Author Archives: Carol Edwards

For some, travelling to another country on business or pleasure means holing up in a resort or hotel designed so you don’t have to lift a finger — or even know you’re overseas. Huge, all-inclusive resorts can take care of your purchasing needs quickly and efficiently.

For you, however, that’s a waste of a trip.You want the full experience. You want to eat and shop locally, find those cool little stores, dine at local cafes, stands, or markets.

You’re in a new land, so you need to find a way to pay for what you buy without getting stuck with a hefty set of fees or finding yourself suddenly poorer than you were when you left thanks to a dip in the exchange rate.. Here are a few tips that can help you enjoy your trip. Read more…

More about Travel, Currency, Finance And Economy, Travel Leisure, and Lifestyle

Rapper Kanye West has turned his attention to environmental sustainability, revealing a pair of prototype Yeezy shoes partially made from algae.

West and Yeezy head designer Steven Smith unveiled the algae Yeezy on Thursday at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. Though the shoe is still partially made from petroleum-based ethylene-vinyl acetate, or EVA, this will be blended with foam made from harvested algae.

“Eco concerns are intersecting with what we do, and this is just the beginning of the future that Kanye envisioned for us to start working on and creating and challenged us to,” said Smith. Read more…

More about Yeezy, Kanye West, Shoes, Sustainability, and Algae

Following a mass shooting at a Halloween party in a California Airbnb, CEO Brian Chesky has decided to officially vet all properties and listers, as well as ban “party houses.” Read more…

More about Tech, Mashable Video, Airbnb, Listings, and Rental Homes

Created by the University of Maine in just three days, the 3Dirigo was also made with the world’s largest 3D printer, and is the world’s largest solid 3D-printed object. Read more…

More about Tech, Transportation, Mashable Video, 3d Printing, and Boat

Joining its self-driving fleet of cars, the Yandex.Rover is a delivery bot that can navigate around objects and obstacles. Read more…

More about Tech, Transportation, Mashable Video, Yandex, and Yandex Rover

Weed tech is finally getting some mainstream recognition. Well, sort of. 

CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics convention held in Las Vegas, announced KEEP Labs as a 2020 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Home Appliance Category on Thursday. It’s the first time the conference has awarded a cannabis tech company. 

KEEP designed a smart stash box that connects to an app via WiFi and Bluetooth to allow cannabis users to responsibly contain access to their weed. The box can be unlocked via biometric touch or using the app, which can send notifications to the synced device if anyone attempts to move or access the box when it’s locked.  Read more…

More about Ces, Cannabis, Weed, Tech, and Web Culture

The now infamous Popeyes chicken sandwich was finally restocked on Sunday, so people are back at it trying to get a taste. (I had my first today and it was life-changing.)

But if you want to try to make your own version, YouTuber Joshua Weissman has a recipe that he says is even better. 

Now, the Popeyes chicken sandwich is pretty basic. Stacked between two butter-toasted buns are just three ingredients: sauce, pickles, and their legendary fried chicken. 

But Weissman brings up some good points in his recreation. The chicken could be a tad crunchier, and the pickle layout is suboptimal. Finally, Weissman’s bun simply can’t be beat. Read more…

More about Youtube, Popeyes, Recreate, Chicken Sandwich, and Joshua Weissman

Airbnb has announced plans to verify every single one of its approximately 7 million listings after a mass shooting at an Airbnb in October, alongside several other safety initiatives.

The shooting took place at a Halloween party thrown at a California Airbnb, leaving five dead and prompting Airbnb Co-Founder, CEO, and Head of Community Brian Chesky to declare a ban on “party houses”. 

Chesky also tweeted about several other safety initiatives, including “expanding manual screening of high-risk reservations” and a “dedicated ‘party house’ rapid response team”, though he was somewhat light on details.  Read more…

More about Travel, Airbnb, Safety, Brian Chesky, and Mass Shootings

Facebook was thinking about ways to possibly bring children onto its platform long before it launched its first kid-centric app. 

In fact, the issue cropped up as early as 2013, when Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg floated potential ways to bring “under 13s” into Facebook, according to newly public documents.

The documents, which were obtained by investigative reporter Duncan Campbell and published by NBC, include thousands of pages of internal messages between high-level Facebook employees over a number of years. Among them is a summary of Sandberg’s many meetings with European officials at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2012. Read more…

More about Tech, Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, Sheryl Sanberg, and Social Media Companies

No, Farmville, you may NOT have access to my photos.

Thousands of pages of court documents containing Facebook’s internal communications leaked to the public on Wednesday. Reading between the lines of business bluster, you’ll find ideological clashes between executives; these dense email chains would come to shape Facebook’s future, and now reveal its blind spots.

One such oversight comes in the realm of user trust in third party apps. By contrasting a 2011 email exchange between executives, and some of Mark Zuckerberg’s own thoughts from 2012, it appears that Facebook’s users were wise to the risks of giving third party apps access to their personal data long before Facebook’s CEO was.  Read more…

More about Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Cambridge Analytica, Tech, and Cybersecurity