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...For years, 3-D printing sounded like science fiction. But in recent years, 3-D printing and scanning devices have gained broad acceptance across a broad range of industries – turning science fiction into reality.
Gartner estimates that worldwide shipments of 3D printers priced under $100,000 will grow by 49 percent in 2013. Major industry players are expected to sell 56,507 sub-$100,000 3D printers this year. And that number is expected to double by 2015, as big product designers like Rolls-Royce are planning to use 3D printing for jet engine parts....
If you sit down with any experienced graphic designer, they’ll happily talk to you for hours about the importance of typography. It’s everywhere you look, from huge billboard ads to the front of your favorite t-shirt. Type can reflect many emotions, but most of us rarely notice its profound impact.
Notegraphy is an iOS and Web app that wants everyone, regardless of their experience in Adobe Illustrator, to have fun with typography and create vibrant, sophisticated examples that can then be shared with their friends online. Just as Instagram made photo-editing dead simple and accessible, Notegraphy wants to do the same with type....
This morning at the Massachusetts School Library Association's conference (a fun conference that I highly recommend) Pam Berger presented some good ideas for working with primary source documents and Web 2.0 tools. One of the ideas that she shared and others elaborated on was the idea of using word clouds to help students analyze documents. By copying the text of a document into a word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that appear most frequently in that document. Here are five tools that you and your students can use to create word clouds
LinkedIn is the undisputed leader for business and career-oriented social networking. Some claim it is too boring, too plaid, but the network quietly simmers away in the background serving the needs of job seekers and business owners.
I am a heavy user of the service and regularly search for tools that will make it even more profitable for my blogging and content company. I explored 35-plus tools in a post at Small Business Trends (where I’m the tech product review editor): 35 LinkedIn Tools For Business. I pull out some of my favorites here and found a few extras that I thought you might value. If you are not out shopping on this Black Friday, Gray Saturday, or whatever color day, take some time to amp up your LinkedIn presence....
Today is a little different. I'm actually not typing at all -- I'm writing this blog post by "talking it" on Evernote. And it only took me ten minutes.
I wanted to test this out because although being a Staff Writer here at HubSpot means I have lots of time to blog, I've also worked at places where I didn't have that luxury. When you're balancing 100 different tasks, it's hard to find time to actually sit down and write. (Or maybe writing just isn't your strongest suit.)Luckily, with a little creativity, it's actually still quite easy for you to blog. So in the spirit of being meta, I'm going to show you how to write a blog post without actually "writing" anything. In just 30 minutes (I added on an extra twenty minutes to give you buffer time for importing, formatting, and editing) you should have a polished draft ready to publish. So let's get to it!...
Metta helps turning stories into short movies out of pictures, videos, text and sounds that are already published on the web. Polls and quizzes can also be embedded anywhere inside a video presentation to get controlled responses from viewers.
Via Baiba Svenca
This evening I received a question from a reader who was wondering what I use to create the annotated screen capture images that you see in the guides that I produce. I create those images by using Jing which I have installed on my Mac and Windows computers. There are other services that I have tried from time to time. Those services along with Jing are described below....
Discover the tools social media pros are using today and get more out of your social media marketing.
Are you looking for social media tools to get more out of your marketing?Are you wondering what tools marketing pros are using successfully?
We asked fourteen well-known marketers to share the latest social media tools they’ve been using. Discover how you can use these tools to help you to get more out of your social media marketing....
Though the tasks have gotten significantly more complex and intellectual, today’s web tools fall into the same general categories, either enabling new tasks (creating infographics) or performing manual tasks faster and more easily (sharing information across multiple social networks and profiles).
Ever wish you could search for something by sketching it rather than using text? Send professionally formatted emails from your Gmail account? Easily develop optimized landing pages for marketing campaigns?
Find tools to accomplish those tasks and many more here in more than 20 of the best cool online marketing tools and reviews of the past year....
The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analysing the data and, finally, reaching social media business intelligence; using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. If you are a social media rookie, this list of the Top 10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools might come in handy.
When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple of them and choose the one that suits your needs best. However, bear in mind that these tools are not an alternative to Enterprise-level tools, such as Brandwatch, which brought social media monitoring to a new level, offering a much higher variety of services and in-depth analysis. It all depends on your needs. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best free monitoring tools...
The company behind the .co domain has been working to associate .co websites with startups and innovation. Now its founders are trying to make it as easy as possible to start a business online with a new company called Pop.co.
thisBasically, Pop.co is a bundle of online services that should remove any barrier between coming up with a cool idea and building a web presence around that idea. This approach is particularly important in a future where entrepreneurs run “three or four micro-businesses at a time, easy come, easy go, and you don’t have to keep the domain forever,” said CTO Tom Lackner — he suggested you should even be able to set all this up from your smartphone.
Lackner and CEO Juan Diego Calle gave me a quick demo of Pop.co. You just pick the .co address that you’re interested in (assuming it’s available, and if it’s not, Pop.co will suggest alternatives), then the company automatically claims it for you, and you can either use Pop.co’s simple web page editor to create the page with just a little bit of typing, or use its simple DNS editor to point the website to a page you’ve created on another service like LaunchRock or Barley....
Are you looking for a social media analytics tool that can link social media marketing to sales conversions? Here is my review of Oktopost - which does that.
How do you prove the ROI of your social media efforts? For most people, social ROI is proved by measuring likes, follows, tweets, retweets and clicks because they don’t think they can link social media activity to sales. And truth be told, for most of the inexpensive social media management platform options available click/follow/tweet tracking is all that is offered. But that is changing.
Recently I began testing a new option, Oktopost. Oktopost is a cost effecient, social media management, tracking and reporting platform that tracks clicks, and more importantly conversions, down to the individual Facebook, LinkedIn or G+ post and tweet level. It is this ability to track conversion at the individual post level that I’ve found most helpful as it finally provides a tool to report true social media ROI....
If you're looking to up your mobile marketing strategy, check out these 5 vendors that can help....
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Free stuff is great. Free stuff that helps your business is awesome. While there are many free business apps screaming for you to play with them, I’m going to focus on 8 of my favorites.Here are 8 free online services that a small business can use to make life a little less complicated
Twice this week I've been asked for alternatives to iBooks Author that students can use to create multimedia books. This is probably a good time to share the three options that I usually recommend. These are listed in the order in which I typically recommend them...
Hootsuite is a great social media management tool that comes with a large directory of Hootsuite apps. Check out some of the great apps you can use.
When was the last time you had a look at all the apps in the Hootsuite app directory?
There is an ever growing list of apps so every so often it’s worth checking them out. Most Hootsuite apps allow you to integrate with other applications that you might already use outside of Hootsuite. They save you time by not having to swap back and forth between the applications.In this article we look at 5 extremely useful apps for Hootsuite…..
A primer on the photosharing service that Facebook reportedly offered to buy for $3 billion.
.... How does Snapchat actually work?
Once you've found your friends on Snapchat, you can simply start taking pictures and sending them out to as many friends as you want.The app has a couple of distinguishing features in terms of photo taking. One, users can draw on their photos. So that's funny sometimes. Two, you can caption any photo. Three, you get to set how long — from 1-10 seconds — the photograph will be visible to receivers. Crucially, too, the app tells you when your snaps are opened by the receiver. You know they saw it....
Animated videos can now be created easily using software. Check out these 5 tools and save a lot of money producing these videos.
The initial idea from this post on animated videos came from Nick from List.ly. I love when people share great ideas for posts!
So here goes, here are 5 animation video tools that we have reviewed.
Browser based presentation platforms are quickly gaining ground as HTML5 has made it possible to create robust presentations online without the need for applications like PowerPoint or Keynote.
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Adobe’s Photoshop is the gold standard when it comes to photo-editing software – the preferred tool for many graphic designers and photographers. But many of the complex features that once only a Photoshop pro could do, can now be achieved using basic, free software that comes with your computer or downloaded from the Web. Think cropping, resizing, color adjustments, filters, red-eye removal, and automatic enhancements.
In fact, a lot of useful photo-editing features are built into online photo-sharing sites like Google+ and Flickr. However, what if you want to quickly apply one or two effects without having to become a Photoshop guru? We’ve found and tested a few online alternatives that won’t require you to fire up any photo-editing apps....
In my previous article I discussed the importance of ensuring that your data is clean and processed before attempting any form of data visualisation. Here I will share some really awesome tools that (once your data is clean and ready to use) you can have at your disposal to create mind-blowing representations of the facts and figures.Here is a list of tools, some more open and adjustable than others, that add value to your raw data and can be used as a source of inspiration and design when approaching the visualisation process....
You've got a wallet full of cards that'll get you things. They’ll pay the check, get you library books, and snag that tenth sandwich for free. But we found a card that will bring you power. Real power.It’s the ChargeCard, a USB charging cable for your iPod, iPhone or Android phone that fits in your wallet!...
Images tend to receive better engagement metrics than regular posts when shared on social networks, so what if you could add underlying content to images in order to further drive brand engagement? Thanks to PassionTag, you can do just that.
PassionTag is a mobile app (currently only for iOS) that essentially allows users to attach content to images via ‘SmartTag’ functionality. The images, along with their SmartTags, can then be shared on Twitter and Facebook, as well as through email and SMS messaging. By leveraging the app, users have the ability to turn static images into interactive photos that contain actionable tags that extend the story they want to tell....
With YouTube Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made publishing videos easy. Now they want to make it just as easy to create them.When Google wanted to boost the quality of YouTube’s content, it gave out $5 million in grants to select creators. YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who sold the service to Google in 2006, are now tackling the same problem, but with a different philosophy.
They hope that a new app they are launching on Thursday, called MixBit, will make shooting quality video scalable and accessible to everyone.“Unfortunately I think YouTube is going down the route of rewarding the select few around content creation, be it with partnerships or with ways of funding original content,” Hurley told Fast Company. “I can understand, it’s great to stimulate the community and make money available to them. But I feel that’s a more traditional approach to solving the problem. It’s basically replicating the studio model...I’m looking for something that doesn’t necessarily alienate any group of people, but gives them all equal access.
”That apparently includes people who never shoot any video. With MixBit, as with Instagram video and Vine, users touch their phones’ screens to take multiple video clips that the app combines into one video. But only MixBit allows other people to use those clips, if they’re public, in their own videos....
Create Epic Stories with Shorthand...
New storytelling tool for journalists, writers and creative people looks very promising. It's in beta and is definitely worth exploring.
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Still risky or finally a reality? Here's an investor's perspective of 3-D printing.