Evolution of Invention in the Last 50 Years

In 1963, John F. Kennedy (JFK) was the president, the Beatles released their 1st single in US "Please Please Me", and Mickey Mantle signed a contract with the New York Yankees for $100,000. Society and technology has evolved quite a bit over the last 50 years, and advancements in invention have been a large driver of change. In the last 50 years between 1963 and 2012, the number of patent applications and patent grants issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office has increased by roughly 500%.
To celebrate the innovation that has taken place over the last 50 years the patent and new product marketing experts at Innovate Product Design have come up with a very interesting infographic that explores the evolution of invention.

The infographic notes several trends over the last five decades, most notably the dramatic increase in the number of patent applications and grants. However, a spotlight is also cast on some of the most influential innovations of the last 50 years, including the commerical jetliner, the remote control (TV), cellular phones, GPS technology, and perhaps the most life-changing evolution of them all, the internet. Also, the infographic offers a useful overview of the disntinctions between the three different types of patents including, Utility Patents, Design Patents, and Plant Patents.

Enjoy this infographic, and please feel free to submit your comments or questions, including any inventions of the last five decades that you think should have been included on this list!

© 2013 Innovate Product Design

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Best Apps To Make Christmas Easier

Christmas is approaching and as many of you rush around, preparing the food and buying/wrapping the presents things can get pretty hectic. Fortunately there a number of great apps to help take some of the stress away. There are many apps to be taken advantage of which can really ensure this time of the year becomes less stressful. For those wishing to ease into the festive season, consider some of these useful apps:

The Christmas List
You'll be able to control your Christmas shopping with this app, keeping track of everything you've purchased as well as everything you still need to buy. The app keeps track of prices, provides you with ideas and adds contacts from your own contact book. It's an ideal app for those that require clarity and precision at this time of year as well as those looking to keep to a budget. Christmas shopping no longer needs to be the overwhelming mission it can be anymore.

Gift Wrapping Instant Expert
Many people will actively love buying and receiving presents but this time of year always tests one's patience with sellotape. Wrapping gifts can be a chore but this creative app is designed to reduce that stress with hints, tips and great techniques. For those who feel like they're ready to take the next step, you can learn how to create bows, produce personalised gift tags and even set up gift baskets for a specified recipient, adding some spice to the usually mundane procedure.

Christmas Cookies - Heavenly Recipes
Christmas is a time of indulgence and the time of year when people forget the diet and embrace the season. Christmas cookies are always a classic, easy to bake and enjoyed by everyone. This app makes it even easier with its sophisticated interface and easy-to-understand recipes, perfect for all budding chefs. For the required ingredients, the app even includes a shopping list feature allowing you to add the ingredients, making it easier once you hit the supermarket as opposed to writing everything down.

Cards
Providing you have a good fibre optic broadband connection, Cards is a great app that changes the way you send off your Christmas cards this year. You can choose from a large array of cards, themes, backgrounds and messages, and then log in with your ID to send them out, eliminating the need for envelopes and stamps and post-office queues entirely. It's something different and special and those that are printed are done so with high-quality paper, ensuring a unique twist on a Christmas tradition.

Christmas Countdown
Finally, the Christmas Countdown app is a minimal app that records the days left until the big day. Not only does it count down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to Christmas, it also allows the user to play a selection of their favourite Christmas songs and carols, fully immersing them into the festive season. For those looking for an extra whimsical touch, the app features a range of different, festive backgrounds whilst some may wish to use photos from their own personal library.

Related Article : Top Technology Gifts For Her

Lindsey is a stay at home mum and blogger. She understands how stresful the holiday period can be and is always keen to find ways to make it a little easier! 

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Developing Online Courses That Encourages Student Participation

Online courses provide learning institutions with a way to broaden their educational reach and teach more individuals. Nearly every type of learning can be taught in an online environment, giving instructors and course designers the freedom and flexibility to go beyond the limit of the classroom and teach in ways that would have been unimaginable before the commercialization of the internet. As the world of online courses continues to evolve and expand, not only in a K-12 and higher education setting but also in corporate training systems and other adult education environments, the challenge of ensuring participation by everyone is a constant concern.

Some of the bias against online courses is the inability of the instructor to physically engage learners in the same way as in the classroom. Some suggest that learners in an online environment simply turn their computer screen on are engaged in a monocratic process with no interaction with the learner. Whether that is actually true is an eye of the beholder opinion; however, the way in which an online course is designed has more to do with the level of interaction and participation an instructor will receive.

A Critique of Early Online Learning Environments
One of the problems with the earlier designs of online learning was the belief that the limits that are intrinsic to teaching learners in the classroom (i.e. size of the room, available supplies and equipment, time, etc.) do not exist outside of the classroom. The instructor's role, based on some technically designed course, was to provide their content in a static format, handout out a login and sit back and watch the learners learn. What took place unfortunately was with the lack of a human presence, such as a moderator or facilitator for the learning, learners were less apt to fully participate and as a result found the online experience dissatisfying. Much of the online learning that was created in the early days focused on the tools used in delivering the learning as oppose to a focus on the learner's needs. The missing element in this type of tool-centered learning was the social presence or process of socialization needed to sustain a learner's attention and motivation to participate in the course.

The Reason for Student Participation in Online Courses
Learning institutions are moving toward the development of learner centered courses that appeal to the different perceptions of learning (i.e. modalities of learning). The absence of an instructor's physical presence needs to be simulated in a way that gives online students the full sense of the classroom and classroom participation. Utilizing techniques that incorporate live discussion, multimedia webcasts, polling and other forms of interaction give students the opportunity to share their personal experiences with other learners. The institution of a pedagogical approach to online learning is important because of the demographics of the online learner. Undergraduates make up the vast majority of people who attempt at least one course online (82.4 percent). Those individuals who are of Generation X (born 1965-1980) are the majority of online distance learners (many using online courses as a way to learn new skills or finish previous degree requirements) with those in Generation Next (1981-2000) in line to become the largest population of online learning consumers. The age range for these two groups is 18 (those born in 1995) to 48, meaning that adult pedagogical learning models must be developed to produce greater student participation.

A Social Constructivist Approach to Encourage Student Participation
The word "constructivism" and social constructivism is being used more and more to describe the types of successful learning environments that yield effective student participation. A constructivist approach involves the construction of knowledge in a learning setting by including the importance of the learner's culture in relationship to the learning. Creating small groups and collaborations among online learners helps the learner discusses and debate learning in order to build on or reinforce existing knowledge. Changing the way online courses are developed to account for the needs of the learner will help make courses stronger, impactful and more able to deliver their desired outcome.

Sameer Bhatia is founder & CEO of ProProfs.com which is a leading provider of online training plateform  for building, Online testing, and applying knowledge. Sameer has a background in technology with a Masters in Computer Science from USC (University Of Southern California) and is an ed-tech industry veteran. You can find Sameer on Google+.

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Fascinating Finds on Ebay

If you search for it, you can find amazing stuff on Ebay! Here are some of the amazing things we’ve found on Ebay!

Joe Di Maggio’s passport! You’ll probably get arrested if you try and use it to fly abroad but for $4.8K it can be yours!

If you’ve always wanted to own a ballistic missile base but the estate agents have never been able to find the right one – you’re in luck! We found the former US ballistic missile base in Washington on sale for $750K. Not sure if the seller will budge on the asking price but try your luck.

Who doesn’t want to own their own town? We sure would but they’re rarely on sale! Well, we’ve found that a town in Texas called Albert is on sale for $3.5 million, we’d advise you to hurry up as buying a town is quite a popular activity.

Lady Thatcher wasn’t famous for having the most loyal fan group but her famous black handbag is on sale for £103K which gives the Hermes Birkin bag a run for its money! There is also a pre-historic skeleton that could be yours for just £61K! If you’ve always wanted Max the Mammoth’s skeleton – this is your chance to your hands on it but be gentle it is quite old!

Infographic brought to you by UK Packaging

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What If Your Favorite Music Programs Were Built In the Past?

Did you ever wonder what it would have been like if the top music programs of today had been around decades ago? What if iTunes was built in the 1970s, for instance? If it were, you would have been standing in ridiculously long lines just for the experience. But you’d be able to check out songs for three weeks at a time, and you’d probably get a really cool Apple sticker with your rental. What would the downsides be? Well, for one—that same ridiculously long line we mentioned earlier. You know, for the experience. You’d also have late fees if you don’t return your songs on time. Finally, you’d only be able to use your song rentals in one household. Bummer. There are other modern music programs that would have operated a little differently in the past. Think about Pandora, Grooveshark, Napster, Spotify and even Last.fm. If you’re curious to know what these programs would have been like in the past, check out the infographic below.

Torch is a free and unique software that offers you powerful browsing together with built-in media downloading and sharing features, and creator of the Torch Browser Back in Time infographic.

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CME Co-Location Services - Reasons To Choose It For Web Hosting

Colocation is nothing but a hosting option for the small business organization who wishes to get the feature of a large IT department without incurring the costs associated with it. Many large corporations have their own infrastructure to host their web servers and also have a team of IT professionals to design and manage the site, the small companies and individuals don’t. There are different options that are available, that range from simple hosting to running your own Web servers off of an internet connection. Such an option is called colocation. But if you’re wondering why one would choose colocation over all the other hosting options, you need to know more on this.

What actually happens in colocation?

When it comes to colocation, you actually place the server machine with a third-party and apart from this, you’ll be able to share the bandwidth. The expenditures that are associated are a bit higher than the usual web hosting and as a matter of fact, it is even less than normal web hosting. After the machine gets established, you can even move it physically to another location of the provider of the colocation and fix it in the rack. In case you want, you may even rent a server machine from the provider of the colocation and you can also rent from CME aurora data center as this is yet another alternative to get enhanced speed. As a result, CME colocation services helps you place the order at a rapid speed than what is expected.

The different advantages of colocation services

There are more than one advantages of colocation and if you’re not aware of them, here are some that you may check out.

1. Expenses are related to bandwidth: The cost of the bandwidth is usually believed to be one of the biggest advantages of colocation. Particularly in such a situation, you may be able to save more money with time and the reason behind this is that the only one server that is there in colocation is the CME aurora data center.
2. The server machineries and software: This may happen that the server machineries usually run very slow as they don’t have sufficient memory and in such cases, you might have to update the server machinery and also the software.
3. The outage protection has been enhanced: The power outage protection is even better when you include it in the features of colocation. If there’s a power-cut and there seems to be a heavy storm, there will also be generators that can check the back-ups. This can easily safeguard you from the situation where you might have to face any kind of interruption.

So, in case you’re looking for web hosting services, colocation is certainly the best and the right option for you. Earn money and get services from CME aurora data center to ensure high speed.

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Windows Data Recovery Using Linux

We've all been there. We've used the same hard drive for more than 5 years until it suddenly decided to give out. Was it a virus? Was it a mechanical problem? You don't know. And you don't care because you're too angry. All those songs, all those picture collections and wallpapers you'd downloaded are gone! You've made a backup for some of them, of course, but not all. And who knows how old the DVDs are and if they will run properly. Ah, darn it! If only there was a way to recover the data from the dying hard drive...

Oh, wait, there is! There are many Linux distributions you can use in order to deal with this problem. Lucky for you, most Linux distributions have a live CD and can be used to recover the data. There are even distributions created specifically for the job, such as SystemRescueCD. This is the A-Team of operating systems. When you have a problem; when there is no way to solve it; when there is no one else to turn to and if you can operate SystemRescueCD, then you can use it. Don't worry about it, it's not that difficult. Although most Windows users faint at even the thought of using Linux, and even more so when they see the text-based user interface, like I said it's not that difficult to deal with the issue.

SystemRescueCD

SystemRescueCD is based on Gentoo Linux and uses the Xfce user interface (the same as Xubuntu, for example). Don't get too excited, though. Even though the OS has an GUI, that doesn't mean that you will be using a lot of it. In fact, you will mostly be typing commands in the terminal. But don't despair – you won't get lost (hopefully).

Even though it looks like your garden variety operating system, it's actually designed for data recovery alone. You can't use it as your only OS. This is what makes it perfect for the task of recovering your data from the hard drive. Since you don't know what the reason is for the hard drive's demise, if it's a virus and you use a Windows based system for recovery, you might end up destroying the recovery system as well. This is your best bet

Data Recovery

When you first boot SystemRescueCD, type startx in the shell to launch the GUI. After that, insert the recovery USB flash drive. It's important that the flash drive has enough memory to hold all the data you wish to extract and also to be formatted in the NTFS file format. FAT32 is just bad and if you have large files, you really won't have a good time with it.

After you've inserted the proper flash drive, type blkid -o list so the system identifies the drives. Next, use the command ntfs-3d in order to mount the NTFS partitions (the command is mount in case you were too stubborn and insisted on using FAT32 format). Then type ls/mnt to display the directories to be mounted. The commands ntfs-3d/dev/sdb1 /mnt/backupto mount the recovery USB in the directory and ntfs-3d/dev/sda2 /mnt/windows mounts the partition you want to recover.

After you've mounted both the partition you want to recover and the USB drive to the directories, you are free to copy the data. You can do that either by using the cp command or by using the GUI of SystemRescueCD. In the bottom there is a folder-looking icon that has e2 written on it. It will open the emeFM2 file system and enable you to copy the information using the GUI. It's pretty straightforward from there. Navigate to the directories and choose the data you would like to recover. After doing recovering the data, close the file manager and type the command shutdown -h now. This will shut down SystemRescueCD. If all went according to plan, you will have saved your data successfully. Now all you have to do is format your hard drive and install a fresh Windows (if it was a software problem) or replace the hard drive altogether. The important part is that you managed to save your data.

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Web Hosting Consumer Tips

Introduction

Having your own website equates to having a superb web hosting service, for very obvious reasons. A web hosting provider that could assure you of continuous services, without downtime could very well spell great success to your website. A few minutes of downtime could mean lost sales. If you are concerned about business survival and online presence, you need to choose the best host provider that could answer to all your needs. What comes to mind is, how do you this?

Guidelines on Choosing a Web Hosting Service

• The Lure of the Free Domains

There are many hosts today that offer free hosting service. They look very enticing, since you can just plunge in and your site is ready in a flick of a finger. This can lure the most naïve among us, and it may take a while before you start asking questions – “What if your site becomes successful? Will the free service still continue?” Always remember that even if the domain provided by them is free, the web host still retains ownership of the domain name. What this means is that in a few months or years from now, though the present arrangement may sound appealing ---there may be may be need for you to ask some serious questions. For instance, who owns the domain? Even if it is free now, the host still retains ownership of it. This means, that a few years down the line when your site may have become successful, there may be a need for you to buy the domain name. Either you buy it or you go both ways – you get stuck with it or it gets deleted from cyberspace.

• Bandwidth Problems

Most newbies who are on the lookout for online presence often ignore disk space and bandwidth requirements when it comes to public domains. Just because it is free, this very critical feature is often disregarded when making decisions on what host to choose from. Problems may crop up later on or if in case your site becomes popular. At this juncture, you go running to your host to inquire if they may have an additional disk space that you can pay at an equitable price. Good if they do, and bad for you if they don’t!

• The Unlimited Storage Fallacy

We get to see many flyers and come-ons online that tend to get the attention of many netizens. It is the concept of unlimited storage, that is dangled around us like some carrot on a stick. This is a fallacy, a creation of their mindless think-tanks --- since there is no such thing as unlimited storage. If you read the fine prints on their terms of service, exceeding their prescribe amount of storage will mean a violation of your agreement. Hence, your account can be terminated for cause.

• Required Back-Up of Files

To seduce consumers into their fold, many hosting companies give off guarantees to protect your data. These come-ons come with stipulations that they have a reliable backup plan to ensure that all your documents are protected. While this may be true for some companies, it is still prudent if you do your own backups, especially if you opt to use a public server. Doing your own backup of documents would mean having an off-site alternative, so that your files are safe even if the public server crashes, as they are wont to do. It is also advisable to only enter into a short-term contract with hosting companies, so you can get out right away in case problems arises in the future.

Conclusion

Finding a good host is often times hard to do. Even professional webmasters can still fall prey to a web host that suddenly goes under. Hosting is a complex business and can experience both ups and downs in the trade. If you get lucky in finding a good host, stick it out with them through good or bad times. But if they go down for more than 24 hours, you should research other hosts in preparation to moving out. There are pros and cons to using private and public servers. The choice would eventually depend on your specific needs and budget.

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Social Media's Role In Reputation Management

It hasn’t escaped the attention of the savvy business that online reputation management is becoming more and more important pretty much by the day. With almost everyone now turning to the Internet before making any real spending decisions, it’s hardly surprising that what’s said about you and your brand online counts for more now than largely any other form of feedback. There were once only select service industries that were dependent on positive online feedback – the same now extends to every business and service across the board. But here’s the real kicker – a full 23% of people admit that they will take to the web to say bad things about a brand if need be, but less than 10% will sing the brand’s praises when absolutely delighted with their services or products. As such, the vast majority of online feedback has the potential to be negative and paint a picture of a brand that’s neither balanced nor fair – especially where everyday social network gossip is concerned.

This makes it hugely important to tap into the power of social media for positive reputation management and promotion – here are a few tips from the pros on how to go about this:

Optimize Social Media Pages

If and when it gets to the point that entering your brand name or other keywords returns a list of results where several are negative, you’re in trouble. The last thing you want is for the first thing people to see about your brand to be negative comments and reviews in Google. In order to prevent or treat this, optimize your social media pages and create more pages to optimize, in order to get these higher in the rankings and push the negative feedback further down while you go about addressing it.

Choose Social Media Carefully

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the world of social media begins and ends with Facebook. Not only is this not the case, but Facebook might not be the best platform for you to choose – not even close. Take into account the various platforms out there in accordance with the target market you’re trying to reach, in order to tailor your decision accordingly. The power of Pinterest and LinkedIn for example cannot be overstated for a great many business areas.

When You Find Praise, Run With It!

Without getting carried away and coming across as desperate, it’s never a bad idea to spread the good word about you and your brand every time something positive is said about you. If you happen to find some really glowing feedback in a dark corner somewhere that most folk won’t come across, bring it to light on either your primary page or via social media. Likewise, be sure to draw further attention to any glowing praise you receive by responding to it or leaving your own comment thanking the reviewer. In addition, don’t ever be worried to reach out to your target market and actually ask them to leave you a positive review. Assuming of course you haven’t let yourself down and did a great job living up to expectations, some will be more than happy to do so.

Embrace the Criticism

It might not appear so on the surface, but negative criticism can actually be better for your business over the long-term. Not only does it show you where you need to improve, but you can turn any negative into a positive by following it up and responding to it in order to win over the part responsible party and anyone else coming across it.

Listen and Learn

And finally, the most important thing of all to take away from social media in terms of reputation management is constructive feedback as to where you’re going wrong and what is going down well with the punters. Don’t weigh up what you read against your own biased views of the business, take them as the most valuable insights you will ever have as to how you can better your operations.

Author Bio
Rocky John Tayaban, for the past 8 years, has been helping small and large companies all over the world in their online marketing. At the moment, Rocky is the managing director of iSolutions Media - a search engine marketing firm in the Philippines. Follow him on Twitter @SmartOnlinePros to stay updated on all the latest in social and search.

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