• Read more about Intridea's Favorite Things 2012

In the spirit of the holidays, we decided put together a list of our favorite things from 2012. As product junkies, we Intrideans are always on the lookout for things that make our lives simpler, smarter, easier, and all round better, and we love to spread the word.

From tech gadgets and software products to functional clothing and quirky books, below are some top picks from our team.

Amelia Saletan

WhatsApp
Text your friends in other countries for free

Foam Rollers
If you do, or don't do, any type of exercise, you need a foam roller. Good for warming up or cooling down the muscles. Or for muscle pain/soreness.

Anthony Nystrom

VueZone Wireless Cams
VueZone wireless cameras allow me to check in with my family no matter where I am and anytime. Makes me feel like I am there when traveling.

Chamberlain Wireless Intercom
Love these units. Simple communication throughout the entire house.

Bioinformatics - The ML Approach
Best book I have read to date on bioinformatics with ML. I am always rereading parts of it.

Ben Markowitz

Thunderbolt Display
I gave up waiting for Apple to refresh their display and bit the bullet on their 27" Thunderbolt Display. It's bright, huge, and has a built in camera, speakers, USB and Firewire ports that I can hook up to my laptop with one cable.

Chris Tate

Corcoran 10 In. Historic Leather Military Brown Jump Boot
They were designed for WWII paratroopers and haven't changed since. They're rugged, super tough looking, and crazy comfortable after broken in. I've had mine for 3 years and hope to rock them for the next 3. My uncle, Al Saguto, is Colonial Williamsburg's master shoemaker and he recommended these to me a few years back.

MacBook Air
My other fav thing is my MBAir. Light, powerful, perfect for what I do—I can't imagine a better laptop. It's been perfect for me while I've been on the road for the last few months. Seriously, amazing, I love it.

Insiya Hussain

AwayFind
This year AwayFind helped me (partially) cure the incessant need to check email every 5 mins. I actually feel like I can step away without missing something important.

Jurgen Altziebler

Romotive
Innovative award from me. Clever, cute, fun.

Evernote
I have to give Evernote a thumbs up - the newest desktop version is great.

Kathleen Selmer

Garmin Forerunner 405CX
This running watch keeps track of mileage, pace, elevation changes and so much more. No more guessing at how far I ran!

Knuckle Lights
So much better than a headlamp! These were really useful on the AT where they worked like "low beams" in the heavy fog.

Maggie Lubberts

Browserstack
Windows. So many people use it, and I DON'T as a rule of thumb. This is great right up until it comes time to test. With Browserstack I don't have to install cumbersome virtual machines in order to test my sites in Windows browsers. Browserstack spins up a machine for me to use in the cloud, and it works perfectly!

Fab
If you don't do fab, you're missing out. We all need things; sunglasses, clothes, bags, cookware, furniture, suitcases. Fab has it. But not ALL the sunglasses, or ALL the luggage, only the slickest. Every item is accepted into the Fab store for being beautifully designed. The iphone app rocks, and I did a large portion of my holiday shopping there (much to my family's delight.)

Marc Garrett

The Lonely Planet Book of Everything
Recognizing animal poop, making your hotel room burglar proof, carrying an injured friend from a remote location, understanding why the TGV is so darn fast: these are critical skills in the daily life of an engineer and the “Book of Everything” covers them all.

Mike Tierney

Palomino Blackwing Pencils
These are incredible pencils, creating a rich dark line without getting nasty and smudgy. They're a revival of the classic pencil of the same name, used by authors and artists like John Steinbeck and Chuck Jones.

Brooks PureConnect Running Shoes
I spend more time thinking about shoes than I care to admit, but when I'm running I want something that's going to take care of my feet and make the experience as enjoyable as possible. Of all the shoes I have tried, the Brooks PureConnect do live up to their marketing up making running a purely enjoyable experience. They're light and have great airflow, but I never feel like my foot is vulnerable (which is remarkable, given how minimal of a running shoe they are); I hardly even realize they're there.

Patti Chan

Sorapot
The only thing I need besides my Macbook to do work, is TEA. And nothing brews tea more beautifully than my Sorapot, a gift I got 5 years ago. Except when I catch myself gazing at it instead of answering emails.

Tom Zeng

FitBit Zip
Great little device to keep me motivated to excise, it has helped me keeping up with the 10k steps/day goal and making me healthier and more productive both at work and home.

Yoshi Maisami

Google Translate
It's been around for a while... but keeps getting better and better.

• Read more about QUP.TV

Last weekend I participated in the first Hack the Midwest, a 24-hour hackathon in Kansas City. I was very impressed by the event: nearly 100 developers from the Kansas City area participated with tons of API sponsors and great prizes. I decided to go it alone and throw my hat into the ring with an idea that I had been thinking of for a while: what if there were email alerts for Netflix Instant? 24 hours later, the result was Qup.tv.

I was fortunate enough to be awarded top honors at the competition and since then the response to Qup has been phenomenal! It's been covered in GigaOM, SlashGear, and Silicon Prairie News (and even tweeted about by Roku) and has already grown to more than 600 users in under a week!Qup is a simple application that links your Netflix account to your email address. You receive periodic emails when Netflix adds new titles to their streaming catalog, and you can queue titles, watch them, or visit their Netflix page with one click. You don't even have to be signed into Netflix to queue up titles so you can add them from your phone or from a public computer without the hassle of signing in. Qup also pulls in Rotten Tomatoes scores for movies and gives you the power to filter the titles you receive based on Netflix rating, Rotten Tomatoes rating, and more coming soon.

The best part about the success of Qup for me has been demonstrating that something real, polished, and useful can be developed in just one day by just one person. It's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about web development: one person really can make a dent in the world.

If you're a Netflix user, I hope you'll give Qup a spin and if you're a developer I hope you'll take a look around and find a local hackathon to participate in. It's a lot of fun, you will learn a lot, and you might just get something you want to keep building out of it!

• Read more about Change The Way You Do Business With Socialspring

Today we launch a suite of social enterprise solutions that will change the way you do business. Introducing Socialspring: business software, humanized. We've reimagined how social enterprise software should work and our tools are rooted in the modern tenets of social interaction to engage, empower and strengthen your employees in the areas of productivity, company culture, process, and workflow.

Web-based consumer software has drastically changed what employees expect out of the tools they use to get work done. Yet business software has not kept pace. This is why Socialspring applications have been designed with a focus on real world behavior for easier and more natural collaboration, communication and sharing.

Socialspring launches today at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. The Enterprise 2.0 crowd is a diverse mix of thought leaders, small and large business owners, forward-thinking CTO's, and game-changing innovators. It makes sense to unveil Socialspring among this crowd and we're excited to engage with people in various markets to show them how our software can open up dormant lines of communication, expose hidden resources within their companies, and give their employees the emerging tools necessary to collaborate and innovate in today's enterprise world.

To kickoff this big launch we're announcing the first three Socialspring applications: Answers, Stream and Links. All Socialspring applications will be accessible via Passport, our custom single-sign-on system that simplifies and amalgamates the process of switching between multiple business applications within one environment.

Answers is a knowledge sharing solution for the enterprise that puts the expertise of your entire company at your fingertips. With Answers, stop repeating efforts and missing opportunities with mass emails and start building a foundation of knowledge for your company.

• Spend less time searching for information. Answers helps to centralize relevant and frequently requested information - information that is often stifled or lost through traditional email or phone conversations. Ask questions and get answers from your own in-house experts. Answers can be tagged for quick search and retrieval, ensuring that you can always find what you're looking for without fuss. It's information management for employees, departments and entire organizations.
• Build A Network of Experts. Information trends will naturally surface in Answers. You'll be able to easily identify experts on subjects within your company and expand your own expertise.
• Allow information to unfurl. Your employees need access to information - whether it be about your benefits programs, protocol for sales inquiries, standard procedures for interviewing candidates, current marketing strategies, guidelines for implementing a new design process, best practices for development and more. Liberate this beneficial information from antiquated two-way communication systems and make it available to anyone that might need it today, tomorrow, or a year from now.
• Strengthen your company culture. Your employee's lives are abuzz with emerging social mediums. Answers brings social information sharing to your company in a way that is engaging, intuitive, and rewarding. The fun badge and karma system ensures quick and easy adoption and continued, worthwhile participation by rewarding your employees for exchanging information and building reputations as experts.

Stream is the secure, communication and collaboration platform for today’s enterprise. Your employees have great ideas. Stream unlocks those ideas with a platform designed to foster collaboration, communication and engagement in your company.

• Better ideas, faster. The best ideas are a result of collaboration among bright people. You've hired the brightest thinkers, innovators and strategists to lead your company; now, empower them to work together and exchange and develop ideas in real-time. Stream gives your experts the competitive edge to innovate quickly and dynamically; harness the advantage of group-thought within your company.
• Persistent Awareness. Communication is everything in the enterprise. Stream allows your employees to stay connected to the lifeblood of your company anywhere they go. Available on all major mobile, web or desktop devices, Stream provides a method for immersion whether you're at your desk, walking to lunch, in a meeting, at the gym, driving to client sites, or trapped in a server closet. Never miss a discussion around your project or announcements about product launches and press coverage. Stream keeps you persistently aware.
• Centralize the important conversations. Your employees are always thinking, creating, and pioneering. Some of their best ideas will come to them in the lunch room, around the water cooler, driving home at the end of the day, or with a peer after work at the local wine bar. Stream acts like a virtual water cooler that brings everyone together to share and develop those bright ideas in one distinct space that is accessible any time of day or night. It provides a direct solution for exchanging ideas, collaborating on projects within groups, and relaying valuable information to specific departments, teams, or organizations.
• Invoke passion. Nothing sends the message that you want your team to go forth and create like giving them a social collaboration tool that was designed for today's active enterprise. Giving your employees the tools to thrive creatively and professionally will result in higher levels of enthusiasm, loyalty and commitment.
• Share media. Share pictures, audio, video, text and other files easily with Stream. Upload a design mockup and get instant feedback from your teammates. Share a screencast or new product ad and gauge interest. Collect opinions on website content before it's made live. Stream gives you the interactive platform to deliver information to the people that need it.

Links is the ultimate link sharing application for the enterprise that saves you time and space while producing valuable data. It's a simple yet powerful and secure URL shortening tool that tracks what is being shared and detects trends across departments or your entire company.

• Protect Your Information. Your employees share hundreds of links a day to private information. Protect sensitive information with Links by setting passwords on shared URLs and creating a viewing time frame with expiration dates. Enjoy the security of knowing that shared information doesn't have to be freely accessible to just anyone; with Links it can be safeguarded so only the right people get access.
• Social Minimalism. Encourage beauty, simplicity and function through internal link sharing. Shorten nonsensical, endless links and share them effortlessly with co-workers. They'll appreciate your succinctness.
• Gain insight. Analytics improve our understanding of behavior and help us to form smarter strategies. With Links you can detect link sharing patterns and act on them. Track which links are clicked on to see how many people have viewed your links. Detect which types of links receive more clicks. Use the information to improve your strategy for delivering information, garnering views and calculating the optimum time of the day/week to share the information.

Safe. Secure.

In order to facilitate meaningful adoption, measurable success and immersive participation we knew that Socialspring had to be safe and secure. We're not only giving your company a way to engage, ignite and reward your employees through social collaboration and real-time communication - we're making sure all of those exchanges and innovations (and all the information that's produced as a result) are kept safe. We offer a Software As A Service (SaaS) option or a Behind-The-Fireall (BTF) option for installation for the highest level of security.

Pricing

Socialspring is comfortably priced to accomodate the budgets of companies large and small:

• Socialspring Answers - Powerful Enterprise Knowledge Sharing: $2/user/month
• Socialspring Stream - Enterprise Strength Status Updates: $2/user/month
• Socialspring Links - Internal Link Shortening with Analytics: $1/user/month

Forging Our Own Path

We've talked to hundreds CEOs, CTO's, designers, developers, business strategists, and business owners and one thing was clear: business software needed to be rethought. That's why we took our own team of innovators and solutionaries and together we built the most robust and complete suite of social enterprise applications. We understand the needs of your users including your project managers, marketers, sales staff, HR professionals, board members and engineers.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can depend on Socialspring to change the way your employees engage, create, and interact. Call, email, or signup to receive more information about how Socialspring can benefit your company. We're humanizing business software. Join us.

• Read more about Introducing Socialspring: Business Software, Humanized

Introducing Socialspring - a suite of smart solutions for today's enterprise.

The Socialspring suite private beta launches today, along with its first application, Answers, and you can be the first in line to receive access; sign up now and you'll be the first to receive product announcements, details about release schedules, and you'll get the first opportunity to demo the applications in the suite.

A Fresh Idea

Socialspring is business software, humanized. The suite offers a complete set of tools for internal social collaboration, productivity, expert search and more. Unlike current social enterprise software, Socialspring is not just a dressed-up social network. We’ve re-imagined how business software can mimic real world social connections to help you be more productive and make work a more pleasurable experience overall. Socialspring apps will be united with single sign-on and although all of the apps can be used standalone, the more apps you use within the suite, the more powerful Socialspring becomes for your company.

Answers

Answers is the first application of the Socialspring suite; it's a Q&A platform for the enterprise that unites the collective knowledge of your organization. It captures workplace interactions, encourages participation with seamless integration of a badge and karma system, and promotes the sharing of knowledge among employees within your organization. It does all this (and more!) with a super user friendly interface, because we believe in creating software that is fun and easy to use.

Through participation, your employees will build a centralized (and searchable) knowledge repository. Answers puts the expertise of your entire company at your fingertips. Ask questions, get answers. Answer questions, get recognized.

Sneak Peek

Here is a shot of Socialspring Answers in action! Notice the Q&A functionality, the rating system, search capabilities, as well as the badge and karma points.

Why Answers?

In the modern world, companies are looking to consumer trends to determine their own enterprise strategies. Today's trend is knowledge and easy access to it. As a company grows in numbers and resources, relevant information is obfuscated through traditional means of communication - information is passed person-to-person through email, chat, or phone and then reaches a dead end. Answers allows that information to be captured, preserved and made available to anyone who might need it at the company.

Answers allows all that useful information in a company to be centralized, tagged, and saved for quick, easy access by anyone who needs it - today, tomorrow, or a year from now. Answers helps ease the process of getting new employees bootstrapped; it streamlines protocol for training and communication; it provides administration and other departments within your organization a way to make documents and information available to those that need it. Answers is the always growing, ever improving knowledge-base for your company.

Get On Board!

More information about Answers and Socialspring is coming, and it will go out first to those who sign up. Anticipate announcements regarding additional products in the Socialspring suite, including a core social network, internal link shortening, expert search and several more! So sign up now for the private beta, announcements and information about Socialspring - business software that treats you like a human being!

• Read more about Announcing 'crowdsound' -- Receiving User Feedback Just Got A Lot Easier

Intridea is pleased to announce the official public beta release of crowdsound, a new tool that allows companies and websites to gather, organize and respond to suggestions from their users.

By integrating the crowdsound widget on their website, companies can transparently gather suggestions from users without forcing them to navigate away from their page. Using the widget, users can post new suggestions and also vote and comment on existing suggestions — essentially building a community around the improvement of the company’s product or website.

crowdsound’s detailed admin interface then lets companies respond to each suggestion, opening up previously closed lanes of communication between the company and users. The admin interface also allows companies to manage, organize and integrate suggestions into their workflows quite easily.

crowdsound is currently in public beta. After the beta phase, we will launch reasonably priced, tiered subscriptions plans with exciting new features.