Brilliant tips for every day

25 clever ideas to make life easier

Posted on November 01, 2011 in Bed, Bath & Kitchen, Decor & Furniture, Organise & Personalise by Simone

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Via: amy-newnostalgia.blogspot.com

Why didn’t I think of that?! We guarrantee you’ll be uttering those words more than once at these ingenious little tips, tricks and ideas that solve everyday problems … some you never knew you had! (Above: hull strawberries easily using a straw).

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Via: apartmenttherapy.com

Rubbing a walnut over scratches in your furniture will disguise dings and scrapes.

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Via: unplggd.com

Remove crayon masterpieces from your TV or computer screen with WD40 (also works on walls).

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Via: athomewithrealfood.blogspot.com

Stop cut apples browning in your child’s lunch box by securing with a rubber band.

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Via: marthastewart.com

Overhaul your linen cupboard – store bedlinen sets inside one of their own pillowcases and there will be no more hunting through piles for a match.

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Via: realsimple.com

Pump up the volume by placing your iPhone / iPod in a bowl – the concave shape amplifies the music.

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Via: savvyhousekeeping.com

Re-use a wet-wipes container to store plastic bags.

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Via: iheartnaptime.net

Add this item to your beach bag. Baby powder gets sand off your skin easily – who knew?!

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Via: realsimple.com

Attach a velcro strip to the wall to store soft toys.

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Via: flickr.com

Look up! Use wire to make a space to store gift wrap rolls against the ceiling, rather than cluttering up the floor.

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Via: instructables.com

Gotcha! Find tiny lost items like earrings by putting a stocking over the vacuum hose.

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Via: realsimple.com

Make an instant cupcake carrier by cutting crosses into a box lid.

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Via: stephmodo.com

For those who can’t stand the scrunching and bunching: how to perfectly fold a fitted sheet.

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Via: sprwmn.blogspot.com

Forever losing your bathroom essentials? Use magnetic strips to store bobby pins (and tweezers and clippers) behind a vanity door

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Via: realsimple.com

A tip for holiday packing. Store shoes inside shower caps to stop dirty soles rubbing on your clothes. And you can find them in just about every hotel!

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Via: familyfun.go.com

A muffin pan becomes a craft caddy. Magnets hold the plastic cups down to make them tip-resistant.

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Via: unplggd.com

Bread tags make the perfect-sized cord labels.

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Via: kiboomu.com

Bake cupcakes directly in ice-cream cones – so much more fun and easier for kids to eat. Definitely doing this!

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Via: squawkfox.com

Microwave your own popcorn in a plain brown paper bag. Much healthier and cheaper than the packet stuff.

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Via: jengrantmorris.blogspot.com

Brilliant space-saver: install a tension rod to hang your spray bottles. Genius!

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Via: 9gag.com

Win friends at breakfast with this heart-shaped egg tutorial. Aww shucks!

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Via: wilton.com

Turn your muffin pan upside down, bake cookie-dough over the top and voila – you have cookie bowls for fruit or ice-cream. Click here for recipe.

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Via: realsimple.com

Freeze Aloe Vera in ice-cube trays for soothing sunburn relief.

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Via: lifehacker.com.au

Gutter garden: Create a window-box veggie patch using guttering.

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Via: re-nest.com

Use egg cartons to separate and store your Christmas decorations.

What do you do on your Mobile?

Infographic Of The Day: All About The Mobile App Market

A superb infographic from GDS reveals three important insights about what people want from the apps on their phones.

Everything you hear about these days is mobile-app this and mobile-app that. But what does the mobile-app market look like? What do people want from apps? And what does the competitive landscape look like when you compare iPhone to Windows to Android?

Lucky for you, we have answers, thanks to James West of GDS Infographics, who created this superb collection of facts and figures for the iStrategy conference. Let's dive in.

Games are obviously the killer app of the mobile market--64% of people who pay for an app also download a game; other popular ones include social networking, weather, entertainment, and banking:

[Click to view larger]

But the really astounding stat lies at the bottom of that chart: Despite all the noise about Android owning more market share than Apple, Apple has 300,000 apps available compared to Android's truly pitiful 25,000. You be the judge about whether that's because Apple was first or because developers find Apple apps easier to develop or because the device's users simply use more apps--it's hard to deny how significant a content lead Apple's iOS has over its competition.

Moving onto the next chunk of insights. You might think that since games dominate the app market, they would be the only things that people are willing to pay for. To some extent, that's true: The top five paid-for apps on the market are all games, while the top five free apps all have some sort of function:

There's a massive gap in the app market.

But again, pay attention to the bottommost charts in that panel (above). While 93% of people who paid for apps might be willing to pay for a game, 84% are also willing to pay for a productivity app and 77% are willing to pay for a food app. Compare that to the things that people actually bought, in the first panel we saw above: Only 21% actually bought a productivity app and only 18% actually bought a food app.

That means one of two things: Either people say they'll buy things they actually won't. Or: There's a massive gap in the app market. I find the latter option a bit more likely: As app developers have chased the dream of creating the next Angry Birds, they've left some huge gaps in the market. As I've argued before, we're coming to a point where if something is important to you, then it lives as an app on your phone. But developing all those applications is a far different task than developing a game: For one, you have to think in a deep way about the user, rather than just the user experience. In other words, building that new generation of apps is hard work. But that's where the real opportunities lie in the app market.

The last panel brings us to some different insights. But in many ways, this is the most surprising information of all. Check out the first chart: iPhone, Android, and Windows 7 users all download games at about the same rate. But iPhone users spend way, way more time actually playing those games:

I suspect that there's a few things going on here: For one, given the huge lead that Apple has in apps available, the games might simply be better.

But I would bet there's something more subtle going on as well: People relate to their iPhone a bit differently. All you have to do is pick one up and compare it to the competition. You quickly realize that in many ways it's a friendlier device, with a less complicated interface. It feels a lot less like a productivity tool than it does a window onto this big zoo of apps. That's a very subtle effect that arises from a slew of design details. But it's nonetheless true that those design details can change your attitude to a product--and how you use it.

60 seconds online

ipad usage

International Mobile

China has 842m mobile subscribers

http://digital-stats.blogspot.com/2010/11/china-has-842m-mobile-phone-subscribers.html

"Total telephone subscribers saw a net increase of 7.56 mln in October, with mobile subscribers growing by 8.74 mln to 842.04 mln, and fixed-line subscribers dropping by 1.18 mln to 300.09 mln. Broken down by traditional fixed-line and PHS, the PHS subscriber base declined by 1.17 mln subs to 31.65 mln, while traditional (i.e. non-PHS) fixed-line subscribers decreased by 20,000 to 268.44 mln.

A total of 67.38 bln SMS messages were sent during the month of October, bringing the total for the first 10 months of 2010 to 685.27 bln, a 6.8% increase over the figure during the same period of 2009."

There are 506m mobile subscriptions in Africa

http://digital-stats.blogspot.com/2010/11/there-are-506m-mobile-subscriptions-in.html

"The number of active mobile subscriptions in Africa crossed the half-a-billion mark in the third quarter of this year, to reach 506 million at end-September, according to research by UK-based Informa Telecoms & Media.

The report, published on the researcher’s website said at the end of the third quarter of this year, Africa accounted for 10% of the world’s mobile subscriptions and was one of the world’s fastest-growing regions – with the subscription numbers increasing 18% over the year to September."

Mobile Phone Orchestra

Taking the musical instrument to the next level and adding an element of global social networking... Interesting.

Different Digital Display

Have you seen this? Assassin's Creed Campaign, digital creative and new formats that interlink and run across different sites.They've linked YouTube to MSN and then only click through to their own landing page.

It really shows that it's about:
1) Engagement, captivating your audience and providing relevant content within the ad unit
2) Interrupt the user journey only to enrich  and add value
3) Generate stand-out through innovation

Quite amazing really:

http://www.youtube.com/user/assassinscreeduk

Same principle but across individual ad units within a page:
















http://www.flashtalking.net/view/demo/7624/1/

Brand advocacy with Coca Cola light on their 25th anniversary...

Yet another brand that shows that it understands that the cumulative effect of lots of small gestures can create a lot of noise.  

New browser experience or just another gimmicky social networking facilitator?

http://www.rockmelt.com/



NYT Review

RockMelt: The User Manual

By PAUL BOUTIN

RockMelt’s browser interface.

Last week, a start-up company called RockMelt unveiled a free browser for PCs and Macs, customized for people who live on social networking sites. RockMelt has gotten a lot of attention, because the company’s management and investors include several of the “Netscape mafia” who built the first widely successful browser in the early 1990s, including the Silicon Valley wunderkind Marc Andreessen.

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RockMelt’s goal is to let people keep on top of Facebook, Twitter and Google as quick, efficient side tasks, rather than going to separate sites for each. The company plans to add support for other sharing services, too, like Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. There are plenty of other social-network-console products already out there, but RockMelt’s clever implementation is worth a spin.

"Dinner Party" Stats

Gaming
+20m gamers in the UK (PC / Console and casual)
+14m gamers via mobile phone
Active Female gamers play an av. p/ 6hrs per week with Males playing 10.
7% of all online time is spent playing games
There are 9m Xbox/PS3 in the UK and a further 10m Nintendo Wii’s
Facebook has 500m members and 200m of those play regularly play games in it (ie. Farmville)


Mobile
It took 14 years for the 1st billion phones to be sold and only a year for the 4th
Mobile commerce accounts for £2.8bn in the UK but only 3% of companies are mobile enabled
33% of all mobile searches are location specific
Mobile searches grew 400% last year
20m UK mobile internet users
The average smartphone user is using the mobile internet for 34 minutes a day
Prediction? By 2015 your mobile will have replaced yoru keys and cash spending...

Inspirational: The Influencer

INFLUENCERS TRAILER from R+I creative on Vimeo.


http://www.influencersfilm.com/#/Home

Virtual game made real: Mini

Through simple and easy to use mobile technology MINI create an engaging game. A virtual treasure hunt, where by-passers become your enemies and the city becomes your playing field.

Digital Media Museum

Adobe builds an all-digital museum created to showcase all forms of digital art and media. The vision for the museum is to celebrate digital media and the artists who are embracing and exploring its limitless possibilities. The venue invites visitors to thoroughly explore the interactivity, lack of physical boundaries, and 24/7 availability of the online world.

Band plays entire song with 4 iphones

Atomic Tom produce an iPhone-inspired video, playing an entire song on Apple apps.
Gizmodo suggests: “Authentic or not, the dudes sound great with a very minimal setup, and their fellow passengers seem entertained enough—which is more than you can say for your average Subway crooner. Note to future bands: maybe you don’t need the pricey instruments to begin with?”

360 Video experience

You can scroll around the scene while it's playing and watch the video from 360 degree angles. Watch it more than once and you'll find different hidden scenes, you may have missed while looking a different way when watching it the first time. Fun.









And a 360 degree view on surfing. The effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. Awesome!

Google launches "hyperlocal" ads

Mobile search still represents a very small part of global search traffic but it appears that Google is becoming more and more keen on capitalizing on it's potential.

Google introduces "hyperlocal"  ads, an ad format that takes full advantage of mobile's geo-targeting capabilities by providing distance information directly within the ad. Moreover, local businesses are also able to include click-to-call and click-to-site option simultaneously within the same ad.

Virals that spread in 2009 & 2010

http://thefuturebuzz.com/2010/08/02/viral-images-2010/

Music: Just for fun

Facebook Mobile Stats