Julie’s “Guide to Geek Gifts 2009″: DOTS Gloves
The following post is part of Julie’s “Guide to Geek Gifts 2009“, during which she highlights 20 gifts that she’s deemed geek-worthy. Check back to see what other gadgets and tech goodies will make her list. And be sure to contact Julie or leave a comment below if you have a suggestion of your own!
Why they’re geek-worthy: By now every geek – and beyond – has an iPhone or similar smartphone. And although many may have forgotten since we haven’t yet pulled out the gloves this season, it’s impossible to use a touch screen while gloved. DOTS Gloves have the perfect solution – the fingers of the gloves have little balls of threads (I think that’s how it works, at least) that enable you to reclaim use of your phone during winter months. AND they keep you warm, to boot. The D105 (picture below on the left) are already sold out, giving an indication just how geektastic of a gift this is, but you can can snag the D110 (pictured below on the right) for $20, and the even more solid D200 for $25.
If I have my history correct, DOTS Gloves were the first to create these types of gloves, making me like them even more, but since the D105 is sold out and the D110 is only available in Medium, I’d like to point you to a variety of other brands available on Amazon.
An Interview on New Media (Part Two)
I was recently interviewed by Alexa Lee of The Daily Universe, Brigham Young University’s student newspaper, for an article she was writing about twentysomethings who are successful at using new media as business ventures. I have provided a sneak peak of the article below.
(Please note: This is the second in a three part series – Read part one and come back next week to read two more questions that I was asked along with my answers.)
What do consumers want from new media?
New media has without a doubt shifted the consumer to corporation relationship. Before the emergence and, now, the continuing widespread adoption of new media, consumers were not empowered to speak about their experiences with different companies and their respective brands. Now, everyone is a journalist, a food critic, a photographer… Consumers want to be, as a whole, more active in their relationships with brands. If they don’t like something, they now expect that the company will listen to their complaint and do something about it.
A recent example of this was AT&T’s pricing structure when the new iPhone 3GS was released. AT&T customers thought the proposed prices were unfair and protested – through Twitter and blog posts. In the end, AT&T relented and modified its structure. That sort of interaction would not have been possible in the pre-new media era. (An example of the Twitter petition I referenced can be found here: http://twitition.com/f96aq.)
How is today’s communications environment different from even a year ago?
A year ago, the general public was becoming increasingly more aware that these new online tools existed, but I think the overall consensus was that it was just for the “youngsters”. There are a number of reasons why new media has exploded recently, but I think that the role of President Obama’s campaign in this revolution cannot be underestimated. The campaign did a great job of leveraging these new tools to create a community of active and vocal supporters. The resulting tangible, quantifiable success forced those working in marketing and PR roles to stop and consider integrating new media into their overall strategy.
Before, an online communications strategy most likely included creating content for a website and sending out periodic e-mails to an organization’s customers or constituents. It was very much just a “push strategy”, the thinking being, “we’re putting out the information we want and we think is valuable”. Now, it’s much more of a two-way street. The organizations that are seeing results from new media are those that are actively engaging their supporters – and even their critics.
Hidden Secrets of the iPhone Revealed
**The following is a guest post by David, a good friend and former colleague, who loves finding hidden features of the technology he uses. Below, he reveals a few iPhone features you may have missed. (The original post can be found here.)**
Okay, that’s a bit too Penn & Telller perhaps, but there are some fun little nuggets somewhat buried in the iPhone that I’ve slowly been discovering. I feel like in the past month especially I’ve dug up some good stuff. I’ll start off with the stuff that most folks know. If you didn’t, great. If you did, I never said I was the great Houdini 
Special Characters
We all know that you can find some add’l characters by tapping the 123 then the #+= button on the keyboard. This provides us with some European currency characters, as well as the important hash tag for twitter. But what about the eñe in spanish? Or the upside down exclamation point for spanish? If you simply tap and hold the “n” on the keyboard, the ñ will appear. Same with the accented letter “e” or the exclamation point. If you play around, you’ll find other fun hidden characters lurking above the letters (ooh, m-dash!).
Keyboard Settings: Periods & Caps Lock
I’ll admit it. I never really got into the whole text speak. Sure I LOL and might wonder WTF occasionally. I am also a fan of FML – makes me laugh when I see it. But I don’t write “Wr U @? C U L8r.” With full keyboards, the inner English Major in me just can’t stomach it. I write things out. I tend to still use proper sentence structure. Call me fusty, but I can’t help it.
So I like that if I double-space after a word, I get a period. That makes it nice and easy. And while I’m not a big YELLER when it comes to texting, there are times when you want to write a bit in Caps. And hitting the shift key each time is tedious. There are settings for both these features.
Go to Settings>General>Keyboard. Toggle “Enable Caps Lock” and “‘.’ Shortcut” to On. Now when you double-space after a word, the period pops in. And if you quickly double-tap the shift key, it’ll turn blue and Caps Lock is on. Pretty nifty.
Contacts View
I mentioned I’m a little old-fashioned. I can also be a little OCD too. I have set up my iPhone Contacts to sync with my Google Contacts. I like having a back-up and over-air syncing is still pretty cool to me. But the other day I realized I had 6 more contacts in my iPhone than I did in my Google Contacts. Quite frankly, I’m still confused how this happened. But to make matters worse, Google Contacts are sorted by first name. My iPhone Contacts were sorted by last name. Trying to eyeball over 400 contacts is tough enough, but when the lists aren’t apples to apples, it’s even harder. Enter Settings. Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendar. If you scroll to the Contacts section (near the bottom), you’ll see that you can change both the Sort Order and Display Order. While I prefer to sort by last name, it’s nice to be able to toggle this when comparing to Google. I’m sure there are other benefits to this toggle as well.
Screenshot
I’d seen plenty of people showing their Weather app image on Facebook to indicate a crappy/fantastic week of weather ahead. I just presumed they had purchased some app that enabled this. Nope. The iPhone has a built-in screenshot feature. Which I think is pretty cool. When you have what you want on your screen, simply push the top button and the bottom home button on your iPhone quickly at the same time. The screen will quickly fade and come back. That image is now saved in your Photos. Pretty nifty. It is great when you happen to be in 1st place in foursquare or something and you might want to share that with your friends
I heard at&t will finally be supporting the updated MMS features on September 25th. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll be happy if I never see the following screen againg – scribbling down those ridiculous message ids and passwords – only to open a picture of someone’s dog.
Any hidden secrets that you’d like to share?
