http://usat.ly/iVu2GR Sent from Mobile
GroupCard - Downlad & Print this card
Excerpt:
Rendering now, ready in about 5 minutes
Arrives within one week.Arrives within one week.Arrives in 10 - 14 days.START A CARD TODAYYep. You can order at any time. We won't process the card to be printed until after it has been delivered. But we have some flexibility. If you have a special request, just let us know. What happens if somebody signs the card after it's e-delivered?
In most cases we start processing your order the same day the card is emailed to the recipient. We do this so the printed version arrives as soon as possible. If somebody signs your card after the delivery date, contact us and we will do our best to update your order. Which printed version is right for me?
It all depends on how you want to display it or present it. We offer four unique styles to choose from... DOWNLOAD & PRINT
As soon as your card is delivered to the recipient, we generate an easy-to-print PDF version and email it to everyone who participated. The recipient, as well as all of the signers, can easily print out the card on their home or office printer. By far, it is the world's most unique printable e-card. This is a great option if you're on a budget or need your printed GroupCard fast. Print as many copies as you wish and keep the file forever. POSTER CARD
Using our high-quality fancy-dancy roll printers, we print your card in one long sheet. 5 signatures or 500... it doesn't matter. The card is delivered in roll format on hi-gloss paper. This version is great for getting attention at the workplace. DID YOU KNOW... we've printed a GroupCard that was more than 100 feet long! (that's a lot of ink.) WALL POSTER
Our designers carefully arrange the signatures and photos from your card into one large glorious poster. Frame it and show off your one-of-a-king GroupCard in an office or den. This poster comes in the standard poster size (18"x24") and a hi-gloss finish so it will look great for years to come. PHOTOBOOK
We transform your card into a high-quality 5x7 photobook. This is the mother of all keepsakes. It's a great gift to get, and an even greater gift to give. Is there a maximum number of pages allowed?
No. But we've had a few cards with thousands of pages that require special attention. If your card gets that big, please shoot us an email and give us a heads up. What about a return policy?
Why would anybody want to return a gift as magical as this? If for any reason you're not happy with your poster or photobook, please let us know. (but we know you'll be thrilled!)
Standard shipping $8.00
Overnight (arrives in 48 hrs) $14.00
International $23.00
Sent from my iPad
85 Tool Swiss Army Knife: Giant, Useless, Amazing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Excerpt:
This brobdingnagian contraption is called, not surprisingly, the Giant Swiss Army Knife. Wenger, the inventor of the iconic pocket tool, has made this special edition to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and has rendered the device thoroughly useless by packing in every single blade ever featured in one of its knives – all 85 of ‘em.
It weighs almost three pounds, cost almost $1000, and comes in a presentation box (because nobody has a pocket big enough). The only thing missing is a USB drive, although it makes up for this by having both a key ring and a “second key ring”.
"Save" Lego creations in digital photos as wall art
Excerpt:
Sent from my iPad
"Save" Lego creations in digital photos as wall art
In the spirit of decluttering without destroying your kids' artistic masterpieces, here's a brilliant two-fer Lego hack, from Michelle:
Hack #1: If you have a child that likes to build Lego creations, but wants to keep them together forever, here is a solution! Take a photo of the creation and then you'll have a record of the creation and can break the bricks down and reuse them for the next creation.
Hack #2: I placed my son's Lego creations in front of a white sheet for a backdrop, took a photo with our digital camera and then printed 8x10 photos and hung them in simple black frames. They look great in his room and he is proud of his creations!
Knowing how passionate some kids are about Legos, this hack strikes me as a major problem-solver.
What do you do you with your child's beloved but bulky construction projects?
Potty training inspiration: make custom underwear decals!
Excerpt:
Potty training inspiration: make custom underwear decals!
Becky titled this hack "Inspiring underwear." I say: inspired underwear for those who are looking to motivate beginning potty-trainers:
They say you should let your potty-training child pick out some big-kid underwear at the store so that he/she is inspired to keep them dry for potty training. But when I took my son shopping, all the underwear designs featured characters he didn't know. I thought, "Man, I wish they sold underwear with Winnie the Pooh (his favorite bedtime stories) or Little Bear (his favorite DVD)." Then I saw a package of plain white undies and was inspired.[Inspiration comes from unlikely places, eh? -- Ed.]
I downloaded images of all my son's favorite characters and saved them in a single document using the Paint program that came preloaded on my computer. I resized the images so they would fit properly on my son's underwear (I printed test sheets to make sure).
Once they were the right size, I printed them white iron-on transfer paper, available at any office supply store. I cut out each image and followed the directions on the package to iron it onto the plain white underwear I had bought in bulk. Voila! A collection of underwear with all my son's favorite characters, made on the cheap, and they looked as good or better than the stuff available at the store.
The whole process was actually much easier than it sounds. I'm a working mom and I did it in one evening. My son loved them! Now, almost a year later, he's still excited about picking out his underwear in the morning.
Are those tighty-whities adorable, or what?
More: Potty training hacks
Teacher Appreciation Week flash cards (free printable)
Teacher Appreciation Week flash cards (free printable)
It's the middle of Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughter's school and I...really appreciate the teachers. But I haven't exactly shown it. Apparently, neither did my friend Marlynn of Urban Bliss. The difference is, she whipped out these adorable flash cards, which she has made available as a freely-printable PDF.
Read the full post to see how the entire set looks together, and to print some for yourself.
At Urban Bliss Life: {printables} Teacher Appreciation Week Flash Cards
iPad Claims 82% of U.S. Installed Tablet Market, Eating Into Other Devices - MacRumors.com
Excerpt:
Media research firm Nielsen today announced the results of its Mobile Connected Device Report survey for the first quarter of 2011, determining that Apple held a dominating 82% of the installed base for tablets in the United States during the quarter. The survey found 3G-capable iPads slightly more popular than non-3G models, 43% to 39%, with the Samsung Galaxy Tab proving the most popular competitor with only 4% of the market.
Google’s Free Predictive Software - Quentin Hardy - At Your Servers - Forbes
Excerpt:
Sent from Mobile
Google expects to put predictions everywhere.
The company just quietly announced that a prediction API will be added to its cloud developer suite of products. That means that people can build software that analyzes data being uploaded to its online storage, then suggest actions as new data comes in.
The initial uses are likely to be in things like Web page design (you increase the parts people are looking at, and rethink the others) or sentiment analysis in online marketing. But if the service holds up, other more complex applications will probably come along.
Realism in UI Design
http://www.uxmag.com/design/realism-in-ui-designExcerpt:
Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to "read" the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element. Realistic details can get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate to your users.
The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details. UI elements are abstractions which convey concepts and ideas; they should retain only those details that are relevant to their purpose. UI elements are almost never representations of real things. Adding too much realism can cause confusion.
Math, data, & ads
Excerpt:
On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That's when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology. He became, as it were, a Want.
At social networking companies, Wants may sit among the computer scientists and engineers, but theirs is the central mission: to poke around in data, hunt for trends, and figure out formulas that will put the right ad in front of the right person. Wants gauge the personality types of customers, measure their desire for certain products, and discern what will motivate people to act on ads. "The most coveted employee in Silicon Valley today is not a software engineer. It is a mathematician," says Kelman, the Redfin CEO. "The mathematicians are trying to tickle your fancy long enough to see one more ad."
Sometimes the objective is simply to turn people on. Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, collects 60 billion data points per day—how long people play games, when they play them, what they're buying, and so forth. The Wants (Zynga's term is "data ninjas") troll this information to figure out which people like to visit their friends' farms and cities, the most popular items people buy, and how often people send notes to their friends. Discovery: People enjoy the games more if they receive gifts from their friends, such as the virtual wood and nails needed to build a digital barn. As for the poor folks without many friends who aren't having as much fun, the Wants came up with a solution. "We made it easier for those players to find the parts elsewhere in the game, so they relied less on receiving the items as gifts," says Ken Rudin, Zynga's vice-president for analytics.
These consumer-targeting operations look a lot like what quants do on Wall Street. A Want system, for example, might watch what someone searches for on Google, what they write about in Gmail, and the websites they visit. "You get all this data and then build very rapid decision-making models based on their history and commercial intent," says Will Price, CEO of Flite, an online ad service. "You have to make all of those calculations before the Web page loads."
Ultimately, ad-tech companies are giving consumers what they desire and, in many cases, providing valuable services. Google delivers free access to much of the world's information along with free maps, office software, and smartphone software. It also takes profits from ads and directs them toward tough engineering projects like building cars that can drive themselves and sending robots to the moon. The Era of Ads also gives the Wants something they yearn for: a ticket out of Nerdsville. "It lets people that are left- brain leaning expand their career opportunities," says Doug Mack, CEO of One Kings Lane, a daily deal site that specializes in designer goods. "People that might have been in engineering can go into marketing, business development, and even sales. They can get on the leadership track." And while the Wants plumb the depths of the consumer mind and advance their own careers, investors are getting something too, at least on paper: almost unimaginable valuations. Just since the fourth quarter, Zynga has risen 81 percent in value, to a cool $8 billion, according to Nyppex.
The Secret Lives of Links
Excerpt:
Trigger Words
- On the Walgreen’s site, 21% of people go to photos, 16% go to search, 11% go to prescriptions, 6% go to pharmacy link, 5% go to find stores. Total traffic is 59% for these five links. The total amount of page used for these 5 links is ~4% of page space. The most important stuff on the page occupies less than 1/20th of the page.
- This violates Fitts’s law. The bigger and closer, the easier a target is to hit. So we’re often using the real estate of Web pages poorly.
- Make real estate reflect the importance of links. Link copy needs to communicate what the user will get. The links have to take the user to where they want to go.
- Nobody goes to a Website just to visit. They have a reason. Trigger words serve the goal of the user. They trigger the user to click/take an action. When trigger words are well done, they get the user to the content they want and signal where to click.
Why the Mobile Web vs App debate is dead
Excerpt:
Sent from Mobile
Consumer product strategists designing product experiences for mobile phones and smartphones must decide on their development priorities across the mobile Web and apps. While some believe this is a fundamental “either/or” choice, current consumer behavior suggests that consumers are using both. More than half of European consumers and 60 percent of U.S. consumers who download apps at least monthly also access the Internet via their mobile phones at least daily. In short, heavy app users are also heavy mobile Web users. The more frequently consumers access the Internet via their mobile phones, the more likely they are to download apps at least monthly. More than 10 billion apps have been downloaded cumulatively since the launch of the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) App Store—the majority of them via iPhones. But this doesn’t stop iPhone owners from being the most frequent mobile Internet users: 63 percent of U.S. iPhone owners and 72 percent of European iPhone owners access the mobile Internet on a daily basis.
The mobile Web and apps offer different benefits and serve different audiences. For now, mobile apps make the most of smartphone features because they integrate more deeply and more widely with the unique features of smart mobile devices that use an operating system. However, mobile websites cost less to reach a wider audience. The majority of consumers don’t own a smartphone and don’t access app stores; they are more likely to use a mobile browser and to access the Internet from their mobile phones. The barriers to accessing a site via a browser are lower than those to downloading an app—even for smartphone owners. Also, the fragmented nature of the mobile industry means that porting apps to different platform environments costs money—particularly when including maintenance and promotion costs.
I have covered this issue in more detail in a new Forrester report “Why The ‘Web Versus Application’ Debate Is Irrelevant To Your Mobile Product Strategy.”
Copic Multiliner Inking Pens Set B-2 | Bagcheck
Excerpt:
Nick Lamkin These copic multiliners are excellent pens ranging from 0.03-BM (which is a small ink-brush). The quality of the pen is great because even the tiniest of tips can take allot of pressure without bending. The more brush like liner has a very dark black and an excellent brush stroke for all kinds of sketches. I use these alongside my markers. Even with such inky blacks they cause absolutely no smear with the colors (using correct paper). I use these in my sketch book and they are my new go-to pens of choice. They quickly replaced my previous pens (microns). They are waterproof so you can use them with water colors too.
Sent from Mobile
Sent from Mobile
Mobile First, or, as I like to think of it: Layer cake
Excerpt:
Mobile First, or, as I like to think of it: Layer cake
If websites were cakes, we would all like ours to be a multi-tiered confection with rich filling and intricate icing. But if you can’t have that, a simple, well-made sheet cake is still pretty darn good!
How do you ensure cake for everyone? Simple. Start with the bottom layer and work your way up. Focus on your most crucial content and functionality, stripped of all extraneous embellishments for your mobile users—that’s layer one. Then add on successive layers of rich content and interactivity for tablet and desktop users. Now you’ve got a tasty experience for everyone!
But wait! There’s more!
Thanks to our handy friend the media query tag, we have other options beyond Mobile First and graceful degradation as well. You can now deliver content that is specifically customized to the user’s device. Whole layouts can shift and flow, images can be specifically sized, all based on how they are being viewed. This is called Responsive Design, the new darling of the dev world. Additionally, emerging technologies like JQuery and CSS3 allow us to introduce motion to our sites without losing audiences on devices that don’t support Flash. And hey, did you know mobile even offers up cool features a desktop could never match? Geo location, anyone?
BBC: Surprisingly nice design
Like it. Good balance of simplicity, minimalism, with large obvious affordances. Where have I seen this before?http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13270926
Flexible phone made from electronic paper to debut
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13308452
Excerpt:
The PaperPhone is used by being bent or written upon.
Excerpt:
The PaperPhone is used by being bent or written upon.A prototype flexible smartphone made of electronic paper has been created by Canadian researchers.
The PaperPhone can do all the things bulkier smartphones can do such as make and take calls, send messages, play music or display e-books.
The gadget triggers different functions and features when bent, folded and flexed at its corners or sides.
"Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," said creator Dr Roel Vertegaal.
Osama Bin Laden and the New Ecosystem of News
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2011/tc2011052_724960.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories
Excerpt:
Twitter broke the big rumor, but the microblogging site and Facebook were playing their aggressive roles in an evolving media ecosystem that still includes mainstream media
A Thousand Points of News
Looking at it as an ecosystem instead of as a competition reinforces the point that all these things feed into each other: TV reports are spread through Twitter while news that breaks on Twitter forms a part of TV and newspaper reports that try to summarize what has happened, and so forth. As one person put it on Sunday night: "Twitter breaks news.TV covers it." Leveraging the power of social media can help traditional news outlets find sources—such as the guy who unwittingly tweeted about the Abbottabad attack. Twitter and Facebook-style networks also helps the mainstream media distribute and promote their content, using network effects to their advantage.
At least one blogger said Twitter had experienced its "CNN moment" with the bin Laden news—a reference to how the all-news channel went mainstream during the first Gulf War.But Twitter has had a long series of CNN-style moments in the past couple of years, going back to Flight 1549's landing in the Hudson and followed by such varied disasters as the earthquake in Haiti and uprisings and outright revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.In other words, the fact that Twitter is a news network is, well … not really news.
As my colleague, Stacey, pointed out in a post on Sunday night, the process by which this kind of event filters out through Twitter has become so commonplace that it now proceeds in well-defined stages: the rumors, the news break, the confirmation, and then the jokes and spinoff Twitter accounts (@OsamainHell, for one.) and so on.There's no question that the bin Laden news was big, peaking at more than 4,000 tweets per second during President Obama's speech, but it was not unprecedented.
As I tried to point out during the initial frenzy about social media and the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, it's not really about Twitter or Facebook; it's about the power of the network.The bin Laden news case is yet another sign that the way we consume media has changed and is continuing to change.
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