One of our newest clients, Blind Tiger Santa Barbara, is celebrating the month of November and men’s health with a Made In Movember ‘STACHE BASH next Saturday, November 22nd.

They are also hosting a contest for the BEST ‘STACHE on social media—if you post a photo to either INSTAGRAM or TWITTER with hashtags #stachebash AND #blindtigersb, and FOLLOW @blindtigersb, you could win a bundle of super awesome prizes!

‘STACHE BASH supports the Movember Foundation, who seeks to raise awareness about men’s health and wellness.

The winner of the contest will recieve:
—2 Free Tickets to the Made in Movember ‘STACHE BASH on November 22nd
—2 Free Drink Cards
—Gift Certificates to Richie’s Barber Shop
—Dinner for two at Blush SB

Apple is never far from the headlines these days, especially after their iPhone 6 and Apple Watch  launch that basically stopped time. Today, Apple released their first update to the iOS 8 operating system (which was released last week), that turned out to be an absolute nightmare.

A tidal wave of complaints and panicked rants on Twitter led Apple to immediately (and awkwardly) withdraw the update. The two largest issues were the alleged loss of service and the disabling of TouchID. The update was initially to fix a bug on HealthKit, but no word on if that got fixed since it was overshadowed by the other glaring issues.

Mashable has been keeping very close tabs on iOS 8, reviewing the good, the bad and the panicked scramble to downgrade after this disastrous update.

I myself have not yet downloaded the update (storage problems FOREVER/#regrets on not getting the 32GB in the first place) but for now, this setback just goes to show that as far as we’ve come in the technology of mobile phone softwares, mistakes are still made. Of course, no operating system is perfect and i’m looking forward to seeing how quickly Apple can fix this.

Ever since stepping into Topshop’s Las Vegas store several years ago, I have been in love with the UK brand. When I was in London this past year, I got the chance to go into several Topshop stores, including their flagship in Oxford Circus, and was amazed at how the brand has become basically a household name in the UK. They not only have innovative clothing at affordable prices, but they always have seemed on point with weaving technology seamlessly into their label and fashion shows.

This year at London Fashion Week (#LFW), they stood out above the others with their democratization of fashion by targeting the younger customer base with a social media takeover.

This morning at 10am PST, the whole world gathered for the unveiling of the highly anticipated iPhone 6 at the Apple Live event in Cupertino. However, Apple not only revealed the details of the next iPhone but also debuted their very first product in the world of wearable technology. The Apple Watch, described as “a smartwatch with inductive charging, a square face, sapphire glass, swappable bands, a heartbeat sensor and a rotating digital crown” by TechCrunch, is Apple’s sleekest new product proving their innovation in the advancement of technological development.

While Apple made it very clear that the watch is not simply an iPhone on your wrist (the watch is only compatible with iPhone 5 and 5s), the list of applications and functions available on the watch holds its own against its mobile counterpart. The design of the watch is classic Apple, with remarkably clean features and lines. All the watches use the innovative “digital crown”, aka the spinning thing on the side of the watch, to access the different interfaces and utilities.

A quick description of the aesthetic differences between the collections:
WATCH: The standard 38mm and 42mm watch faces with leather and stainless steel bands in a variety of loop designs and colors.
WATCH SPORT: Made to withstand sport-style use, these watch faces are made with a 60 percent stronger alloy case. This collection also includes a “sport band’ made of durable Fluoroelastomer in a variety of bright colors.
WATCH EDITION: This collection seems to be the high-end collection, with Rose and Yellow 18-karat Gold 38mm and 42mm watch faces and leather straps.

Instagram unveiled their newest venture in the app world this morning: Hyperlapse.

Hyperlapse is exactly what it sounds like: “a new app to capture high-quality time lapse videos even while in motion.” according to Instagram’s official press release.

Mike Krieger, Instagram’s co-founder and CTO told Wired that “this is an app that lets you be in the moment in a different way…we did that by taking a pretty complicated image processing idea, and reducing it to a single slider. That’s super Instagram-y.”

Hyperlapse is very much like taking an entire $15,000 setup and creating a cinematic-grade time-lapse video, with different speed options to create different “looks”, and image-stabilization, which is the key to it all. The product team behind the app are product designer Chris Connolly and software engineers Thomas Dimson and Alex Karpenko. Karpenko actually created the first image-stabilization technology for smartphone videos with Luma. This was added on to by Dimson, who after realizing that smartphones had the built-in technologies that could stabilize video footage. This developed into a prototype app, which was the start of Hyperlapse.

All you have to do is shoot a video, pick how fast you want it to speed up (the options range from 1x to 12x) and then save it to share with others. The interface is remarkably clean and very similar to Instagram, but the decision to develop it as a separate app stems from Hyperlapse being such a distinct idea that would be shrouded if it was simply added into the existing Instagram app.

Excited to try this out, and see how users get creative with this app!

Images leaked Tuesday by Android Police supposedly show the long-awaited joint effort of Google and Youtube. The new service, titled Youtube Music Key in the screenshots, will also mean changes for Google’s existing service: Google Play will reportedly become Google Play Music Key.

While i’m still not entirely seeing the appeal of yet another music subscription service, many of the features do seem interesting:
- A free trial month will be offered, and thereafter $9.99/month
- At least 20 million music tracks in the music library available to users
- Additional content such as concert footage, covers and remixes
- Offline playback of music videos and songs with audio-only option for background and screen-off listening

The most interesting claim in my opinion is the statement that all of this can be done “without an Internet connection” and the options for screen-off listening. However, i’m still unsure if this is enough to set it apart from the already existing services such as Spotify, Beats Music, and Google Play and draw users to pay for the service.

There is still not word on when any of this will be released or a predicted launch date, so we will have to wait and see how the final product develops and if it’s anything like the leaked images.

FYF 2013 completely won me over, and it instantly became one of my favorite festivals. From the music to the giant emoji balloons to the food trucks to the overall ~vibes~ of the festival, FYF was an amazing experience and one of my best memories from last summer. This year’s lineup is, in my opinion, one of the best lineups of the festivals this season, and here’s a quick preview of what i’m most excited for:

Earlier this year on April 9th, Facebook announced it would be moving its messages completely out of the app and into the standalone messenger app, thus forcing users to download the app in order to send and receive messages.

Over this past weekend, the changes began to ramp up speed when messages started disappearing from the Facebook app, making the only way to access your messages on mobile be through the Messenger app.

Today, Mashable published an article about the newest development in the Facebook Messenger app discussion: being able to retain your messages on the Facebook app without having to download the separate Messenger app. Turns out, if you simply start the download of the Messenger app but stop it before it’s installed, your messages will show up back in the main Facebook app.

While I have been an avid user of the Facebook Messenger app for as long as I have had an iPhone, I can understand the qualms users have over downloading the Messenger app, as well as the desire to keep everything into one app. Privacy issues remain rampant, and although this Huffington Post article lays out most of the questions and answers, users still have their doubts regarding security, especially now that they are being forced to download the separate app. While it doesn’t seem like there is any other choice at this point other than to download the Messenger app, this loophole is probably the last resort. Personally, I could see this new change coming, as Facebook’s claims over the past few years about the quality of the app versus in-app messaging (it is indeed faster) seemed to somewhat allude to this change. All in all, Facebook’s control over our lives does seem at times a bit forceful, but I don’t see any need to panic over privacy or security because of this requirement. Yet.

It’s that glorious time of year again- COMIC-CON 2014!!! The annual convention celebrating all things comics, television, films, art and culture begins today in San Diego. There are preview screenings, panel discussions, celeb sightings, book signings, and the of course the spectacular exhibition hall with different vendors showing off their displays and selling exclusive merch. The entire area of downtown San Diego turns into mass chaos when nerds from all corners of the earth descend upon the city for the convention. While I am sadly not there this year (*crying*), here’s a quick preview on some of the things we’re missing out on

exclusives available at SDCC this year.

In a world where there are so many different ways and outlets to communicate, one system has stood out above the others: EMOJIS.

These little pictographs you see on their separate keyboard on your iPhone or iPad are relatively new, appearing in the last couple years or so, with origins in late 1990s Japanese cell phone usage (which explains much of the appearance of some of the emojis). Emojis were encoded into Unicode Standard in 2010, with over 700 characters currently in existence.

Emojis are there when words don’t or can’t say enough, to provide a visual example to a message, and for all those moments in communication and life when you just want to include a cute little relevant emoji. With each younger, tech-savvier generation, emojis have permeated to the furthest depths of the internet: Twitter supports them in a remarkably clean 2D style (see this article), you can track the use of emoji on twitter in realtime on emojitracker.com and there’s even a Wikipedia-esque website dedicated to explaining different emoji, Emojipedia.