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iPad

Beauty and Purpose: Most Popular Apps and Web Services in 2011

What makes you become a fan of an app on your iPhone? Is it that all your friends are on it and you feel the need to use it? Or maybe you use it as a tool for work wherever you are. To answer this question, we asked our team of user interface designers, iOS developers and user experience experts to look down at their iPhones and iPads and to report what are the apps they use the most. The key of this experiment is that our app development team was reporting on their usage as a normal user not as an expert. Now, you might want to dismiss this information as not representative of a normal user. After all, it comes from directly from the hands of people that are building apps and doing usability studies all day long. But you’d be wrong to dismiss it. Let me explain.

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Half Marathon SF

How I Ran The 2011 San Francisco Half-Marathon And Lived to Tell The Tale.

That last stretch was so difficult, draining and challenging. The tiniest hill became hard. But I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop. Not in the last three miles. I was exhausted and losing strength. Looking down at my watch I saw that my speed wasn’t terrible (9:00 per mile) and I decided to conserve the pace. To my surprise, very few runners passed me in the last stretch. That last stretch was about camaraderie and making it happen. I was on the verge of finishing but with the real possibility of failing. Failing didn’t scare me. What I was fearful of was feeling that I didn’t give it my best, so I kept pushing one leg in front of the other and remembering the routine I’d practiced in my runs at the Stanford Dish. I repeated it out loud. Land soft, push back, lift the other foot, take a short stride and repeat. Breathe. Keep your back straight. Don’t worry about the distance. Be fearless.

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Localuncle.com: Is it Really Just Another Question-and-Answer Site? The CEO’s answer.

I think that specialization is the key in the location-based Q&A services as well, and to LocalUncle’s founder this is also clear. Taking this into account, Philip Estrada Reichen -a Swiss-Mexican engineer and web entrepreneur who graduated at the same university where Einstein got his Physics degree- carefully manages his Q&A site which has the same concept as Quora but focused entirely on location and points of interest.

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Young Chilean Entrepreneurs Change the Way TV Ratings Are Measured [South America's Startups]

Social Meter is a web platform where people share what they are watching on TV in real time via social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. Very much like GetGlue in the United Sates.

With this data, the rating of TV channels is measured. Users can click on the TV shows they are watching and share it with other people on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. In order to motivate people to share what they are watching on TV, Social Meter offers users the chance to win prizes and discounts as a reward for participation. Users can also comment on the TV show they are watching and see what their friends are watching. Social Meter will be available in desktop and mobile.

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Food Extra Will Tell You What You Are Eating Right Now [South America's Startups]

Food Extra is one of the few South American Startups that has managed to set up its offices in the Silicon Valley, the Disney World of Technology. The way to Silicon Valley is quite bumpy for every company, but it even more so for those enterprises from the southern hemisphere. However, Food Extra gambled and earned its spot on Lytton Avenue in the city of Palo Alto and among the “big ones” in the technology field.

“Specialization is the key in a world of abundant and low cost information”, claims Sebastian Nader in an article he wrote last year. Sebastian Nader and Fernando Valdivia are the founders of this Argentinean Startup which is focused on social food traceability. The term traceability refers to the number of procedures used to track a product through all stages of production, processing and distribution.

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Inside South America’s Most Innovative Startups

Latin America has become one of the most productive regions within the digital arena, showing fantastic potential in technological innovation. In this blog post I want to go further and tell you what is happening right now inside of South America’s most innovative Startups. Prepare to be surprised. Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Brazil and more! Check it out and if you know of other really cool startups that we should write about please let us know.

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Courtesy of Rudy De Waele

Nhuma: Creating Useful Mobile Apps for Daily Life and Showcasing Argentina’s Entrepreneurial Promise.

Silvia Mann and Raul Vargas live in Córdoba. Silvia’s brother Sergio and his wife Paula Salinas live in Mendoza. These Argentine cities are 10 hours away from each other and yet these four young entrepreneurs bridged that gap and formed Nhuma Expansion Technologies, a startup that develops mobile applications. Nhuma has won international recognition in just a few months since the launch of their first two applications.

Nhuma’s main goal is to create useful apps for daily life. Nhuma’s creative approach is to focus on the symbiotic relationship between people and their smart phones. They understand that the smart phone has become an integral part of people’s daily life so they create applications that help people handle the daily routine in a more efficient way.

Applications for daily life don’t need to be overly utilitarian or monotone. They can truly be fun and can help you solve a problem in a fun and effective way, as Nhuma has shown. In fact, Silvia’s experience as a mother was the raw material that the team used to create their two applications: Your pregnancy, Week by Week and Crazy Weather.

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South America’s Top Technology Events for 2011. A Technology Renaissance

The recent activity in the technology sector is giving birth to a nascent technology scene with great potential in South America and the US Latino market.

South America is leapfrogging and rapidly becoming a more suitable and popular destination for technology events. The enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit is starting to reach a boiling point across the region, making it a prime spot for top-notch talent recruitment and a desirable market in its own right.

This new awakening is in great part due to the exponential growth and penetration that the Internet has had in the region. The Internet has provided an efficient channel for freedom of thought and expression for the younger generation. This generation is not bounded by the remembrance of oppressive regimes, as it is the case with the prior one.

The young are empowered to pursue their dreams and to break down social and geographical barriers.

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Is the New Social Media Era Taking into Account the “Social” Dimension of the Media? [Hearsay Social]

Last month, Hearsay Social was launched onto the market. It is a SaaS based platform designed for those corporations which need a tool to manage their global online marketing strategies, sometimes threatened by the lack of plans and policies regulating the way in which representatives interact with the public through social networks.

Are they trying to take social aspect of out of social media?

Undoubtedly, it is very profitable, convenient and secure for a company to design only one marketing campaign for an entire country, but will the same campaign be as successful in Massachusetts and California? Will it be received by the public in the same way in Portland and Miami?

Is it possible to think that marketing policies imposed by headquarters in the United States will be equally successful in Peru and France?

Driven by these questions I put myself in the shoes of an end user; someone who sympathizes with a particular company and is used to exchange tweets with its representatives: How would I feel if I learned that headquarters monitors and archives my tweets.

Let’s explore that.

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Looking for the Best CSS Editor for your Startup

This is the question I try to answer here. However, from this central question other questions arise, such as: What feature should I prioritize? Does the quality of each editor depend on its price? Well, the answers really depend on the problem you are trying to tackle and the environment you are working on. Here we tackle the fast paced development environment of a startup and the best CSS editor that might fit your needs.

In my research, I figured out that editors like Stylizer, TopStyle, Notepad + + and PSPad seem to be the most recommended. They all offer similar features, such as support for multiple languages and different browsers, ability to view and save changes in real time (wysiwyg) and syntax highlighting.

After several hours of researching it became evident that there are a handful of CSS editors that everyone writes about. But my questions remained unanswered because although I now found plenty of information about “the top 7 CSS editors” or “the top ten of CSS editors”, I still didn’t have a clue which one would be the best choice for a web developer working within a Startup.

Wondering who could be the “superhero” that can solve my dilemma I remembered my faithful followers on Twitter. I asked them and, as always, they were there for me once more.

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