Keep your eye on Evernote. What began simply as a note taking app has now exploded into a social sharing platform for friends and family. Users are sharing their to-do lists, recipes, and family plans with each other to create one of the most personal and surprising places to digitally connect.
Katie Ford, EVP of Starcom MediaVest Group, speaks to iMedia about how this network has evolved and grown into an exciting social sharing tool.
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The first tablet to offer a serious alternative to the iPad has come a long way. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, which originally debuted in late 2010 and quickly earned status as Android's de facto tablet offering, is now in its third generation of products. Fittingly, it comes in three sizes — with screens that measure 7, 8 and 10.1 inches — and they're all coming to the U.S. on July 7.
Of course, there are tons of other Android tablets now, and the Tab has evolved into Samsung's entry-level "consumption" tablets, leaving the high end to the company's premium Note line, which adds more features and processing power (not to mention a stylus) for people interested in "productivity" from their tablets. Read more...
More about Android, Samsung, Tech, Gadgets, and Galaxy Tab 3
Bad news for Brooklyn's Brits: a Welsh pub in Bay Ridge that got in trouble for posting a Brits-preferred want ad are giving up their fight with the state's Commission of Human Rights, and they'll be paying a hefty $2,500 fine as penance. [ more › ]
People, the MTA and NYPD really don't want you to get your electronic gadgets stolen—that's why they make warnings and PSAs about keeping your valuables out of sight when you ride mass transit. Case in point: A person snatched an iPhone out of an unsuspecting subway rider's hands last week. [ more › ]
A Good Samaritan who tried to intervene during a domestic dispute aboard a train on the Upper East Side yesterday ended up pepper-spraying everyone in the subway car. According to the Post, a couple got into an argument on an uptown 6 train near 96th Street around 4 p.m. Saturday. The Good Samaritan tried to break up the argument, and was punched in the face in the process. And then he broke out the pepper spray. [ more › ]
This week, a group of SoHo residents filed a lawsuit against the city to have the 43-slot Citi Bike docking station removed from Petrosino Park and relocated down the street. That group has collected over 600 petition signatures and 132 letters to the DOT, who haven't budged yet. But there have been a handful of stations which have been moved, or removed entirely—but apparently, you have to be rich or famous to get it to happen. [ more › ]
Prcog1They're yummy!
This summer Dunkin' Donuts unveiled two seasonal doughnut varieties: Lemonade and Key Lime. While I am not much of a doughnut person, the journalist in me screamed for Truth, and I tried the 99-cent Lemonade version so you wouldn't have to. [ more › ]
Life magazine believed that pictures could change the world. And so, during the 40s, 50s and 60s, when the United States was at its most dynamic, Life provided the illustrations for the story of America.
Famed fashion photographer John Rankin Waddell and BBC Four went in search of the people who did this — the photographers who led the charge and turned Life into a photojournalistic superpower. The documentary America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine (shown in its entirety above) is the result of that search.
What made Life magazine different was their attitude towards photography and photographers. In the past we shared a short documentary about legendary photographer Art Shay, who said that working for Life was the equivalent of “playing for the New York Yankees.”
And just like the players who suit up for the Yankees, the photojournalists on staff at Life were treated well. In most magazines, the writers led and the photographer supported the story. At Life it was the other way around — the reporters even carried the photographers’ gear for them at times.
The documentary runs a full hour, so we won’t try and summarize everything here. But if you carve out some time this weekend to watch it, we’re pretty sure you won’t regret it (in fact, we’ll give you your money back if you do). Given the recent blows that photojournalism has been dealt, the story of Life magazine is a heartening one that we could all stand to hear.
(via Fstoppers)
If you’ve gone to a concert or public event or even certain art openings recently, you’ll notice that something is amiss. In the past, people would look, enjoy and try their best to experience the moment when they attended such things. Now, many of them are doing their best to craft the most likeable smartphone photo.
The BBC’s Newsnight is troubled by this trend, and so they set out to discover if the smartphone photography movement is doing more harm than good.
One of the examples Newsnight’s Stephen Smith uses to illustrate the point is this viral comparison photo from earlier this year. At the top we have the view at the Vatican as people bid farewell to Pope John Paul II in 2005, and at the bottom the same ceremony for Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Which crowd do you think remembers their experience best?
It could be that the 2013 crowd with their pictures and videos will remember the moment best simply because they have a record of it. But it’s also possible that they only actually experienced the moment on their smartphone or tablet screen at the time, not truly engaging with it.
It’s an interesting question that the report takes on from several angles — enlisting the help of curators, musicians and even a psychologist specializing in narcissism — and we’d like your input as well. What’s your take? Is smartphone photography killing our memories and experiences, or just helping us preserve them?
(via Fstoppers)
Back in December, Dropbox acquired the photo storage service Snapjoy, seemingly getting ready to jump head first into the cloud sharing battle. At the time, the announcement on the Snapjoy blog rang with excitement, and even though they weren’t going to be accepting new signups, they promised that “your photos are safe!”
Well, not anymore. As of yesterday, Dropbox has officially decided to shut down the service — a decision that was confirmed by Snapjoy on its blog and through an email to all of its remaining subscribers.
Here’s that announcement:
Before its acquisition, Snapjoy was a half aggregator, half storage site. It would pull your photos from the myriad services and devices they were stored on and collect them all in one place. As Dropbox continues to make moves into the photo storage and sharing game, the acquisition made sense.
The reasons behind Snapjoy’s untimely end, on the other hand, are less known. It’s possible (even likely) that the Snapjoy code and employees will be behind a forthcoming photo-centric update to Dropbox, but it’s unfortunate for Snapjoy users that the service has to be shut down before that update comes about.
As you can see from the announcement above, Snapjoy users have just over a month to log in to the service and download a .ZIP file with all of their photos before the entire service goes down and your pics along with it. It just goes to show, when it comes to the cloud, your photos are only as secure as the company in charge of them.
(via TechCrunch)
More than 75 years ago, aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared not far from the completion of her record-breaking attempt to circumnavigate the Earth at the equator. The wreckage of her plane was never found, and many believe that what’s left of that wreckage is still somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.
Another theory, however, is that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan made an emergency landing on the reef surrounding the yet uninhabited island known as Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). And some recently found aerial negatives of that island might hold to key to proving this theory right.
The negatives in question were discovered by Matthew O’Sullivan, the keeper of photographs at the New Zealand Air Force Museum. Buried in the museum’s archive, O’Sullivan found a box containing five sheets of contact prints, complete with negatives. That’s a total of 45 large format photos.
Amelia Earhart and the Lockheed Electra she attempted to take around the world before disappearing desperately close to her goal.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has been hard at work for some time now, trying to figure out exactly what happened to Earhart and her Lockheed Electra. And in addition to scouring the Pacific floor with high-tech sonar equipment and submersibles equipped with high definition cameras, they can now bring in photography expects to scour the tiny tropical island.
The photos were taken December 1, 1938, some 15 months after Earhart and Noonan disappeared. Their plane, it’s thought, did wind up in the ocean. But the negatives might hold evidence that the two made the island their home for as long as they managed to survive.
Earhart and her crew on March 17, 1937 about to embark on an ultimately unsuccessful first attempt due to issues with the plane.
Executive director of TIGHAR, Ric Gillespie, is a little more than hopeful. Even if they don’t find anything in the photos, this is a very promising lead that could forever confirm or put to rest one possibility.
“We will be working not from a third generation print but from the original large-format, fine-grained negatives,” said Gillespie speaking with Discovery News. “In our fondest dreams we couldn’t have wished for something like this.”
(via Discovery News)
Serious introspection usually doesn't come in sugary form, but that's what makes this video so sweet. Using candy, Ze Frank has created a visual representation of the average American's lifetime. One jelly bean equals one day, 28,835 beans total
From there, he delineates what you'll do with that time — working, sleeping, eating, cleaning, caring for others — and removes jelly beans for the number of days the average person spends performing these tasks in their lifetime. The pile that's left pales in comparison to the original stack.
Watch the video to see the full thought-provoking visual unfold. And let us know, what will you do with the time you have left? Read more...
More about Viral Videos, Videos, Candy, Thoughtful, and Watercooler
Is Don an alien? Is Joan a wizard? Is baby Gene a Russian spy who will one day grow up and be your father? According to the internet: Yes. "Mad Men" conspiracy theories are our guiltiest Monday morning pleasure, and after this Sunday's season finale we'll be stuck waiting months for the next crop (or will we?! See: conspiracy #467). After the media exploded with suspicions about a Megan Draper/Sharon Tate connection, we decided to dive all the way down the rabbit hole and see what other interesting theories we could come up with. It was quite a trip.
Some of these notions have roots in reality, and many took us back to our film school days of picking apart the mise en scène to determine a character's fate. And some of them are just bonkers. Either way, we whittled down the hundreds (probably more, we're still digging around down here) to the best and craziest "Mad Men" conspiracy theories out there.There are no spoilers here, unless these bloggers, journalists, and redditors are right. In which case — watch out, Pete Campbell. You're about to be eaten by a bear.
Aforementioned internet explosion occurred after Jessica Pare appeared in this top during the last scene of this season's ninth episode. Sharon Tate wore the top in a famous 1967 Esquire shoot, so naturally, we assumed Megan would soon be preggers and/or dead. According to Matthew Weiner and Janie Bryant, it was actually just about some boring argument they had over whether or not women wore T-shirts in the 60s. OR WAS IT, WEINER?
A smaller (but no less vocal) group of conspiracists insist that Megan has been dead this entire season. It's something to do with the fact that she appeared in Don's stoner fantasy out in L.A.. We don't get it, but we liked her headband.
Some speculate the whole Megan-will-die theory is just a red herring, and really it's the former Mrs. Draper who's about to bite the dust. Fine, by us. Can Sally kill her?
    
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Adobe rolled out Photoshop CC in the past week, enhancing the gold standard of image editing applications with powerful new capabilities. Let's test these intelligent tools folded into the new version, and figure out if it's worth it to upgrade.
Once I installed the evaluation copy of Photoshop CC provided to me by Adobe, I noticed that the interface looked exactly the same as its predecessor, Photoshop CS6. That's good. Photoshop's workflow is excellent and hard to improve upon
And then I was met with a pleasant surprise: Photoshop asked if I would like to import all my settings. Of course I would like to import my settings! Importing settings has become a tedious ritual every time I upgrade Photoshop, and it's always been an awkward routine involving exporting and then importing files that don't completely get the job done Read more...
More about Adobe, Reviews, Marketing, Tech, and Apps Software
Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked secret information about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, left Hong Kong on Sunday, according to a statement from the Hong Kong government. Snowden reportedly boarded a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, with plans to fly to a third country where he can take asylum.
Snowden's departure comes two days after the United States formally charged him with espionage and requested that Hong Kong's authorities put out a warrant for his arrest. However, Hong Kong's government said in a statement Sunday that the documents filed by the U.S. "did not fully comply" with its legal requirements Read more...
More about Us World, Nsa, and Edward Snowden
Hollywood has long been inhospitable to women, and it is only getting worse for those who are also aspiring screenwriters.
According to Suzana Orozco’s analysis of recent sales of spec scripts — scripts written with no deal in place (hence speculative) — women make up a smaller percentage of those sales than any time in the last two decades.
While the spec script market as a whole has cooled from its heyday of the mid-1990s, the impact on female writers has been even more severe.
Between 1991 and 2000, women accounted for 14 percent of spec script sales. The numbers remained high in 2001, 2002 and 2003 as women sold more than 20 spec scripts each year.
Since then the bottom has fallen out (see the chart below). Only three times — 2004, 2007 and 2009 — have female scribes sold more than 10 percent of specs. Female writers sold the same number of scripts in 2001 as they did in 2011 and 2012 combined.
Between 2010 and 2012, the last three full years this has been measured, scripts written by women constituted just 9 percent of sales.
Compare that to the ratio of women writers in other areas of entertainment:
Translation: women have better luck selling books and TV shows than film spec scripts.
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The ranks of active duty female soldiers is higher: Women constitute 14.5 percent of soldiers on active duty, well above the 9 percent of female screenwriters with spec sales between 2010 and 2012.
SEE ALSO: 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' Film Takes A Chance On Fairly Unknown, Female Screenwriter
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There'll be a day, if one recent Wi-Fi startup has its way, when you switch on your tablet or laptop and the wireless Internet access you need is just there. Automatically, everywhere, every time.
You won't think about it. You won't search for elusive hotspots. You'll just get to browsing, and the days when passwords or daily- or monthly-pass payments stood in the way of productivity are no more — they'll vanish, much like the brick-and-mortar video store.
That's the vision of Karma. A 10-person team, the startup is pouring some $1.2 million of investor funding into building not just an infrastructure that makes Wi-Fi ubiquitous at a low, pay-as-you-go cost, but — this is the key point — sharable. Read more...
More about Wifi, Hotspot, Karma, Tech Innovators Series, and Tech InnovatorsI needed a Seattle skyline photo for my website and wanted to give my new camera lens a try yesterday since the weather was beautiful, so I headed to Kerry Park, that most iconic of Seattle viewpoints. After about 15 minutes, another photographer parked his tripod next to mine and asked if I was going to hang out until the moonrise at 8:26 PM. I hadn’t realized that this weekend was the “super moon” where the moon passes closest to Earth and is larger and brighter than normal. Over the next three hours, the hillside filled in with a horde of Seattle photographers looking to capture the perfect moon shot of the Seattle skyline.
Seattle photography geeks line the hillside at Kerry Park to capture the ‘super moon’
The technical term for this weekend’s event is the perigree moon, where the moon’s elliptical orbit is closest to earth, resulting in a full moon that is 14% bigger and 30% brighter than typical. The Seattle photographer’s dream shot is capturing the Space Needle with the super moon as a backdrop.
The light blue line shows the location of the moon rise, relative to our location.
The challenge is to find the perfect spot to take a photo that lines up the path of the moon across the sky with the Space Needle in the background. Many of last night’s photographers came equipped with a couple of smartphone apps to help them pinpoint the path of the moon.
The two apps I was introduced to are The Photographer’s Ephemeris and Sun Surveyor. Both apps allow you to predict the position of the sun and moon throughout the day and accurately locate where they will rise and set. Most interesting for photographers is that you can also align a subject with the location or the moon or sun. Standing at Kerry Park, The Photographer’s Ephemeris quickly told me that the moon was set to rise just to the left of the Space Needle.
Sun Surveyor also came in handy with an augmented reality view of the moon’s path, so you can eyeball your foreground subjects in relation to the moon (or sun).
Augmented reality view lets you visualize the path of the moon or sun from where you are standing.
While the weather was glorious yesterday, as was the sunset, a low batch of clouds to the east got in the way of a truly spectacular Seattle moon shot. A little more advanced planning with these apps might have also lead me further west to Magnolia to try to get better alignment with the moon and the Space Needle.
These apps take the guesswork out of planning lighting for a variety of photographic events. Even if the sun or moon isn’t your planned subject matter, they can be very useful for planning the time of day for optimal light. As far as apps go, they aren’t particularly cheap, at $6-$9, but given the hundreds of thousands of dollars of zoom lenses, camera bodies and tripods I saw last night, it is a drop in the bucket for photography geeks.
Kevin Lisota is CEO & Co-Founder of findwell, a Seattle real estate startup. He can be reached at kevin@findwell.com or @kevinlisota.
Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit, all-volunteer organization based in Denmark, is set to launch its Sapphire rocket from a platform in the Baltic Sea at 4 a.m. ET Sunday. The mission will test the 17-foot, 500-pound rocket's active guidance system (read more here). Watch live!
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From Ardusat to ARKYD, space startups are bringing space exploration and participation down to Earth. How? Thanks to years of microchip and sensor miniaturization, we are now making useful satellites shockingly tiny, powerful, and affordable. And recently, one design in particular, the CubeSat, has become near-ubiquitous in the race to throw open the door to space exploration.
According to the Space Review, as many CubeSats as have been launched in their history (50 or so) are planned for launch this year (50 to 70). These days, launching a CubeSat falls within most university research budgets. And indeed, universities make up the majority of launches, though well-heeled or Kickstarter-funded students, hobbyists, and artists aren’t priced out of the equation either.
Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (SSOD) used to release CubeSats from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
The base CubeSat is 10 centimeters to a side and, depending on what you put in it, weighs up to a kilogram. CubeSats are designed to be scalable along one axis. A 2U satellite is 20 centimeters long, 3U is 30 centimeters long, and so forth.
Anyone can put a small satellite into orbit if they can figure out how to engineer it and pay for the ride. The only regulatory requirement in the US is a NOAA license for satellites that “sense” the Earth’s surface by way of “emitted, reflected, or diffracted” electromagnetic waves (think high powered cameras, radar, etc.).
Because CubeSats are a standard size and weight, they are compatible with standard deployment systems like the Poly-PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD). P-PODs accommodate three CubeSats and can be attached to rockets as secondary payloads, making it easier than ever to hitch a ride into orbit.
Most of today’s CubeSats ride on other commercial or government rockets at a steep per pound launch cost. But as private rocket developers like SpaceX make cheaper rockets, we’re likely to see more affordable launches in the future. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, due to launch later this year, may slash launch costs to under $1,000/lb.
Building and programming decently powerful satellites is getting cheaper and easier too. Some CubeSats even boast Android phones for brains. Why build hardware from scratch when smartphones contain miniature “sensors, cameras, GPS, batteries, accelerometers, compasses, [and] data storage”?
Or even better, if you backed the ArduSat Kickstarter last year, $150 bought you a timeslot to steer their CubeSat and take 15 pictures from orbit. Or $325 booked satellite time to upload and run an experiment, application, or game using the satellite’s CPU and suite of sensors. (We visited ArduSat creator Nanosatisfi’s San Francisco workshop late last year. See here for more.)
What other creative uses are folks finding for CubeSats?
Interorbital Systems, a space exploration company that specializes in small satellites, offers a list of applications including imaging, research, space art, and space burials. The Japanese FITSAT-1 has been flashing morse code from orbit since late last year. Project Calliope will convert the ionosphere into free sound files for all to hear and perhaps mix and remix into music.
Maybe these seem a bit frivolous. But the fact there’s even room for frivolity is hugely promising. The more small satellites we can engineer and launch, the better and faster we can hone our designs. As space research moves beyond the elite few, the pace of space technology will accelerate. It’s about time, don’t you think?
