David Lidsky's Blog, page 4889

Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life

When you're active on the Web, keeping up with all your online accounts can feel like a full-time job. You want your high school friends to find you on Facebook, your co-workers to follow you on Twitter, and business associates to find you on LinkedIn. But there are only so many hours in the day, and too many Web sites to check in and update. The good news is that you don't have to hire a personal assistant to update all your profiles. With the right strategy, you can manage multiple...

Stanley and Fiona Druckenmiller: The Most Charitable People in the U.S.?

Slate recently released its annual list of the largest American charitable contributions, and the results may surprise you. Familiar faces abound, with Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros all taking top spots. But Stanley and Fiona Druckenmiller? John M. Templeton? Who are these people and why are they giving so much money?

Stanley Druckenmiller, the CEO of Duquesne Capital, has opted to give $705 million to the Druckenmiller Foundation, which supports medical...

Why Brands Should Strive for Imperfection

We've seen and heard this commercial a thousand times, the one with the flawless model posing in an ad for facial-blemish cream... an extremely powerful cleaner that removes every trace of dirt in one effortless wipe... the picture-perfect baby modeling the 100% waterproof diaper. In these scenarios, there's not even a hint of a single red spot, a stubborn stain, or a bedraggled mother. This is the story of the past 50 years of commercials, and they all have one thing in common: perfect...

Loopt's Location-based Ads Hit the iPhone, 'Minority Report' Here We Come

Loopt, the location-based sharing service, has taken the logical next step for its system: Loopt on the iPhone now includes location-based advertising. We've been expecting this, but is it a sign the floodgates of location-ads are open?

Loopt is in roughly the same game as Yelp, Foursquare, and a number of other players in location-based social networking. It's also a little like Google Latitude, in that users can see in more-or-less real time where their friends are located (and what...

World's Tallest Fail! The Burj Khalifa Is Temporarily Closed

A little over a month after the half-mile high tower opened in Dubai (and exactly a month since a pair went base-jumping from the top) the Burj Khalifa is closed for business--at least temporarily. The owners of the world's tallest structure, Emaar Properties, released a statement claiming "unexpected high
traffic" as well as "electrical problems" prompted the closure. Construction workers at the base, however, were unaware of any issues, and it was unsure whether elevators were effected.

...

New Zhu Zhu Pets, Now With Celebrity Kid Names, to Take Manhattan Next Week

You have probably been wondering what the company that brought the world Zhu Zhu Pets last holiday season has planned for next week's massive toy fair in New York City. Well wonder no more!

That company, Cepia Inc, has moved some $70 million worth of furry product, capitalizing on the parental desire to give kids what they want-- specifically, a pet--so long as there is no mess and no stink. Now they are adding a slight edge to the cute crowd already owned by about 7 million American...

Safer Suds: U.K.'s Design Bridge Invents a More Bar Fight-Friendly Pint Glass

The British ad agency has released two new versions of the classic pint, both designed to make rowdy bars safer and picky drinkers happy.

With some 87,000 pint glass attacks every year, the U.K. bar scene is rough enough to make a cowboy shake in his boots--this ain't the wild west, and they don't use sugar glass. The NHS estimates it spends £2.7 million on bar-fight injuries yearly.

Until recently, there have really only two choices for a safer glass: plastic, which everyone hates, and...

TV Spots Not That Effective, Say Advertisers Who Just Spent $150-Plus Million on Super Bowl TV Spots

Looks like we're not the only ones ranting about lackluster Super Bowl ads. According to a new study from Forrester and the Association of National Advertisers, the majority of TV ad buyers (62 percent) say they think their 30-second spots are "not as effective" as they were two years ago.

This isn't a huge shock, given that dwindling ad revenues were the driving force behind last month's Fox v. Time Warner Cable brouhaha, as well as Cablevision's squabble with Food Network and HGTV...

The Treehugger's Ivory Tower Gets Plantinum LEED

Yale's high-performance Kroon Hall also pulls off the near-impossible feat of looking at home on a campus with legendary Gothic architecture.

Kroon Hall, the recently completed home of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has just been awarded a Platinum LEED--the highest designation offered by the U.S. Green Building Council. That's a great-big green feather in the school's cap: While LEED has grown to encompass thousands of buildings, Platinum is still quite rare in...

Will Google's Translator Phone Lead Us to Babylon or Babble On?

Google's revealed it's working on extensions to its smartphone voice-control powers, debuted in the Nexus One, that'll automatically translate between languages. It's the stuff of pure utopian science fiction. But is it a good idea?

Google's plans are to enhance the remote server-processed speech recognition systems in the Nexus One to include automatic, fast and accurate machine translation between languages, with a synthetic voice output.

Sci-fi fans will of course immediately associate...