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Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric

2012-05-27T04:12:23Z

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong.

Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily.

As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year.

It’s as if Zuckerberg has steered the company by this golden ratio. Which begs the question: is there some wisdom here regarding this ratio as a predictor of Internet success? Obviously, there are no guarantees and starting cutting edge tech companies will always be risky business. But, assuming you have a solid business model, there are good reasons to believe that if there is one metric to focus on while building your business, it’s the percentage of users who come back daily as expressed by this ratio.

As I’ve written previously, I believe a mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits and, ceteris paribus, I’d bet on a business with the higher ratio over a competitor every time. Here’s why:

More is More

When it comes to web and mobile startups, high DAU to MAU is more important than the size or growth rate of an entrenched competitor. Case in point, Facebook defeated much earlier competitors like MySpace and Friendster, both of which had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Facebook got started.

This is because of what I call the “more is more principle.” High user engagement has an exponential effect on user growth. As David Skok points out on his blog, “The most important factor to increasing growth is not the Viral Coefficient, but the Viral Cycle Time.” Viral Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a viral loop and it has massive impact on user growth. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.”

Having a greater proportion of DAUs dramatically increases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons. First, daily users initiate loops more often – think tagging a photo on Facebook. Second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates; with high DAU to MAU, it accelerates.

One Way to Grow

Those who talk tech split into two dogmatic camps. Some prioritize growth and accept low engagement, while others believe a company needs to nail engagement before focusing on growth. I believe this is a false dichotomy. If you have only one or the other, congratulations, you’ve got squat.

Let’s first take a look at user growth. Distribution, of course, is critically important and no company can survive without a sound customer acquisition strategy. Not only is growth essential but it is something engineer-driven companies love to work on. In fact, the title of “Growth Hacker” has recently become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley digerati. Tweaking viral coefficients and instantly seeing the results is intoxicating. It’s startup feedback at its finest.

But optimizing growth without engagement has its pitfalls. As Peter Thiel recently told his class at Stanford, the effectiveness of distribution channels tends to follow a power law. Just as businesses tend to have only one revenue stream, they also have only one good growth strategy – the effectiveness of which is 10x the results of other distribution channels. The problem with having only one real way to grow is that the method becomes obvious to others and is quickly copied. For example, in its early days, Facebook capitalized on users importing their email contact list to drive growth. But soon thereafter, so did everyone else.

But having competitors copy you is a high-class problem. It means something is working. Worse yet is discovering a fantastic viral loop that drives growth only to see engagement crater when users realize there’s little long-term value in the service. Ringtone businesses, sheep-throwing Facebook games circa 2008, and today’s social video sharing apps using questionable growth tactics, are just a few of the “leaky bucket” businesses that occur when distribution outpaces engagement.

When it comes to building a big business, clearly a good acquisition channel is mandatory, but not sufficient. Given the power law of user growth, you will likely only have one major way of acquiring customers and it won’t be much of a secret. You’ll need some other competitive advantage.

Engagement as Advantage

As opposed to distribution channels, the mechanics driving user engagement do not follow a power law. In fact, it is the nuances of user behavior that make the competition irrelevant, just as it did in the case of Facebook’s early rivals.

Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error. It takes time to create new habits and getting the user to act the way you’d hoped is accomplished by uncovering a thousand tiny insights into the user’s psyche. The process of uncovering latent needs is characterized by understanding more about users than they know about themselves.

The distribution strategy will always be obvious, but the behavioral insights are important secrets that can only be discovered through rigorous testing. Zynga had one obvious way to acquire users, namely Facebook ads. But the company has a cadre of behavioral insights it uses to craft addictive games. It collects terabytes of information daily to alter game dynamics to boost user engagement. Quora primarily drives users to its site through Google search traffic. But the conjecture about all the reasons why the service is so sticky spills over a long question thread. Instagram posted images to Twitter and Facebook to drive user acquisition, placing its growth strategy in plain sight. However, the founders, one of whom studied psychology as a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, acquired a deep understanding of what makes users tick and click.

But why can’t behavioral design be copied like a distribution strategy? Because competitors are not able to recognize and act upon these kinds of insights. You can know the competition’s product feels better to use, but you won’t know why. Engaging products gain their advantages by leveraging tiny improvements, which together create huge advantage. From the outside, you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t.

For example, the iPhone is objectively a better designed, more user-friendly, and ultimately more engaging product than the Android experience. But why? Nearly everyone, when given the choice between an Android interface and an iPhone, chooses the iPhone. There are plenty of good reasons to own an Android, but intuitive interface ain’t one. Google knows this and yet they can’t replicate Apple because they don’t know the answer to “why?” You can’t make decisions between seemingly identical interface choices unless you’ve walked the path of user behavior. Without this knowledge, copying the competition becomes a game of throwing darts at features.

Habit design requires a fundamentally different, though complementary skill set to growth hacking. Designing high-engagement products is an art which is increasingly becoming a science. The craft crosses the disciplines of psychology and design – both fields which are hard to learn in a short period of time. Unfortunately, designing habits often falls in the organisational abyss between the founders’ vision and what is technically feasible.

But those companies able to habituate users quickly enjoy massive advantages. Not only does engagement drive growth for the reasons stated above, but users tend to shut out other, sometimes superior, solutions. In fact, business history is peppered with technically inferior products beating competitors because of the fierce loyalty of habituated users (I’m looking at you Apple addicts). Users only have time and brain cycles for a limited number of services. If a high proportion of users are using your service daily, they aren’t using the competition’s.

Can’t Have One Without the Other

But focusing on engagement without growth is also a losing proposition. For one, virality is not something that can be bolted on to a product after it is in the wild. Distribution is not an afterthought and it needs to be built into the core of the experience. Either the company has a viral growth mechanic or it doesn’t. So no matter how engaging your service is, it will remain niche unless there is a way to get it in front of new users en masse.

Creating a company with both high engagement and high growth requires a sound distribution engine fueled by active users. Both engagement and growth are essential to a company’s viability and by adhering to the tao of DAU and MAU, founders have an accurate point of focus to increase their odds of success.

Thank you to David King for reading early versions of this essay
Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Native GitHub Client Application Comes to Windows, Is Ready For Windows 8 [Updates]

2012-05-23T22:00:16Z

GitHub, one of the leading open-source code repository websites, has recently released a new native application for Windows, called (unsurprisingly) GitHub for Windows. The new GitHub application is free for all, and allows convenient interaction with GitHub’s features with no need for a browser. You can use it to browse code commits, create new ones, roll back changes, and more. The application looks sharp, and matches the new Windows 8 Metro look.

Since Windows does not ship with the Git version control system out of the box, the new GitHub client includes everything you need to get set up out of the box, including a complete installation of msysGit, a build environment that can build Git for Windows. That sounds complicated, but the upshot is that the native GitHub client is likely to become the de-facto standard way of installing Git on Windows, unless Microsoft does something surprising like ship Windows 8 with built-in Git support.

The Windows client also supports GitHub Enterprise installations, which means large corporate clients that have deployed GitHub internally can already enjoy the new client. Last but not least, GitHub now shows a new “Clone in Windows” button for every code project, making the Windows client easily discoverable.

Source: GitHub Blog

Why Startups Need to Control Their Own Destinies

2012-05-23T22:25:50Z

Jesse Draper is creator and host of The Valley Girl Show, through which she’s become a spokesperson for startups and helped pioneer the way of new media content distribution. Formerly a Nickelodeon star, Draper is now CEO of Valley Girl‚ where she oversees the show and runs technology blog Lalawag.com.

Silicon Valley is finally starting to have a real impact on the health care industry, and Practice Fusion, an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) company, is leading the way. In addition to replacing paper charts, its free, web-based product helps doctors with everything from appointment scheduling to prescription management. With major VC backing and vocal support from investors like Peter Thiel, the managing partner at Founders Fund and former CEO of PayPal, the company is positioned to scale quickly and dominate the digital health care revolution.

According to Ryan Howard, founder and CEO of Practice Fusion, the startup already has 150,000 users and 34 million patients under management. That represents about 10% of the U.S. population and averages out to about 70,000 patients a day. It’s also connected directly to over 70,000 pharmacies across the U.S.

SEE ALSO: Why Digital Medical Records Could Save Your Life

How has Howard managed this rapid growth? “Everything comes down to people,” he says. “The right person can figure out the right process and system to implement.” He also acknowledges that when you’re fundraising, growing and hiring at a fast pace, there’s a certain amount of blind trust involved. “If you meet a venture capitalist, and you meet them for three meetings, and they put cash into your company and come on board, it’s like going to Vegas and getting hitched. The flaw with that is that in Vegas you can get divorced, but with board members you can’t.”

In our interview, Howard advises aspiring entrepreneurs to “control your destiny by maintaining control.” According to Howard, that means “your composure, the way you address your team and work with them, the way you structure your board, all these things are super critical for the long term success of your company.”

Sounds like a healthy health care company to me!

Guy Kawasaki Compares Google+ to Apple, Calls it a ‘Religious Experience’

2012-05-23T02:32:44Z

Former Apple software evangelist Guy Kawasaki thinks that Google+ has a lot in common with Apple.

“When I saw Macintosh for the first time it was somewhat of a religious experience for me,” said Kawasaki during a talk at the Google+ Photographer’s Conference Tuesday. “Fast forward about 25 years and I had a second religious experience — which is when I saw Google+ for the first time”

Kawasaki was leading a presentation at the conference on building your brand on Google+. A suggested account, Kawasaki currently has over 2 million people following his posts on the service. He also has 900K followers on Twitter, and a substantial Facebook following.

“When I started Google+ I didn’t need another social media/social networking service,” he said Tuesday. “I had plenty to do with Twitter and Facebook. But when I saw Google + it’s as if scales were removed from my eyes.”

Kawasaki also uses the metaphor of scales being removed from his eyes in his bio on his website when referring to the first time he saw the Apple II.

“I noticed something very parallel between Macintosh and Google+, which is I thought Macintosh is a better computer, it was used by far fewer people, and the experts -– I use experts in quotation marks euphemistically and sarcastically -– the experts were saying that Macintosh would die,” he said. “Fast-forward 25 or 30 years, I saw Google+, thought it was better, fewer people were using it, and the experts were saying it would die.”

Kawasaki says the design of Google+, particularly the white space of it, reminds him of an Apple Store. He also loves the way photos are integrated into your feed in the network, calling it a “religious experience.”

At the peak of his Macintosh career in 1987, Kawasaki wrote a book called ‘The Macintosh Way’ that explained what they were trying to do with Macintosh. Now he’s decided to write another book about a product, Google’s social network, called “What the Plus?” The $2.99 e-book is available now.

“I’ve written about product twice in my life: Macintosh and Google+. That’s how much I love Google+,” said Kawasaki.

What do you think about Google+? Is the social network going to be a silent hit like Apple? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Thumbnail via iStockphoto, franckreporter.

More About: apple, Google

9 Tips to Fast-Forward Your Fears and Live Your Dreams

2012-05-23T03:00:33Z

When you don’t take action to live your dreams, someone somewhere else in the world will.

Take the risk. Put in the practice. Be willing to pay the price. Get it done no matter what it takes or how long it takes. You are responsible for the results you get. There is no time for excuses.

The following tips can help you on the path to live your dreams.

1. Fear is no excuse; we’re all afraid.

It’s part of being human. It’s what you do in spite of your fear that matters. Look your fear in the eye. Tell it to back down. You have work to do, people to see, and connections to make.

2. Make a choice

We make hundreds of choices every day. Become aware of the choices you make and the consequences of your choices. Choose to get up an hour early. Choose to use your gifts and talents. Choose to go the extra mile. Choose to ask for help. Choose to leave your mark on the world. It’s all about choices.

3. Talk to yourself

Use encouraging words. I’m 58 years old. Saturday night I ran a five mile road race for charity. It was 93 degrees and we ran on the black pavement at 8 p.m. There were no water stations. I used the mantra, “I am a fighter.” I talked myself across the finish line. Why did I do it? Because I could!

4. Minimize your number of regrets

Do what you need to do today to live your dreams. Don’t hesitate, delay, or isolate. Apologize, take the high road, and accept responsibility for all that you do and all that you don’t do. Life is messy. So what! Learn from your mistakes and move on.

5. Don’t be afraid of hard work

Be willing to do what it takes. Put in the hours. Network. Become an expert. Don’t back down and don’t give in. Dream big! Sometimes life will demand that you crawl one more inch and sometimes life will allow you to soar. Continue to advance forward. Enjoy it all.

6. Live the part

What does success feel like? Get into the feeling. What does success smell like? Wear the perfume. What does success look like? Dress the part. Go where successful people go and do what successful people do.

7. Kick down the doors

When things go wrong, get back up. When doors don’t open, kick them down. When there’s a detour, climb a fence. When somebody tells you, “no”, ask again. Keep going back and keep moving forward until you get what you want. Each “no” is a step closer to a “yes”.

8. Make yourself stand out

Tell the truth. Keep your promises. Make others aware of your strengths. Be persistent. Be yourself. Listen to your heart. Follow your dreams with integrity and love.

9. Share your gifts

Do it in small and big ways. Help, server, and surprise others. Yesterday, my husband went into the gas station for a few minutes as I waited in the car. I noticed a man standing on the sidewalk. He was old, worn, and was missing an arm. His other arm didn’t look very good either. I phoned my husband and asked him to pick up a bottled water and a sandwich. I asked him to give it to the guy on the sidewalk when he came out. The man smiled, accepted it, and walked away. It’s that simple. Are you willing to share your time, talent, wisdom, or money today?

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so we need to create and live our dreams today!

(Photo credit: Businessman in cloud via Shutterstock)

Tess Marshall of The Bold Life has a master's degree in counseling psychology and has recently released a new course, "Take Your Fear and Shove It!". Download her free ebook, "How to Be Bold."

Grockit Wants to Build a Pinterest for Learning

2012-05-23T09:58:08Z

Search engines may make it easy to find information, but they don’t necessarily do the same for learning it.

That’s why the founders of social test prep startup Grockit want to re-configure online content such as YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries and ebooks into ordered lesson plans.

Their new product, Learnist, works a bit like a Pinterest for learning. Soon anyone (the capability is still invite-only at launch) will be able to compile content pieces onto a board or “learning.” A nifty bookmarklet makes it easy to collect content from other sites.

Unlike Pinterest, however, creators suggest a path in which to consume each content component. Users can check off each component as they go or “re-add” it to one of their own learnings.

So how does Learnist beat Google as a learning tool? Or Pinterest, for that matter?

Grockit founder Farbood Nivi argues that expert curation helps avoid the misinformation, hacked-together how-to articles and other useless content one must weed through in a typical Google search. It also provides a clear learning path and eventually, he hopes, will include some form of assessment.

“We don’t think it’s a Wikipedia replacement,” he says. “We think it’s a Wikipedia enhancement.”

The scope of content he has in mind is larger than that of both online course platforms such as Udemy as well as that of Sophia, a startup with a similar mission of helping experts curate content that focuses on academics. Along with lessons about common core standards, it includes topics such as “how to find the best pizza in Brooklyn” or “how to hack your kitchen” that don’t require courses.

He wants to replace not just textbooks, but also how-to articles.

Grockit will continue to offer its test-prep service for $30 per month, but it is focusing on Learnist going forward. Grockit’s social, adaptive learning question sets are now embeddable within Learnist boards.

“Test prep was always a stepping stone to larger learning,” Nivi says about the change in direction. “We always knew this was coming. We just didn’t know what it would look like.”

Image courtesy of istockPhoto, fotosipsak

More About: clearspring widget, education, Grockit, trending

Ive: What Apple Is Working On Now “Feels Like The Most Important And The Best Work We’ve Done” – [UPDATED: VIDEO]

2012-05-23T10:55:20Z

This morning, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, was knighted – and shortly afterwards The Telegraph published a two part interview (Part 1, Part 2) with the Apple executive, in which Ive revealed some – (perhaps rather telling) – aspects regarding the current projects going down at Cupertino.

With secrecy surpassing that of most American companies, Apple has in recent years built up a reputation for itself that – in its most basic form – suggests clearly that the company will only let you know what it’s doing, when it wants you (and the rest of the world) to know.

In what may signal the “revolutionary” impact of Apple’s upcoming offerings, however, Ive noted in his interview with The Telegraph that he considers the firm’s current projects as “the most important and the best work [Apple has] done.”

“It’s a really tough one. A lot does seem to come back to the fact that what we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about,” Ive noted.

So, what exactly are Ive and the team at Apple working on which is considered to be the firm’s “most important” work to date? — Well, one educated guess would be the future of television.

In fact, a report from earlier this year actually cited that Ive’s design lab could currently be home to Apple’s upcoming, 50-inch television product.

Mockup of Apple’s Siri-boasting, gesture-driven television offering

The report noted that such a product may also carry a display of at least 42-inches diagonally, “according to [a] source who worked at Apple.”

Apple is said to be looking at a 42-inch or larger LCD TV with built-in Wi-Fi. Inside the locked-down studio of Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, there’s a slick 50-inch TV, according to the source who worked at Apple.

Apple is – as ever – keeping “mom” on the entire situation, likely in an effort to build hype for whatever it is that it has planned for the coming months. The product – once revealed – though, is expected to be Apple’s “real” entrance into the television market, versus the Apple TV set-top box of today, which is largely still considered a “hobby” to the Cupertino firm.

Ive was publicly honored for his contributions to Apple earlier this year – specifically his modern-day contributions to “design and enterprise” – when the BBC reported that the UK designer was set to gain the title ‘Knight Commander of the British Empire’ (KBE).

Today’s ceremony makes that title official.

UPDATE – WATCH IVE GET KNIGHTED

via BBC:

/ Image Credit: London Evening Standard
/ AppleInsider

Should You Be Worried about Google’s Latest “Penguin” Update?

2012-05-23T11:00:00Z

You probably know about Google’s “Panda” update last year, which created a major shift in which sites ranked well on Google’s search results pages and which didn’t.

Now there’s the latest update called “Penguin” (what is it with the cute animal names?) that has the internet buzzing again.

Just like with previous updates, some sites have been smacked so hard they’re seeing stars. Others are actually doing better.

As you can guess, you’ll hear a lot more noise from those who were bitten by the Penguin than you will from those who were rewarded.

So how about your site? Is this something you should be worried about, or need to re-optimize your content for?

Today we’re going to talk about why you should not fear the Penguin. And if it did bite you in the backside, we’ll talk about the strategies you can move to so future updates are much less likely to give you headaches.

Penguin isn’t as new as you might think

For the most part, Penguin is simply automating work that the Google search quality team was already doing manually.

Were you doing something tricky to cloak your keywords, or participating in dodgy link exchanges? Before, Google had a quiet army of employees out scouring the web to look for spammy practices like this.

Many SEO researchers actually thought this work was automated already, because the Google team was so diligent. (They only looked like a robot army …)

Now Google’s algorithms have at least partly caught up with their manual work. Which means they’re just getting a little better at catching what was already “against the rules.”

What is “overoptimization”?

One of the specific targets of Penguin is what’s called “overoptimization.”

That means search optimization that’s a little too perfect. When 99% of the links to you are using your preferred keyword term as anchor text, for example.

The penalty also applies to what’s called keyword stuffing.

One important function of our Scribe content optimizer is to let you know if you’ve used your keyword phrase too many times in your content. That’s because “stuffing” your keyword too many times into your content is actually probably more harmful than slightly underusing your term.

(One of our goals with Scribe is to get you to that Goldilocks “Just Right” level … using your term often enough so the search engine can figure it out, without overdoing it.)

It’s still fine to include keywords that are related to your term. So if your keyword is contract attorney, you might squash in dozens of references in to contract law, contract lawyer, negotiate contracts, etc.

There’s a very simple test to see if you’ve overdone this:

Read your content out loud and see if it will make sense to a human reader.

If it’s useful and “sounds right” to a person, it’s unlikely to trigger any red flags with the search engines, today or tomorrow. That’s the key to good SEO copywriting, and it always will be.

Write for humans first.

Why you should love the Penguin

Updates like Panda and Penguin exist to weed out the bad actors who are using scripts and other practices to make poor-quality content rank better than it should.

That means they’re getting rid of the content that ranks purely because it was optimized by a clever SEO — but that isn’t actually useful to human readers.

And what does that make room for?

It makes room for your content. Written to be useful and shareable for real people in the real world, not robots or scripts.

Attracting natural links from real web sites.

Serving a real purpose for readers by educating them, informing them, and keeping their attention with good writing.

Search engine updates will tend to clear out the clutter and allow your content to find the audience it deserves.

(Why am I so confident about your content? Because you read Copyblogger. If you wanted to write thin, spammy, second-rate content, you’d be reading someone else.)

Your best defense against Google or Bing/Yahoo updates is to write excellent content, then promote it naturally and without too many automated shortcuts.

If you write well, in a way that both people and Google love, you will rank well. And no Google update has ever altered that.

How are you holding up in the Update Wars?

How about your sites? Have Panda and Penguin been kind, or cruel? We would love to know, so let us know in the comments. And be sure to include your website in the box so we can check it out.

Image from the glorious Aardman Animation film The Wrong Trousers

About the Author: Sonia Simone is co-founder and CMO of Copyblogger Media. Get more from Sonia on Twitter and Google+.

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13 Things to Teach Your Kids About Credit Cards

2012-05-23T10:36:08Z

This article is made possible by our underwriter Equifax.

Whether your kids are 5 or 15, you should to start teaching them about credit cards now, before they start being inundated with credit card offers. (Some parents report their 4-year-olds receiving offers in the mail!) It is much better for your children to learn about credit cards from you than to make a mistake when handling their cards and learn the hard way. Below are 13 things to teach your kids about credit cards.

What Young Kids Need to Know About Credit Cards

Depending on the age of your children, they may not be ready for a fully loaded lecture about credit cards. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the topic completely. Here are three things even young children should be taught about credit cards. I’ve written these as things you can say directly to your children.

Credit Cards Are Not Toys

A credit card is not something that you should play with. While they aren’t fragile like glass, they can be broken if bent. More importantly, because of the size of a credit card, it can be easily lost. If you are playing with mommy’s credit card, you might leave it somewhere she can’t find it. Then she will be very upset and have to look a long time for it. Or she might think it is stolen and have to cancel her card, which will make her even more upset. The best thing to do is to leave mommy’s credit cards in her wallet where she keeps them.

Credit Cards Are Not Magical

When mommy uses her credit card to pay for something, it is just like real money. When you take dollars and coins from your piggy bank to buy a model airplane, you don’t get that money back. You have to trade your dollars and get the airplane in return. When mommy uses her credit card, it is just like she is taking dollars from her piggy bank. [Yes, this is slightly simplified and should be clarified as a child gets older, but it gets the basic point across.]

Credit Cards Are Private

Every person has his or her own credit card. Mommy doesn’t give her credit card to her friend Susan to use. And she is very careful about who she tells her credit card number to—on the phone or on the internet. It is important that you don’t ever tell anyone the numbers on mommy’s card, type the numbers into a form on the internet, or give her card to someone else to use.

What to Teach Your Kids about Credit Cards When They Are Older

If your kids are a little older—certainly by the time they are teenagers—you need to begin educating them about the ins and outs of credit cards. Here are ten more things to tell them.

Understand That Your Credit Limit Is Not a Suggested Target

Don’t spend up to your credit limit. It’s a bad idea for a number of reasons, including the fact that you likely won’t be able to pay it off. And if you can’t pay it off, you’ll spend tons of money on interest. Worse, if you can’t make a payment at all your credit card company can report you to a collections agency or charge you outrageous fees.

Don’t Accept Every Offer You Get

Credit card companies will start sending you offers before you’re 18. Don’t ever fill out one of these offers without talking to me first. When the time is right, we can discuss when you should be able to get and use your own credit card. When you are 18, don’t apply for every card offer you get.

Keep Track of Your Credit Cards

Once you do have a credit card, keep track of it. If you needlessly sign up for multiple cards and then forget about one, it could result in someone stealing your information. If you’ve forgotten about the card altogether, you wouldn’t necessarily know.

Pay Them Off in Full Every Month

It’s best to pay off your credit cards on a monthly basis. Interest adds up quickly.

Watch Your Interest Rate—It Can Change

Credit card companies will get you in the door with too-good-to-be-true low interest rates. These rates don’t last, so read your offers carefully and keep a close eye on your interest rate month-to-month.

Always Read the Fine Print

There’s a lot of it on credit card offers, but it’s essential to be aware of what you’re signing up for. Credit card companies count on you reading the “0% APR!” and skip the fine print about the APR jumping to 28% in 18 months.

Know That Identity Theft Is A Real Problem

The FTC estimates that at least nine million Americans are victims of identity theft each year. If you have a credit card, it’s even easier for identity thieves to steal your identity. Make sure you take steps to protect yourself, including making careful decisions about who you give your credit card number to and getting your credit report at least annually.

Be Careful When and Where You Use Your Cards

Be savvy with your credit cards, especially when you’re shopping online. Only use secure payment sites - these are sites whose addresses start with “https” - and use your best judgment. If a something doesn’t seem right, it probably isn’t.

Get Your Credit Report at Least Annually

You can get a free credit report every year, so take advantage of it. The information in your credit report is used to determine your eligibility for everything from employment and insurance to car loans and credit. Make sure everything is accurate; if it’s not, find out why and dispute the errors. To get your free credit report at the official government sanctioned website visit Annual Credit Report.

You Don’t Need to Have Money In Your Bank Account to Use Your Card—But You Should

Unlike with a debit or charge card, you don’t need to have the money in your account to spend it with a credit card. This means you can spend well beyond your means and still not reach your credit limit. But that doesn’t mean you should. It’s easy to get carried away with credit card spending and rack up a ton of debt without meaning to. Be careful and spend responsibly.

With all of the risks of credit cards, should you still tell your kids to get one? Absolutely. They’ll need credit to get a mortgage, a car loan, or even an apartment. I recommend opening a bank account for your kids when they’re in elementary school, and making decisions about when they get their first card based on the needs and personality of each child.

Written by Elizabeth Lang and published on Wise Bread. Read more articles from Wise Bread.

Mass Effect: Infiltrator sneaks into the Play Store

2012-05-22T22:27:41Z

OK, so the Mass Effect 3 live wallpaper wasn’t exactly a star-studded Android debut for Bioware’s massively popular sci-fi RPG franchise. But now Android gamers can finally get their hands on Mass Effect: Infiltrator, the mobile prequel to Mass Effect 3. The EA game is available now on the Google Play Store for $6.99… just ten weeks after it was released on iOS. Hooray!

Infiltrator is a prequel to Mass Effect 3 with an original character not featured in any of the previous games. You play Randall Ezno, an agent for the shadowy Cerberus organization led by ~~Martin Sheen~~ the Illusive Man. (Sorry folks, no FemShep or Liara action here.) You’re assigned to collect various alien organisms and artifacts for Cerberus experiments combining human technology with the terrifying Reapers.

Go to interesting locales, meet fascinating alien species, then kill most of them! That’s the formula that Mass Effect has used thus far, and Infiltrator doesn’t disappoint. It adapts the cover-based third-person shooter gameplay of the main game into a tablet and smartphone form factor, using much of the same weapons, hacking and biotic (AKA The Force) techniques. You’ll need a pretty powerful device to play the game – probably Tegra 2 or better.

You might want to hold off on this one for a few days, gamers – reviews of the original iOS game were lukewarm at best, and Infiltrator is an expensive $6.99. It’s also pretty massive (yuk yuk) at over 450MB. Connecting Mass Effect: Infiltrator with your EA account can affect your Galaxy at War score in the main game, possibly changing the ending. Well, as much as the much-hated ending can be changed, anyway.

[via Android Police]

Why HTC’s clock always says 10:08

2012-05-23T00:20:40Z

Long-time Android fans and HTC aficionados have probably noticed that in HTC’s advertisements and press shots, their distinctive clock widget always shows 10:08. Why is this? Is it because of some connection with a founder’s birthday? The moon landing? A Masonic ritual? Well, no: the real reason is much more ordinary, if somewhat obscure. HTC’s official blog clues us in on why.

See, 10:08 is the time at which the maximum number of cells on a digital 12-hour clock (like the one you’ve probably got sitting next to your bed) are lit up. Of course “88:88″ would be ideal, but since the clock is constrained to real time and most of them only have two cells for the first hour position, 10:08 is as full as the cells get. Of course, modern touchscreens aren’t limited to this, so why keep the trend going? HTC doesn’t say this in their post, but it probably goes back to the original HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6, way back in 2007. The TouchFLO interface introduced in this model eventually became the Sense UI we know today. You can see the digital-style clock in the Wikipedia photo below:

Wikipedia also tells us that 10:08 (or something close to it) has been a popular position for analog clocks and watches in marketing materials for decades. Reasoning varies, but the most obvious seems to be that the symmetrical hands wouldn’t obscure the manufacturer logo (either below the 12 or above the 6) or the date or week view, if such is present. There you have it folks – conspiracy theorists, it’s time to move on.

Doomsday Preppers: Sony Introduces 4,000mAh Hand-Cranked Portable Battery

2012-05-23T04:14:21Z

Going on a family camping trip but want to keep texting the gf/bf? Maybe the world was just hit by a meteo scientists are calling “wormwood,” and there’s no longer in your area? In the past, we’ve shown you a few options for powering up your device when situations aren’t exactly ideal, but where the PowerPot required you to start a fire to generate power, Sony’s all new CP-A2LAKS USB charger requires nothing more than a set of working phalanges.

The 4,000 mAh hand-cranked USB charger works great in a pinch, requiring only 130 minutes of crankin’ to charge a device to full capacity (and get some totally ripped forearms in the process). If you body can’t handle 2 hours of vigorous activity, Sony also says that 5 minutes of cranking should provide about a 2 minutes of talk time and somewhere around 1 minute of online browsing (provided you aren’t connected to Verizon’s 4G).

If cranking your device to climax isn’t really your thing, it also doubles as a traditional portable battery that can be charged via a standard wall socket. This little fella will go on sale in June for around $100. Get one for the wife. Tell her it’s the new Zumba.

[XperiaBlog | Sony]

Why Start-up Culture Is Bad for Creativity

2012-05-22T13:01:00Z

Founders are expected to perform under pressure, iterate on the fly, and fail fast. But is that ethos doing more harm than good?

Something is happening to the start-up culture—and I'm not sure I like what it's doing to me.

For a couple of years now, one of the core start-up mantras has been "release early and release often"—or, even more pithy, "fail fast."

There's nothing wrong with this idea on the face of it. But combine it with the romanticized notion of working day and night narrowly focused on your start-up, and you have an entrepreneurial culture that's fast-paced on a whole new level.

Most days, this is exciting and it is what's required to keep up with the pace of innovation in the tech community. But more and more, I'm starting to think that the constant pressure to go-go-go may be killing more organizations than it's helping.

Where 'Aha' Moments Really Come From

I've been reading Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. In the book, Lehrer explores everything from neuroscience to anthropology to uncover the mystical nuances behind those "aha" moments. How do entrepreneurs break through creativity blocks and come up with brilliant ideas and solutions? Contrary to the prevailing start-up culture, creativity doesn't usually come easy or fast.

Think about the most creative companies: Apple doesn't iterate on the fly. The company has learned over the years to follow its vision and release something right, not rushed. Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest, often recounts the six months of tweaking he did to the home page that would eventually grab so many users' attention. Most great ideas are months (even years) in the making, and they tend to come along when the pressure is off.

According to Lehrer, we need the right mix of focus and freedom from pressure to be at our most creative. We need to gather all of the information we possibly can, then let our brain relax enough to access the bits that tie it all together to form the answer.

Where's the Breathing Room?

I don't think the current start-up climate is conducive to breathing room. It's about perform, perform, perform and release, release, release. Sleeping under your desk and being obsessive is valued.

A start-up CEO does a million jobs: PR, business development, design (Illustrator is my second most used application next to my browser), investor relations, recruiting, marketing, and more. The most important job, however, is to provide vision. But if you are pulled in several different directions, that vision is impaired.

I posted "All I need is room to breathe" on my Facebook wall the other day. Every start-up founder I know liked the post. I love fast-paced environments just like most entrepreneurs, but I make too many bad decisions just because I need to. I perform well under pressure. I wonder what I could do with more breathing room.

Dragon Drive! lets you take the wheel, while Nuance takes dictation

2012-05-22T22:12:00Z

Do you like your cars smart? Are you itching to drive something a bit more K.I.T.T. than KIA? Well, this summer the glory of your Hasselhoff-soaked, '80s dreams will become reality, thanks to the folks at Nuance. Utilizing the same natural-language voice software currently employed across select mobile phones and TV sets, the outfit's hatched a new platform, dubbed Dragon Drive!, specifically for connected autos. The hands-free tech will support six languages at launch, with more to come throughout the year, giving drivers the ability to dictate texts and emails, as well as manage multimedia and navigation without ever lifting a finger from the wheel. So far, the company hasn't outed any initial partners for the voice recognition service. But if you're in the market for a high-end vehicle and your very own virtual Synergy, rest assured, your needs are going to be met. Hit up the break for the official presser and video tour.

Continue reading Dragon Drive! lets you take the wheel, while Nuance takes dictation

Dragon Drive! lets you take the wheel, while Nuance takes dictation originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 18:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fire Up the Grill: 5 Mouthwatering Recipes for Your Memorial Day Weekend

2012-05-22T22:16:18Z

For many of us, Memorial Day weekend kicks off the start of another great summer. Thousands will flock to the beaches, lakes, and mountains of our great country to take in the warm sunshine and beautiful weather. Of course, I’ll be right there with the rest of you. Readied with a cold beer in one hand and a spatula in the other, I spend the majority of my Memorial Day weekends surrounded by family and friends at our lake house on Georgia’s scenic Lake Oconee.

On such weekends, my house typically becomes the center for all of the action. After all, my family is pretty well-known for never meeting a stranger. For instance, if you walked through my backdoor, momma would instantly offer up a variety of home cooked food and drink from her kitchen–quickly followed by an invitation to stick around for supper. I suppose it’s true that the acorn doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I owe momma a debt of gratitude for my cooking expertise and Southern hospitality.

Since I can’t invite you all over for supper, I figured I’d offer up the next best thing: my recipes. Whenever I’m at the lake, I prefer to spend my time outside–just man and grill. These recipes provide an outstanding base of grilled fare for you to enjoy at your holiday cookout.

Most importantly, when you are surrounded by family and friends this weekend, enjoying some of the great recipes below, say a prayer for the members of our armed forces and their families. Some have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Many of them are fighting battles or serving far away from those that they love. May our hearts and prayers be with them until they safely return home.

Best,

Bistro Steak Sandwiches + Caramelized Onion + Basil-Balsamic Mayo

Even with such a complicated name, this recipe couldn’t be easier. However, don’t let the ease of this recipe fool you, as it boasts tons of flavor. Follow my step-by-step instructions for this delicious and hearty favorite. (Prep 15 mins, Cook 45 mins, Serves 4)

Bistro Steak Sandwiches

4 Hamburger Buns (French-style if available)
2 lbs. Skirt/Flank Steak
¼ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Kosher Salt
Fresh Cracked Pepper
Caramelized Onions (see below)
Basil-Balsamic Mayo (see below)

Caramelized Onions

2 Large Yellow Onions, thinly sliced
¼ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 Teaspoon Kosher Salt

Add ingredients into a skillet over medium low heat. Cook onions for 25 – 35 minutes, stirring often until browned and tender.

Basil-Balsamic Mayo

1 Cup Mayonnaise
1 Clove Garlic, finely minced
¼ Cup Fresh Basil, julienned
2 Tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar

Whisk together ingredients in a mixing bowl until thoroughly combined. Cover and keep chilled until ready to serve.

Cooking and Assembly

Preheat a grill or grill pan over medium-high heat. Slice buns and cook cut-side down over direct heat until slightly charred and toasted. Meanwhile, coat the skirt steak in oil and season liberally with salt and pepper. Add the steaks to the grill over direct heat and cook for 2 – 3 minutes on each side for medium rare/medium (depending on the thickness). Remove steaks from grill, allowing them to rest for 4 – 5 minutes before slicing. Next, thinly slice the steaks on the bias and across the grain every ¼ inch or so. Pile the sliced steak high on the bottom side of the bun, while generously coating the top side of the bun with the mayo and onions. Top off the sandwich and serve immediately.

Grilled Beef Kebabs

These juicy, marinated kebabs are perfect for preparing a day or so in advance, and pulling out to quickly grill and serve in a matter of minutes. Packed with tender beef and colorful vegetables, these are sure to be a hit with your guests. (Prep 15 minutes, Marinate 3 – 4 hours, Cook 15 minutes, Serves 4)

1/2 Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 Cup Balsamic Vinegar
2 Tablespoons Red Wine Vinegar
1 Lemon, juiced
10 Garlic Cloves, minced
2 Tablespoons Fresh Mint, chopped
2 lbs. Top Sirloin Filets, cut into chunks
1 Large Red Onion, cut into chunks
Assorted Sweet Peppers, seeded and cut into chunks
2 Tablespoons Kosher Salt
1 Tablespoon Fresh Cracked Pepper
3 Pinches Red Pepper Flakes
1 Teaspoon Allspice
1/4 Teaspoon Cinnamon

Add all ingredients to a zip-lock bag and marinate for 3 – 4 hours in the fridge, or overnight. Preheat grill over medium high heat. Skewer ingredients evenly on metal or bamboo skewers (soak prior to using). Place skewers over direct heat, grilling for 2 – 3 minutes on each side for medium. Remove and rest for 5 minutes prior to serving. Serve.

Grilled Rosemary Shrimp Kebabs

Tender, fresh shrimp are one of my favorite things to put on the grill. The rosemary doubles as a skewer, while also providing a nice, herbaceous flavor to the hearty shrimp. (Prep 10 mins, Cook 8 mins, Serves 4 – 6)

6 – 8 Large Rosemary Sprigs, soaked in water for 10 minutes
1 lb. Large Shrimp, peeled and deveined
Kosher Salt
Fresh Cracked Pepper
1 Lemon, juiced
2 Tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Preheat one side of the grill to medium-high heat. Meanwhile, season shrimp in a bowl with a few generous pinches of salt and pepper. Add lemon juice and olive oil–toss until thoroughly combined. Begin skewering shrimp, starting at the bottom of the rosemary sprig and working your way to the top (with the leaves), careful not to overcrowd. Add shrimp to grill over direct heat, 1 – 2 minutes. Move shrimp to indirect heat and cook for another 3 – 4 minutes, or until firm and pink. Remove from grill and serve immediately.

Oven Roasted/Grilled Baby Back BBQ Ribs

This recipe is written with the assumption that most of you do not have access to a smoker. For those that do, you can replace the cooking process described below with simply smoking the ribs over low heat (175 – 200 degrees F) for 3 – 4 hours. The result is a fall-off-the-bone rib that still packs plenty of bite and flavor. Substitute spare ribs if desired. (Prep 15 mins, Cook 3 – 4 hours, Serves 4 – 6)

2 Slabs Baby Back Ribs, trimmed
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Kosher Salt
Fresh Cracked Pepper
Garlic Powder
BBQ Sauce (I use Johnny Harris BBQ sauce out of Savannah, GA)

Preheat oven to 175 degrees F. Meanwhile, line a large baking sheet with aluminum foil. Coat ribs in olive oil and season liberally with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Place ribs, meat side down, onto the baking sheet and bake 3 – 4 hours. Next, preheat grill to medium-high, carefully add ribs over direct heat with the meat side up (as pictured) and coat in BBQ sauce. Grill for 10 – 15 minutes and serve.

Red Cabbage + Chive + Blue Cheese Slaw

A colorful and delicious slaw, this version omits the mayo without losing any flavor. It’s best to prepare this at least an hour in advance, keeping covered in the fridge to allow the flavors to meld before serving. This slaw makes a great side dish for all of the grilled items above. (Prep 15 mins, Cook N/A, Serves 4 – 6)

5 Cups Red Cabbage, thinly sliced
¾ Cup Chives, sliced every inch on the bias
½ Cup Crumbled Blue Cheese
¾ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
¼ Cup Red Wine Vinegar
1 Teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 Teaspoon Fresh Cracked Pepper

Add the first three ingredients into a large serving bowl. Next, whisk together the remaining ingredients until thoroughly combined. Pour the oil and vinegar mixture over the cabbage and toss until evenly distributed. Cover, and keep in the fridge for at least one hour prior to serving. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

What’s on your Memorial Day menu? Share your recipes and grilling tips with us in the comments!

Want to Shop With Your Friends Online? Try This Site

2012-05-22T03:21:16Z

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Motilo

Quick Pitch: Shop and style fashion products with your friends.

Genius Idea: Like going to the mall with your best friend, online.

Sofia Barattieri and Maysoune Ghobash wanted to shop together. The best friends and former shopping buddies had suddenly found themselves on separate parts of the globe, and missed being able to suggest items and get feedback from each other when perusing for clothes and accessories in their favorite stores.

And so they were inspired to launch Motilo in April 2011. The site, which nabbed “Most Innovative Website” at the Guardian Awards for Digital Innovation earlier this year, serves up a feed of fashionable items from retailers like Net-a-Porter and Farfetch, which girls can assemble into outfits, a la Polyvore. While they’re browsing, they can chat with their friends to praise a certain blouse, or recommend a different pair of earrings.

When they’re finished browsing and styling, users can click through to purchase their looks from their respective retailers.

It’s a well-designed site, and a neat solution for those content to shop from the (mostly high-end) retailers included. For those who tend to shop from other retailers — a Banana Republic, say, or Ann Taylor — the experience is less seamless; users can still swap links and discuss products, but they will be unable to style items or click to purchase when they’re done. As Motilo expands its range of retail partners and its mobile offerings, we can see this improving, however.

Try it for yourself and let us know what you think.

Image courtesy of Flickr, andrewarchy

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, ecommerce, fashion, motilo, retail, shopping

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Microsoft Research team shatters data sorting record, wrenches trophy from Yahoo

2012-05-22T09:26:00Z

Bruise inducing high-fives, anyone? They're handing them out in Redmond, according to one mildly injured researcher, after breaking a data sorting record Yahoo set in 2009. The ruckus surrounds a benchmark called MinuteSort, which measures how much data can be sorted in 60 seconds. Microsoft's Distributed Systems group utilized a new file system architecture, dubbed Flat Datacenter Storage, over a full bisection bandwidth network to burn through the competition.

Not only did the nine-person crew best the old record nearly by a factor of three, it gave itself a handicap -- sorting 1,401 GB of data at 2 GB/s over a remote file system, forcing the system to crunch data at a slower speed than the technique is capable of. It's not all about bragging rights, however, Bing has its eye on the newfangled file system in hopes of boosting its RPM. Microsoft suspects the tech could also pick up the pace of machine learning and churn through large data sets in a jiffy. You can catch Microsoft Research's detailed explanation in all its glory at the source.

Update: Commenter Mark Streich points out that while 2 GB/s may sound fast, it's certainly not speedy enough to sort 1,401 gigabytes in a single minute. To achieve that performance, simultaneous input and output speeds could hit 2GB/s on each computer used.

Microsoft Research team shatters data sorting record, wrenches trophy from Yahoo originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 05:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GitHub branches out, releases Windows client

2012-05-22T10:26:00Z

GitHub, the version tracking and collaboration platform for developers, has proven quite popular, especially with the open source crowd. There's been one glaring issue with the dev hub, though -- lack of an easy to use Windows client. Sure, app creators could sync their changes though command line tools and SSH, but Mac devs have had a slick desktop app to call their own for sometime. Now Microsoft users get the same benefits, including the ability to merge branches and roll back changes, wrapped in pretty Metro-friendly package. You'll find more info and a download link at the source.

GitHub branches out, releases Windows client originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 06:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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8 Most Useful Keyboard Shortcuts For Beginner Eclipse IDE Users

2012-05-22T00:31:56Z

I recently had two pair assignments for class, each of which had to be with a different classmate. With the object of programming for Java, we utilized Eclipse as our IDE simply because that was what we were taught to use. I tried learning VIM editor keyboard shortcuts, but I have not been using it daily so I was fine with using Eclipse, which seemed to make everything a lot easier. You can see a list of all the files in your Java (or Android for that matter) project in the package explorer, easily navigate to the desired function with the outline window, get suggestions for functions, imports, and more.

Anyhow, since my partners and I worked with Eclipse, my first partner taught me a few keyboard shortcuts, which I then taught to my second partner, whom did not use “sysout” or any Eclipse shortcuts (if you do not know what “sysout” means, you’re reading the right article!). Thus, the reason for this post was born – to go over some very useful keyboard shortcuts for actions you’ll probably perform often.

If you are a frequent reader of this post and have contemplated programming for a little while, ponder no longer. We at MakeUseOf have compiled a few lists to websites that will guide you through Java (or C++) lessons and examples. What if you’re unsure of what language to start with? We also have you covered with suggestions for web and software development. So once you’re done browsing through our development collection, feel inspired to start programming, and have Eclipse installed, you might want find the following tips useful.

Control + Shift + O: Import

If you’re going to use ArrayList, LinkedList or any other such data structure class from the Java Collections Framework, you will need the following lines above your class declaration and constructor.

import java.awt.List;
import java.util.ArrayList;
 
public class Hello {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello World!");
  }
}

Instead of having to type the import lines, you could just write your code first in the editor and whenever you see red squiggly lines signaling that you need to import a specific class, all you have to do is press Ctrl + Shift + O and ALL the unknown types will be imported. No more going into the focus popup and pressing Import for each class.

Control + I: Indent

Is your code looking like this at times?

Simply highlight the code portion that looks hard to read, press Ctrl + i to indent everything nicely.

Control + D: Delete Line

If you need to delete a line, you might usually highlight the entire line with your mouse (or with the Home or End buttons) and delete the new line character every time. Try Ctrl + D for quick whole-line deletion. It will be like the line was never even there, no final new line character touchups necessary.

Control + Space: Auto-Complete Variable Or Function Name

If you have declared and initialized at least one variable or even function or method, you can type the first few letters of the variable or function name, hit Ctrl + Space to auto-complete it. This will work well if you have very unique variable or function names, because otherwise, you’ll have to choose among the distinct names in a focus popup window.

Sysout + Control + Space: Puts System.out.println()

If you ever need to type out a print statement, in particular, “System.out.println()”, there’s a shortcut for this: Simply type out the word “sysout” and then hit Ctrl + Space.

Control + H: Search Your Entire Project

When you’re working on projects with numerous classes that rely on each other, sometimes you might forget where it was you declared a specific function or variable. If that’s the case, Ctrl + h will come in handy as it lets you search through not just the class you’re working on, but the entire project folder.

Control + F11: Run

If you’re constantly pressing on Run As > Java Application, you can instead press on Ctrl + F11 to run your program.

Alt + Shift + R: Rename

When you want to rename a variable or a function, you don’t have to re-type every single instance of the old variable or function name, nor do you have to right-click on the name and select Refactor > Rename when you can simply press Alt + Shift + R to rename ALL the instances.

What other handy tips do you have for beginners? Let us know in the comments below!

Siri, Y U No Understand Me? [INFOGRAPHIC]

2012-05-22T01:32:17Z

Siri is a loyal mistress, following you wherever you go — but is she a good listener?

Since the iPhone 4S began coming standard with Siri last October, the voice activated personal assistant has become a cultural phenomenon. Samuel L. Jackson and Zooey Deschanel star in Siri-themed ads for the phone. A creepy iPhone case forces you to interact with Siri. A different project enables Siri to destroy your phone if it’s lost or stolen, and a viral video shows what happens when Siri goes psycho.

But everyone’s not impressed. In March, a man filed suit against Apple, alleging that Siri “does not perform as advertised.” Anecdotally, many others have complained that Siri doesn’t respond to voice commands and questions as hyped.

Given the controversy, Internet education portal OnlineDegrees.com rounded up a number of studies and statistics from sources including The Wall Street Journal, ABC News and others over the past several months to produce the infographic below. Among the findings: 87% of iPhone 4S owners use Siri at least once per month, with just over half describing themselves as “satisfied” with her performance. Another 9% say they’re not satisfied, while 36% say they’re somewhere between happy and unhappy.

Only two-thirds of users, however, employ Siri for anything beyond searching the web, making a phone call or sending a text. At least 30% of users say they would never use Siri to schedule a metting, play music or even send an email, while just a quarter use Siri to send emails on a daily basis.

Check out the infographic below for more on how iPhone owners do — and don’t — use Siri. Then let us know in the comments — do you think Siri really works?

More About: apple, infographics, iphone, siri