Hack

Open garage door indicator

How many times has this one happened to you? Just coming home from work, you walk in from the garage, settle down, and pick up the newspaper. But wait, did you remember to shut the garage door?
Presenting the open garage door indicator. [xjc2010] chose the simplest circuit possible, using only a switch to turn on and off the setup, an LED acting as the signal, and a transformer/resistor combo to drop the voltage to an acceptable LED friendly 2.8 volts. We don’t like how he strung wire all over his house to place the beacon, and would have…


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Facebook

Brand Lift: Facebook’s Answer To The Brand Advertising Conundrum

There are two primary types of online advertising: direct sales marketing and branded ad campaigns. Direct sales models like online affiliate marketing or email marketing have already been proven. However large brands have only begun spending billions of dollars online, because there have been very few ways to monitor the effectiveness of campaigns. Let’s say that you set up a Facebook application which millions of users interacted with. How do you then measure the ROI of that program once it’s complete? Given that large companies spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars on advertising everywhere, it’s difficult to…


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Facebook

This Week In Facebook: September 20, 2009

This week was yet another big week for Facebook with the company reaching new milestones, employees leaving, and the official launch of status tagging. I’m also proud to introduce a new feature of our weekly roundup: a stop motion video produced by my sister, Megan O’Neill. This new addition is a complete experiment so let us know your thoughts on the new weekly video!

Facebook Reaches 300 Million Users
This week Facebook announced that they officially crossed the 300 million user threshold, increasing the rate of growth to record levels. In addition to crossing this significant milestone, the company announced…


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Finance

A Love/Hate Relationship: How your credit score can open and slam doors for you

Manage yourself and your money. Money is like food; we don’t eat only when we’re hungry, and we certainly don’t spend only when we need something.
There are many ways to get ahead financially: attend seminars where you cut up your credit cards with hundreds of other people, participate in debt consolidation services that help you take out a home equity loan or refinance your home, or you can transfer debt on one credit card to another credit card with an introductory rate of 0% (which goes up to 12% six months down the road). The reason these methods don’t…


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Facebook

Viral Facebook Message Brings Issue Of Ad Endorsements Into Spotlight

This morning I’ve received numerous messages from people about the viral message going around the site about how to opt-out of Facebook advertisements. Following a misinformed article by Download Squad from last week, users are now going crazy about their images using in Facebook advertisements. While your image may be used, most users aren’t educated about how they are being displayed.

For many months now, Facebook has been using our friends’ images in advertisements about groups, Facebook Pages, and applications. When it was initially launched, the blogosphere was debating whether or not Facebook’s decision to make consent a default setting…


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Facebook

Facebook Attempts To Spark Privacy Revolution, Will The People Follow?

Facebook’s most recent feature announcement about the new granular publisher controls received a lot of attention for being a move against Twitter. We’ve been covering the drawn out battle between Facebook and Twitter for months now but what’s more important is the immense amount of control that Facebook is attempting to give the user. While Facebook has been criticized on numerous instances for aggressive new features that push the limits of access to our friends’ information (news feed, beacon, etc), the company is trying to hand control over to the user rather than giving them the twitter-like option of private…


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