ANAHEIM, Calif. — You've seen folks doing it all summer long: taking those silly pictures of themselves directly into the smartphone.They're called "selfies," which Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of photo messaging app Snapchat describes thusly: "a picture taken with the front-facing camera of your cellphone of your face."Snapchat generates 200 million photos daily, many of them "selfies."The practice of taking one's photo and sharing it with the world is also huge on Instagram, the world's most popular photo app. A simple Instagram search on Friday for "selfies" produced 150 million mentions.But it's not easy framing yourself into the camera, especially when others join the shot. What are the best techniques for selfie-dom? We asked consumers at the recent VidCon convention here, a gathering of YouTube fans and stars."Take your phone, tilt it and lean," says Emily Faulkner, who lives in the United Kingdom.In other words, get the phone at a good angle to fit both yourself and your friends. You don't have to always shoot straight on.Tom Milsom, a British musician who makes videos that run on YouTube, likes the control of selfie shots. "I prefer to hold the camera myself and be able to position it appropriately, so I'm looking at a screen with a real-time view of what the photo will look like," he says, "so I get the best photo possible."Katt Wade, a friend of Faulkner's from the U.K., says she enjoys watching folks making Snapchat selfies on the streets. "You can see those people in public, when they'll be doing something on the phone," make a funny face and then "carry on."Adds Faulkner: "In university, I'm like sitting in class, and you know who's not doing anything. They're on Snapchat" making funny faces into their phone quickly and then returning to pay attention.Katerina Guillermo, from Miami,…

Originally introduced in 1953, color television was not an immediate success. Nowadays, though, most of us couldn't imagine watching our favorite TV shows or movies without it. The means of digital color production have changed over the years, but the basic makeup of what is called "additive color" has remained the same. As professional TV reviewers, we make it our business to know how televisions create color on-screen, and to know how that color relates to what we see in real life, as well. By the end of this article, expect to have a pretty good idea of how digital color works, and why there are standards for it. What is Digital Color? The color produced by TVs, monitors, tablets, and smart phones is called digital or "additive" color, made distinctive from real or print color by the way it is produced. In the real world, our eyes use tiny, photosensitive receptors called cones to perceive color. Oddly enough, we only have cones for three colors: Red, green, and blue. This is because human vision, like the other four senses, is tuned to promote our common environments, our repetitive habits, and—ultimately—our survival. Real color is a phenomenon of the Universe that only exists for the observer.Real color is a phenomenon of the Universe that, like a tree falling in the forest, only exists for the observer. Color falls along a spectrum of longer/shorter wavelengths of light; our eyes are tuned to some wavelengths better than others, and there are some we can't see at all. An apple, for instance, absorbs all of light's wavelengths—except for red. That is why, to human beings, apples appear red. Photo: Johnathan Ratcliff, Flickr [CC-BY-3.0] Digital color is called "additive" color because the colors are added together, rather than subtracted from one another, to make…

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and founder of Square, talks about how simple technology can level the playing field for small businesses. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of social-media giant Twitter and digital payments system Square, at a Small Business Administration conference in Washington, D.C.(Photo: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)Story HighlightsFrom mobile payments to build-it-yourself sites, digital tools deliverOne consignment store saw revenue go up 250% with a websiteSquare lets food trucks take cards on the flySHARECONNECTEMAILMOREDigital technology, websites and social media now are key tools for growing small businesses and competing with larger ones."Even if you're making coffee or ice pops or lobster rolls, you can also expand your business using technology," says Small Business Administration chief Karen Mills. "It levels the playing field."Examples:• Swing's Coffees, near the White House, has customers tweeting about its lattes and employees tweeting at strategic times of the day about specials. Meanwhile, its baristas at one location place orders on iPads that let customers pay by swiping their credit cards. And those with the Square Wallet app can pay with their phones.• After doing brisk business at seven farmers markets and with a food truck using mobile devices, the owner of the Washington, D.C., frozen fruit pops company Pleasant Pops turned to Kickstarter.com — a site that lets people post projects and solicit investment — to raise money to open a store. Bryan Sykora raised $13,000 in his first day and has attracted 400 supporters.• Marilyn Caskey, owner of the San Antonio designer consignment store The Garment Exchange, used to spend much of her day answering the phone just to tell people her hours and location. After she spent an afternoon setting up a website with that information, her phone largely stopped ringing — and revenue increased 250% in the week after the site went…