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Wednesday, 1 April 2015
Report: Q1 US Paid Search Growth Strongest In 3 Years
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How to Use Your Fears to Grow Your Business
Today’s guest on Hack the Entrepreneur has spent 20 years in digital marketing, consulting for more than 700 companies during that period, including 30 of the Fortune 500. His current company — Convince & Convert — is the fifth multi-million dollar company he has started from scratch. Before his move into digital marketing in 1994,
The post How to Use Your Fears to Grow Your Business appeared first on Copyblogger.
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Strong Bad is just as disgusted with April Fools' Day as you are
Look, April Fools' Day is played out. You know it. I know it. Even characters from decades-old flash cartoons know it.
Sure, hating on April 1, a.k.a. the worst day on the Internet, is just as passé as coordinating fake launches of goofy products, but at least lovable grump Strong Bad can lampoon the holiday in just the right way.
"It's the day the Internet gets on the Internet to make inside jokes about the Internet," he says, followed by several inside jokes about the wacky trailers, nerdy product tie-ins and tech problems from the early 2000s. Read more...
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How #esuranceaccess gave three people the greatest SXSW experience ever
We all know that SXSW is a pretty spectacular event. But this year, Esurance decided to up the ante by giving away the ultimate SX experience complete with #esuranceaccess.
Esurance partnered with Mashable in order to create the SXSW My Way contest. Not only would winners score a paid-in-full trip to SXSW, they’d also enjoy exclusive access to personalized, VIP experiences.
For two weeks, Esurance asked a variety of SX-inspired questions, in hopes of finding the most tech-savvy, social media hungry people on Twitter.
After poring over thousands of entries, a panel of judges selected Yocelin Gallardo, Joey Cirilo, and Marissa Ferraraccio as grand prize winners based on the creativity and overall awesomeness of their Tweets. Read more...
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Five Best Umbrellas
We shook out your nominations and found five clear frontrunners for best umbrella (actually only one of them is clear). Which umbrella ella ella is your best bet? It's time to vote.
Gustbuster
If I had to nominate just one model, I think the Classic is the perfect size; I keep one in my office, one on the back parcel shelf of my car, two at home. I've never had one break, I've never had one flip out on me, and they're substantially less expensive than most "luxury" umbrellas while being lighter, as durable and easier to use. I also find them much better in wind than the Senz. - Astigmatism
Cannot recommend a gustbuster enough. My current gust buster is over 12 years old and still looks like new. Never popped in the most ridiculous of winds, not a seam or stitch out of place, really nice weight, and super strong main shaft. It only has one issue and that is not having it stolen off you. My wife has left three gustbusters in shops. Funnily enough they have never been there when she went back, even one after two hours. Note to be specific the current version almost identical to mine is the golf pro. - Mutts Nutts
Senz
It's indeed the best. Last weekend it has proven again it's ability to handle the wind: with a storm of 9 on the Beaufort Scale it kept my head dry with heavy rain showers. Stable in the wind. Great invention by students of a Dutch Tech University. - Fer Le Jeune
You have my vote as well. Another neat advantage from being able to withstand high winds is that the umbrella is narrower along the sides, making it easier to move through foot traffic without being too worried about poking people in the head. - Moosen10
Totes Bubble Umbrella
Clear, so you can be nicely enveloped by its coverage, but still see where you're going. And the dome shape makes it resistant to inside-out wind flips. And they're durable. I've had the same one for 5 years. - doit2julia!
Totes Signature Auto Open/Close
Sturdy, inexpensive, and compact auto open and close umbrella with a lifetime warranty available in a variety of colors and patterns. - yomann
Blunt Umbrella Lite
The Blunt Umbrella Lite. The Classic is good too but doesn't have a loop on the handle. My spouse was gifted the lite about three years ago and this thing really holds up. It never turns inside out, even in the strongest of NYC winds (it claims to be wind-tunnel tested). The spokey things never ever poke through the fabric or snap in two (they are fiberglass). The handle is lightweight. The fabric itself is really sturdy. They have cute colors and apparently they are now selling them with a GPS tile, which is pretty cool. - wafflecopter
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Turns out 3D printing with Easy Cheese isn't so easy
Delve into the complicated and messy world of spray-cheese 3D printing as a maker attempts to produce gooey cheese forts and cracker toppings. No, it's not an April Fools' joke.
from CNET News http://ift.tt/1xzHylE
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Police officer's verbal abuse of Uber driver leads to NYPD investigation
The NYPD is investigation a road rage incident, caught on camera, of a plainclothes policeman berating an Uber driver and mocking his accent.
"How long have you been in this country?" demanded the detective, continuing on a tirade outside the car while two passengers looked on.
According to one of those passengers, Sanjay Seth, the Uber driver who he identified as a man named Humayun honked at the unmarked car when the detective was parking without a blinker.
The plainclothes NYPD detective can be heard slamming the side of the car and mocks the driver's English. He then tells the driver the only reason he is not being arrested is because the detective "had things to do." Read more...
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'Miracle baby' Eli born with no nose
An adorable baby boy was born last month in Foley, Alabama, with a rare facial anomaly that left him without a nose.
Little Timothy Eli Thompson, better known as Eli, came into the world March 4 with a condition called congenital complete arhinia. It means he has no external nasal structures or passages and it affects just one in 197 million people. In fact, there have been only 28 reported cases since 1931, according to the medical journal IJSS Case Reports & Reviews .
Eli's mother, Brandi McGlathery, knew something was special about Eli the minute her doctor laid him on her chest.
"I pulled back and said, 'Something's wrong!'" she told AL.com. "And the doctor said, 'No, he's perfectly fine.' Then I shouted, 'He doesn't have a nose!'" Read more...
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Samsung Galaxy S6 Review: Not The Next Big Thing, Just a Fantastic Phone
Remember the good old Samsung Galaxy S III? It was a fantastic little trooper, but we’ve come a long way since plastic phones were king. iPhones and Nexii and Motorolas and HTCs have been pushing the limits of style and substance, and now the Galaxy S6 is finally, finally catching up with them. It’s stylish, it’s solid. It’s the whole package.
What Is It?
Samsung’s new non-giant flagship phone. A drastic glass and metal redesign of the plastic handset that became one of the most ubiquitous Android phones out there. A 5.1-inch stunner with a 577 PPI, 2560 x 1440 AMOLED screen, Samsung’s own Exynos 7420 processor, a great 16MP rear-facing camera, two forms of wireless charging, a non-removable 2550 mAh battery, and no microSD expansion. A smartphone that looks a whole lot, even suspiciously, like an iPhone—way more than the lineage of plastic phones that triggered an avalanche of lawsuits. It’s uncannily familiar. It’s also a pretty fantastic phone.
Oh, and it’s a phone that comes in two variants, one with a curved screen. Read more about its counterpart, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, right here .
Why Does It Matter?
Regardless of the Nexus phones and Moto X’s that nerds like me (and maybe you?) fawn over, Samsung is Android to lots of people. Next time you’re on a subway or a bus, just take a look around and you’ll see what I mean. Samsung reached this incredible ubiquity not (just) through snarky ads but by making cheap phones that weren’t total garbage. It’s a strategy that pretty much topped out with the band-aid-esque and pretty relatively underwhelming Galaxy S5. With the S6 though, Samsung’s offering something a bit more premium, and way more iPhoney.
If you’re a diehard Samsung fan, the Galaxy S6 might actually push you into the waiting arms of another brand. But if you’ve been waiting for Samsung to finally figure out how to build a premium smartphone, this could be the moment you hop aboard the TouchWiz train.
Design
Beautiful and cohesive in a way a Samsung phone has never been before. No more fake leather, dimpled Band-Aid plastic or fake metal edges—the Galaxy S6 is all glass and aluminum. Previous Samsung phones tried to look premium, but there were always telltale signs that the Korean manufacturer had cheaped out in one way or another. The S6 nails it.
It looks great from all angles. The glass back feels and looks classy, the buttons feel great, the metal trim is lovely. On the one hand the Galaxy S6 design is not particularly unique or exciting, but on the other much more important hand, absolutely nothing about it sucks.
And yes, it looks like an iPhone. A lot like an iPhone! Enough so that my fiancée and I have confused my white S6 for her white iPhone at least a half-dozen times. It’s only ever for a split second—after all, the S6 has a smaller button and different front facing speakers and a SAMSUNG logo—but with the same color and shape, the similarity is the first thing you’ll notice.
But Samsung isn’t (just) aping the iPhone’s style here; there are some considered differences that make it better. Yes, the Galaxy S6 has a unibody aluminum frame which means no removable batteries, but the glass back gives it a sort of old-school premium feel like the Nexus 4 or iPhone 4 / 4S. It feels pretty fantastic.
Around the sides, the S6 has a rounded metal rim that’s a little like the iPhone, but not entirely. Instead of being fully rounded, it actually plateaus a bit, which does wonders to make this thing easy to hold and settle into your hand. The iPhone 6’s full rounded edges make it feel like it could pop out of your hand like a bar of soap if you really gave it a death grip. And the S6 doesn’t suffer from that.
Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t drop it. That glass back can be pretty slippery! The second you try to hold the S6 in any sort of open-handed way—which is to say just letting it lay on your hand without exerting pressure on the sides—it’ll slowly slip until you (hopefully!) catch it on the protruding camera. That’s not the end of the world, but it can be annoying!
But as for shatters and scratches, I’ve seen none of either yet. I’ve kept the S6 in the same pocket as my keys (heresy! I know!) but all i’ve managed is cosmetic scratches on the home button. When I got a little more, ahem, deliberate, the Gorilla Glass 4 back withstood considerable pressure from my keys and the tip of my pocket knife unscathed. As for drops, it’s survived a handful of three-foot falls from hand to hardwood and tile floor, and more aggressive tests suggest it can take much more.
The S6’s screen is eye-poppingly good, but at ludicrous 577 pixels per inch (the iPhone 6 has 401, and the Note 4 has 518) it’s reaching the point where it mostly doesn’t matter. Yes, the screen is crispy as hell, but not like it’s soul-rendingly better than other phones that creep up on the same ~500 territory. The only point at which this starts to matter is if you strap this thing to your face. Gear VR, Samsung’s phone-based virtual reality headset that’s soon to be revamped for use with the S6 and Galaxy Edge, actually makes use of that extra resolution.
With its 5.1-inch screen but smallish top and bottom bezels, the S6 is not that much bigger than the iPhone 6. It falls right into what I personally (admittedly with largish man-hands) consider to be the sweet-spot for non-gigantic phone-size. It’s right in there with the HTC One M9 and the Nexus 5 and the new Moto X. This is Android’s new “small” and it’s pretty much what you’re stuck with unless you’re willing to do something drastic, like buy an old 2013 Moto X or hunt down a Sony Z3 Compact.
Using It
The Galaxy S6 is blisteringly fast. Switching between apps, scrolling through the multitasking queue, pulling down the notification shade, opening the camera, running games, I never once saw the slightest hitch in performance. There’s nothing wildly throw-your-hair-back about the speed; it’s not unbelievable or anything like that. Other recent flagship phones feel fast, too. But the S6 does everything you’d want it to as quickly as you could ask. And it does it consistently.
The S6 runs an Exynos processor—one of Samsung’s home-grown chips—instead of the Qualcomm’s new flagship Snapdragon 810, but it doesn’t suffer for it in the slightest. Apps launch with a snap, and even with Samsung’s historically bloated TouchWiz interface sitting on top of Android, swiping through homescreens, pulling down notification shades, and opening app drawers is quick and fluid.
To push the processor a little further, I loaded up old faithful Dead Trigger 2, which ran fantastically on the auto-detected “low” settings, and barely any worse once I manually jacked up the settings all the way to max. Similarly, GTA: San Andreas runs smoooooooth as hell, although I did see some super weird graphical glitches. So far, though, it’s the only place I’ve seen anything like that.
But all of this performance talk comes with a big ol’ asterisk. It’s great for now. Samsung’s TouchWiz interface has been getting less and less obtrusive—the newest version that runs atop Android’s latest Lollipop update is the most scaled back it’s ever been—but Samsung phones can get bad quickly. The Galaxy S5 we have banging around the office (still waiting for its fabled Lollipop update) is a shadow of its former self performance-wise, staggering under the weight of Samsung’s software plus new versions of Android. It’s impossible to predict if the S6 awaits a similar fate.
For now, though, the S6 a pleasure to use and it’s worth expressing one more time how not-terrible Samsung’s proprietary UI has gotten. In a streak of good decisions, Samsung has culled most of the extra bullshit options out of things like the camera. Once cluttered with useless toggles, it now looks simple, clean, with just the buttons you want and need. It’s practically indistinguishable from stock Android when you boot it up.
The quick notification buttons, those ones you use to toggle things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from the notification shade? TouchWiz gives you options to customize the ones you want, without slapping you in the face with like 50 superfluous buttons for “Golf mode” or whatever insanely extraneous bullshit it used to. All that, plus the material design ethos in Android Lollipop has bled over into TouchWiz and made it less ugly than ever. Samsung has (mostly) learned how to keep its bullshit out of your way.
And when it isn’t getting out of your way, it’s actually doing a good job of adding value. The Galaxy S6 can run apps in windows, and even run two different ones side by side, just like the Note 4, though admittedly it’s not quite as useful on a smaller screen and without a stylus. What is useful though is that a double tap of the home button will immediately bring up and open Samsung’s quick and snappy camera app, which makes the Galaxy S6 maybe the best split-second shooter I’ve ever used.
If you’re looking for a real down-and-dirty look at how the Galaxy S6 shapes up shot-for-shot against its toughest competition, you can check out our camera comparison. But that’s almost beside the point. The point is that it’s fucking fast, and in the end that’s all that really matters. The app launches fast, it focuses fast, and shoots fast in a way that makes every other phone I’ve used feel like something from the civil war. When the camera is this fast, little differences in color quality hardly matter when you catch a photo that you would have missed entirely.
Here’s a sampling of street photos from the Galaxy S6 (click the magnifying glass to enlarge):
Another special S6 feature that’s not in stock Android, the fingerprint scanner, is pretty good! Really! Samsung’s early fingerprint scanners were trash. The one in the Note 4 actually requires you to run your finger across the button like a laptop from 2008. This one is way better though. It’s a lot like Apple’s Touch ID—you just have to set your finger down, and there’s a fair bit of leeway as to the angle. It’s not quite as good as Apple’s, but it’s close! I’d say it works like a charm 9 out of 10 times, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Obviously, it works for unlocking your phone, but you can also use it to enter account passwords in your browser if you store the credentials ahead of time. It can be used to verify anything connected to your Samsung account—but only your Samsung account. That means you can your thumb to confirm purchases in the Samsung app store, but not the Google Play Store where you’ll actually be getting your apps. And while Samsung hasn’t spilled the deets on exactly how Samsung Pay will work just yet, you can bet it’ll also make use of that fingerprint-Samsung account tie-in.
Now I know you nerdy, replaceable-battery devotees out there are worried about the battery life since you can’t carry a spare for a Samsung phone anymore. Yes, the S6’s battery is built-in. Well, battery life is…fine. It’s fine! It could be better but it’s fine. In my use so far, With light to moderate use, I’ve been able to cruise into the witching hour (after taking the phone off the charger at 7am) with something like 15 to 20 percent battery left. Under more strenuous use—like the day I spent an hour making actual calls—it’s iffier; I hit the 20 percent mark around 10pm and had to carefully coast to the finish line.
But! There are a few mitigating factors here. The S6 has a quick charge feature—as most phones do these days—and with it I was able to boost myself up from zero to a sold 52 percent battery in 30 minutes. In addition to that, the S6 also supports wireless charging in a BIG way. As you may or may not know, there’s kind of a standards war going down with wireless charging, and there are currently two big flavors that most phones only support one of. But the S6 has both!
Like
The camera! God, is that super-fast camera great. The “double-click to open” shortcut on the home button is gonna get me a really god damn cute cat picture I just know it. It’s maybe the best feature on this whole phone.
The fingerprint scanner is damn good Not perfect, but best I’ve ever used on an Android phone, easy. Between this and the camera shortcut, Samsung’s doing a way better job justifying the existence of a physical button than Apple.
I haven’t mentioned it much here because I haven’t tried it for the S6, but Gear VR! Samsung’s Gear VR for the Note 4 is badass (if a little expensive) and Gear VR for the S6 is bound to be even better since it has a screen with a higher pixel density. Gear VR is only just getting off the ground, but it’s still the coolest phone accessory you could hope to buy.
Speaking of stuff that isn’t here yet, Samsung Pay—build on legitimately cool technology from a company called Loop—sounds cool. It doesn’t launch until the summer, but it seems like something that could be a decent Apple Pay analogue.
No Like
The glass back is slick but it’s also, well, slick. The way it can just sliiiiiiide down your hand is an ultra drag. (Except it doesn’t drag. Because it’s slick. I digress.) But, unlike my glass-backed Nexus 4 that I swear had an actual death wish, the Galaxy S6 has yet to take a header off of any tables or bathroom sinks of its own accord yet.
TouchWiz and all the other stuff that comes built into Samsung’s phones is still there. The modifications Samsung makes to the skeleton of Android is less heinous than ever but the stable of included and uninstallable apps is still enormous.
The battery life could be better. It’s adequate, but for every phone that’s all “oh wow, thin!” or “big battery but check out this pointlessly nuts screen!” I yearn for a phone that’s still nice-looking but packs some much needed battery-junk in its trunk.
Should You Buy It?
Yes. The Galaxy S6 is fantastic. With great performance, premium design (finally!), and a camera that just screams, it’s one of the best Android phones out there. It’s a solid buy for anyone looking for a premium, solid, not-ginormous Android device. And if you like the iPhone but for some reason cannot bring yourself to buy an iPhone, Samsung’s mostly got you covered.
But just because it’s fantastic doesn’t necessarily make it exciting. Unless you plan buy a Gear VR to go with it—or pretend you’ve got an iPhone for the LOLs—there’s nothing reatolly new or special here to show off to your friends. Honestly, I find it a little boring. It’s just a great phone, a phone with no huge downsides, which is pretty damn rare in the Android world. So yeah, the Samsung Galaxy S6 isn’t the Next Big Thing. It’s just the next phone you’ll wind up buying.
from Gizmodo http://ift.tt/1DpRFMo
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