But what reviewers tend to miss is that a feature doesn’t have to be particularly useful or functional to inspire curiosity and intrigue. If they brighten up the humdrum experience of using a phone, even superficially and occasionally, that might be enough.
Robert Rummells, a U.S. Army Ranger for 22 years, says it was a natural transition when he opened a Mosquito Joe pest-control franchise in Richmond, Virginia, earlier this month.“I’m an outdoor type of guy, and I didn’t want to be chained to my computer in an office, talking on the phone,” said the 49-year-old, who tried jobs such as installing equipment at a community college and simulated firearms training after retiring from the military in 2009. “I learned I needed to work for myself.”
As more former service personnel turn to entrepreneurship, they’re generating jobs that are helping to cut the unemployment rate for veterans to a four-year low of 6.2 percent in April, lower than the 6.9 percent rate for adult non-veterans. The boost to the labor market matters: More than a million Americans are projected by the White House to transition out of the military through 2015.
via Read More.
It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them. Would they see the apparition as a genuine ghost or as something more mundane, like a bloke in a bed sheet?
The plan was foiled when not a single bystander so much as raised an eye brow. Several cows did notice, however, and they followed Cornell on his ghostly rambles. Was it just a fluke, or did people “not want to see” the besheeted man, as Cornell concluded in his 1959 report?
Okay, that stunt was not a very good experiment, but twenty years later the eminent psychologist Ulric Neisser did a better job. He filmed a video of two teams of students passing a basketball back and forth, and superimposed another video of a girl with an umbrella walking right through the center of the screen. When he asked subjects in his study to count the number of times the ball was passed, an astonishing 79 percent failed to notice the girl with the umbrella. In the years since, hundreds of studies have backed up the idea that when attention is occupied with one thing, people often fail to notice other things right before their eyes.
The Hunt, a website designed to help shoppers find specific items to buy online, has added Tyra Banks to its list of high-profile backers.
This is not the first time Banks has expressed interest in the tech startup community. The former model added an investment sector to the Tyra Banks Company, Fierce Capital LLC, and told Betabeat she would have liked to have invested in startups such as Uber and Airbnb when they first launched.
The amount of Banks’ investment was not disclosed, but The Hunt CEO Tim Weingarten tells TechCrunch the money will go to improving functionality and user engagement. While Weingarten also declined to give specifics of the direction The Hunt is heading, he says users can expect to see new developments within the next few months. Prior to its most recent investment, The Hunt raised $2 million from Javelin Venture Partners and another $700,000 from Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary (Madonna’s manager) and Rohan Oza.
Weingarten’s website functions through “hunts” that users post to find items they want to purchase. Weingarten tells me 75 percent of the time that a user is satisfied with an answer and declares the hunt “found.” However, this majority is solved by the minority of users — 15 percent of registered users aid in others’ hunts. With over 300,000 registered users and 250,000 products added to submitted hunts, a simple and generalized calculation comes out to an average of 55 hunts from each person in that percentage. That’s not necessarily representative of what actually happens, but it’s still a lot of hunts to be solved.
Naren Shaam spoke virtually no German and knew only one person in Berlin. That didn’t keep him from founding his travel planning website, GoEuro, there.
“Berlin was the right choice,” said the 30-year-old Harvard Business School graduate, who now has 20 people working for him at his offices in an old industrial building. “I would do it again here.”
Young people like Shaam have made the German capital a global hotbed for startups, drawn by a raw, artsy atmosphere that rivals Brooklyn’s as an icon of global hip. The city is home to 2,500 fledgling tech companies, employing some 30,000 people, according to the Federal Association of German Startups, which was set up in the city last year.
But even as Berlin jostles with London for the title of Europe’s latest Silicon Whatever, a lack of financing threatens its growth. Shaam, for instance, acknowledges that finding backers would have been easier and valuations higher in the U.S. or Britain, though he felt free-wheeling Berlin, with its growing talent pool, was a better fit
Love the idea of a treadputer and happen to own the well-loved, easy-to-Craigslist IKEA Jerker? Turns out it makes for a really nice treadmill desk.
The muscle soreness I’m experiencing today after walking around Comic-Con this weekend made me realize: I’ve got to incorporate more standing and walking into my daily routine. Maybe a treadmill desk? There are some expensive desks made to fit over a treadmill (sold separately), but someone on Hacker News modified an IKEA Jerker desk to do the job. The discontinued but beloved model of desk, which I already own, plus one of those inexpensive but utilitarian wire shelving units gives you a wide monitor stand plus plenty of keyboard and mouse room. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it looks really tempting to try. The owner says:
If you have noticed the design and layout of solar panels around, you would have thought a minute or two about its aesthetics. Though not too bad, the dark colored cells could be a put off. Scientists have now decided to add some color to them. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Germany are working on a new type of photovoltaic using thin film technology to give some color to the panels.
Once upon a time, there was a website designed to crowdfund small, creative projects—a garage band’s new self-recorded album; a short film; a dance video. That website was called Kickstarter.
Then, along came Tim Schafer and Double Fine Adventure, the video game now known as Broken Age, which transformed the site into an indie video game crowdfunding platform overnight. Kickstarter termed it the “Blockbuster Effect.”
Well, not just a video game funding platform, but these days many of the biggest projects—from the Ouya to Star Citizen to Torment: Tides of Numenera—are video games or video game accessories. And these projects all have, at least in part, Schafer and his game to thank. Broken Age was the catalyst, the trailblazer, the portent of things to come.
And now, despite the $3.3 million the game raised on Kickstarter (and the additional $1.2 million Double Fine raised for its second Kickstarter game, Massive Chalice) Broken Age is out of money.
There are so many things we have to teach our children but one that is often overlooked in today’s world is teaching kids about money. Unless your child has a large trust fund in their name or some other financial windfall heading there way they will need to learn about personal finance. The earlier you start teaching children about financial matters the better. During the most impressionable years of their lives, young people will formulate an opinion about money that will likely stick with them throughout adulthood. With that being said, it’s important to be straightforward with kids. They need to know the value of a dollar and you’re their best teacher.
Use everyday activities to teach lessons about money.
Take your children to the grocery store. Teach them how to find the best deals by watching for sales, comparing prices, and using coupons. Purchase a small calculator for your child and work on adding and subtracting while you shop. This is especially helpful for elementary aged children who are learning to differentiate between a dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill.
