Saturday, January 16, 2016
This Inflatable Sleep Hoodie Lets You Nap Anywhere
You’re a successful 21st century citizen of the world, but your regular, naturally sourced hoodie is holding you back. After all, if your hoodie doesn’t have a discreet inflatable pillow hidden in its hood, what good is it? Well, lucky for you, California based Hypnos is giving out tickets to Sleep City, and you’re invited!
Designed by Josh Woodle, the Hypnos sleep hoodie will let you nap anywhere. The starting at 46 USD garment comes with an inflatable pillow in the hood: blow up the pillow, and it’s nap time, all the time! The successfully funded Kickstarter project comes in three colors and a fitted or relaxed fit; most of the sweaters are made of 100% cotton, although the jacket version is made of nylon.
See the hoodie in action below:
from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/admin/this-inflatable-sleep-hoodie-lets-you-nap-anywhere/
Friday, January 15, 2016
How to Best Market Yourself on College Applications
The act of applying to colleges can feel overwhelming—deciding which schools you’d potentially like to attend, considering scholarship and other financial aid opportunities, and exploring living options is a lot to consider. But once you’ve narrowed down your schools, you’ll want to give each application your all, which can require some clever marketing on your part.
Getting into college isn’t what it used to be—now, it requires a complete academic portfolio, a well-written essay, and a whole lot of creativity.
Evaluate your social media
College admissions officers are at least as social media savvy as you are, so you’ll want to prepare your accounts accordingly. First, make the profile image of yourself one that the general public sees a positive one. This might mean adjusting your privacy settings or even deleting pictures that might cast you in an unflattering light.
You might also curate your social media profiles to reflect your interest in a particular school—a photograph of you on campus, a picture of the school mascot, or sharing one of the school’s relevant posts can send the message that you’re committed to the school. Assume that admissions officers will be performing a Google search on you as well and make sure the results say what you want them to say.
Focus on creating a personal brand
A great way to market yourself to a college is by working to create a comprehensive personal brand. This helps ensure that the image you’re projecting on social media is consistent with your personality and also your academics. Your personal brand should make you a memorable candidate as well as tie every aspect of your college application materials together. It should present you as a student, a professional, and a contributing member of your community. A good personal brand should also show a school why you wish to attend—after all, they want students who want them!
Highlight your uniqueness
Colleges respond to people who demonstrate diversity in a number of ways. Before you even begin the application process, think about what makes you a unique and uniquely qualified applicant. Perhaps it is that you grew up in a foreign country or started a community garden—whatever the case, find ways to play it up.
Think outside the box when thinking about what makes you a unique applicant. Maybe you’re the oldest of ten children or hold a school record for the most spelling bee wins. Find ways to draw attention to these interesting tidbits.
You can highlight your uniqueness on your social media profiles, in your admissions essay, or through any other means that feels both professional and appropriate. Find a way to stand out amongst the thousands of other applicants and you’ll be much more likely to leave a lasting impression.
Think multidimensional
Most students are going to submit application materials that are relatively simple—typewritten essays that may contain great content, but lack visual interest, for example. To catch the attention of admissions representatives, you might try doing something more uncommon. Consider attaching links to your YouTube channel and submitting a visual essay, or highlight your podcast.
If you’re feeling slightly less adventurous, you may also try playing with the visual format of something, such as your typed college admissions essay. Something as simple as taking a conversational (but appropriate) tone can be just enough of a deviation in form to make you stand out.
Of course, you’ll want to check the school’s application rules (probably by calling them or thoroughly exploring the website). You’ll also want to make sure that your nontraditional application materials address everything the application asks for—and does so in a professional way. While you want to stand out, you also want colleges to take note of you in a positive way.
Nail the interview
A great way to market yourself to colleges is by way of the interview. While not all schools conduct admissions interviews, it is a great way to stand out. Make sure that you dress professionally and conduct yourself as you would during a job interview. Be conversational and friendly, but remember that you’re there to prove that you’ve got a place at their school.
Don’t underestimate the importance of eye contact and a firm handshake—and don’t forget to do a little bit of research on the school before you head in. Use the interview to prove that you’re the best student for this particular college.
Let your hard work pay off
Finally, let all of your years of hard work pay off. Chances are, you’ve put together an impressive academic and extracurricular portfolio, which does a lot of the marketing for you. Think about why you want to attend a particular school and you’ll be able to reasonably market yourself—let your passion do the work!
Heather Hamilton is a contributing writer for Varsity Tutors, a live learning platform that connects students with personalized instruction to accelerate academic achievement.
from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/varsitytutors/how-to-best-market-yourself-on-college-applications/
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
9 Common & Lesser-Known Ways to Keep WordPress Secure
Has one of your WordPress sites ever been hacked?
If it has, you know the frustration, time, and money it takes to fix the problem and get everything cleaned up. Skilled hackers will plant a virus deep in your file structure to make it exceptionally difficult to remove. And while you’re trying to figure it out, your website will be doing the hacker’s bidding, whatever that may be – spreading a virus, creating parasite pages for SEO, etc.
Basically, it’s a nightmare.
Securing your site to prevent a hack in the first place is absolutely crucial. Take a few minutes to follow the steps below and you’ll be more secure than of 99% of WordPress users out there. We’ll even give you ways to prevent hackers and spammers from knowing you’re on WordPress in the first place. Read on.
1.Limit Login Attempts
Download for free from the WordPress repository, or, install automatically upon installing WordPress if you’re using a platform like Softaculous.
2.From now on, you’re not called “admin”
Most webmasters will use admin as a username simply due to the fact that it’s the defaulted text value on installation. With a random password, admin as a username can be okay, but with a custom, easy-to-crack password, the combination is risky.
Use different usernames for all of your websites, and of course, use random strings of numbers, letters and symbols for your passwords. WordPress has a built-in password generator now, or, you can use a browser extension like LastPass to generate passwords and keep them handy.
3.Change the locations of important URLs
Another default you should change is the login and admin URLs. Often times, hackers will scrape for WordPress footprints and append the default folders onto the root URL for quick brute-force access. Plugins like Custom Login URL and Protect Your Admin can help prevent that.
4.Remove WordPress footprints
Prevent your site from getting on a hacker’s “list” of websites to try out in the first place with a plugin like Hide My WP, one of the most popular plugins on Code Canyon.
5.Never mess with cracked plugins or themes
Most commonly, this is script to steal ad placement or traffic. More malicious versions will auto-install malicious files (such as .exe files) on visitors’ computers, and the script will only run for a percentage of your traffic, so you will likely have no idea it’s running in the first place (until Google deindexes your site).
Don’t risk it. Get the official version, support the developers, and sleep safely at night knowing some random person doesn’t have complete access over your site(s).
6.Delete plugins (and limit plugin use in general)
Any single plugin leaves your WordPress site open to vulnerabilities – even the simple ones.
- Deactivate and delete the plugins you’re not using.
- Don’t use big plugins for small tasks. Adding meta descriptions can be done without installing a massive SEO plugin like Yoast.
- Do things manually wherever possible. If you’re verifying through Google Analytics with a meta tag, go to the Editor and insert the tag into header.php yourself. The fewer plugins you have, the more secure you are – period.
7.Update automatically
Set both your WordPress core and your plugins to update automatically.
If the developers of a plugin or the WordPress team discovers a vulnerability, they will release a new version with the quiet description of minor bug fixes. You want to download these updates immediately – the easiest way is through doing it automatically.
8.Keep track of logins, just in case
Use a plugin like WP Security Audit Log to see who is coming and going on your website. It’s an easy way to spot a hack (if something does happen) and get to work on fixing it before any serious damage is done.
9.Keylog hackers are just as prominent as WordPress hackers
Taking preventive action with the above nine steps will take you under an hour, and can potentially prevent hours to days of wasted time and hundreds to thousands of wasted dollars down the line. Be smart and prepare for the worst – good luck!
from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/leurypichardo/ways-to-keep-wordpress-secure/
Turning Customers into Promoters
Word of mouth is the best way to have your company promoted. It is affordable, with a cost to you as low as zero. More importantly, person to person promotion is effective, since your potential customers are more likely to be persuaded by the experiences of those who already use your goods and services than by the controlled messages you offer.
The reality is that consumers are savvy and quite cautious in today’s marketplace. They resist being sold anything. The good news is that you can use their informed, wary approach to your advantage by making them happy to promote your brand and offerings. Let’s explore how to make your customers do the marketing for you – here are four ways to get customers to be very positive about your company as they eagerly promote it to others!
Make your website interactive with review and Q&A options.
Amazon is the model for doing this effectively. Customers are encouraged to rate the product they’ve bought as well as the purchasing experience, and they do so in droves in reviews from a few words to several thousand. If you’ve bought anything from Amazon recently, you’ve probably received a follow-up email from the company encouraging you to review your purchase. Amazon knows this method works and promotes it heavily.
When you offer customer reviews, your current customers promote to new visitors to your site; some of those visitors convert to customers who leave their own reviews. In addition, many customers will say to friends something like, “the product gets really good reviews,” which encourages the next wave of visits to your site.
Here’s another feature from Amazon that might increase your sales. Shoppers can submit a question to be answered by those who’ve purchased the item. The Q&A hold people on the site and keep them coming back to look for answers to their queries. The longer shoppers are on your site and the more often they visit, the more likely they are to buy.
Add video to your site.
Videos can be used to promote your brand and your products, show how to use your services, talk about your company’s social advocacy and be used in other promotional ways. The value of videos is that they are easy to share, so your customers are likely to pass them on to their friends either with a link or by saying, “Hey, you should take a look at the video for product X or service B.” The video doesn’t have to be Hollywood slick. Dropbox used a simple demo as its first promotional video, and it went viral through customer shares. Even a small investment in video can yield tremendous return.
Join a mobile app program that rewards sharing.
Retailers of all size can promote their goods and services through mobile apps like Shopkick and Shopular by offering discounts and loyalty rewards. Importantly for our discussion here, users of these and similar services earn extra points when their friends download the app.
In other words, when your company becomes one of the services promoted via the app, the app’s users spread the word about you by encouraging their friends to download the app. With more than 30 million downloads of such apps, a figure growing quickly, your pool of potential customers gets bigger every day.
Enhance the value of the goods and services you offer.
Here are a few examples of how companies are making use of this tip.
Sellers of products such as boomerangs that require technical skill to master produce how-to videos or put on workshops for their customers. The education increases the enjoyment of using the product. In turn, the customers promote the products and hobbies.
Schools offer employment services to their students that help them land jobs. For example, ITIC in Sydney assists with resume writing, interview skills, coaching and internship/work experience programs that ready students to find employment. A high percentage of them do. Those grateful graduates who have become IT professionals earning an outstanding salary are very happy to share their success story including the help they received along the way.
Cosmetic companies produce videos that teach users how to apply makeup to get the look they want. The videos, like these from Maybelline, are recommended by mother to daughter, sister to sister and friend to friend. Each video is a commercial for the products used, essentially, with viewers eager to watch.
Which of these promotional methods will work for you? Most growing companies are employing more than one of these tools to build their ongoing success.
from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/twitter-epicninjadaboss/turning-customers-into-promoters/
4 Fabulous Car Brands That Should Be in Your Garage at Some Point of Your Life
One of the most useful inventions in modern history is certainly the car. During the last century, auto expansion and development brought about a great change in the world of traveling. In the beginning, some brands focused on the car’s performance, others focused on comfort. After centuries of development, the majority of car brands strived to create a high performance vehicle that spends a low amount of fuel and is as comfortable as possible. Even though a lot of different brands try to achieve this, there are those that simply offer a unique driving experience. These are the cars that should definately be found in your garage at some point in your life.
Nissan
This is an incredible brand coming from the Land of the Rising Sun. The company was founded in 1914, however, the name Nissan was first used back in 1930. Throughout the years, the company has grown and manufactured some of the best cars in the world. We can easily say that Nissan’s crown jewel is definitely the GT-R. Its rich history suggests that this sporty ride is the biggest pride of the Japanese company. The amazing flexibility of the car offers ultimate driving comfort, however, in a matter of moments, it becomes an untamable beast with insane sports performance. However, what makes this brand perfect is its high reliability, which can be attested to in various consumer reports.
Mazda
Another incredible brand that is loved by millions around the globe is definitely Mazda. Over its long and rich history, this company has become one of the giants that offer a comfortable ride in both stylish and aggressive cars. The reliability is incredible, according to consumer reports in the US. The company produces cars that run on traditional piston engines, however, it has managed to successfully implement the rotary Wankel engine.
The most popular model running on this type of engine is the Mazda RX-8. Even though the model is currently discontinued, the successor of this incredible car has already been announced at the Tokyo motor show. If you are a family guy, Mazda delivers a wide range of classic, reliable and comfortable family cars but, if you want to get a vehicle that is fun to drive, RX-8 might be the perfect car for you – it will certainly make you feel a big adrenaline rush.
Audi
The German auto moto industry is famous for creating several high performance brands that have become world renowned for their quality. However, judging from the consumer reports in 2015, Audi was the best rated brand coming from Europe. The incredible history of this company is just one of the things that makes the company stand out. The high level of luxurious comfort and incredible performance is the trademark of this company. This statement is ultimately confirmed by the S class vehicles, which run on incredibly powerful engines, yet also remain perfectly comfortable family cars. Another innovative feature is the company’s unique Quattro system, which played a key role in earning the brand it’s immense worldwide success. The amazing comfort and insane performance makes this car the perfect candidate for your garage.
Tesla
As you may have heard, this brand is relatively new. Even though it does not have an astounding history as the other brands on this list, it is a new and innovative brand that promises a perfect transition from fossil fuel to electricity as the car’s main power source. The Tesla Company has so far created the Tesla Model S, which has left many people surprised with its insane performance. Owing to the fact that the car runs on electricity, the amount of baggage space leaves the customers speechless. The car’s claim to fame was the impressive fact that it can exceed 220 miles per hour, and is backed up with free fast charging networks. If you are thinking of acquiring a future-proof means of transportation, this electrically powered vehicle is a must have.
These are only some of the companies that have earned their success in the car industry, but there are many more that offer quite unique vehicles. However, if you are a person who believes in statistics, according to various different consumer reports, these are the most popular and reliable brands in the world.
from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/ivandseo/4-fabulous-car-brands-that-should-be-in-your-garage-at-some-point-of-your-life/
Thursday, January 7, 2016
Three Strange Ways Fashion Meets Smart Tech
When talking about wearable technology, the first things that come to mind are health trackers, computerized glasses and smartwatches. However, there is far more going on, especially when we talk about the cooperation between fashion and tech industries. Designers and entrepreneurs are constantly finding bizarre and brand new ways to make the regular clothes we wear smarter without jeopardizing our style. Some of these products are truly revolutionary and useful while others are just plain novelties that don’t have much durability. Most combinations of these two are still pretty strange to many people. However, for those who follow current trends, we have picked the three most unusual tech fashion items.
Clothing items that can charge devices
What will happen when you are traveling or out on a business event and your tablet or phone battery dies? You will need an outlet to charge the battery of your device or you won’t be able to use it further. This is why a fashion designer from Netherlands, Pauline van Dongen, teamed up with many experts and scientist to create a brand new clothing line – a prototype coat and dress. However, the interesting thing about this piece of clothing is that it will have flexible solar panels which are built into the wear. The coat has around 50 solar cells and the dress has around 70 solar cells which are all flexible.
If any of the two clothing items is worn in the sun for two hours, they can store enough solar energy to fully charge a regular smartphone, says van Dongen. One interesting thing about these items is that the solar cells can be revealed according to your need, as well as hidden away and totally unnoticeable. It may sound like impractical, but the reality is quite the opposite and the clothes don’t look bad at all.
Social media hoodie
If you are a social media junkie and like checking your Facebook all the time, then I suggest taking a look at this thing. Ping is a design coming from Seattle’s Electricfoxy, which is a wearables designer firm that started a couple of years ago. What is Ping? Basically, it’s a hoodie without sleeves that allows its wearers to connect to their Facebook accounts using a wireless connection. The person wearing this hoodie can use this item to connect to some social network via using a series of different “natural gestures”, rather than a typical app.
For example, when using a sensor integrated into the hood, the wearer can receive and send messages by moving the hood up and down. Messages are customizable and can be assigned to a group of people, and the user can also manage different messages based on where he or she is, what mood the person is in, or to whom the message is being pinged. If a certain friend sends a message to the user, he or she will feel a tap on the shoulder as a sign of an incoming message.
A dress that can pour drinks
You never expected that a bartender or a waitress will wear a dress similar to this one. The DareDroid is a brand new biomechanical dress that makes cocktails. However, there is a catch, and if you want to get a drink, you will first have to play a game with the person who wears the dress. The sensors located around the neck detect the presence of nearby people and allow the system to release non-alcoholic liquid.
If you want alcohol, then you will have to play a game of truth or dear on the touch screen and use your charm to convince the dress to give you more than just soda. This may seem a bit ridiculous, but it has the potential to break the ice and get people to interact with each other, instead of being locked into their phones, so why not?
The future is all about fashion and tech combining their efforts for creating even better and unusual clothing items. Not only that our clothes will look pretty, but they will also have practical applications. The only thing we can do is wait and see what fashion designers and tech experts will come up with in the future.
from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/ivandseo/three-strange-ways-fashion-meets-smart-tech/