Blake Hall

staff:

Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls to U.S. Representatives in a concerted effort to protect the Internet. Extraordinary. There’s no doubt that we’ve been heard.

So just to keep you updated: The well-intentioned, but immensely flawed “Stop Online Piracy Act” is still in the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was yesterday and now members will debate and bring amendments to the bill. The Committee will reconvene in a few weeks — the date has yet to be scheduled. Nothing has been brought to a final vote. Everything is still very much in play. We’ll keep you posted on what’s going on and what you can do to help. But for now, we want to thank you.

One encouraging thing we heard yesterday:

I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.

— Representative Darrell Issa

We also want to express our tremendous gratitude to our friends at Mobile Commons who, on 30 minutes notice, hooked us up with their amazing platform (and provided their expertise) to automatically connect callers with their Representatives.

brit:

The Laundry Pod

City dwellers, camping fanatics, boaters and college students: this post is for you! The Laundry Pod is a new laundry machine that is small and portable, giving you the ability to clean your clothes wherever you are.

Apparently, the idea struck when RKS, the design firm who made the Laundry Pod, discovered that many urban young women were washing their delicates in salad dispensers from their kitchens. (Kind of strange, but I see the vision.) 

It can manage up to six garments, which isn’t much, but can save you if you’re in a rush to wash a few things and don’t want to run to the laundromat. I, for one, still remember washing clothes in a bathtub a few months ago while I was traveling for weeks on end in South America. This little gadget could also be a great in-room hotel amenity, for those that don’t want to spend a ton of money on laundry service.

The device was supposed to go on sale a few months ago, but isn’t yet, so I’m assuming we should hear an update any time now. You can keep informed here.

(Source: brit)

parislemon:

Apple’s vision for the future of computing versus Microsoft’s vision for the future of computing. 

vimeo:

Today we are very proud to announce the release of a new service, Vimeo PRO.

Vimeo PRO is a simple and extremely affordable video solution for businesses. We’ve been hearing from companies for years about how they would love to use Vimeo for commercial purposes (something our current platform prohibits) so we’ve built a service and added some tools that we think small businesses and organizations will find very useful.

What do you get with PRO?

Portfolios allow PRO members to create unique, stand alone, fully customizable websites, without any Vimeo branding, to promote and showcase their videos and service. Need a website? With Portfolios you can create one in minutes without having to type a line of code. We’re launching with several themes toget you started, and there will be many more to come. We even have custom domain support and built-in video SEO!

Video Review Pages give PRO members a way to share unbranded and unlisted video pages with clients or for internal use. We are also allowing anonymous commenting as well as added password protection privacy.

Brandable video player options gives PRO accounts the ability to add their own logo to the player! All embedded videos will show your logo, no matter where they are embedded or shared.

Third-party video player support if you don’t like ours ;) We think our player is pretty awesome, but we know you might need something we don’t offer. Now you have even more options!

All the best features of Plus are included as well, including Advanced Stats, Unlimited HD uploading, HD embedding (up to 1080p), priority uploading, and great mobile, tablet and TV support.

Read more and get all the details on the new Vimeo PRO blog!