Survive Your Holiday Party With 5 Tech Tools

Who doesn't enjoy a good holiday party? Fun-loving friends, festive food, candy-cane decked cocktails.

But all that revelry sometimes can lead to regrets.

Surrounded by new and old faces, it's easy to miss a name. All those peppermint-flecked treats pack on the pounds. And, of course, hours of slinging back boozy beverages can lead to e-mails, texts and phone calls you know you shouldn't make.

Technology can't undo seasonal slip-ups, but it can help you prevent them. Check out a few "survival" tools for the holidays below.

Social Media Sobriety Test

Convinced that "nothing good happens after 1 am," a computer security software company introduced a free program last month that prevents tipsy tweets and other kinds of polluted social media posts.

The Social Media Sobriety Test plugs into a Web browser to block you from your favorite social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Tumblr) unless you can pass an Internet version of a field sobriety test.

You just choose the sites you want to protect and indicate the hours during which you expect to be intoxicated. When you try to socialize online during those hours, you'll have to follow a moving circle with your cursor to prove that you're sober enough to sign in.

The program works in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome but, unfortunately, does not work on mobile devices.

Google Goggles

If you use Gmail, let Google protect you from drunk e-mails too.

Its Mail Goggles program (which riffs on Beer Goggles) asks you to complete a few simple math problems within 60 seconds before you're allowed to send off your late-night missives.

If you can make it through the math, your message goes on its merry way and you can continue to e-mail without further checks.

But if you have difficulty solving "five times two" or "94 minus 33," Gmail keeps its guard up. You can try again, but it won't let you send until you prove you can add and subtract.

By default, Mail Goggles only "breathalyzes" you on the weekends between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. But, once the program is enabled, users can adjust when it's active and the level of difficulty.

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Top 5 Apps for Holiday Shopping

96" target=external>best bargains this holiday season, your smartphone may be your secret weapon. New applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry have shifted the power back into the hands of you, the consumer. Score deals, find savings, and cut your costs dramatically. Here is a countdown: the High 5 holiday shopping apps.

#5: Coupon Sherpa

Who doesn't love saving money? And for all you savvy shoppers, the coupon can be your best friend. But searching through mailng ads and Sunday newspapers for decent deals is time-consuming work.

Enter the Coupon Sherpa. This app searches high and low for the best mobile coupons available. Find one by searching for the store name or by category, then just show it on your phone at check out.

#4: Shopkick

Holiday shopping can be exhausting. Going through all the aisles, looking for the right products, trying not to spend too much money, and getting no reward for your hard work. Until now. Shopkick is an app designed to make the whole experience a little less stressful and a little more interactive.

Shoppers are rewarded wtih kickbucks, which are basically frequent flyer miles for shoppers. Earn them just for walking into a store. There's no need to check in as with other location-based services. A device located inside the store emits a signal automatically picked up by your phone. Retailers also reward you with kickbucks for trying on clothes or scanning a barcode.

You can then redeem your kickbucks for a variety of items, including discounts, gift cards, movie tickets, even donations to charity.

#3: Gas Buddy

Driving around from store to store trying to find the perfect gift for everyone on your list can drain your gas tank and your wallet. Prices for gas can vary as much as 20 percent from station to station, so where you fill up can start to add up.

Gas Buddy is an app that helps you find the cheapest gas within reach. Just enter your ZIP code, or let the app figure out your current location by GPS. Gas Buddy will tell you all of the gas stations in your area, how close they are, and what they're charging.

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Amazon Says Holiday Shopping Deadline for Free Shipping is Dec. 17 [eMoney]

Procrastinators, listen up! Amazon.com says that next Friday, Dec. 17, is the final day you can get free shipping on orders of $25 or more and guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve. Among a plethora of other options, the next best is for Amazon Prime customers, who can wait until Dec. 21 and still get presents on time for free. The deadline of Dec. 17 is an official day of sorts with a Web site, at freeshippingday.com, claiming to get thousands of merchants to commit to offering free shipping with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve in the U.S. if orders are made before midnight.

Tagged: EMoney, Newsbyte, Tricia Duryee, Amazon, Christmas, commerce, free shipping, holiday, merchants, retailers, shopping | permalink

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The Hunch Gift-O-Matic Churns Out Holiday Gift Ideas For Your Twitter Pals

/15/hunch-taste-graph-business-model-api/">taste graph to come up with the recommendations.

So how well does it work? The top suggestion for Hunch CEO Chris Dixon is a railrroad strategy game called Ticket To Ride. He’s always Tweeting about the Carcassonne, so that’s a pretty good suggestion. What to get Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley? How about an iPod-compatible jukebox. Our own MG Siegler, aka @parislemon? The Gift-O-Matic’s top suggestion is a a Star Trek USB Communicator nerd phone. Perfect!

So far, so good. But when I tried @arrington, the man who has everything, I got mixed results. It came up with some pretty decent ones: a voltaic backpack, the Hurt Locker DVD, a large carry-on satchel, and an expert bocce set. But the first suggestion, a book called Wetlands, was a little off. I may be wrong, but I just don’t think he’d enjoy this book. Here is the description:

With more than one million copies sold in Germany and rights snapped up in twenty-seven countries, Wetlands is the sexually and anatomically explicit novel that is changing the conversation about female identity and sexuality around the world

Yeah, I’m definitely getting him the bocce set.

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Holiday calendar: Russia's most dazzling delta

Alan Boyle says: This picture may look like a delicate ocean coral ... or a microscopic view of a stained tissue sample ... or a visualization of someone's psychedelic dream. But it's actually an image of Russia's Lena River delta, captured in the year 2000 by the Landsat 7 satellite. The colors don't reflect what you would actually see if you were looking down from Landsat's 438-mile-high orbit; rather, they represent different types of surface composition, ranging from vegetation-covered terrain to bare ground and bodies of water. This online tutorial explains the seemingly crazy color scheme.

The Lena River is about 2,800 miles (4,400 kilometers) long, making it one of the largest rivers in the world. The Lena Delta Reserve is the most extensive protected wilderness area in Russia, providing an important refuge and breeding grounds for many species of Siberian wildlife.

This picture of the Lena Delta is the fifth treat in our Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar. Every day from now until Christmas, a fresh image of Earth as seen from space will be posted to Cosmic Log and Photoblog. But you don't have to wait until tomorrow to sample some more Landsat goodness: Go ahead and feast your eyes on this year's "Earth as Art" slideshow.

Here are more space images, from our own Advent calendar as well as others on the Web:

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter.

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Let Your Friends and Relations Choose How to Use Their Gift Cards This Holiday Season

/01/bizspark2.gif">This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Tango Card

Quick Pitch: Say bye-bye to a wallet full of unused gift cards — the Tango Card allows the recipient to shop where he/she wants, donate any portion of the balance to charity or even redeem it for cash.

Genius Idea: Oh, awesome. Your grandma gave you a gift card this Christmas that will score you $50 worth of meals at the local Rib Shack, and you’re a staunch vegan. Re-gifting, anyone?

Although gift cards make pretty good presents, it can be hard to choose the right one for any given friend or relation. That’s where the Tango Card comes in. This gift card allows the recipient to choose where they want to shop, donate money left on the card to charities (including America Scores, Grameen Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, InSTEDD, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, National Park Foundation, Summer Search, USO) and redeem any balance left on the card for cash.

Yes, there are a limited number of locations you can choose from when it comes to shopping, but two of the top three most-wanted cards are included in the mix: Target and Amazon. The rest are Gap, Home Depot, Nike, Pottery Barn, REI, Rixty, Spafinder, Starbucks and Zappos.

Recipients can even download a free iPhone app [iTunes link] that will help them keeps tabs on card value and store card info for online shopping.

Like Cardpool — an online marketplace for users to buy, sell and trade giftcards — Tango Card aims to make the gifting process easier and more rewarding for everyone involved. It’s a simple solution, but one we think will certainly come in handy this holiday season.

Image courtesy of Flickr, mmlolek

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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