Christie's, a 250-year-old auction house with showrooms spanning from New York to Shanghai, is expanding it's online catalog to reach new — namely, younger — customers more akin to making purchases from their laptop computers than in a formal auction house.

This year, Christie's is dramatically increasing the number and breadth of online-only auctions from seven to about 40, bringing accessibly priced objects and works of art to engage with what a spokesperson calls "early adopters." These auctions are separate from Christie's LIVE, which allows consumers to tune in to and bid on real-time auctions around the world. The online-only auctions, which began about a year-and-a-half ago, function more like eBay, allowing shoppers to browse and submit bids on items in a two-week timeframe. Read more...

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As Google Glass makes its way into the hands of consumers, the first videos recorded on the stylish headgear are hitting the web. Users are finding some interesting, creative and downright beautiful applications for the wearable tech

But long-haired users, beware: Invest in a headband if you're filming in the wind

Now these early adopters will answer the question Google posed on Twitter earlier this year: What would you do if you had Glass? Take a look below to see the tech's potential

How would you use Glass? Let us know in the comments Read more...

Here's What You See

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Samsung is all-in on mirrorless cameras. After launching the NX300 earlier this year, now the company unveils the NX2000, a more affordable model that's aimed at people who want to upgrade from point-and-shoots but want something more compact and affordable than a digital SLR.

Mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras, which don't have a viewfinder and therefore don't need the space-hogging mirror that makes DSLRs so bulky, are advancing in technology and lowering in price. The NX2000 costs just $649 (with a 20-50mm lens), which $100 cheaper than the NX300, yet the new model has almost all of its older brother's features. Read more...

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In theory, you know your mom better than anyone, so don't let a random email dictate what to buy her for Mother's Day. In addition to showcasing your sensitivity, choosing your own gift will let you avoid an email scam that could end with a stolen credit card number.

Mother's Day scammers start off with an email that reads: "Don't Forget Mother's Day - $19.99 Flowers." Clicking on the embedded links, however, will take dutiful sons and daughters (mostly sons, in this case) to a website chock full of manly items for sale, ranging from gourmet hamburgers to Aston Martins. Good luck actually buying any of these, though: The site is just a front to steal credit-card information via phishing attacks. Read more...

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In order to raise cash for planned dividend payments and stock buybacks, Apple has sold $17 billion in bonds Tuesday in one of the largest corporate bond sales in history

The amount of money Apple has raised through a bond sale is not unheard of — GM raised $17.5 billion in 2003, and Roche Holdings sold $16.5 billion worth of bonds in 2009

But what does Apple, which has $145 billion in cash, need the money for? After the first year-over-year profit decline in a decade and a sharp drop in stock price, Apple has recently announced it would give back $100 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015. The $17 billion the company just raised will come in handy Read more...

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Henry Gribbohm, the New Hampshire man who lost $2,600 in life savings at a carnival game only to score a stuffed banana as consolation, may see his luck turn around.

Comedy site CollegeHumor launched a Facebook campaign Tuesday to buy back Gribbohm's banana — which sports a beanie and dreadlocks — for the full $2,600. Gribbohm lost what he claims to be his life savings over the weekend on a carnival game called Tubs of Fun.

For every Facebook Like that this CollegeHumor post gets, the site will put $0.10 towards purchasing the banana. If the post reaches 26,000 Likes, CollegeHumor will offer $2,600. If it gets 30,000 likes, the site will buy the stuffed fruit, as well as pay for the Xbox Kinect that Gribbohm was originally trying to win for his kids at the carnival Read more...

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In the past few months, fans have funded a Veronica Mars movie starring Kristen Bell, and a follow-up to Garden State written by Zach Braff. Now, one tongue-in-cheek Kickstarter campaign is asking celebs to return the favor by paying a pair of plebians to watch their films.

California-based friends Luke Barnett and Tanner Thomason say that after fans poured millions of dollars into Bell's and Braff's pet projects, it's payback time

"We think it's so great of the celebrities who've reached out to their loyal fan base to fund their passion projects, instead of using the mountains of money they made while their shows were on the air and in syndication!" Barnett and Thomason write on their Kickstarter page. "We think it's time for the sell-ebrities to give back a little, and pay us to go watch their movies and do cool stuff!" Read more...

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Remote desktop applications are a popular category in the App Store, but many of the solutions often involve confusing download instructions or a clunky interface. If you're looking for a fairly pain-free setup, consider the following iPad apps, which are all free and can connect to your desktop computer with minimal hassle.

PocketCloud

PocketCloud Remote Desktop is one of several cloud-based business products Dell’s Wyse offers. The company’s business credentials are clearly in play here by creating a solid remote desktop tool.

Instead of going through the highly annoying process of creating another online account, PocketCloud lets you sign in with a Google account. The app will then patiently wait while you download the desktop component. Setup for this portion is just as simple: enter your Google account and then wait for PocketCloud to connect through Wi-Fi. The only additional step will be adding in your OS X Keychain or Windows credentials depending upon the security settings on your computer. Read more...

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Actors have a saying: There are no small rolesIBM is seriously challenging that expression, however, now that it's created a short film where the actors are actually individual atoms.

A Boy and His Atom would be just like any number of unremarkable animated shorts were it not for the fact that it's only visible if you use a microscope that enlarges the action by 100 million times. Using techniques it honed after years of researching atomic data storage, IBM created 250 stop-motion frames depicting a boy playing with his (pet? toy?) atom.

How exactly does one manipulate atoms in this way? It's not cheap: IBM needed to use its two-ton scanning-tunnelling microscope, which operates at minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit, to shoot the film. The microscope moved a "super-sharp" needle to within 1 nanometer of a copper surface, which then could attract and physically move each atom, one by one. Read more...

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Looking for a quick way to creep out your friends?

Meet FaceSwap, an iPhone app that lets you instantly swap faces — yes, faces — with your friends in photos. Using Face detecting technology the app is able to find all of the faces in a photo, crop them, and swap them instantly.

Once FaceSwap does its initial swap, you can pinch and zoom to perfectly position the faces. Finished photos can be saved to your camera roll, or shared on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from directly within the app.

Regularly $1.99, FaceSwap is currently free for a limited time.

Definitely a fun time, the app isn’t without its issues as well. Read more...

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Ex-NFL star and eternal Twitter legend Chad Johnson did a pretty awesome thing over the weekend — something so cool it's still worth revisiting

Johnson, the artist formerly known as Ochocinco, showed a homeless man called Porkchop a fun weekend after a chance meeting in Miami. Better yet? Johnson posted a continuous stream of Twitter updates letting his 4.4 million followers in on the good times

It all started, apparently, when Porkchop randomly asked Johnson for a beer on Saturday, but then this happened instead:

Homeless dude asked for a beer, I bought him a case of a 24 n a pack of Newports, we balling together fuck it..twitter.com/ochocinco/stat…

— Chad Johnson (@ochocinco) April 27, 2013 Read more...

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What happens when you cross-breed soccer and basketball? This amazing alley-oop

It comes from a charity basketball game dunk contest, and features pro dunkers "Pat The Roc" and Gary "G" Smith. That's Mr. Roc with the sweet reverse heel-kick, and Mr. G with the authoritative finish

The highlight's YouTube description says it "might be the greatest alley-oop ever performed." We wouldn't go quite that far, but it is pretty dang cool. So check it out for yourself above, then let us know what you think in the comments

Homepage image via iStockphoto, Artistic Captures Read more...

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We all knew it was coming, and finally it did: A male athlete in a major American pro sport came out as gay while still an active player

Twelve-year NBA veteran Jason Collins became that person on Monday morning, when Sports Illustrated posted an exclusive first-person account beginning, "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay."

The story instantly dominated Monday's news cycle, getting picked up by sports and non-sports outlets far and wide. Kobe Bryant, Bill Clinton and other celebrities tweeted their support to Collins, while general sentiment on Twitter was overwhelmingly positive. Collins himself later took to Twitter to thank people for the "truly inspirational" reaction to his announcement Read more...

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Artists often need to supplement their incomes with something a little more substantial, and that especially goes for poets. For instance, did you know that Robert Frost ran a dairy farm to earn some extra cash? Or that Maya Angelou sang calypso music in a nightclub?

In this comic, on the last day of National Poetry Month, Grant Snider of Incidental Comics shows us several other poets' day jobs. Which one surprises you the most?

Snider makes a few clarifications:

• Wallace Stevens wasn't just any ordinary insurance salesman — he was an executive at an insurance company.

• Philip Larkin was a librarian at the University of Hull.

• Emily Dickinson had no known career other than poetry, but "her sister Lavinia was cat-obsessed. So Emily must have been forced to cat-sit occasionally." Read more...

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If your smartphone is attached to your hip, your blood flows like a Twitter feed and you're fairly certain your eyes permanently see through an Instagram filter, then maybe it's time to disconnect for a bit?

A new summer camp aims to help adults take a break from technology for a weekend of being a kid again"Camp Grounded," a retreat brought to you by the folks at The Digital Detox, takes place this June near Anderson Valley, Calif. (about two to three hours north of San Francisco).

This four-day "summer camp for adults" in a 1970s-style Boy Scouts camp atmosphere brings together 232 campers who must follow some special rules: no technology use, no cell phones allowed and no talking about work. Read more...

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David Ferrer is a Spanish tennis star. He's playing in the upcoming Mutua Madrid Open tournament. That event happens to be sponsored by Samsung, so Ferrer sent a tweet on Tuesday in which he gave a big ol' shout-out about how much he loves his new Galaxy S4 smartphone

Sounds like your average athlete tweet-for-cash, right? Well, there was actually just one problem here: Ferrer apparently sent the tweet from an iPhone

The tweet — since deleted — was noticed by Spanish journalist Jaime Novoa, who posted this screenshot:

@benedictevans you’ll like this. Professional Spanish tennis player working for Samsung. Tweet sent from… iPhone twitter.com/jaimenovoa/sta…

— Jaime Novoa (@jaimenovoa) April 30, 2013 Read more...

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Humans are able stick their arms into cluttered areas like a refrigerator or reach across a table set for dinner without knocking anything over. Robots aren’t so good at that. In fact, until now, researchers generally design robots to not touch anything except for the object for which they’re reaching.

However, a robotic arm developed by a team lead by Charlie Kemp, associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, has sensors that cover its entire “arm,” helping it touch other objects gently, while reaching for a specific item. The technique gives robots a more effective and realistic method for dealing with real-world circumstances, where obstacles and clutter are usually an issue. Read more...

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If AMC's Mad Men has taught us anything, it's that advertising is a dog eat dog world.

So YouTuber umandaful did the only feasible thing and created a version of the show's opener featuring puppies. Only these dapper mutts are hardcore enough to handle '60s panache as well as Don Draper himself. And if you've ever seen a pup drunk, they quite resemble Roger Sterling's alcohol-fueled behavior on the show. Not to mention the whole butt-sniffing thing.

The team behind the video also rounded up the best cast to ever appear together in Hollywood. Favorites include "Sparky Boneman," "Sassy Morris," "Bosty Smushface" and "Ginger Ortega" as, what we can only imagine, a very curvy, red-haired poodle Read more...

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GIG-IT, a new social game coming to Facebook in May, will let players create 3D concerts featuring virtual versions of famous musicians along with music from the game's library or music available to purchase within the experience

Players will be able to customize every aspect of the concert such as the music, backup dancers, speakers, opening act, headline performers, wardrobes, sponsors and venue. They will then have the option to share their creations with their friends and followers on Facebook, turning the game into a music-discovery experience.

"This ain't no farm."

"This ain't no farm." Read more...

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Netflix's streaming catalog is about to lose nearly 2000 movies.

As of May 1, 2013, Netflix will officially have 1794 fewer titles in its streaming repository. Now, before you freak out too much, this isn't as bad as the Great Netflix Starzageddon of 2012. After Netflix and Starz were unable to renew their streaming agreements with one another, more than a 1,000 films — including many of the newer films in Netflix's streaming catalog — disappeared from the service.

This time, most of the titles (you can see the full list here) are inconsequential and include titles such as Caged Fury (yes, that's a real movie starring Erik Estrada) and 1998's Deep Impact. Still, we're also losing Cruel Intentions, which makes my 16-year-old heart break into thousands of tiny pieces. Read more...

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You've seen the Dove "sketches" campaign. You've seen the parody. Now, here's another parody.

The premise: Men are seated in a room and describe their testicles to an artist. Before long, they get hip to the fact that the man is, in fact, sketching their nether regions according to their description. Then, some men and women describe the body part in question. Sketches based on both descriptions are compared and the men get emotional

"Those balls are angry and have no friends," says one such man, referring to the ones based on his self-description. "And these are alive and have hope ..."

Is it funny? Sorta, but not as funny as the previous send-up. After seeing both, though, it's impossible to see the original and feel the same emotional connection. Such is the power of the Internet Read more...

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Henry Gribbohm's had a rough week. It could have been worse — he did, after all, end up scoring a stuffed banana with a beanie and dreadlocks. It just happened to cost him $2,600

Gribbohm, 30, of Epsom, N.H., spent what he claims was his life savings over the weekend on a carnival game called Tubs of Fun. The game's premise is simple: contestants drop an entry fee to toss balls into a tub for prizes. Gribbohm, specifically, had his eyes on an Xbox Kinect

But as he started the game, he says, all of the balls he was throwing began bouncing out of the tub. He tried to win his money back by going "double or nothing," but within a few minutes, he was out $300. He ran home to grab $2,300 more, but soon lost all of that as well Read more...

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If you're in the majority, chances are you haven't gotten your hands on Google Glass just yet. And even if you've peered through the high-tech specs before, you might be in need of a tutorial.

Now, Google has released a video explaining how to get started with Glass, a touch-sensitive device heralded as the future of mobile

Here's a deeper look at how it works: By swiping the frames' "touchpad" — which runs from your temple to your ear — you can change settings and access new features. To turn it on, all the touchpad needs is a simple touch. The display positioned above the user's line of sight can be adjusted manually, similar to a rear-view mirror in a car. Read more...

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Can you offer a home improvement tip in 6 seconds? Apparently yes, as Lowe's demonstrates with these Vines.

The retailer introduced the following Vines last week. Unlike previous Vines from brands, these are designed to be useful. The effort, called "Lowe's Fix in Six," offers simple, everyday improvements that consumers will want (hopefully) to share with others

The subjects range from cleaning rusty knives to keeping squirrels away from your plants. To ensure some quality, the brand and its ad agency, BBDO, contracted Meagan Cignoli, a photographer and Vine user who had two shortlisted entries in the inaugural #6secfilms Vine contest at last week’s Tribeca Film Festival. Lowe's hopes to release a total of 12 Vines and will distribute the rest via its Twitter and Facebook feeds in coming weeks. Read more...

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Fast forward to 2020. What job skill must you have? Coding

Well, we may be getting ahead of ourselves slightly. It's uncertain that HTML and CSS in their current form will be on the menu of the next decade. But what we do know is, for the foreseeable future, coding is one of the most important and desirable skills there is, no matter how it evolves.

Coding is the new black. And it's getting so hot that there are a slew of startups focusing on teaching coding — to your kids.

For those of us grown up and out of grammar school, there are two schools of thought: specialized education programs or teaching yourself. School can be both expensive and time consuming. While hitting the books at home via online courses is significantly cheaper, it's also draining, as there's no one to copy answers off of Read more...

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Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is crazy, stupid and one of the most brilliant pieces of gaming this year

A veritable send-up of the first-person shooter genre as a whole, Blood Dragon takes the immersive mechanics of its Far Cry brethren and melds it with the mind-numbing ridiculousness of ‘80s post-apocalyptic action heroism. Somehow in this garbled salad of ideas, the team at Ubisoft Montreal managed to make a game that is actually quite enjoyable, and perhaps worth more than its price tag of $15

It’s hard to believe that Blood Dragon even exists in the first place. This download-only game was originally an earnest attempt to expand the Far Cry 3 universe of Rook Island, but it took a hard left somewhere around the production phase. Creative Director Dean Evans and his team said they became inspired by RoboCop and other cheesy ‘80s B-movies that tried to show off “the future.” But it doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously as those movies ever did Read more...

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For some time, Facebook has deflected criticism about its low click-through rates for ads by arguing that the metric is irrelevant. However, showing a link between ads on the network and a corresponding sales boost has been tricky.

Data from partner Datalogix may help Facebook make its case. In particular, a Facebook campaign for Bud Light appears to have helped increase sales.

The overview: During a four-week period from Dec. 3 to Dec. 31, Bud Light ran Page Post ads that appeared in all Facebook placements, including the mobile News Feed, visible to its 5.8 million fans. The ads were reconstituted Page posts that had already done well. One was a pic of someone pouring a Bud Light from a smartphone and another an image of a football stadium made of luncheon meat with the message "Bud Light in the fridge. A few snacks on the table..." Read more...

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The circus is coming to town — the Two Bit Circus that is. And today the think tank troupe of self-described artisanal engineers is launching a Kickstarter campaign to produce the STEAM Carnival.

This isn't bearded ladies and strong men carnival fare. This is a tech bent affair focused on hooking kids with the thrill of cool education. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and math. Think educational entertainment. The makers behind this circus maximus want to inspire the youth to pursue careers in the sci-tech world. It's like a World's Fair for the iPhone set.

“We’ve found that high-tech games spark curiosity about engineering and science, so we created the STEAM Carnival to inspire the next generation of inventors,” explains Eric Gradman, Two Bit's CTO and co-founder. Read more...

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Small business owners and entrepreneurs who use Twitter only as a marketing tool for their businesses are missing out. The microblogging service can also be a huge resource for them in the day-to-day operation of their business. However, business owners must know the right accounts to follow in order to benefit from all that Twitter can offer

Here are 10 Twitter accounts that every small business owner and entrepreneur should be sure to follow.

Gene Marks — @genemarks

Even though you can find Gene Marks' views on small business everywhere from The New York Times and Forbes to Inc. and the Huffington Post, it is his Twitter account that provides small business owners with some of his best information. His tweets not only link to his many weekly columns, but also to interesting and unique business-related news that can benefit business owners from businesses of all sizes Read more...

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Nashville musician and YouTube favorite Preston Leatherman has graced the mall again with his impeccable dance moves — this time, to the catchy beat of Wham!'s "Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)."

The 21-year-old is most famously known for his 2011 holiday version of the series, in which he danced to "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and even got a nod of approval from Mariah Carey herself.

While he keeps Internet users entertained with his wild hips and crazy, flailing arms, Leatherman has simultaneously focused on creating music — both original and covers — and touring around the country. The artist is a one-man show — he sings, plays drums, piano, guitar, and other instruments. He also produces his own music and videos, and runs his website, YouTube channel and other social media platforms Read more...

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