The Perfect Solution to Year-Round Weather Problems – The 3-in-1 Quilo™ | CoolBusinessIdeas.com

June 12, 2017June 12, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Summers leave you with a hard choice – to either spend a lot of money covering your electricity bill thanks to high unit air conditioners, or to sweat your way through work and lie tossing and turning in bed at night. It’s worse when you want to stay cool and relax indoors, but can’t because of the heat. More than that, high temperatures can be bad for your health too, leading to fatigue, rashes, and in severe cases, heat strokes.

Winters, on the other hand, are a time to cozy up indoors with something warm to drink or eat. As great as that sounds, winters can cause a lot of dryness in the atmosphere because of low humidity. This low humidity more often than not makes your skin dry and itchy. It can also affect wooden furniture and any books, papers, and artwork.

The 15-year-old developer making a difference one app at a time | Mashable

June 5, 2017June 5, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Like many developers about to attend their first major developer conference, Amanda Southworth is looking forward to the week-long event. Besides Monday’s keynote, when Apple will unveil the next version of iOS, MacOS and maybe even some new hardware, there will be deep dives into new developer tools and countless networking opportunities.

That’s enough for any developer to get excited about, but Southworth is not like most other developers.

At just 15 years old, Southworth has the distinction of being among the youngest to attend Apple’s developer conference, which awarded her one of its WWDC Scholarships — a program that helps “talented students and STEM organization members,” travel to and attend the event.

Though she’s been teaching herself to code for the better part of six years she says it wasn’t until the seventh grade when she really began to throw herself into her coding projects and other “nerd stuff.” Soon, she was spending as much as 30 hours a week to her various projects: first building robots and programming micro-controllers; then picking up web and iOS development.

Learn How To Love Talking In Public (And Stop Saying “Um” And “Like”) With This New App | Fast Company

June 5, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Four out of 10 Americans regularly worry about not having enough money for the future. And one in three fear the U.S. will be involved in another world war–just as many report concern over global warming and climate change. And more Americans (25.9%) are afraid of public speaking than are afraid of heights, devastating natural disasters, police brutality, and even dying?

Now, imagine what that experience is like for a non-native-English speaker who is, say, pitching her startup idea to a group of very white funders. That’s tough. The good news is, of course, that there’s an app to help with that.

Flipboard’s Quest To Save Online Publishing—And Itself | Fast Company

February 8, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010, but the apps it presented offered a rather nostalgic revival of traditional media. Photos, graphics, magazines, and books optimized for its high-res screen featured a print-era visual polish that had been sorely missing from ad-crammed web pages and monochrome ebook readers.

One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page; and flicking up on the screen triggered a visual effect that looked like flipping pages. Flipboard was among the top 10 iPad apps in its early days, according to rankings by AppAnnie. “It seemed to be a perfectly timed creature of the iPad age, of the tablet age,” says digital advertising consultant Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.

Hemelswater Makes Beer From Rain On Urban Rooftops | Pop-Up City

February 8, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Climate change makes it rain more often and more heavily in Western Europe’s low countries. At the same time the streets of our cities are completely paved, leaving no room for water to drain. This causes increasing urban flooding issues. But there is a solution, and it’s called beer.

The Amsterdam-based brewery Hemelswater has started to collect water from rooftops in the city to make beer from. Their first beer is called Code Blond and is collected from the roof of the Volkshotel building in Amsterdam. The name Code Blond refers to the weather forecasting codes that indicate dangerous weather expectations such as storm, snowfall and heavy rainfall in the Netherlands. As a consequence of the changing weather conditions these weather alarms are being used more often than in the past.

Ask For Shopping Assistance | CoolBusinessIdeas.com

January 19, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

An innovation to get all those salespeople to leave you the hell alone while you’re shopping has finally arrived.

On Thursday, a Reddit user shared a photo of a shopping basket rack inside an Innisfree, a Korean beauty store located throughout Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The basket with the green sign indicates the shopper doesn’t need assistance, while the orange sign indicates the shopper may.

Secondhand marketplace app Letgo raises $175 million to fuel its quest to take on Craigslist | Mashable

January 17, 2017January 17, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Secondhand marketplace app Letgo just got a big boost in its quest to become the Craigslist of the smartphone era.

The e-commerce company announced Tuesday that it has raised $175 million in its third major funding round following a year of breakneck growth.

The sum brings the startup’s total investor backing to $375 million, including money raised from a previous round and a merger with rival Wallapop last year. The company declined to reveal its resulting valuation.

Letgo aims to bring a mobile-friendly, millennial-geared touch to localized used-good listings, a space currently dominated by Craigslist.

Portable vision testing kit puts an eye doctor in your smartphone | Newatlas

January 11, 2017January 11, 2017 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that many of us spend a good portion of our day in front of a computer or pouring over documents, chances are we don’t get our eyes checked as often as we should. Whatever the reason for this, there’s now a solution that renders most of our excuses moot: the EyeQue Personal Vision Tracker, a smartphone-enabled vision testing kit that costs less than the average monthly cellphone bill. What sets it apart from other smartphone-based eye exam kits – such as the SVOne by New York-based Smart Vision Labs, and Peek – is that it is designed for frequent consumer use.