Important First Steps for New Freelancers

via slodive.com

Deciding to pursue a freelancing career may not exactly be like a walk in the park. True that it has its perks but before you can enjoy those, you will have to go through some rough spots before you can actually make a name and stand out in the overwhelming number of freelancers.

Coveting a spot in the freelancing world will not be easy especially if you are an amateur who lacks experience. Think of the competition you will be facing when you start looking for freelance jobs. It’s no secret that most clients would prefer to hire those who have a solid portfolio and a considerable amount of experience as opposed to newbies.

So, how exactly can you get that first job and how can you start a freelancing career if you can’t find a client? The answer is really simple. You just need to know the basics. In other words, you have to learn the tricks of the trade before you can expect to find solid ground. As a budding freelancer, you have to begin with the important first steps.

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Facebook's First Official Hi-Res Imagery Of Its Redesign

via businessinsider.com

Facebook redesigned its news Feed today, creating separate feeds for photos, music, news from friends and news from advertisers that you follow.

Here are Facebook's prototype images of the new redesign, which will be rolled out gradually.

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BlackBerry pushes out first BB10 software update with performance, camera improvements

via theverge.com

Less than a month after the launch of BlackBerry 10, owners of the Z10 can now check their device for the first software update. BlackBerry has today released version 10.0.10.85 of the young OS. First and foremost, the company is promising users will see better overall performance from third-party apps. Interestingly, BlackBerry also says it's worked to improve the low-light capabilities of the Z10's 8-megapixel camera. "You’ll love the difference this makes for photos where you don’t use a flash — like the Time Shift Camera feature," reads today's blog post detailing the changes.

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The first 3D-printed plastic car is as strong as steel and half the weight

via extremetech.com

Cars are big and heavy, and that means they use a lot of energy while traveling. It’s easy to understand why these behemoths have traditionally been so weighty, though: It takes countless parts to make a modern car, and it’s mostly made out of steel for structural stability. That’s all changing, however, now that large-scale 3D-printing is becoming a reality. These new cars can use less parts and lighter materials to offer the same functionality and safety with less complexity and energy required. With the Urbee 2, Kor Ecologic is making a small two-passenger vehicle with a 3D-printed exterior. It’s highly efficient, light, and extremely safe in spite of being made of plastic.

In an article on Wired, the Urbee 2′s lead designer Jim Kor talks in-depth about the process being used to create this lightweight aerodynamic marvel. Using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) method, thin layers of plastic are sprayed one after the other for about 2,500 hours until an entire car exterior is created. Thanks to the customizability afforded by this production method, different thicknesses and patterns can be used to reinforce the structure. This leaves us with a product as strong as traditional cars, but at a fraction of the weight.

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3Doodler: The World’s First 3D Printing Pen

via hiconsumption.com

We already knew that 3D printers were gaining mass popularity over the past few years, but what about 3D printing pens? Well that’s exactly what we have here in the innovative 3Doodler.

This is the world’s first and only 3D drawing pen to ever hit the market, allowing users to simply draw anything they’d like without the use of software or computers. If you can scribble, you can use the 3Doodler. Crowned “the most affordable way to print,” the concept behind the pen is the same as its 3D printing companions, heating and cooling plastic as it passes through the body of the pen. Simply plug this thing in, and go to work building 3D models, jewelry, toys, art, you name it.

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Design or Content First: The Chicken & the Egg

via paper-leaf.com

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re starting a website design project, and the client wants to tackle their own content – or maybe there is an outside copywriter. So as to keep the project moving along, you decide you will just jump into design using lorem ipsum (or perhaps bacon ipsum) before you get the real content; after all, when the content comes in, you can just swap out the placeholder copy with the real copy.

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What to Expect When You’re Freelancing

via freelancefolder.com

More and more of us are becoming freelancers. But, for many of us, the reality of freelancing is different from what we expected.

You’re probably already familiar with the freelancing feast or famine cycle problem and with the struggles freelancers in finding gigs. We’ve already discussed both of those problems on Freelance Folder, so I’m not going to go over them again in this post.

What you may not be aware of, especially if you’re fairly new to freelancing, is the other challenges that freelancers face–the ones that most freelancers don’t talk about much.

In this post, I’ll list some of less discussed challenges of freelancing so that you’ll know what to expect when you start freelancing.

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World's First 3D Printing Photo Booth Dispenses A 3D Figure Of You

via bitrebels.com

This is just so cool I’m about to burst. This is the world’s first 3D printing photo booth. If you’ve been following Bit Rebels for a while, you probably know that we are doing our best to keep up with the advances in 3D printing. The technology is moving so fast though that if you look away for just a moment, you can miss it all. We all know how popular photography and photo sharing sites have gotten over the past few years.

Imagine this…What if you went to a photo booth in a mall or a movie theater and you put in a dollar, pulled the curtain, and sat down to get your photo taken by the machine. What if instead of spitting out the usual black and white strip of four or five photos, it dispensed a small mini-me figure of YOU?! Wouldn’t that be awesome? I can totally see this being the kind of thing that I’m flipping out excited about yet my grandchildren will think it’s boring.

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The First 11 Apps You Have To Download On Your iPad Mini

via businessinsider.com

Apple's iPad mini and revamped iPad 4 launched just two short days ago.

If you were lucky enough to score one, you'll want to start off your experience right by downloading these awesome apps.

The apps we selected come from across the spectrum and are sure to make your iPad more entertaining and useful.

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Apple iPhone 5 sales top 5 million during the first weekend

via www.gadgetell.com">technologytell.com

We saw a brief statement from Apple not all that long back about how the pre-order sales were going for the iPhone 5. And well, we are now sitting on the Monday following the official launch weekend and as many were waiting for expecting — Apple has dropped the press release. In this case, they are touting as having sold more than 5 million iPhone 5′s.

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Here's The First iPhone 5 Ad From Apple

via businessinsider.com

Apple's first TV commercial for the iPhone 5 (below) is titled "Thumb" and touts its new larger screen in relation to the size of your hand and the radial sweep of your thumb. The spot asserts it's just "common sense."

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Website Tips Based On Your Website's First Impression [Infographic]

via bitrebels.com

Need some fresh website tips based on data you don’t already have? I’ve got just the thing for you. If you have a website, whether it’s an e-commerce site, a blog or any other kind of webpage, you’ve probably put a lot of time into determining how it looks. When it comes to attracting visitors and keeping them, there are so many things that factor into the equation. Everything from how many ads are displayed to the colors you choose will play a role in how your website will be received by the readers who visit you. We’ve written about dozens of different aspects that will affect how powerful your website can be, but this is one we haven’t touched on before. Based on what you see here, you will hopefully get some website tips that will be helpful for you along the way.

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This Is the First Website Ever

via gizmodo.com

Once upon a time, Tim Berners-Lee took the concept of Hypercard and turned into a world of networked pages. Then there was the first website ever, a boring but clean and well-lighted place that started with the title: "World Wide Web".

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Google's First 20 Employees: Where Are They Now?

via businessinsider.com

Marissa Mayer was Google's 20th employee. Now only 7 of the initial 20 remain at the search giant that made them all rich (excluding founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page).

Some have become entrepreneurs, others are angel investors, and a few are happily retired.

A Quora user compiled a list of all the original Googlers and where they are now. We did some additional digging to find out which roles they had, when they joined, and more.

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What First Got You Interested in Technology?

via gizmodo.com

In our "What Was It" series, we've been talking with notable people about what first piqued their interest in technology.

People like Steve Wozniak and Alexis Ohanian have shared what pushed them into this field. Last night, at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil de Grasse Tyson told us what got him hooked on space exploration.

These recent discussions have been illuminating, and we'd like to hear more on the subject from our readers. So what did it for you? A trip to a planetarium? A high school science teacher? Tetris?

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Microsoft Just Lost Money For the First Time Ever

via gizmodo.com

Microsoft just posted its fourth quarter results, and for the first time since the tech giant was founded, it lost money. But this isn't necessarly all doom and gloom the beginning of the end—not yet anyway.

Microsoft hasn't had the best few years recently, but its business is so huge and its users so many that it has been able to keep turning profits despite Ballmer's biggest blunders. The loss, according to the AP, was caused by an accounting adjustment. What does that mean? In 2007, Microsoft bought the advertising business, aQuantive. Turns out it was a bad deal, so in its fourth quarter balance sheets, Microsoft decreased the value of its assets by $6.2 billion to address the botched deal, pushing its numbers into the red for the quarter—$473 million in the red to be exact. Without the write-off, Microsoft earned 73 cents per share, which actually beat analyst expectations. Go Microsoft!

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Microsoft makes its first ever loss

via bbc.co.uk

The computing giant Microsoft has made its first-ever quarterly loss after it wrote off some of the value of its online advertising business.

The loss came after it wrote down the value of Aquantive by $6.2bn (£3.94bn, 5bn euros), which failed to bring the profits expected by Microsoft.

That led to a $492m loss in the three months to the end of June, compared with a profit of $5.9bn a year ago.

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This Could Be the World's First Computer Generated Animation

via gizmodo.com

It's almost impossible to pin down when and where the first computer animation was created, given several companies and research facilities were dabbling in the new medium at the same time. But AT&T—formerly Bell Labs—and others believe this simple clip dating back to 1963 could indeed be the world's first CG animation.

Not surprisingly, the animated clip isn't exactly a t-rex dismantling an SUV. Instead, its creator, Edward E. Zajac (who's also narrating), was trying to model and simulate the motions of a satellite orbiting the planet. So the results are basically a wireframe rectangle circling a wireframe sphere—but back in 1963 this was a revolutionary accomplishment.

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Make a Great First Impression: 7 Smart Tricks

via inc.com

Research shows that customers decide whether or not they want to work with you within two seconds of meeting you face to face.

That puts the burden on you to make certain that those two seconds really count. The only way to do that is to prepare ahead of time.

These tricks may help.

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The First Television and Telephone Satellite Launched 50 Years Ago

via gizmodo.com

On July 10th, 1962, NASA launched the first Telstar satellite. The spherical satellite—which actually looks like a model of the Death Star—was the first to relay television and telephone signals through space.

In fact, just two days after launch on July 12, 1962, the satellite transmitted a television signal across the Atlantic Ocean from Andover Earth Station in Maine to the Pleumeur-Bodou Telecom Center in Brittany, France. According to the excellent history at Telstar50.org, the first images from the United States were of President John F. Kennedy and the first beamed over from France were of singer Yves Montand, along with clips of sporting events. Telstar 1 was also responsible for the first telephone calls—some 400 of them—sent through space.

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