What?s On Your Bucketlist? [TNW Social Media]

?What I do today is important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.? -Hugh Mulligan

We all have things we want to do before we die. Accomplishments like climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, row a boat through the Galapagos, and drink Pinot Grigio in Tuscany. I want to help make The Next Web the best website in the world. I also want to go to Greece with my lover. What do you want to do before you die?

By day, Scot Hacker is the Webmaster at UC Berkeley?s School of Journalism. But when he?s not taking care of his son or hiking, he?s hacking. In fact, the appropriately named Hacker programs every night between 11pm and 1am and his latest project is ?Bucketlist.?

Simply put, a bucketlist is a list of things to do before you die, a play off the term ?kicked the bucket.? Bucketlist, the website, is a site where you can keep track of all things things you?re going to do before you die. It also acts like a social network, essentially a warehouse of interesting and inspiring stories shared between users to kick-start your own life goals. While the idea behind the website is simple enough, its aims is noble: to help people find inspiration in the accomplishments of others.

On the site, users can add items to their Bucketlist along with stories, images and videos. As you surf the site, you can ?vote? for items you think are interesting by clicking the ?I Like This? button below the item title. You can also brose the ?Popular? section in the main menu which tallies up all the ?liked? items and floats the most popular ones to the top of the list.

If you find something cool on someone else?s list, you can click the ?Me Too!? button. When you do that, you?ll get a new copy of that item in your own list, which you can then modify. Bucketlist lets you ?follow? other people?s lists, which means their added and completed items show up in the following section under the main menu. The rules are simple: no porn, no mean-spirited stuff, no trying to use Bucketlist as a platform to promote your business. ?Don?t post anything you wouldn?t want your mother to see,? Hacker writes.

Hacker, who used to run a site that cataloged people?s misinterpretations of song lyrics, enjoys building sites of user contributed content with pages of material for people to ?click through and consume like peanuts.? In other words, sites with high page views and low bounce rates. Hacker is spending his time right now understanding the users, watching how people are contributing to a pool.

The site, which launched just three months ago, currently has 1,736 lists and 28,000 goals. Looking forward, Hacker plans to build an iPhone app to accompany the site so users can jot down ideas quickly while they?re out in the real world bumping into inspiration.?I?m still trying to find ways for more Bucketlist be more social,? he says. To monetize, Hacker will avoid selling ad space but he says he?s definitely open to selling the site to a company like Facebook that would be interested in integrating it into their already existing framework.

#1 on Scot?s Bucketlist? He writes, ?While hiking Mt. Tamalpais recently, discovered a wonderful little 1930s hotel called the West Point Inn, nestled in with the Bay Area?s best views. No electricity, so you have to rough it a bit, but it was just wonderful. Would love to spend the night here with family or just the wife.?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/11/29/whats-on-your-bucketlist/

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Weekend Open Forum: Where do you buy online?

Tech enthusiasts were among the first consumers targeted by dedicated online retailers and since brick and mortars charged hefty margins, online shopping was made even more attractive from the get go. Early etailers included the ubiquitous Newegg, which now exceeds $2 billion a year in sales, Buy.com, TigerDirect, and many sites dedicated to photography and audio equipment. As you might recall, PC manufacturers like Dell and Gateway were also quick to take full advantage of online ordering and made a huge asset out of it.

As online shopping became more mainstream, and for many a necessity, dozens of star retailers on many different categories have emerged. You have Zappos for buying shoes, Steam/Impulse for games, iTunes for music, Expedia/Orbitz or any other of the numerous travel sites, Fandango for movie tickets, and the list goes on. Amazon has also remained a pioneer in the industry and today you can buy nearly anything you could possibly want from their site, either direct or from smaller retailers using Amazon's impeccable logistics.


As the holiday shopping season gets rolling, our question for you is: How much do you rely on online retailers and where do you prefer to buy stuff? Not only tech, but things in general like clothes, gifts for family and friends, food, flowers, anything you are used to buy online these days. Even if it's a local store, we want to hear about it. Discuss.

* Graph used for illustration purposes only. Source: Lifehacker, Permuto, US Census Bureau.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41326-weekend-open-forum-where-do-you-buy-online.html

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Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

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Kinect used to control the original Super Mario Bros.

In order to celebrate 25 years of Mario, a gamer who calls himself Yankeyan posted a video titled "Kinect as a Nintendo controller on the PC." In it, he shows himself playing the original Super Mario Bros. game using Microsoft's Kinect motion controller. He used drivers from OpenKinect and FCEUX's NES emulation to create the proof of concept.

"I programmed it to recognize my motions and passed the virtual button presses to the NES emulator," reads the video's description. "I could have placed a simulated keypad right in front of me that I can press with my hands, but I thought full body gestures were more in the spirit of Kinect. Of course, Mario isn't designed to be played like this, so this is really really hard."

We also have a second video for you that really shows one avenue developers could take with Kinect hacking. Oliver Kreylos has managed to connect two Kinects together and calibrate them in a way to combine their two data streams into one continual video of a particular object. His work shows that it could one day be possible to combine multiple Kinects to have a truly 360 degree experience.

"First test of merging the 3D video streams from two Kinect cameras into a single 3D reconstruction," reads the video's description. "The cameras were placed at an angle of about 90 degrees, aimed at the same spot in 3D space. The two cameras were calibrated internally using the method described in the previous video, and were calibrated externally (with respect to each other) using a flat checkerboard calibration pattern and manual measurements."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41328-kinect-used-to-control-the-original-super-mario-bros.html

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Crytek: the PC is "a generation ahead," but PS3 and 360 holding it back

Crytek believes that because developers are focusing on the PS3 and the 360, the game quality on the PC is being held back. This is happening despite the company saying that the PC is already "a generation ahead" of Sony's and Microsoft's consoles.

Crytek is currently working on Crysis 2 for all three platforms. The original Crysis was an exclusive for the PC. That being said, Crytek has already stated that Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC.

"As long as the current console generation exists and as long as we keep pushing the PC as well, the more difficult it will be to really get the benefit of both," Cevat Yerli, founder, CEO, and President of Crytek, told the latest issue of Edge, according to CVG. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks."

Developers have very low sales expectations for the PC, compared to consoles. It's a vicious cycle: the PC market doesn't give the same revenue as the console market, so companies don't spend much on the PC version of a game. This is certainly true for games like Unreal Tournament 3: it would have been much better had it been released as a PC exclusive.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41323-crytek-the-pc-is-a-generation-ahead-but-ps3-and-360-holding-it-back.html

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Crytek: the PC is "a generation ahead," but PS3 and 360 holding it back

Crytek believes that because developers are focusing on the PS3 and the 360, the game quality on the PC is being held back. This is happening despite the company saying that the PC is already "a generation ahead" of Sony's and Microsoft's consoles.

Crytek is currently working on Crysis 2 for all three platforms. The original Crysis was an exclusive for the PC. That being said, Crytek has already stated that Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC.

"As long as the current console generation exists and as long as we keep pushing the PC as well, the more difficult it will be to really get the benefit of both," Cevat Yerli, founder, CEO, and President of Crytek, told the latest issue of Edge, according to CVG. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks."

Developers have very low sales expectations for the PC, compared to consoles. It's a vicious cycle: the PC market doesn't give the same revenue as the console market, so companies don't spend much on the PC version of a game. This is certainly true for games like Unreal Tournament 3: it would have been much better had it been released as a PC exclusive.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41323-crytek-the-pc-is-a-generation-ahead-but-ps3-and-360-holding-it-back.html

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The Best Online Shopping Start-Ups for Cyber Monday Shopping [TNW United States]

If you?re wallet isn?t hurting too much from pounding the pavement on Black Friday, then be sure to celebrate Cyber Monday!

Cyber Monday is a term the marketing world made up in 2005 for the Monday following Back Friday, which is predominately an American shopping day. But since the world wide web is well, world wide, Cyber Monday is celebrated by the marketing world in Canada, the UK, France, Portugal and Germany.

We?ve tracked down our 5 favorite online fashion start-ups offering great Cyber Monday discounts.

1. Gilt is my personal favorite for online shopping. Each day at noon, Gilt offers its members a curated selection of merchandise, including apparel, accessories and lifestyle items across the women?s, men?s and children?s categories. Ella Moss, Miss Sixty and BCBG at 60% off? What more could a girl ask for?

For Cyber Monday Gilt is offering free shipping on any purchase (from Gilt Women, Gilt Man, Gilt Home, and Gilt Kids) made on Monday, November 29 between 12 a.m. ET and 11:59 p.m. ET.  N.B. The deal is limited to one shipping ?coupon? per customer and only applies to UPS Ground orders.

2. Rent the Runway made our recent list of 20 NYC start-ups you need to know about. The site, like a ?Netflix for dresses,? allows women to rent dresses from notable fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, Hervé Léger and Proenza Schouler for about one-tenth of what they would cost to buy in a retail store. Dry cleaning is included in the price and damage insurance costs $5. The renter is responsible for the full retail price in case the dress is completely destroyed.

They are currently running a promotion where users receive $20 for inviting a friend.

3. Exclusively.In, often referred to as the Gilt Group of India, is a new e-commerce warehouse that sells Indian imported clothing, accessories and art like colorful dresses, saris and masala tees. The online shopping site looks and acts like Gilt Group with members-only, flash sales offering heavily discounted high end designer threads, but with Exclusively.In, the designs are exclusively Indian. In November of this year, the site raised a $2.8 million round of institutional and angel funding from Accel Partners India and Helion Venture Partners.

For Cyber Monday the site is offering $20 off any order over $100; $55 off any order from $250-$499; and $125 for any order over $500.

4. Of A Kind, the world?s first online Tumblr store, commissions designers to create limited-edition, exclusive ?5, 10 or 50 of a kind? pieces. The site then releases each piece, one at a time, promoting it with a story. Each piece of limited edition merchandise is complemented by refreshingly intimate editorial content. They are currently selling a 23 of a kind scarf by Symmetry Goods.

Shoppers will receive $25 off all items purchased on Monday between 12 a.m. ET through midnight on Wednesday 11:59 p.m. Use coupon code: OFAKINDNESS

5. StyleTrek, an online shopping community featuring independent designers, launched globally this month, officially expanding beyond the U.S. to an additional 91 countries on November 22nd. The site features an easy Facebook log-in and a crowdsourced e-commerce platform with the ability to ?Like? products and share on Facebook, Twitter and via e-mail, which means StyleTrek designers receive real time consumer feedback at every stage of the design and production process. You can also ?Like? a designer and follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook.

We recently wrote about their global launch and they offered our readers a promo code, use NW10 at checkout.

Don?t know what you want? Check out our latest online shopping obsession, Svpply, a site for window browsing online. While you don?t actually purchase anything on Svpply, the site lets you browse beautifully designed and fashionable objects in a curated, Tumblr like format. Pick what you like and the site will re-direct you to the specific site. It?s up to you to find out if they?re offering something special for Cyber Monday. But considering it?s known as the busiest Internet shopping day of the year, chances are good.

Also, since you?ll be shipping your packages, check out our story on Popular Mechanics?s ?Who Ships Your Packages Best?? test.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/11/28/the-best-online-shopping-start-ups-for-cyber-monday-shopping/

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Weekend Open Forum: Where do you buy online?

Tech enthusiasts were among the first consumers targeted by dedicated online retailers and since brick and mortars charged hefty margins, online shopping was made even more attractive from the get go. Early etailers included the ubiquitous Newegg, which now exceeds $2 billion a year in sales, Buy.com, TigerDirect, and many sites dedicated to photography and audio equipment. As you might recall, PC manufacturers like Dell and Gateway were also quick to take full advantage of online ordering and made a huge asset out of it.

As online shopping became more mainstream, and for many a necessity, dozens of star retailers on many different categories have emerged. You have Zappos for buying shoes, Steam/Impulse for games, iTunes for music, Expedia/Orbitz or any other of the numerous travel sites, Fandango for movie tickets, and the list goes on. Amazon has also remained a pioneer in the industry and today you can buy nearly anything you could possibly want from their site, either direct or from smaller retailers using Amazon's impeccable logistics.


As the holiday shopping season gets rolling, our question for you is: How much do you rely on online retailers and where do you prefer to buy stuff? Not only tech, but things in general like clothes, gifts for family and friends, food, flowers, anything you are used to buy online these days. Even if it's a local store, we want to hear about it. Discuss.

* Graph used for illustration purposes only. Source: Lifehacker, Permuto, US Census Bureau.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41326-weekend-open-forum-where-do-you-buy-online.html

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The Best Online Shopping Start-Ups for Cyber Monday Shopping [TNW United States]

If you?re wallet isn?t hurting too much from pounding the pavement on Black Friday, then be sure to celebrate Cyber Monday!

Cyber Monday is a term the marketing world made up in 2005 for the Monday following Back Friday, which is predominately an American shopping day. But since the world wide web is well, world wide, Cyber Monday is celebrated by the marketing world in Canada, the UK, France, Portugal and Germany.

We?ve tracked down our 5 favorite online fashion start-ups offering great Cyber Monday discounts.

1. Gilt is my personal favorite for online shopping. Each day at noon, Gilt offers its members a curated selection of merchandise, including apparel, accessories and lifestyle items across the women?s, men?s and children?s categories. Ella Moss, Miss Sixty and BCBG at 60% off? What more could a girl ask for?

For Cyber Monday Gilt is offering free shipping on any purchase (from Gilt Women, Gilt Man, Gilt Home, and Gilt Kids) made on Monday, November 29 between 12 a.m. ET and 11:59 p.m. ET.  N.B. The deal is limited to one shipping ?coupon? per customer and only applies to UPS Ground orders.

2. Rent the Runway made our recent list of 20 NYC start-ups you need to know about. The site, like a ?Netflix for dresses,? allows women to rent dresses from notable fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, Hervé Léger and Proenza Schouler for about one-tenth of what they would cost to buy in a retail store. Dry cleaning is included in the price and damage insurance costs $5. The renter is responsible for the full retail price in case the dress is completely destroyed.

They are currently running a promotion where users receive $20 for inviting a friend.

3. Exclusively.In, often referred to as the Gilt Group of India, is a new e-commerce warehouse that sells Indian imported clothing, accessories and art like colorful dresses, saris and masala tees. The online shopping site looks and acts like Gilt Group with members-only, flash sales offering heavily discounted high end designer threads, but with Exclusively.In, the designs are exclusively Indian. In November of this year, the site raised a $2.8 million round of institutional and angel funding from Accel Partners India and Helion Venture Partners.

For Cyber Monday the site is offering $20 off any order over $100; $55 off any order from $250-$499; and $125 for any order over $500.

4. Of A Kind, the world?s first online Tumblr store, commissions designers to create limited-edition, exclusive ?5, 10 or 50 of a kind? pieces. The site then releases each piece, one at a time, promoting it with a story. Each piece of limited edition merchandise is complemented by refreshingly intimate editorial content. They are currently selling a 23 of a kind scarf by Symmetry Goods.

Shoppers will receive $25 off all items purchased on Monday between 12 a.m. ET through midnight on Wednesday 11:59 p.m. Use coupon code: OFAKINDNESS

5. StyleTrek, an online shopping community featuring independent designers, launched globally this month, officially expanding beyond the U.S. to an additional 91 countries on November 22nd. The site features an easy Facebook log-in and a crowdsourced e-commerce platform with the ability to ?Like? products and share on Facebook, Twitter and via e-mail, which means StyleTrek designers receive real time consumer feedback at every stage of the design and production process. You can also ?Like? a designer and follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook.

We recently wrote about their global launch and they offered our readers a promo code, use NW10 at checkout.

Don?t know what you want? Check out our latest online shopping obsession, Svpply, a site for window browsing online. While you don?t actually purchase anything on Svpply, the site lets you browse beautifully designed and fashionable objects in a curated, Tumblr like format. Pick what you like and the site will re-direct you to the specific site. It?s up to you to find out if they?re offering something special for Cyber Monday. But considering it?s known as the busiest Internet shopping day of the year, chances are good.

Also, since you?ll be shipping your packages, check out our story on Popular Mechanics?s ?Who Ships Your Packages Best?? test.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/11/28/the-best-online-shopping-start-ups-for-cyber-monday-shopping/

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