RPS on the Streets is your quick guide for the latest and greatest tools and tricks that will keep you running at optimum speed. Now, we aren’t talking about fancy motor oil, we’re talking about websites that help you find that perfect gift for that “difficult to buy for” person on your list, an easy way to get everyone’s plans for the holidays together, and a way to never forget any of the cool things you stumble across on the web.
The older a person gets, the harder they seem to be to gift. Children are easy: spend an hour with them in the toy aisle, and they will gesture to every item they’d like to see under the Christmas tree. (left there by Santa, of course) Older children and adults, however, can take the “happy” out of “Happy Holidays” faster than an open parking spot at the mall fills up this time of year, when it comes to making sure their spaces under the tree are filled, too. Well, we’ve discovered a service that just might make your festive foray into gifting a little more bearable.
Wantful is a service that takes cues from a person’s likes and dislikes, quirks and qualities, and creates a list of items that it thinks that person will enjoy. The process is simple. To begin, you fill out a questionnaire about the person you’re trying to find a gift for. Using the results of the questionnaire, Wantful will generate a list of items that you then choose up to 16 of. Your selections are then put into a book that will be mailed to the gift recipient. That person can then choose which gift they would really like, and it will be mailed to them. Almost like a personalized Sears catalog that you KNOW you’re going to get something out of. Happy holidays, indeed.
Trying to get everyone together for the holidays? More often than not, that can feel a lot like trying to herd kittens, especially when you have family members that aren’t local. Well, instead of creating the world’s longest email daisy-chain, racking up the overtime on your cell phone minutes, or relying on other family members to relay “get together news”, why not try something a little more fool-proof?
Hatch allows you to “hatch a plan” about any event you could think of. All you need to do is include details (location, time, date, etc.), then send out the plan to those you wish to invite, using their email address or cell phone number. Hatch is available as an app, but the beauty of it is, you can interact with invitees, even if they don’t have the app. So maybe NOW everyone will make it to Grandma’s house.
Have you ever been watching a video on YouTube, laughed your pants off at it, closed out of it, then struggled to recall it a few days later when trying desperately to reenact it for friends? Well, if you had been using Gimmebar, that video could have been playing for your friends again in seconds, instead of subjecting your friends to a full five minutes of you impersonating a piano-playing cat.
Gimmebar is a lot like Pinterest on steroids. For those not familiar with Pinterest, it’s a place for storing images from all over the web in specialized boards for other users to view, and to help you organize great ideas, fantastic recipes, or funny sayings from all over the web, just by “pinning” a picture that corresponds with it. Gimmebar takes this “Internet organization” a few steps further. Instead of only saving a picture, you can now snag videos, lines of text, even screenshots of an entire webpage, and sort them into a public or private gallery, all from the Gimmebar taskbar. In these galleries, you can further organize your content into lists like “What I want for Christmas” or “Ideas for our new marketing strategy for 2012”.
So, give Gimmebar a spin. We dare you not to get addicted.
Have any cool online services or apps that you just can’t live without? Share it with us in a comment below. Have a Merry Christmas!
