Yapper Monday: Happy Small Business Week!

This week is Small Business Week, and what better way to highlight innovative small businesses than to shout out some of their apps? We’ve featured some small biz Yappers before, but we’ve seen many new small business apps pop up and want to give them a chance to shine. 

Have a small business you’d like featured? Send it our way! http://bit.ly/yappback

The Z Recording Studio in Peekskill, NY, advertises their space for recording, parties, and art openings, among tons of other events. On the app, you can check out the space and its many visitors.

Scavenger Hunt Atlanta uses Yapp for all of its scavenger hunts. The biz arranges and hosts various types of hunts, both private and public, and each one gets its own Yapp to broadcast items found. 

We’ve featured Young’s Wine previously on our blog, but the spirits seller has also created apps for stores in Washington State and Oregon. Each one features an inventory of the store and features specials from time to time.

Happy Father’s Day, Dads!

If you’re a child looking for a simple and fun gift for dad, or a dad looking to add sharp technology to your new smartphone, we’ve got just what you’re looking for. Give the man who taught you to bargain for everything a little bit of free tech this year.

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Manliness: Important for any man, but especially dad, to embrace the art of manliness. So, the guys at The Art of Manliness created a go-to blog and app to give dad his daily boost of man-reads like how-to exercise with a kettle ball or grout tile or best western movies.

PGATour Caddie: For the golf-loving dad, this free version features directions to worldwide greens, hole previews, and tracking so dad can better his game. A perfect gift for the man headed out to the course with his buds.

ESPN Radio: Headed out on summer vacation with a long drive ahead? Keep dad happy with the ESPN Radio app, featuring podcasts and radio feeds from cities all around the country to follow games and updates. Plus, when he’s not listening, he can still grab updates and alerts from ESPN.

Shake-N-Tell: This app puts a fresh spin on storytelling for dad. It comes preloaded with story lines and characters from which dad can improv, hopefully complete with his own quirky voices.

How to Tie a Tie: Because it’s almost a guarantee someone will get dad a tie for Father’s Day, this is an easy guide to tying all sorts of tie knots. Give this one to dad as a companion gift to your little brother’s sports-themed tie so that dad can get creative.

Happy Father’s Day!

Yapper Mondays: Summer Camps Embrace Tech

Summer camps usually bring to mind canoes, climbing walls and bugle wake up calls. These Yappers have taken correspondence to a new level with free apps for all types of education-centric camps.

The Confident Kids Camp is a therapy camp program for children with social disabilities preparing for school with workshops for parents. They’re using their schedule to plan daily field trips and a news feed for updates as the camp dates grow closer.

Brookwood School’s STEM camp is using Yapp in a bunch of awesome ways. Not only do they have their main app, which includes an overall schedule and information for parents, but the campers are making apps, too!

The Sommerkurs 2013 app from Norway has a detailed schedule of it’s camp for different levels of school band members around the country. Each night, the campers perform concerts, and the app integrates Twitter, photos and Facebook to keep parents in the loop.

Yapp: How To Create Your Own Mobile App

Think entrepreneurship is just something you’re born with? Well, listen to how today’s guest became an entrepreneur by obsessing over her idea. She didn’t seek out entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship found her. Also, listen to the story of how today’s founder got kicked out of Starbucks because she was surveying people to get early user feedback. All that and so much more.

Thanks to Steve Young & Mobile App Chat for a great tech talk! Listen to the podcast here.

Mobile App Chat

Learn Something New This Weekend

If you’re in for a rainy or relaxing weekend, why not sit down and learn something you’ve been dying to master? The awesome leaps and bounds in tech have brought us so many great apps to learn from the masters or from the hobbyist down the block. Here are a few of our favorites…

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Learn & Explore: This app from Nikon is a great reference for budding or experienced photographers. Get a leg up on taking incredible photos in a weekend by reading educational articles, browsing photos and studying the glossary.

Khan Academy: Brush up on just about anything you can think of with this library of instructional videos. That means math, history, science…but in a way much more fun than high school. 

Duolingo: Regret taking Latin while in school? Duolingo has a simple and proven method to get you on track with Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and English by playing games and translating actual texts for the Web.

Howcast: Here, you can learn something specific on the go, or let Howcast choose your new skill at random. A library of videos and playlists give you a ton of instruction to help you master anything from lock picking to moonwalking.

Learnist: This platform not only lets you learn from your fellow humans, but also encourages sharing by curating your photos and videos into easy guides.  You can follow boards and be updated whenever new content arises, plus collaborate to inform topics. 

Summertime DIY

We’re all about DIY here at Yapp. And, of course, we love apps. So what’s better to kick off the summer season than a highlight of our favorite DIY apps? Get crafty and brighten up the house using these handy and inspiration-filled guides.

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CraftGawker: Let’s start with getting inspired. CraftGawker is like Pinterest targeted toward crafts. You can search for specific projects or sift through their library of hand-picked photos from craft bloggers to find whatever project catches your fancy.

Craftsy: Looking for a hobby instead of a one-day craft? Craftsy’s app offers video demonstrations to help you discover and perfect your hobbies one-on-one. You can watch whenever, where ever, and interact with your instructor and fellow students. This might be the most fun school will ever be.

Instructables: You can read up on how to do just about anything with Instructables tutorials. Reuse old stuff lying around your house, create a delicious meal, or finally learn how to use the drill correctly. This app is handy to have even beyond crafty projects.

Home: Sprucing up the house, new or old? This app, from the Home TV channel and Craig Phillips, has easy how-to videos, a to-do list to keep improvements in order, and a level so you can stop telling friends that your floors are tilted.

Handy Man DIY: One step beyond Home’s how-tos, Handy Man lets you input all the details about rooms you’re renovating, make lists of materials and tasks, then calculate the average price of the project. Carry it along to the hardware store and feel like a handy pro.

AlleyWatch: Made in NY

“Being Made in NY means a responsibility to build and give back to the community so that we can grow stronger — a stronger network of technologists, investors and partners.”

Our CEO Maria Seidman chats with AlleyWatch about where Yapp fits in to the Made in NY campaign. Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/1adZGQD

From AlleyWatch.

Happy Memorial Day!

For your long weekend celebration of Memorial Day, or for the upcoming summer months, there are plenty of sunny day vacations on the horizon. We’ve grabbed five essentially summertime apps to save you time, money, sunburn and burnt steaks.

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GoSelect: Currently available in 9 big U.S. cities (including Boston, L.A., New York and San Francisco), this app becomes a mobile pass for the city’s essential vacation attractions. Through the app, you can purchase tickets to different attractions (and save when you bundle!), get tips, maps and hours to help plan your day, then keep the passes on your phone to avoid those ticket lines.

iBBQ: Grilling is a great summer pastime, and the iBBQ app grabs all the information you need to make your cookouts sublime. Recipes? Check. Nearby butcher’s shops? Check. Weather forecasts? Check. Pull out the charcoal and you’ll be ready to roll.

OurCast: April showers bring May/June/July showers. Be prepared before you leave the cozy shelter of the beach house with OurCast, which gives you a weather forecast in 10-minute increments instead of the more common hourly. You can also share the local weather you’re experiencing and read updates from others in your area.

iSunBurn: A trip to the beach usually calls for the inevitable sunburn. This apps lets you check the EPA’s UV index before going outside so that you can grab the SPF 15 or the SPF 90.

Tide Table: Keep track of the lo and hi tides while lounging on the beach to save your towel and paperbacks an ocean drenching. Tide Table pulls information from nearby coast guard stations and can give you predictions for your entire vacation in a few quick seconds.

HugDay

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Here at Yapp, we’re all about entrepreneurship. Heck, that’s how we got here! So we’re celebrating Hug an Entrepreneur Day with arms wide open.

Every day, we thank our users for being the bombdiggitybest in the app creatin’ universe. Today, we’re taking a second to thank our stellar team, especially our founders, Maria & Luke. Their entrepreneurial spirits brought Yapp to life, and the tough, winding road they continue to navigate us through qualifies them for lots and lots of #HugDay hugs.

If you know, work for, or are an entrepreneur, get huggin’. Today’s the day to spread the love!

Yapper Mondays: All on Sale

Few things boost a blah day like an email from your favorite shop offering you a good sale. But waking up in the morning to a inbox filled with product emails from the stores can have the opposite effect. Some of our Yappers changed their pace and started offering discounts and deals through apps to reward their customers who downloaded.

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A few weeks back, we highlighted author Erin Nicholas, whose Yapp offers goodies big and small for it’s users. We’re giving her another shout out here for having such a cool app, full of freebies and discounts for members of her Yapp community.

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Raw Caviar Clothing Co. offers regular deals and discounts for app users through it Twitter account and the live news feed inside the app. The deals range from alerts that products are on limited time sale to codes for 50% off, all given through the app.

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KRSGallery.com integrates its Twitter feed to offer deals and updates as well. Codes are tweeted out, as are new design features, and then are synced to the app.

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Modernica, a modern furniture store in San Francisco, used Yapp for their recent factory sale. They included pictures of items being sold, encouraging notes to get users to come and buy, and offered a $25 gift card to the first 100 people in line.