No more waiting around for parcels to arrive. No more rushing to the post office and queuing up with a "misssed delivery" slip.

With drones, you can get packages delivered to your exact location, within minutes.  They target the location of your smartphone, via GPS, so even if you walk down the road they'll still find you.

Flirtey Zookal flight on Vimeo.

6 ways personal data tracking is getting easier

Automation is key with personal analytics, because people are too busy and too lazy to self-record everything, despite increasing numbers of mobile apps trying to make it easier.

Actively self-tracking also introduces errors and reporting bias.  You're more likely to remember recording your mood when you're miserable than when you're neutral, or slightly happy. Here's how it will get easier:

1. Ubiquitous sensors
The Internet of Things will be busy learning about you. Expect a deluge of sensors in every home and every object.  Your phone already collates data on when and where you travel, expect your car and GPS to do likewise.

2. Wearable computers
Google Glass and its rivals have a key role to play, even more so when they can reliably interpret commands given through brainwaves.

3. "Old skool" devices
Pedometers, heart rate monitors, sleep monitors and others will get increasingly connected, transmitting data automatically, in realtime, much like the FitBit.

4. Social mining
Social media networks are already gathering up vast realms of data on users, the next step is grabbing this yourself and taking a look. Give Me My Data, which lets you extract and visualise your existing Facebook data.

5. Smart meters
Already going into homes, the same meter that helps you use energy more efficiently will also be able to tell you about your life: when you're up, how often you cook, how much longer you shower when it's cold.

6. Data interfacing
Mint grabs data from your different financial accounts, so there's no need to add it separately. Similarly you authorise various apps to automatically mine and analyse your Facebook data, or your Google history.

So you've discovered that you sleep longer after eating tomatoes, that your mood is higher when you've seen more yellow, and that you drive faster on days you send less tweets. The question then is what do you do with all these insights?

Personal analytics: tracking yourself

Major technology trends these days tend to lead from the ground up. Consumer adoption is followed by corporate adoption. iPads arrived in the living room long before tablets appeared in the office.

So what about big data? Will personal analytics end up driving BI?

Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram has experimented with this, but given his PhD in Particle Physics he's hardly a layperson.

To what extent, then, are we seeing regular individuals tracking different data sets in their lives, and analysing them? Here are some interesting ways:

1. Diet & fitness
FitDay records nutritional intake, activity, mood and custom data, and spits out charts showing nutrient deficiencies or calories vs mood.

2. Conception
Fertility Friend allows women to compare and overlay menstrual cycles with those of thousands of other women, to analyse why they may be struggling to conceive.

3. Infant care
Numerous apps, like iBaby Log, help new parents capture and analyse information about their newborns, to figure out correlations between feeding and sleep.

4. Happiness
MoodPanda records and creates a graph of your mood, which you can compare against the entire world's mood, or the mood of your geographic area.

5. Money
Mint pulls in information from different financial accounts, and graphs how much you are spending in different categories at different times.

If you're interested in turning your own life into a graph, try these sites:

Personal Informatics
Measured Me
your.flowingdata (YFD)
12 apps to track, share and visualise peronal data
Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

What will really propel the wider use of personal analytics is ease of capture: making the data collection effortless.

How to make love to the camera

So you want to make a video, but you're more George Constanza than George Clooney?

There are quite a few tricks that can help you maximise your attributes and minimise your flaws.

Ultimately it's about having personality and confidence and letting that shine through.

But the camera can also lie for you a bit - here's how.

Seven ways to create easy, affordable video

If you want to do more with video but have limited resources, here are seven options you can try - even for free:

From slideshows to event promos - see all seven on SavvySME.

When does online video work?

Tim at Mumbrella asks whether online vide is journalism’s final frontier? He claims there is no definite rulebook as to what works.

The key question - in fact the only question - that needs to be asked is WHY would someone want to watch a video rather than read a transcript or short article with photo(s)?

1. Is it incredibly funny or astoundingly cute visually for at least several seconds?
2. Is it someone so famous/beautiful/sexy that people want to watch them rather than just read their words?
3. Is there an interaction/reaction that cannot easily or as satisfactorily be transcribed?
4. Is it an astounding, amazing, spectacular moving sight?
5. Is it a beautifully crafted and edited piece of moving, and/or musical, visual art?
6. Is it a phenomenal piece of history?

Another way to look at it is "no one needs to hear a policeman speak". Unless he has no clothes, green skin or matinée idol looks, I don’t wish to watch his verbal statement to media, I’m quite happy to read it.

If photos can convey what your video can convey, then use photos (try a slideshow).

Video is never worth it just for the sake of it.

4 great graphics apps for business

Get creative while giving your business ultimate visual appeal. These days you don’t need to be a professional photographer or graphic designer to add some colour and visual buzz to your business. These are some apps that are easy and enjoyable to use, and could give extra appeal to your website or social media feed.

Photosynth
Windows Phone, iOS
This brilliant, free app from Microsoft Labs allow you to easily turn digital photos into 3D panoramas. All you need is a camera smartphone and you can quickly create spectacular, useful scenes that can be uploaded and shared from Photosynth.net. Microsoft allows 20GB of storage - even for commercial use. Photosynths are ideal for businesses that need to show off locations, such as the real estate or hospitality industries.
Suggestion: use it when checking out venues or recording the progress of a building development. example

Cinemagram
iOS
Cinemagraphs, also known as "cines", are high quality, animated gifs that looks like moving photos. Created from video, only a selected area of the image is animated, reducing the file size and making it look more like a photo than a movie. They’re easy to create, and a fantastic way to add subtle movement to your site, creating a dynamic quality without the need for Flash. Cinemagram also allows you to upload and share your creations online.
Suggestion: put a cinemagram of your office on your website to create a sense of serenity. example

Diptic
iOS
With Diptic you can combine multiple photos to create a new image. It’s great for sending a quick collage, rather than multiple images. There are a range of templates for between two and five photos, as well as customisable, expandable layouts.
Suggestion: use it to combine several images of people at an event, to convey the busy atmosphere. example

Adobe Photoshop Express
Android, iOS
Adobe PhotoShop Express is a free image editing app for smartphones, with a Flash-based online version too. It allows you to very quickly and easily crop, rotate, straighten and flip your photos, as well as adjust exposure, colour saturation and brightness. There are extra tools you can buy, such as a self-timer, noise reduction, and extra effects.
Suggestion: brush up a quick self-portrait if someone needs you to email a last-minute profile pic. example