The Inevitable - @adage - Most TV -- Broadcast or Cable -- Saw Ad Revenue Fall Last Year - http://bit.ly/cB5tWo
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
LocalWineEvents Indexes Wine Tasting Tours and Dinners [Wine]
Unless you're on the mailing lists of the companies and vineyards that put on wine tasting events and meals, you're essentially out of the loop when it comes to finding out about them. LocalWineEvents indexes tasting events by state and city and provides an overview of the event including the cost—whether a flat fee, a per ounce fee, etc.—as well as the menu for the event and whether or not food will be served. In addition each entry has contact details in the form of a web site, phone number, and/or address.
You can browse listings in a variety of ways searching—by events at a location you enjoy visiting or put on by a particular company whose events you have enjoyed. Alternately you can hit up the local calendar and browse by day to see what's going on during the time you have available.
LocalWineEvents is free and requires no signup to use, you contact and pay the event host directly. Have a favorite service for finding out about local food and drink-related events? Let's hear about it in the comments.
LocalWineEvents [via TechCrunch]
BetterMe Helps You Give and Receive Honest Feedback Without the Awkwardness [Advice]
If you're wondering, for instance, if you talk too much during meetings, BetterMe can help you find out without cornering a co-worker to ask. Just sign up for a free account, then send an email to your colleagues via the service asking how you come across in meetings. They can respond to you anonymously and honestly, no hard feelings. Log in to your account to see responses and get feedback.
BetterMe can also be a tactful way to handle sharing feedback with others. Is the entire office annoyed at the team member who yaps away loudly on her cell phone all day? Use BetterMe to send a gentle—and anonymous—email to call her attention to the issue. Conversely, you can also use the site to send a verbal pat on the back to someone who's done a great job and deserves some praise.
Sure, there's the possibility that someone will misuse the service to deliberately hurt someone's feelings, but we think the premise of BetterMe is a great one. Many of us would love to get an honest opinion on everything from personality quirks to a new haircut, but don't want to corner our friends. BetterMe gives us a great way to ask others to help us improve without making them feel uncomfortable. Keep in mind that there's still a time and place for a good face-to-face, and in many instances confronting someone is actually important. For the other times, BetterMe is an interesting option.
Unofficial Better Gmail for Chrome Bends Gmail to Your Will [Downloads]
Almost a year ago our own How-To Geek put together a version of Better Gmail for Chrome, but that was way back when Chrome didn't even have extensions (his were all bundled into a single user script). This new Chrome extension is an unofficial Better Gmail for Chrome that was inspired by Gina's Firefox extension and our earlier Better Gmail for Chrome bag o'scripts.
Once installed, access Better Gmail's options by clicking the wrench -> Extensions -> Better Gmail Options. Tick the boxes of the features you want activated and you're good to go. You can choose to hide little used fields like "Invite Friends," remove ads, show the number of unread emails in the favicon, and more.
Gruev says future versions of Better Gmail will hide spam count, move to next message on delete or archive, and include support for POP3 email. A big round of applause goes to Gruev for putting this together. What kinds of features do you hope for in future versions of Better Gmail? Share your ideas in the comments.
Better Gmail for Chrome [Chrome Extensions Gallery]
MIT Teaches Computers to Turn Sloppy Sketches Into Search Queries [Tablets]
Some folks at MIT figured out a way to turn what sounds like a sci-fi fantasy setup into reality. You grab a tablet computer, a smart whiteboard, or another device which allows for stylus-based input and draw out a molecule, a compound, or a circuit design. Then you ask your computer whether such an object exists anywhere in a database or on the Internet and if so, to identify it. Your trusty pal will not only be able to interpret your sloppy sketch and convert it into a query, but it will also be able to adjust to additional questions or demands for modification—even if you're simply pointing at the screen. What if you added an element here? What if this wasn't here? Is there something similar?
There's still plenty of work left to be done on this software—currently chemistry is its main topic—but we should soon see it developed further and adapted to other fields such as electrical engineering. I just can't wait for the day when I can doodle instead of trying to figure out how to Google search for "that thing with four triangles and a hexagon-like thingie on the side with the squiggly tail." [PopSci]
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