Back in August while attending the Skillshare class Interviewing: Come Bearing Gifts at Dogpatch Labs in NYC, I saw a little sign for Artsicle posted on the wall. When I got home from the Skillshare class, I went to the Artsicle website to check it out. 

Artsicle helps you discover art with the option to rent and buy. This is great service, whether you are new to art like me, or you want to buy a piece of art of but don't have time to go to galleries. In my honest opinion though this is pretty much for everybody out there. 

Signing up is very simple and you actually don't need an invitation like a lot of other services out there. After you sign up though, they ask you if you want to play their discovery game. This helps both you Artsicle by narrowing down the type of art you like and it helps the suggest art to you. 

Besides the artwork, the beauty of Artsicle is the business itself. If you find something you like, you can rent that piece of art for as long as you like. Renting artwork starts at $25 a month depending on the piece which is pretty affordable in my opinion. If you end up keeping the art, you can purchase it %50 of the rent for the art goes to the purchase of the artwork. Shipping is always free for both ways as they state on their sites FAQ. As far as insurance goes, the artwork is insured for $5. Now I'm not sure whether that's an additional charge or included in the rental fee. Artsicle's philosophy on art that is on their site is simple, the artist has to be alive and working today. They even have a list of artists on their site.

Now I haven't purchased or rented anything from Artsicle yet, (that will change in the near future) but I had to write about it because it's an exciting service. It makes me, a newbie to the art world feel more comfortable buying and viewing art. 

I got to actually meet Alexis Tryon and Scott Carleton the co-founders of Artsicle. I had a fun conversation with Scott and him telling me that before Artsicle, he said he didn't know anything about the art world, but that clearly changed. Artsicle has art hanging up at Dogpatch labs and he was telling me about them. 

Overall the Artsicle experience is great, there are small things they should change. For instance putting the rental agreement out there before you sign up/rent a piece of art. As well being clear on the insurance policy of the artwork. I visit Artsicle once a day to try and find something to rent and maybe even buy. However, I learned from Alexis, Skillshare class titled Art Collecting 101 that you shouldn't rush to buy art. What you might like right now, you may not like tomorrow. 

It's been jus about over a year since I opened my Betterment account and I have to say it's such a great financial asset to have. Betterment is an investment account that has the feel and simplicity of a savings account. I'm not going to lie, I fell in love with this company the minute I saw them on TechCrunch Disrupt in May of 2010.

I actually like this concept because simply for the fact that I am saving money and letting my money grow at the same time. Unlike traditional savings account where you gain a small fraction of interest, Betterment returns are a lot higher. Below is a list of banks and the interest you gain from the money in your account.

Bank Of America - .05%

JPMorgan Chase & Co - .01%

Citibank - .05%

Wells Fargo & Co - .05%

I would like to point out that I obtained these rates from each of the banks website and that I selected New York as the state. They may vary state to state. I also chose these four banks because they are the four biggest banks in the country according to the Wall Street Journal.

As far as Betterment goes, my return since last month is 8.69% and my Return since account opening is 6.84%. You can clearly tell that My Betterment account is A LOT better than tradtional savings account and maybe other saving services that banks to offer. 

How does Betterment do it? Simple, they take your money and invest it into the stock market and/or US Treasury Bonds. You get to decide on how you want your money allocated. For short term savings, invest in treasury bonds, long-term invest in savings. My current allocation is set to 65% to the stock market and 35% is invested in bonds.

When Betterment invests your money into the stock market, they trade ETF shares. Investopedia definition of an ETF is "A security that tracks an index, a commodity or a basket of assets like an index fund, but trades like a stock on an exchange. ETFs experience price changes throughout the day as they are bought and sold."

Betterment charges you yearly on using their service and depends on how much money you have. Here is a break down of the fee they charge yearly:

$0-$25,000 they charge .09% yearly

$25,001 - $100,000 they charge .07% yearly

$100,001 - $500,000 they charge .05% yearly

$500,001+ they charge .03% yearly.

Now if you look at this and compare the big four banking interest rates, I'm willing to pay that fee. (Note: I am paying .09% yearly) 

There are number of other reasons I like Betterment. One being their blog, very informative and educational. It's helps you understand the world of finance without the use of all those huge and yet confusing finance terms. 

The other main reason is the create goals feature. For instance you can create savings goal for certain things. For instance, you want to save up for retirement and allocate the money accordingly. Each goal that you create can be compared to you openning a new account. Creating a new goal, I can add money into it and allocate the money accordingly without effecting my retirement goal allocation and balance. Now if I do delete a goal, it will notify me that the money will end up going into my retirement plan.

They are very transparent with what they do with your money. You are notified of statements and dividend payouts. If you are also worried about tax forms, don't be. They help you out with that as well. 

My overall experience with them is great and I actually use Betterment as my primary savings account. I don't see the point of having it any other way. If you skeptical, put in $100 dollars and then take it from there. You should also take note that Securities in your account are protected up $500,000.

Invite Link: https://www.betterment.com/betterfriends

They also have a Demo of Betterment for prospective users to try out here

TechCrunch Disrupt Video

When I heard about Fab.com launching, I was thinking it was going to be just another flash sale site like Ruelala and Gilt. For all of you that don't know what these flash sale sites, then you've been living under a rock. Don't worry though, it's nothing fancy (except for the items that they sell). Flash sale sites are sites that have products up that are on sale for a limited time. For instance, when Gilt opens their sale up at 12 noon EST time, you have 2 days to buy what you want. You may think that you that is more than enough time to buy those shoes. You are mistaken. All the good stuff is usually sold out within minutes of the sale opening. People have actually created a strategy on buying products on these sites. The strategy is simple, add what you may want into your cart. Once all the items that you may want are in you shopping cart, you have about 15 minutes to go through it thoroughly before it goes back on the shelf sort to speak. 

Fab.com has the same concept but their items are totally different than Gilt and Ruelala. Don't get me wrong I'm not hating on Ruelala or Gilt since I do buy from them as well. The thing with Fab.com is that their items, I feel are very unique. They also sell things that I would normally never find. For instance, I bought a water bottle created by The Bamboo Bottle Company from Fab that I would never knew existed. I was actually looking for a water bottle for awhile and this just happened to be onsale at Fab.com so I bought it. I will tell you this, it is being used on a daily basis and couldn't be happier with my purchase. I also discovered RevolveR Bound Books. Basically these books have two sides to them. A journal side, and then a sketch side. Now the cool thing about these journals is that you litterally flip the book inside out. My book is green and black. When I want to sketch, I can use the green side. If I want to write something, I can flip inside out and the cover will turn black. 

When it comes to Fab.com customer service I have to say they kick ass. I had brought my brother a Pi bottle open and a Pi pint glass created by The Uncommon Green. What I realized about Fab.com is that they drop ship everything. Meaning, they don't have a warehouse of the items the sell. Instead they make deals with these small companies like The Uncommon Green and once all the orders have been placed, they will notify The Uncommon Green to ship out the products to the locations they bought them. When buying these items, I had two problems. The first one was that I forgot to put my brother's apartment number in the shipping address section. I emailed Fab.com and they got back to me within minutes of my e-mail. Now my second issue was that a couple of weeks after placing my order, I got a UPS tracking number to track my package. However, when trying to track this, UPS apparently never updated the info. I had later found that The Uncommon Green was still processing all the orders. I had email Fab.com on the situation with my purchased and not only did they look into it, but they followed up with two emails. One email was stating that they were looking into it and the second email was telling me that they had shipped my product. Which I found great for the simple fact that I didn't have to constantly check the UPS tracking on when they were going to send out my package. 

The funny thing about Fab.com is that they their team is so great as well as their work environment that the founder and CEO of Fab.com, Jason Goldberg has dared other companies to try and recruit his team members away from him. He wrote a blog post about it on his site, the Betashop.com. Honestly reading this blog post made me more of a fan of Fab because it shows that this company is a happy place to work and that they want their customers to feel just as happy. Below are invite links to Fab.com, Gilt, and Ruelala.

Fab.com: http://fab.com/7n846v

Gilt.com: http://www.gilt.com/invite/vpatel82

Ruelala.com: http://www.ruelala.com/invite/vpatel18

Thanks Fab.com for the great customer service. I will be buying more stuff from you. 

Winner of the 2011 TC Disrupt SF People's Choice Award!

Card Flick has to be my favorite iPhone app right now. Cardflick is a digital business card app, or my friend Tommy would say, Business Card 2.0. Now I know what a lot of people are thinking, what about Bump. Well the Co-founder of Card Flick, Ketan Anjaria said at Tech Crunch Disrupt on how Bump sucks. I don't agree or disagree with that statement. But I do like Cardflick better than Bump. I'm going to break Card Flick into three sections

The Good

For people that don't know, Bump is an app where you can exchange information with another phone just by bumping the two phones together. Now this is great for just one other phone. However, with Card Flick. I can send out my business card to everybody in the area without bumping phones together but by flicking the card in an upward motion within the app. The receiver of the card has the option of accepting the card which will be saved in their app, or reject the card. If they don't have the app no worries, you can e-mail them your card and they will have the opportunity download the app. 

I also want to point out that digital business card aspect of this. The themes that Card Flick has going on for their digital cards are crafted by the Card Flick team. My three favorite cards are Stripes. Which I aggressively used during private beta testing. Now that Card Flick is out, I'm torn between using Field Guide and Posted. 

Another AWESOME feature of Card Flick is that your information is stored in the cloud. This is beneficial to you and the people you shared your card with. The minute you update your card, everybody that has your card has the updated information. 

The Bad (which is temporary)

Now the only bad thing about this app (which is temporary) is the simple fact that anybody in the area with the Card Flick app, can receive your card if you flick it. For instance, if you are at a networking event, and you want to send your card to a group of Venture Captialists, and I happen to be in the area, We all will get your contact information. So this maybe bad for now but they are working on fixing that. 

The Beautiful

I know it's suppose to be The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly but if you look at the over all look of Card Flick, it's the opposite of ugly. There slogan/motto is Lets Flick. How clever is that? They even create a T-Shirt which I bought two of. One for me and I figure I get one for my brother. 

To download Card Flick click here. I also included a video below of a demonstration of Card Flick by the team.