Along with yoga's rise in popularity has come a raft of DVD and online classes offering a potentially less expensive and more convenient alternative to live, scheduled instruction. Such prerecorded offerings often focus on the fittest and most photogenic yogis, however—without the real-world masses—which may be good for education, but can be demoralizing for those who are less than perfectly toned and proficient. Enter YogaVibes, a site that offers recordings of real-world yoga classes, complete with fellow classmates in all shapes and sizes.

North Carolina-based YogaVibes offers a wide variety of online classes of varying lengths and difficulty levels, taught by actual yoga instructors from top studios around the world. Rather than situating those instructors against breathtaking backdrops for glossy, fully staged productions, however, the classes featured are real ones with real students of all ability levels. The site explains: "Our classes are authentic. With few exceptions, we film real students, who come in all shapes, sizes and abilities. We know they’ll inspire your yoga practice, both on and off the mat." A series of free vignettes are available on YogaVibes, as are an assortment of paid classes, which are typically priced at USD 10 for 14-day access. Alternatively, a Class Pass offers five full-length online classes for 30 days for USD 20. YogaVibes gives five percent of its class fees to charities including yogaHOPE, Yoga Bear and Street Yoga.

It seems reasonable that just as consumers value the opinions of twinsumers when making purchase decisions, so they value the inclusion of others at—and even below—their own ability level when learning something new. The lesson to be learned? Co-consumers can remain a critical part of the equation, even in an online setting; remove them, and you may just remove part of your service's value.

Website: www.yogavibes.com
Contact: www.yogavibes.com/pages/contact

Spotted by: Sarah Anne Jackson

It's been less than a year since the launch of Stack, the curated subscription service that samples a variety of independent magazines each month. We covered the UK-based service last December, just after it launched, so were pleased to learn recently that it's already expanding to North America.

Just to recap, the original Stack service offers readers a choice of receiving six, eight or 12 issues delivered each year. Subscribers never know exactly which magazines they'll get in any given month because Stack selects what it sees as the best issue from among a roster of multiple indie magazines, including UK-based Bad Idea and Electric Sheep, and Netherlands-based Foam. Now, with the launch of Stack America this week, the service is available in a version tailored to American consumers as well. The magazines sent out by Stack America will be different from those chosen for the original Stack service, focusing primarily—but not exclusively—on magazines made in the US, Canada and South America. The first delivery will go out in early January, Pricing for delivery of six magazines per year is USD 71.99 for the US, USD 119.99 for Canada, USD 139.99 for Mexico and USD 159.99 for the rest of the world.

Andrew Losowsky, CEO of New England-based Stack America, explains: "There’s a huge wealth of independent magazines made in America, and there are lots of readers who want to get hold of them. But there are problems of marketing and distribution—small magazines find it hard to promote themselves effectively, and with many Americans living out of reach of a good magazine store, it can often be impossible for people to discover and pick up new titles." Like Meatpaper, which will be the first magazine that Stack America sends out.

Similar in many ways to the curated offerings we recently covered from Hipstery and ShoeDazzle, ad-supported Stack may just have hit upon a model that will make independent magazines sustainable. The company's expansion to the US, meanwhile, "paves the way to more franchises in the future," founder Steve Watson says. One to bring to independent readers in *your* neck of the woods...?

Website: www.stackmagazines.com
Contact: info@stackmagazines.com

There's nothing like a little surprise and mystery to spark fresh interest in a company or product, and we've recently seen a spate of companies that are putting that idea to work. Hipstery and ShoeDazzle are two examples from the world of fashion, and recently we came across one in publishing: Fourth Estate, a UK imprint of HarperCollins that recently challenged its readers to guess which authors wrote the anonymous stories in a new collection.

HarperCollins is no stranger to involving the crowds, as we've already seen via Authonomy, its recent crowdsourcing effort. Now there's Anonthology, a collection of nine short stories written by a variety of Fourth Estate authors and published earlier this year as part of Fourth Estate's 25th anniversary celebration. The trick is that while the authors' names are on the cover of the collection, they're not associated with the stories themselves; rather, it's up to readers to guess which one wrote which story. Joyce Carol Oates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Patrick Gale are among the authors represented in the collection, which is available both in print and online. (Of particular interest to regular Springwise readers is that the online version is powered by Issuu, which we covered last year.) UK-based readers of the free publication could take their best shot at matching the people with the prose, as long as they did so before midday today. The winner—drawn randomly from all correct entries received—will win a complete set of five Fourth Estate 25th Anniversary special edition books.

The company's website explains: "The Anonthology is an experimental project to assess the importance placed on name and reputation over quality of writing. Amongst the writers contained within we have Orange and Genius Prize winners, Booker and Pulitzer Prize nominees. We have one author who’s sold over half a million copies, another who’s written over fifty books. But can you tell which is which? And how does it change the reading experience, not knowing if the author is young or old, male or female?"

Of course, it's also a compelling way to engage consumers and increase both awareness and involvement in the company and its products. One to spend a quick brainstorm session on: how can your company add a splash of mystery or surprise to its own story or offerings...? (Related: Author's next thriller will be cowritten by the crowds.)

Website: www.anonthology.com
Contact: enquiries@harpercollins.co.uk

Spotted by: Katherine Noyes

It's been more than a decade since online diaries first appeared, and during that time most have transformed into communications of a much more public sort than the paper counterparts that inspired them. Aiming to restore some of the original privacy to today's ubiquitous blog, Toronto-based Penzu offers a secure online journaling medium that's private by default.

Penzu is an online diary and personal journal that is focused on privacy. The core component of Penzu's interface is what it calls "the pad," resembling a sheet of blank journal paper. Users begin by signing up—basic use is free. After that they can begin writing immediately on the pad, and Penzu saves their work automatically. Entries can be searched, sorted, filtered, renamed or discarded at any time, and photos can be uploaded from the user's computer or from Flickr. Most distinguishing of all, however, is that all entries made on the site are private by default, with an additional password-protection option for those who desire it. When users do decide to share their work, they can do so via email or a public link that opens it up to comments. The basic service is free, and there's also a premium version (Penzu Pro) that's priced at USD 19 per year. For that price, users get additional features including military-grade security and importing from LiveJournal.

While most blogging tools—from WordPress to Tumblr—let users keep their entries private, Penzu could well appeal to audiences that view privacy is a top concern. Diarists in 170 countries currently use Penzu, the company says, but the service is available only in English. One to partner with on a localized version for your part of the world...?

Website: www.penzu.com
Contact: info@penzu.com

When we recently reported on Verizon's sponsorship of the New York Mets' interactive big screen, we noticed that the telecom giant is also bringing social media to the small screen, with a Twitter widget for its FiOS fiber optic TV service. The widget, freely available to all FiOS subscribers, is displayed on one half of the TV screen, allowing viewers to continue watching their favourite show while following a related feed or discussing it with their followers on Twitter.

The Twitter widget, available to the approximately 2.5 million households with FiOS TV, has been very successful so far, with some 1 million users in the first few days. It's part of a suite of applications available to FiOS customers through the service's 'Widget Bazaar', which also includes a Facebook app—proving popular for picture sharing—and Blip.tv, which hosts user-produced video content. Following in the footsteps of Apple's trendsetting App Store, Verizon has announced that it will also be opening the Widget Bazaar to third-party developers.

Older technologies that have sought to integrate the web and TV have failed to make much of an impact, and it remains to be seen whether new television interfaces will be able to compete with the laptops, netbooks and smartphones that have already joined their owners on the living room couch. The larger implications are less uncertain: by giving viewers real-time connectivity as they watch, Verizon is tapping into a growing consumer trend. More about that in our sister-site's latest briefing on nowism.

Website: www.verizon.com/fios
Contact: www22.verizon.com/content/ContactUs

Spotted by: Duncan Rickelton