Consumer Electronics Daily News

Beauty Company Creates Social Media Support Network For Women

 Facebook, move over.  There's a new social media network in town, and it's called Eye Am Empowered.  This life-changing social media support network is an innovative way for women to share, inspire, and empower each other.  EyeAmEmpowered.com is the brainchild of Chrislie Formulations, a beauty company created by women, for women. Its brands include Lashem® luxury lash and brow products, Measurable Difference® face and body products, Nailuv® gel nail polish, Wicked Crown™ hair products, and Fearless Fantasy™ beauty products.  But Chrislie Formulations doesn't stop there.  The company also participates in programs that make a measurable difference in women's lives—and it has just created a social media support network for women who have experienced or are currently experiencing life challenges.

Eye Am Empowered is designed to be a type of Facebook, but with a special focus—its users form an international sisterhood, keeping an eye on improving the health and well-being of women throughout the world.  Chrislie Formulations is inviting women from all over the globe to share their own personal stories on EyeAmEmpowered.com.  Women can upload their own videos, write about their life challenges, and share tips and advice.  These shared experiences can inspire and empower other women around the world who are facing similar challenges—empowering women on an international scale.

On EyeAmEmpowered.com, each woman who is currently dealing with life challenges will receive practical advice, support, and encouragement from an international network of women who have gone through or are going through her exact situation.  For example, the website can provide support for women dealing with serious health issues; women helping aging parents or an autistic child; women struggling with the loss of a loved one; women battling weight management or fitness issues; women protecting themselves from an abusive relationship; women experiencing financial challenges; in short, women gearing up for any challenge, whether scaling mountains or running marathons—literally or figuratively.

The EyeAmEmpowered.com website launches this October in honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  Chrislie Formulations encourages all women to visit the website in order to share, inspire, and empower one another.   

Trivie Opens Cross Platform Play to Android

Trivia lovers rejoice. Not only is Trivie® Breaking Bad, by premiering a new game just in time for the blockbuster season finale--but the minutia-loving game publisher that brought us the ultimate Battle of Wits™ between friends is including Android in an expansion that also includes new games, and even more officially licensed exclusive content partnerships. Trivie isn't just a game. Trivie is a specialized and personal game store in its own right, devoted to all things trivia.

Since launching in the summer of 2012, Trivie's gotten to know its users on a personal and organic level, over 2.0M+ of them. Other trivia games might be tired, spending so much time focusing on the small stuff. But, Trivie is all about the small stuff.

Trivie users are the smart, good looking popular kids, and they have friends. Android-using friends.  Never again will Trivie hear the tortured cries of Android aficionados and their iOS friends. Starting today, Android users can join in the fun, frictionless pace of Trivie in cross platform play. Trivie's 50+ officially licensed games featuring highly specialized content categories are ready and waiting for all the Android lovers.

Lawrence Schwartz, CEO of Trivie, says this about recent developments at Trivie,"Trivia is about learning while having fun! Trivie started where vintage TV game shows left off, and we have tried to translate specific user experiences into mobile game-play. By expanding Trivie into the Android market, we are now able to share our platform to over 70 percent of the world's smartphone users."

Trivie is busy. By the end of 2013, Android and iPhone trivia lovers will have 100+ games within the Trivie store to choose. This officially licensed content expansion is due to collaborative partnerships between Trivie and top-tier entertainment and business brands. Content partners include properties from DreamWorks' animated genius to Travelocity's genteel gnome--and also include direct tie-ins with network programs on Fox, CBS, and AMC. Trivie is synchronizing games with day-and-date movie releases as well.  If that's where the 'TV' trivia thing left off-- Trivie is going back to that in 2014 with a new and refreshing mobile approach. Busy and a tease.

In fact, fans of any and every niche are able to experience their passions related to a favorite brand, movie, show, magazine, etc. Trivie players can play 80's music trivia, or enter Billboard Magazine's 80's music genre game. Regardless of where a player's attention lands or lives, Trivie's highly customized games feature the familiar look and feel of a player's favorite brand.

Trivie's Breaking Bad game is here, as the ultimate example of how Trivie can partner with topically and culturally current trends. Trivie's players are able to drill down on all things Albuquerque with fellow BB buffs over the hiatus. "Thank you, and have an A 1 day," courtesy of Trivie.

PRNewswire

Transform Instagram Video Into Custom Products With Cap That

Cap That (www.capthat.com), the only website that enables users to capture still images from videos and transform them into one-of-a-kind products, has announced the launch of a new feature that will allow Instagram's 130 million users to capture moments from Instagram videos and turn them into canvases, phone covers, woodprints, dog tags, designer quality apparel, and more. Users can upload a video directly from their Instagram gallery, and use a variety of filters, graphics, and other effects to create "art with no boundaries."

Brands like Disney, Universal Music, Discovery Channel, and IndyCar have already partnered with Cap That, allowing their fans to turn captured still images from licensed videos into official merchandise.  Now Instagram users will be able to enjoy the same technology with their own Instagram videos.

"Instagram offers an easy way to take high-quality photos and create really beautiful videos, we wanted Instagram's users to be able to take their photo and video sharing experience to the next level. Now they can turn their memories and special moments into personalized high-quality products," says David Hibbard, chief executive officer of Cap That. "You'll always be able to catch the apex of an epic trick and you'll never miss the 'blowing out the candles' moment; all those amazing shots that can only be captured in video will now be liberated by Cap That's new platform."

The launch of their Instagram video interface is the latest addition to Cap That's intuitive, easy-to-use product design platform. Users can play with effects, textures, templates, cutouts, graphics and transform any photo or still image from a video into unique expressions of themselves.

Cap That and Instagram are a perfect match: Instagram made it simple for anybody to take stunning pictures and videos, and Cap That does the same, empowering users to create incredible one-of-a-kind products.

Go to www.capthat.com for more information.

FeZZee, who Make Music Festivals Smarter, Launch Their Kickstarter Project

FeZZee, who make awesome apps for Music Festivals in the US, UK and Europe, are looking to raise $80,000 on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to help them build a Smart Phone Testing Lab and finish FeZZee in time for next year's festival season.

The 2013 festival season is finished, but as festival organizers are competing to book the headline acts for 2014, the creators of FeZZee are building a new set of apps that are Festival Smart and embrace many emerging technologies.

FeZZee is designed for music festival fans, by music festival fans. FeZZee cares about music festivals, because you do. After interviewing 100's of festival fans, the crew at FeZZee arrived at their four main solutions:

• Line-up components that let you select the acts you want to see, and recommend and help you check out the ones you don't know.
• A Location app that lets you mark and find your car, your tent, your favorite food/merchandise vendor, and your friends, reliably.
• The Buzz feature is a single place where you can check out what's happening at the moment, from a host of social media channels, and also contributes.
• Share and synchronize your photos and videos with groups of friends to contribute to collective crowd-sourced albums quickly and easily.

FeZZee is web, smart-phone, and social media apps working together, doing what each do best, at the time they do it the best, to make music festivals less hassle and more fun. Smart-phones are street-smart; they're designed to work in towns and cities. The FeZZee Festival Smart apps are designed to solve the problems unique to festivals, including huge crowds, remote locations, and limited connectivity. Co-founders Gene Myers and Matt Mapleston have together 30 years of experience developing software for defense, security, and high volume websites, and are now using their experience to address these challenges. Both are also long-term music festival fans.

"This Kickstarter project will allow us to deliver on our promise to make apps that are Festival Smart, and we also have a great range of essential festival items as of rewards for backers that will make great holiday gifts," says Gene Myers, FeZZee's CEO. Backing FeZZe's Kickstarter gets you access as a Design Partner, and for those that love festivals, it's a way to keep that spirit alive during the winter months and help shape the apps that many are saying will revolutionize the festival scene.

"This will take over-- [it's] the future of festival programs," says Benga, Radio 1 DJ and owner ofthe record label Benga Beats. Ella Guthrie, of the music magazine Guestlist, went further, "The New Generation Festival App that will save your life".

There are a wide variety of awards for backers of FeZZee on Kickstarter. For $5, your support will be celebrated by adding your face and name on a photo-mosaic crowd scene on the FeZZee apps and site. Further levels of reward include T-Shirts, Smart-phone charging bricks, waterproof phone cases, limited edition media, and even a chance to appear as a Mock Star in FeZZee's demo festival lineups.

Please visit http://kck.st/17TO3hD and for more information visit http://fezzee.com

PRNewswire

Facebook Announces Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API

Facebook has announced another way that it will be taking your words and applying them to media marketing. According to Jason Osofsky, VP Media Partnerships and Online Operations, "Over the past few months, we have rolled out a series of products aimed at surfacing the public conversations happening on Facebook including hashtags, embedded posts, and trending topics. We are committed to building features that improve the experience of discovering and participating in conversations about things happening in the world right now, including entertainment, sports, politics and news." Basically, a user's conversations and posts will be meshed with trending topics (not only hashtags) to create a comprehensive and enhanced ad stream alongside the facebook feed, profiles, and pages.

This will be carried out with the Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API, and they will only be available to certain news organizations, including Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC's Today Show, BSkyB, Slate, and Mass Relevance. With these tools, the news organizations can "begin to integrate Facebook conversations into their broadcasts or coverage by displaying public posts of real-time activity about any given topic. For example, CNN’s New Day can now easily incorporate what people on Facebook have to say about the latest, breaking news event during their show."

The function of these two APIs are summed up by Osofsky:

Public Feed API
The Public Feed API displays a real-time feed of public posts for a specific word. Only public posts (from Pages and Profiles of those with ‘Follow’ turned on) are available with this API.

Keyword Insights API
The Keyword Insights API aggregates the total number of posts that mention a specific term in a given time frame. It can also display anonymous, aggregated results based on gender, age and location.

It will be interesting to see how news outlets integrate these tools into their media. Will this become as obnoxious and prevalent as forced facebook logins, or will it be relatively unobtrusive like the facebook web tracker API?

Technology's Bitter Taste: A Decline in Approval of Modern Lifestyles

Harris Interactive-- Fear of technology's impact on our lives is nothing new. Even today, Americans are divided on how technology impacts the way we live our lives. On the one hand, strong majorities believe that technology has improved the overall quality of their lives (71 percent) and encourages people to be more creative (65 percent). But, at the same time, strong majorities also believe technology is creating a lazy society (76 percent), has become too distracting (69 percent) and is corrupting interpersonal communications (68 percent).

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,210 U.S. adults surveyed online between June 12 and 17, 2013 by Harris Interactive.

"Warm fuzzies" for technology show year-over-year declines

Americans' collective assessment of technology's impact on everyday life appears to have suffered a bit over the past year. In comparison to June of 2012, Americans have become more likely to indicate that technology has become too distracting (from 65 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2013) and less likely to agree that it has improved the overall quality of their lives (78 - 71 percent), that they use technology as an escape from their busy lives (53 - 47 percent) and that it enhances their social lives (56 - 52 percent).

There also appears to be year-over-year erosion in how Americans feel technology is affecting several aspects of their lives. Though Americans are consistently more likely to report a positive impact than a negative one for all aspects tested, many of these perceived positive effects have declined in comparison to 2012:

• My work productivity (down from 42 percent in 2012 to 34 percent in 2013)
• My work life (41 - 34 percent)
• My safety and security (42 - 36 percent)
• My productivity at home (39 - 34 percent)
• Relationships with my family (43 - 39 percent)

Additionally, the perception that technology has a negative effect on safety and security has grown by a third in the same period, from 15 percent in 2012 to 20 percent in 2013.

Despite all these concerns about technology, clearly Americans still have a hard time unplugging. When faced with a list of technological devices and general life staples and asked how long they could live without each, majorities of Americans indicated that they could make it a week or less without Internet access (68 percent), a computer/laptop (64 percent), television (57 percent) or a mobile phone (56 percent), with roughly one-fourth going so far as to state outright that they simply could not live without them (28, 24, 23 and 26 percent, respectively). Just to add a dash of perspective, fewer than half (43 percent) said they could only make it a week or less (or not at all) without sex, with two in ten (20 percent) saying they could not live without it - period.

Tech savvy doesn't necessarily translate to tech love

These divergent perspectives on technology are not limited to U.S. adults at large; a comparison of Americans by generation reveals an equally complex picture. A recent Harris Poll confirmed what we likely all know-- that younger generations are more likely to own such high tech goodies. However, this should not be taken to mean that these younger Americans are more affectionate towards technology. In fact, Echo Boomers are consistently more likely than their older counterparts to indicate that technology has a negative impact on every tested aspect of their lives. Some examples of this include:

• My productivity at home (33 percent Echo Boomers, 21 percent Gen Xers, 18 percent Baby Boomers, 13 percent Matures).
• My safety and security (25, 19, 17, and 14 percent, respectively).
• Relationships with my family (18, 10, 7, and 5 percent, respectively).
• My work productivity (17, 9, 3 and 4 percent, respectively)
• My happiness (15 percent, 6 percent, 5 percent and 4 percent, respectively).

And yet even with a higher likelihood to see negative effects of technology on their lives, younger Americans nonetheless prove to be less willing to part with their goodies, with Echo Boomers and Gen Xers (33 and 30 percent, respectively) more likely than Baby Boomers (22 percent) or Matures (16 percent) to indicate that they could not live without a mobile phone.

 

A Shocking Way to Reduce Your Facebook Usage

Two MIT Ph.D. Candidates, Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff, have created the Pavlov Poke-- an invention that sends a non-serious shock to a computer user whenever they too frequently visit their favorite procrastination websites.

On Robert Morris' website, he explains how the device works:

"The design is simple. There are four important components:

• UI Inspector: You need something to monitor computer application usage. We use the Mac's UI Inspector.
• Processing Code: If a distracting site is visited too frequently, a Processing script produces an on-screen alert.
• Arduino: An Arduino is connected via USB to the computer. When a shock is triggered, the Arduino activates a relay and starts the shock circuit. If you want more info on how to build a shock circuit, check out this fine tutorial.
• Electrodes: Conductive metal strips are placed on the keypad. When the Arduino relay is triggered, a current is sent through the strips and through palm of your hand. Ouch!!!"

On medium.com, Morris says, "Prior to using ‘Pavlov Poke’, my Facebook habits were so ingrained that I would often find myself visiting the site and logging in well before I noticed any conscious intention to do so. I would be on Facebook, gorging on pet photos, stuck in some weird hypnotic trance, and it would be minutes or even hours before I realized I had no desire to be there in the first place." Though this contraption is not meant to be taken seriously, Morris and McDuff thought it was another fun alternative to "Person Slapping You in the Face" or "People Yelling At You On the Phone When You Get on Facebook"

It's clear that technological indulgences are getting harder and harder to resist, since more work (and schoolwork) is happening on computers. And sometimes, users need something more than a slap in the face to stay focused and productive.

 

Sound Effects and Music: A Qwyrky Way to Personalize Email and Social Media Messages

Qwyrk Media Inc. today announced the launch of a new app that lets users personalize email and social media messages with music, movie quotes and sound effects.

Available throughout North America, Qwyrk is an innovative application for audio "social self-expression" that allows users to add up to 24 seconds of a song, movie clip or sound effect to an email, Facebook post or tweet. Drawing from some of the world's top record labels, movie studios and sound effect libraries, Qwyrk provides access to millions of licensed audio tracks which can be edited to complement just about any digital message, and sent or shared to make friends laugh, cry or smile.

"Communication and entertainment have become one," said Qwyrk CEO Jonathan Otis. "Apps like Instagram, Vine and Snapchat re-defined social messaging by introducing new ways to make digital communication more fun, engaging and entertaining. Qwyrk is going to re-define the social audio space by providing quality audio content that can be personalized and shared with anyone, anytime to suit any occasion or theme."

Qwyrk is free to download and supported by advertising. The iOs version is currently available in the Apple App store, with Android and desktop versions to be introduced in the early fall. The app must be downloaded to send a Qwyrk, but not to receive one.  Any full-length track that is shared on Qwyrk can be purchased through major online retailers of entertainment content.

"People have a basic need to be understood and Qwyrk offers a way to satisfy that need beyond emoticons and 'LOL's," noted Qwyrk Partner, Doug Checkeris. "We're excited by its potential. Qwyrk provides an amazing range of content—from Katy Perry to Cole Porter and Billy Madison to Jaws along with lots of fun sound effects. During pre-launch testing, users were enthusiastic about the app's features. Participating music labels have also embraced Qwyrk and are planning to use it to promote some of their top artists."

Qwyrk for iOS key features include:

• Music - search music by artist, album or title
• Movies - search by actor or title
• Sound effects - search by keyword (e.g., clapping, barking, burping)
• Browseentire library - search for Qwick Qwyrks by mood or theme (e.g., happy, humorous, birthday, friendship, gross) to get pre-cut audio clips
• Customize - select up to 24 seconds of any audio clip
• Send private Qwyrks - using email or the Qwyrk app
• Send/Share public Qwyrks - to friends/followers on Facebook, Twitter or Qwyrk

PRNewswire

Twitter Now Attaches Related Links to Embedded Tweets

Yesterday Twitter announced that it will be adding links of related content to users' newsworthy tweets-- and there's nothing users can do about it. According to the blog post, "Starting today, you will see a new “Related headlines” section on the permalink page of Tweets that have been embedded on websites. It lists and links to websites where the Tweet was embedded, making it easier to discover stories that provide more context."

While some twitter users may appreciate the free press, other twitter users are outraged-- who is the force that decides which "related headlines" should be linked to their tweet? According to readwrite.com, "The company didn’t say how it will determine the order in which headlines appear, which could give it leeway to charge publications, or even advertisers, for ranking. With sponsored tweets quickly filling up our Twitter feeds, it's not a big leap to think that both Twitter and its advertisers can capitalize on link placement, as prominent Twitter users like actor Wil Wheaton have been quick to point that out."

This move will secure twitter's position as an internet news provider and allow for twitter partners-- those who embed tweets-- to extend twitter's reach even further on the web.

 

HTC One Mini: Pocket Friendly But Packed With Large Experiences

AT&T announced today its plans to launch the HTC One mini, a compact version of the award-winning HTC One. The HTC One mini shares the iconic design and must-have features of the HTC One and will be available exclusively from AT&T beginning August 23 for $99.99 with a two-year agreement. To see the HTC One mini in action, check out this video.

Jason Mackenzie, President of North America, HTC, said, "The HTC One mini is pocket-friendly but packed with large experiences – an HD screen, our breakthrough UltraPixel camera, a home screen with customized feeds from news networks to social networks including Instagram, and huge sound from its front-facing stereo speakers."

Shorter, thinner and lighter than the original HTC One, the new HTC One mini boasts a striking aluminum body with a 4.3-inch Super LCD 2 HD 720p display, a powerful Qualcomm^® Snapdragon™ 400 dual-core 1.4 GHz processor, and HTC's UltraPixel Camera with backside illuminated sensor that captures 300 percent more light than traditional smartphone camera sensors, so you can take better photos in low light and bright light.

The HTC One mini packs all the great features you love about HTC One including:

• HTC BlinkFeed™ puts your favorite content at the center of your mobile world, delivering social updates, news updates and photos directly to your home screen. It aggregates the freshest content, with more than 10,000 feeds served up daily from the most relevant and interesting sources. Enjoy all the information at a glance, without the need to jump between multiple applications and websites.
• HTC Zoe™ brings special moments to life in three-second videos, enabling a range of advanced editing capabilities and creative flexibility. Photos, videos and Zoes can also be featured as part of automatically edited 30-second Video Highlights with pre-selected themes with music or using sound tracks from your personal music library.
• HTC BoomSound™ provides dual front-facing speakers and a built-in amplifier to bring music, movies and games to life with minimal distortion, as well as the authentic sound experience you expect from built-in Beats Audio™. 

PRNewswire