Cox: The split has made us better parents
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09Mar
For Real: PMS-ing Women Better At Spotting Snakes
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According to a recent study conducted by Nobuo Masataka at Kyoto University, women on their periods are better at spotting snakes than when they’re not. That…wow. I’ve come up with a lot of studies before, but NEVER anything that involves hanging around a bunch of PMS-ing women. You’re a sick man, Nobuo.
[Researcher Nobuo] had 60 women look at a nine-photo grid featuring eight “neutral, non-scary” flowers and one snake shot. The results showed that they could spot the snakes faster during the “luteal” (aka PMS-y) part of their cycles, suggesting a biological mechanism that can “help pregnant and potentially pregnant women stay safe.”
A biological mechanism to help pregnant women stay safe — or — OR — a biological mechanism to help women identify wieners and scream at whoever they’re attached to? “Ahahahahhaha — there is NO WAY your girlfriend’s letting you sleep in the bed tonight.” Already rolled my sleeping bag out on the couch.
Women with PMS are better at seeing snakes [msn]
Thanks to Johnny Freakin Call, who understands women on a level nobody without ‘Freakin’ in the their name could even comprehend. View full post on Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome
08Mar
Stamped Updated For SXSW: Better Maps, Search & Austin-Area Recommendations
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Stamped, the NYC-based startup founded by ex-Googlers, is rolling out an update to its social recommendations app today with a focus on improving local discovery. Specifically, Stamped has overhauled the app’s map interface with the addition of a search box and slider for switching between views.
The company has also teamed up with The Austin Chronicle for SXSW, whose branded account will “stamp” their favorite restaurants around Austin.
The mobile app, for those unfamiliar, launched back in November, to help simplify the ratings and reviews process by making it super simple to recommend anything – a restaurant, bar, nightclub, etc., or even items like books, albums, movies or apps. Instead of using 5-star ratings, you just “stamp” something if you like it. Adding notes and photos are completely optional.
With today’s update (ver. 1.1), the app’s map feature has been refreshed, and now includes a slider at the bottom. Here, you can slide between views that show just your stamps, stamps from you and your friends, stamps from friends of friends, and the most popular stamps for the area.
Also added is a much-needed search box that lets you filter the types of stamps you’re seeing. So, for example, you could type in “pizza” to narrow down the selections.
While the map update is the big news, Stamped co-founder Robby Stein tells us that there are a few other minor enhancements being shipped today, too, including an improvement to the suggested users’ feature. Now, Stamped will be able to recommend people you should follow based on your stamps. The app will tell you why it’s making these recommendations, too.
The suggestions will indicate which friends you have in common and which tastes you share, for example.
In addition, SXSW goers will now see recommended restaurants around Austin, courtesy of The Austin Chronicle. This isn’t the only brand partnership for Stamped, we should note. The company previously established partnerships with New York Magazine as well as with notable individuals like Mario Batali, Michael Kors, Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, and others. And they’re close to adding more partnerships with other brands and public figures, Stein says.
Although the company is too young to feel comfortable talking metrics, they are announcing they’ve reached 100,000 stamps across their worldwide audience, with the majority of ratings, surprisingly, found outside of location-based venues (restaurants, bars, etc.). A lot of the activity in the app has been on rating movies and TV shows, apparently.
The updated iPhone app should be out in the iTunes App Store today. (If not now, then very shortly after this post.) You can grab a copy of Stamped from here.
View full post on TechCrunch » Mobile
07Mar
New iPad vs iPad 2: Just how much better is the latest version?
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Apple finally announced the followup to the popular iPad 2. This new device, simply called the new iPad, boasts a slew of features and specs that are pretty great. And while there’s no denying that Apple’s latest iPad is an awesome gadget, is it really that much better than its predecessor? Let’s start by taking a look at the chips that power…
View full post on TodaysiPhone.com
05Mar
Crosswa.lk, The App Discovery Service Better Than iTunes Genius, Is Now An App
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Mobile application discovery service Crosswa.lk has just debuted its much anticipated native counterpart, in the form of a new iPhone application. The app soft-launched over the weekend, allowing users to see what apps their friends are using as well as those that are popular on the wider Crosswa.lk network. It also allows users to quickly rate apps and receive recommendations of apps they might like to try.
As a self-described app addict, I’ve enjoyed using Crosswa.lk’s online service since its November launch. The user interface for the website is well-designed, easy to use, and feels more like a social network than an app search engine or app ratings and review site.
On Crosswa.lk, users can find and follow their friends, including those from Gmail and Facebook, and peruse the site’s popular and recommended users in order to fill out their network of personal app recommenders. To use the service, you sync your iPhone with Crosswa.lk, which allows it to build an online profile of your app collection. There’s even an iPhone emulator which shows how your apps would look, if installed on a phone. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t duplicate your personal organizational structure and folders.)
And, of course, there are the app ratings and recommendations – the key piece to the Crosswa.lk experience. You can “like” apps, give them stars, write reviews, share the app to Facebook or Twitter, and see how many of your friends have the app installed, too. It’s really the social recommendation component that’s most important here – when you discover a lot of your friends are using an app, you’re likely to try it, too.
Explains Crosswa.lk co-founder Thomas McLeod, the concept for the Crosswa.lk service came to the team after they faced their own app discovery challenges as developers. (The team’s other apps include Pagelime, Spypic, Spyvid, ControlShift, Cooties and Frametastic).
“As we got deeper and deeper into app development, we kept hearing from other developers that they had no idea how people found their apps, and honestly we were facing the same problem ourselves,” McLeod says. “We sat down and kicked around a bunch of ideas, and came to the conclusion that the number one way we were guaranteed to download an app was if a friend recommended it.”
And so, Crosswa.lk was born.
But as much fun as it is to use the online service, Crosswa.lk desperately needed its own mobile app. After all, if you’re building a service to help improve app discovery…well, you kind of need an app for that.
The new mobile version of Crosswa.lk brings real-time feeds of apps trending among your friends plus all those using Crosswa.lk. You can then filter this list by a large set of criteria, such as price, category, community (e.g. photographers, gamers, bloggers, etc.), ratings, most “liked,” and more. You can also use the app to access the various Crosswa.lk communities, or see which apps are on sale and what searches are popular now, find friends, rate apps, and, of course, get your own Genius-like recommendations.
Actually, scratch that last bit – Crosswa.lk’s recommendations are far, far better than iTunes’ Genius.
Oh, and one more thing – just in time for SXSW, Crosswa.lk’s app features a section called “Who’s Winning Austin” which will keep track of the trending apps at SXSW in real time. You’ll find this at the bottom of the Trending Apps section.
Crosswa.lk comes from the team at Imaginary Feet, whose other two co-founders are Emil Anticevic and Patrick Jackson. The company has a small amount of seed funding from a new firm called XOL Ventures, which happens to be four ex-AOL guys. (Disclosure(?): TechCrunch is owned by AOL).
You can grab the new Crosswa.lk app here on iTunes.
View full post on TechCrunch » Mobile