Archive for December, 2011

Posted on December 13, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: Apps to make you seem musically talented

Guest Post Author:

Lisa is an avid yoga enthusiast who enjoys writing in her spare time for Usdirect.com – home of USdirect.

I love music. Unfortunately, the only thing I know how to play is the radio. My husband sings, my daughters play the piano and my son not only beat boxes, he can hear a song twice and sing it back to you in key. Makes me sick.

On the other hand, I also love technology, which can help you look more musically talented than you really are if you know which programs to use! Personally I believe everyone can make music, and everyone should. So here are some brilliant applications you should consider if your interest is in music, but your talent isn’t.
Ocarina. One of the top 20 selling Apple apps of all time, Ocarina will have you making incredible music in moments. This amazing application uses the microphone on your iPhone to create a wind instrument. There are several ways to create music:

• You can hold down each of the four “holes” on the iPhone to create the pitch (or combinations thereof).
• You can change the way you hold the iPhone by tilting it and change the depth and vibrato rate.
• You can even change the key.

Another fun aspect of this app is Ocarina’s user community. There are over 2000 user-generated songs you can learn with cool finger charts to show you how to do it. Just plant your fingers and blow! When you’re ready, you can name your Ocarina and allow other people to listen to you play, from all over the world. Want to listen to what other people are playing? Then just tap on the globe icon!

Magic Piano. Makes playing the piano and sounding like a musical prodigy virtually effortless. Created for the iPhone, you can now take music with you anywhere, and with it, the ability to spin your own versions of popular songs. Magic Piano is fun and easy to learn, because all you have to do is follow the beams of light. It’s that easy to sound that great. By the way, Magic Piano is FREE!

I Am T-Pain. Want to sing instead of playing an instrument? Then show off your amazing vocals with I Am T-Pain. Use it with your headphones or plug your iPhone to an external speaker and sing away. This powerful app applies the T-Pain vocal effect as you sing! You heard correctly: this uses the same correction technology used in professional studios, now available in the palm of your hand.
GLEE. Another fun option is the #1 music app in 21 countries: GLEE Karaoke. It’s FREE, it’s incredibly enjoyable to use and it lets you strut your stuff. The app has pitch correction with a little taste of reverb, so you’ll sound, well…better than you actually do. Made for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, GLEE allows you to sing along with any song you have in your iTunes library. You can even join into someone else’s performance and add your voice to theirs! One feature I find especially fun is owningmy own radio tower from the app itself. Share songs on Facebook and Twitter and once you’re ready for the big time, compete in weekly contests to win free songs.

Magic Fiddle. Want to show off your sophistication? Mashable says Magic Fiddle is “…pure, unadulterated musical awesome.” I couldn’t agree more. This brilliant app teaches you how to bow, pluck, vibrato, trill and glissandi right from your iPad. Give yourself and hour or two and you’re sure to blow away your friends and family. You can share your experiences with other enthusiasts around the globe as you perform like the masters. The fiddle shows you all the right notes and gives you a piano accompaniment to show off your new found musical genius. Heck, I bought it just so I could say “glissandi” more often.

Posted on December 12, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

TEDx Video: The Killer Business and The Next Vision of the Web by Kimberly Dillion of House of Mikko

Title of Talk: Acknowledgment- The Killer Business Strategy

Kimberly Dillon @prettylittleceo is the founder of House of Mikko, @houseofmikko,where she manages Marketing and Product Strategy. She founded the company to address the challenges that women, specifically women of color face at the beauty counter. She has been featured in TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, named by Huffington Post as one of 25 Female Tech Founders to watch, and is a member of Women 2.0.
She started her career as an IT Consultant with Accenture and has over 8 years of marketing experience in the digital and consumer space, including a stint at Procter & Gamble. She has 2 undergraduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from the University of Michigan. A lover of all things beauty, she won’t leave home with out eyeliner. Ever.

About TEDx?
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)
At our TEDxBayArea events, TEDTalks videos and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connections in a small group setting.

Posted on December 9, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Podcast: The Social Geeks Episode 41 – On The Right Path

TheSocialGeeks Episode 41 – The Right Path

Join Caleb Elston, Robert Murray, Chris Miller and myself as we have great conversations around:

• Facebook buys Gowalla.  What was the real purpose?
• Is Path.com the new mobile app to beat?
• If you have a whim to do something, Whim is the mobile app you need.
• Are we too far ahead of the adoption curve of the normal user?

TheSocialGeeks is part of Spiked Studio Productions

Download | or Click Here to listen.

Posted on December 8, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Guest Post: What does Google+ Need to Fix?

Guest Post Author:

Paul works in the marketing department for CliqStudios, a cabinet manufacturer that sells white kitchen cabinets and more factory-direct, and is a blogger and Apple fanatic.

We all know of Google’s dubbed “Facebook killer” called Google+ that has, in fact, failed to kill Facebook. We also know that the success of Google+ is also highly debated. Sure, it sports over 40 million users, but only a fraction of those users actually remain active. In contrast, as of last September, Facebook has over 800 million active users worldwide.
So, what went wrong for Google+?

From the outset of its beta, the primary selling point of the service was its almost too simple way of organizing your friends into Circles so you can share specifically and privately with only certain people. Circles was meant to be a means of one-upping Facebook’s lackluster and underused Lists feature.

However, Circles is by no means perfect, and the way it’s intended to be used is somewhat laborious. Using Circles is a manual process and requires you to drag and drop your friends in a variety of friend categories that you’ve created.

The problem is that friendships aren’t one or the other, and are constantly changing. Google+ can’t keep up with your life outside of your interactions on Google+, and thus requires you to continually evaluate your friendships and manually change them on the service.
If you think about it, most people wouldn’t bother spending the time to organize their friends into super specific categories, let alone keeping the Circles organized and up to date. This, basically, then renders Circles useless.

Shortly after Google+’s release, Facebook announced Smart Lists, a feature capable of automatically grouping some of your friends. For example, it creates Smart Lists for people you are related to, places you work, and for where you are currently living.
What’s more, and what is the most important part of Smart Lists in terms of updating relationship and organizing friends on a social network, is its ability to dynamically update. If a work friend leaves for a new job, he is automatically removed from that List once he updates his employment. Facebook is showing that developing better ways to categorize your friends without you having to think about it is important for its users.

Therefore, rather than Google+ requiring its users to manually update their Circles, Google should start to give Circles some artificial intelligence capable of evaluating and updating for you. While there’s not a way that I’m aware of for Google to know every detail of your life, there must be a way to analyze your behavior and interactions across the site to do this. I don’t know what that is, but I’ll leave it to the developers to figure out.

What do you think about Google+’s Circles? Do you use them? Do you constantly update them? Please share your opinion.

Posted on December 7, 2011 - by Wayne Sutton

Whim iPhone app launches to make it easy to go places with your friends

While in California for the summer I met two yobongo friends offline, Emmanuel @jewgonewild and Ben @benbinary who were  just getting started working on a new iPhone app to make it easy to invite your friends when going out. The app was called Whim @getwhim on twitter. Yesterday Whim launched in Apple’s App store [iTunes Link] . It’s great to see the progress that Emmanuel and Ben have made since the summer.

At it’s core whim allows you to do the following:

• Quickly share plans with friends
• See what friends are up to
• Find places to go, together
• Stay connected with real-time chat

Take a look a whim via the screenshots below.

Whim joins the growing trend of new apps to invite your friends to locations vs letting your firends know where you’re at after you have checked into a location. I all it “friends availability around location discovery”.

For more about whim visit: getwhim.com .

Congrats Emmanuel and Ben!

Have you invited your friends on a Whim yet?