It is always very impressive when a startup company, especially in the dog-eat-dog world of New York City, is able to exponentially expand and grow in a very short time. Even better is when the company’s concept and mission is so unbelievably fantastic that you really have a hard time believing that someone hasn’t snatched up this idea before. This time around, the company at hand that has done all of this is Manhattan based SELECT, which is an amazing service that makes you, the customer, feel VIP all the way with them connecting you to the best of the best in lifestyle in the greatest city in the world and beyond.
TECHNOLOGY
Catching Up With Booming Lifestyle Brand Krave And Kulture
As someone who is always interested in up and coming brands, primarily ones with an LGBT focus, it gives me a great sense of adoration when there is one in particular I really like a lot that has had some fantastic developments to them, all within a short time frame. This can be said of the up and coming and booming clothing line Krave and Kulture, who just relaunched their website with four incredible new collections for the savvy & smart guy.
[Read more…] about Catching Up With Booming Lifestyle Brand Krave And Kulture
Fab.com’s Great Gift Ideas for Valentine’s Day
Fab.com is one of our favorite sites for all things shopping, and they have really upped the ante with their amazing collection for Valentine’s Day! We chose some really great products from their Valentine’s Day look book for you to gush over. Each are unique, colorful, and fun in their own way! Check out what we think you should get for your honey on the biggest day of love in 2016!
[Read more…] about Fab.com’s Great Gift Ideas for Valentine’s Day
Love Conquers All For NYC’ers & Beyond on LoveWinsDating.com
Guest Contributor: Daniel Woolmer
Now that Love is starting to win for the LGBT community and equality of marriage is becoming accepted over many countries worldwide, we really need to stand for our rights and get the rest of the world on board. The days of being stereotyped for our natural genetics and outcast-ed with the things that do not fit in to the bracket of “normal”, is on its way to being over. The LGBT community must now make the most of the freedom that so many pioneers past and present have worked so hard in braking the boundaries so we can have what we have so far in the modern times.
[Read more…] about Love Conquers All For NYC’ers & Beyond on LoveWinsDating.com
The Brand New Nintendo NY Store Reopens February 19th!
As a kid of the 90’s who grew up worshiping and adoring all things Nintendo, I am thrilled that its legacy remains true and honest with the generations that have come in and loved it just as much as I did nearly twenty years ago. Now that the iconic Nintendo Store in Rockefeller Center is reopening its doors in two weeks to the public, my only hope is that future generations can really see the impact that this amazing company has brought to millions of people who love incredible characters like Mario, Luigi, Kirby and so much more, all under one roof. And they will be able to see that when its reopened on February 19th, starting at 12PM.
[Read more…] about The Brand New Nintendo NY Store Reopens February 19th!
What is the cost of building a mobile app?
This post originally appeared on the VenturePact website.
The Idea: “Hey, I am trying to build an app. It’s going to be a social network for dog owners. I have $10K. You know someone?”
Source: http://bit.ly/1B49vBV
2 Weeks Later
“Yo, I got a steal – I found these people who told me they’ll build the app and give me unlimited maintenance for $10K. What a deal!”
6 Months Later
“Still building the product but not paying extra even though its going way over, I’m lucky I got a deal. $10k for 6 months of work is less than $20 per hour!”
8 Months Later
“I will never outsource anything again, the doesn’t work its been 8 months.”
What went wrong?
An outsourcing decision made solely on price can result in an array of problems.
When choosing a firm to build your application, price is a component in the decision making process, but time, experience, and quality also come into the equation. Quality is hard to quantify and its hard to know whether a company is high quality based on their website.
Sometimes you’ll find a low quality company that charges $250 per hour. Sometimes you’ll find a great company that charges $40 per hour. Of course this is not the norm, but price alone does not mean that a company is amazing or terrible. Also, a service provider that is amazing for one company might not be for another.
To guide companies through the development pricing maze, we have created The VenturePact Budget Grid with three zones and three tiers representing the world’s development firms and respective pricing.
Zones vary based on each region’s cost of living, and tiers vary based on clientele, years of experience and specialty of firm.
The chart shows the minimum project size that each zone and tier would require and their approximate hourly charges. This VenturePact Budget Grid should help guide companies when deciding how much they should pay and where they should select a service provider.
Do you have questions about outsourcing or finding a development firm for your next project? Feel free to reach out to [email protected].
Randy Rayess is the co-founder of VenturePact, a service that helps companies find and engage with vetted software development teams. He is passionate about remote work, outsourcing and software development. He previously worked in private equity at SilverLake Partners, in machine learning and in payments.
Goldstar: Making Events More “App”ealing
Do you have friends and acquaintances who sit in their apartments, complain that they are always broke, and announce that there is nothing to do? Now you can resist the urge to smack them in the head and send them back to their native mid-America state by informing them about Goldstar’s brand new Android App. Wait! What is Goldstar? Thank you for asking! Goldstar is both a free website and app which provides listings of shows, concerts, events, dinner cruises, theater and tons of other fun stuff to do in the city–at a fraction of what you’d pay for the full price ticket. Since 2002 this California based company has connected with over 5,000 venues in cities across the United States. Recently, they’ve rolled out in Pittsburgh, PA, Detroit, MI, and are making plans to engage in more medium sized markets.
Goldstar CEO Jim McCarthy recognized the demand from customers to make usage more mobile. As of September 2014, 63% of its’ users were accessing the services on either smartphones or tablets. With the launch of this Android App, McCarthy and his team are making access even more effortless. “Now, Goldstar is there when people think about what they want to do,” he said. It should be noted, however, that the app is not strictly limited to Android. It can work across all other devices as well. Sorry, Gramps…this does not mean your rotary phone!
The new app features include an even wider array of events, reviews from other members who have already attended the event, and a new “sit with friends” option. This means that your friends can buy tickets individually, but you can still sit together. This way, you won’t get stiffed by cheapskate companions who either don’t show up or won’t pay you back. As always, deals are available almost up to the last minute and entry tickets will be sent immediately to your device. Unless the deal is sold out, in which case, you probably should’ve planned better.
Download the app now, sign up for deals and emails, and enjoy a city which is abundant with non-stop activity–at discounted prices. If your buddies continue to mope around like Eeyore, find new friends!
To download the Android app, click https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.goldstar. On other devices, simply locate “Goldstar” and download.
For more information about Goldstar, visit http://www.goldstar.com
For more information about sitting at home doing nothing, I can’t help you.
Nail Polish Prevention: How Society Chooses to Address Sexual Assault
Since Undercover Colors went public earlier this summer, many have reacted to the company’s effort to aid in sexual assault prevention, which involves nail polish that changes color in the presence of “date rape drugs” slipped into someone’s drink, the idea being that a woman dips her finger into her drink to give it a stir and subtly procure information about the drink’s possibly insidious contents.
The North Carolina State University students who are developing the polish don’t actually suggest that it will solve the problem of date rape and other sexual assaults aided by drugs like Rohypnol, GHB, and benzodiazepines (those that the nail polish will detect). They plan to proffer it amongst a slew of “technologies” meant to “empower women to protect themselves from this heinous and quietly pervasive crime” known as sexual assault, according to the Undercover Colors Facebook page.
At first glance, this may seem (as it did to me, to be honest) like a cool, not to mention helpful, product. It’s empowering women by adding another tool to their self-defense kits! It’s subtle enough to prevent women from feeling burdened by it! It’s a health-positive fashion statement! Even women who are careful never to put down their drinks at bars or parties could consider this product helpful when it comes to the first or second dinner date, in which one might abandon her glass to go to the restroom without yet having gained full trust in her dinner companion.
After engaging in such reveries about the nail polish created to prevent sexual assault, it becomes easier to fasten on its many problems. First of all, it’s inherently gendered. Though I’m by no means saying that men do not and should not wear nail polish, the product is specifically aimed at women, sending the message that sexual assault happens only to women, or is only a women’s problem. It’s in part because of this attitude that sexual assault goes so frequently unreported amongst men.
Undercover Colors uses language like “empower” to suggest that it’s fighting the dynamic in which men traditionally have the upper hand over women. However, is the dynamic changing when it remains on women to have to work towards sexual assault prevention? In other words, it’s not a bad thing that, thanks to the polish, women have another tool to add to their anti-SA toolkits (sidled up to pepper spray in pink containers and purse-sized revolvers), but the product markedly keeps the responsibility of ending this kind of assault on the side of the potential victims.
As Undercover Colors puts it (again, in their Facebook mission statement), “Through this nail polish and similar technologies, we hope to make potential perpetrators afraid to spike a woman’s drink because there’s now a risk that they can get caught.” Is this really the best approach to stopping sexual violence, by scaring potentially violent aggressors into accountability (not to mention the, if small, possibility that they already can get caught—but no need to go into the legal system that’s overwhelmingly soft on these kinds of perps, police that have trouble taking these crimes seriously, and the stigma and shame associated with reporting them)?
Working on prevention that targets these possible perps would send a much stronger message than prevention tactics that tend to shift the burden onto women. For example, with the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, more of these institutions are implementing workshops and information sessions aimed at prevention. These hope to foster awareness and group discussion rather than encourage women to endure the possibility of sexual assault “discreetly,” in silence.
Also, by putting the responsibility on the side of the women the product aims to protect, it presents possible detrimental consequences for them. For one thing, bystanders who know that a woman is wearing her Undercover Colors may be less likely to interfere on her behalf if she’s in trouble. They might assume that this puts her in complete control of her ability to detect and avoid predators. However, alcohol alone often proves sufficient as a date rape drug, and it’s always worth looking out for your friends when out on the town. Let’s think even further forward, to the post-assault moment when ill-informed cops ask questions like, “Well, did you say no?/Is this what you were wearing?/Then what did you agree to leave the bar with him for?” Say technology like this nail polish becomes mainstream. Would police then ask survivors, “Why weren’t you wearing your nail polish?”
Of course, that’s looking at an extreme possibility, one that would come long down the line considering the Undercover Colors product is still in development. Regardless, it’s worth thinking about the implications behind any means of sexual assault prevention and asking what kind of overall dialogue it fits with, one in which sexual assault is a women’s problem, or one in which it’s a human problem. Naturally, we should aim for the latter.
__
*Image credited to The New York Times, Samantha Rapp
Richard Avedon: Digitizing a Legacy with a Brand New App
It’s no secret that theater, fashion, and culture are among the greatest NYC treasures. For years, they’ve been the singular alluring factors for transplants aspiring to careers in these fields. For natives like the the late, iconic photographer Richard Avedon, they were sources of inspiration for what they already knew existed here.
Over the span of his sixty year career, Avedon captured the most beautiful, truthful, and vulnerable portraits from luminaries including Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Zero Mostel, Humphrey Bogart, Paul McCartney, and countless others. While a large part of his work was centered around celebrity, his eye was also on the political and social pulse of the Nation. Avedon encapsulated the rocky era of the Vietnam War , the civil rights movement, and the strain of many working class individuals.
Earlier this week, the Richard Avedon Foundation announced the launch of its’ first mobile app for iPad: The RICHARD AVEDON app. Developed in partnership with the technology studio Potion, it contains over 1,000 images and a virtual guide to the photographer’s archives. As more of his work is digitized, the Avedon Foundation will continue to update this informative, user-friendly, and fascinating resource. It is divided into three major areas: Fashion, Portraiture, and Reportage. According to the press release from the foundation, “the RICHARD AVEDON app catalogues the output of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century and displays the arc of this extraordinary artist’s career.”
New Yorkers not only crave high culture of this caliber, but they also love a good bargain. This latest reference for visual history is free of charge and can be found on iTunes. More information is also available at http://www.avedonfoundation.org
Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack – Part 3
Guild Wars 2 goes “mega.”
Welcome back! This is the third and final part of our coverage of the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack, which goes live on the 15th! We’ve covered balance updates, PvP, quality of life upgrades, the new wardrobe feature, and new traits, but this part of the patch figures to be bigger than them all! Responding to the game-wide issue of certain zones and cities being barren and unpopulated, ArenaNet has seen fit to completely overhaul the way servers operate, giving birth to the “Megaserver System.”
How will it work? Well, for starters, it won’t be going entirely into effect on the 15th. It will be a deliberate process, beginning with the Heart of the Mists PvP hub and the maps with the lowest populations, and should be complete by the end of the year. The Megaserver System seeks to provide players with well-populated zones around the clock, that way there’s always someone to play with and the less populated events in the game get done more often. Instead of each server having one main copy of a given map, the Megaserver System will combine all worlds together and only have the number of copies it needs to accommodate the player population in a given map. It will also allow for players who are in the same party or guild to play together more easily, with functions dedicated to ensuring that related players are placed in the same instance of a map or can easily join friends if they’re separated.
But wait! World bosses spawn at different times on each server! How will they be affected? Fear not, players. With the rollout of the Megaserver Systems comes a standardized schedule for the various world bosses, which you can find here. Bosses that previously did not have failure mechanics or timers will be getting them, to ensure that the game remains on schedule. Also, many of the bosses will be tweaked to preserve balance, and this includes abilities, overall difficulty, or even the event chains that lead up to their encounters. Such changes were not detailed in the reveal, but will be available in the release notes next week.
Waypoints, dungeons, and temples will be slightly affected by the new changes as well. For instance, you will no longer be able to tell if a waypoint is actually uncontested until you arrive on the map that it’s in. In the Orr maps, which have many contested waypoints, this figures to be a bit of a hassle. The same goes for the three dungeons that require event chain completion to open: Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity, and The Ruined City of Arah. You will now have to waypoint to Fireheart Rise, Mount Maelstrom, or Cursed Shore, respectively, to find out the status of these dungeons. As for temples, the god statues that normally have cross-map mechanics will no longer function that way, and instead will only be active when the nearest temple becomes contested.
The final aspects of the Megaserver System covered were guilds and World vs. World. Guilds will remain separate for now; they will still be server-specific until the Megaserver System is completely implemented, but once that happens guild members will earn influence towards the same total regardless of their home world. Guilds will still have a hard cap of 500 members and if a guild has chapters on multiple servers, they cannot be combined. World vs. World will remain unchanged for the time being and logically speaking, it’s unlikely to be affected by the Megaserver System at all. ArenaNet is making many ambitious changes here, so it’s nice to see that they’re preserving the identity of Guild Wars 2‘s WvW game mode for the sake of those who have made their legend on the battlefield.
With all of these imminent changes coming to Guild Wars 2, the game will never be the same again! I’m admittedly skeptical about a few things that ArenaNet is trying with this patch, but I’m also greatly excited that a number of issues that have existed since launch are finally getting the proper attention they need. If you’ve never played Guild Wars 2, now would be a great time to jump in; it really is a fantastic MMO during its high points (and it’s on sale for $24.99 until Saturday). They may not get everything right, but I have a strong feeling that ArenaNet knocked this out of the park.
For more information regarding the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack, click here. For more of our coverage on the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack, click here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).