At first glance, the science behind red light therapy seems a little thin. How can shining an LED onto the skin clean it up? How can it cure conditions like acne, eczema, or dermatitis when conventional medicine cannot?

The treatment actually uses red and blue light, depending on the situation. The blue light is an effective antibacterial that kills harmful bacteria on the surface of the skin. It works better than conventional creams because it permeates the top layer of skin and kills off the bacteria that causes acne.

Acne is caused by excess sebum on the surface of the skin. Bacteria interacts with the sebum which causes pustules or lesions. The sebum traps the bacteria, which causes the infection, and the resulting skin problems. By removing the bacteria, the condition is brought under control.

When used in conjunction with a proper skin-care regimen it can remove acne altogether. Best of all, you don’t need to take any drugs to do it.

Red light offers different advantages to blue. Red light therapy is more about healing that killing bacteria, so the two work well together. The primary function of red light therapy is that it is supposed to accelerate wound healing and stimulate collagen production.

In the case of acne, once the skin has been cleansed by the blue light, the red light stimulates that collagen production to speed up the natural healing process of the skin. Red light therapy can heal the lesions and the scarring that acne can cause, making the skin look healthy and new.

While the treatment is pretty straightforward, it need to be done properly to reap the benefits. Anyone wanting it to remove acne will need to have an effective daily cleaning routine, drink lots of water, and follow any instructions provided by the person offering the treatment.

Many tanning salons are offering red light therapy as part of their treatment range. If you have a good salon near you, ask them about it. The process is easy, similar to tanning in fact. It differs in that the treatment targets a specific area rather than the whole body.

It goes something like this. The attendant will wipe down the affected area to ensure it’s clean and free of bacteria. An LED plate will be applied to the affected area and the light will be switched on. The color of that light depends on the treatment being administered, but will be red or blue.

You may feel a little warm under the light, but it’s nothing to worry about. The light will be applied for a couple of minutes, then moved or switched off. That’s it. Depending on the severity, and type of condition, that session may be one of many.

Red light therapy is risk-free, drug-free, doesn’t hurt, doesn’t need surgery or recovery time. It’s the cure for all sorts of skin conditions. Don’t just take our word for it, find out yourself!

I own an iPhone. I live in San Francisco. As such, it’s basically a total crapshoot as to whether or not I’ll be able to make a phone call in the city. Skype had always been a pretty good back-up solution, but an even better one came a few months ago: Gmail Calling. And now Google has just extended the free period of the feature through 2011. Yes, through next year.

Gmail Calling is great because it exists fully in the browser in an app that I always have open anyway: Gmail. If you use gChat, it’s right below your status message marked with a phone icon and the words “Call phone”. Hitting this launches a dialpad window within Gmail (similar to a chat window) and you can call any number in the U.S. or Canada for free. In my experience, the call quality and reliability have been excellent.

All of this is done by way of a Google Voice plug-in. We were all excited for the desktop version of Google Voice — which we got to test out — but Google decided to go this route instead, and I do think it’s a better idea.

When the feature launched back in August, Google would only commit to keeping it free through the end of the year — so this 1 year extension is great. But a Google representative at the time also told us that they hoped they could keep calls free indefinitely if the margins on international calls could cover the U.S./Canada ones. No word on if that’s the case yet, but again, the 1 year extension is a good sign. It currently costs 2 cents a minute to make calls through the service with dozens of other countries.

Gmail’s Holiday Gift: Another Year Of Free Calling To The U.S. And Canada

It’s no secret that Zynga is making a big bet on mobile, recently acquiring mobile app developer Newtoy, and launching native Farmville apps for the iPad and iPhone. In fact, as of earlier this month, Farmville for the iPhone had seen 7 million downloads with 10 million people per month accesing Zynga on a mobile device. Today, Zynga is debuting the first game designed for the mobile web: Mafia Wars Atlantic City.

According to the company, the game was built in HTML5 and has been designed specifically to be used on a browser-based smart phone or device including the iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and WebOS devices. Mafia Wars Atlantic City is available by pointing your mobile web browser to M.MafiaWars.com or at GetJar.

Zynga’s bet on HTML5 (versus Flash) is also worth noting as well, which allows the games to be played on iPads and iPhones. The gaming giant recently bought Dextrose AG, which developed an HTML5-based development engine.

Zynga, which brought on former Yahoo exec David Ko as its SVP of Mobile, also recently announced Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars are coming to Android phones. And Mafia Wars debuted a significant music partnership with rap artist Dr.Dre last week.

As Ko told TechCrunch’s MG Siegler at LeWeb a few weeks ago, Mobile is a huge opportunity for us. We have a huge user base to leverage, and they have some really exciting IP. Stay tuned.

Zynga Debuts First Mobile Web Browser Game Mafia Wars Atlantic City

%content%
XtremeInvision’s Blog – iRadio Hook 1.0.0 – Dev Update 1

Need something to do while waiting for your copy of Farmville for Dummies to arrive? Isle of Tune is the latest in viral web distraction, built on the side by London-based interactive director Jim Hall.

Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. There is even a collection of pre-built loops for those of us less musically inclined.

Hall also offers a way to customize individual sounds, share your island on Facebook and Twitter as well as vote other people’s islands up or down. iPhone and iPad versions are in the works.

While a pretty amazing digitally landscaped version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” currently rounds out the Isle of Tune top 50, I dare you to show me something more hipster than MGMT’s “Kids,” built entirely with animated cars, flowerpots and bumps in the road.

Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning

An update to Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app for the iPhone, has just hit the App Store. And while the version numbering (1.0.6) may not make it seem like a big update, there are a few notable things about the latest version.

First of all, in an effort to drive more social connections for new users, they’ve added a suggested users list. Second, they’ve added seven new languages (Japanese, German, Russian, French, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish). Third, they’ve fixed a number of bugs and increased performance. And finally, for the first time, they’ve also added two new filters into the mix.

The suggested users feature may draw a bit of controversy given what it did for certain users on Twitter (like our TechCrunch account). But the reality is that it’s an obvious and easy way to get new users engaged. Co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us that the feature is partially algorithmic, based on your location and language. But going forward they hope to make it much more algorithmic and less about them selecting people.

The two new filters are called “Sutro” and “Toaster”. I’m sure you’ll be seeing them all over Twitter shortly. Humorously, the latter appears to be named after Kevin Rose’s new little adorable puppy.

You can find Instagram in the App Store here.

Instagram Gains Suggested Users, 7 New Languages, And Yes, 2 New Filters

%content%
Morbo Codding! – Christmas Sale To all apps

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/morbo-codding-christmas-sale-to-all-apps/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/the-fall-and-rise-of-twitter-in-english-literature/ http://www.invisionskins.net/the-fall-and-rise-of-twitter-in-english-literature/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:22:18 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/the-fall-and-rise-of-twitter-in-english-literature/

Words come and go, and now thanks to a new Google database of 500 billion words in 5.2 million books, you can chart the popularity of words in literature and other books going back hundreds of years. The database is can be accessed by scholars or anyone through a Google Labs project called the Google Books Ngram Viewer. You type in a word, and it charts the usage of that word over time.

Naturally, I typed in “twitter”, to see how that word has come in and out of vogue. The result is in the chart above, which shows the word gaining popularity from 1750 and peaking a little over a century ago around 1900. Then the word went into along decline until this decade when it started to shoot up again. The graph above is smoothed over, it doesn’t really start to take off until 2006 (see unsmoothed graph) when Twitter was founded, and the word took on an entirely new meaning. Strangely, though, there was an uptick starting even before that around 2003. Maybe Jack Dorsey read it somewhere and it stuck in his mind.

The Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. So if you do a search for “Twitter” proper, it shoots up even higher. For some reason the data only goes to 2008, so imagine what the chart would look like if it went all the way to today. These searches are across all English-language books in the database, but you can also narrow it down to just English fiction or different languages. The charts are broken up into different time periods, which you can click on to get book search results containing the word you are graphing.

Speaking of the rise and fall of words, they can also tell us something about the relative importance of different centers of power in the public imagination. Do a search for “Paris, London, New York, Boston, and Rome,” for instance, and you can see when interest peaked and started to taper off for each one. Yeah, things don’t look so good for America (as represented by New York City).

CrunchBase Information

Google Book Search

Twitter

Information provided by CrunchBase

The Fall And Rise Of Twitter In English Literature

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/the-fall-and-rise-of-twitter-in-english-literature/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/ips-extras-ip-seo-and-ips-marketplace-app-released/ http://www.invisionskins.net/ips-extras-ip-seo-and-ips-marketplace-app-released/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:29:06 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/ips-extras-ip-seo-and-ips-marketplace-app-released/

Invision Power Services has always tried to offer many services and products as added value to those who have an active IP.Board license. Services like the free, 5-user IP.Chat, spam monitoring service, and skin generator to name a few. Today we are happy to add to that portfolio of free extras for your IP.Board.

IP.SEO 1.0.0 Released

Our new IP.SEO app for IP.Board aims to provide additional search engine optimization feature and tools to our software. IP.Board itself already has many built-in SEO related features and this app builds on those features to extend the capabilities for those who have an interest in SEO. In addition to new capabilities, IP.SEO also looks at your configuration and gives you advice on the best way to ensure that search engines can easily index your community content and properly rank that content.

We are keeping it simple for the 1.0.0 release of IP.SEO and include the following features:

• IP.Board SEO Advice – IP.SEO lists specific items that you review or change to improve your search performance.
• Meta Tags, Anywhere – Set custom meta tags and page titles for specific pages, entire sections, or even all pages of your IP.Board site.
• Sitemaps – Generate a sitemap for your IP.Board content. Currently supporting IP.Board topics and forums, IP.Blog blogs and entries, IP.Content pages, IP.Downloads categories and files, some third party applications, with further support coming soon. Set the number of items from each app to be included, and the priority that should be assigned to them. Full support for the IP.Board permissions system.
• Sitemap Pings – Once your sitemap has been generated, IP.SEO will automatically “ping” search engines to tell them there’s new content available to index.
• Search Activity Statistics – See how many visits you’ve had from users coming from search, and from the search engine spiders themselves. See what your top keywords are, or report on specific keywords, search engines and more.

We are very excited about the prospect of this new, free extra product and will be updating it frequently. If you have experience with SEO, please give us your feedback and ideas. You may also want to “Like” the file in the IPS Marketplace so you will get notifications of updates as they are released.

Active IP.Board license holders (and IPS Community Hosting clients) can download IP.SEO in the IPS Marketplace. Just login with the same email and password you use for the IPS client area.

IPS Marketplace App 1.0.0 Released

The IPS Marketplace connects the many thousands of users of IPS community software with our talented community of authors who make many resources for IPS software. IPS Marketplace features skins, hooks, graphics, applications, and more that work with the IPS community software platform. All are contributed by authors in our community. Many are free and some carry a small fee set by the author of the work.

The new IPS Marketplace App allows you to easily browse and discover resources in the IPS Marketplace from within your AdminCP. The new app makes finding fun resources for your community even easier. The first version of the app focuses on browsing resources. Future versions will add more features such as tracking downloaded resources for updates and even streamlined install routines. Please let us know what you think in the IPS Extras forum.

Active IP.Board license holders (and IPS Community Hosting clients) can download the IPS Marketplace app in the IPS Marketplace. Just login with the same email and password you use for the IPS client area.

We hope you enjoy these two new extras added to our already great list of IPS-customer perks!
IPS Extras: IP.SEO and IPS Marketplace App released

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/ips-extras-ip-seo-and-ips-marketplace-app-released/feed/ 0 http://www.invisionskins.net/black-desire-3-1-4/ http://www.invisionskins.net/black-desire-3-1-4/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:52:52 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/black-desire-3-1-4/

%content%
Black Desire 3.1.4

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/black-desire-3-1-4/feed/ 0