Sick of trying to balance your SmartPhone, tablet or compact camera when taking a snap of friends or other social stuff – are the close-up selfies making you look like a hamster?
Well take a look at this device. Its called the iStabilizer. Its a really cool mount for your photo device that’ll probably attract as much attention as that new iPhone 6 of yours. The company has been making universal lightweight compact tripods, steady cams, and other products for smartphones, tablets and cameras for some time. And this cool gadget has just won the USA Today 10Best Readers’ Choice Travel Award in the Best App/Gadget for Phone Pics category.
USA Today’s awards are voted for digitally, so give an accurate reflection of what today’s users of mobile devices really like. In making this award, USA Today said “USA TODAY is thrilled to have this method of sharing what 10Best and USA TODAY readers and users love most,” said John Peters, President of USA TODAY Travel Media Group.
“Our readers are well-informed, well-traveled and opinionated. At the end of the day, content on our platforms is a reflection of them. A business which finds itself the recipient of a 10Best Readers’ Choice Award has really accomplished something.”
USA Today site recently acquired 10Best.com, which provides users with original, unbiased, and experiential travel content of top attractions, things to see and do, and restaurants for top destinations in the U.S. and around the world. The site’s uniqueness is its team of local travel experts who are not only experts in their fields and their cities, but discriminating in their tastes. These local experts live in the city they write about, so the content is constantly updated.
In 2012, 10Best.com averaged more than 700,000 monthly unique visitors generating approximately 28 million page views. 10Best.com was recently acquired by USA TODAY, the nation’s number one newspaper in print circulation with an average of more than 1.6 million daily. USATODAY.com, an award-winning newspaper website launched in 1995, reaches a combined 6.6 million readers daily.
Go find out more at http://www.10best.com or http://www.istabilizer.com.
Here’s a cool new website for the fashion cognoscenti. Secret d’or launches this month, designed to offer digital shoppers cutting edge fashion inspiration as well as access to the world’s most coveted new designers and brands. Luxurious, curated and highly desirable, Secret d’Or is a new frontier for the world of online fashion. Featuring collections from over 70 designers, the platform is for fashion forward individuals with a taste for the finer things in life.
Secret d’or offers unique pieces which are worlds away from the usual, conventional high street brands and off-the-shelf, push, pack and pack collections. Instead, Secret d’Or spotlights independent labels to connect forward thinking fashionistas with a top drawer choice of contemporary designers.
Camilla Jerath, Secret d’Or founder said, “In a world of fast fashion there is a new found respect for independent creatives who offer innovative products made with exceptional quality. We have created a curated platform to bring fresh and stylish independent brands to fashion forward men and women who crave unique and limited edition pieces. Take our Portamento shoes for example. Rather than generic designs, our collection is handmade in Italy using only the finest 100% genuine leather.”
In a time when political correctness and ticked boxes dominate business, its great to see credit going to someone who truly deserves it.
Harriet Green, the dynamic CEO of the now re-vitalised Thomas Cook holiday group has been recognised with a prestigious Veuve Clicquot Business Woman award.
Harriet became CEO in July 2012 – after having the courage to cold-call the Company’s chairman. Just 12 months later, she’d designed and launched a bold strategy that focussed on digital leadership, new product innovation and placing customers at the very heart of the business. In the last year, the business refinanced and unified its many brands under the new ‘Sunny Heart’ umbrella, with the Group’s 27,000 employees working as one global team across 80 countries to deliver the transformation. Today, the share price has risen around 950%. An incredible achievement.
“Madame Clicquot transformed her family business through belief, innovation, and a ‘can do’ attitude, which are as relevant today as they were then, and I’m honoured to accept the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award on behalf of everyone at Thomas Cook as we continue to transform our business, just like Madame Clicquot did, through innovation, belief and our ‘can do’ attitude,” said Harriet.
“Madame Clicquot was truly one of the first real businesswomen of our age. I’ve long admired her spirit, courage, and determination. She and the original Mr Thomas Cook were of the same generation and together they created two amazingly powerful brands, whose heritage and promise clearly live on today – over 170 years later.”
According to the Office of National Statistics & Forbes – 2.8 million of the UK population now work from home regularly, alongside 1 in 5 Americans. This makes it’s one of the fastest growing workplace trends.
The problem can sometimes be convincing your boss its right for the company – and you.
The team at London & Zurich have published an interactive guide on how office-workers can convince their boss to let them work from home, remotely in their dream location, or adopt a flexible working scheme. It features 26 articles, videos & apps on how to make sure you still get things done, all wrapped up in one, very cool infographic. Check it out here.
Electric bikes, electric cars. How about a real, electric plane from a real aircraft company?
There’s some serious technology at work here. Maybe a taste of the future. Go take a look at thsi video of E-Fan, the electric plane project by Airbus Group Innovations.
Amazing.
Lloyds Banking Group is the latest shady bank to receive a slap on the wrist from the FCA. In fact, the $45 Million fine meted out for gross financial mis-selling is the biggest to date. But it won’t change things one little bit. Why do I say this?
Foreign money transfer is big business here in the UK, with many Commonwealth citizens working over here wanting to provide for families back home. Banks and services such as Western Union can be expensive, intimidating and inconvenient, so a Singapore based company has launched a new service using social channels like Facebook and Twitter.
Spotted a very surprising Tweet a few days ago from prominent banking futurist and founder of Moven.com, Brett King.
He’s been caught up in a gross administrative blunder by HSBC in New York when they closed his account as part of a small business account rationalisation process.
Apparently, HSBC in the US are shifting their retail strategy away from smaller businesses and removing banking facilities from well maintained, perfectly viable customers. A bit like RBS in the UK, but without the criminal intent.
While that’s certainly a regrettable action by anyone’s standards, it wasn’t what Mr King took issue with. It was the failure to engage with the customer properly, turning a mistake into little short of a PR catastrophe.
The largely Swiss-based watch industry boasts some very prestigious brands. Even in this economic cliumate, each one constantly raising the bar at sometimes mind-boggling cost to produce something spectacular for the watch fairs held all around the world each year. There seems no limit to what some people will spend on a piece of wrist jewellery.
Ever heard of NFC, ever used Google Wallet at the cash-out?
No, neither have most people. But how about this?
This may actually be the first mobile payments system that actually works. Check this out.
Specialist marketing agency Organic Hospitality is using crowdfunding to raise capital for expansion.
Graeme Kerr, the Glasgow entrepreneur behind Organic Hospitality, is using Crowdcube, the commpany chosen by TV’s Kevin “Grand Designs” McLeod recent £2 Million pound investment plans.
Graeme is looking for £150,000 to grow Organic Hospitality as a specialist marketing agency for the exclusive four and five star boutique hotel and tourism market in the UK and abroad. His company already lists prestigious hotels such as Mar Hall and Sherbrooke Castle as clients and undertook a large branding and web design project for St Andrews last year.
If you’re one of those people who uses a workstation rather than a notebook, you may have noticed despite the quality of your display, your eyes feel a little tired – particularly when working early in the day, later in the evenings or when the ambient light is changing.
That’s because the system that lights up your monitor – called the backlight – flickers as it adjusts to the light within the room. That causes the ciliary muscle in your eye to overwork, as it tries to compensate for this nearly imperceptible flicker.
So, your eyes feel tired, you actually squint at your screen (making you look tired) and you can even walk away with a headache. Not good at all.
Well, BenQ, the Dutch based monitor manufacturer has used its vast research facilities and experience in the medical sector to come up with a new range of displays designed to avoid this. The Senseye Eye-Care range…
You know, looking back I guess we’ve all come a long way over the last decade. Few could have imagined the rise of the Internet-driven business.
The dot-com bubble didn’t slow the launch of new devices and faster connectivity. Most of my work was in infrastructure design – data centres and desktops. Corporates saw the Internet as something to be tightly controlled and restricted – filtered out of existence. Barclays had 256Mb in 2003. In total.
How dare I question. What right do I have. If I know so much, I should start a bank! What had I done – collapsed the economy, started a bank run or something?
No. This stream of vitriol was for suggesting, “maybe people like bank branches.”
Earlier that day, MovenBank’s Brett King gave me his view about bank branches, having read my piece about the psychology of financial services buying.
We hadn’t agreed, but valuing his view, I printed it. People should have both sides. But by arguing, I’d upset someone. And the smelly stuff hit the proverbial…
Autumn 2011 has been a really interesting time for banking. I mean new banking, not that tired old high street of ours.
MovenBank’s appeared, Zopa’s broken more records, Wonga’s won more awards and a new social P2P player’s launching, CivilisedMoney.
It generated quite a lot of Twitter traffic with people on digital banking’s front-line, like banking innovators, Darren G and Aden Davies. And raised one key question.
Online or on high street – can a click ever replace a footstep?
You know, no matter how much you explain, some people never manage to get it.
Take Wonga and the thorny question of APR, for example.
Now I’m not going into compound interest’s mysteries and related technobabble. Let’s just look at the reality of how life is and take it from there.
Before the crash, we trusted banks and most of us funded our lifestyles with credit. Nowadays, most people are recovering from first-degree finger burns and avoid credit like gasoline on bonfire night.
But life still bites. You still get unexpected bills that threaten the next meal’s arrival. And if that happens – and you’re smart – you’ll appreciate Wonga…
Here’s a question for you. Imagine all four banks merging. What would we lose?
OK – so they wouldn’t share one trough – and no one makes one that big.
If our high street merged, what would you take from each to form one super bank? I’ll leave you for a minute to have a think about that one.
For all banking’s “talent” and money, why so little to choose between each one? Why can’t we find a killer product or even one differentiator?
How can this be – in other sectors key differences exist. Why not in banking?
A writer who I follow was bemoaning the lack of change in banking the other day. Now the point was perfectly valid – until he took a pop at P2P lending.
As I follow social banking – and as one of its great supporters, I had to disagree. But it raised an interesting question. How do we measure disruption?
The writer in question was James Gardner, who’s the general manager of Spigot, the leading business process software vendor in the innovation space.
In theory, he should know. But then he suggested that it could be “nearly 100%”. That sure had a disrupting effect on me – because that’s plain silly…
I worry about web design. We’ve always catered for the lowest available platform. Designing for people who don’t know, or just don’t care about the Web.
I mean, there are some great web browsers – and they’re all free, for Pete’s sake. Gaming calls for the latest technology. People happily buy that, don’t they?
But for some reason, we have to placate the stupid and design sites like its 1999. Web designers are told that they must maintain full compatibility with everything. Not just for browsers maybe a version behind, but stuff from another age.
Well, I think it’s time we ask the question. Should we push or just follow?
Business as usual for the global auditors. Its just like there was no banking crash. Pricewaterhouse Coopers – PwC – has just published its results.
Three things jump off the page to me. And each mind-numbing fact reminds me just how stupid banks and enterprises really are.
Firstly, PwC two main businesses turned over £900 Million and £650 Million each. The next is that UK Chairman Ian Powell will net a bonus of £3.7 Million.
And thirdly, they took on 1,200 graduates – average age 24 – to work with clients. Congratulations. That waste-of-space intern is now costing you £2,500 a day…
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