Explore the Brain with fun games, videos and quizzes in an Alice in Wonderland themed world
Wondermind – If you have kids, and naturally they’re better at using the internet than you are, make sure you direct them towards this wonderful site. This is modern, online education for kids, as it should be. If you look back fondly at those ‘fun’ educational videos you used to watch at school, you’ll marvel when you see how these kind of video lessons have become so interactive and, well, actually fun!
Wondermind is a beautifully crafted, interactive video and game program that teaches kids (and grown ups too) about how the brain works. It’s created by Bafta award winning games studio Preloaded, interactive video director Martin Percy and a London University professor. And it slickly combines the science behind the brain with a mini Alice in Wonderland themed world of minigames, quizzes and videos.
Chill.com – Facebook may be the master when it comes to sharing photos with your friends; but when it comes to video there’s still something missing: the ability to create a nice big collection of all your videos, and also collections of cool videos you’ve found on any particular subject across the internet, and show them off in one place. And luckily enough for us avid consumers of online video, Chill’s creators have addressed this gap.
You sign up with your Facebook account, follow a few suggested users based on your interests, plus any of your Facebook friends already ‘chilling’. And then you can view cool videos either from a stream of all these users put together, or by clicking on any user’s individual feed. The feeds are great looking, and really do come out like a lovingly created scrapbook of shareable videos. This idea really works best when it comes to creating a ‘collection’ of videos on any particular subject, like this (albeit slightly Apple-geeky) collection of Steve Jobs videos I decided to follow and share for example. And there’s also a bookmarklet that allows you to post videos you find around the net that you like onto your Chill board (and Facebook and/or Twitter if you want!) for you and your friends to view and share on.
30 Second MBA, from Fast Company – Ever wondered how they do it, the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs of this world? How did they create and continue to grow some of the globe’s biggest businesses? Well with 30 Second MBA, brought to you by Fast Company magazine, you can view a series of lovely golden nuggets of insight from those business men and women who have been there, done that, and sold three billion t shirts. And each video is limited to 30 seconds, so you can watch a few in any coffee break! Click here to get learning from the best of the business world. Oh, and watch the 30 Second MBA clip on innovation below featuring Mr Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself!
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Get Buttoned Up – Life for any mommy (or daddy) having to balance work, kids and love is never easy. For many among us, the idea of organization is but a distant pipedream. But for those of you who do dream of a life of (im)perfect organization (because who wants perfection anyway!?), you could do a lot worse than taking some handy hints and top tips from the gurus at Buttoned Up.
Buttoned Up is a great company founded by four mothers, to help other parents organize their lives with tips and products designed to help you stay “buttoned up.” If you click on their ‘tools & giveaways’ button, you’ll find a whole host of goodies to help you stay organized, and there’s tons of hints and tips for any of life’s events, from moving house to general home life. Try it out by clicking here or on the pic below!
A selection of all the handy hints, tips, tools and products you can use to organize your life on "Get Buttoned Up"
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Nerve Dating – Do you use online dating? Come on now, don’t be shy! Did you know 1 in 8 couples who got married last year in the US met online? It’s getting more and more socially acceptable to use the internet to find flings, dates, love and marriage. But many e-dating sites are still inaccessible and, in all honesty, a little bit embarassing! Nerve Dating has taken note of this to create more of a social network feel around the e-dating meet market. To borrow directly from the words of its creators: “Think fewer awkward “About Me” essays, and more conversations about what you did last night and what you thought of latest buzzed about restuarants.”
I really like this idea, being a proponent of online dating myself. It makes it much easier to fill out a profile, because you’re answering one-liner questions on your opinions and habits that pop up in very user-friendly places on the webpage. They’re actually quite fun to answer, and this feed of answers on your profile in turn gives a potential date an easy way of starting conversation with you. The usual suspects of online dating remain – your profile picture and stats for example – but again these are very easy to complete. All in all, if you do date online, this is a new, different approach worth your attention. It’s for anyone to use, whether you’re interested in men, women or both, and it’s free to fill out a profile. You only have to pay the $20 monthly fee to get the absolute most out of the site.
Foodie.com, by online lifestyle publisher Glam Media, is a site that’s launched with very grand aims: to become a Facebook/Twitter hybrid… for food! Before you start groaning at yet another social network however, this does seem to have a reason to exist. For a start, you couldn’t say with much conviction that Facebook or Twitter provide a real niche towards food, recipes and restaurant sharing. And that’s exactly what Foodie provides.
This social basis enables Foodie.com to become a sort of interactive food magazine: you can browse delicious looking pictures of new and exciting recipes currently. And you have the ability to follow and interact some of the world’s most exciting chefs, who will post recipes and ideas on their feed; as well as top restaurant lists and shareable menus. All sounds rather delectable if you ask me! Click here or on the big pic below to join this fast growing foodies’ network.
Foodie allows you to follow top food writers & chefs, as well as get inspiration for meals in and out with tasty recipes
Don’t forget to check out our All My Faves Recipes Faves Page – with some great sites that any food enthusiast would salivate over (or just find some good ideas for tonight’s meal!).
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This site + app actually pays you to go to the Gym... and fines if you don't!
Gym-Pact – The unmistakable allure of splashing out on an expensive gym membership is something many of us just can’t resist, with the opportunity to transform from Mr.Measly to Mr.Muscle too good to pass up. However, we don’t tend to factor in the likelihood that after joining, the most difficult weight to actually pick up is, well, ourselves. Sometimes we need just that little bit of extra motivation to get up and go. And that’s where Gym-Pact.com comes in, ensuring that the couch potato in you will remain firmly locked away until after you’ve been to the gym!
Gym-Pact.com gives its users that extra incentive in the form of financial rewards – money. Gym-Pact dishes out money for its users that actually use their gym memberships. Sounds a little too good to be true? Well, the site works by letting users set up ‘Pacts’, where they will set weekly targets for how many days a week they will go to the gym, and how much they will have to pay out as punishment if they break the pact. Members can check in at any registered gyms (new gyms can be registered easily) using the Gym-Pact iPhone app. Gym-Pact can then see who will be paying the forfeits that week for not keeping their weekly pact, and who has been committed enough to cash in. The best part is that those who keep their pacts get paid by those who don’t – survival of the
fittest sound familiar?
Bureau of Trade – If you’re into making new and interesting discoveries (which you hopefully are if you like reading about our website and app discoveries each week on here!), then you may love this site. It’s a hand curated collection of some of the most unique, weird and wonderful, retro items floating around on sites like eBay and Craigslist (also some beautiful dogs up for adoption on Petfinder.com).
If at first you don’t get what’s going on when you first set eyes on Bureau of Trade, you can do one of two things: 1) Simply scroll down until you see the icons bar of options: from automobiles to clothing to new pets (“companions”); click on any of them and see unfold before your eyes pictures of some absolutely awesome items up for sale on eBay and Craigslist. Or 2) Click on the ‘Archives’ button in the top right hand corner, which will take you to an archive of special, themed collections, featuring these items (they often cleverly coincide with current affairs, so there’s a selection of retro camera gear for the day when Kodak announced it had filed for bankruptcy!).
It’s a great site to browse when you need to kill a few minutes, just to see some of the cool items people have put up for sale, even if you’re not interested in buying (although there’s always a risk of an impulse purchase on cool sites like this). Click here to check out Bureau of Trade, or click below on the big pic.
Some of the unique items up for sale on the internet, hand selected and displayed onBureau of Trade
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Readability - Read articles more comfortably, without all the added online clutter; save them for later
Readability is a free downloadable service aimed at making web-pages and articles more visually accessible and reader friendly, as well as allowing users to save and send articles they may want to go back to later. Particularly on smart phones, cluttered internet pages make reading good, interesting articles or blogs a far more stressful and uncomfortable experience than they should be.
With Readability, readers can extract articles from a busy webpage, and see it on a clear, in a customised style and font size, without any distractions. It makes reading online a far more relaxed, organic experience. Readability also allows users to save articles for later, or send them to an Amazon Kindle, leaving its users feeling organised and refreshed, and not frantically searching through Google for an article that seems to have been cleansed from the web, just to personally inconvenience you. Readability’s video gives a clear visual of how it works – simple, easy, readable. Click here to get to the Readability website.
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A Future Cult Classic in the Free Online Games World? Quite possibly...
Cuboy: Back to the Cubeture 2 – our free online game of the week – is at times hilarious, at others incredibly bizarre, but nearly always engaging and entertaining to play. A classic point-and-click adventure game, you use your mouse to control a funny cuboid character called Cuboy as he ventures around a mysterious, equally cuboid land, filled with some odd, yet invariably equally funny, cuboid characters. I’d play this game just for the voice acting, which is about as good as you’ll get on a free flash game online! Click here to play it free on All My Faves Games now
Click the pic to play Cuboy: Back to the Cubeture 2 for free on Allmyfaves
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The potential next phenomenon to swarm over the iPhone photosphere, Cinemagram (cinemagr.am) fuses still photography with moving video to create a moving photo, or a partially still video…or whatever you want to call it. Either way, being able to animate a photo you’ve taken is really very clever, and it gives photographs posted online an extra dimension, literally.
Cinemagram is a 5-star rated app available on the Appstore for $1.99 and allows users to
isolate a specific part of a photograph, such as the tail on a giraffe, or a billboard in Times Square, and animate it so that the isolated section moves, whilst the remainder of the image remains still. Experienced and non-experienced photoshoppers alike will also be able to filter colours and styles before sharing their hybrid creation with the online art-loving public. Magnifique.
Start your weekend with the best games of the week! We already took care of the sorting to bring you only the very best of what the games world has to offer. We hope you enjoy these as much as we did.
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