Leslie Shapiro

Everywhere you turn, new ways to support causes and ideas have been created. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is inescapable. Friends just used Honeyfund to let wedding guests finance their honeymoon. Perhaps more philanthropically, another friend is getting help with medical payments through GiveForward.com. My bicycle rides are logged onto the Plus3 website that, through corporate sponsors, donates money to charities based on how many miles I ride. (I’ve personally raised almost $700 and burned 1.4 million calories; that’s a lot of M&Ms.) It seems that new ways to raise money for a cause are being created daily. Enter ShareBrand.

It’s possible that you’ve never heard of Bayan Audio. The company is better known in the UK, where it has built a solid reputation. Now, Bayan is bringing two new products to North America. The Soundbook and Soundbook X3 are portable Bluetooth speakers packed with some very cool features in very impressive packages. Can they make the jump over the pond and land with a big enough splash in an already crowded speaker market?

There are lots of ways to get television content into your home, and everyone makes it seem like it’s a simple matter of literally cutting the cord. Get your entertainment from online streaming, and use a pair of rabbit ears to get your local news fix. Easy, right? If you live in or near a big city, that may be true. But having recently left urbania for smalltown USA, I can attest that it’s not so easy after all when the nearest TV towers are miles and miles away. When Winegard announced FlatWave, a new line of flat, passive or powered HDTV antennas, I was all ears.

Life is good. Having just moved into a house with a room for a dedicated home theater, it was time to get set up. More to the point, time for shopping. Usually, the last thing I want to do is to buy furniture, but the search for the perfect chairs for my home theater became my quest. Seeking perfection, I pored over furniture catalogs, websites and scoured any furniture in my path. A woman’s home theater is her castle, right? I already had furnished my girl-cave, I mean home office, and the A/V room, although last on the decorating list, was in my mind, the most crucial.