TAKA DESIGNS

One of the great things that I love about Foursquare are the tips that people leave for restaurants and venues. When trying a new restaurant, one of the first things I do is check and see what food tips people have left. If you like a tip you can also “like” it. Think of it as the “Like” button for Facebook, but on Foursquare.  Tips are also listed by the number of likes, with the highest at the top.

So when I decided to check-in to Urth Caffe in Santa Monica recently, I noticed one particular tip that had over 800 likes. However, it wasn’t from a person. It was from a brand. Not just any brand – it was Bravo. They had leveraged their TV personality Patti Stanger from the show Millionaire Matchmaker to endorse Urth Caffe by leaving a tip.

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StumbleUpon was one of those sites that I had always heard about, but never really spent much time looking into, until more recently. A few days ago, I decided to visit their website and was quickly frustrated because I was having a hard time finding out how their service worked.

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At SXSW Interactive, it really occurred to me how much social media can influence our daily lives. So I thought it would be fun to show what a typical day can look like. One of the fun things about SXSW Interactive is the amount of free food offered by tech companies that take over food trucks, stands and restaurants all over Austin to promote themselves. Knowing how to find them is the trick and luckily there’s a whole suite of tools right inside your mobile phone.

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It’s been a long time coming, but support is finally being dropped for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) on many high profile sites I manage at UCLA such as http://ucla.edu. You might be asking what took so long since sites like Google dropped support for IE6 long ago. For us, it was because of our users, and it’s something that you should always consider.

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Tucked in the middle of a tiny strip mall on the corner of Overland and Woodbine lies an ice cream shop. You’d never notice it driving by, especially at night, because there’s no permanent sign up yet. Only a small banner hangs above the entrance that proudly reads “Scoops Westside.” The shop’s interior is minimal at best: a few tables and chairs, a small coffee press that serves Intelligentsia coffee, and a laptop with speakers playing music from Pandora. But drop by in the evening on any given day of the week and there is a continuous flow of people coming in and out. They’re eagerly anticipating a menage e trois of flavors such as coconut white chocolate wasabi, brown brown bread, salty white chocolate and black sesame chai. At times the shop has gotten so busy that it has to close early because it’s run out of ice cream.

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