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Top 30 QR code uses. QR codes have really taken off recently as marketers find creative ways to integrate them into campaigns. Below is a roundup of some of the best campaigns and uses for QR codes. Lifestyle 1) Tesco’s Home Plus supermarket found a unique way to help hardworking Koreans with their grocery shopping. They placed lifelike billboards depicting supermarket shelves in the subway and shoppers could scan the QR codes with a phone application as they waited for their trains. 2) JCPenny’s Santa Tags allowed customers to personalize holiday gifts with a QR code gift tag that contained a recorded message from the giver. 3) Department store Macy’s has started using QR codes on clothing signage that take customers to fashion tips from designers on how to wear the clothes. 4) Living Headstones has created on online memorial for loved ones who aren’t able to visit a cemetery regularly.

Leisure and entertainment Food and drink Promotions Events 23) SXSW had several QR code-based incentives last year. Information. John Bohannon: Dance vs. powerpoint, a modest proposal. 20+ Tools to Create Your Own Infographics. A picture is worth a thousand words – based on this, infographics would carry hundreds of thousands of words, yet if you let a reader choose between a full-length 1000-word article and an infographic that needs a few scroll-downs, they’d probably prefer absorbing information straight from the infographic.

What’s not to like? Colored charts and illustrations deliver connections better than tables and figures and as users spend time looking back and forth the full infographic, they stay on the site longer. Plus, readers who like what they see are more likely to share visual guides more than articles. While not everyone can make infographics from scratch, there are tools available on the Web that will help you create your very own infographics. In this article, we’re listing more than 20 such options to help you get your messages across to your readers, visually. Read Also: The Infographic Revolution: Where Do We Go From Here? What About Me? “What About Me?” Vizualize.me Piktochart easel.ly. How to use icons and symbols to improve the clarity of your mind maps. #2 in the Effective Mind Maps blog post series Icons and symbols are small visual elements that you can attach to topics in your mind maps, which add meaning and context to them.

These miniature images can be used to depict priority (A/B/C or 1/2/3), types of activities (phone calls, meetings or travel), tasks, and types of information and ideas. It’s been said that a picture is worth 1,000 words. A symbol or icon, attached to a topic within your mind map, can convey much more meaning and context, which can be quickly understood by your brain. Symbols and icons are also a powerful way to categorize the contents of your map, as explained by Tony Buzan in The Mind Mapping Book: “Codes enable you to make instant communication between different parts of your mind map, however far apart they may be on the page… For instance, you could use a range of simple codes in all your notes to represent people, projects, elements or processes that frequently recur.

Customizing your icons and symbols. How To Create Your Own Venn Diagrams. Thursday, January 10, 2013 8:05 am, Posted by | How To Topics: , , , , When I was younger, I thought Venn Diagrams were awesome. I’m pretty sure, looking back, that I just liked the name “Venn Diagram’, but the visual overlapping of ideas can be pretty useful in helping people to understand a concept. Also, people love visualizations of just about anything. It’s a great way to absorb information without having to read those pesky words, right?

So the folks at Visual.ly (a great source for infographics of all kinds) have made a tool that lets you create your own (albeit basic) Venn Diagrams. Featured Image Credit: MaggienotMargaret.com Great Reads From Edudemic Partners:

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The 10 Commandments of PowerPoint. Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter. One of the unavoidable things about college, and increasingly work life, is PowerPoint. Most of us have, at one point or another, had to slap some slides together and give a presentation to our friends, family, class, co-workers, or boss. PowerPoint itself is all well and good, and is actually a great application.

But here’s the problem: most people just truly suck at giving PowerPoint presentations. Good PowerPoint presentations are more fun, more impactful, and more impressive to listen to. These are the Ten Commandments of PowerPoint (or, at least, the ten ways to get me to listen to you). Thou Shalt Not Read The Slides I can read. Thou Shalt Use 15 Words Per Slide There’s absolutely no reason to ever have more than a few words on a slide.

Use 15 words per slide, and hopefully a lot fewer. Thou Shalt Not Only Use Text Pictures say a thousand words, and videos are usually a lot more interesting than you are. Thou Shalt Not Bullet Thou Shalt Rehearse. This is Uncommon - Customizable Apple iPhone Cases by Uncommon - How It Works. How to Supercharge All Your Favorite Webapps with ifttt. How to Setup Google Calendar on Your iPhone 4. Even though my company officially uses Microsoft Exchange, including the calendar function, I use Google Calendar. I do this because a few people outside the company need access to my calendar. Google Calendar allows me to give access to anyone I want, provided they have a Google account.

However, using Google Calendar with my new iPhone 4 was not as straight forward as I had hoped. When turned the calendar function on within my iPhone’s Gmail account, I only got one calendar. (I actually have five different Google calendars.) Some people suggested that I set up my Gmail account using the Exchange option, but that did not work. After an hour or so of research and hacking, I finally figured it out.

Open Safari on your iPhone and go to the Google Calendar Sync Settings page. I was surprised that Google didn’t provide these step-by-step directions. Question: Did this procedure work for you? Want to launch your own blog or upgrade to self-hosted WordPress? The Ninja’s Guide to Google Alerts. Google Alerts is one of the most powerful free tools available, but it is often overlooked. It monitors the Web for words and phrases and even sends you an email or updates an RSS feed every time it finds a new result. Sounds pretty simple right? You will be amazed at how powerful a simple tool like Google Alerts can be.

It has a huge range of uses which are only limited by your imagination. I’m going to reveal how I use Google Alerts to leverage brand, authority, traffic and sales, as well as share the exact alerts I have setup for my personal SEO blog. Monitoring Brand Just like John Chow, my name (Matthew Woodward) is my brand. You can then take action by addressing the feedback and getting links added. Matthewwoodward.co.uk www.matthewwoodward.co.uk matthewwoodward matthew woodward Monitoring Competitors In addition to monitoring your brand, you should also be looking at what your competition is doing. Monitoring Questions in Your Niche Monitoring Content Distribution Monitoring Shoppers. My NEW Social Media Secret Weapon – IFTTT Review. Over two years ago I wrote about my then favorite social media secret weapon, Tumblr, which helped me manage my school’s Facebook and Twitter accounts through the use of automatic cross-posting.

Truth be told – Tumblr really wasn’t designed for this purpose but it did help me manage my time with social media. As I’ve said time and time again, social media is a time suck and it will consume as much time as you give it. Although I enjoy participating on social media I do have other responsibilities, both professional and personal, so I’m always on the look out for tools to help me with social media time management.

While I think Tumblr is still a very cool tool I’d like to share with you my NEW social media secret weapon- ifttt.com. IFTTT (which stands for “if this then that”) is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement. Here is a great description about their service from their website: About IFTTT. What Does It Do My IFTTT System Sharing Recipes.