I know it’s not hip to say, but I dig Target. They have lots of quality stuff for cheap prices. I’m starting to like them even more because it has just announced a neat mobile coupon program.
Related News from IntoMobile:
If you’ve been watching my Twitter feed, you’d know I’ve been playing with the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Devour. The Devour is Motorola’s second Android phone for Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless and it’s the first to bring MotoBlur to Big Red. The handset is a decent mid-range smartphone for social networking fanatics, but it is underpowered and is nowhere near as good as Verizon’s other Android offerings.
Hardware
While the Devour may be the younger brother to the Droid, there’s nothing “little” about it. It’s a chunky phone that feels very weighty but good in the hand. The aluminum unibody construction is sturdy as hell and it feels well-constructed. You could throw this thing down the stairs and it would probably be no worse for the wear. There’s a power/unlock button and standard headphone jack on top, and there’s volume controls and a dedicated voice command button on the right spine. One cool thing is that that you can open the left spine to remove the battery or insert a new microSD card. It’s neat but there’s a dingy hinge that looks like it could snap off if you’re not being careful.
The 3.1-inch screen is pretty vibrant and is generally extremely responsive to touch. Unfortunately, it’s way too small for the device. Even without comparing it to the Droid, there’s just seems to be so much wasted space on the face of the device. You can use the on-screen keyboard (or Swype) but I found some issues with getting a quick response when hitting letters near the edge of the screen.
The three backlit touch buttons under the screen really pissed me off. These were very unresponsive, there’s no dedicated search key, and Motorola changed the layout from the Droid so the back button is now on the right side. There’s also too much wasted space between the screen itself and the buttons. There’s also an optical trackpad that works pretty well, but I would have liked it to be a bit bigger and less recessed.
The sliding mechanism is done well and it feels like it will hold up for years. Once you’ve popped the screen up, there’s a weird sharpness on the edges. It’s not like the cheese-cutting Pre, but it is odd. The Devour’s physical keyboard is far better than the Droid’s because there’s more space between keys, there’s a full row for numbers, and the tactility is great. A few quibbles: I’d prefer the function key to be on the left and the space bar is between the v and b letters. Despite these niggles, it’s easy to blast out e-mails or status updates but I’m miffed that there’s no auto-correct for the physical keyboard. I’ve become adept at relying on the software to fill in the gaps for me, so it’s not that much faster to type with the hardware keys. Still, if you’re a physical keyboard fan, you won’t be disappointed with the Devour.
One issue I had with the overall look of the Devour is that it just screams text-happy teen – you wind up looking like some Twilight-reading teenybopper if you’re whipping this out in public. I’m shallow though, so you may not have the same experiences.
Software
Devour’s Android has Motorola’s and Verizon’s hooks all over it. The first thing you notice is MotoBlur, which is a user interface layer that is supposed to make social networking easier and more intuitive. I still think MotoBlur is a good idea but the implementation still needs a lot of work. First of all, the screen is way too small. If you don’t customize it, your main home screen is utterly filled with the Happenings, Messages and Status widgets. I’m a big fan of ambient information on your home screen – I have Slide Screen set up on my Droid and love it – but MotoBlur is just too much clutter without much benefit. Let’s take the Happenings widgets, which is supposed to show the latest status updated from your friends. Cool idea, but I don’t want to have to manually swipe through every single tweet because it’s just tiresome and inefficient. The News widget is cool and I imagine MotoBlur could be really cool on a big-screen device like the Dell Mini 5 or a tablet.
Big Red also has its hooks into the handset, as it comes packed with the carrier’s music, video and navigation apps. There’s also a big, gross “Verizon Wireless” in your notification bar in case you forgot who your carrier is. Like many Android phones, the Devour suffers from too many logos on it.
The Devour is only Android 1.6 but you’re not really missing much. The crown jewel of 2.0, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps Navigation, can be used on the Devour once you download a text-to-speech app from the Android Market. It’s not as smooth as on a Nexus One but it works just fine, and the GPS is darn accurate and quick. There will be some apps that may not work like Google Gesture Search and the whole pulling-up-drawers metaphor needs to die, but you could do a lot worse than this OS. You also can’t have multiple Gmail accounts set up without jumping through hoops, which is an immediate non-starter for me. While Joe Overalls may not care what version of the OS is on the phone, there are real questions about if and when this device can gain multiple new features over the years.
Like all Android phones, you need to know how to manage your device or it will become sluggish. I’m not sure if it’s the processor or MotoBlur but things just seem a half second slower than I’d like it. It’s still better than most of the same phones in this range though.
Web browsing, Multimedia, Camera
The Webkit-based browser has a few tweaks from other Android devices and I like it. There’s an extra zoom button on the bottom left that gives you a larger view of the overall page while keeping the section you’re looking at in focus. Big Red does have a solid network, so I had no trouble finding and staying connected on 3G in San Francisco and San Diego. Connecting to WiFi was easy and done the same way as other Android devices. I didn’t have any trouble hopping on to private or public networks.
It’s the normal Android media player, so it’s more than adequate, but don’t get your hopes too high. There’s Verizon’s music app, if you’re into that. Just download Listen and the tunewiki app and your multimedia experience will immediately improve.
The camera sucks. It’s weak at 3 megapixels, things look fuzzy when you’re trying to snap pics, there’s no flash, editing is limited, and the photos looked dark. The Picture Gallery app is better than the standard picture viewer in Android 1.6 and it gives you some cool slideshows. Video recording is fine but nothing to write home about.
Call Quality, Battery Life
Verizon’s network is still pretty darn good, so I had voice coverage nearly everywhere I went. Voice calls sounded a slight bit muffled and I would have liked a bit more volume. People on the other end of the phone said I sounded clear, even when I was talking in the rain.
I thought MotoBlur would destroy the battery life because it’s constantly pulling in news and updates but I was pleasantly surprised that I could get through the day on a single charge. That’s all you can expect from a smartphone nowadays.
The Final Take
I have an appreciation for devices that aren’t bleeding edge but do what they intend well (I dug the HTC Snap). The Devour is a solid device for what it is, and it wouldn’t be too hard to recommend the Devour in a vacuum because it’s a decent smartphone that could appeal to those who love a good physical keyboard. But when you consider that the Droid can be found for nearly the same price and it has a better processor, screen and will be updated more often, I’d have to say it’s safe to pass on the Devour.
Related News from IntoMobile:
I have been using Pandora’s online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix’s “watch instantly” queue.
As I investigated the service more, I came to understand exactly the challenge of what it takes to be truly multi-platform in the current era. It isn’t just about having both Web and mobile phone versions of your service, but how you have to go deep into a lot of different devices to appeal to your customers.
The cool thing about Pandora isn’t that you can create your own custom radio station that will try to find music based on a particular artist or genre. But that once you set up your account on one platform, you can access it in your car, in your home, and on the road in between. All with the same collection of stations and music. As you spend more time with the service, it tries to figure out your likes and dislikes.
Let’s look at all the various places you can get your Pandora fix as an example of how hard it is to become this ubiquitous. First is the Web browser: you have to work in a bunch of them properly, so there is the usual testing in IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Add Mac, Windows and Linux versions of each browser, and that’s 15 regression tests right off the bat. But we have just gotten started. Add in the newer brower versions, like IE8, the fact that Linux isn’t a single OS, and 64 bit Windows. Then stir in support for both Flash and HTML v5, and you can easily get more than 200 different environments if you want to support a wider base. Pandora, by the way, doesn’t officially support much beyond Flash on Firefox, IE, and Safari on Mac and Windows.
Then we have separate apps for each of the five mobile phone platforms (Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, and Windows Mobile) and four cellular providers because their phones work differently on each network. Never mind that each phone’s ecosystem has different rules on how an app can get posted for download and get itself updated. There are at least twenty different tests there. The phone apps have to be designed to work with the limited screen real estate available on each phone, and yet still connect to your account in a way that you can recognize without a lot of user training. Some of the phones have different screen and control button configurations, so just supporting the Blackberry line, for example, isn’t so simple. You also need to get the development environment for the phone (typically these run on PCs with simulators that show you what your phone user will end us seeing) and probably a bunch of phones to test out too.
But wait, there is more. How about Facebook, My Space, and other social networks? Don’t you want to integrate with them and leverage them to make your app viral? More code to write, more interfaces to learn, more tests to run to make sure you new versions don’t break these links.
Then there is support for the home-based entertainment systems. While each of these have some embedded Web browser in them (like the Roku or the Samsung BluRay DVD players), you still have to test to make sure that the pages load properly and the music keeps on playing and your fancy navigation controls operate as intended. There are more than a dozen different devices, including the Ford Sync in-car service that will be available later this year, to test out. The trouble here is that these devices typically have older and less capable browsers that don’t get updated, unlike the PC world where users are trying out new versions.
As you can see, it is easy to lose count of how many different platforms you want your app to run on. And then if you have to make choices and limit yourself, how do you do the triage? Do you drop Andoid in favor of Roku? Bring up the new Ford Sync API and leave the Pre to wither away? The user populations of each of these communities is constantly changing, as sales wax and wane.
It is enough to make many of us long for the simple days of the 1990s, when we just had to worry about Mac vs. Windows support.
I got the idea to look at Pandora from an article in today’s NY Times. And while the service can wreck havoc on corporate networks (lots of folks start the audio stream and then walk away from their PCs), I think they are doing exactly the right kind of things when it comes to managing their multiplatform strategy.
Since I don't drive much, I often miss trends like digital billboards:
- Matt Richtel, Electronic Billboards Called Another Driving Distraction
The billboard industry argues that the new signs are part of a larger technological and economic shift to a paperless society (no more crews hoisting and removing ads from billboards) and that they give advertisers more flexibility.
Marketing materials published last year by Clear Channel, one of the nation’s biggest billboard companies, say the digital billboards are, among other things, ideal for posting game scores by advertisers like radio stations and sports bars. News organizations can also use them — “as the Web site headline changes, so does the digital billboard,” the materials say.
”It’s a very flexible, very responsible medium and very impactful,” said Ron Cooper, chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor, which has 450 digital billboards and plans to add 150 more this year. Big corporations that have used them include ABC, AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, General Mills, Ford and Verizon. “Consumers report seeing it, remembering the brand, remembering the advertisers.”
He and others in the industry say they have been careful to make the signs memorable but not distracting. They say the “television on a stick” label is an exaggeration.
“It’s a slide projector — it shows one image after the next,” said Bill Ripp, a vice president who oversees digital billboards for Lamar Advertising, another large billboard company. “We were as concerned as anybody. We wouldn’t want to cause danger.”
So many people are concerned about the dangers of texting while driving, and now, digital billboards, that they forget the elephant in the room: It's driving that's dangerous. Let's get rid of the damn car culture! Then digital billboards would be a cool thing.
Now, that to one side. Let's take the digital billboards on the highway theme to the extreme.
Imagine that in the near future your car could be outfitted with a transponder of some sort, like the one we use for EZPass tool booth systems. We could opt into ad networks so that when we are driving home late at night, after working too long one evening, all alone on the highway, the ad could be targeted us individually on that big shining billboard.
Or imagine that Sunday afternoon, when a large number of Redskins fans are within sight of a digital billboard, and they opt to show the Redskins game scores. Five minutes later, the traffic is mostly soccer fans, so they get the DC United scores.
Or you could text from your car, and your Twitter message could be displayed next to the scores.
Or they could synchronize a series of displays to target you as you speed along, showing you five different shots of this years Camaro.
All of these things are obviously dangerous, at least to the driver of the car, but so are GPS systems, cell phones, reading while you drive (I have seen that a lot in Southern California), changing clothes while you drive (saw a woman putting on pantyhose while driving, once), applying mascara, eating, making out, and so on.
But putting up giant digital biillboards is an eyesore, and obviously intended to make people look at them. It's inherently a distraction, while drive-through fast food isn't. We should outlaw this.
Some MS Office users were put off a bit by the Ribbon feature in 2007 for being cumbersome and confusing. Today we look at a cool new feature in Office 2010 that allows you to create your own custom tabs with specific commands for easier document creation.
Create a Customized Tab
In our example we’re using Word, but you can create a custom tab in the other Office apps as well. To do so, right-click on the Ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon.
The Word Options screen opens up and from here you can manage a lot of customization options.
We want to create a new customized tab, so click on the New Tab button.
Now give it a name…
Now just drag the commands you want to add from the left column over to your new custom group.
You have every command available to choose from. You can select specific groups or all commands from the dropdown menu on the left.
That is all there is to it…now you have your own customized tab with the commands you use most often to help you work more efficiently. In this example We didn’t add a whole lot of commands, but you can customize it with as many as you need. You can also create other tabs with different sets of commands too.
When you create a customized tab in one application, it’s only going to be in that app. For example if you create on in Word, it’s not going to show in Excel as commands differ between apps. If you want a custom tab in another Office app you’ll need to create one for it.
Another very cool thing you can do is export the customizations to use on another machine or pass them to a coworker. To export the customizations, go to the Customize Ribbon section and at the bottom of the right field click Import/Export then Export all customizations. Then save the file to a location on your hard drive.
To import the settings to another machine, go into Ribbon Customizations and select Import customizations file… then browse the the file you exported.
![sshot-2010-03-04-[20-28-54]](http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/sshot20100304202854.png "sshot-2010-03-04-[20-28-54]")
You’ll be prompted to confirm you want to import he customizations…
![sshot-2010-03-04-[20-31-25]](http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/sshot20100304203125.png "sshot-2010-03-04-[20-31-25]")
After confirming the choice now you’ll see the customization show up on the other machine. This is very handy if you work on several machines throughout the day and want to easily bring your customized tabs with you.
![sshot-2010-03-04-[20-31-56]](http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/sshot20100304203156.png "sshot-2010-03-04-[20-31-56]")
If you find yourself using a lot of specific commands throughout the day, creating your own customized tab will help access them more quickly. If you want to test out Office 2010 it’s currently in Public Beta and can be downloaded for free.
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Yes, indeed, it is that time of the year where very soon I will be on the road again for my second and third business trips of the year and already working towards finalising the last few details, before I embark on the not-to-be-missed and always interesting Lotusphere Comes To You events. That’s right! Next week Tuesday and Thursday, 9th and 11th of March, I will be in both Madrid and Barcelona, respectively, presenting a couple of times per event on the topic of the Social Enterprise (What else, right? hehe).
If you would want to find more details about the various Lotusphere Comes To You events around the world you can go and have a look into them over here, or at this particular link, where you will find the scheduling; in this case for Europe, but you could also access other geographies from there. The main Web site though for the Spanish Lotusphere Comes To You events can be accessed over at this link.
From there onwards, you can have a look into how you may be able to register for the event (If you happen to be around…), as well as check the agenda that has been put together for both events. Lots of interesting and rather relevant topics related to the main Lotusphere 2010 event that took place in January, as you may be able to see; I have now taken the liberty of sharing this screen shot of the agenda below so you can get a glimpse of what to expect:
You will see how in the agenda there is a key concept permeating throughout the entire event for both locations and that is the one on Collaboration. But not just collaboration for the shake of collaboration alone; more along the lines of Social Collaboration (i.e. The Social Enterprise) and Smart Work / Collaboration.
I will be speaking at two different time slots around the topic of Social Enterprise (One of my favourite topics as of late 
) and the really cool thing is that in both cases I will be sharing the stage with a couple of very talented fellow IBM colleagues: Rafael Gallegos (Lotus Software Sales Manager SPGI) and Ed Brill (Director, Product Management IBM Lotus).
It will be the first time that I will be sharing the stage with both of them on a particular event, and I just can’t wait!, as I am sure it would be plenty of good fun! Ed and myself didn’t get much of a chance to talk while in Orlando, so it would be a good thing catching up, too! Plus it would also be a great opportunity to watch him deliver his session on "Smart Collaboration: la evolución del puesto de trabajo de colaboración" (I have already checked out his slideware for the session and I can tell you that you will enjoy it quite a bit! Lots of very similar topics to the ones I have been talking about over here for a while already …)
But don’t miss out the rest of the topics covered on the agenda, because there’re some golden nuggets out there as well worth while checking out, like "Modelos flexibles de adopción de las estrategias colaborativas" with David Gutierrez Serrano and Luis Sanchez Acera (Yes, another Luis! How many of them can you have doing very similar things in the same company, eh?!?!) and a couple of use cases / success stories of how IBM customers have been making use of Lotus Collaboration technologies all along.
Like I said, lots of good stuff! And I surely can’t wait to get there on Monday morning to go through the final round of details and get things going on Tuesday in Madrid and Thursday in Barcelona. Exciting, to say the least! As usual, there are a couple of online spaces that folks would be able to check as well to see how things go before, during and after the event. There are a Facebook and LinkedIn groups, as well as a Twitter ID. And from my side I’m hoping to be able to live tweet the event using my alter ego (Split personality) over at @elsua_b (And a few other tweets, coming through to you from the good old @elsua Twitter ID). Then I will be putting together a couple of blog posts with some of the highlights on my way back from both events, hoping to share with you what some of my main key findings have been during those couple of days.
All of that, of course, if I managed to have a good connection to the Internet, although having the events hosted in Spain is going to make things a lot easier this time around … Yay for iPhone tethering!!
If you would want to get together for a drink or two, or just basically drop by and say "Hi!", you know where you can find me, right? 
Don’t forget to register, if you are going to be around during those dates! Look forward to seeing you all next week and exchange a thought or two on what a Social Enterprise is all about …
Tags: Lotusphere, Lotusphere Comes To You, LCTY, #ls10, #lcty10, #lcty, Conference Events, Madrid, Barcelona, Spain, Agendas, Lotus Knows, Collaboration, Social Collaboration, Social Enterprise, Social Web, Smart Work, Remote Collaboration, Rafael Gallegos, Ed Brill, David Gutierrez Serrano, Luis Sanchez Acera, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, @elsua_b, @elsua, Registration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Innovation, IBM, Lotus, IBM Lotus, Networking, Social Networks, Communication, Connections, Productivity
When Google launched Gmail they revolutionized emailing.
Until then, the focus of email clients and services had been on sorting emails. Thunderbird for example has over a dozen sorting criteria including date, size, and status. Searching emails, however, is notoriously difficult.
Google is a search engine. Consequently, Google’s email service provides many different ways to search your Gmail emails, while sorting is neglected. This article shows you how to use all the search options you have within Gmail.
When entering a search term into the query field, Google will suggest terms based on names and email addresses found in your emails. This can help to quickly find out an email address.
On the right side of the search buttons are two inconspicuous pieces of text, one of them reads “Show search options“. Clicking the text will bring up a menu with advanced search options.
These search options combine several operators, such as from:, to:, subject:, and in:. You also can manually enter these operators into the search field, followed by your query. In my example above I would type “from:mark in:anywhere deadline after:2009/02/28″.
If your search is limited to the criteria available from the search options, it’s of course much easier to use the form.
Using the search options you can search any of your folders, without having to know complicated operators. However, your options will always be limited.
When you need to search something very specific, you can use operators, just like you were using a search engine. The cool thing is that when you start typing an operator, the search filed will provide matching suggestions for supported operators.
Here are five of the most useful operators:
OR
When you want your results to match either one OR the other term, this is your tag.
Example: from:mark OR to:authors
cc: and bcc:
With these tags you can search for recipients that were (blind) carbon copied.
Example: cc:jorge
label:
In Gmail you can label important emails to make it easier to find them again. A menu button in the bottom right of each email allows you to quickly add labels. Additionally, the system will automatically label emails based on the folders they are stored in.
Example: from:mark label:deadline
has:attachment
A useful operator to locate emails with any type of attachment, such as photos or documents.
Example: subject:vacation has:attachment
filename:
When the previous operator comes up with too many results, you can further specify the filename. Since the full filename also includes the filetype, e.g. .pdf, you can also use this operator to search attachments by file types.
Example: subject:vacation has:attachment filename:.jpg
A full list of operators can be found in Gmail Help: Using advanced search.
MakeUseOf has published many, many articles about Google Mail. Here are a few highlights:
This article on how to search Gmail was inspired by a question posed on MakeUseOf Answers. Swamy asked whether it’s possible to search emails by size in Gmail. This is not possible. However, you can search your mail by size in clients like Thunderbird or Outlook. So, a compromise would be to use one of these tools and import your email from Gmail.
Do you know of other ways to search mails in Gmail? Please shout it out in the comments. Thank you!
em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!
"Flamboyant" is so mid-February. Now, if you want to call Johnny Weir gay without actually calling him "gay," you can call him "fierce." Like Larry King did tonight on his Larry King Enlivening Program.
Queried Larry King: "Another question from Facebook: Johnny, how does it feel to be so fierce?" To which Johnny responded "Larry, I never thought I'd hear you call something 'fierce'... Kathy Griffin would be very excited for you right now." He continued:
I suppose being fierce is a very good thing and a very cool thing. But more than fierce, I think I'm a strong person and a strong individual, and that's what I take with me everyday.
They're talking about gayness!
The move from "flamboyant" to "fierce" as the Johnny Weir Snicker-inspiring Gayness Euphemism of the Hour is a positive one. Where flamboyance is silly, fierceness is to be feared. It is a valued quality in everyone from figure skaters to Wall Street traders to Marines to Beyonce Knowles. If things keep heading in this direction, it's only a matter of time before we put a fierce man in the White House. Weir-Lysacek 2016?
My first experience with "production methods" cost me 25 cents and came as a child. In the days before the third rail, you could clamber down to your local subway or railroad tracks and place a quarter on them. After the uptown 5-train or 2:10 to Brewster came and went, you'd have a flat, shiny disk. (And while turning money into mere metal was pointless, it was still more positive than frying ants with a magnifying glass.)
[image credit: OmegaDude]
Another cool thing you can do with a quarter--that requires a drill and a Dremel, no trains--is turn it into a ring, as seen in this cool WikiHow by Matthew B. Vigor:
Pretty neat, a silver ring for 25 cents, right? Well, not exactly--turns out you need to use a quarter made in 1964 or earlier, when they still used silver. (The alloys in a more contemporary quarter will oxidize on your finger, leaving a sort of chemical tan line.) Coin dealers sell them for about $3, which is still a steal when we're talking jewelry prices.
Anyways the most disturbing thing I learned during this little discovery...is that an instructional also exists for how to fry ants with a magnifying glass. Leave those poor things alone!
[image credit: Spokesman Review]
Knowledge Notebook is a $39 Windows application (free 30 day trial) designed to enable copious note-taking, organizing, and review for students.
Colleges are worrying that students spend too much time on the Internet in the middle of lectures. They’re hitting Facebook instead of taking notes.
One proposed solution is to turn off wireless connections in the classroom.
Bentley College allows profs to choose one of five settings from fully-off to email-enabled to full access. Or they can restrict students to campus sites only, for access to course materials.
The cool thing about Knowledge Notebook is, it has both offline and online modes. You can turn off your WiFi to pay attention, or fire it up to add online research.
Don Li, a veteran of big-tech firms Booz Allen Hamilton and SRA International, started his own company, Virginia Web App, two years ago. Knowledge Notebook, his own creation, is designed specifically for taking notes in class, connecting them to previous and future notes, and optimizing both the in-class offline and back-at-the-dorm online experience for studying and reviewing.
KN’s look is as plain as Windows 3.0, but it’s the concepts that matter, not the graphics.
Jarred Milich, a senior marketing major at Virginia Tech, emailed me to say he uses Knowledge Notebook instead of Microsoft OneNote for his note-taking.
“Taking notes is only the first step,” he wrote. “There is a feature that allows me to easily export my notes into flash cards. Also, the Concept Mapping feature allows me to link my related notes and see all of them on one screen. This is very convenient because I am a visual learner and like to see all the info on one page, in one place.”
The demo video below shows how that works. Knowledge Notebook also has shortcuts for, say, looking up topics or words in Wikipedia, and to import content from PowerPoint slides. That sounds trivial, but wait until you’re pulling an all-nighter on an overdue paper. Every click counts.
I could sit here and talk about the latest big “hack attack” to strike the civilized world, but these have become so tedious. The story is always the same: hackers from scary place (here, China and Eastern Europe) attack Western government/corporation (here, corporations) for unknown, shadowy reasons. Blah, blah, blah. Instead, I’ll take this opportunity to remind you all of a very basic thing: please use the Internet with care. Don’t go clicking things willy nilly.
The story here is that hackers were able to penetrate German defenses by phishing. Yes, phishing. It’s the equivalent of, “You win Cool Thing! Please click here!”
And people click! Come on, people! Stop this nonsense already!
I understand that I’m talking to people who already know not to click every little thing on the Internet, but please tell your friends or something.
So many of the world’s computing problems could be solved if A) people let the Windows firewall do its thing and B) use some common sense when online.
Let’s say you’re walking down the street. A man in a shiny coat approaches you and says, “Good sir! Today you have won the Nigerian lottery! Oh, you don’t remember buying a ticket? Don’t worry, good sir, for the lottery is compiled using the latest United Nations statistics. Just give me your social security card and I’ll get back to you as soon as I get off the phone with the prime minister. Again, congratulations!”
Sigh.
This is a bit of an interesting entry. RIM has just released a ShopBlackBerry app in App World. A natural extension of the ShopBlackBerry website, RIM is hoping to use the app to pimp accessories out to those that need them in a quick, and convenient way. The cool thing about this app is it already knows what device you’re using, and shows you relevant accessories right away for your device. No need to go in and select your device from a list. Not that this was a hassle anyway… But, you know… Just sayin’.
For the moment the ShopBlackBerry app is in the ‘test center’ category, and will no doubt work its way out into the mainstream once some final bugs are worked out of the system. Overall though the thing works great, although I would like to see more payment options (you can use Visa and Mastercard to checkout currently).
Feel free to check it out for yourself in App World. It’s a free download.
[Via: @mikerlawson]
Related News from IntoMobile:
The 5 Most Interesting Things About Google's ReMail Acquisition http://bit.ly/9lv65D
Email startup ReMail announced this afternoon that it's been acquired by Google and there's a pretty interesting story behind this cool technology that could inspire future developments in Gmail.
The news was announced by ReMail CEO Gabor Cselle on his blog today (we learned about it first via CenterNetworks). Gabor was a former Gmail intern and was YCombinator funded. There are even more interesting elements to this story than that, though.
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The 5 Most Interesting Things About Google's ReMail Acquisition
- Louis GrayThe 5 Most Interesting Things About Google's ReMail Acquisition
- Niklas Sjostrom
OKCupid is interesting for a variety of reasons, one being that they don’t bombard us with suicidal thought-inducing commercials that could be mistaken for Cialis ads, featuring depressing people frolicking on a boat.
Another cool thing is the way they analyze and blog about trends present in their massive pool of daters- whether it’s the impact of religion on relationship marketability or the relative success of profile picture poses, OKCupid has a knack for presenting stats in a way that recalls the pop-statistics book Freakonomics. While a lot of the data gathered by the algorithms address things users can control like cleavage exposure, today’s topic is one sadly less adjustable on the user end: aging out of the dating pool.
The lengthy post to which I refer isn’t all bad news though- while it confirms that online matchmaking favors the under-thirty set, an argument is made that there’s an untapped sweet spot of women in their thirties and beyond who are, get this, “in a fellatio-positive time in their lives.” Yes, if you take nothing else from reading this, remember those words: fellatio-positive. There’s even an interactive map showing level of enthusiasm towards oral sex by region and age that you can adjust to show how bj-friendly women in your area happen to be. Isn’t math fun?
It’s not just a propensity for sword swallowing that increases after a woman leaves her twenties- kissing, bondage and threesomes were all looked upon more favorably in OKCupid’s data collection. Still not convinced? The OKCupid data goes on to point out that women over 30 are generally happier (although this inexplicably drops off at 40), more self confident, and shower/brush their teeth at a higher frequency. As for attractiveness, while the writer of the post concedes that youth and beauty are inextricably linked, attractiveness level stays fairly constant throughout one’s twenties and thirties. (Out of your league is out of your league, homes.)
TIME posted an article today with slightly more sobering statistics regarding online dating. While America’s still patting themselves on the collective back for electing a black president, an overwhelming number of us would be far less content with a black date. Studies conducted by other dating sites, including Match, Yahoo and Chemistry, found that 73% of female users indicated a racial preference for potential partners, and of that 73%, 64% of those studied have a “whites only” sign above their dating water fountain. Men aren’t that much more racially enlightened, with nearly 60% of those surveyed expressing a preference, and possibly only branching out from white women because they think Asian women get their freak on more in the boudoir. (The exact word used was “hypersexual.”)
Black women and Asian men seem to have the hardest go of it when looking for a mate online, again partially due to stereotypes. (Black women are mentioned in the study as being stereotyped as “bossy,” and I won’t speculate on what people say about Asian men.) Once again, OKCupid is heading up the data gathering game, from the earlier link about profile pics:
After attempting to control for attractiveness… the study found that black women garnered the fewest responses of any female group. White women responded at much higher rates to white men than to men of color. Asian women’s and Latinas’ response rates showed even stronger preferences for white men. (The site’s latest eye-opening study determined which types of profile pictures elicit the most responses. To all the single ladies: the older you are, the more cleavage you should show.)
So there it is- plenty of fish in the cyber sea, if you’re young, white and hate giving BJs. What do you think? Is it worth the possible rejection? Do we all deserve a lifetime of not getting laid because we’re superficial, racially unenlightened jerks?
OKCupid is interesting for a variety of reasons, one being that they don’t bombard us with suicidal thought-inducing commercials that could be mistaken for Cialis ads, featuring depressing people frolicking on a boat.
Another cool thing is the way they analyze and blog about trends present in their massive pool of daters- whether it’s the impact of religion on relationship marketability or the relative success of profile picture poses, OKCupid has a knack for presenting stats in a way that recalls the pop-statistics book Freakonomics. While a lot of the data gathered by the algorithms address things users can control like cleavage exposure, today’s topic is one sadly less adjustable on the user end: aging out of the dating pool.
The lengthy post to which I refer isn’t all bad news though- while it confirms that online matchmaking favors the under-thirty set, an argument is made that there’s an untapped sweet spot of women in their thirties and beyond who are, get this, “in a fellatio-positive time in their lives.” Yes, if you take nothing else from reading this, remember those words: fellatio-positive. There’s even an interactive map showing level of enthusiasm towards oral sex by region and age that you can adjust to show how bj-friendly women in your area happen to be. Isn’t math fun?
It’s not just a propensity for sword swallowing that increases after a woman leaves her twenties- kissing, bondage and threesomes were all looked upon more favorably in OKCupid’s data collection. Still not convinced? The OKCupid data goes on to point out that women over 30 are generally happier (although this inexplicably drops off at 40), more self confident, and shower/brush their teeth at a higher frequency. As for attractiveness, while the writer of the post concedes that youth and beauty are inextricably linked, attractiveness level stays fairly constant throughout one’s twenties and thirties. (Out of your league is out of your league, homes.)
TIME posted an article today with slightly more sobering statistics regarding online dating. While America’s still patting themselves on the collective back for electing a black president, an overwhelming number of us would be far less content with a black date. Studies conducted by other dating sites, including Match, Yahoo and Chemistry, found that 73% of female users indicated a racial preference for potential partners, and of that 73%, 64% of those studied have a “whites only” sign above their dating water fountain. Men aren’t that much more racially enlightened, with nearly 60% of those surveyed expressing a preference, and possibly only branching out from white women because they think Asian women get their freak on more in the boudoir. (The exact word used was “hypersexual.”)
Black women and Asian men seem to have the hardest go of it when looking for a mate online, again partially due to stereotypes. (Black women are mentioned in the study as being stereotyped as “bossy,” and I won’t speculate on what people say about Asian men.) Once again, OKCupid is heading up the data gathering game, from the earlier link about profile pics:
After attempting to control for attractiveness… the study found that black women garnered the fewest responses of any female group. White women responded at much higher rates to white men than to men of color. Asian women’s and Latinas’ response rates showed even stronger preferences for white men. (The site’s latest eye-opening study determined which types of profile pictures elicit the most responses. To all the single ladies: the older you are, the more cleavage you should show.)
So there it is- plenty of fish in the cyber sea, if you’re young, white and hate giving BJs. What do you think? Is it worth the possible rejection? Do we all deserve a lifetime of not getting laid because we’re superficial, racially unenlightened jerks?
