ABCey’s Weekend Lineup 6.12.14- 6.15.14

Looking for something fun to do this weekend in and around the City? Here at ABCey, we have you covered from electronic picnics to World Cup viewing parties to fun things to do with your dad on Father’s day!

Featured event: Sunset Island |Saturday, June 14|12:00am-9:30pm|Great Lawn, Treasure Island| What better way to celebrate the last official weekend of spring and usher in summer than an outdoor picnic and festival on Treasure Island?! The groovy musical guests include Phuture, Kyle Hall, Beautiful Swimmers, Awesome Tapes From Africa and many more! And the best part of all, the event will be bringing in some of the best local food trucks from around the Bay Area, including Senor Sisig, Mr. Nice, Eat Fuki, Curbside Coffee and Me So Hungry.

1. Waterfront Flicks: Outdoor Film Night |Thursday, June 12|8:00pm|Jack London Square, Oakland| Looking for good movies to watch this summer? Look no further than the kickoff movie night at the Waterfront in Oakland this Thursday evening in Oakland. This is a summer-long-event and is free every Thursday night! For this Thursday evening, they will be showing Gravity, and for the rest of the summer’s movie schedule, check out the website. They show a mix of new and old movies, perfect for everyone to find a movie or two they want to see over the summer!

2. 2014 World Cup Live Outdoor Big Screen Party |Saturday, June 14|9:00am|Civic Center Plaza| In honor of the World Cup “kicking off” this week, there will be an outdoor viewing party taking place in the plaza of the Civic Center! This is an all day and completely free event, so why not take your favorite sports buddies and friends over to the center on Saturday and watch Colombia take on Greece at 9am, Uruguay and Costa Rica at noon and Italy versus Germany at 3pm. This sounds like a great place to get into the soccer spirit and watch the World Cup!

3. Burning Man Precompression |Saturday, June 14|7:00pm-2:00am|8410 Amelia Street, Oakland|With only 81 days left until the renowned Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, make sure to head over to Oakland to get a small taste of what is to come! This event is held at NIMBY and is an indoor/outdoor event, with 6 stages of epic beats, art cars, fiery installations and much more. Make sure to get there before 9pm, when tickets only cost $15, after that it bumps up $10 to $25!

4. North Beach Festival |Saturday and Sunday, June 14-15|10:00am-6:00pm|North Beach District, San Francisco|North Beach is celebrating its 60th annual festival this year. This two day event is free and welcomes you to come and explore! During these two days, the streets of North Beach shut down while food vendors, artists, musicians and craft vendors flood the area. Lovingly known as the Italian district of San Francisco, expect some of the best Italian food you will ever eat! You really do want to make sure that you make it over to this festival and bring dad as a special Father’s Day treat!

5. Giants vs. Colorado Rockies |Sunday, June 15|1:05pm|AT&T Park, San Francisco|Of course, there are always baseball games going on in the Bay Area, so that is nothing special. However what is special is that on Sunday, Father’s Day, the Giants play at home! If your father loves baseball and you have yet to get him a present, head over to Stubhub or the Giants ticketing area and pick up a couple of tickets to make your dad’s day as special as you can!

This Father’s Day weekend is filled with so many different things to do, it’s bound to be an incredible holiday! Let us know how your weekend goes in the comments below or on Facebook and Twitter!

10 Interesting Social Media Facts

Social media plays a huge role in our lives, whether we like it or not! To honor our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, ABCey compiled a list of the most interesting social media fun-facts. Enjoy!

1. Half of all smartphones connect to Facebook every hour of every day!

2. 20% of Google searches every day have never been searched before. Which begs the question: what the heck are you searching??

3. The most optimal photos (ones that get the most likes and repins) on Pinterest are photos of salad.

4. “Earlybird” is the most popular Instagram filter, yet 47% prefer #nofilter.

5. The average LinkedIn user is a male college graduate.

6. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined!

7. Links about sex are shared 90% more than any other link. (Doesn’t its inclusion on this list say it all?)

8. 53% of people on Twitter recommend products in their tweets, which is important because most people trust recommendations from friends versus the 14% of people who trust advertisers. Social media is more important to business than you’d think!

9. 7% of Americans have never heard of Facebook. We don’t know how this happened.

10. More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome.

Want to channel some social media yourself? Tell us what you think of this article with a comment here or on Facebook & Twitter!

Tech Tuesday: Tout!

Tech Tuesday highlights the best and brightest ideas in the tech world. ABCey would like to recognize these up and coming companies for their innovative ideas and ability to think outside the box!

If you really want to wow your social media followers, stop typing that status update! We’re in an age where we can share our lives in real-time, and there’s no better way to do that than with Tout.

Here’s how it works: using the Tout smartphone app, shoot a short 15-second video. After uploading your video to Tout, the app makes it super easy to share with your friends. Tout was designed to be a form of social media and to make it easy to share footage with the user’s other existing social media networks. You can tweet it, post it, use the blog widget, and more!

Everyone seems to be touting Tout! When you visit the homepage, you have your choice between subscribing to the Wall Street Journal, ESPN, or celebs like Shaq. This social media network is great for news junkies who love getting up-to-the-minute updates around the world. Of course, it’s also cool to post a video of your cat sleeping.

Have you used Tout? Tell us what you think! Send us a comment below, a Tweet, or visit out Facebook!

10 Ways to Stay Fashion Forward

When fashion and technology team up, only good things can happen. Really, really good things, like making Pinterest and Instagram shoppable, giving you access to other people’s closets, and creating a sweater that changes color depending on your mood. Try to resist the urge to shop while you read ABCey’s top ten favorite online fashion services!

1. LookMazing | Have you ever seen the most impossibly chic woman strutting around Union Square and wondered, where did she get that?! LookMazing lets you browse through everyday people’s looks and, if you see something you like, just click the picture and you’ll see just where everything comes from. If you’re one of the impossibly chic, you can upload your own pics and share your lookbooks and wishlists with everyone!

2. Fashion + Tech SF | If you’re interested in learning the ins and outs of how the fashion and tech industries fit together, you have to attend a Fashion + Tech SF workshop. Besides hearing from knowledgable entrepreneurs and professionals in either business, these events are huge networking opportunities. Job-seekers and passionate individuals are always welcome to the meetings, so check the schedule on their website. ABCey would love to learn more from this innovative organization!

3. Sensoree | Who knew fashion and technology could combine to be so contentious! This clothing line creates wearable technology that connects the inside of your body, like your electromagnetic energy, with the outside world. Not convinced? The design, which showcases your body language through an interactive light display, was created to aid Sensory Processing Disorder. Learn more here.

4. Boutiika | Boutiika brings the fun and adventure of discovering the cutest little boutique to the web, but with a twist. Local shops share their latest merchandise on this site and shoppers can select what they like, but not buy. Boutiika strives to preserve the personal experience of going into the store itself, so they tell the store to reserve your selections when you have time to come in. It’s like being your own personal shopper!

5. Stylend | Stylend is a location-based app that brings together the woman with the brimming closet and the woman who needs a dress for that restaurant opening she forgot about. Dresses, accessories, shoes, and more are available to rent and browse in your city. The app is fairly new, so our advice is to share your closet to get the ball rolling!

6. 52Grams | Following someone chic on Instagram is so much more fun when you know where they buy their clothes! 52Grams can turn any follower into a fashion leader with their online lookbook made from user’s own Insta’s. This site seems like an excellent social media tool for up-and-coming designers and bloggers and is definitely worth a visit.

7. Just Fab | Justfab.com has constructed their business to connect consumers to producers more directly in order to keep their products inexpensive. By joining this free service, you can select any shoe on the site for $39.99 each. JustFab.com as a company is growing like crazy: in the last few months, they’ve acquired Fab Kids and The Fab Shoes. This is a company to watch out for… and to shop with!

8. Threadflip | We all have that beautiful bag we bought three years ago and have neither worn nor been able to part with. Threadflip lets you turn your closet into a boutique and cleanse your room of all clutter while selling your things to someone who’ll actually use them. And when you’re staring at the open space in your closet afterwords, head back to the site and browse the pre-loved items other users are selling! At ABCey, we just can’t stop snatching up these deals!

9. ShopInterest | Re-pinning a photo on Pinterest turns into clicking “add to cart” with ShopInterest. This site is a way for businesses and resellers to create their own website with a Pinterest-like interface. All items are buyable, show the price on the photo, and can be shared with users on Pinterest. Finally you can remove that “Wanted” pinboard and actually buy these products!

10. MySaleTable | Can it be possible that some genius created a website just for boutique sales? Yes, yes it is. MySaleTable brings the sales to you online where you can browse tons of discounted merchandise. Boutiques upload pictures and details of the products they want to put on sale, and you can either buy them online or reserve them for store pick-up. Never miss a great deal again with MySaleTable!

What do you think: are these services fashion forward enough for you? Tell us in a comment or connect with us on Facebook and Twitter!

Startup Monday: Tadaa

Tadaa is ABCey’s new favorite iOS photo-sharing and editing app. The Hamburg, Germany-based startup differentiates itself from the abundance of mobile photo-sharing apps and services with an emphasis on ‘high end’ editing features, targeted towards the more serious “iPhoneographers”.

Unlike Instagram, Tadaa has a sense of “gamification” whcih comes in the form of ‘tadaa Dollars’, a virtual currency rewarded for every like, comment, reply or re-share a user receives. The editing features are what really makes Tadaa really stand out. Firstly, the editing features are built-in and users don’t even need to join the service to use the app as a photo editor. Additionally, lighting, contrast, and saturation can be adjusted, while upload image resolution remains high (1600 PX max), which the company claims is around three times higher than Instagram.

Incredibly, after adding Instagram import just over two weeks ago, the startup says that over 3 million photos have been imported from Facebook-owned Instagram. In that same period of time, the app garnered nearly 500,000 new users, bringing the total registered user base to just shy of 2 million.

Even though I love using Instagram, I decided to download Tadaa to try it out. It definitely takes some getting used to, but the quality of editing is significantly superior and I am keeping it! (sorry Insta!) What do you think of this app? Do you plan on downloading it and experimenting? Let us know below in a comment or on Facebook & Twitter!