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Thursday, December 19, 2013
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The most important gift you give this holiday season will be the gift you give your sweetheart. After all, this is the person you get sex from.


That said, these are some cute last-minute ideas that will keep you out of the dog house come New Year’s Eve.


HBloom Subscriptions ($75/delivery)


Screenshot 2013-12-18 13.01.39


HBloom is a creative flower delivery service that offers a wide range of products — these are the same folks that came up with the SuperHero package, which delivers flowers to a guy’s work so that he can be the one to give them to his sweetheart. Now, the company offers floral delivery subscriptions, with new arrangements arriving weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. All you do is meet up with a design consultant who checks out the space and learns about your tastes and the deliveries begin. Starts at $75 per delivery.


HowAboutWe Couples ($10/month)


Screenshot 2013-12-18 13.00.48


HowAboutWe keeps the romance alive by offering up interesting date ideas based on your location. Awesomely enough, the service offers a $10/month membership for couples, which hooks you up with up to 75% off the dates, one free date, and access to sold out shows and booked clubs. There are some cute ideas on there, but the best idea of all is you showing your partner how important it is to go on special, interesting dates. You know, like you did when you first fell in love.


Couple (Free)


Ok, you caught me. This isn’t necessarily a gift because technically it’s free. However, signing up for Couple and inviting your partner to join you in your own private social network can be pretty romantic. Couple lets you chat, share pictures, drawings, and location, and it even lets you draw simultaneously in a live sketch. With the new foursquare integration, users can suggest date spots and the thumbkiss feature is cheesy but fun. The app automatically stores important dates for your partner and the relationship, like birthdays and anniversaries, and you can share lists to stay on top of things as a couple. Hey, some of the best things in life are free.


HelloTouch ($55)


Screenshot 2013-12-18 12.59.05


Or you could spend $55 on a really, really fun night in the bedroom. The Jimmyjane HelloTouch vibrator may seem a bit awkward at first — after all, it is reminiscent of those Spider Man-style shooter toys you wear on your wrist. But once those finger pads get to buzzing it won’t seem so awkward anymore. The HelloTouch can be worn a few different ways so that everyone can enjoy, and it even comes in a Holiday package, including a stocking, handcuffs and a blindfold.







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The most important gift you give this holiday season will be the gift you give your sweetheart. After all, this is the person you get sex fr...

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A new Kickstarter project called Tooga Gear based out of LA wants to provide a versatile, durable camera mounting solution for capturing tricky shots in a modular package that can support DSLRs, GoPros and other action cams, and even smartphones, all in a package that can fit in a small sling bag.


Tooga Gear includes a dolly, suction mounts, a ballhead tripod mount, a protective guerrilla cage and a shell component that ties everything together. The pieces can be switched out depending on your needs, to make for smooth rolling pan shots, footage taken from a camera mounted to any smooth surface, including, to quote the project description, “the side of a plane.”


This is nicer than many similar rigs (of which I’ve used and own a few) because of the accessory mounts built into each leg on the dolly wheels, which can support additional accessories like external fill lights, off-camera flashes and mics. The Tooga Cage, too is designed with two cold-shoe mounts, along with threaded mounts for additional gear. That suction mount kit seems a little more specialized in usage, but you could quite easily mount it to a car window for doing your own follow shots on (hopefully not illegal) chase scene filming.


toogaThe entire Tooga kit can be had starting at pledges of $449, which sounds like a lot but is actually a pretty great deal when you compare against the price of any of the components individually (from a decent manufacturer). The team consists of mechanical engineers Shan Kim and Chris Anderson, who has built a number of camera gadgets before, and design students Kay Kim and Benson Lam. The founders have an existing supply chain in place, they say, so that should help them hit their March 2014 anticipated ship date.


The Tooga team is seeking $45,000 to turn its prototype into a shipping device, and it’s just starting out with a little over $3,000 pledged so far. As a sometime videographer, it’s something I’d definitely like to see become a reality.







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05 Home Notifications

Facebook’s Home has been a bit of a flop, with few users willing to so drastically change the face of their phone. Today Facebook launched a redesign that makes Home more familiar to a traditional lockscreen by overlaying phone and Facebook notifications, a clock, and weather info on top of Cover Feed and giving users more customization options. The hope is by making Home seem like less of a shock, more users will adopt it.


Screenshots of the new version of Home rolling out on Android today are below.


06 Home Settings main 04 Cover feed instagram 02 Home cover feed photo 01 Home lock screen 09 Home Launcher







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A familiar story is starting to play out in the Ivory Tower.


A powerful incumbent with a very lucrative business model gets reactive when the content it holds the rights for becomes too freely distributed on the web.


First, it was the music industry. Now it’s happening in academia, one of the very last bastions to be affected by the free, unfettered flow of information on the web.


Reed Elsevier, which owns many of the most prestigious research journals in the world, has been sending mass research takedown notices to everyone from startups like Academia.edu to individual researchers and universities. They brought in about $1.65 billion in scientific and medical research revenue in the first half of this year, through journals like the Lancet and Cell.


For years, they’ve operated a business model where academics provide their research for free and give journals publishing rights to the final versions of their articles in exchange for distribution in prestigious journals. Sometimes academics have quietly published their research on their own personal web sites or new emerging, social networking platforms like ResearchGate or Academia.edu. They’ve done this without feeling too much blowback from the publisher.


But now Reed Elsevier is cracking down on this, saying that final articles need to be “readily discoverable and citable via the journal itself.” They’ve been asking researchers to take down their work.


“We used to get one or two DMCA take-down notices a week. Then in the last few weeks Elsevier started sending DMCA take-downs in batches of a thousand,” said Academia.edu CEO Richard Price. “We are not sure what started this, but it seems that Academia.edu is not alone.”


Rafael Maia, a Ph.D student in biology at the University of Akron who researches bird plumage, is one academic who got a takedown notice.


“I don’t understand the difference between sending an e-mail or putting my work online for a person to find it,” Maia said. “The purpose of research is to be read and interpreted. Anything that stifles that is really problematic.”


It’s a touchy issue. Technically, authors do give away publishing rights for the recognition that being published in a prestigious journal provides. These journals can be key to achieving tenure or building up a strong academic reputation.


“We can’t allow published journal articles to be freely accessible on a large scale — especially not through other for-profit companies, who want to benefit from our and other publishers’ efforts. What library will continue to subscribe if a growing proportion of articles is available for free elsewhere?” said Tom Reller, who is Reed Elsevier’s head of global corporate relations, in a statement.


He said the amount of research that was being published in violation of these agreements had reached a scale where they had to respond.


“The number has reached a threshold to where we felt it was important to address by reminding various platforms of the variety of permitted ways authors can share the results of their research,” he added.


But many academics feel that Reed Elsevier’s traditional business model is fundamentally unfair. Universities are effectively double-charged for their work — once because research institutions bear the cost of producing the research and twice because libraries and academics have to pay for expensive subscriptions to see published work. That feeling of unfairness has prompted boycotts like “The Cost of Knowledge,” where more than 14,000 academics have pledged not to publish, do peer review or editorial work for these journals.


A new generation of “open access” journals has also gained prominence. They allow readers to freely access scholarly work online and authors either pay for publication or they are subsidized by other research institutions. But these journals are still a far ways away from having the reputations that older, more traditional journals have built up over the last several decades.


Even Reed Elsevier has adapted to this by starting a series of open access series journals. Reller also says that academics are still able to publish other non-final versions of their work if they follow certain guidelines.


Then, powerful universities like Harvard have also developed programs that allow academics to freely and legally publish alternative versions of their research. Peter Suber, who is a director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, said Harvard had also received a few dozen takedown notices in the last few weeks.


“If these takedowns anger you, then don’t give your rights to Elsevier. Steer your papers to another publisher,” said Suber, who stressed he was speaking from a personal perspective and not on behalf of the university.







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A familiar story is starting to play out in the Ivory Tower. A powerful incumbent with a very lucrative business model gets reactive when th...

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The Smithsonian American Art Museum this week announced the addition of two video games to its permanent collection: the 2009 title Flower by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago of the Thatgamecompany; and the 2010 title Halo 2600 by Ed Fries, former head of Microsoft Games Studios. These new acquisitions will build upon the museum's collection of film and media arts and further its commitment to the study and preservation of video games as an artistic medium.


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The Smithsonian American Art Museum this week announced the addition of two video games to its permanent collection: the 2009 title Flower...

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airbnb chesky

This is what hockey-stick growth looks like: Peer-to-peer lodging marketplace Airbnb announced this morning that it’ll top 10 million guest stays since being launched in 2007. That’s a big number, for sure, but the bigger overall point is that the company had more than 6 million guest stays on the platform in 2013, more than doubling its total over the past year.


Of course, we kind of knew this was coming, based on data Airbnb had shared in October. Back then it touted 9 million stays, so it’s added another million in the past two months alone.


The company’s user base continues to skew international. Of the 6 million guest stays over the past year, about a third were American. The company has said in the past that about 75 percent of its stays have an international component — that is, either a foreign guest staying in a U.S.-based property or a U.S. guest staying in a foreign property, or a non-U.S. guest staying in a non-U.S. property — so that’s not surprising.


But the distribution of guests to lodgings has a funny sort of symmetry: Airbnb says that travelers from more than 175 different countries used the platform over the past year, staying in listings from more than 175 different countries.


While Airbnb has seen really impressive demand, its supply of listings has also grown dramatically in 2013. More than 250,000 properties have been added to the platform over the past year, bringing the total number of listings to 550,000 worldwide.


The company has added more than 50,000 in the past month alone, when Airbnb launched new mobile apps to facilitate the process of adding your home to the platform.


Airbnb’s big year came after the company raised $200 million in funding from Founder’s Fund last fall. The company has been using that funding to aggressively expand worldwide, something that appears to be working out.







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This is what hockey-stick growth looks like: Peer-to-peer lodging marketplace Airbnb announced this morning that it’ll top 10 million guest...

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Gift giving is very anticlimactic. You hand something over, the recipient tears it open, and you’re done. Maybe there are hugs exchanged, maybe some high fives. Whatever. Cheetos, beer, and football the rest of the night.


But get a load of the Timeless Box. It’s an $100 aluminum (or titanium) box that is locked shut for a period of time – between a few days and a year. You put something small inside it, lock it, and hand it over. Then, a month later or whatever, the recipient hears a little click and the box opens. You can be gone, dead, flying around the world, in deepest space, and they get a little memory of you that pops out as if by magic. Note: do not put live animals into the Timeless Box.


Blew your mind, right? Boom.


420266_300I asked the creator, Ignasi Giró, for some help in understanding this thing. Giró is co-founder of Honest&Smile, a design agency in Barcelona, and he seems pretty grounded in the deep truths of the universe.


TC: Why did you build this?

Giró: We live in an “ever-connected” and kind of “super empowering” society. But we end up sending poor “Happy Birthday” messages from airport waiting rooms. Or forgetting about what we really wanted to become one year from now. So, I really felt there was room for a sort of “anti gadget” that removed almost all power to its users… but gave back two very precious things: A re-gained perception of time passing by, neatly confronting something from years ago with your present time and an extremely simple and easy to use time-capsule object, that won’t get lost with time, or that you won’t need to call NASA to set up properly.


Having this in mind, adding to it all the wonderful literacy and storytelling about the subject (from Dr Who’s TARDIS references, to “time travel tales” and general relativity, too), the idea grew quickly and developed into what you are seeing today.


Oh, and there’s also a virtual version, here, to beta test virtual boxes, that is completely responsive for phones and tablets.


TC: Isn’t it kind of morbid?

G: Ha ha ha, well, maybe, yes.. Some people take it that way, and start considering extremely cruel uses for it. To punish their kids, for instance, by hiding their iPod inside for a few days. Also, someone told us he would give a 10 years locked Titanium Timeless Box to someone, and leave it… empty! Imagine, waiting 10 years for it to open, and then find nothing inside. But most of the people connect with that special moment they don’t want to miss, when their kid will turn 18, or when that good friend in Europe will get married. Furthermore, people consider using it to send messages to their future self, as a kind of reminder of what you wanted to accomplish. And, well, yes, we can’t deny it, the Timeless Box can become a very valuable tool for someone wanting to leave any kind of legacy or message to their loved ones, to be opened in some future moment when he or she feels won’t be there anymore.


TC: How secure is it? Can I crack it open?

It’s built into a two pieces of solid aluminum (and there’s a Titanium one, too). It’s solid, sure. Off course, its not unbreakable. But you certainly will have to be pretty mean and aggressive to get into it. We feel the best safety mechanism it has is it’s design: it looks to beautiful to harm it or destroy it. And, well, it’s also a game: you can always break the rules, sure. But then it’s not a funny game anymore.



That’s some pretty heady stuff in this season of giving. Pretty heady indeed. You can pledge to get a Timeless Box right here. I’m going to fill mine with cheese.







11:09 AM

Gift giving is very anticlimactic. You hand something over, the recipient tears it open, and you’re done. Maybe there are hugs exchanged, ma...

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Posted by at 11:09 AM 0 comments
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