Profilactic Mashup - smorty71

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7l3wxo Fact: Cops' mustaches have been asking to have their picture taken with my mustache. http://mobro.co/smorty71

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:30:00 GMT

sMoRTy71: Fact: Cops' mustaches have been asking to have their picture taken with my mustache. http://mobro.co/smorty71

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7hv47c Good morning from me and my sweet, sweet mustache. You're welcome. #Movember

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:31:07 GMT

sMoRTy71: Good morning from me and my sweet, sweet mustache. You're welcome. #Movember

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7hv1n0 Reese's Puffs' DJ Name Mixer formula seems very familiar. Hope my kids don't notice. #pr0nname

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:26:12 GMT

sMoRTy71: Reese's Puffs' DJ Name Mixer formula seems very familiar. Hope my kids don't notice. #pr0nname

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7g3ftn Meet Mason Monroe Morton! 10lbs 7.5oz.

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:09:43 GMT

sMoRTy71: Meet Mason Monroe Morton! 10lbs 7.5oz.

My photos: Maddox sings Queen

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:58:10 GMT

sMoRTy71 posted a video:

We get to here him sing this about 10 times a day. This part never gets old.

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7ey8ba Fact: My mustache is twice as badass as your mustache. #DidTheMath #Movember http://mobro.co/smorty71

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:11:33 GMT

sMoRTy71: Fact: My mustache is twice as badass as your mustache. #DidTheMath #Movember http://mobro.co/smorty71

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7dxn1h #Movember day 13. You're welcome.

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:53:06 GMT

sMoRTy71: #Movember day 13. You're welcome.

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7d3boz Seems like a reasonable way to spend my day off.

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:33:37 GMT

sMoRTy71: Seems like a reasonable way to spend my day off.

TwitPic: sMoRTy71: http://twitpic.com/7cak8o Looks like the 'stache is starting to take off... especially when I do this. #Movember

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:02:24 GMT

sMoRTy71: Looks like the 'stache is starting to take off... especially when I do this. #Movember

Google Reader: Google TV 2.0 Rolls Out But No New Hardware Til 2012

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:11:37 GMT

A year after the much-hyped launch of Google TV with partners Sony (NYSE: SNE), Logitech, Intel (NSDQ: INTC) and Dish Network (NSDQ: DISH)—and disappointing reception, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is upgrading the software and resetting expectations.

The over-the-air update starts this week on Google-TV enabled Sony TV and Blu-Ray players, then moves to the Logitech Revue set-top box. But Google will miss the all-important holiday season when it comes to new hardware, instead waiting for 2012. The company says it has deals in place for new devices at “new pricepoints.”

The settop was overpriced, launching at $249, the remotes for both Sony and Logitech were clunky and ultimately, the experience was underwhelming. (Logitech cut the price to $99 over the summer after more were returned than sold.) It didn’t help that programmers like Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and Fox (NSDQ: NWS) and online video hub Hulu blocked access from the Google TV web browser, insisting that Google TV required distribution agreements.

On the plus side, Google says time spent on YouTube ~~use~~ doubled when users switched from computers to TV screens. The investment YouTube is making in original content is aimed squarely at increasing “TV” programming that comes straight from the web.

In line with that, this version of Google TV includes a custom YouTube experience, including tight integration with Google TV search and what Google says will be easier access to HD-quality video.

The “new” Google TV also has a TV & Movies app to search across multiple sites, including Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), cable, and satellite. That’s not exactly revolutionary but if it works well could take the place of some official programming guides.

The update also aims to simplify the experience and open the development to third-party solutions that will let people use Android smartphones and tablets to run connected devices. The Android Market for Google TV is a stripped-down version—no telephony, touchscreen or GPS apps—and the number of developers to start is very small, only 50.

On the less-simple side, Google TV also runs Google’s browser OS Chrome—well, some of it. The majority of Chrome apps are supposed to work; Chrome extensions won’t.

Google TV project lead Mario Queiroz and Vincent Dureau, director of engineering, offered the party line in ablog post: “The initial version of Google TV wasn’t perfect, but launching it gave us the opportunity to learn.”

We’ll hear more about that from Queiroz, the VP of product management, in an interview at paidContent Entertainment: Everything Everywhere this Thursday. (Disclosure: Google TV is also a sponsor of the conference.)

We'll be addressing some of these themes during our next conference, paidContent Entertainment, November 3 in Los Angeles. You can find out more about the agenda and register here.

Related

Google Reader: Why More of Your Facebook Fans are Seeing Fewer of Your Messages

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 04:00:00 GMT

Five weeks after Facebook revamped what users see when they visit the site, the verdict is in on the implications for brands and their messages: Reach is up but frequency is down, or so it would go in conventional media parlance.

Google Reader: The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:22:13 GMT

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher.

There was a girl at a party, Ona, who then started telling me how she met her current boyfriend. She just simply told him she liked him. I was insanely jealous right then of this guy. Here was this beautiful, hysterically funny girl who told a guy she liked him and now he was having regular sex with her.

That doesn’t happen, right? It never happened to me. I sat there nodding, not being able to say anything but thinking, what if she said, “I like you” to me right then. I would’ve been happy. Instead, I got depressed and went to sit on the stairs.

There was another girl there. She was crying.I tried to comfort her by telling her I was an artist. I then asked her why she was crying. Apparently the party was actually her birthday party! I had no idea. I didn’t even know who she was. And she was crying because her boyfriend didn’t show up.

Within a week we were living together. Ultimately it didn’t work out and I did my usual passive thing, which was to move to another city (in this case, NYC), to get out of the relationship.

In Stephen Covey’s Book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” his first habit is “Be Proactive.” I haven’t read the book. I saw the list on Wikipedia. I will not buy the book because at this moment it’s the #1 book on Amazon under Motivation on the Kindle and I am #2. How can he be #1 after 22 years?

But it makes me think—unfortunately he’s dead on. In fact, Being Proactive might be the only effective habit. I read the other six and they all seemed to be corollaries of the first one.

When I started my first company, Reset, I showed my brother-in-law the Internet so he could start learning design for it. And then I hired Reset from my perch at HBO to do HBO’s website. I was insanely proactive in getting the company off of the ground. When I wanted to sell the company I didn’t wait for buyers. I proactively went after everyone who was buying companies in the space. And screw you, Razorfish, for ignoring me.
When I was trading for hedge funds I sent out about 20 emails every weekend to new potential investors. Altogether I probably sent out over 1000 emails. Most of them ignored me. Over the course of a year about 14 allocated money for me to trade.
When I started Stockpickr, I spec-ed out the site, mocked up a few pages, and showed the CEO of thestreet.com what I was working on. I had spent less than $1000 on it at that point. He wanted to be involved and eventually it grew into a good business. If I had just said to him, “let’s do a social media business in Finance”, it would not have worked. I would’ve become a consultant rather than an entrepreneur. You have to do things to succeed. Nobody is just going to give you money. This is why being as proactive as possible is important.
Ona was proactive in meeting her boyfriend. He was never going to ask her out. So she told him she liked him and they started going out. She was proactive.
Before I met my wife Claudia, I was sending out probably 50 messages a day on dating services. That’s the sheer quantity I had to do in order to meet someone I liked and it worked. And I screwed it up so badly, as I’ve written before. She wrote to me that she was from Buenos Aires and I said, “oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Brazil.” And she wrote back, “uhh, Buenos Aires is in Argentina!” Ugh, what an idiot I am! I can’t believe she agreed to go on a date with me after that. But if I hadn’t been sending out 50 messages a day I never would’ve met her. To top it off, I really was hoping Buenos Aires was in Brazil. I would save at least four hours on any plane rides. Oh well.

(Claudia looking very suspicious, minutes after we were married).

Here’s the proactive plan:

LIST AND DO:

Proactively list what you want (a spouse, a new job, a new business, a new opportunity.

List what the next step is (sign up for dating services, take a yoga class, look at classifieds, spec out your business, decide how you will build your product, contact the people who will build it and get a price from them, ask people if you can work for them.) Make sure the next step is very doable. So doable that you can (and will) do it today.

CUT LOSSES:

Quickly determine what doesn’t work. For instance, when I set up Stockpickr.com I set up 10 other websites at the same time. None of them got any traction and I stuck with the one that did.

GET A JOB:

If you want a new job, proactively go out and get another one. Preferably freelance : think about what you do best, and then do it for three paying customers. Contact 30 customers and ask what simple services you can do for them that they would be willing to pay for. Three of them will respond and now you can quit your job.

If you want to raise money: Contact 100 VCs or angels and share with them your business. If they all say “no” then build up for six months, send them all notes on your progress every month, and go out and raise money again six months later. If you have no progress then start a new business. It didn’t work.

Another example: when a book publisher once rejected me, I wrote back to her saying that I fit perfectly with her list, describing how I could publicize the book with the different branches of her own company. I would make all changes she wanted, I would work with a co-author, etc and wouldn’t you know it—she published my book that she had rejected. It was an easy book to write (my co-author did a lot of the writing) and I got an advance and made money. It never would’ve happened if I hadn’t researched her and proactively chased her down.

GET PUBLICITY:

If you want publicity, write your own publicity. Write a guest post for a popular blog (like I am doing here). If you want to go on TV, contact the producers of shows and give them ten ideas of what you can talk about and why they should pick you to talk about them. Example: I have no credentials in politics but I wrote a post about a year or so ago for the Huffington Post on who the possible third-party candidates could be. Next thing I was on five radio shows talking about it. Suddenly I was a political expert.

HEALTH

If you want health, proactively get it. You know when you are putting bad stuff in your body, when you’re not sleeping enough, when you’re not exercising enough, when you’re letting short-term pleasures get in the way of longer-term gratification . Proactively make sure that when you’re 80 you’re not stooped over and suffering.

PROACTIVELY EXTEND YOUR RUNWAY

Of course one way to make more money is to spend less. Cut out the biggest expenses in your life. Even rent or mortgage. It’s no crime or shame to move someplace else. I’ve done it repeatedly when I’ve needed to. That’s how you live happier and longer.

PROACTIVELY ELIMINATE THE CRAPPY PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE

If someone is making you angry, how do you be proactive? That’s easy. Ignore them! Don’t try to fight them. You’ll never win. Do you think you are going to win an argument against a someone who hates you? Of course not. Ignore them until they stop hating you. Now that entire problem is gone.

HOW TO START TODAY!

So today, write down the five things you want and what the absolute very next step is to getting those things (if you want to start a business, for instance, write down some ideas for businesses and how you can realistically start them within the next month).

I did beat out Covey for about 15 seconds. (Click here if you want to a promotion on my book).

NO EXCUSES

You can come up with a lot of reasons for not proactively beginning something. Excuses are easy and I get it. But how about take a ten-day diet from excuses. You can get back to your “I cants” 10 days from now. If I said, “I can’t start Stockpickr, I’m running a fund of hedge funds,” then I never would’ve started it and sold it nine months later. If I said, “I can’t self-publish – nobody will buy it” then I never would’ve had for 15 seconds the #1 best-selling Motivational book on Amazon’s kindle store, beating out Stephen Covey’s crappy little book.

After I was dating Sue for two years (the girl whose birthday party it was at the beginning of this post), I went shopping for an engagement ring. My friend, Peter, went down to the main store in Pittsburgh with me. There was an emerald ring that looked nice and it was $700. I was shaking. That was a lot of money to me at the time.

There were so many pretty girls walking around the store and I fell in love with all of them. It was an honest and sincere love I felt for every woman walking around. I wanted to marry them all. Right then.

Later that night I came home and told Sue I wasn’t ready to get married yet. A year later we were broken up. Probably the most effective habit: Don’t be proactive about the things you don’t want to do.

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JAMES ALTUCHER

Person: James Altucher

Website:

Companies: 140Labs

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Google Reader: (Founder Stories) Houston On Pitching Dropbox: “Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive”

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:00:23 GMT

Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston recently sat down with TechCrunch Editor, Erick Schonfeld to discuss the origins of Dropbox – a service that allows users to upload and access their files from virtually any device, anywhere. With $250-million in funding and 45-million users, Dropbox is shaking up the world of digital storage.

The roots of Dropbox were planted when Houston was a student at MIT. “You could sit down at any of tens-of-thousands of computers on campus and not only your files but your whole environment was just in front of you and kind of followed you around.” Then graduation hit and Houston says he was thrown “back to the stone age.” He had just launched a company but didn’t feel secure carrying it around in his jeans on a thumb drive.

Solving his own issue, Houston created Dropbox and pitched it to Y Combinator with the premise that “Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive.”

He was accepted.

Below, Houston briefly describes how he tested Dropbox – without actually releasing Dropbox. It’s a strategy Eric Ries recently wrote about on TechCrunch.

Aware that releasing a flawed beta would result in customer backlash, Houston made and posted a video describing his software. “It turns out we got the same feedback from all of our prospective users that we would have gotten from putting code in their hands, except it was a ton less effort.”

Speaking of feedback, when asked about the “file folder structure” of Dropbox, which was created before the iPad, Houston says Dropbox will apply a “post-PC non-file and folder centric approach to everything” it does.

Make sure to check out the full video for additional insights.

Past episodes of Founder Stories, featuring conversations with Eric Ries, Scott Heiferman, and Fred Wilson are here.

Episode II of this interview is coming up.

Crunchbase

Company: Dropbox

Website: dropbox.com

Funding: $257M

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a...

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Company: Y Combinator

Website: ycombinator.com

Launch Date: January 4, 2005

Funding: $10.3M

Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...

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Person: Drew Houston

Website:

Companies: Dropbox, HubSpot, Accolade, Bit9

Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service relied upon by millions around the world. Drew leads Dropbox’s activities, and is actively involved in its business and product decisions. Before founding Dropbox, Drew attended MIT where he studied computer science. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer for Bit9. After graduating from...

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Person: Erick Schonfeld

Website:

Companies: TechCrunch, Time Warner

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington left in 2011, Schonfeld became Editor. Prior to TechCrunch,...

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Person: Eric Ries

Website: theleanstartup.com

Companies: IMVU, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Aardvark, Veri, Rock Health

Eric Ries is the author of the forthcoming book, [The Lean Startup] (http://theleanstartup.com). Previously, he co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and...

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Google Reader: How Klout Got Klout.com

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:07:26 GMT

While everyone is making up their minds about whether Klout is an utterly meaningless service or the divine “standard for influence” the world has been clamoring for, I had an interesting chat with Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez the other day at the F.ounders conference in Dublin, Ireland.

When I informed him that, if anything, I think that the name of the company was well chosen, he told me the story of how he obtained the domain name klout.com. Since I have a huge interest in that type of small behind-the-scenes story – and in domain names – I loved it and found it interesting enough to be worth sharing here.

When the company started out a few years ago in New York City, Fernandez’ first and top choice for a name was Klout, so he registered klout.net and tried to get in touch with the owner of klout.com, who was based in San Francisco.

Klout was still a long way of getting funded or making money, so Fernandez offered the owner $1,000 of his own money for the domain name. The owner responded by laughing at him, suggesting it was worth ‘high five figures’ and saying he had plans to build something for it.

For the next year and a half, Fernandez harassed the owner every week to try and convince him to sell the domain name. Then, in August 2009, Fernandez decided to move the company from NYC to San Francisco. Around that time, Klout also raised its first round of seed funding: a check from angel investor Nova Spivack, which Fernandez cashed, keeping the cash in his apartment. Much to the dismay of his team and hosting company, he tells me.

Next, Fernandez started following the owner of klout.com on Twitter, waiting for him to reveal his location. When the guy at one point tweeted that he was at a restaurant in San Francisco, Fernandez went there, threw an envelope with $5,000 in cash on the table and told him that he would stop bothering him if he finally agreed to sell the domain name in exchange for the money.

The guy agreed, and Fernandez opened up his laptop and took care of the domain transfer right then and there, leaving the restaurant ten minutes later.

He then tweeted this:

Admittedly, some will think this was slightly creepy and obnoxious behavior. I, on the other hand, think it’s awesome. Real entrepreneurs, after all, know how to hustle.

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KLOUT

Company: Klout

Website: klout.com

Funding: $40M

Klout measures influence across the social web. Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. Data is collected about the content users create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of their networks. Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.

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Google Reader: DirecTV's iPad app updated with live TV streaming, as long as you stay at home

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:58:00 GMT

DirecTV debuted its iPad app in February with an impressive suite of remote control and content browsing options, but one of the few missing features was the ability to watch TV on it, which has now been added. Like similar apps from Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, v1.3.1 adds the ability to watch 38 channels live on the tablet, provided you're connected to the same home network as your DirecTV Plus HD DVR. That home restriction, plus being limited to only live TV streams and not DVRed programming separates it from Sling's apps, but at least it's still a free add-on. If you want to watch recorded shows or take them on the go you'll still need the Nomad box for that. Check below for a link to one of DBSTalk's usual thorough walkthrough PDFs breaking down the new features, a few screengrabs sent in by a reader, and the complete channel list after the break.

Gallery: DirecTV iPad app streaming live TV

[Thanks, Will & Jon]

Continue reading DirecTV's iPad app updated with live TV streaming, as long as you stay at home

DirecTV's iPad app updated with live TV streaming, as long as you stay at home originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Reader: Anti-Facebook Social Network “Unthink” Launches To Public

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:51 GMT

Scrappy outsider startup Unthink.com, which bills itself as the “anti-Facebook,” is opening up its doors today, allowing in its first round of beta testers. The Tampa-based company with $2.5 million in funding from DouglasBay Capital sees itself as a more open, more honest form of social networking – one where its users are the owners of their data, and not the product being sold to advertisers.

Unthink is the kind of startup that could only come from outside of traditional tech hotspots like Silicon Valley or New York, as there’s a certain level of audacity, and perhaps even ignorance, that you need in order to think you have a shot at displacing social networking giant Facebook and all of its 800 million users.

And taking down Facebook is the core of Unthink’s marketing campaign. In fact, the majority of Unthink’s message is about what it is not: it’s not another social network, it’s a social revolution. Unthinkers are not users, they’re owners. Unthink is not in control, you are. And so on. It even has its own manifesto, deeds and covenants.

“If we want to be free, we have to control our own communications…we have to claim that power,” CEO Natasha Dedis shouted with vitriol to the crowd at September’s Tampa Bay Barcamp (the un-conference), before delving into all the ways that Facebook does its users wrong.

She explained that the idea for Unthink came to her when her son wanted to sign up for Facebook and she read the terms of service. They were not something she wanted to agree to because they could change at any time. But for her son, that decision was met with a lot of anxiety. “He was really stressed about it, like he didn’t have a choice – he had to be on Facebook.” It was either be on Facebook, or be a pariah in school, she said. Whichever decision Dedis made, she felt like she was being bad mother.

(Above: a profile after sign-up)

On Facebook, your personal data, your posts, your likes – in short, all your social networking activity – is used to provide advertisers with a way to directly target precise demographics. Some may call it genius, but for others like Dedis, it feels exploitive.

“The number one thing that had to be ‘un-thought’ about social media, is who does it belong to? We need to own everything that we put on our page. We can be as private or as public as we want, as long as it’s our choice,” she said.

On Unthink, user data isn’t sold to brands. Instead, users choose a brand to sponsor their page, by way of an ad dubbed “iEndorse.” The idea is that a user will select a brand they feel some affinity with, and will then become an advocate for that brand. Users who don’t want to select a brand have the option to pay for the service instead ($2/year).

Brands also have a different way to communicate with fans than they do on Facebook, where messages are spliced into a users’ News Feed. On Unthink, there’s a separate section on users’ profile pages just for communicating with businesses. Users decide what companies they want to communicate with, what type of messages they want to receive and how often they want to receive them. Then, when they choose to interact with a brand, they’re rewarded for their engagement with points that can be used towards discounts and offers from the brand in question.

Upon signing up for Unthink, as I did today, you’re offered an app that will export your photos and videos from Facebook. You’re also asked to fill out the standard social networking questions (name, date of birth, gender, etc.) and are then directed to your own personal profile page.

These pages are split into sections, each with a dedicated purpose and easy-to-customize privacy controls. The top section, “iUnthink” is your public microblog, the middle, your social section, the third, your lifestyle section for connecting with brands (this part will launch in a few weeks), and the bottom, your professional section for connecting with business colleagues.

Oh, that’s right. Did I forget to mention?

Despite its anti-Facebook manifesto, Unthink actually wants to displace Twitter, Groupon and LinkedIn, too. If anything, however, it’s Diaspora done right. Hey, if you’re going to appeal to the “I don’t want corporate control of my data!” crowd, you may as well go all in.

Will Unthink take down Facebook? Not likely. But it’s fascinating to watch someone try on this scale.

Unthink is launching into a limited beta today. If you know someone who’s in, they can send you an invite. TechCrunch readers can email techcrunch@unthink.com to get to the head of the list.

(Above: full-page profile. Note that ticker would normally be at bottom)

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Google Reader: Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Brings Receipt Aggregator And Tracking Service To Gmail

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:33 GMT

We wrote about receipt tracking service Slice a few months ago when the startup announced its $9.4 million Series A funding round from DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Michael Birch, FLOODGATE, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Rick Thompson.

In May, Slice launched its Yahoo Mail app to help you organize your online shopping by analyzing your inbox. It’s sort of like what TripIt does for your itineraries, except Slice tracks receipts, notices and purchases. Today, Slice is bringing its receipt organizer to Gmail users.

Once you sign up, the app automatically aggregates and pulls information from the electronic receipts in your email and organizes it in one place. The startup says that receipts and purchases often gets lost in your inbox and the app consolidates your shopping history in one place so you don’t have to log into multiple websites, dig through receipts or manually file emails

Slice will automatically track in-progress shipments and chart shipping from multiple retailers on a single map. And the service will also provide quick access to return and customer service information that isn’t always so easy to find and will show you exactly what you bought down to the individual item from the most popular merchants, not just where you bought it. Additionally, Slice is launching a new features, called Price Alerts, that will let users know when the cost of an item purchased drops, so you can try to recoup the difference from the retailer.

Since launching for Yahoo Mail earlier this year, Slice has tracked and organized over 2.5 million purchases for its users. The Gmail app is particularly useful, especially as the holiday shopping season nears and there’s an influx of receipts arriving in my inbox.

Slice faces competition from recently launched Lemon.

Google Reader: Logitech To Join The Apple AirPlay Fray

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:56:17 GMT

Cilck to enlarge.

Within the next few weeks, Logitech intends to join the AirPlay fray with their aerodynamic Air Speaker.

At its most basic, when talking audio, Apple’s wireless streaming protocol is conceptually similar conceptually to Bluetooth — beam your music from one device to another. However, as AirPlay rides ones wireless network, it’s not limited to the same short distances as Bluetooth (~30 feet) and more complex interactions are supported. From Apple:

AirPlay does more than just stream your music to external speakers. It streams information about your music, too. Song titles, artists, album names, elapsed and remaining time, and album artwork all appear on AirPlay-enabled speakers with graphical displays. For the ultimate sonic panorama, you can stream your tunes to more than one room simultaneously, so you’ll never lose the beat, no matter where you are in the house.

We anticipate the Logitech Air Speaker will land at a similar price point as the recently released iHome iW1 ($300, reviewed here). Unfortunately, Logitech’s solution requires the speaker to be tethered to power at all times with no indication of a rechargeable battery. On the other hand, for those streaming and/or controlling AirPlay audio via an iPhone or iPad, Logitech kindly provides a “hideaway” dock for Speaker configuration… and iOS device charging.

Logitech has yet to release pricing or itemize the Speaker’s sonic capabilities, but their Amazon listing provides a few more nuggets of info:

The Logitech Air Speaker with Apple AirPlay technology uses your home Wi-Fi network to stream uncompressed audio from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch or laptop.
Once you’re set up, any iOS device or computer on your Wi-Fi network is instantly connected. So you can stream tunes from your iPad , your friends’ iPhones or your girlfriend’s laptop no pairing required.
For years, we’ve been building some of your favorite and best sounding speakers and iPod docks. And now, we’ve crafted an AirPlay speaker that looks great in any room and delivers a big soundstage with impressively detailed, stereo sound.
Your Air Speaker even includes an Apple Dock Connector in a hideaway drawer. Use it to charge your iPad or iPhone when it’s low on power. Or use it to play music from your iPod classic or iPod nano.

As for my household, we prefer the agnostic and possibly more elegant Sonos solution over AirPlay and have been contemplating picking up a refurb Jawbone Jambox ($130) for lighter weight Bluetooth audio duties (including speakerphone) in the kitchen.

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Google Reader: Battlefield 3 video shows 360 version without HD texture pack

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:30:00 GMT

A comparison video of Battlefield 3 for Xbox 360 by WikiGamesGuides reveals what kind of difference the HD texture pack makes. Last week, EA finally fessed up to the feature, with executive producer Patrick Bach saying the difference would make the the game look "standard-def." He wasn't kidding -- the difference is staggering.

The pack install is optional because, unlike PCs and PS3, hard drives aren't standard for the Xbox 360. The real question, though, is why does it look this bad without the pack? Even ignoring all other non-EA, DICE games, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 didn't require a hard drive install and still looked fantastic. If you don't have a hard drive for your Xbox 360, consider this a warning.

Battlefield 3 video shows 360 version without HD texture pack originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Reader: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception review: Precious moments

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:00:00 GMT

If you were to take all the good parts -- you know, "Oh, guys, you have to see this one part," or "Watch! Watch! My favorite part's coming up!" -- of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, and strip away all of the filler, you'd be left with the same game you had when you started. It's not one to play host to unextraordinary moments: Every plane must crash, every truck must flip and every ancient, long hidden civilization must be discovered (and, as a natural result, destroyed).

The sequence of events that propels Uncharted 3 from start to finish has clearly been the subject of the same brilliant centrifuge which separated wheat from chaff in the series' previous outings. The moments of thrilling peril which punctuate Uncharted 3's every chapter have been daisy-chained together with exhausting proximity -- they're so close, in fact, that it's sometimes a little difficult to see the thread that ties them all together.

Gallery: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Gamescom 2011)

Continue reading Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception review: Precious moments

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception review: Precious moments originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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