Archive for December, 2012

Dooism.com: The Art of Motivation

December 19th, 2012 by Johnny in

Community, Games, Motivation

Need some motivating before you start on your tasks? Going through a trough phase in your life? Come check out dooism.com where the latest motivational and inspirational quotes will have you pumped in no time. 

Motivation and Doing Things

No one can stay 100% motivated all the time. It’s simply impossible. People burn out all the time. That’s why we created dooism.com for your daily dose of motivation. See what’s up and what’s motivating others in the three categories — trending, new, and top100. These quotes have one goal and that is to get you started on what you want to do. The site utilizes the Twitter and Flickr API to find the most motivating quotes. 

Built on the Latest and Cutting-Edge Technologies

Built on Ruby on Rails, served using nginx/unicorn, and hosted on mediatemple, dooism.com keeps up with the latest web technologies. On the front-end, jQuery, sausage.js, and jquery star rating plugin were among the few tools used to build features such as infinite scrolling. Some responsive CSS styling is incorporated with HTML5 as the structure.

A Great Place To Share Motivations

Have something that inspires you? Want to share it with the world? Dooism.com doesn’t have to be just about purely about motivation. It’s also about what motivates someone and sharing it with the world for others to experience it themselves. However, if you don’t agree with the motivational item, you can rate the entry with 1-star.  The average score is shown to represent the popularity of the entry.

Next time you’re feeling a little lazy, feeling a little sluggish, swing by dooism.com and get yourself motivated.

In no particular order, here is a list of my favorite dooisms:

Merging Gift Exchanging with the Internet

December 7th, 2012 by Alice in

Charity, Community, Geo-Location, Holidays

Holiday Gifts

This time of year, many people are thinking about choosing the perfect gift–ideally at the right price and without waiting in any lines. But it’s also a good time to think about gift giving more broadly and creatively.

Universal Gift Registry Cheer

For example, My Perfect Gift appears to be on a promising track with its expanded social gift registry concept.  Here, you can create not only online bridal and baby registries, but also an updatable personal registry suitable for any upcoming occasion.  The idea is that if friends and family members create their own wish lists and make them available for viewing by each other, then everyone in the circle will find it easier to buy the right present.

After setting up a registry, you install a browser application that allows you to place items from online retailers from around the Web into your registry.  If you’re coming up empty,  you can click in items from sample registries of items from Amazon, Macy’s and Target, and celebrity registries. There also are Pinterest and Facebook sites and a YouTube video connected to the website.

When I first heard about My Perfect Gift, I thought it was a great idea, and ideally, we’d all be registered with up-to-date lists to take the guesswork out of gift giving.  But once I visited the website and perused a few of the registries and ran down multiple pages of suggestions, I got a little overloaded on how much stuff there is to buy and list.  My caveat is that distributing a registry like this to friends is a bit of a social frontier. You might want to test the waters with your social circle before jumping in.

When you can’t decide — Let the computer do it.

Another creative startup is Mystery Gift Machine, which is an online platform similar to Kickstarter designed to make it easier to plan and execute a group gift.  Like Kickstarter, it uses the power of crowdsourcing to generate funds for a gift from a group. The organizer identifies the recipient and the occasion, and friends contribute money and ideas.  The “Mystery Gift Machine”  chooses the gift, making it a surprise for all–and who doesn’t like a little surprise element with a gift? This is one to watch.

Global Random Gift Giving

Some of the most innovative ideas around are about gifts to strangers.  Many were inspired by “random acts of kindness,” the mid-2000s global meme about the spiritual benefits of  performing selfless acts to benefit a stranger. Now the concept lives  on in efforts such as World Kindness Day, Gifts For Strangers Day and Gift A Stranger, a startup website created in Belgium that allows you to register to obtain a random address of a stranger so that you can send them a gift. An online map keeps track of the givers and recipients.

As you can see, Gift A Stranger still has the look of a startup after two years,  but I think I will stick around. I think they are onto something.