On Gear Live: Apple Magic Mouse: Multitouch, Bluetooth, one button mouse

Amazon acquires Zappos

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: News

It has just been announced that has purchased the vastly popular Internet shoe retailer Zappos for $850 million. The sale, confirmed in a letter sent from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to his employees, was for $807 million in Amazon stock, plus $40 million in cash and restricted stock.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has also given some feedback on the acquisition as part of a video that he put out today, embedded above.

You can check out the full press release, after the break.

Click to continue reading Amazon acquires Zappos


Advertisement

TripIt Introduces TripIt Pro Premium Flight Monitoring Service

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Business Tools, News, Product Offers, Productivity

TripIt Pro

Make no mistake, we are huge fans of TripIt, and have been using the trip managing site for two years now. I’d always wondered when I would be able to pay for the excellent service, and that answer came with today’s launch of TripIt Pro. TripIt Pro, first and foremost, stays on top of your flight plans and sends you text messages about flight delays, cancellations, and even gate changes (which is awesome.) In the event that a delay will mean you missing a connecting flight, TripIt will even let you know of alternate flights that will get you to your destination, including flight status and what seats are available. As you can see, TripIt is definitely trying to bring it with TripIt Pro.

According to the company, another much-requested feature has been added, that being a point tracker that keeps track of frequent flyer miles and hotel points that you rack up during travel. It’s nice to have that in your travel dashboard. Lastly, there is the Inner Circle, which basically let’s you set other specific TripIt members as contacts who can always view any of your itineraries, helpful for those of us with spouses or office assistants, where it would be helpful for them to just get those details without any action needed to be taken on your own.

TripIt Pro will cost $99 per year, and at that price, is well worth it if you travel often. Even better, though, is that from now through July 31, you can sign up and pay just $49 per year. If you sign up now, you will stay on a $49 per year price for every renewal period, until you cancel the service.

Read More | TripIt Pro

Gnomedex 8.0: Kris Krug: Making Better Photographs

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Productivity

Kris Krug is here at Gnomedex to talk to us about taking better pictures. He goes into tips:

  1. Light in the Eyes: You want to try and get light in the eyes.
  2. Evaluate the Light: Sun? Shade? Incandesent? Halogen? Look around and find highlights, spotlights, and shadows, and then put your subject in good light. Look for reflection and light in the eyes, and if possible, use lamps.
  3. To shoot in low light: Turn your ISO UP, Increase your aperture (make number lower), decrease your shutter speed, focus manually if autofocus fails you, tinker with manual settings/metering, brace on things (tripod, wall, gear bag)
  4. Reflections are Yummy: Look for puddles, glass, metal, shiny floors that may have reflections in them, and then take an image of that reflection.
  5. Focus on a theme: Black and white, portraits, funny faces, laptop stickers, over-exposed. This will give you a goal.
  6. Learn Your Camera: Isolate the variables like depth of field, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc. ALso, Tinker, tweek, shoot a bunch of photos, share them, get feedback, and feel free to change up your style. Share your gear by finding someone you can test out lenses, flashes, etc. with. Last, but certainly not least, set the white balance.
  7. Take a look at your background: No trees sprouting out of peoples heads, less busy puts more focus on the subject.
  8. Fill the frame: Hold your hand out, and if your subject isn’t bigger than your hand, you are too far away.
  9. Get High! Swing Low: People look better from above, so stand on things, lay down, get the angle, and change your perspective. This is why people are always taking MySpace photos by holding their phone above themselves.
  10. Tips for being a good subject: Laugh, smile, have fun. Make eye contact with the camera. Stand in the light.
  11. Camera buying advice: Lenses are more important than the body. You should spend 2/3 of your camera budget on your lens. Don’t fall for megapixels. Look for manual controls. Cameras from Canon, Nikon, and Fuji are great.


You can find Kris at Static Photography. This dude is an amazing photographer.


Blog Business Summit: 10 Ways To A Killer Blog

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Blogging, Features, Marketing, Planning

Robert and Maryam are speaking on getting noticed in the new word-of-mouth network.

1) Blog because you want to. A story without live is not worth telling. Maryam talks about how Robert kept pushing her to blog for four years. Then one day, she started to blog. As soon as she started, she was blogging about Robert and he tried to get her to stop talking about him on her blog.

If you are blogging about something you don’t really care about because you think it’s profitable, you won’t have passion to go long-term.

2) Read other blogs. Use Technorati to find blogs that are similar to the topics you want to discuss, pick up writing styles, and learn about your competitors. If you read 50 blogs in two weeks and you aren’t compelled to answer back the things that you are reading, you probably won’t be a good blogger.

Maryam started blogging because she was going to a lot of conferences, but people told her they had no way of linking to her. It brings out community and a bond that she hadn’t experienced before. Through blogging she has gotten a much better job and has made a lot more friends. She loves it.

3) Pick a niche you can own - be different. There are two kinds of bloggers - ones that want to make things, and shake things. Others just want to talk to their friends and use their blogs to post baby pictures, talk about books they read, etc. Either way, each group should have a common set of values. When Robert visited people outside of Silicon Valley, he studied the way people use their computers. People go to Google and search for Yahoo because they want to get to Yahoo. Same for Yahoo, one of their top terms is Google.

Normal people outside the tech world aren’t using things like Google Maps, Google Groups, or Picasa. Everyone comes at this world through the search engine, so how do they interact with that?

Question - if you were to pick a category to be different in, would that be the tech category? Yes, it would be hard, but Mike Arrington came in late to the game and went to number one. He was also very focused on a very specific part of the tech industry, being Web 2.0.

There was a niche blogger in London who talks about the London Underground transportation system. After the London bombing, everyone hit her site, and now she is popular. Of course, we don’t want to have a terrorist act happen to make us famous, but you get the point.

Click to continue reading Blog Business Summit: 10 Ways To A Killer Blog


Advertisement