Mobile music exploration.

Not a day goes by at EcoSalon without a visit to Indie Shuffle. A music blog devoted to music that covers indie rock, hip hop, alternative, folk, punk and everything in between, it’s an excellent place for discovering new music.

With Indie Shuffle’s new iPhone app, (don’t worry, the Android version is coming soon) you can now do all of that music exploration on the go. The app is like the Indie Shuffle blog, using SoundCloud to stream tracks and lets you favorite music, create your own playlists, or just listen to the most recent picks of the Indie Shuffle team.

That means you get a curated music experience, with some of the best in new music, and you’ll certainly be finding a whole lot more hipper stuff than that one Gotye song.

Best of all? No audio or banner ads, meaning you get music without any interruptions of any kind.

Download the app here, and start dancing on the go.

Images: Indie Shuffle

The post Music on the Go: Explore the New Indie Shuffle iPhone App appeared first on EcoSalon.

Email is old news, and it’s getting less efficient by the day.

Chances are, you’re still using email for all kinds of communication throughout each day – personal letters, quick messages, business communications, group memos and sending files. But there’s also a good chance that email is far from the best way to accomplish that communication. It’s impersonal and inefficient, and you’re taking a chance of getting lost in the shuffle of coupons, inane chain letters and invitations to enlarge certain anatomical parts. Here are 15 alternatives for online use and off, for both business and personal purposes.

Letters

Sending a personal note to a friend or family member? If your message is longer than a few sentences, do it the old-fashioned way.  Now that letter writing has nearly died off altogether, receiving a hand-written letter in the mail is like getting a gift. It’s nice to be able to hold something in your hand, but there’s more to it than that. Something about the blank pages of actual stationery encourages us to be more poetic with our language, to meander a little in our correspondence, share more of ourselves than we would when staring at a blinking cursor on a computer screen.

Texting

For those moments when your message just can’t wait, nothing beats texting. It’s quick, it’s short and you can be pretty confident that your recipient will see it fairly quickly. It used to be that texting was reserved for people you know well – like friends and family – but its use in the business world has grown a lot in recent years. While texting can be great for messages like the time and place to meet a client, keep it brief and save serious or sensitive topics for phone calls or face-to-face meetings.

Chat

Don’t rely on email when you just need some quick back-and-forth communication. These days, most of us don’t compulsively check our email like we used to, especially when our inboxes are packed with junk and messages that are pretty low on our priority lists. Gchat, Skype and Facebook Messages are just a few options that are superior to email when you need to ask a quick question but aren’t on familiar enough terms to text.

Facebook Messages

Considering that pretty much everybody is on Facebook, it’s not surprising to hear that the social network’s messaging system is quickly replacing email altogether for many people, especially teens and twenty-somethings. Facebook Messages essentially combine email, text and chat into one place by offering real-time threaded conversations that can be sent and accessed across a range of devices, including phones. Even people who aren’t on Facebook can communicate through Facebook Messages by sending email to your own personal Facebook email address, which has recently been foisted upon you whether you like it or not.

Postcards

Who says you can only send postcards when traveling? If you’ve just got a short message that you don’t mind being seen by various mail carriers and processors across the country, jot it down on a postcard. Stationery stores are packed with pretty postcards and note cards, and hunting down just the right one for your recipient is half the fun.

Postagram

No need to go through the trouble of finding a place to print out your photos while you’re on vacation, or even hunt for the perfect postcards so you can send them to loved ones back home. An app called Postagram turns any of your Instagram photos into a postcard and sends them to the addresses of your choice for just 99 cents. It’s even more personal than choosing a pre-made image, putting your own unique spin on the sights you’re seeing.

Dictation Apps

There’s a time and a place for writing email, and the driver’s seat is not among them. While multi-tasking and driving is probably never the greatest idea, you can fit in a few extra tasks using one of the many dictation apps available for smartphones. Dragon Dictation is one popular choice. You simply speak your message into your phone, and the app turns it into text that you can send via email or any other communication service you like. GoogleVoice, which offers basic call/text/voicemail services, has similar capabilities. You can even set it up to take a call from your cell number, transcribe your message and store it in your Gmail.

Video chat

Maybe it’s not correspondence in the conventional sense, but if your messages don’t contain specific instructions or anything that would need to be written down, video chat is a great alternative to email. It gives back all of those irreplaceable face-to-face signals that you’re missing in text, like tone of voice and body language.

Surprise Packages

The only thing that’s better than receiving a hand-written letter in the mail is finding a package on your doorstep, marked with the return address of somebody you love. And sometimes, “just because” gifts are better than birthday gifts, simply because they’re totally unexpected. Send something meaningful along with that letter. But don’t forget the letter.

Twitter Direct Messages

The fact that you’re limited to 140 characters per tweet is what makes Twitter work the way it does: you’re forced to condense your communications down to the absolute basics. The same goes for direct messages, or DMs, sent to other Twitter users. Twitter DMs can be another quick and efficient way to get across a small amount of info. The only limitation, aside from the fact that you can’t be sure your intended recipient is actually checking them, is that DMs can only be sent between users that follow each other.

Google+ Hangouts

Get up to 10 people together to talk business or just catch up using Google+ Hangouts. This group video chat service replaces Google’s 1:1 video chat, Google Talk, and was recently integrated right into Gmail. The catch? You’ve got to have a Google+ account. It’s a pretty nice feature that Facebook has yet to offer, and there’s no harm in signing up for Google+ just to use Hangouts.

Three.sentenc.es

Take the short-is-better spirit of Twitter and apply it to email by limiting yourself to just three sentences. A service called Three.sentenc.es cuts out all the unnecessary information and pleasantries that normally accompany an email, saving time for both sender and recipient. Like Twitter DMs, it forces you to keep your message short. While you could argue that this terse style of communication could lead to dumbed-down language and social blunders, three-sentence emails could certainly help you avoid an intimidating pile-up of unread messages in your inbox.

Yammer

For in-house business communications, email can be a pretty inelegant and inefficient solution. Enter services like Yammer and Chatter, which aim to bring conversations, content and business data into one place where everything is updated in real time. Essentially, they’re like a private Twitter or Facebook for companies. Accessible through the web, mobile phones or desktop applications, these services are essentially virtual offices that replace email altogether for many companies.

DropBox

If you need to send large attachments, email definitely isn’t the best way to go. First of all, it’s slow, and has a fairly small maximum file size. But more importantly, it’s not secure. DropBox is just one of many services that enables quick and easy file transfers from one device to another, and from one user to another.

GoogleDocs

Hopefully you’re not still emailing documents with multiple contributors and/or editors between a group of people, dealing with all of the headaches that come with multiple versions of the same document. This practice has gone the way of newsgroups and AOL chat rooms. Use GoogleDocs instead, where you can create, share and collaborate on documents, which are stored online for easy access from anywhere in the world.

Photos: MartinaK15, postagram, thomcochrane

The post 15 Ways That Are Better for Corresponding Than Email appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly roundup of EcoSalon’s top stories.

Ruin porn is a nasty thing and yet our objectification of all thing crumbling and abandoned is strong. Detroit, the largest city in the state of Michigan is the American automobile industry’s main squeeze. How can the home of Motown music legacies and Motor City mechanics be in such decay? You Know It When You See It takes a closer look.

Mobile social platforms are hot right now and a sustainable fashion app? Right up our alley. Writer Rowena Ritchie interviews GreenGlamGo founder, Clarissa Nicola, about her company’s new green fashion finder app in Sustainable Fashion? There’s An App For That.

We’ve seen too much of Charlie Sheen of late, but when it comes to celebrity consciousness, a star can take a cause a long way. George Clooney – who is certainly easier on the eyes – has a long and storied list of social activism. “Despite his involvement in bringing the Darfur genocide to light, he considers it ‘the greatest failure of my life’ – because little changed after he and his father smuggled cameras into a refugee camp to bring to light the horrors committed against an entire nation.” In Katherine Butler’s column, George Clooney Vs. Charlie Sheen: Welcome To Shade Grown Hollywood, we look at Hollywood without the rose-colored sunglasses.

We launched the new series Places & Spaces this week, and they all depict amazing representations of those idyllic places we all dream of and hope to go to. Shelter editor Leigha Oaks takes us on a visual vacation, first stop: Juvet Landscape Hotel.

The Hyde Amendment was passed in 1976. If you’ve never heard of it, Hyde ensures that federal money is not used to fund abortions on military bases, in Planned Parenthood facilities or anyplace else. “Anti-choice politicians and activists have spent a lot of time over the last few months making sure that there’s confusion about how government dollars are used to fund abortions. Here’s the quick answer: they’re not,” explains Libby Lowe. In Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…And Don’t You Dare Get Pregnant, we learn the most intrusive employer of all might just be the U.S. government.

All right, we can’t resist one more…

Has your gardening habit yielded yet another bumper crop of squash or greens you can’t give away fast enough? Plenty of people have the same problem and they’re turning the veggie surplus into a profitable cottage industry. In The Green Plate: Is Urban Farming The Next Green Cottage Industry? we get the update on how the urban farming legalization trend is sweeping the country, and putting green not just in our mouths, but in our wallets.

Image: Michael Ruiz

The post The Friday Five, Vol. 4 appeared first on EcoSalon.

An interview with the founder of a hot new green fashion finder app.

As any stylish eco dresser will tell you, it’s all about access. From finding the perfectly cut organic cotton tee, recycled leather boot or that vintage tea dress that makes a modern statement, putting together a unique low impact look is hard. We rely on tips from those style savvy friends who keep an ear to the ground for new designers, sport lines we’ve never heard of and the scoop on that secret vintage store in town that isn’t overpicked and -priced.

And let’s face it, when it comes to nabbing the best items, relations between pals can get decidedly unfriendly. Ever conveniently forgot the location of your favorite eco store when someone asks where you got that incredible recycled jacket? Or felt a sharp pang of jealousy at a friend’s beautiful vintage find?

Thanks to a new smart phone app launched in the San Francisco Bay Area last week, you’ll have access to all the latest insider information right at your very own fingertips. GreenGlamGo is a mobile social platform that offers the ability to search for green beauty products, sustainable fashion and vintage, handmade items from the retailers who stock them.

GreeGlamGo co-founder, Clarissa Nicola, answers a few questions and shows us how simple it is to keep our shopping sustainable and our shopping relationships civil.

What is GreenGlamGo and how do I get it?

It is for consumers who want access to green fashion, vintage, handmade items, Made in the USA, green bridal, and green beauty products. It is also for green brands and etailers who want to participate on a mobile application platform. We wanted to expand the playing field for consumers beyond online. We created a platform using flash lite 4 and adobe on Nokia phones so their products can be browsed easily and quickly.

What personal challenge inspired the creation of GreenGlamGo?

I have been in the fashion industry for 20 years now, and produced  over 2000 fashion shows and trend presentations for consumers and merchants. After my 10th season of telling customers to buy yet another new pair of black pants for their wardrobe, I stopped and thought “Really?  Do these people really need to buy another pair of black pants? How many pairs of black pants does one person need?”.  I looked at my own closet and realized I had about 20 different pairs, all in different shapes and fit and lengths. Then, I thought of the other basics, like white blouses, t-shirts, and I couldn’t help but think of the impact I was making by motivating people to buy more and inferring that what they had wasn’t enough.

Can you give us a run-thru of the process of say, finding a local fashion designer producing sustainable hats?

We  have four main categories: Handmade, Fashion, Bridal, Beauty. If a user clicks on Handmade, then Hats on the top navigation, they can easily find hats. If they want Bridal hats, they click Bridal first, then hats.

Tell us why you decided to include a handmade section, which doesn’t necessarily feature green designers?

We realize the importance of handmade as it keeps production out of factories, which greatly impact the environment.  With sites like Etsy, we felt it was visually cluttered and hard to navigate. We wanted to feature the best of handmade and to raise that bar by keeping it easy to find within the 4 main categories.

Why do you think it’s so hard to find green and locally produced items?

It is hard because they’re not accessible. No one knows where to find these things. People will buy green if it’s easy and they aren’t inconvenienced. The price has to be right, too. While it can be expensive, we built this platform to give small green businesses a chance to go global and expand their playing field. The more people know about what’s out there, the more accessible it is, and the more prices will go down.

How do you plan to promote GreenGlamGo to communities outside of SF, LA and NYC where it’s so much harder to find sustainably made fashion and beauty?

We partnered with Nokia as Nokia smart phones have a stronger market over the iPhone world wide. Their phones are purchased the most in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America. That is one of the reasons why we went with them. Everyone goes to iPhone first with their app because they dominate the smart phone market in the US. We’re looking to reach as many potential green consumers as possible.

The post Sustainable Fashion? There’s An App For That. appeared first on EcoSalon.

Early adopter that I am (Pinterest, check, About.me, check, Foursquare, check – related: why do I feel compelled to be the mayor of the corner coffee shop, check), if it can’t integrate with my beloved Firefox or my necessary Facebook, I am less likely to get hooked. Enter Rightcliq, a simple new shop-and-share-and-buy browser tool from Visa. It’s seriously simple: whether you see a cute product on a blog or are perusing an online catalog, you can save all your favorite things to Rightcliq with…well, a right click. The tool is integrated into your browser which makes it a snap to add, change and manage your favorite finds.

Once you’ve clicked the toolbar icon, you’ll see the “Wishspace,” where your discoveries are saved. It’s neatly customizable in that you can cluster things however you want (organization freaks will love this) – or not, if you want. But here’s where it gets really useful. Not only can you compare pricing and product information (a given for online wishlist services), but you can enlist your friends’ opinions and reviews via email and Facebook.

It makes the act of online shopping a little more thoughtful, which we dig. As in, hold your horses before making that impulse buy so your best friend can remind you there’s an organic alternative and what are you thinking. So, for example, if you’ve been hunting around your favorite eco retail boutiques online trying to put together the perfect look for a holiday party, you can save multiple items from various sites with a simple right click, and then organize them as, say, “Holiday Party”…or perhaps “In Which I Will Knock ‘Em Dead”. You can then invite any and as many of your friends as you like to give you their thoughts on said get-up so you know if the outfit is more word-to-your-mother or simply Meh.

Personally, I see this being incredibly useful for managing my Etsy addiction, and though it’s not a listed use, I see it quickly becoming an easier way to share design and fashion post ideas with our editorial team in lieu of hobbling through the Stumbleupon tool together. (No disrespect meant to the Stumble.)

But back to knocking ’em dead. If your trusted team says your ensemble is a go, purchasing and shipment tracking is integrated, of course (and Rightcliq handles all your info no matter how many sites are involved). Simple. Intuitive. Yep, we like.

Editor’s note: This post is sponsored by Rightcliq by Visa. In accordance with FTC policy, we will always tell you when we publish sponsored posts. We hope you have as much fun with Rightcliq as we do!

The post Get Friend Reviews on Tonight’s Outfit (or Tomorrow’s Gift) with Rightcliq appeared first on EcoSalon.

Food carts. If you’re not up to speed on the latest trend in food movements you’ve been living in a cave; a very dark one. Food carts are everywhere, and they’re bringing rise to some of the coolest in local, sustainable creations by some of the most up and coming chefs out there. And they’re quick and cheap.

Portland, Oregon has long been one of the US leaders in street food – even ranked #1 by some – so it’s no surprise that Microsoft would choose this city to launch a hyperlocal Bing product: the Portland Food Cart Finder.

You can use the desktop and mobile application to access information on over 250 carts in the Portland metro area, including reviews, photos and menus. With carts offering food from Guam to Germany, you’re sure to find something.

The food cart finder is part of the search engine’s larger foray into localized products, and we can only hope that this means more food cart-related search apps for other foodie centers. In the meantime, there are plenty of websites devoted to tracking individual city’s food cart scenes, like Austin, San Francisco and Atlanta.

Thanks to Read Write Web for the tip!

Image: vespar avenue

The post Foodie Underground: Bing’s New Portland Food Cart Finder appeared first on EcoSalon.

Ridesharing is like skinny-dipping: it’s great in theory, but awfully hard to find someone who’s ready to go when you are. Well not anymore because Carticipate is a nifty little iPhone App that pairs you up with your friends, family, or co-workers so you can share the ride, gas, and carbon footprint together.

To connect with a pal that’s going your way or find someone to ride with you, just fire up the app and indicate where you’re going and when. All your iPhone-toting friends with the same app installed on their devices can check in and match up their plans with yours.

Carticipate comes with a pre-loaded list of destinations, but you can easily add your own. There’s also a global search feature that lets you scan a list of registered users to see if anyone in your area is headed where you’re going. While we’re sure Mother Nature appreciates your desire to help save the planet, remember mom’s advice: Don’t get in a car with a total stranger.

Don’t have an iPhone? That’s okay, there’s also a Carticipate app for Facebook that’s just as cool and useful.

The post Get Your Ridesharing Groove on with Carticipate appeared first on EcoSalon.

If you’ve ever wondered just what kind of carbon footprint you’re putting down as you go about your everyday business, here’s a free gadget that can help you figure it out. ECOBOT is a tiny Adobe Air application that installs on your computer (Windows, Mac, and Linux), and analyzes the amount of power, fuel, and paper – yes, paper – you use daily. Once you’re in the know, you’ll be able to figure out where you need to cut back.

This tiny app can’t be beat when it comes to tracking fuel consumption. If you install it on a laptop and input information on the various wireless networks you use regularly (home, work, coffee shop), ECOBOT will automatically calculate the distance when you switch from one network to another. The app prompts you to enter the method of travel and adds that distance to your trip history so it can report back on how much fuel you’re using. Suddenly, that weekly drive across town to that little bistro with WiFi might not look so appealing. If you don’t have a laptop, you can still enter your car travel data manually.

ECOBOT also automatically figures out how much power your computer is using, and spits out data whenever you need it. If you provide additional information about other power sources you use regularly like video games systems, TVs, fans, and vacuum cleaners, you’ll get an even more accurate picture of your power consumption.

Even though we’re trending toward a paperless society, we still use a lot of the paper in our daily lives. ECOBOT automatically keeps an eye on how much your printing from your computer, and tracks other paper products if you like. Just log in all the newspapers, magazines and other paper-based products you buy for a clearer picture of just how much of the stuff you’re using.

ECOBOT won’t make suggestions on where or how to cut back on fuel, power, or paper consumption, but it does go a long way toward helping you gauge what effect your attempts to keep their usage under control are having. Sometimes “going green” feels like a moving target – it’s hard to monitor the effects of small changes. ECOBOT is a neat way to see how our choices make a difference.

The post Decrease Your Carbon Footprint with the ECOBOT App appeared first on EcoSalon.