Locket
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Simple Habit aims to de-stress you with 5-minute meditations
Yunha Kim knows a lot about stress. She founded Locket, an app that put ads on the Android lock screen, which was eventually bought up by the shopping app Wish. Starting and running her own company, naturally, was a stressful proposition, so she turned to meditation as a way to center herself. Now, she's hoping to do the same for everyone with a new iPhone app called Simple Habit. It offers five-minute guided meditation sessions that you can do from practically anywhere, each targeted for specific situations.
This app lets you send messages right to your friends' lock screens
Locket, a startup focused on making your phone's lock screen more useful, is living up to its reputation with ScreenPop, a new Android app that basically turns your lock screen into a messaging client. Unlike most messaging solutions, you don't need to open up a new app to send or receive photos. Instead, you can choose to send photos and notes right from your lock screen to your friends, which will greet them the next time they try to unlock their phones. And, similar to Snapchat, the messages disappear once your friends swipe through their lock screens. ScreenPop is clearly an evolved form of Locket's original concept, which involved paying you for viewing ads on your lock screen, but it also taps into our current love affair with messaging apps.
Locket puts ads on your Android homescreen, pays you a penny to unlock (video)
Take a look at your Android phone. See that background shot? It's probably kind of cute, but hardly inspiring. In fact, is it bringing you any joy whatsoever? Is it helping you to make rent? Believe it or not, there's now an app for that. Locket has just launched into the Google Play Store, enabling a limited (for now) selection of advertisers to place ads on your lock screen and then paying you one cent for each time you unlock. Of course, it's capped at $0.03 per hour (so every other unlock is just making the company money), and you'll be allowed to cash out, toss the funds on a gift card or donate your earnings to a charity. For now, it's restricted to users based in the United States. Oh, and don't worry, we already did the math -- you can earn $262.80 by unlocking your phone's screen three times each hour, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Or you can just mow some grass. Update (2014): As it turns out, Locket's business model didn't scale fast enough and as of January, it's no longer paying users to unlock their phones. It still exists, and will push quotes, funny videos or other info to your lock screen if you're interested -- but it just won't pay you to look at them.
Kodak 1881 concept cam takes discreet snaps, is not discreet
Apparently designed so Flava Flav could secretly record his travels back in time, the "1881" concept designer Lindsey Pickett showed at a recent Kodak design exhibition is a bold new entry in the uber-competitive non-existent camera / locket space.The foldable cam takes snaps just by squeezing the case, or you can crack it open and line things up on the dual LCD screens. Pickett also tried to capture some of that old-school photo locket vibe by setting those the screens to auto-play the internal memory when opened, which'll keep you entertained during the frequent rest breaks you'll have to take while lugging this thing around on your neck. No specs to be had, since the 1881 is just a concept, but first Kodak and Pickett need to figure out how to build a camera smaller than a manhole cover.[Via Techie Diva]
