Simon Says

Simon Says: Don't Live Through Your Phone

Do you know you're going to die one day? I remind myself of this every morning. Not for a depressed, self loathing, teenage angst kinda way. It's to push myself to get things done while I can.

My new years resolution was to stop using my phone while walking. My main two reasons for this are -

1) I hate the inconsiderate people (I previously included myself in this group) who slow down or even stop walking while on their phone in front of me. Nothing is that important you have to be staring at your phone that intensely, if it was, you wouldn't have forgotten about it or left it to last minute.

You might say “but I needed to check Google maps for directions”, but you could have moved to one side and not walked into oncoming people, or slowed down the people behind.

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Simon Says: Hashtag Pages, the (much needed) love child of Facebook & Google News

I’ve not been this excited in ages. After a while you see a lot of the same stuff getting repeated in social media. Rarely do you see a useful innovative product that people would actually use that benefits both brands and consumers.

Hashtag Pages does exactly what it says on the tin. They are a unique page designed to pull together all the media and interesting commentary around a certain hashtag. The first people to take advantage of this is #NASCAR.

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Simon Says: QR codes are rubbish, use Google Goggles

Google

You love Google.

It's one of those universal tools everyone has a soft spot for. I secretly imagine people who work at Yahoo use it when their boss isn't watching. Who couldn't adore a company who has an unofficial slogan "Don't be evil."

In April 2010 the search giant purchased "PlinkArt." PlinkArt was originally designed to identify works of art once you took a photo of it. The app was one of three winners of the Education/Reference category of the Google ADC2 (Android Developer Challenge 2). Google then purchased them and added the functionality to what we now know as "Google Goggles" - a visual search engine.

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