We were unlucky enough to experience the Fukushima disaster first hand, but the biggest takeaway we gathered from the disaster wasn’t the horrific event rather it was how people came together. We were overwhelmed with support from our own families, the heartfelt thoughts of the people of Japan thinking of their loved ones, and the resiliency of a nation. When the nation was hurting people the people of Japan were coming together.
A new social network in San Francisco has learnt from moments such as this and others such as the devastation created by Hurricane Sandy. Instead of seeing disasters as a time when cities fall apart – SF72 wants you to see them as a time when people come together. Being prepared for a catastrophe isn’t just about having tubs of water, cans of beans and other supplies it also is about knowing those around you, lending a friendly hand, and transferring knowledge.
Although technically not a startup, Karma Refill is a concept app that has a striking visual approach to charitable donations. Designed by Isaac Pagan, Senior Art Director at Energy BBDO, the application is intended to make it donating as much as your heart wishes and your wallet can bare to various, popular, and preferential organizations as easy as possible.
Once logged in, with a tap of a button users can incrementally decide how much to donate (once for $1, twice for $5, three times for $10 and so forth). After any donation is made Karma Points are earned which, in concept, can be utilized to redeem for goods through participating corporate partners, or given back to charities.
Google (PowerMeter) and Microsoft (Hohm) couldn’t successfully launch an application that helped users adopt energy monitoring technology. But Facebook is hoping that their new application, set to launch in 2012, will be adopted and let users monitor their energy consumption while competing with others to reduce electricity bills.
Crunch.fm is a application that makes your Tweets more musical. By integrating the Crunch.fm application to your Twitter account, you can use their service to search for a track, listen to a stream of the track (via YouTube) and then share the track with your followers.
Remember those childhood build your own adventure stories that we took part in during reading time? Well how does that rebuild itself with today’s technologies? The Infinite Adventure Machine is a truly imaginative technological advancement that lets your own ideas work with computation to develop a truly unique fairy-tale plot on the spot.
Waking up could become a new way to express and embrace creativity through the TalkO’Clock app. This interesting new app connects you with others who are volunteering to wake you up through their “creative” means. The app will be free and users simply signup through the TalkO’Clock website, setup a time for when they want to be woken up and pick the gender of whom they would like to receive a call from. TalkO’Clock will then choose a name at random from its database of volunteer callers, call them anonymously and then connect them to you. Then its up to the caller to wake up the receiver.
Onavo is an app for your iPhone that compresses your data usage to save you money. While the app is installed and during your normal iPhone usage, the software will compress the background data usage by the other apps currently installed on your iPhone. The application will also break down the data usage of each app and let you know which ones have their hands in your wallet the most.
Developed by the team from PixelMedia Inc. Bzzy App is a convenient SMS auto responder to text messages and phone calls to let your friends know you’re busy. A simple, smart, intuitive and easy to use app that lets you customize text messages for reply’s while you perform various tasks.
Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina is launching a fun and clever product today to let iPhone users send real, physical postcards directly from your iPhone (or from the Web). Postagram is the app. Sincerely is the new company he started to create it.
iMockups, for the iPad, is your solution to design on the go. By giving developers and designers a plethora of templates and tools on the iPad, users can quickly draft wireframes for websites and applications on the fly. Exclusively for the iPad, iMockups takes advantage of the flexibilities of the platform with a simple and intuitive interface that takes full advantage of the touch screen abilities to draft your designs.
