2010 August | Gadgets & Technology

Too Many E-mails? Try Priority Inbox for Gmail

Too Much Mail 300x258 Too Many E mails? Try Priority Inbox for Gmail Between e-mails from friends, colleagues, publicists and automated mailing lists, my Gmail inbox is never empty. Sifting through the hundreds of product pitches, updates from friends and sale reminders that flood my inbox on a daily basis can be overwhelming. But managing the e-mail overload is a bit easier now, thanks to Google’s Priority Inbox, a new beta feature for Gmail.

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else.”

priority inbox quick guide Too Many E mails? Try Priority Inbox for Gmail

Using information such as keywords and the people you e-mail most frequently, Google’s new feature prioritizes e-mails by marking important messages and placing them at the top. You can teach it to better categorize e-mails by marking incoming messages as important or unimportant.

Instead of the number of all unread e-mails, Priority Inbox displays the number of those marked as a priority, which will appear as “Important and unread.” Priority Inbox can also be set to automatically mark messages from specific senders (bosses, friends, spouses, etc.) as important.

E-mails that you’ve starred will have their own section while the rest of your unarchived inbox will appear as “Everything else.”

Priority Inbox will be rolling out over the next week or so. Find the new feature in the top right corner of your Gmail account or in the tab in Gmail settings. Check out this video to learn more!

New Foursquare Badge Rewards STD Checkups

FourSquare Badges New Foursquare Badge Rewards STD Checkups You can “check in” to coffee houses, restaurants and bars, but what about STD testing clinics?

Letting friends and strangers know that you’ve just “checked in” at a health clinic for an STD test may seem embarrassing, but MTV and Foursquare are teaming up to help erase that stigma and encourage users to take control of their sex lives. As part of the “GYT: Get Yourself Tested” campaign, a special Foursquare merit badge will be awarded to all those who get STD checkups.

MORE on GLOSS: How To Use Foursquare

To get the badge, follow MTV on Foursquare. Once you’ve gotten your test, check in and shout “GYT” to your followers. You’ll also be entered to win a trip for two to New York City, as well as backstage passes to MTV’s “10 on Top.”

Foursquare users can already earn virtual badges for a range of check-in accomplishments, including going home with a member of the opposite sex more than three times a week or checking in to four or more bars in a single night.

The GYT campaign launched in 2009 as part of a partnership between MTV and the Kaiser Family Foundation called “It’s Your (Sex) Life,” that encourage young people to get tested at Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide.

MTV and Foursquare recently announced that they’d be partnering up for the VMAs. The music network is one of the most popular brands on the geo-location service.

Will you be checking in to get this new badge?

via Mashable

Do This Now: Interactive Arcade Fire and Google Experiment

Do This Now: Interactive Arcade Fire and Google Experiment Take a thoroughly modern trip down memory lane with Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown,” an unbelievable new interactive video created in conjunction with Google.

Set to the band’s single “We Used to Wait,” this Chrome “experiment” uses Google Maps and HTML5 to personalize the video with brilliant pop-up images of your childhood home. You’ll also be prompted to write a letter to your younger self that will be incorporated into the video for an even more powerful (and interactive) experience.

The video works on other browsers but is best displayed on Google Chrome. Visit thewildernessdowntown.com (now!) to get started.

Thanks to one my faves, Whit at Pop Candy, for the tip!

Facebook Places Boosts Foursquare to 3 Million Users

Location-based social network Foursquare saw its three millionth member signup over the weekend, less than two months after surpassing the two million mark in July, TechCrunch reports. Despite predictions that it would be destroyed by Facebook’s newly launched location sharing feature “Places“, Foursquare has actually enjoyed a boost in popularity. In fact, the four days following the Places announcement were the biggest sign-up days in Foursquare’s history, with an average of 18,000 users every day.

Deemed by many as a “Foursquare killer,” the social media behemoth has helped popularize the concept of location-sharing, thanks to Facebook’s massive 500 million members and the press attention that Places has attracted. A platform for other location-based services, Places allows competitors to integrate with Facebook — Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah are some of the other services that users can import into Places.

MORE on GLOSS: How To Use Facebook Places and Foursquare

But will users continue to check-in?

Launched in March 2009, Foursquare took a little more than a year to reach the one million mark but as PC World points out, Twitter two years to reach two million users. Four years later, there were 100 million registered Tweeters.

Have you used Facebook Places or Foursquare? Do you check-in regularly?

Book And Pay For Cab Rides From Your Phone With ‘Taxi Magic’

taxi magic find cab 300x216 Book And Pay For Cab Rides From Your Phone With Taxi Magic Beauty secrets, “Sex and the City” and the appeal of Del Taco weren’t the only topics of conversation during dinner Saturday night with GLOSS’ Lolita Carrico and chicGLOSS editor Aly Walansky. Lolita, the very plugged-in Founder and CEO, also tipped us off to “Taxi Magic,” a must-have app that lets you book a taxi, track its status, and charge the ride to your credit card from your phone.

Long waits and drivers who claim they don’t accept credit card payments can make using a taxi service a frustrating experience. But with the free Taxi Magic app available on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm devices, ‘hailing’ a cab is ridiculously convenient and done with just the push of a button.

Using GPS to determine your general location, Taxi Magic pulls up a list of taxi companies in the area for you to choose from. Once you enter the pick-up address, your request is sent to directly to the company’s routing system, booking a taxi without the need to speak to an operator or wait on hold. Once your ride is dispatched, you’ll receive a message with the driver’s name and how far away he or she is. A map tracks the taxi en route, alerting you when its nearby as well as upon its arrival. Taxi Magic also allows mobile payment using stored credit card info so you never have to pull out cash or actual plastic, and emails the receipt for added convenience.

Non-smartphone users can also book a taxi on the Taxi Magic website or by texting TMAGIC (862442) with the pick-up address (ex: “1658 W. Barry 60657″ or “Bowling Alley Cupertino CA”).

Taxi Magic’s on-demand service is currently available in 45 cities nationwide, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, with plans to expand soon. In New York, local cabs that do not accept electronic reservations due to regulations so Taxi Magic offers competitively priced private car companies as alternatives. RideChange, the company behind the app, also hopes to add more frequent GPS updates for more accurate tracking and features like a user rating system for drivers. Even if the on-demand service isn’t yet available in their city, riders can still use Taxi Magic to find the names and numbers of local cab companies, which can be especially useful for out-of-towners.

The Taxi Magic application is free and available to download on taximagic.com.

Twitter To Play An Important Role In Tonight’s Emmy Show

Like emotional acceptance speeches, red carpet fashion, and the obligatory celebrity fawning, Twitter will also be playing an integral role in tonight’s live Emmy Awards broadcast.

Emmys host Jimmy Fallon is enlisting the help of Twitter users to write introductions for the show’s 38 presenters that include Tina Fey, Betty White, Ricky Gervais, Neil Patrick Harris and “True Blood” newlyweds, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer.

MORE on GLOSS: How to Make an Emmy-Approved “Mad Men” Martini

Viewers can tweet their ideas to Fallon and his team of writers for consideration by logging on to the “I’m On The Emmys” website. The best Tweets will be incorporated into Fallon’s on-air material and read as celebrity presenters take the stage to hand out television’s highest honors.

As the “Late Night” host explained to Digital Spy:

We thought it was a cool idea because this technology hasn’t existed before and now Twitter is out there. What we are basically doing is, online there’s a list of presenters to possibly write the intro for. For example, if it’s Jon Hamm, you could be sitting in your apartment and watching the Emmys and say, ‘My grandmother wants to leave my grandfather for Jon Hamm’. Jon Hamm himself could even tweet in and say, ‘This man is bigger than Jesus’. That could be the one we choose and our intro.”

Adding to the full Emmy viewer experience, video of exclusive backstage content like extended acceptance speeches and candid celebrity moments will stream live on sites like NBC.com, AccessHollywood.com, Ustream.com and Emmys.com.

Our own chicGLOSS fashion and beauty maven, Aly Walansky will also be tweeting live as the red carpet reporter for the Emmys’ official dessert sponsor, Duncan Hines. Follow her at @alywalansky to get the VIP scoop from the celebrity-studded event as well as the Suave Emmy afterparty in Beverly Hills.

MORE on GLOSS: Suave Styles Nominee Sofia Vergara for the Emmys

The 62nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards will be broadcast live on NBC from LA’s Nokia Theatre tonight starting at 8pm ET.

via Reuters

How Web Dependent Are We? Internet Addiction By The Numbers

addict How Web Dependent Are We? Internet Addiction By The Numbers Last year, Ben Alexander, a 19-year old college student obsessed with the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, made headlines as the first client to check into reSTART, the country’s first Internet rehab, a residential treatment center for individuals trying to ditch their digital dependency.

While some may dismiss the idea of “Internet Addiction Disorder,” the fact that an Internet rehab like reSTART even exists says a lot. A study of 200 students at the University of Maryland from earlier this year reveals a more serious psychological and behavioral problem — during a 24-hour break from all things media, students felt the symptoms of withdrawal. They reported feeling “jittery,” “miserable,” “anxious,” “crazy,” and “lonely” among other things, without cell phones, Facebook, laptops and iPods.

Loosely defined as an online-related compulsive behavior that interferes with normal living and causes severe stress to one’s relationships, IAD is arguably less destructive than a balloon of heroin. But according to CNN, some therapists have reported a growing number of Internet users who they say, blur the line between social networking and social disfunction. As the Web and advanced technology continue to play bigger roles in our everyday lives, cyber-bingeing is easier and more accessible than ever before.

While IAD has been the subject of new research, its status as an official medical diagnosis is still widely debated. Spending 4 or more hours a day online is considered to be excessive – after a full-day in the office, personal emails, Facebook updates, online shopping, etc., most of us would probably meet the criteria for IAD. However, many argue that addictions to the Web and online video games do indeed exist (imagine how you’d react to a 24-hour media fast) and have even been linked to clinical depression in younger children.

More research has to be done before Internet Addiction Disorder can be considered as an addition to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but here are a few interesting numbers to chew on in the meantime.

Internet Addiction by the Numbers

12,000,000 to 20,000,000: The estimated number of Americans who have at least a mild Internet addiction, according to a Harvard study that concluded that five to ten percent of people online are described as suffering from overuse of the Internet or being “Web dependent.”

13,800,000: The estimated number of Americans who have a drinking problem.

39%: The number of adults who are self-described “Facebook addicts,” according to a recent poll by Oxygen Media.

57%: The number of women in the study, ages 18 to 34, who say they talk to people online more than they have face-to-face conversations. And 42% think it’s okay to post photos of themselves intoxicated on Facebook.

5: The number of days that self-admitted Internet addict Mark Malkoff will spend locked in a New York bathroom in an attempt to ditch his online dependency.

2.5: The number of how many times more likely that teens who use the Internet will develop depression than teens who are not addicted to the Internet.

2,000,000: The number of Internet addicts in South Korea, according to the Government. (1 in 10 online users are addicts.)

23: The number of hours a week that the average South Korean high school student spends playing Internet games.

15: The number of hours a week that the average American spends on the Internet.

10: The number of hours a night that South Korean couple Kim Jae-beom and Kim Yun-jeong spent in Internet cafes. They were later charged with negligent homicide when their 3-month daughter died of starvation after she was left alone during an overnight gaming session.

11: The number of Internet addicted participants in a recent South Korean study that tested the effects of the antidepressant Bupropion on video game addictions, conducted by Han, Hwang and Renshaw from the Department of Psychiatry at Chung Ang University, College of Medicine.

2: The number of study participants who were divorced because of their StarCraft video game and Internet addiction.

23.6: The percentage of decrease in Internet cravings that the group reportedly felt after six weeks on Bupropion.

20,000: The estimated number of hours that Donald Smallwood spent playing the game “Lineage II” over a 5-year period. Averaging around 9 hours a day of gameplay, Smallwood says he became “psychologically dependent and addicted” and is suing the makers for not warning him of the dangers.

$14,500: The cost of a 45-day Internet addiction recovery program at ReSTART in Redmond, WA (near Microsoft headquarters), which deals with the “excessive use” of video game use.

$9: The monthly cost of Saavi Accountability, accountability software and “parental awareness program that helps people address online addictions from the inside out.”

333: The number of fans on the “Internet Addicts” Facebook page, as of Thursday morning.

We want to know: What do you think about Internet Addiction?

Video Game is Required ‘Reading’ For New College Course

4963238 300x225 Video Game is Required Reading For New College Course Video games as college course required “reading”? In addition to Aristotle’s “Politics,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” and the “Tao Te Ching,” freshman attending Wabash College will also be required to play “Portal” a first-person game where players solve a series of puzzles using a device that creates teleportation portals, as part of a new course that begins in the spring. Students enrolled at the small liberal arts men’s college in Crawfordsville, Ind., will have to both attend and pass the new course in order to graduate.

Developed in part by Michael Abbott, a Wabash teacher and the the designer of “Portal,” the all-college Humanities course, “Enduring Questions” is “devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives,” and will “confront what it means to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our world.” The school will start using “Portal” in a smaller subsections of the course as they work out some of the technological hurdles before expanding to the full course.

Abbott, who also writes The Brainy Game Blog, thought that a game would be the perfect way to challenge students to think about the topics and issues discussed in the “Enduring Questions” course. After an initial pitch, Abbott’s colleagues were game to give “Portal” a try, and even though they were not gamers themselves, they did like it, he reports. “We enjoyed the first meaningful discussion about a video game I’ve ever had with a group of colleagues across disciplines.”

Described as a “space-and-mind-bending game of teleportation and deception,” “Portal” will probably make a few students wish for a Cliff Notes edition. Fingers-crossed for “Intro to Mario Kart”?

via MSN

Pictured: A screenshot from “Portal”