How To Filter Your Gmail Like a Pro




Your Gmail inbox is taking over your life. At least, that's probably how it feels sometimes. Waking up to an inbox filled with a few dozen unread messages makes you want to close the browser in defeat.

But don't worry, we're here to help. Filters are some of the most powerful Gmail tools, serving to keep less important email out of your face, and allowing the cream to rise to the top.

To access these tools, look for the gear icon in the top-right corner of your Gmail. In that dropdown, click "Settings," then the "Filters" link at the top of the next page. This page shows you any existing filters, then invites you to "Create a New Filter."

While some of the filters are very straight…
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More About: email, features, gmail, Google, How-To, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/22/gmail-filters/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_mediu...

Ask Slashdot: Instead of a Laptop, a Tiny Computer and Projector?

rover42 writes "I travel a lot, usually on a tight budget and often on airlines with tight luggage weight restrictions and high fees for going over, so traveling light is very important to me. So is connecting to the net when traveling, which creates a conflict. I do not trust machines in Internet cafes and my laptop adds significant weight & bulk to my luggage. I could buy a small netbook or a MacBook Air, but is there another choice? There are quite a few tiny computers available, Raspberry Pi and the like. Alone, they don't solve my problem because you need a screen and that is at least as heavy as a laptop. However, there are also quite a few tiny projectors. Would a tiny computer plus a tiny projector do the trick? Which ones? All I need for software is some open source Unix (any *BSD or Linux distro should be fine, or even Minix), a browser and an editor. I don't need large storage or a fast CPU. Has anyone done something like this? Does anyone have a recommendation for either the computer or the projector?"

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from Slashdot http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/06/17/1821258/ask-slashdot-instead-of-a-lapt...

LinkedIn-powered Hookflash iPad app wants to replace your business phone

The traditional business phone line may be dying a slow death but Canadian start-up Hookflash is looking to speed up its demise. The Calgary-based company is launching an iPad app  by the same name Thursday that integrates LinkedIn’s directory, giving business users a free over-the-top alternative for voice, HD video and messaging. It’s the first communications app to build upon LinkedIn’s social graph and demonstrates some of the latent potential in the network of 160 million people.

Hookflash users will sign-in with a LinkedIn account and will be able to communicate with other LinkedIn users in their contact list, which is populated from their LinkedIn directory. Users will be able to see the profile of who they’re talking to and will see their latest updates from their activity feed, so there’s helpful context for each call. If a recipient is not available to receive a call or message, they will get a push notification that takes them into the app.

The iPad app will be joined soon by an iPhone app and then a version for Android later this year. The service will also get calendaring, scheduling and other productivity tools as it evolves. Multi-party video calling is also on tap later this year, though the service is not meant to take on WebEx and other conferencing systems.

Co-founder Erik Lagerway told me that the goal is to become a next generation business phone, replacing traditional handsets from Cisco or Polycom. That should put Hookflash in competition with Skype and other enterprise VoIP services. He said the integration of LinkedIn is a smart way to utilize the network and appeal to business users, who increasingly turn to LinkedIn as their tool for staying in touch with business associates.

“Most of the people I communicate with from a business perspective are all on LinkedIn; it’s my business Rolodex,” said Lagerway. “We want to make sure we use that directory in a way that’s absolutely seamless.”

IT managers might not embrace Hookflash out of the gate, admits Lagerway, but he said that as bring-your-own-device policies becomes the standard, it opens up opportunities for services like Hookflash in corporate settings. He said business users also long for more communications choices, which are not as plentiful as consumer services.

Hookflash was supposed to hit the market earlier this spring, but got held up as the company completed the P2P technology underlying the app. Hookflash has developed its own P2P protocol called Open Peer that will enable additional services, such as file sharing. Hookflash is opening up the spec to other developers who will be able to build services off the same technology. Open Peer, for example, could be dropped into customer relationship management or other enterprise applications, enabling simple communications and other uses.

Hookflash, which debuted at the DEMO conference last fall, has raised a little more than $2 million to date and is close to finishing up a $3 million round. The company is hoping to make money through a freemium model, with added premium features layered over the free service in the future. There’s also an opportunity to license its P2P technology to carriers and other communications companies, said Lagerway.

I think Hookflash is an intriguing service, making LinkedIn potentially more powerful for business users. My LinkedIn directory is often an afterthought, but it’s still a big network of people that I continue to add to.  I might be tempted to utilize it more now with Hookflash. Airtime showed how a consumer video application can ride atop Facebook’s graph. But I think Hookflash could have more of an impact because there aren’t other communications services that are building on top of LinkedIn. I don’t think it’s ready to kill the traditional business phone overnight, but this could really be helpful for certain kinds of use cases in which business colleagues want to reach out to each other quickly and casually.

I think it would make sense for LinkedIn to eventually try to incorporate Hookflash into its own mobile apps and website, making it even more of a daily destination and utility for users. An acquisition by LinkedIn might be a logical next step if the technology proves durable. That might be the future for Hookflash though Lagerway said the company is looking at integrating with other social networks in the future.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/06/21/linkedin-powered-hookflash-ipad-app-wants-to-rep...

The State of VC in Boston: A Q&A with C.A. Webb

Pictured: Pure Awesomeness

This Saturday, General Assembly is holding an all-day event on how to raise capital, featuring a number of interesting panels. One of those is a panel on the future of venture capital that will be moderated by C.A. Webb, executive director of the New England Venture Capital Association.

Webb is as looped into Boston’s venture community as one can get, and so we asked her to give us a preview of her thoughts on the venture industry, as well as to explain the role of the NEVCA and how she views the Boston ecosystem. If you want to hear more, or what panelists Dustin Dolginow of Atlas, Matthew Witheiler of Flybridge, David Cappillo of Goodwin Procter and Wan Li Zhu of Fairhaven Capital have to say, you can register for the event here.

With the release of the Kauffman Report a while back, rumors of the demise or at least dire state of the VC industry are back in fashion. Do you buy it?

Every industry has its inflection points and venture capital is experiencing a big one right now. Venture is too meaningful a source of capital and driver of scalable innovation for it to die. Talk to entrepreneurs who started their careers in Europe or South America where this kind of capital is nearly impossible to access and you quickly understand what a powerful and positive force venture capital can be. So, no, I don’t buy the demise of venture capital.

Venture Capital is, was, and always will be a cyclical business. The truth is there are a finite number of businesses well suited to the venture financing model, which as you know is all about funding a bunch of businesses with the potential to deliver an outsized return, and sticking around until one of them does. In good times investors see those returns, capital in excess of that which can be invested well flows in, valuations expand, and returns drop. Then capital flows out, leaving the strongest firms in a stronger position. Startup valuations decline in the face of limited capital, returns improve, etc. There’s no doubt we’re in a bit of a downturn after a big capital inflow, but the system works over the long run, and the businesses that depend on that system are essential to the local, national, and even global economy.

Boston as a startup hub and Boston VC in particular can get a bad rap as being stodgy, old school and not collaborative enough. How has your experience been working with the city’s VC’s? Is there collaboration? Are things changing? Where the stereotypes never true?

Since starting this role in January, more than a few people have said something along the lines of, “You must have your hands full dealing with so many big egos.” I have to tell you, I think I have the best job in Boston. The VCs I work with are enormously talented, intelligent and thoughtful. I think we have fantastic talent in our VC community and I also think there’s a lot of room for the community to come together and have a stronger presence here.

I’ve been involved with companies that have raised money from Boston VCs and benefited tremendously from those relationships. I think there’s a huge home court advantage to investing locally and getting day-to-day, on-the-ground insight from both the investor and entrepreneur perspective. We have many local firms (Atlas, Battery, Bessemer, Charles River, Flybridge, Highland, Matrix, Northbridge to name a few) doing a lot of deals in town. And these are also the VCs you’re more likely to bump into at the CIC or Voltage because they’re focused on connecting with entrepreneurs in Boston.

Explain the role of the New England Venture Capital Association and what you hope it can accomplish in the ecosystem.

NEVCA is a platform for local venture capital firms to advance their common interests. We’re a collective voice for the venture community, focused on making sure Boston remains the best place in the world to start and grow a new company. We represent nearly 100 venture firms investing in everything from consumer tech to SaaS to hardware to robotics to biotech. We are here to listen hard to the needs of this entrepreneurial eco-system and fill in gaps and invest in great efforts that keep this place thriving.

I’m interested in working with our VCs to shine the light on amazing companies we’re backing and taking more of those stories to the national stage. And also on moving the needle on student talent retention here in Massachusetts. We want every student in the Commonwealth to understand what a thriving startup community we have here.

You’re the New England Venture Capital Association, but we all are hearing a lot about New York these days. Do we need to start thinking of New York and Boston as two hubs in the same greater region? Or is New England the right unit to develop our innovation economy?

It’s always hard to generalize across a whole region, but I think the two venture markets are different. New York is a hub of media, finance, and consumer marketing, so the startups there tend to be of those worlds. Boston is a global leader in enabling sciences across biotech, enterprise IT, materials, big data, mobile…we seem to be generally better at those things. That said there are great biotech companies forming in New York, and great consumer companies getting funded in New England (Zipcar, Wayfair, and Gazelle being recent examples).

In general, I think a little too much is made of the regional rivalry. Capital doesn’t root for the Giants or the Pats. It just wants to win.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/06/20/the-state-of-vc-in-boston-a-qa-with-c-a-webb/

TEDx Boston: Context is King, So Let’s Build Better Filters

I’m at TEDx Boston right now and having fun so far. The most recent speaker was Jodi Beggs, a behavioral economist and lecturer at Northeastern. She gave a great talk about how context matters and how the details in which an item is presented shapes how you think about it. How you taste wine depends on how much it costs, what your friends have told you about a musician impacts your taste for their music, etcetera.

This is all crucially important, and Beggs concluded by stating that she is bringing it all up in the hope that we might, with more awareness, be a bit more rational. And that’s a worthy goal. But we need to go further and build technology around these insights.

We need to build smarter filters that take these biases into account. Lots of online businesses — Yelp, Pandora, BostInno — function as filters in various realms. And those filters can be architected to help account for our biases, to shape context in a way that achieves the right goals.

A smart filter for music might seek to prioritize independent musicians, wine stories might include reviews done by blind taste tests, etcetera. Perhaps those are impractical; I’m not expert in either. But in the case of media (particularly political media), and the nasty problem of confirmation bias, we can experiment with smarter filters that help de-bias us.

I wrote about this for The Atlantic last year:

Context can affect bias, and on the Web — if I can riff on Lessig – code is context. So why not design media that accounts for the user’s biases and helps him or her overcome them? …

…as we design ever richer media experiences for the Web, we should pay attention to this kind of research and consider how we might create media that draws on it to counter our political biases. Our ability to reason is flawed in predictable ways. And as we increasingly link our social graph into our media experience, there is plenty of relevant data to mine for hints of bias. Why not improve our reasoning using cognitively sophisticated media?

You can read the whole piece for specific suggestions. My point now is to follow-up on Beggs’ great talk by pushing it a bit further. Technologists need to understand behavioral economics and the science of bias, and use that knowledge to build better filters.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/06/22/tedx-boston-context-is-king-so-lets-build-bett...

How to Start (and End) a Relationship on Social Media

My friend — yes, it’s actually a friend, not a “friend” — has been seeing this guy for a few months, and I had asked to see pictures of him on Facebook.

“We’re not Facebook friends,” she quickly admitted. ”I think we’re in an undiscussed stalemate. Neither of us will add each other. It’s like who can hold out longer.”

It’s 2012. We’re constantly on our phones, Instagramming images of every meal we eat, tweeting about how miserable the MBTA is and checking in to all six bars we venture to on Friday night. Given all that, I find it extremely strange that you can’t Facebook friend someone you’ve been seeing for several months.

Which got me to thinking, when is an appropriate time to “friend” someone you’re dating? How about following them on Twitter and Foursquare? Then there’s the flip-side — what happens when you break-up? Do you cut all social media communication?

Ugh, 2012 is hard. I’m by no means an expert, but here are my thoughts on dating and social media.

Starting a Relationship

Twitter – Go ahead and follow them right away. Assuming you both have open accounts, your tweets likely won’t be filled anything too personal. If it’s kosher for your colleagues’ eyes, it’s OK for the dude or lady you met at the bar last week to see it, too.

Facebook – Facebook gets a bit more intimate. I’d wait a few weeks before friending them. Up pop the mutual friends. “Oh hey, how do you know my coworker Eric, too?” “Uh, I once dated him.” Yeah, awkward. Once accepted, they can then see your life in sometimes less-than-flattering images: senior prom pics, your obsession with your cat named Katniss, photos of you on the Cape with your ex-boo last year, embarrassing posts from Mom. You’re opening a lot of doors here with the new Timeline, Zuck.

Foursquare – Foursquare crosses into stalker zone. I wouldn’t add until you’re in a completely committed relationship with this person. I mean, you’ve got to leave some mystery in the relationship, right? You don’t need to know the exact minute they checked into Dunkin in the morning, and they don’t need to know that you had to stop at CVS to pick up tampons before meeting them for dinner.

LinkedIn – Whenever you remember to log on. Your forgetfulness may outlast your relationship. Carry on.

The Breakup

Twitter – Larry the Bird should be the first to go. Because Twitter doesn’t have a good filtering mechanism (who honestly uses lists?), their little avatar will continually pop-up in your stream at the most infuriating times, especially if you’re someone like me who tweets every 2.5 minutes. You don’t need to hear about their MBTA horrible commute this morning or how much they loved Buzzfeed’s latest list about disappointed cats. It’s torture. Unfollow.

Facebook – Unless it was a horrible breakup, there’s no need to de-friend. Luckily, Zuck-dawg must have had some miserable breakups, because Facebook now has the “unsubscribe” feature, which allows you to stop receiving updates from the ex in your newsfeed. But you can still stalk their profile to see if they’re hooking up with their neighbor you caught them eyeing at that party that one time. Win-win.

Foursquare – Tread carefully. Like I said earlier, Foursquare ventures into stalker category. “Oh, hey! I just randomly happened to bump into you a this Dunkin that I had absolutely no idea you were at! Why am I so out of breath, you ask? No, I didn’t just jog a mile across town to get here after I saw you check-in….”

LinkedIn – Leave it alone. If you’re concerned about your ex seeing your resume updates, you’ve got much deeper issues. Plus, you never know when you might need to sweet talk her into helping you land your dream job. She always did like truffles — don’t forget that.

Oh, and as for Pinterest, if you even allowed him to see your “My Future Wedding <3” board in the first place, you now know the reason for your breakup.

What are the conventions of social media and dating?

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/06/21/how-to-start-and-end-a-relationship-on-social-...

TV’s Biggest Highlights on Social Media This Year [INFOGRAPHIC]




With the 2011-2012 TV season behind us, networks are not only looking into ratings to gauge success, they're also diving into social TV statistics. Which series reigned supreme with the social media-wielding viewers?

Fox generated the most comments on Facebook and Twitter from September to May for primetime series programming and all series programming, with American Idol, Glee and The X Factor leading the charge online.

"Fox is clearly a leader in social TV," Bluefin spokeswoman April Conyers told Mashable. "But it's also interesting to note that when you expand beyond series-only to include sports and special events, CBS jumps to the top."

SEE ALSO: Summer TV Guide -- 20 Social S
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More About: american idol, celebrities, Entertainment, Facebook, Fox, GLEE, grammys, march madness, Music, pretty little liars, Social Media, social tv, the-voice, TV, Twitter, x factor

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/23/social-tv-highlights-2011-2012/?utm_source=fee...

Want to Learn More About iOS and Mac Development? Get Apple's WWDC Content for Free [Learn To Code]

Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is known to most as a common release date for new products, but the week is primarily filled with sessions for developers to learn about new technologies and practices for creating apps for Apple's platforms. If you've been looking to start developing for iOS or Mac, Apple's posted videos of all these sessions to help you learn. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5920608/want-to-learn-more-about-ios-and-mac-developmen...

Boomerang Calendar Turns Gmail into the Ultimate Event Planning Tool (and We’ve Got Invites) [Video]

If you use Google Calendar and Gmail, you know it can be tricky to flip back and forth between the two to check your availability and schedule appointments. Boomerang Calendar (from the makers of previously mentioned Boomerang for Gmail) fixes all of that by turning any mention of a time or date in your Gmail messages into a link you can use to add an appointment to your calendar. The links are veen highlighted red, yellow, or green so you can see if you're busy at that time, have an adjacent appointment, or free. Best of all, it recognizes natural language, and even corrects for time zone. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5920357/boomerang-calendar-turns-gmail-into-the-ultimat...

Amazon Picks First Original Projects for On-Demand Video Service [VIDEO]




Amazon Studios -- the retailer's venture into the world of on-demand video -- announced its first four projects Saturday, including a handful of comedies and a children's program.

The comedies include an animated show about Hell, a "mockumentary" about the end of the world and another series about a magician's helpers turned arch-rivals. The children's show features a sheep named Buck with a penchant for high-speed driving.

SEE ALSO: Online Original Video: Amazon Studios Searching for Hit Series

The service will go head-to-head with other on-demand streaming platforms that have also been introducing original content, including Hulu and Netflix
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More About: amazon, amazon studios, Entertainment, hulu, netflix, on-demand, streaming, television, Video

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/23/amazon-original-content/?utm_source=feedburner...