis’s approach, focusing specifically on ways retailers can respond profitably to the new realities. The 10 rules, each illustrated by specific retail success stories, include

1. Listen to your customers. Social media means customers are talking to each other. Convert critics into fans and fans into influencers.
2. Become a destination for information. Assume customers are accessing information via smart phones—even from within stores. Retailers that share the most accurate and comprehensive product information will win favor with consumers.
3. Be transparent. Share both successes and failures with customers. Customers appreciate candor and want to align with retailers that reflect their values.
4. Communities of customers already exist, so help them organize better. Bring like-minded customers together to promote product discoveries and word-of-mouth advertising.
5. Serve small markets with niche products. Today’s technologies make it much easier to reach small, widely distributed markets.
6. Offer experiences to go with the products customers buy. Different experiences attract different customers for exactly the same products.
7. Use social networks to make better merchandising decisions. Social media makes it easier not only to collect data but also to collaborate and vote on new ideas.
8. Being green earns customers’ respect and lowers costs too. Consider new ways to recycle, be more energy efficient, design better stores, reduce emissions, and encourage environmental values.
9. Be prepared to pounce on your customers’ fickle interests. When assortments are kept fresh, customers tend to visit stores more often.
10. Give staff permission to fail so innovation won’t be stifled. A culture that allows for risk-taking and early adoption of technology can pay off handsomely.

Read the “New Rules of Retail” white paper.

(from oracle)

Now with ebooks this is changing. There are still a lot of people who still things that all this kindle, iPad, Sony book reader are not the same, that they prefer to have a book in your hands. The smell of the book, the pages, the fact that there are no issues with direct light or if you take it to the beach… but if you think like this is probably because you are over 30.

Ebook readers have room for all the books you can have in a life time.

The parallelism would be CDs and MP3. Are you still buying CD’s? If you do, then traditional books are still for you.

Well what I wanted to discuss here is how do you organize your books. The ones you have on paper and the ones you have in your ebook reader and the ones you have in audio (this is my favorite now…).

For the paper ones, I take photos of each of them and I upload them to evernote. I have talked a million times about evernote, but briefly is a software that makes your photos indexable, so the text in it is searchable. I tag them and I put them all in a notebook called books.

Now every book has a note, so you can even add if you have lend it or tag it so.

True you have similar more dedicated software, but for me evernote works like charm. Same for the wine ;-)

If you want to have them in the cloud, so you can share, review, publish in facebook and so, there are 3 very good tools you should look at:

Visual Bookshelf from Live Social: This is a free software that it is fully integrated with facebook (and also they have a stand alone website), which is great for the following reasons:

You can have your full collection of books, those you have read, those you want to read and those you are reading.
You can publish at anytime in your wall that you are reading it. When you finish you are offered to give a rating and to write a review and then to publish it in your wall.
You can see what your friends are reading, which is the future of advertising. Direct recommendations from friends, who you trust in taste.

I started using this because my friend did.

Then I found:

Goodreads: They also have a dedicated site for this, also fully integrated into facebook. I also used it. I first exported all my books from Visual Shelf and imported them here. I prefer this site, but unfortunately none of my friends use it, and the fact I use and recommend this sort of sites is for the social aspect.

Finally:

Google Books: As a google fan boy I had to try this one. I don’t think they have an facebook extension, but I imported the book list too. It is ok because is google, but zero social

Conclusion:

For me Visual Shelf is the one that most of my friends use, so I use it, but I keep the three of them updated. Be aware you can import and export from all of them. Sometimes is not trivial though.

You can see the routes the cyclists are taking on the map, including important points like the beginnings and ends of stages. Weather forecasts, distances and times are provided for each stage, and results are updated in their own tab as they come in.

Microsoft has also put an elevation profile over the map. Just move your mouse along a route to see where the climbs and falls are.

Forget about your already outdated travel books. Stay.com has updated information on thousands of places to visit for your next vacation or business trip.

Simply collect everything you find interesting in your own personal guide. This way you can bring along all the details you need. You can print your guide in a nice compact format which is easy to fold and put in your pocket.

A very cool idea!

Here you have some:

Carrefour

Living in France and having Carrefour supermarket all around Europe, it is only now that I realized that there is a “C” in the white part of the logo. Carrefour is one of the biggest European retailers, and it’s also French for “crossroads”. The logo symbolizes this word via two opposite arrows. They also added the first letter of the name, because if you look closely you’ll see the letter C in the negative space between the two arrows.

Toblerone

You’ve probably seen the Toblerone logo dozens of times – it’s just a mountain, right? Look closer. There’s a bear shape hidden in the negative space within that mountain, symbolizing the city of Bern, Switzerland where the Matterhorn mountain that inspired the logo is located.

Sony Vaio

VAIO was originally just an acronym for Video Audio Integrated Operation – since changed to Visual Audio Intelligence Organizer. But the strange, seemingly abstract logo derives from another lucky coincidence: ‘VA’ represents an analog wave and ‘IO’ represents digital binary code, perfectly illustrating the integration of analog and digital technology.

Presbyterian Church

How many symbols can you fit into one relatively uncluttered, uncomplicated logo? The Presbyterian Church logo is a pretty good example of making this work: you’ve got a cross, a bible on a pulpit, a pastor’s robes, a dove, a fish and fire all within the same basic shape.

Northwest Airlines

Before they changed it to something far less interesting – and then faded into oblivion by merging with Delta – Northwest Airlines had one of those logos that contain a bit of symbolism entirely  unnoticed by the vast majority of the public. Sure, it’s got the ‘N’ and ‘W’, seemingly placed inside a circle for no good reason – but check out the location of that little triangle making up the upper corner of the ‘W’. It’s the arrow of a compass, pointing northwest.

Museum of London

Well now, isn’t that a pretty… blob. But there’s more to the Museum of London logo than an artsy splash of watercolor; the various colored circles actually represent the changing shape of London throughout history.

Milwaukee Brewers

Sure, it was just a bit of luck that gave the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team a name with the initials ‘M’ and ‘B’, but it took a great logo designer to see how those letters – combined with the negative space in a lowercase ‘b’ – could form a mitt with a baseball in it.

London Symphony Orchestra

The London Symphony Orchestra escaped its staid reputation a bit with this redesigned logo, featuring the letters ‘LSO’ in a modern script that forms a single wavy line. But what you may not see immediately is the abstract image of a conductor waving with one arm and conducting with the other.

Hope for African Children Initiative

In this trick of the eye, you’re actually drawn to look at the negative space first – the continent of Africa in white, albeit a rather unfaithful rendering. A closer look reveals the shapes of a child and a woman on either side in shades of orange.

Elefont

Designed by Mike Erickson (otherwise known as Logomotive) for a fictitious company, this logo has three different elements combined into one simple and visually striking symbol. That curving lowercase ‘e’, which stands for ‘elefont’ and highlights an elegant font, also has an elephant trunk shape hidden inside it.

Eighty 20

Do you ever see a logo and think to yourself, what was the designer thinking? How does this random image contribute to or identify this brand’s identity? In this case, at least, you’re simply not in on the joke – unless you’re a math nerd. If you view the dark squares as ‘1′ and the light squares as ‘0′, the two rows read 1010000 and 0010100, which read 80 and 20 in binary.

Cluenatic

Perhaps it’s not the most readable logo ever, but it works flawlessly as a visual representation of the puzzle game ‘Cluenatic’, which involves unraveling four clues. Each of the four letters in the world ‘Clue’ are nested inside each other like a puzzle or a maze.

Bison

Designed for a rock band from Vancouver, this logo is like one of those left brain/right brain quiz images: what do you see first, the picture or the word?

Amazon

This logo doesn’t seem to hide much at first sight, but it gives you a little insight in the philosophy behind the brand. First of all, the yellow swoosh looks like a smile: Amazon.com want to have the best customer satisfaction. The swoosh also connects the letters a and z, meaning that this store has everything from a to z.

Baskin Robbins

The old logo of Baskin Robbins had the number 31 with an arc above it. The new logo took this idea to the next level. The pink parts of the BR still form the number 31, a reference to the 31 flavours.

Big Ten

Big Ten is an academic union which was founded in the year 1896. Until 1990, this union consisted of 10 universities, but in June 1990 Pennsylvania State University was added. They didn’t want to change their name, so they added the number 11 to the logo.

Continental

Continental is a manufacturer of tyres. You could actually see this in their logo, because the first two letters create a 3-dimensional tyre.

Eight

Every letter is made of the number 8.

Fedex

This is probably one of the best known logos with a hidden meaning. If you look closely, you’ll see an arrow that’s formed by the letters E and x. This arrow symbolizes speed and precision, two major selling points of this company.

Formula 1

At first, this logo might not make much sense. But if you look closely, you’ll see the number 1 in the negative space between the F and the red stripes. I also love how this logo communicates a feeling of speed.

GreenLabs

I know this logo looks like a simple, boring green tree, but if you look at the tree crown, you’ll see that it can also be interpreted as a brain. The logo lays emphasis on the strong intellectual capabilities of the company’s staff and also reflects ‘green’ and ‘labs’ parts of their name.

Hartfort Whalers

This logo also uses a negative space to create the letter H. You can see three different parts: the letter H and W and a whale’s tail in blue.

NBC

The NBC (National Broadcasting Company) is one of the biggest American television networks. I think most of you have already seen the peacock in this logo. The peacock has 6 different tail feathers, referring to the six divisions at the time that this logo was created. The peacock’s head is  flipped to the right to suggest it was looking forward, not back.

Roxy

Roxy is a company that specializes in clothing and accessories for girls who love snowboarding, surfing… The company is actually a part of Quiksilver. The Roxy logo is made of two Quiksilver logos that form a heart.

Sun Microsystems

The Sun logo is one of the most famous ambigrams in the world. You can read the brand name in every direction; both horizontally and vertically. This logo was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt of the Stanford University.

Tostitos

If you look at the centre of this logo, you can see two people enjoying a Tostito chip with a bowl of salsa. This logo conveys an idea of people connecting with each other.

Twins

This logo was made for twins. To reflect the essence of the duo, a bold typeface was created to reflect the boldness of their approaches. The number 2 was integrated to show the creativeness of their ideas.

Unilever

Unilever is one of the biggest producers of food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. They produce a huge amount of different products and they wanted to reflect this in their logo. Each part of the logo has a meaning. For example: the heart represents love, care and health -  feeling good, a bird is a symbol of freedom. Relief from daily chores – getting more out of life.

Body Wisdom

In this case, a logo design for a high end day spa,the hands effectively convey massage, while the proximity of the “eyes” within the owl shape created by the hands clearly say “wisdom”.

Amnesty International 30th anniversary

This logo was designed by Pekka Piippo from Finland, for the Amnesty International 30th Anniversary of Finnish Division. Clever multiplication of 5 fingers on 6 hands mark the occasion of 30th Anniversary occasion.

ED logo

The designer of ED – “Elettro Domestici”, “Home Appliances” in English, changed the concept of traditional logo designing through this logo. The designer has amazingly used the negative space to demonstrate the letter “E” and “D”

Fuga

It is a logo for Architecture Center Of Budapest. It might seem something like a maze but if you follow the white space, the four lettered company name will become evident.

!N3K8

It is a business and IT consulting company based in the UK. The logo explains the word “intricate”

Lafayette

Galeries Lafayette (Paris), you will notice that it’s logo represents Paris with its joined letters “t” to form Eiffel Tower.

Marriage

What better logo can be used to symbolize a marriage with two mirrored “R” in the middle. No frills, no shadows, still so powerful and meaningful.

Mosleep

Very cleverly the designer have integrated a bed and the letter “M” in this logo. You cant miss to love it.

Piano Forest

If you notice the logo closely you will observe the trees placement form the keys of a piano. An intelligent way to display two different terms, “piano and forest”, through a single logo concept.

Yoga Australia

At first glance the logo is a simple picture of a young girl doing her yoga but if you watch it carefully the body posture is creating the Australia Map.

8 fish

I am sure, at the first glance you can’t figure out the 8 fish instantly or maybe I am being a little dumb. The designer, very creatively, uses the negative space and monotones to show 8 fish in one logo.

Academy of Fine Arts

The logo shows merger of the lower case letters “A”, “S” and “P”.

B

Although you might think it is a simple “Symbolic Logo” showing a “Bee” but what makes it more appealing is the portraying of the letter “B” and the real “Bee” through a simple symbol.

Minimum

This wavy logo looks like “a queue of letter ‘U’ but I would like you to give a second look. Designed by Kilment Kalchev, the logo spells the word minimum in an unrecognizing manner. I really enjoyed figuring it out

New Man

The reversible Newman logo. This logo is the best example of simple but clever logo.

Treacy Shoes

This logo is the cutest example of hidden logos. The hidden shoe packed between the company initials conveys the company message in a very stylish and interesting way.

Best Blogs

• Zenhabits
• PostSecret
• Climate Progress
• HiLobrow
• Hipster Runoff
• Kottke.org
• Cake Wrecks
• The Oatmeal
• S___ My Kids Ruined
• Deadline Hollywood
• Everything Everywhere
• The Sartorialist
• Information Is Beautiful
• The Daily Kitten
• Shorpy
• Apartment Therapy
• Double X
• Strobist
• Roger Ebert’s Journal
• The Awl
• GeekDad
• Engadget
• The Washington Note
• The Consumerist
• Pitchfork

Essential Blogs

• The Daily Wh.at
• TechCrunch
• Gawker
• Politico’s Ben Smith
• Boing Boing

Overrated Blogs

• FAIL Blog
• The Big Lead
• Perez Hilton
• Mashable
• Daily Kos

Read more here.

Ever since the first iPhone, there has been a “Notes” application. However, the ability to save and manage notes has always been fairly minimal. Now, with iOS4, Gmail users can easily manage their notes, even across multiple Gmail accounts.

One of the apps that is seemingly unchanged from the very first iPhone release is the Notes app. While it fulfills the basic functions of a notepad, many users want more functionality. Specifically, people want a good way to save and manage their notes. Up until recently, your only options were emailing directly from the Notes app, or syncing with iTunes.

iOS4 users who have Gmail accounts will notice a few new settings. Amongst those is the ability to individually toggle mail, calendar, and notes syncing. If you turn on notes syncing, all of your notes will automatically be copied to your Gmail account. Once they are synced however, they may be difficult to find.

To find notes inside Gmail, look for a “Notes” label on the left side of the sceen. If it is not visible, the label may be hidden. Click on the link that says “X Number more” (in the above screen shot it indicates “3 more”) to pull up the list of all labels. Once you click on the “Notes” label, you should see all of your notes copied over from your device. The synchronization is done over-the-air, meaning it does not require an iTunes sync to copy them to Gmail.

From here you can organize your notes, add labels and delete them. The one limitation is you cannot add anything to the notes, or edit them in any way. While this may seem like a flaw in the design, it’s because Gmail is treating the notes as an email message. You cannot edit the notes just as you cannot edit past emails.

While not a perfect solution, this added functionality is a welcome improvement.

(from appadvice)

((created by TechCrunch Europe)

Expensify is an application developed with the premise that the process of creating accurate expense reports doesn’t have to be nearly as difficult as most people make it. Rather than letting receipts pile up and manually typing each item you’ve purchased into a massive spreadsheet, Expensify lets you import expenses directly from your credit card without any typing, photocopying, or calculator usage required. Although the application is aimed at employees, accountants, freelancers, contractors, and students, it could really be used by anyone at all who needs to keep track of expenses for tax purposes or to receive reimbursement from work.

To start creating expense reports with Expensify, create an account with your Gmail, Google Apps, or Yahoo! login. The application also integrates with FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and SalesForce, which means people who already use these services can input even less information before getting started. To begin creating expense reports, add your credit card or online banking information, and watch as Expensify begins populating the page with all of your most recent transactions. Click on any purchases that were business-related, and Expensify will automatically gather and save the e-receipt for that purchase. If an e-receipt isn’t available for the transaction, then Expensify will prompt you to scan the original receipt to be saved and archived as a PDF file. Once all of your receipts have been uploaded, Expensify will handle everything and produce an accurate, complete expense report without any math required.

In addition to handling basic expense reports, Expensify also offers a number of advanced features such as mileage logs, time trackers, and mobile applications that let you input expenses directly at the time of purchase. For managers who are responsible for reimbursing employee expenses, the application lets you approve expense reports online and reimburse via credit card or direct deposit. Now that paper receipts are increasingly becoming a relic of the past, Expensify is positioned to become the new way that expense reporting is done at businesses across the country.

Practical Uses:

• Create an expense report in minutes
• Take a photo of your receipt with your mobile phone and save it online
• Get reimbursed for purchases without a paper receipt by getting an e-receipt instead
• Receive expense reimbursements via credit card or direct deposit

Insider Tips:

• Download the mobile app to input expense information on the go
• Email a scanned copy of a paper receipt to Expensify to be added to your account
• Export any expense reports to QuickBooks
• Track cash purchases by sending a text message to Expensify with the transaction information

What we liked:

• Expensify calculates expense totals for you and reduces the chance of human error
• Mobile application lets you snap a photo of any receipt, to be saved in the system
• Creating expense reports with Expensify takes much less time than manually copying and adding up each receipt
• Expense reports can be approved or rejected in a matter of minutes, since everything is automated online

What we didn’t like:

• Expensify only handles expense reports, and users must use separate web-apps for other financial business matters like invoicing or accounting

Alternatives:

• ExpenseCloud – expensecloud.com
• ExpenseWire – www.expensewire.com
• FastDue – www.fastdue.com
• Freelance Total – www.freelancetotal.com

Company Info:

• Launched: May 2008
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: David Barrett
• Web site: www.expensify.com

Costs:

• Free to create and submit expense reports
• Free to approve expense reports from 2 employees (submitters) per month
• $5 per submitter, per month for additional expense reports

Rating:

• 5 out of 5 (wow)

(via appvita)

The best:

Folders: I used to have 7 or 8 screens, now I have only 1.
All inboxes in 1: I keep my inboxes to zero messages. I love to see all the incoming email in a single place, from any of my email accounts. Now you have subtile improvements such as highlighting stuff like telephone numbers, addresses, dates, so you can take action.
Bed mode: When you double click there is now an icon to block the screen so it doesn’t rotate. Great for reading in bed.
Tap to focus in videos: Great. The Zoom for photos not that great, but handy. Camera seems to be faster when shooting.

The disappointments:

Multitasking: is it a joke? True that there are not many apps making use of multitasking but the fact of having all the apps down in the dock when double clicking home and when you click on any of them is just like opening like before, makes it a joke. Where is skype? IMs? I guess it will improve in the future, but today, it just sucks. The only app I use regularly that uses multitasking is Evernote, and it is not that great the implementation they did. I read you can record a note and do other stuff but…

It is fine…

ibooks: ibooks app rocks. Far sexier and better than kindle. Bookmarks sync with iPad and books look great, but… who read books in an iPhone? I prefer a trillion times to listen to books, put the iPhone in my pocket and listen.
Tip for ibooks: they use .epub extension, so if you have any .epub books, just drag them to your iTunes and you’ll have them in your iPhone. Just great.

Now that I have iOS4 in my 3GS, do I really need to buy an iPhone 4???

I am sure a lot of people is going to be asking this question. What else do you get? A better display? A better camera? Maybe the killer feature for the switch is facetime, but I still don’t know how it works. Do you have to start a regular call before starting? If so, it is now worth it for me. The other end cannot be a computer and I don’t know anybody with an iPhone 4.

Now if you have to make a call, lets suppose my mum in Spain buys an iPhone 4, then I have to spend a lot of money to call her first to Spain from a Swiss phone. If you can start the call over wifi (no need to make a call) then it is a different story. It might be a good thing.

By the way, is Fring or Skype going to support the front camera? if that is the case, then yes…

First make sure that:

• If you have a Jailbroken iPhone 3GS with the OLD BOOTROM and you DID NOT use Spirit to jailbreak then you can create the ipsw with PwnageTool 4.0 and restore with your jailbroken recovery mode.
• If you have an iPhone 3GS with the NEW BOOTROM this is NOT supported by PwnageTool 4.01

This is what you have to do:

1. Download Official iPhone iOS 4 for iPhone 3GS here (official from Apple).
2. Download Pwnage Tool 4.01 from any of this locations:
   • http://www.iphone-storage.de/PwnageTool_4.01.dmg
   • http://dl.finalgaming.de/dev-team/PwnageTool_4.01.dmg
   • http://www.stimp.nl/mirrorfiles/PwnageTool_4.01.dmg
3. Download iTunes 9.2 (you can do that but opening iTunes and look for upgrades)
4. Now run the PwnageTool. If it is in the same directory of the image ipsw image you downloaded in the step 1, then it will see that it the image to use. Just use Simple Mode and this image. This will create a new image that by default will be placed on your desktop. You can then close the PwnageTool.
5. Now before you upgrade your iphone, you could consider installing from Cydia AptBackup (from BigBoss). That will know which Cydia apps you have installed and in a later stage restore them.
6. Now, back up your phone, by connecting it to iTunes
7. Switch off your phone by holding on the top button and sliding to switch it off.
8. Make sure that it is connected it to the mac with the image you created and iTunes is open. Now hold the top and home button to enter into recovery mode.
9. iTuenes will tell you it is in recovery mode. Now you have to hold the Option key and click on restore. That will allow you to select the image on your desktop.
10. That’s it. The restore upgrade will not take a lot of time. What takes time is once you have iOS4 to restore you latest config.

If you have gone to the 10 steps you should have an iPhone 3GS with iOS4 and after more than an hour (in my cases) the same you had before.

Now you go to Cydia and install AptBackup, click on restore and voila, all your Cydia apps.

I had a problem though. My iPhone had a safe mode due to a problem with an app in Cydia. The app in question was MyFi. I had to remove it and now everything is OK.

Anthropomorphic design is nothing new, but these furniture objects are quite literally made of people. A cross between art photography,performance artand home furniture design, these strange shots show us a surreal artistic perspective on everyday household objects. These photographs may not be safe for work … nor are the creations they depict safe, and they do not really work.

From stacked human shelves to place settings set on structural bodies, arched figures holding entertainment systems to a lamp-headed person, these images shot by photographer David Blazquez feel almost uncomfortably raw and personal.

The feeling of discomfort is augmented, of course, by the nudity of the posed figures – but is also tied to the surreal depictions of familiar forms. The composite ‘people furniture’ seems at once stable and solid yet also simultaneously soft and poised to collapse.

Sensual or sexist? Simplistic or sublime? It is said of the best and most controversial artists in history that they were masters of their craft before they broke away from mainstream techniques, materials or approaches. Likewise, Peter Rolfe did not simply start by making suggestive and erotic pieces of furniture – he began by becoming a master of fine wood furniture design and construction.

These forms may come as a shock to moral sensibilities – or might not, depending upon the cultural context of the viewer. Either way, however, the layered, carved and polished wooden forms are incredibly well-made despite the complexities involved with having opening and closing doors, drawers and other moving elements.

Whether sublime, sexy or something else entirely, each part is carved with incredible delicacy and precision – from the human forms themselves to the props with which they interact – such as the supporting object above designed to look the part of an remarkably life-like cloth draped over a dresser.

Before you begin to wonder whether this work is more sexist than sexual, it is worth noting that he has crafted male forms as well as female ones.

Still, some of the women are modeled with arguably unrealistically ‘perfect’ curves by societal standards – and the locations of some of the drawer openingsand storage spaces do leave open questions about just how erotic these pieces truly are. But perhaps that is their purpose, or at least part of the point: to create conversations, spark controversy and question our avoidance of sexually suggestive forms in contemporary furniture design.

(from dornob)

While the YouTube Video Editor is certainly nothing to compete with the likes of Final Cut Pro or Premiere, it has the basic functionality needed to finally make it possible for those living the ultra-mobile, ultra-lightweight lifestyle to put their videos online without having to leave all the unwieldy odds and ends.

The editor is simple and intuitive, with a drag-and-drop interface showing a full thumbnail inventory of all of your videos. Editing a video consists of setting a starting and stopping point for each clip, so if you want to select multiple clips from the same video, you simply drag that video to the bar below and repeat the process for each clip. In much the same way, different videos, or clips from those videos, can be spliced together.

Of course, rough editing like this can leave some interesting audio, so YouTube also provides you with audio tracks to overlay over the entire video from its AudioSwap library. Two caveats come with using the audio overlay – adding an audio track from the AudioSwap library will permanently erase the audio track on the mashed-up video and YouTube says that it may display advertisements on videos using these audio tracks.

(from readwriteweb)

Like its progenitor, Memeo Connect still offers drag-and-drop uploads, but in the latest release, the application’s operating system integration has been dramatically improved. Most notably, your Google Docs folder now appears as a virtual drive that Memeo labels “GDrive”, and, according to company representatives, the name is being used with Google’s blessing.

But Is it Really a “GDrive”?

To Internet early adopters, the name “GDrive” rings more than a few bells. It’s referring to the long-rumored cloud storage service that Google has yet to launch. In its imagined state, Google’s GDrive would have been a lot like Microsoft’s SkyDrive: several gigabytes of free storage available on the Web for all your files. On the theoretical GDrive, however, files could be in any format, of any size and there would be easy ways to sync them or move them back and forth between your computer and the cloud. Office files would open with Google’s Docs service, an online counterpart to desktop programs like Microsoft Office, and some even imagined that GDrive would further integrate with other Google properties, like Picasa for photos or YouTube for videos.

Google never fully realized everyone’s GDrive dreams, but its Google Docs service is functional enough for most. It allows for the upload of any file type while multiple third-party services offer decent options for keeping files in sync between your computers and cloud. These include Memeo competitors like Box.net, Dropbox, Syncplicity, SugarSync, OfficeSync, Gladinet and more.

There are few programs that actually offer the full virtual drive functionality that Memeo now does, though. The company worked closely with Google to build this latest version of its Connect software and when Google engineers found out Memeo was calling the virtual folder it creates “GDrive,” they had a good laugh.

Sorry, Internet, Google isn’t designing its own GDrive service anytime soon, but it’s well aware of the rumors.

Google actually prefers that, when it comes to GDrive-type offerings, third parties do it for them. The closest thing we’ll see to a Google-branded tool of any sort is a desktop uploader application now being built, sources tell us. But it’s no GDrive, based on what we’ve heard.

Version 2.0: More OS Integration Blurs Line Between Desktop and Cloud

In Memeo’s case, version 2.0 of its software continues to offer drag-and-drop uploads (even folders!) and automatic synchronization. But it goes further with a combination of features that make using its so-called GDrive a more viable option. For example, you can save files from your desktop-based applications like Microsoft Office directly to Google Docs via GDrive, and you can open GDrive-hosted files with its associated native desktop program. In other words, it blurs the line between the cloud and the desktop, just as Google’s mythical GDrive would have supposedly done. And for that reason, we don’t at all begrudge Memeo the name “theft.”

Memeo Connect‘s other new features include the ability to select multiple files at once for deletion (from the cloud), filter files by type or category, download all Google Docs with a click, view folders shared with you via Google Docs and more.

And let’s not forget one of the most exciting new features: full text search for documents, another benefit of the in-depth collaboration between Memeo and Google when building this new version of Connect. To truly transition to cloud-hosted files, this feature is considered a must-have for many users.

For Business Users Only?

Memeo Connect is more business-focused than it is a consumer tool. It’s not available as a “freemium” offering, as some would expect. Surprisingly, that’s not Memeo’s decision, but rather Google’s. Google restricts its API usage for these types of synchronization services so that they only work with those who have business-level accounts.

As far as pricing goes, for Google Premier users, it’s $9 a year per user and for non-Premier users, it’s $59 a year per user, which includes a new Google Apps Premier Account in addition to the sync service.

Memeo Connect 2.0 is available for free evaluation from here. Both Mac and PC versions are available.

(from readwriteweb)

Flowdock is similar to google wave, with strong focus on tagging. The best way for you to understand how it works it to watch their video:

Check out what Kevin Rose, the founder and CEO of Digg has to say on how to improve the iPad:

To fix Growl

Download a pre-patched GrowlMail.bundle and drop it in your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/ directory. If you want it available to multiple users on your system, use /Library/Mail/Bundles/

Download: GrowlMail.mailbundle

To fix Letter Opener

Close the mail application. In finder go to Macintosh HD /Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled)

Copy OMiC.mailbundle to Bundles

Replace the old info.plist (located inside contents folder) for this one: Info.plist

(all images copyright Clark Little, used with permission)

Clark Little is pretty well known today as the foremost shorebreak art photographer (his art has been seen on “Good Morning America”, and featured in a number of glossy magazines all over the world). But as much as we like the fantastic shots of various wave’ innards, we are even more impressed to see him pitched against dangerous, massive amounts of water – violent waves, where you only have a moment to make that shot and to get out of the harm’s way.

With exclusive permission of Clark Little Photography we publish today the rarely-seen photographs of Clark Little heading with his camera into…

Into the Vortex!

(Clark with his camera “inside” and “under” the waves)

Encounter with a Wave (almost alien-like in intensity, if you ask me):

The Result: Out of This World

A glorious, almost Mandelbrot-like complexity is simply striking in this “Glitter” photograph (our favorite):

Unusual, over-saturated colors show up inside crystal clear waves, reflecting kaleidoscopic world around them:

There is also a place for pure abstraction, even psychedelic touches:

This image is titled “The Twelve Disciples” – see if you can spot some faces inside that wave, too:

Here is perhaps his most famous image: the wave’s “mohawk”, an amazingly colorful splash, featured recently inside National Geographicmagazine:

Another singular splash:

Inside the belly of the beast: “The Twister” photograph shows what a violent wave is made of -

Even in the absence of killer monster waves, the shorebreak art can look slightly alien… Here is the little “Frosty” guy:

(all images copyright Clark Little)

The Book! The Ultimate Spectacular Photo Book!

Can’t get the computer screen wide enough and HD TV capable enough to give justice to Clark Little’s slices of glorious wave eye-candy? Well, now you can order his book, a coffee table-sized huge book, in fact arguably a “mother of all coffee table books”: 182 pages, over 100 photographs, 12×12 size, weighing close to 7 pounds.

Make sure you own a coffee table big enough to do this book justice (you might have to move your coffee cup closer to the edge, but then you might be already seating at the edge of your seat – with excitement over Clark Little’s fantastic images).

(Clark Little with Jack Johnson (musician) and Kelly Slater (9-time Surfing World Champion) at book signing)

Some of Clark’s newest images can be seen here… don’t forget to look for his book in your bookstore, or order it online.

(from dark roasted blend)

Two months ago, Google announced some major new features for Google Docs. Users were able to preview these upgrades, which included completely group chat, real-time collaboration tools, and completely redesigned editors for documents, spreadsheets, and drawings.

From now on, anytime you create a new document, you’ll be doing so from the new version of Google Docs. Documents already created using the older editor will remain in that interface, and you’ll soon be able to move those older documents to the new version of Docs, too.

Here’s a little video that highlights some of Docs’ new features:

Enterprise-level users of Google Apps will also see the new default interface soon.

Here’s what the rebuilt Docs looks like, in case you haven’t been testing it out over the past couple months:

This upgraded version becoming Docs’ new default interface comes at just the right time; Microsoft recently announced a Google Docs competitor in Office Web Apps, a web-based suite that includes a text editor/word processor, spreadsheet editor and presentation software.

(from Mashable)

One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.

If you collect other data about your trip, such as your heart rate or other body monitoring stats, those can be overlayed as a graph below at the bottom of the screen. I’d love to see an iPhone or Android fitness app that takes advantage of these new capabilities.

Another new feature in Google Earth is the ability to launch a regular Web browser from within the desktop app. Hopefully, that is the first step towards bringing Google Earth completely from the desktop to the Web. Otherwise, it might end up like Second Life.

Below is a video Google Earth product manager Peter Birch made of his bike ride to work.

(from techcrunch)

When you first here about it you think that this will kill foursquare and gowalla, but if you read twitter’s blog you will see that apart from letting people tag specific places they will also allow apps like gowalla’s and foursquare linked to twitter (the big bro) post also specific locations.

In addition to this twitter will allow external apps to access places information through an improved API.

Will this kill Gowalla and Foursquare?

Well they both have a niche: games, major, stuff you leave, photos, tips, so … I don’t think so. It will just make twitter better.Also don’t forget about Google Places:

Before we use to have cabinets where we stored our papers, now we have bookmarks, and other internet services. We have moved to have an Internet Explorer browser with favorites that are duplicated and useless as we used to just click favorite and forget about it, then 5 years later realize that we have hundreds of bookmarks in the office computer, different bookmarks at home, in our laptop… basically a useless mess.

The idea of this blog entry is to show a set of tools that can help you be organized in this chaotic Internet so you can be more productive.

If you are a bookmark type of guy, then what you need is synchronization. Be aware that syncronization of bookmarks is different depending on the browser you use.

Google Chrome

In the cases of Google Chrome browser if you have a google account, then all your google chrome browsers bookmarks can be synchronized.

So if you have Google Chome in the office and at home, if you add a new bookmark both will be synchronized. The way it is done is via Google Docs. There is a document there with all your bookmarks.

Firefox

If you are a firefox type of guy then you have several plugins that will allow you to sync your bookmarks between firefoxes and the web. The most notable I would say is xmarks (previously known as foxmarks).

Safari

If you use safari then the best way to sync not just between safaris but also with your iPhone, iPad and so, it is using mobileme.

Browser Independent

Delicious in Safari

Now, if you are not married to a specific browser, then I would recommend Delicious. Delicious is a socialbookmarking but you have plugins for all browsers, so if you see a site you like or want to remember you just click on a button and the beauty is that you can access via web o via another button in your browser (no matter which one), plus it is very powerfull because it let you apply tags to your bookmarks (much better than folders) and decide if you want them public or private.

Delicious in Chrome

Delicious in Firefox

Other tools

Bookmarking is OK but not enough. We have been bookmarking for 20 years now. True that now we have synchronization and tagging, which makes life easier, but there are other tools that allow you to:

1. Highlight parts of text of a website or PDF, add notes and share them. You can comment on a specific website or add some notes.
2. Get a copy of the website offline and make it searchable
3. If you don’t have the time to read something, with the click of a button you can add it to a cue of thing you have to read in your computer, iPhone or wherever when you have time.

This things have different tools.

1.- To annotate on websites and PDFs (which is very usefull) you can use:

a.nnotate, just for PDF. It is the pionner (I think). It is free if you don’t use it a look but it looks great. You upload a pdf and you can highlight stuff and add notes. Share, and so.

Lets annotate I discovered lately. It is also for PDF only and it is not as nice as a.nnote but it is free. In a.nnotate you can select text to be highlighted. In letsannotate you create a box with the mouse. It is good to provide comments on PDFs

Webnotes is by far my favorite, and the one I use. When you see a website click on the bookmark you have to add it to your webnotes and voila, you have the website with a top bar that allows you to highlight text, add post it’s, share it… and then you have an organizer where you can organise your websites and PDFs on folders and see the annotations.

2.- If you would like to have a copy offline of your website, Evernote does a great job. Its competitor Springpad might also do it (I have never tested as I am a devoted Evernote user).

With Evernote, if you see a site you want to remember then you click on the Evernote button in your browers (no matter which one you are using) and then you can access your evernote online or in your desktop sofware. If you want the site as you see it click on SHIFT+ the Evernote button (tip). It will be indexed and you can change the name and tag it as you wish.

3.- If you use twitter in your phone or you see a long article you can not read now, then there are a couple of tools that are great for this:

Instapaper (the one I use) has a bookmark you can have in your browser so you basically add the website you are reading or want to read to the cue of sites to read. The nice thing is that it has an iPhone (I don’t know about Android) app where the sites are transformed in text if you wish.

Readitlater is similiar.

Most of all services I mentioned here are free, and if you want more features, space, etc… then you have a pro payed plan.

Which ones I use?

1. Webnotes. Specially to highlight parts of a website I find interesting.
2. Evernote: not a lot for websites but I take photos of all the incoming mail, books, wine, receipts, etc… so they are indexed.
3. Instapaper: if there is something I want to blog about, or I’m in the iPhone and theres is a link in a tweet that I would like to read later. Very handy.

So imagine that you are at work and you leave your iPhone charging with the USB cable, then this little software will trigger an alarm if someone disconnects your phone.

You can download it here.

This software reminds me a similar one that I use to have on my mac, so when someone removes the power cable, touches the mouse or keyboard or closes the laptop… o even if it is moved!, the software takes a photo sends it via email and triggers an alarm. This one was called iAlertU and you can download it here.

Both are free.

Here PadLock:

Here iAlertU:

Additionally you can view, track and delete files right from your menubar.

So, any file, you just click on your define shortcut or drag it to the icon and it is uploaded to the cloud. Another shortcut and you have the link to the file that you can send to your friend/family.

Easy, elegant. Give it a try. It is free.

You can have an online dashboard where you see everything you have uploaded.

Forget emailing big files again. Just send the unique URL ;-)

Here a video I found in youtube showing how it works.

Microsoft rolled out Microsoft Office Web Apps on Skydrive to users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Ireland yesterday. Users can login with their free Live accounts and create and edit Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010 and Excel 2010 documents in their browsers, and store them in the cloud. Users don’t need an Office 2010 desktop license to use the apps, but the Skydrive version integrates with desktop versions of Office 2007 and 2010. There is also a beta version of Office Web Apps that can be deployed on-premise as part of Sharepoint.

And there are more!

Power Rangers Zeo

Scrubs 6×16

A texasi láncfrészes

Everybody hates Chris 2×05

Modern Family 1×16

Angel 3×04

Lucky Louie - 1×06

A Murder of Crows

Desperate Housewives - 2×13

No Country For Old Men

From all the videos, photos and rumors we did not know the specifics, and now we do.

The iPhone 4 running iOS 4 (the renamed that), has a retina display with 4 times more pixels per inch than the iPhone 3GS. Pretty astonishing for what I read. The resolution is 960×640. No other phone out there is close to this. It is twice the resolution of an old iPhone, with a contrast ratio of 800:1.  If the nexus one screen with OLED was great but unusable with direct sunlight, this is another story.

I hope once they can scale this technology they port it the macs and iPads. Basically you can not see the pixels… incredible.

The new iPhone has also 2 cameras, a front one for FaceTime (I will explain further down) and a proper one on the back with 5Mpx. Not too many pixels, but a very good sensor that works with low light. The fight for pixels is over, you need good lense and great sensors, and looks like it does have one.

This back camera will have a led (flash) and will allow to take HD videos (720p and 30fps) and they are porting the touch the screen to focus to the video as well, which is great. Also, they have added digital zoom and iMovie to edit your videos with the iPhone like a pro ;-)

There are rumors that iWorks will be also migrated to iOS4.

Continuing with FaceTime basically is the fact that you can use the front camera to have video calls, using wifi only for the time being, and between iphones… using open protocols. I hope in the near future you can use this with skype or qik or ichat or other clients that can be used in a computer. In my case I would love to be able to use an iPhone 4 front camera to chat with my brother (now in Nigeria) or my mum (in Spain) using their computers.

The new iPhone has the expected A4 chip that ships with the iPads and will give the iPhone a great battery life (7h 3G talk, 6h 3G browsing, 10h Wi-Fi, 10h video, 300h standby). I am a bit disappointed that they will have 8, 16 and 32 Gb. I was expecting a 64Gb, but knowing Apple we shouldn’t be surprised if they leave this for Christmas or next release.

It is 24% thinner than the iPhone 3gs, and they claim it is the thinner smart phone.

It has also a 3 axis gyroscope which I bet will be great for those who play with the iPhone.

For the connectivity, it has wifi n (great) and the back of the body is plastic, having steel all around which is used as the antenna, for which we have to suppose that the speeds and coverage will be better/faster.

Well this is basically it. It will launch in the US on the 24 June. Also France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. I think is 18 more countries sometime in July (including Switzerland) and the rest of the world in August.

It comes in black or white, and with a new contract in the US, costs $199 for a 16GB version and $299 for 32GB.

You can see the official announcement here.

Features

• Turn your iPhone into a real wireless webcamera.
• Two quality options.
• Instant-Pause mode, stop streaming instantly and resume whenever you want without exiting your host application.
• Plug and Play ready, install the drivers and you are ready to go!
• Built-in manual.
• Beautiful Userinterface fully translated in English and German.
• Compatible with Windows 7, Vista and XP and Apple’s Leopard and Snow Leopard.

iWebcamera requires an iPhone with at least iPhone OS 3.1, a computer connected to the same network and the installation of the iWebcamera drivers.

Craig Tracy is dedicated to creating surreal moments in time. Without the use of digital manipulation or photographic tricks, he creates dazzling body painting compositions that have elevated this particular type of artistic expression into the realm of fine art. He recently opened a gallery in New Orleans: the first gallery in the world dedicated to fine art body painting images.

Although he’s been an artist his whole life, it took Craig Tracy a number of years to truly find his passion. His first professional art job was airbrushing t-shirts in a shopping mall. This experience gave him the foundation that would later lead him to discover that he could – and should – paint on unusual surfaces.

After college, Tracy went on to become an illustrator. Like many artists, he found the work dreary and depressing. With no artistic freedom and no way to imbue the projects with his own style, he felt trapped. After retiring from illustration and declaring his freedom from stuffy commercial work, he discovered that body painting was the only type of art that truly made sense for him. Starting out painting faces, he progressed to painting bodies and eventually began showing and selling prints of his body paintings in his own gallery.

Since then, Craig Tracy’s work has developed into a full-time passion. His body paintings show the strength and aching fragility of human bodies, juxtaposed perfectly with the fluidity and transience of the pigments in which they are covered. In some paintings, the model blends with the background, creating a stunning illusion. In others, the painted model is the focus of the piece. The above piece (bottom right), named “Butterfly” as a reference to the subtle butterfly disguised as a nose, features a woman as the leopard’s nose bridge. Her bottom forms the big cat’s top lips. The artist took 24 hours to paint the model and backdrop, pausing only for a one-hour nap.

Unlike Emma Hack, an artist who uses body paint to melt models into the background of her paintings, Tracy seems to celebrate the human form present in his work. Rather than hiding the model, he allows the curves and shadows of her body to interact with the entire piece, adding a depth, texture and powerful mystery to the paintings.

In doing this, he travels to a rather artistically dangerous zone. Just how much should the model’s form be allowed to influence the shape and direction of each piece? At what point does the body cross the line between canvas and subject? Each of Tracy’s paintings seem to play with these limits, exploring the human form as both the focus of the painting and an incidental part of it. Between those two extremes are many shades of grey, each of which is explored lovingly by the brush of the artist.

(all images used with permission of Craig Tracy)

The result of his playful and experimental approach to art and his obvious passion for what he does have made Craig Tracy one of the most respected contemporary body painting artists in the world. If you’d like to see more of the artist’s work, Craig Tracy Gallery can be found in New Orleans. It’s the only gallery in the world dedicated to fine art images of body paintings, and it also features videos of the body painting process for those interested in seeing the paintings unfold.

(from weburbanist)

Remember The Milk

If you are one of these guys living in the cloud, using google docs, or zoho, online calendars… then you probably also use online task management tools. Maybe you are happy to use your outlooks todo lists, or you do it in the cloud using Google tasks or remember the milk.

BaseCampHQ

If you work with clients then you are probably looking for a way to manage your tasks, sort of ticketing system but not necessarily for IT projects, a way to organise your work and the work of your team: a project management tool in the cloud. The king up to new has been  37 signal’s star product basecamphq (click here to see the tour).

Now you have other players in the market that do it equaly or better than bascamp and that you should consider:

Assembla

This is the one I use. It is free and I can create a space for each of my clients. They can also create a free account and add tickets or tasks to it, that I can customize in terms of organising the fields, milestones, etc.. (content, newsletter, technic) etc…

I like assemble because I can track the time I spend on a ticket, so at the end of the month I can bill by hours of work if I wish. You can have a wiki, upload files, etc…

Producteev

They just launched version 2. Very very nice. I just opened an account. It is the more social oriented ticketing system. You can add tickets or tasks via IM, email, they have a nice iPhone app… very nice. Simple though. You cannot indent task or add projects but you can have different workspaces add tags and link it to your calendar. It is nice to be able to feed it via IM, email or iPhone.

Screencast Producteev Two from Producteev.com on Vimeo.

Trac

Open source. The king tool for managing your files in a team. Try the demo.

Redmine

This one is an open source solution. Never tried. Demo here.

Teamwork Project Manger

This is a good alternative to bascamp. It is cheaper and here you can see how they say it is better.

Unfuddle

This is good tool to ticketing. This is the one I used when I was working at Shelter Centre and developing the new Drupal site. You can also track time (money) manage your code, etc… They support trac and check ins for code. Assembla does too.

Others:

• http://achievo.org/
• http://www.projectpier.org/
• http://www.springloops.com/
• http://fogcreek.com/FogBugz/
• http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/employee-community
• http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/?lang=en
• http://www.hyperoffice.com/task-manager/
• http://www.myintervals.com/
• http://www.deskaway.com/

Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results — such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs — that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example, people use Google Alerts to:

• find out what is being said about their company or product.
• monitor a developing news story.
• keep up to date on a competitor or industry.
• get the latest news on a celebrity or sports team.
• find out what’s being said about themselves.

Here’s how it works:

1. You enter a query that you’re interested in.
2. Google Alerts checks regularly to see if there are new results for your query.
3. If there are new results, Google Alerts sends them to you in an email.

For general queries like [ football ], you can get a summary of the new results every day. For specific topics, like [ cardiovascular atherosclerosis ], you might not get an email every day, but you’ll find out when something new and relevant is published. See more examples of how Google Alerts are used

CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) *

EFTA (European Free Trade Association)

GAVI alliance

IATA (International Air Transport Association)

ICC (International Computing Center)

ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)

IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies)

ILO (International Labour Organization) *

IOM (International Organization for Migration)

IPU (Inter-Parliamentary Union)

ITC (International Trade Center)

ITU (International Telecommunications Union)

ISO (International Standards Organization)

OCHA – Relief Web (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)

SITA ( Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques – NGO International Company)

UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS)

UNCC (United Nations Compensation Commission)

UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development)

UNHCHR (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights)

UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)

UNOG (United Nations Office Geneva)

WCC (World Council of Churches)

WHO (World Health Organization) *

WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)

WMO (World Meteorological Organization)

WTO (World Trade Organization)

* With online application system.

You can also check: http://icsc.un.org/joblinks.asp

Please note that all UN organizations (UNCC, UNCTAD, UNHCHR, UNHCR, UNOG,..) have a common online application tool (e-Galaxy).

WHO and UNADS have a common online applications tool as well.

As you know recently Apple bought Lala, an online music service like pandora, last.fm and meny others.

Also Apple has been building mega big data center in North Carolina (see aerial photos/video).

The rumour now that Lala is down, is that Apple will lauch something simliar to Spotify. Very interesting.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Ways in which regulations can choke motivation: Philip K. Howard and four ways to fix a broken legal system

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Don’t wait in line… Snapfinger is the largest online Restaurant Ordering Site

Snapfinger is the US’s largest most complete restaurant search and remote ordering site for take-out, delivery and catering from your favorite restaurants. More than four years in the making, Snapfinger allows you direct access to the nation’s top restaurant brands through each location’s interactive menu. You can access your favorite restaurants from the web, from your cell phone or from a toll free number.

Genius Idea: If you are thinking of putting an old watch up for auction oneBay or listing your latest T-shirt design on Etsy, you may want to check out Tinypay.me first.

Tinypay.me is an e-commerce service that enables users to create quick listings for their products or services. Simply fill out the name, price and a quick description of the good or service you’d like to sell, type in a few personal details and upload a picture. You can also opt to donate the proceeds of the sale to charity, and identify your product or service’s location on a map.You can then share your listing directly with your social networks or set up your own online store on your blog or website. The whole process can take less than a minute.

The service only asks for your name and your PayPal e-mail address; you don’t even need to set up an account or share any of your bank information. You can also sync your listing with Facebook, Twitter and Google Product Search to share your listings instantaneously.

While the service is great for selling your products and services quickly and easily, it lacks many of the benefits of e-commerce sites like eBay, Etsy and Amazon Marketplace. They are destination sites for buyers and drive most of the traffic to the listings of individual sellers via marketing and excellent search and recommendation engines. And although Tinypay.me allows visitors to leave comments on a product, it has yet to implement seller and product ratings.

In other words, if you want to succeed with Tinypay.me, you’re going to have to depend entirely on your website and social networks to advertise and sell your goods.

What do you think of Tinypay.me? Have you ever sold anything online? If so, what e-commerce service did you use?

Find out more about the service in the video below.

This are my thoughs on how I would like this sort of cameras to evolve in the next years:

1. Pixel-wise they are OK already. Around 12 to 20 Mpx is more than OK.
2. I would rather improve the sensor to be able to shoot at nights. I hate flash and noise. Nikon D3s in in these lines. My future camera should be great shooting with low light and have nearly zero grain (noise).
3. They should geotag photos. These cameras should come by default with a GPS. Now you can buy an external one (see my latest post), but ideally it should be integrated.
4. I shouldn’t bother to connect the camera to a PC. I should be able to get home, and via my home wifi (or you could configure this) the camera should be able to upload the photos to your media centre, to your flickr, smugmug, picasa or whatever service you use for online backup. Now you have eyefi doing something similar, but it should be out of the box with the camera, being able to configure it: local pc, HD, online service… or if you are traveling and find a hotspot, then be able from the camera menu to upload them somewhere.
5. HD video, sure.

Most of this things can already be done with your phone. Phones are getting beter and better on photos and video, with 8Mpx and HD video… so DSLRs should not be less. They will always be beter optic-wise and sensor-wise.

(from engadget)

Jumbles of beheaded bodies, limbs entwined, torsos twisting, hands reaching out – in compositions that are both glaringly Asian-influenced and psychedelic – call to mind some orgiastic body painting experiment, until you focus on the strange perspective and profusion of hands in various sizes.

This is no ordinary example of beautifully crafted body painting, and as stunningly realistic as the images appear, they’re actually computer-generated. Contemporary Korean artist Kim Joon uses 3D animation software to assemble the perfect body for each piece, building the form and grafting on skin texture before moving on to the intricate designs.

One piece, entitled ‘Neverland’, pays respects to Michael Jackson, but deeper behind this lies an homage to what Kim admits is his idea of the perfect male body: ebony-skinned and powerful. But the real star of each digital work is the body decoration, which Kim identifies as tattoos. To Kim – who says his single biggest influence is Jimi Hendrix – tattoos are sensual markings that simultaneously represent desire and repression, beauty and scars.

“I would like people to be able to think about their own tattoos and re-examine their lives through seeing my work. Tattoo or tattooing symbolizes the multi-layered composites of desire and will, emotion and action, pain and pleasure of self and other (tattooist) which can be translated as a complex system of complicit activities,” Kim told Art Radar Asia.

“This is much like the way in which our lives are conducted in the larger social matrix. I want people to be able to feel the tension between human (in)ability to control desires and situations. That we have less control than we think in defying forces in capital driven society.”

(from weburbanist)

Oh sure, Nikon’s got its own solution for adding native geotagging to your existing DSLR, but the GP-1 dongle definitely has its drawbacks. Aside from sucking down around 4x more power than Gisteq’s new PhotoTrackr Plus, it also eliminates the ability to use a dedicated flash in the hotshoe while capturing GPS data. Moreover, it has to warm up every time you turn the camera on / off, and there’s just 18 tracking channels compared to the Gisteq’s 44. Regardless of the back and forth, we do appreciate the PhotoTrackr Plus’ ability to plug directly into the 10-pin terminal that few amateurs even think to recognize, though we do fear that the reliance on Bluetooth could cause issues if you stray too far from the transceiver. Still, this newfangled dongle is far superior to its past iterations, both of which simply logged data as you went and then added metadata after you synced the information with your images via PC; this dongle, however, embeds the data right away into every image. Better still, there’s even a price advantage to going third party — Nikon’s aging GP-1 is pushing $200 on many webstores, while the Gisteq apparatus can be procured right now for $179. Take your pic, as they say.