Amazon encourages thank you notes

After receiving a generous Amazon gift card, I logged onto my newly purchased Amazon Prime account to redeem the gift card credit. Upon entering the gift card number and receiving confirmation that it had processed, I noticed something new for an online purchase.

Amazon screen post gift card upload

Good for Amazon!

New discovery: AirDrop

Before the past few months, I always kept Bluetooth and AirDrop off on my phone to save iPhone battery.

While on a boat heading back from kayaking in a small town in Alaska, a middle aged couple told me to airdrop some photos over to them. "I don't have service." "You don't need service." And just like that, the photos appeared in my photo album.

Needless to say, airdrop (for photos specifically, although I'm sure it could be useful for files too) was my new discovery. We used it in college a few times to transfer music, but the thrill was not as large. A few reasons I like it more than texting photos:

• It saves your phone storage
• It transfers faster
• It eliminates the extra step of saving the photo

Happy airdropping!

Finally on Venmo

When it comes to emerging money technology, I’ve been a late adopter compared to most of my acquaintances. I have done the basics that 20-somethings have learned about the past few years, but have resisted making a habit of what’s next and new.

I have transferred money between accounts on my bank’s mobile app, taken a photo of a check to deposit it, use ATMs occasionally and friends have paid me back on Chase Quick Pay. But at the end of the day, I find comfort in walking in to my bank, speaking to the teller, depositing and withdrawing money in person and walking out the door with a lollipop.

Kathryn convinced me to innovate and finally download the Venmo app. After a slight hiccup in getting the bank connection up and running, I set everything up this morning and accepted my first transfer. The ease of doing so was not what shocked me; something else did.

Venmo has made money transfer inherently social. You can create your account with your Facebook login, automatically upload your phone and Facebook contacts and the photos carry over. The technology and trust factor has not only been overcome by teens and 20-somethings, but they’re using this money transfer app as a way to communicate both visually and verbally. I was dumbfounded at all of these emojis and comments for something as simple as paying someone back.

I look forward to not only using Venmo, but seeing what fun emojis I can use when paying people back :).

A screenshot of my Venmo screen

Request your LinkedIn Archive

Still unbeknownst to how this happened, I got on the distribution list for iBlog magazine and read through it on the train this past week.

The most valuable piece I came across in this month's issue focused on the importance of social networking and networking online. The article shared that LinkedIn lets you request an archive of your data in Excel form, and guarantees to send you this information within 72 hours of requesting it.

Here's how:
1. Go to your Privacy & Settings section (on the far right under the Account/Settings link)
2. Click on the Account tab not he bottom left side
3. Click on the "Request an archive of your data" link your network.

I tested it out and within 24 hours, received a .zip file of nearly 12 .csv Excel files with various groupings of data: all of my connections, email addresses, skills, search queries, ads I've clicked on, my ad targeting profile and more. It can't hurt to have an Excel file of all your LinkedIn contacts. Think of all the filtering and pivoting you can do by company, school and more! (Nerd alert). Overall, nothing was incredible or fascinating about the archive, but it helps me feel like I own the information I share eon the Internet. Check yours out!

Immersion: Your email community

I recently came across of the tools that the MIT Media Lab released a few years ago, called Immersion.

With your Gmail, Microsoft Exchange or Yahoo accounts, Immersion aggregates the To, CC and BCC field of your email to visualize your email community. It creates circles to show you a people-centric view of your life, and how who you email reflects your "social" circles.

It worked well for me, creating circles and individual communities for groups like fellow Greek Young Adult board members, and the 4A's class I took earlier this year.

Check it out here: https://immersion.media.mit.edu

What does your zip code say about you?

I spent some time playing around Esri's zip code lookup feature on its website, which lets you type in your zip code and learn about geographic areas.

Esri is a geographic information systems company with mapping software that visualizes data, and this is a perfect example of a user-friendly interface providing interesting and worthwhile information.

This site shows each zip code's "Tapestry segment" (a type of segmentation), income, age and population density.

Check out some of my quick findings!

The top segment for where I work downtown, which I checked just to understand who actually owns property there. 

In the 60601 Loop / River North area, the median age was 33.1 with a median income of $104K. 

This differs from Northbrook (60062), whose zip code search shows an average of $107K household income, but an average age of 49.2. Eighteen percent are "exurbanites," married couples who are empty nesters, just like the Artemas parents!

The top segment for Lakeview, sounds pretty accurate!

My current neighborhood

The top segment at Mizzou is "Dorms to Diplomas."

Check yourself

I recently read about this app called Checky on Dot Complicated. Checky runs in the back of your phone to count how many times you check your phone screen throughout the day. 

Although it might be a battery hack long-term, it’s worth checking out to understand your own phone-checking habit and quantify how many times you do look at your screen each day. Check it out!

Invision: app visualization

My co-worker Lauren and I participated in an internal work competition earlier this summer where we pitched a mobile application. My intern buddy told us about a tool called Invision that he used in an app development competition, and it changed our whole presentation for the better.

Invision lets you upload images or screenshots (think: Powerpoint slides) and add clickability function to allow for an interactive demonstration. You can use it on a computer or mobile device, so when you walk through an idea the audience can understand how it would work live. A significant amount of the features are free, and a one-month and one-year subscriptions are reasonably priced if you plan on using it for more than one project.

Additionally, it lets you send the link to the web app to anyone via email or text, so the app mockup actually downloads to your phone. If you need to visualize your idea or make something interactive, check this out.

Instagram photo map

The Instagram photo map has to be my favorite social media feature right now. Creating it provides an incentive to geo-tag photos, and it creates this beautiful map showing all the territory you have conquered! 

Instagram photo map: Chicago area. Clearly I'm lacking on the South Side. 

Restaurants and destinations win because their locations look more popular on social media. FourSquare wins because they are getting checkins. Instagram wins because you're uploading photos, and you win because it makes this super cool map. I look at the photo map as digital scrapbooking, a simple visual showing where you have been and identifying what else there is to try. Try it out! 

The Loop - River North border on the photo map

A brilliant tagline

I recently saw a tagline for the popular app Snapchat - that said:
Snapchat is the fastest way to share a moment.

In a file on Snapchat's website geared toward parents, the website elaborates on this, and writes: 

"Snapchat creates a place to be funny, honest or however else you might feel when you take and share a snap with family and friends. It’s sharing that lives in the moment, and stays in the moment."

For having a 23-year-old CEO that rejected a $3 billion buyout from Facebook, I think they're doing things pretty smart. Positioning themselves as 'momentary' is a unique selling point against sending a photo from any time via a text message, and the tagline is memorable. As one of the app's users, and a photo-texter as well, I find myself sharing comical tidbits or quick moments out with others with the rest of my friends and family members on the app. 

Way to go on doing your research, Snapchat! 

COOL APPS: Passbook

After not wanting to print a boarding pass last week, I decided to innovate and use the American Airlines app on my cell phone to check into my flight. When I logged in to the app and the boarding pass image appeared, it gave me the option on the bottom left corner of the screen to export it into an app Apple automatically installs on your iPhone called Passbook.

Not aware of how Passbook could be used, I was impressed that it saved your boarding pass without needing to re-connect to the Internet every time like opening it in Safari would do. It does this not only with airline tickets, but any tickets-movies, shows, etc.

It even sends you push notifications for flight updates such as gate and boarding time, and for a ticket as important as a flight, leaves it on your home screen until the flight takes off and the ticket is scanned - making access convenient. 

I definitely recommend using Passbook in the future as an effective way to track tickets! 

COOL APPS: GroupMe money collection

My friends are active users of the GroupMe application, introduced originally as a program for SMS texting for large groups (up to 30 people) before iPhone threads.

As a "private chatroom for your small group," GroupMe not only tries to tackle the problem of communicating to the masses, but continues to enhance its features and offerings by encouraging peer-to-peer lending.

Upon swiping the app to the side, the app showed me the following screen:

Users collect money by attaching a "Split" to their message. Then, group members can contribute to your collection with the click of a button. No ATM fees, no giving 10 debit cards to servers at bars or restaurants and no excuses for not paying someone back. Brilliant idea.

Although it was introduced earlier this year, I look forward to seeing if it picks up traction. 

COOL APPS: Testing out iOS7

Like a true digital vanguard and constant attempt to be an early adopter, I spent this morning reading technology blogs about the features of iOS7, and specifically, how to save battery life. There is nothing more frustrating than low battery percentages on your phone when it's just sitting in your purse with WiFi, location trackers and other apps sucking it away.

I learned a lot from some reading, like the clock app icon being an actual clock, how to block calls and more. But the third point in this Mashable piece showed me the very exciting news that the Compass iPhone app now has a level.

As the tenant of a new apartment that my roommate and I are currently decorating, this news leaves me dumbfounded as we just hung up all of our frames using our own eyes as level, semi-upset that we didn't own the tool.

So for good measure (pun intended), I went to a few of our frames and put the level on them to see how we did.

Testing out the new iPhone level on the Compass app

And look- it is perfectly straight!

For more iPhone tips, ways to save battery life on iOS7, and detailed directions on how to turn off AirDrop, Bluetooth, background app refresh and other battery suckers, click here. 

Lesson of the day: Snapchat metrics

Last night after being added by a friend on Snapchat, I scrolled through my contacts list and came across an interesting feature.

Upon clicking on any one of your contacts' names, you see a "score" as well as each contact's three best friends. WHOA - A LOT OF INFORMATION THERE. Not even surprised that this type of information is public, and being a nerd in general, I did some research as to how these metrics are determined. Are they even valid?

Apparently, I'm not the only one thrown off by this, as a BuzzFeed reporter who was one of the first to call out the feature in the media says, "It's confusing as to why Snapchat would even have a Web presence for user profiles at all-it's a service that's made for phone-to-phone private communication." Well said.

So....getting to the "research":

What is your 'score'?

The total number of points is the total number of Snapchats you have sent and received. If you send a photo to more than one recipient, it's still only worth one point. There are rumors across the internet that each Snapchat is worth 12 points and consecutive photos are worth 20, but this doesn't appear to be true. 

How are your 'best friends' determined?

"Best friends" are supposedly the people you snap the most, but we have to keep in mind that this includes sent and received messages. It seems to be refreshed pretty often, but I could not find a standard measure. In September, Snapchat released a code for users to enter to gain five best friends (instead of three) in their contact lists, which was a big deal in the Snapchat world to tech dorks (or just people who love selfies). 

Has this always been here?
Yes. In fact, I recall seeing it with friends on the old interface, but rather than appearing in-app the score and best friends would pop up in a separate URL. This is still accessible on a mobile device, when you type in snapchat.me/yourusernamehere.

Now to the primary research...is it accurate?
Looks pretty accurate to me. Andrew, Sherman and Shaina have been my best friends since freshman year of college, so I have no shame in them being represented on my Snapchat "best friends" list. We're all in different cities and Andrew & Sherman send Snapchats from their jobs in TV multiple times a week, so I'm not too surprised.

In terms of benchmarking my score, 1,546 seems like a reasonable number since it's a two-way street. Analyzing others' scores, most seemed to have points in the 300-12,000 points range. Many of my personal contacts list appeared to also have scores between 1,000 and 2,000.

So, is your Snapchat score accurate? Are your best friends your ACTUAL best friends, or is there secret flirting going on with someone that your friends didn't know about? What's next, being able to click on someone in your Contacts app, having the capability to identify the top three people someone exchanges text messages with, and a score of how talkative they are based on the quantity of messages? I sure hope not. In the meantime, let's acknowledge the information out there and apply accordingly. 

COOL APPS: Timehop

This is the first in a series of posts on my favorite mobile applications. Click on the tag “cool apps” for more posts.

Now that I’m officially in post-grad life, I have time to rekindle more fun blog topics. And another thing I’ve had more time to do is regularly check social media and Internet applications, now that I’m the happy owner of an iPad mini in addition to the iPhone 4S.

Earlier this summer, a few of my friends recommended I check out an app called “Timehop,” which connects your Facebook, Twitter feed, phone photos and news to provide a tailored “This Day in History” to your own life. It extracts this selection by showing you this information as a daily wrap-up, and how many years ago each photo or social post was. You are even able to share the posts as a link on social media, adding commentary to how much you miss it.

My first skepticism to downloading this app was the narcissistic Millennial stereotype. “Look at me, I’m so cool, I did this!” came to mind, and to some extent, that’s true. But what I learned after a few weeks of checking it out every couple of days was more importantly, seeing what I posted online and was doing in past summers motivated me to maintain an exciting life after college.

I’ve been lucky to have my three summers of college were spent doing things I really enjoyed. After freshman year, I interned at Project Mexico, traveled the East Coast and broke my arm in Chicago. After sophomore year, I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, became as proficient in Spanish as I could be and had my first apartment living experience there with three amazing roommates who are still my friends. After junior year, I took advantage of what Chicago has to offer by exploring downtown after work, interning for the company I will begin a full-time job with in just a few weeks. So posts from all of these have been what have come up when I open the app’s daily wrap-up.

Since Facebook has been around for so long now, Timehop even extracts events from high school—whereas Twitter posts are more from the college years when the outlet launched. So “This Day in History”’s are actually incredibly interesting. For example, on May 29, GBN (my high school) had our senior Spring Fest and it showed pictures from that. The next year, I was recovering from going to four concerts (Ludacris, Nelly, Guster and Glee) in five days. Two years ago on that day, I was at lunch with the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of South America, and last year—I was starting work.

How is that not motivation to do something cool on May 29 of this year?  The same thing happened the other day when one day in July, my sisters and I went skydiving, and two years earlier, my Argentina friends and I were touring wineries in Mendoza.

Although it might just seem like another free app clogging your phone, Timehop inspires me to plan fun adventures and continue this explorative, traveling college lifestyle for the next couple of years.