Bang With Friends Is Heading to Your Smartphone

Bang With Friends, the service for lusty Facebook users, is going mobile. It raised $1 million this week to help you get more friends with benefits. The influx of cash will be focused on helping you see, from the comfort of your phone, just which friends you might want to hook up with.

The site's co-founder, who goes by C, revealed a little in an email exchange with Mashable, but still kept answers as murky as usual. 

"We'll be expanding BWF to enable even more honest offline meetings, helping our users break the ice and find more awesome opportunities," he said before revealing a true nugget. "We're taking it mobile soon, too."

C says the inspiration for the service was "looking at the frustration people have with other dating sites and getting tired of the dishonesty. That, and a decent amount of booze."

At least he's honest. For Bang virgins, here's what you need to know: After signing in with Facebook, the service offers anonymous scanning and selection of friends you'd like to get to know in their birthday suits. And if your matches select you as well, Bang With Friends will email both of you and let you know it's on.

Founded in January by some shy founders, the service is nearing 1 million users and about 200,000 matches. About 70% of the users are between the age of 18 and 34.

What's become window shopping-dating is a hard nut to crack, and love it or hate it, Bang With Friends is a novel digital way to break the ice. But detractors call it a privacy disaster waiting to happen, with questions of data storage, semi-public online sexual behavior and personal data identification. Plus there's also a potential PR fail in the making, should the service fall victim to the pitfalls of tools like Skout, the geo-social dating app that adults used to contact and hook up with minors. If and when that (or something worse) happens, the general public is likely to be up in arms.

There's also competition from services like Snapchat, the photo-message sharing service perfect for sending an Anthony Weiner-like message. With Facebook reportedly working on a similar service, it's very possible that beyond taking it mobile, Bang With Friends' venture capital could help it expand to this image-message space, an increasingly popular means for flirtation.

Spencer Chen, senior director of business development at Appcelerator, says he's not sure about adoption and use by young people — or at least his friends, who he says are instead experimenting with Tinder and Let's Date. Plus he's heard nothing regarding funding or growth since the service's launch before SXSW. Still, he managed to correctly read Bang With Friends' cards and thinks that based on the success of Tinder, Let's Date and Snapchat, BWF will build out its mobile offering to "exploit these serendipitous hookups leveraging mobile, social and location."

Despite a relatively crowded market, there's likely room for one more service, Chen says. "Dating is still a massive market, revenue-wise."

Would you use the app? Let us know in the comments below.

Image via iStockphoto, jaroon

5 Apps to Improve Work Productivity

                                                                    Adam Popescu

We all want more time. Time to finish our work, handle tedious errands and check off items from our ever expanding to-do lists. The problem is, the day's not getting any longer and our responsibilities seem to never stop growing.

The only thing we can do to work more efficiently is to know some very helpful shortcuts and pro tips. And whether you're working form home or remotely, there's a cheat sheet — so to speak — for any setting.

When it comes to apps to help along the way, take a peek at these tools to assist you in everything from remembering important data, scheduling meetings, handling payroll and even virtual assisting:

1. Evernote: Remember everything. While you probably can't remember what you ate for lunch, this free service stores all of your notes, ideas, plans and photos in one easy-to-access platform. More right-brained? It even let's you draw, with its skitch tool. It's really simple how helpful this tool is: Store anything, acces it anywhere. Not enough for you? Well, the year-oldbusiness version of the app features all of that on a scale big enough for a whole company to use. And for all you security-heads out there, two-factor authorization is coming soon, so you can feel safe about where your data is stored.
2. GoToMeeting: Host unlimited meetings, webinars or training from your iPad, iPhone orAndroid device. You can even share documents and your screen, and if you have a webcam, face time, too. Meetings hold up to 25 attendees and no matter your location this service offers conference calls from anywhere with an Internet connection. It's not free, but at as little as $49 per month or $468 per year, it might just be a worthwhile investment if you're looking for an upgrade from Skype.
3. Cloudon: This iOS and Android app is a free cloud experience that basically gives you the power of Microsoft Office, Excel and PowerPoint to create and edit files on your tablet or smartphone. You can also access files you already keep in the cloud with Box, DropBox, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive. This is a one-stop hub to create, manage and share your work with employees.
4. Expensify: Remember those god-awful TPS reports from Office Space? That experience was so painful for the characters in the film that they ended up going AWOL on their jobs. Expense reports suck, so meet an app that makes that process sail a whole lot more smoothly. The software imports any bank or credit card statement, billable items like gas mileage and time, and neatly organizes expenses with custom categories and tags. You can even import receipts from services like Evernote. And the best part of this expensing service? It's not expensive. It's free and available on the iPhone, iPad, Windows Phones and even BlackBerry.
5. Dragon Mobile Assistant: Everyone wants an assistant, but most can't afford the expense. But a free assistant, with you at all times on your iPhone or Android device? Yes, please. The service is voice-directed dictation wherein you speak to text, make calls, schedule appointments, search or update social media accounts. And just like a real-life assistant, you can customize this tool with a name that, when called (or yelled), wakes the dragon. But fear not, Game of Thrones lovers, in this case, it's a very good thing.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, courtneyk

Engineers Call for Repairable Cellphones to Save Money, Environment

 Leslie Meredith
 for TechNewsDaily 

Reduce, reuse and recycle is the foundation of sustainable living. However, it's time to add another "R" to the list — repair.

Repairing electronic devices is equally as important as the other three green watchwords, the IEEE, a professional association for engineers, said in a statement. But most manufacturers must first make their devices more "repairable," the statement said.

In 2013, more than 1.7 billion mobile phones will be shipped to retailers. Each phone uses 165 pounds of raw materials in its manufacture and more than eight gallons of water in the making of its microchip. Extending a phone's life to four years through "modest design changes," could reduce the device's environmental impact by about 40%, IEEE said.

Phones that can be more easily repaired are good candidates for secondary markets, both in the United States and abroad. But repairability can also be a valuable feature in the short term. Considering this factor could do more than make you feel good about doing your part for the environment; it could also save you money.

Bring Back the Screwdriver

As some manufacturers make devices smaller and sleeker, the companies are also using more closed designs and materials that make the phones nearly unfixable, IEEE said.

"Simple things like utilizing openable cases, using screws rather than adhesives and providing easy access to parts that are most likely to break, like screens, greatly improve the repairability of cellphones," said Kyle Wiens, IEEE member and CEO of iFixit, an online do-it-yourself repair site for gadgets.

Still, some phones are more repairable than others. For instance, all you need is a Torx screwdriver to open the casing of the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 . That won't work on the new HTC One with its sealed aluminum body, or with an iPhone.