Life-Tracking App Expereal Is Your Personal Weapon Against Cognitive Biases
Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts.
The iOS app (Android and Web-based versions are planned) is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based digital strategist Jonathan Cohen, who was inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneham’s 2010 TED talk “The riddle of experience vs. memory.” Kahneham argues that our memories are often distorted by cognitive biases. For example, one bad day can completely spoil someone’s memory of an otherwise pleasurable two-week vacation.
When designing Expereal, Cohen decided to stick to a 10-point scale to help users keep their ratings objective.
“I could have potentially asked people to pick a word to describe their mood, but what I like about numbers is that in order to get the full breadth and benefit you also have to enter tags and give meaning to it,” says Cohen.
Expereal’s first screen allows you to rate your day (or part of the day, depending on how often you use the app). Then you can note your location and the people you are with, add tags and snap a photo. A drop-down menu takes you to a set of charts that visualize your ratings by day, week or month, and compares your numbers to all of Expereal’s users or your Facebook friends who also use the app (data is aggregated anonymously). The “Expereotype” option is an album of your in-app photos with embedded ratings, tags and locations.
Cohen says Expereal fills the gap left by journaling apps and life-tracking wearable tech products like Jawbone UP and Nike Fuelband.
“None of these services in my mind really address the fundamental question–’how is my life going and how is it trending over time?’ I thought that by having a better understanding of this over time, it would be an interesting way to look back in order to move forward,” says Cohen.
Of course, Expereal is only as useful as the data you enter into it. The app’s notifications can be set to remind you to use it 1-5 times per day. While testing the app out, I found I was more likely to enter a rating if I was having a bad day because adding tags allowed me to vent. If my day was going okay, however, it was tempting to ignore Expereal’s prompt on my iPhone.
“It’s not immediately sticky,” Cohen admits. “But for many of us who are relatively happy in our lives, I think there is value in those moments of self-reflection.” He adds that Expereal is meant to “counterbalance to the immediate promises of contemporary best-selling self-help books and programs.”
I committed to using the app five times a day for two weeks and was surprised by my data charts. A couple days I had written off in my memory as a total waste of time (because of a headache or a task left undone) were actually rated quite high, and I realized I’m much more pessimistic than I thought I was. I already use Timehop as a scrapbook and Step Journal to keep track of my daily activities, but I like Expereal’s focus on mood tracking because it’s already motivated me to stop being so negative.
Cohen tells me he is continually working on the app’s data analysis so that the aggregate numbers aren’t skewed toward any particular part of the day or people who log onto the app more consistently than other users. He declined to give me specific numbers, but says Expereal currently has several thousand users.
Aside from being a handy life-tracking tool, Expereal is also beautiful, with minimalist graphics inspired by mid-century California design, graphic designer Reid Miles and Monocle magazine. The app was bootstrapped by Cohen, who is currently looking for investors and investigating several revenue models. Cohen envisions Expereal as part of a larger ecosystem that will eventually include books, seminars and other tools that tap into people’s desires to improve their lives.
“If you look at the world of self-help, that segment of the marketplace, there are all of these amazing books by behavioral psychologists out there,” says Cohen. “If Expereal can capture a piece of that marketplace, I think the potential is huge.”
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Instagram alternative Tadaa introduces edge detection to blur photo backgrounds
It’s been some time since we first looked at photo-sharing app Tadaa, which we noted at the time builds on Instagram’s template with more Twitter-like features for social photographers.
Instagram may have gone on to dominate the filter/sharing/social photo-app realm, and it even has that billion-dollar Facebook acquisition to boast, but with around 3 million downloads to date, Tadaa has also carved a sizable niche for itself in what has become a pretty saturated space, with arguably a more sophisticated offering than some of its peers.
Tadaa boldly claims this “patent-pending” edge detection feature to be a “world first” for such a mobile app, so we thought we’d take a look to see how good it really is.
Oh, and edge detection, incidentally, is the technical term for identifying specific points and objects in a digital image. In the case of Tadaa, it promises to separate the main subject (e.g. a person) from the background surroundings to create distinct effects and a sense of depth
Tadaa & edge-detection
You can take a snap on the spot, or reel in images from your camera roll. Click the little edge-detection button on the top left next to the crop icon, and you’re good to go.
You trace an area around the main ‘focus’ region, and Tadaa snaps around the edges of the area it thinks you want to focus on.
Next, you can adjust the background blur to make the foreground standout, while you can also change elements such as brightness, contrast and saturation, and other finishing touches to the background.
Then, you can save it to your camera roll or share it across the social sphere.
Certainly, the outcome is quite impressive and it does create a genuine depth of field similar to what you’d get with a DSLR. But is this actually all that revolutionary? Other apps profess to offer such features, including AfterFocus for iOS and Android, not to mention Big Lens (iOS only).
I thought I’d put Tadaa up against Big Lens to see what the actual difference was, and here’s the result with Tadaa on the left:
If truth be told, I didn’t think there was too much in it, both produced roughly the same output, though maybe someone with a better eye for this kind of thing would disagree.
At any rate, it’s a nice addition for Tadaa and one that will likely prove popular with its 3 million or so users. Plus, for the time-being, Tadaa remains totally free, though there is a suggestion it may eventually cost to use the edge detection feature.
“We can’t wait to see how our users react to this new feature,” says Nikolas Schoppmeier, Tadaa’s Co-Founder & CEO. “There is no other app out there with a feature as sophisticated as this so we’re very excited. This feature is just one more reason to leave your expensive SLR at home the next time you want to take great photos. We’re equipping our users with a set of tools that only professional photographers have access to and we’re striving to make them as accessible as possible.”
Tadaa version 4.7 is available to download now.
Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service
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TNW Pick of the Day: Resultly lets you set real-time alerts for almost anything on the Web
It’s been more than a year since we first caught up with Resultly, a real-time social search engine which founder and CEO Ilya Beyrak confessed at the time was difficult to explain what it does.
Indeed, you have to use it to appreciate what it really does. But at its core, Beyrak said that Resultly is like Google Alerts for the whole Internet, which was about as succinct a synopsis as we could muster at the time.
It was an invite-only Web app when we last checked it out, but it was certainly an impressive proposition, one that let users create specific queries consisting of text attached to a certain category (e.g. Products, Finance, Travel and so on), while serving up real-time alerts based on their personal interests.
Since then, the Chicago-based company has rolled out its iPhone app, letting users follow everything from airfares and jobs, to daily deals and more.
Indeed, Resultly lets users set parameters to be notified when certain products reach a specific price point, and social network integration means they can receive alerts from Facebook and Twitter for very specific updates, such as baby photos posted to your Facebook News Feed (if that’s your thing).
Resultly 2.0
With 100,000 downloads to date, Resultly has just rolled out Version 2.0 of its mobile app, introducing what Beyrak calls a “completely different” product, redesigned and engineered for real-time, cross-category alerts.
When you first launch the app, you’ll see an all-new ‘My News & Social’ stream which displays information in a Flipboard-style magazine from the likes of CNN, Fox, CNBC and other news outlets.
To tailor this, you have to add some news and interests from the main ‘Category’ section, e.g. ‘Manchester United’ or ‘David Beckham’, and they will start showing up here.
To set up alerts, hit the ‘Plus’ button at the top right and choose your category. For travel, you can set departure times, return times, prices, non-stop and even more advanced parameters such as fare class and ages of the passengers.
You can set the frequency for each alert too. If you want to stick to the default frequency that applies to all alerts, you can do so.
While I was wondering why I wasn’t receiving any notifications, I had a look in the main menu under ‘notifications’ and found that it was set to ‘daily’, so I changed it to real-time.
A huge mistake, however, was setting the email alert to real-time too – a minute later, my inbox was flooded with hundreds of new emails. So I changed that to ‘never’, while keeping the mobile alerts to real-time.
It really is a great little app, but it’s only as great as you make it – you can set very specific parameters – based on your location – for housing, news, jobs, products, daily deals, books, social and media. And with the latest version of Resultly, you can also see what’s trending online.
For ‘media’, you can choose to search for keywords related to video and audio, across Metacafe, iTunes, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and more.
Your alerts start showing up in your own personalized section, and you scroll left-to-right to see what results your search parameters have garnered. You can also choose to ‘favorite’ any Resultly content, pushing them into their own little silo for later.
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All in all, Resultly is turning into a very useful, user-friendly, functional app. With built-in mapping for location-based alerts, and friends’ interests and results also showing up if you choose to connect through the app, this has the potential to be indispensable.
As with any such app, however, it needs to offer an Android version given that, well, it’s more than half the smartphone market. Beyrak says that this is indeed in the works, as is a Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 version.
The new version of Resultly is available to download now.
Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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JobFiend lets recruiters create simple mobile-optimized forms for candidates to respond through
Given that mobile is fast-becoming the primary Web-browsing conduit for many people, it goes without saying that many potential job candidates will be viewing recruitment ads on their pocket rocket.
For this reason, the good folks at Zartis, the recruitment software company, have launched a pretty clever but simple Web app for would-be recruiters to create simple mobile optimized forms for applicants on the fly.
“Over 90% of company career sites don’t work on mobile,” says John Dennehy, CEO of Zartis. “Apart from the design issues, it’s almost impossible to upload a CV from an iOS device.”
And this is why they built JobFiend.
JobFiend: Mobile-optimized forms for recruiters
First up, you’ll be asked to create an account and enter your company Twitter account (no need to log in), through which it will glean your company logo.
Your job description must be no more than 140 characters, and actually the shorter the better.
Given that candidates can’t easily upload their CV from a mobile, this is all based on questions and links.
Now, there are three kinds of questions you can ask – Yes/No, Free Text (140-character limit for the question) and Sliders, ranking from 1-5.
You can add as many questions as you like, and if you want more than a simple text-based answer, you can always ask them to link through to their online CV, Twitter account, Tumblr and so on.
As a recruiter, you can add as many jobs as you like, which can be managed from the main dashboard.
Another clever bit is you can copy/paste some simple code into the
tag of your site’s jobs page. Then, when a candidate visits this page via their mobile, they will be redirected to the mobile-optimized page.Whenever someone applies for a job, you will receive an email and you can view a list of all the candidates through the main dashboard.
In terms of what the candidate will see, well, it will look a little something like this – bear in mind, this took me all of 1 minute to create a simple 3-question form.
JobFiend is still in beta, so you can expect some bugs. Indeed, the mobile form wasn’t always the most responsive, but it did work and I submitted the form without to much hassle.
You can sign up for a JobFiend account now.
➤ JobFiend
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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SocialBro just became a more useful Twitter analytics tool with the introduction of tweet data
SocialBro is a really useful app when it comes to analyzing your Twitter community, but until now it’s only been about people. Now the Spanish startup behind the app is taking a step towards offering a more well-rounded analytics product by presenting data about your tweets too.
The new Tweet Analytics feature is a little hidden in a UI that has arguably outgrown SocialBro’s featureset, but once you find it in the Tools menu, you’re presented with a graph that shows information about how your tweets have performed over time.You can see the relative popularity of each tweet in terms of the number of Favorites, retweets and replies each one got – the larger the circle representing a tweet, the more popular it was.
You can break the data down into tweets and replies, and you can adjust the date range covered. I noticed that only the past eight days’ worth of tweets was accurate, with a big chunk of data missing before that – although as this is a new service released today, I’d expect it to start logging the data more accurately from now on.
SocialBro is particularly aimed at businesses wanting to monitor their Twitter presence, and the introduction of analytics for tweets in addition to its strong suite of audience data tools certainly makes it a more attractive proposition in that regard. It follows the recent introduction of DM-based marketing campaigns to its toolset. However, its lack of profile in the face of well-established competition like Salesforce’s Radian6, Topsy and SocialBakers Analytics Pro is a challenge the company needs to tackle.
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