Not only is the Super Bowl going high tech with it’s very own social media command center (read all that that here). But can social media even predict the big winner? Those at MotiveQuest seem to think so! Check out their appearance on Fox News to hear them explain…

Social Media Can Predict Super Bowl Winner: MotiveQuest: MyFoxCHICAGO.com

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Did you ever unearth something from your past so embarrassing yet so extremely cool that you felt the urge to share it with the world? Well, I did! Last week while cleaning my garage I came across a blast from the past, my middle school yearbook from Chaminade College Prep. I know most people would prefer to forget about those awkward “middle” years, but I got a kick out of revisiting them. How can I be so confident about my adolescence you ask? It’s easy because my yearbook is not just a typical 1980’s yearbook with puffy hair and men with bangs. My yearbook is a tribute to one of the great literary pieces of all time – the Lord of the Rings. It’s very clear that the D & D club was also a big part of the yearbook staff.

But don’t take my word for it, just have a look at my yearbook for yourself and see what you think!

Okay, so I’m not really an internet superstar, but I did recently make a video with friends that “went viral” (I guess I am kind of a big deal). It all started one night, sitting at home curled up with my cats, drinking wine and watching House Hunters on HGTV. I was chatting with one of my other single friends about the wildy popular “Shit Girls Say” video. My friend says, “We should make a ‘Shit Single Girls Say’ video” and we instantly start to rattle off all of the ridiculous/sad/pathetic things we’ve said to each other over the past two years. Then, a quick text to one of our funny male friends and it was set – we were making this happen!

We had a small “production meeting” soon after, picked out locations, wardrobe, and made shot lists.  We planned to meet at 8am on a SATURDAY morning. A SATURDAY morning during CHRISTMAS BREAK. That’s how excited we were about making this video.

The whole video took about 4 hours to shoot, and about 8 hours to go through the footage, trim it down, and fine-tune it. We uploaded it on a Monday night, posted links on Facebook and Twitter, asked people to share, then we waited.

Thanks to friends sharing the link, we reached a couple hundred hits within an hour or so. I quickly developed the habit of checking the view count every few hours and immediately when I woke up in the morning. On the 2nd morning I sent an email to my video making partners titled “30100 – that’s not a zip code”. We had already received over 30,000 hits in less than 48 hours. I submitted the link to popular sites like BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon. Someone (a stranger) posted it on Reddit. It was linked to on the Huffington Post, reblogged a couple thousand of times on Tumblr, and showed up on countless other blogs. It made #3 on Adult Swim’s Internet Treasures the week it came out. Random people were making animated gifs. We kept hearing things from our friends like “one of my friends from New York just posted it on Facebook!” and “Wait, YOU did this?!” Yep, we did. The view count kept climbing.  9 days after we uploaded the video, the video hit a million views. At the time I am writing this, 21 days after uploading, we are at 3.5 million views.

I’m not dropping all of these facts to brag (I mean it is pretty awesome), but to point out how powerful social media is. We made a hilarious video but a lot of people make hilarious videos and not all of them get millions of hits. It thankfully caught on, and now I’m set for LIFE!

…Not really.

Well, leave it to our creative masterminds to come up with some of the best Secret Santa gifts around! We really did get some fantastic gifts, and it was hard, but we managed to narrow it down to the top three in descending order.

Number 3

Electronics Gadgets for the Evil Genius

Number 2

Picture Frames with personalized messages from Ryan Gosling

And the Number 1 Secret Santa gift of 2011 is…

** drum-roll **

THE FOREVER LAZY!

Cheers to you, Steve! No one can rock a Forever Lazy like you can!

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This clever ad campaign just emerged from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Designed by ad agency, Team Detroit, these ads are reminiscent of the D.A.R.E. anti-drug PSAs from the 90s. My favorite is “I found this in your room, we need to talk.” Which one is your favorite?

CCS on Facebook

CCS on Youtube

CCS on Flickr

On the other hand, there has been a wide selection of third party lens adapters that give you options from macro, to wide or fish eye. Because they’re actual hardware that you attach to your camera, they tend to be more expensive, bulky and you have to carry them with you. But there’s something organic and nowadays, even novelty to be able to look through your lens and see an effect reacting in real time that makes for a completely different experience. You can actually “play” the effect at the lens to fine tune your shot before you press the shutter or while you’re taking video. Plus you can always process it with your favorite photo app after.

On the lower end of the external lens price scale (approx $7.50 each) we have Kikkerland’s “Jelly Lens.” A series of 7 different plastic lenses that attach to your phone’s camera lens with a little gooey ring. It’s easily attached and then removed and then the sticky ring is covered up by an attached lens cover, keeping the sticky surface safe and ready to use next time you need it.

I was able to test out 3 of the Jelly Lenses.. Starburst, Kaleidoscope and Sparkle. Let’s look at the effect of these three little lenses through an iPhone.

The first up we’ll look at the Starburst lens. Despite the name, it doesn’t really make anything star-like. I was imagining a traditional star-filter but that’s actually what the Sparkle filter does. The Starburst gives more of a Lens Baby effect, there’s a fixed center focus, with the illusion of motion blur on the edges. This was my favorite out of the three tested. As you can see here, there’s the original shot, then by angling the lens any which way, it created different motion effects.

Next up is the Sparkle filter. This is the one that gives that sparkle to some light sources making it “twinkly”. This will be a fun lens to take around during the holidays when shooting decorated trees and houses. It doesn’t seem to work on large light sources, smaller points of light is where this lens really sparkles.

And finally we have the Kaleidoscope lens which creates multiple images  of the original.. The effect is of course very dependent on how you’re angling the phone to your subject.. something that you couldn’t do as easily with a photo app.

One more cool application of these lenses is the ability to use them on the video mode of your phone. Allowing you to see in real time the effect that’s being recorded at the lens.

I own a ridiculous amount of photo apps for my iPhone and I can still see having a blast with these.. and remember you can always process our images or videos later with even more effects if you want to.

The lenses are plastic and there’s definitely a bit of quality loss when putting these in front of your lens, but you’re whacking out the image on purpose and when our eyes have been conditioned to see everyone’s phone photos looking old, blurry and color shifted through the apps, its shouldn’t be a big issue with most people. And surprisingly there is very little loss of light to the lens when these are on vs. off the camera.

There are also the Stretch lens, which elongates the subject, a Heart Frame, Wide Angle, and Soft lens which gives a fixed center of focus and then is quite blurry at the edges. They make nice cheap stocking stuffer’s for your phone photo-fanatic who might like something a little different than another photo app.

You can find these around the web but if you want to check out Kikkerland’s other goodies, you can of course go right to their site.

We had six delicious pies to taste from an array of bakeries, grocery stores and even had one home baked pie!  It was excruciating, but after we blind tasted them all and tallied the votes, we had a winner.

The Winner of the 2011 Apple Pie Taste Test was Brittany’s vegan apple pie!

I hear she is even accepting orders to bake more pies, you better catch her before she raises her prices! Click here to see more photos!

For a little bit of team building and some friendly competition, we took a trip over to Pinz in Studio City for some happy hour bowling action. The “I am Sparetacus” team of Joe, Vin, Jeff and Steven dominated the lanes with a most righteous time had by all. Click here to see photos!

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This is Kevin. Kevin is well known & loved around the Tuesday offices because I talk about him all of the time. He brings joy and happiness to everyone he meets, even people that are severely allergic and will die if they touch him. After being encouraged by several people to start a blog about Kevin, I decided to dedicate the time and start The Daily Kev. Kev’s tumblr has been featured on a few websites since its creation two short months ago, and I believe he is headed for world domination. Kevination. Get used to it!

We have a new website!  As much as we loved our “red” site, we decided it was time for a new look.  With the assistance of our WordPress gurus we redesigned our site to better showcase what we’ve been working on, current news and happenings and introduced our new mascot, the Tuesbuddy!  We’d love to hear your feedback on the site!  Also, we extended the new style over to our blog, so feel free to take a look at some of our recent posts like Astronaut Suicides and What Party? Enjoy!