Google Offers iPhone App Arrives

Google Offers iPhone app has finally arrived for the iPhone users. While the iPhone users had the option earlier to use the web version but a standalone app always provides faster access and a loads of other features that are not available on the web version of the same product. While Apple was busy preparing a send off note to Google Maps it seems the search giant was quietly preparing the launch party for an app that would be very useful for the iPhone users as they grab the deals on the go. The app interestingly is very similar to its Android counterpart, that was released late last year. The iPhone version is for now, and as with quite a few releases of most of the apps from different directions, is available only for the US users. The users will be able to buy the deals from right within the app and also be able to locate if there are any deals nearby to their location. They will also be able to redeem the deals at locations by showing it right on their iPhone without any need to print the respective coupons.

If the users wish to save the deal for later, they even will have that option as well. Users will be able to save the deals on their smartphones, which is unlike the experience they were used to previously on the web version of the product. Google Offers is very deeply integrated with Google Maps on Android and while we right now do not see the same with this iPhone app, its pretty obvious to think the search giant would do that soon considering the recent steps from the smartphone giant ;)

Besides the normal purchase and save features users will be able to track their offers in 'My Offers' section, both in the iPhone and for easy access on the web too. And as a very
convenient feature, you will be able to create notifications when new deals are available or when the deals that you purchased or saved before are about to expire. Putting the user experience and usability right at the center of the feature. 

The app allows users to browse the offers in a map view that allows to you side by side find the locations that may suite you best for a particular offer that you may be viewing. You can also launch a search based on categories to find a deal suitable for you. With the Groupon like app already available and the deals that the search giant has made with the local players and businesses to offer deals to users, it was only a obvious step that the app was launched only in US. Also with the possibility of virtually sans printed vouchers, the risk of loosing the transaction confirmation is very minimal. The app was in the pipeline and if the market competition is anything to go by, it was only delayed by Google while they should have hurried a bit. We will see how it goes with the maps integration with this app but for the meantime it is good news for iPhone users, especially if you are a deal of the day type person.
You could download the app from Apple iTunes.

 

Raj Dubey

Post Credit

Raj works as a Software developer in the ApnaCircle.com IT team that operates from New Delhi. He informed us about this feature on the ApnaCircle portal.
Connect with him either on Facebook or on ApnaCircle for his professional life.

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Facebook Acquires Face.com

There were rumors and now there is the confirmation. After about 2 months of a $1Bn deal to buy Instagram, Facebook made another acquisition. This time its a facial recognition provider company called Face.com. The deal was officially declared on Face.com blog. The details of the sum offered for the deal were not disclosed but is considered that Facebook might have paid something in the region of 80 to 100 Mn USD.

 "Facebook has acquired Face.com! Our mission is and has always been to find new and exciting ways to make face recognition a fun, engaging part of people’s lives, and incorporate remarkable technology into everyday consumer products. If you’re anything like us, Facebook is a part of your life every single day." This is what Gil from the Face.com team had to say on the blog post while making the acquisition' official announcement.

For those not aware about the company, Face.com is a 3yr old Tel-Aviv, Israel based start-up that provides APIs for third party developers so they can integrate the facial recognition software in to their applications. Apart from that they also have released a couple of very famous applications on Facebook. One is the Photo Finder which lets you find all your and your friends' pictures on the social network that are yet untagged. The other is called Photo Tagger which lets you bulk tag photos on Facebook.

With their technology, Face.com can identify your photos on Facebook in live video as well. Face.com also has a stand alone app for iPhone, called the Kilk, that can identify your friends in real time and can adapt image filters to people' faces. Facebook is said to bring the Face.com team on board and in house but its being reported by Face.com that Facebook will still be supporting their third party developers with the APIs.

Clearly the social network giant is turning a lot of attention to the hand held devices (read mobiles and smartphones). The Instagram acquisition and Facebook camera app give a great deal of support to the thought. What's more is that Face.com reported in their blog to be thinking in the same direction as well. This is what they had to say:
We love building products, and like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people’s lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph. By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we’ll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers – that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do.

Neither Facebook nor Face.com has yet provided any details on the mobile development they might be thinking of, but what is sure is that its going to be much fun for the you guys out there who love to be on the go and still be connected to their network. Stay tuned!
          

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YouTube Party Inside Google+ Hangouts

When Google do some acquisitions that make sense (read Google Buys Meebo) and provides some good and pretty useful features to their social platform (read Google Plus Local With Zagat); they mean real business and its very obvious (like we mention time and again) that the search giant is doing every bit that it can to continue the upward push with their social networking platform, Google plus. They continue to expand its presence but with that they are providing a platform where the Google family products finally seems to making their way.

Google has announced the availability of a new YouTube app within the Google+ Hangouts. The search giant and their product that is a vast collection of videos are already integrated with each other and the integration now goes to the next level. With this app you will be able to not only share the videos with your pals inside the hangout but could also control and save the videos right there. The only prerequisite is that you and all the other participants have this new app installed. Yes, that's pretty much it for a start! The only restriction is that the app can be used from the regular Hangouts only, it won't be available in the Hangouts on air to start with.

This is like starting a web party where you can share your favorite videos with your friends and see what they like as well. And what's more is that if you love a video that's playing in the hangout, you are very welcome to share the same with your circles. Pretty cool haan!

From within the app anyone will be able to add a video and do a drag and drop to reorder the playlist and even skip forward or go backward to a video. There is also a search tool so you can search for your favorite videos online and share them within the hangout and then if you want to our circles on the network. And don't worry f you want to start the chat again, just hit the 'Push to talk' button. Besides, you could (like mentioned earlier) save the whole playlist, that you and your pals created, in your YouTube account either as public or privately store it for later viewing.

The app is available worldwide in around 60 languages.
 

   

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Viadeo Eyeing IPO

Facebook (FB.OQ)did crash at wall street, or did it not? It doesn't hurt to be optimistic but we all know what's going on with the social network giant since going public. The voices which were thick at the start due to the expectations and excitement have come close to choking since then. Whether the expectations were too high, the price was over ambitious or Facebook took to wrong time to go public? The speculations will be written and discussed at length for some time to come. What remains to be seen is how Mark and Co. handles the situation they find themselves in.

Much of the blue & white talk, at present we are here to be more orange-ish in color. Whatever seems to going on with Facebook, Viadeo; the second largest professional (and social) network in the world and the biggest competitor of LinkedIn is, as it looks, unfazed by the trouble the social network giant find themselves in. Viadeo seems unperturbed of the consequences that Facebook is going through and is of the opinion that the issues and condition will not dent social media valuations. And on the same note, they themselves are panning on going public in two years from now.

Viadeo' Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), Olivier Fecherolle thinks the impact of Facebook' IPO are limited on the professional network. Looking at the LinkedIn (LNKD.N) status, he seems to be making a point! Headquartered in Paris, France Viadeo is with a global user base of around 45Mn. The company' major chunk of user base comes from Europe, China (operates under Tianji banner), Latin America and India (under the ApnaCircle.com brand name). The site offers enough cream to target the professionals, job seekers and well as head hunters. They did open a new office in San Francisco, USA, in the second half of last year; in an effort to boost the presence in LinkedIn backyard.

The company was reported to be thinking of going public mid last year. The plans were however shelved, rather postponed, citing reasons as focus on growth in emerging markets. As per Olivier, Viadeo's fund raising round that was completed in April this year was a big boost and the company is looking to grow more in the emerging markets with the fund thus raised. Obviously the plans to go public have also received a growth in the minds due to this fund raiser.

This is what Olivier has to say to Reuters a few days back: 

It was our last (funding) round before a possible IPO," said Fecherolle. "We will use this money to accelerate the geographies we are targeting such as China and need time to execute (the plan) before coming back to potential investors.

An IPO could be planned for around two years' time, depending on market conditions and Viadeo's development, with the company most likely to choose between France and the United States for a stock exchange to list on.

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Developers Can Now Reply In Play Store

The news comes as a welcome relief for both the app users and the app developers. Now rather than the sending an email to developers or joining them on forums or some other platform, users can be on the app reviews section in the Google play store where the app developers are now allowed to reply to their queries.

The update was announced yesterday as the restriction was taken off from the Play Store. Now developers will be able to interact with their app users more quickly in the reviews section rather than the section be a one way stream. Good reviews will be heartily welcomed and the bad, or rather unfair, reviews could be better dealt with. There is a small restriction yet, as the ability to provide replies to app feedback is available only to the top developers, that is the developers who are already with the Top Developer Badge. For the rest of the developer community the restriction will be lifted off in the time to come. Google has not provided with any timeline on when all of the developers would be able to interact with their friends on the review section, but that seems enough a good reason to think that(hopefully) it won't be late.

The earlier limitation prevented the developers to be able to quickly discuss the issue with the users and thus provide a satisfactory response or an estimated fix time. This led to users getting furious sometimes making the developers pay in terms of the app reviews and user satisfaction. Now that the developers will be able to quickly discuss, its good news for both the parties.

 

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Facebook Plugin For WordPress

Starting today WordPress publishers can easily integrate Facebook features, such as social publishing and mentions, through the new Facebook for WordPress plugin. The plugin was built by Facebook engineers in collaboration with open source partners, and makes it simple for anyone to make their WordPress site more social; no coding required. The plugin will also work on mobiles and support i18n (or internationalization)

That's what Matt Kelly, engineer at Facebook had to say on the Facebook developers blog yesterday. The social network giant has released the Facebook plugin for WordPress (available here) with an intention to cover the vast majority of the bloggers and website owners who use the WordPress platform for their sites. This doesn't come as a surprise since WordPress is the most widely used platform for publishing content. It alone accounts for nearly 17 percent of all sites and, if you can believe it, 49 of the top 100 blogs use WordPress as their publishing and sharing platform(reports CNET). The list includes giants like CNN and New York Times. Some of them it seems are already using the plugin to wider their social reach with ease. Interested users may head here for the installation instructions of the plugin.

Matt further clarifies that after you are done installing the plugin, you could cross post the content published to WordPress to your Facebook Timeline as well as the Facebook Pages that you may manage. To be able to mention the names of your friends and pages as you share the content is more of a bonus. While you can also comment on any post that may be trending on the social network.

The Facebook Plugin For WordPress nearly has all the features that you are used to on the web version of the social network. So you will have the Like, Send and Subscribe buttons. The Comments ability is included with SEO support; You will be able to click the Recommendations bar to start getting recommendations. You will be able to Like content and also able to add the what you are reading to your Timeline. 

There will be added widgets for support. Here is a look to what they are and what for:

  
Facebook Plugin For WordPress has the current version as 1.0 and is compatible with WordPress 3.1.1 or higher(up to 3.4). The plugin has already been downloaded nearly 11K times. According to WordPress.org page, it seems to have an average rating so far; with 23 ratings.
 

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Apple Likes Facebook, Minus One For Google

Day one of WWDC 2012, the annual event from Apple turned out to be a major heartbreak for the search giant. Not that it we didn't see it coming, especially after the acquisitions they made last year, C3 Technologies in particular. The other things expected on day one also turned out to be true. iOS6 was finally introduced with some new and good to use features. Facebook is now integrated more in the system, Siri will be able to more with your commands, a new way to store all your passes and yes there is more ;)

Apple Maps

Lets start with the bad news for Google. Apple has shown the exit sign to Google Maps and replaced it with a map technology developed in-house. This didn't come as a surprise, a) for the growing rivalry between the two giants in the smartphone arena, and b) although Apple is using Google mapping app as of today, Google has kept a few features like turn by turn directions spoken exclusively for Android smartphones. Apple gave it away last year when they acquired C3 Technologies, hinting the new product to be developed in house.

The new mapping technology will have voice navigation, real time traffic details and will offer alternate routes for the user as well. And while Google is still collecting the 3D images of the structures like flyover etc, Apple has already moved ahead with it. With the help of C3 Technologies, Apple has incorporated the 3D view within the new mapping feature. And it gets better as Apple' very own voice assistant, Siri, will now have access to this map feature. So you will be able to ask Siri for directions and there will be 3D maps available for the voice assistant to use for your help!     

While We Are On Siri

And while we are on the topic, Siri has a few enhancements as well. Besides it makes its presence on iPad available now, which would be enough of an excitement for the iPad users.

The virtual assistant that interprets voice command and talks back to the user will now be available in more languages and has learned a lot about movies. If Apple is to be believed on the partnership with Yelp, then Siri should soon start suggesting you the prices and ratings of restaurants when asked about the laces to eat.

The big bonus comes with the fact that Siri is now able to open up more apps, on the devices for you, then it was in the previous versions while its introduction on iPhone4S.

Apple Did Like Facebook 

Rumored to be achieved it iOS4, the Facebook integration finally happens in iOS6. After the Twitter integration in the previous version, this is a much anticipated and welcomed feature by the iOS users.

What this means is that you will now be required to provide your Facebook password just once and use the integration rather seamlessly, as you can like/suggest pages from the safari browser. Or even better, since the integration spans to the app store; you will be able to recommend apps to your friends as well.

And it doesn't stop here, your Facebook events and reminders (including the birthdays) will be available in your phone itself.

FaceTime, Now On 3G

The limitation of FaceTime usage was there for 2 years since it was introduced. Not anymore! You will now be able to use FaceTime over 3G connections apart from the WiFi usage that existed before. This will make the users use the feature more than it was since the start.

Something On Microsoft

Whether Apple is worried about Microsoft sync or not, we will discuss some other time. But for now Apple with a few other players in the game have introduced a feature that they seem to call 'Eyes Free'. They are building a tech that will allow users to use Siri as well their iPhone while driving and without moving their eyes off the road.  Seems interesting!!

It Gets More Smart

iOS6 seems to have more smart feature. So if you were amazed what Galaxy S3 could do, listen to this. iOS6 introduces a new feature called, call when you leave. You set a reminder to call someone when you leave the place (building) and the reminder alerts you as you get out. The phone detects that you are leaving the place!

It also lets you decide what notifications not to receive when you are sleeping for example. This feature prevents the messaging and other notifications to disturb you during the time.

Store your Tickets With Passbook

With this app you could store all type of tickets. t will store your movie tickets, train tickets and airline tickets etc and makes them available digitally with the help of QRCodes and 2D bar-codes. Not a feature anyone expected, but a handy one nonetheless.

MacBook Pro

Apple announced the next generation MacBook Pro model. Less than an inch thick when closed and measuring 15. inch diagonally, it is being termed as the most amazing computer Apple has ever made. Its supposed to have a battery backup of around 7 hrs.

  

Besides, these there was introduction to the new features on Safari and some enhancements made to the Email app. You will now be able to add images and pictures directly to emails from the email app, something that bothered users quite much in the previous versions.

They did mention the Mountain Lion(Mac OS X 10.8), but its features were already let out a few months back. It should rather be on sale by now we think!!

 

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