Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.
“The Ostrich Problem” and The Danger of Not Tracking Your Progress
This 99U article describes a problem we’ve all dealt with: undermining our own goals by fearing and avoiding feedback. (“The Ostrich Problem” is the name psychologists gave to this phenomenon.) The article linked below explores a bit of the psychology behind this habit and gives some suggestions on how you can overcome it.
Phabricator
Phabricator is a collection of open-source web applications that can help you build better software. These applications include Differential, which can simplify code review; Maniphest, which keeps track of bugs; Herald, which notifies you when important changes are made by other members of your team; and many others.
StickNFind
StickNFind Stickers are coin-sized devices that you place on items you tend to lose; you can then recover these items by using Bluetooth 4.0 to track the stickers. Although there are similar products out there (StickR TrackR and Tile come to mind), StickNFind is already available for purchase and use, and sends notifications to your phone when the stickers are out of its range.
Smart Thermostats
Nest, which we’ve covered before, was recently acquired by Google. In light of some of the privacy concerns that have cropped up since then, a few companies have stepped forward with potential open-source alternatives. For example, Spark (which currently sells the Spark Core, a tiny Wi-Fi development board) wrote a post detailing their own attempts at making a basic “smart” thermostat — a feat which they claim took them a single day and just $70.
MotaWord
MotaWord is a cloud-based collaborative translation service that uses human translators (as opposed to something like Google Translate) to produce translations that are cheap, fast, and accurate. It also allows clients to monitor project progress and quality in real time, a unique feature in the translation industry.
2013: The Year in Kickstarter
We’ve talked about Kickstarter projects a few dozen times in the past year alone, so their year in review didn’t hold many surprises for us. However, even if you aren’t very familiar with Kickstarter, this review is still fascinating and inspiring.
Velocity
Velocity is an iOS app that allows users to speed read by showing them just one word at a time. You can speed up or slow down the words flashing past on the screen, and the app allows you to read articles from Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, plus any text or word documents.
Eyes on the Road
Eyes on the Road is an app designed to cut down on distracted driving. It does this by turning off your notifications once it senses you’re driving 12mph or more and automatically sending “Away” messages to anyone who texts you. It also gamifies safe driving by allowing you to earn points for the miles you travel while the app is turned on.
Hacking OKCupid
Chris McKinlay is a PhD student and mathematician who wasn’t having much luck finding love online. Nine months of actively looking for love interests on OKCupid had yielded just 6 dates; so, he decided to try applying mathematics to the problem. He used Python scripts to riffle through about 20,000 OKCupid female profiles, sorted them into different clusters, and optimized his profile for the cluster he was most interested in. Just a year later, he and one of his matches are engaged.
Fixed
Fixed is an iOS app that claims to help users fight parking tickets. Users just take and upload a photo of their ticket, and then the team at Fixed takes over. They help you contest the ticket and if you win, they charge 25% of the original parking fine for their efforts. If you lose, you pay nothing (except the parking ticket, of course).