Image Credit: oysterbooks.com
Kinsa wants to change how we glean information about our health, starting with the world’s most common medical device.
Quotable: “There’s a bigger picture: Like the Scanadu Scout, Kinsa is part of a larger tapestry of data companies, fitness wearables, and health gadgets that want to empower us to start owning our own data. Sensors give us on-demand insights into our health, whereas a doctor’s office means tests and a wait time for a phone call.”
Read: This Tech-Enabled Thermometer Tracks More Than Just A Fever | Co.Design | business + design.
There are five mega trends impacting the IT departments of every company: Mobile, Social, Cloud, Apps and Big Data. In this presentation, Vala Afshar reveals ten startling stats for each mega trend.
Learning a new language is difficult, which is why there’s a huge market for tools and apps to help you do it. Some of them are really helpful and help you get up to speed quickly, others are a money sink. This week we’re looking at five of the best, based on your nominations.
Discussed:
New French Law Bars Online Booksellers to Offer Discounts With Free Shipping | GoodReader
The French parliament has passed a law that makes it illegal for online stores to deliver books for free while also offering a 5 percent discount on the price of the book. The move is being seen as a means of protecting the interests of independent booksellers as much as it is to limit Amazon’s monopoly in the segment. As Christian Kert, the conservative MP who tabled the bill puts it, the bill is aimed at ensuring “that the price of a book sold online is higher than one sold by an independent bookshop.” The government stated they look forward to “restricting predatory behaviour” with the new bill.
11 Lessons That ‘Jane Eyre’ Can Teach Every 21st Century Woman About How To Live Well | HuffPost Books
The novel was very shocking for its time. One reviewer said that the book “might be written by a woman but not by a lady.” People were scandalized that Eyre returned to Rochester. However, the first edition still sold out in six weeks. Every time I encounter a woman who hasn’t read this book, I advise reading it immediately. Women can learn so much from this great Victorian heroine. [T]here’s much to be learned from the way she chooses to live.
10 Alpha Males In Literature | Jill Shalvis (romance author) | HuffPost Books
What qualifies me to make such a list? Because I write alphas, I read alphas, heck I even married an alpha (Hi, Alpha Man!). I believe an alpha has to be lovable as well as strong.
Australian textbook delivery, care of drones | CNET
A textbook rental start-up will deliver its packages to Sydney customers by drone starting next spring. From ordering to delivery, the entire process could take as little as two minutes.
Reading Made Awesome: The Features of Ebook Apps You Should Be Using | LifeHacker
Reading books on tablets or phones is awesome. There, I said it and I’m not taking it back. While the biggest advantage of reading on a mobile device is convenience and a huge portable library, there are a ton of features that make the experience awesome.
11 Young Adult Books Sure to Make You Cry | Mashable
Book-lovers and high schoolers are celebrating Teen Read Week, but even if you’re way past adolescence, you can enjoy a tear-jerking YA novel at any age. Young adult literature sometimes receives a bad rap as a depressing genre, but a hallmark of YA books is actually a hopeful ending. That doesn’t mean some of the more emotional titles won’t leave you in a puddle of your own tears.
A little more than a month after launching an iPhone app in invitation-only beta, Oyster is making its e-book subscription service available to all users and expanding to iPad.
Oyster charges $9.95 a month for access to more than 100,000 books from big and small publishers, but it now offers users one free month with the hope of getting more people to try the app experience. The startup declined to provide data on the number of users or books read during the beta period, but noted that 1 million pages were read in the first 10 days the app was available and another million pages were read in the following six days.
Read: Oyster Brings ‘Netflix for E-Books’ App to iPad, Opens to Public | Mashable.
You may also like: Test Driving Oyster, a “Netflix for Ebooks” | The Digital Shift
Read-it-later apps have enjoyed a huge jump in popularity as of late, and for good reason — they allow us to prioritize our time, and choose when and where we want to catch up on the latest Miley Cyrus news. That way, we can at least have a semblance of control over some aspect of our lives.
Check out some of the most popular read-it-later apps. Each has its own downloadable bookmarklet for web browsing, and follows the dual-purpose trend of not only being a read-it-later app, but a read-it-later-in-a-prettier-way app.
Apps reviewed:
Going to add this one to my AppShopper wish list in the hope of a future price reduction! Free meta search alternatives include metacrawler/dogpile.
Phlo is an app for iPhone, iPad ($2.99), and Mac ($3.99) that allows you to conduct a single search and get results instantly from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Pinterest, Amazon, eBay, and more.
The app syncs across devices, saving your search history, and provides autocomplete suggestions from both Google and Bing. It’s available as a browser plug-in or in the App store.
Read: This Search Engine Lets You Search 30 Sites At Once | Fast Company | business + innovation.
Paper is an amazing iPad app–and one of our Innovation By Design nominees–because its team at FiftyThree cracked the code of making creation a simple, beautiful experience on tablets. There’s just one problem: Paper isn’t actually paper; it’s a screen.
Today, FiftyThree and Moleskine are revealing a solution called Book. For $40, you will be able to turn your Paper sketches into a custom Moleskine print. The 15-page, accordion-style, handmade “Book” marks the first time that the iconic Moleskine has ever allowed cover customization. It’s also a potential peek into the future strategy of FiftyThree, a company that hasn’t been shy about their plan to expand their purview into a whole suite of creative productivity apps.
Read: Design And Print Your Own Moleskines With Paper’s New “Book” | Co.Design | business + design.
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