Sometimes Need Education...

>New York City, NY (PRWEB) April 27, 2012 Nothing makes a bedtime more cozy than sitting down for a story with Mom or Dad. Even though the team behind the 7 Speed Reading™ platform are today leading the self-improvement software sector, they too once enjoyed their own bedtime stories. Regressing back to their own childhoods, the team is today releasing their ten favorite children books. “We decided to compile a list based on our own team experiences,” says Marc Slater, Managing Director of the company behind 7 Speed Reading™. He continues, “These are not based on sales or anything statistical, they’re just ten books our team have fond memories of, and are titles we’d recommend all children read.” Following a lively debate, the team released their final list:
    ”The Sheep Pig”: Dick King-Smith     ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: Roald Dahl     ”The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth”: Eoin Colfner     ”Flat Stanley”: Jeff Brown     ”The Iron Man”: Ted Hughes     ”Stig of the Dump”: Clive King     ”The Narnia Books”: CS Lewis     ”The Borrowers”: Mary Norton     ”My Friend Harry”: Kim Lewis     ”Gorilla”: Anthony Browne As Slater explains, compiling the list was a vivid trip down memory lane. “We had a lot of fun compiling this list. We hope it gives parents some inspiration to sit down and read both to and with their children. Reading is probably the best way to spend quality time as a family, and we hope that parents will keep this tradition alive,” he adds. The company are global advocates for reading following the successful release of their speed reading software package. The software is held in high regard by many education authorities in the United States; congratulated for its natural ability to improve the reading speeds of children. For more information please visit: http://www.7speedreading.com ******
About 7 Speed Reading™ 7 Speed Reading is the only modern speed reading software that uses the latest technology to produce superior results. The software provides its users with a new way to master speed reading that guarantees three times the reading speed along with improved memory and comprehension. The software is poised as the most comprehensive speed reading system anywhere. It contains seven learning strategies, fifteen software activities, video training, advanced tracking capabilities and many more exciting features. …

Source: 7 Speed Reading™ Announces Top Ten Children’s Books.

(Logo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120420/FL91794LOGO)

Reporting to Brian Thomas, Executive Vice President of Client Services, Borrego will focus on managing providers and suppliers at an executive level out of Acceller’s Denver offices. She oversees account management, internal communications, customer insight and data analytics for these relationships. Her role is integral in ensuring that Acceller performs as a key sales, marketing and distribution partner.

“Trista has been instrumental in significantly improving the performance of our Provider Management team and she has always been a meaningful contributor at Acceller,” said Thomas. “Her expertise will be crucial in ensuring our providers and suppliers are managed at the highest level.”

“I’m excited about this new opportunity within Acceller,” said Borrego. “My team has great relationships with our providers and we expect to make those relationships even better, specifically in revenue growth, products per sale and improved activation rates.” She will help identify key opportunities, and develop programs to drive key performance indicators, including unit sales, and reduced payment cycle times and growing contribution margin.

Previously, Borrego was a Channel Sales Manager and Channel Support Team Manager at Qwest Communications. She was also a Finance Manager at GO Chevrolet and Store Manager for Merry Go Round Corporation.

About Acceller

Acceller is a leading aggregator of Internet, television, phone, and other home services to consumers. Acceller’s innovative comparison shopping platform at DigitalLanding.com, enables customers to easily shop for digital services, compare offers, and place orders directly to leading providers; including ADT, Charter, Comcast, Cox, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.

Acceller’s innovative ecommerce platform powers consumer portals, including the Digital Landing resource for TV, Internet and related services, an XFINITY services locator, and an AT&T site for the latest U-Verse offers.

Contact: Anna Cruz-Morales Phone: (305) 265-0136 Email: media@acceller.com www.acceller.com

SOURCE Acceller, Inc.

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Source: Acceller names Trista Borrego new VP of Provider Management

>San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 10, 2012 StrumSchool.com, a free online service that uses a curriculum of instructional videos, downloadable documents and a dash of personal attention to teach aspiring musicians to play the guitar, is happy to announce its beta launch web. The creation of StrumSchool’s online guitar service is the product of longtime amateur guitar player and site founder Benjamin Shapiro. Shapiro credits a fruitless search for a free resource dedicated to teaching guitar though online video as his inspiration for creating the site. After scouring the Internet and finding nothing but outdated, unorganized and expensive subscription sites, Benjamin decided to create a free and high-quality video-based site focused on teaching beginners how to play the guitar. “StrumSchool’s focus is to teach the fundamentals of playing the guitar for free. We use a straightforward and easy-to-follow curriculum of video lessons that teach beginners everything that they’ll need to know to learn how to play any genre of music. Our lessons are taught by full-time professional teachers and since they are free, you simply won’t find a more affordable or easier way to start learning how to play the guitar,” says Shapiro. StrumSchool’s lessons start from the absolute beginning and are broken down into bite-sized chunks. This means that no matter who they are or how much they do or don’t already know, guitar students can learn to play on their own schedule at their own pace. Shapiro adds, “Our site is focused on teaching beginners what they need to know to get started. We break everything down into easily consumable pieces so that our students can work though them as quickly or slowly as they want. Our first few videos

>Carson City, NV (PRWEB) April 01, 2012 Volunteers for Pets of the Homeless have recently been hard at work in the Sun Belt, partnering with local veterinarians to bring medical care to the pets of the less fortunate http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981181810. In Florida, a volunteer for Pets of the Homeless encountered and contacted the national headquarters of the non-profit to get assistance for Paco, a Pomeranian living with his owner in a van behind a Florida Wal-Mart. Paco was in need of extensive dental work, and after contacting Community Animal Hospital of Royal Palm Beach, Fla., Dr. Randall Dugal performed dental surgery and administered vaccinations to little Paco. Dr. Dugal generously discounted nearly 50 percent from the more than $1,000 bill. Paco is now recuperating back with his owner. A continent away in San Diego, Calif., Pets of the Homeless was at work again. Dee Dee, a cat living in a tent with her owner suffered a broken leg. A volunteer with Pets of the Homeless contacted Pet Hospital of North Park in San Diego. The hospital performed Dee Dee’s surgery and generously discounted more than $1,000 off the bill. The volunteer has kindly agreed to foster Dee Dee until she is fully healed.     Volunteers and veterinarians have charitably donated their time and offered discounts on veterinary services; however, the need for donations is ever present. Homelessness in the United States is as critical a dilemma as ever and many of the nation’s homeless care for animal companions. The need for pet food, vaccinations, surgeries, as well as spaying and neutering is massive, so time is critical. Anyone interested in joining the fight are urged to go to: petsofthehomeless.org to join, or for more information, email at info(at)petsofthehomeless(dot)org. …

Source: From Coast to Coast, Pets of the Homeless Brings a Little Sunshine…

Today is World Backup Day, and though it’s not a recognized holiday celebrated with praying to the cloud or gifting loved ones with hard drives, it does serve as a good reminder to back up your data. (Not to sound like a nagging mom telling you to eat your vegetables, but backing up your data is good for you. Really. And I’m reminding myself as much as I’m reminding you here.)

Now in its second year, World Backup Day was created by Ismail Jadun, a biology student from Youngstown State in Ohio who saw the need for it after reading comments on the lack of backup awareness on social news site Reddit. “I was just a college student who was looking for something interesting to do,” Jadun said. Turns out there was a need for it, too.

A recent Harris Interactive online survey found that only 7 percent of respondents backed up their data on a daily basis, while 23 percent said they performed backups every month. Considering that people create and generate 1.8 zettabytes (!!) of data per year, that puts a lot of info at risk.

Related stories Top external drives: Backing up is a personal matter How to build your own external hard drive See all storage reviews

So why do we take such care to protect our physical possessions and not valuable digital data like important financial Excel spreadsheets and treasured JPEGs of our babies? After all, aren’t those worth more sometimes?

“Part of it is perception. People think it’s never going to happen to them,” said Dong Ngo, CNET’s storage reviews editor and resident backup expert. “And while most of the time your data is safe, your hard drive can die at any time, even new ones.”

Another part of the problem is that some people don’t even know how to back up their data or think it’s too hard, Ngo said. But he adds that it doesn’t have to be complicated. “The gist of backing up is to keep copies, exact copies, of data at multiple places. Sometimes, all you need to do is to drag and drop files onto an external hard drive or thumbdrive, or just e-mail that important Word document to yourself via Gmail, Hotmail, or any Web-based e-mail service.”

Businesses, where data loss can have a huge effect on productivity and profits, are — not surprisingly — more vigilant about backing up, but even they can stand to make improvements.

Acronis, a data backup software and disaster recovery solutions provider, surveyed 6,000 IT practitioners in 18 countries, and while confidence in their backup solutions and technologies is up 14 percent over last year, a third of businesses are still concerned that backup and recovery operations will fail. Also, while the amount of data produced by businesses has increased, according to Acronis, the resources dedicated to ensuring that the data is safe has stayed flat.

I’ve had friends who’ve lost their dissertations and all their data by not backing up. But it’s all preventable. You just have to have some discipline. –Dong Ngo, CNET’s storage reviews editor

“Businesses don’t often see backup solutions as a top priority because they are more focused on increased efficiency or cost reduction projects, but long-term contingency planning is equally important to their bottom line,” said Dmitri Joukovski, vice president of product management at Acronis. “It is a myth that backup and recovery has to be costly and complex, and this myth sometimes prevents businesses regularly assessing new technologies and making the changes their operations that may improve efficiency.”

Joukovski says the best thing companies can do is to “prepare, plan, and practice” by devising a complete contingency plan, communicating it to all relevant parties, and regularly testing it and adjusting it to incorporate new technologies.

For everyday users like you and me, the most important thing is to just start doing it. We’ll even make it easy on you and get you started with a list of CNET’s top external drives, along with some sage advice from Ngo.

Ideally, you should back up all your data every day, but at the very least, back up your most personal data — the things that can’t be replaced, like photos and important documents.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people learn the hard way about the importance of backing up,” Ngo said. “I’ve had friends who’ve lost their dissertations and all their data by not backing up. But it’s all preventable. You just have to have some discipline.”

True confession I’ll be the first to admit I don’t back up enough. I save copies of my photos and occasionally some videos and documents to an external hard drive every six months or so, but because I haven’t had any backup disasters, it’s not at the forefront of my mind as often as it should be, and yeah, I get lazy.

I shouldn’t play Russian roulette with my data, though, and if something bad were to happen, I know I’d never hear the end of it from Dong (I can just hear the “I told you so’s” now), so I’m determined to save myself the lecture and update more frequently from now on.

What about you guys? Have any horror stories of your own to share? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Source: Have you backed up your data today?

With the incredible success of the original Angry Birds, few iOS gamers were probably surprised that Angry Birds Space would rocket to the top of the iTunes App Store. I’ve been playing the game quite a lot over the past 24 hours, and though I’ve noticed some bugs (kill all pigs with one bird to get one star, anyone?), the new gravity fields, interesting levels, and new bird types definitely add something new to the game http://www.fangear.us/yo-gabba-gabba-party-throw-the-best-birthday-party-ever-for-your-child.html.

Angry birds isn’t the only game in this genre, however. When Angry Birds took off at the iTunes App Store, several developers came out with their own version of the sling-shot game mechanic and many brought new elements to add to the fun.

This week’s collection of iOS apps are all Angry Birds-like destruction games, but each have an interesting twist on the original game mechanic. The first offers a heavy metal theme as you smash monster trucks into structures. The second lets you blast ragdolls through intricate levels towards a target. The third mixes game genres to add liquid physics into the equation making for unique challenges.

You get to fire some fierce looking trucks into structures, each with their own abilities.

Trucks and Skulls Nitro (Free) is a heavy metal-inspired sling shooter where you’ll need to launch trucks into structures in order to destroy each levels allotment of scary skulls. The somewhat cheesey distortion guitar audio provides the perfect backdrop for the action. Big explosions add to the excitement as you try to efficiently destroy everything on screen using the least amount of trucks possible.

The control system is only slightly different than Angry Birds in Trucks and Skulls Nitro. The truck sits on the launcher, and you touch and drag a button backwards to launch the truck through the air. Different trucks have different attributes, and as you go through the challenges you’ll need to choose your shots wisely to get the most destruction possible out of the available trucks.

The real charm behind Trucks and Skulls Nitro are the big explo

Monroe College alumnus returns to Trinidad-Tobago to share success story after earning her bachelor’s degree in New York. She brings with her a scholarship offer of $3500/semester, worth up to $28,000 over the course of eight academic semesters. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  Monroe College Allison Hall freshmen dormitoryPRLog (Press Release) - Mar 21, 2012 - New Rochelle, NY, March 21, 2012 – Krystal Dookoo left her home country of Trinidad-Tobago as a young adult to pursue her dream of “making it in New York http://reeny.net/earn-safety-degree.html.”  This coming Thursday, she’ll share her success story with other ambitious fellow countrymen who have similar dreams of post-college successful careers.     Dookoo, a 2006 graduate of Monroe College (www.monroecollege.edu) and now an international admissions counselor for her alma mater, will be co-hosting a free, no-obligation Admissions and Scholarship Information Session on Thursday, March 22nd, 5:00 pm, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Port of Spain.  Accompanying her will be Monroe “ambassador” Cecil Wright, director of admissions, a fellow Caribbean from Jamaica, and a 2007 Monroe graduate.   Monroe is offering to other outstanding students, like Dookoo and Wright, its International Students Academic Scholarship worth up to $3,500 each semester.  Based on high school or prior college transcripts, incoming students from Trinidad and Tobago can automatically qualify and save as much as $28,000 in college tuition costs if they enter Monroe as freshmen and complete their bachelor’s degree requirements there.  Once enrolled, a student must maintain a GPA of 3.25 or better in order to continue to qualify for scholarships.   “This scholarship for incoming international students is competitive and is based on the rigor

Twitter has been working hard over the last year to make photo sharing a core part of its product. It took over the photo-hosting role from third parties and gained deep new integration with Apple’s iOS, among other initiatives http://melanyor.multiply.com/journal/item/7/Fireplace_in_Patio_-_How_to_Build. But there’s also a big new winner coming up on top of its developer platform — mobile photo-sharing app Instagram.

New stats provided to us by social photo aggregator Pixable show how this trend played out at the South By Southwest conference in Austin last weekend. The startup tracked all photos tweeted straight from Twitter or via Instagram, that contained relevant hashtags like #SXSW and #SXSWi.

It found that out of the 63,000 photos uploaded, approximately two-thirds came from Twitter itself and one third via Instagram.

While the study didn’t look at any other photo services that share through Twitter, the number here is still surprisingly large. Instagram, which provides easy ways to alter photos and then share them to social networks, only had around 12% of the total market as of last November. One would have expected it to have less than a third of the usage last weekend.

So what’s next? SXSW is heavily attended by people from around the world who consider themselves influential early adopters. The heavy use they gave Instagram could mean they’ll be helping to evangelize the app later on.

The Instagram market numbers are also likely lower than they will be soon. It is only available for iOS now, but the forthcoming Android version will open it up to many more users (people who Twitter itself already has access to). And then there’s the already strong growth on iOS, where it has nearly doubled to 27 million users from 15 million in the last six months alone.

So, hopefully Twitter is comfortable having this new third-party app make such big waves in an area that it considers a core part of its product.

And with

The boutique PC maker focuses on customization with its new all-in-one.

All-in-one computers (such as the Apple iMac) are the most visible part of the desktop market these days, thanks to excellent screen/PC hybrids from HP, Lenovo, and others. But these are largely mainstream machines, aimed at kiosk-like kitchen environments, or family video viewing.

Boutique PC maker Maingear is adding a different take, with its new Solo 21 all-in-one, which focuses on high-end multimedia. The company says:

The Maingear Solo 21 is the first fully upgradeable all-in-one today, including the ability to upgrade the motherboard to accommodate future technology advances. This powerful all-in-one PC features an optional vibrant LED backlit 10-point touch screen, a built-in Webcam, and supports a wide range of 32nm and 22nm Intel Core Processor to fit your needs and budget, and comes with a 32GB SSD caching drive for faster system response.

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From what we’ve seen, this is a slick but still standard-looking all-in-one, with an all-black design (and honestly, looking a little on the thick side), with an adjustable kickstand on the back and a large speaker bar below the 21-inch screen.

The starting price is $999, which includes an Intel Core i3 CPU and 500GB 7200RPM HDD, but does not include the touch screen. Trading up to the touchscreen and a Core i5 adds a $228, and the upgrades continue from there.

There are no discrete GPU options, so this isn’t being pitched as a gaming system, but it will eventually support Intel’s next-gen Ivy Bridge CPUs, which are said to include improved on-board graphics.

The full $999 default specs are as follows:

Intel Core i3 2125 3.3GHz, upgradeable to Intel Core i7 2600S Intel DH61AG motherboard supporting USB 3.0, SATA 6G, 32nm and 22nm processors 4GB DDR3-1333, upgradeable to 16GB DDR3-1333 memory 32GB SSD caching drive standard, featuring NVELO Dataplex software 500 GB HDD, up to 2TB 7200 RPM SATA HDD DVD burner Intel 802.11n, Bluetooth wireless adapter Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The system is available to order today, with an estimated ship date of March 23.

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Source: Maingear aims for a premium all-in-one with the new Solo 21

NYC non-profit Maya’s Hope Foundation teams up with Ukrainian non-profit Happy Child Foundation to find a caregiver for special needs orphans in Kalinovka, Ukraine FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  The special needs orphans at Happy Home, KalinovkaPRLog (Press Release) - Mar 07, 2012 - Justin Bieber just turned 18. Just a few years ago, his mom, Pattie Mallette, worked several jobs to raise him as a single mother http://www.redbubble.com/people/helenhews/journal/8491698-gestalt-psychology-knowledge. His family has kept him grounded with good values — Justin visited with one Make-a-Wish Foundation child every single day while he was on tour last year. On his 18th birthday, urged his 17 million Twitter followers to support Charity:Water, a nonprofit that brings potable drinking water to people in developing countries. Turning 18 is an exciting milestone for many teenagers. It marks the transition from a teenager to a legal adult: Graduating high school. Leaving behind old friendships. Negotiating relationships with current lovers. Welcoming with a hopeful innocence whatever the future may bring — New friendships, new adventures… and freedom.But for many unfortunate orphans, turning 18 hurls them over a cliff and into a life-or-death struggle. Imagine turning 18, then suddenly becoming homeless, losing all your friends and family, and not having anywhere to go or knowing what to do next. Then imagine… not being a “normal” child.That what it’s like to turn 18 for an orphan with special needs at an orphanage like Kalinovka orphanage in Ukraine. The old, Soviet-era orphanage system doesn’t help orphans receive a good education or prepare them for life after they leave the orphanage. Instead, it’s like a warehouse for children.When they turn 18, the only world they know disappears, they are ill-equipped to join society, and they have no home to go back to if things don’t work out.