Wishfree Tech Blog Award 2012

There isn't a need for a "prize" all the time. Is it? We leave it to you to decide that but we tend to agree with the lot who decides to do things for fun instead, most of the time ;). FYI however that Wishfree is currently among the other contests, running a Tech Blog Award 2012 contest on their site.

The contest is open for all to join. In fact, you could either participate in it for your own blog or you may also nominate others that are already there in the contest. There are currently quite a few famous blogs there, although we are not sure if they were nominated by some of the fans or the blog owners themselves created the entry in there. We however were contacted by the Wishfree PR contact person for the participation and we were very glad to accept the request ;). The contest runs thru till 12th of Oct 2012. 

For a nomination process, all you need to do is create an entry for your favorite blog via the contest page, if they are not already there contesting. For an existing blog entry, all you have to do is log in to the site with either of your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn credentials and then just hit nominate as you see on the screen capture below:

 Don't forget to vote for your favorite blog at this year's Tech Blog awards. See you on 12th then ;)

[Update 09/11/2012: To our confusion "although we are not sure if they were nominated by some of the fans or the blog owners themselves created the entry in there", our good friend from the Wishfree PR team tells us and confirms thru an email this morning that:

"none of the blog has been entered by the admin, all the blogs visible at the contest are either invited or suggested by the fans of the blogs".

We thank her for the correction :) and also for dropping by to check the post!]

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NewsPaper on Smartphone with PressReader

How often does your newspaper lay in the same state the delivery boy left it in during early morning hours? Or how often you feel the lack of time that prevents you from spending some minutes to catch up on the news on that online news site? If you are also like us who keep blaming the business of life then we just got the right app for you.

PressReader is an online newspaper reader app that your smartphone is missing even if you 

are able to get some time right up in the morning to skim the pages. With most people preferring the "on the move" trend now a days, the app will help you keep up to date with the happenings around the place you are in. PressReader is available for both your smartphone as well as tablets. Just to let you know before we dive in to reveal the features of the very famous news app, the app which offers around 2K digital newspapers on your palm devices, is available for smartphones running any of the Android, iOS devices, Windows or BlackBerry Os(es). It also has news from over 95 countries and is available in around 54 languages. The news is available to you on the go and in a very convenient and and replica form of the real newspaper copy of yours. Lets see a few of the features that impressed us while we tried the app on our smartphone.

 

The app is available for a free trial for a day only, which should suffice the trial that you would like to have on this app. You will need to buy it if you like it and the above screen captures from our Nexus devices will help you on how to do it. The authorization would be only after you buy the app where by you will be able to create your authorization credentials.

Once you are in, you could choose the county for which you would want to read the news about (rather the publications). The filters apart from the country will include languages, favorites and the recent ones that may have read or referred to. The left side screen capture in the above image shows you the different publications available when we had our county set to India. As you can see you can either download the paper by clicking anywhere along the row area for that paper (as we did here for 'The Hindu' and 'Times of India' ), or you may also get the app to read the news for you.

This is a very nice feature as you just need tot click on the speaker icon on the right of the screen and the ePaper will load to provide you with the replica of the actual hard copy. The news items will be read out to you by the app and you can swipe your fingers left, right, up or down to change the news items or the pages that you need to be on. You may also like or dislike the particular publication that you are reading with the thumbs up and thumbs down icons on each side of the below part of screen. Feel free to pinch a particular news item to be able to listen to it.

While you are on a particular publication, just tab the options icon on the top right to view more options like the shifting to 'Sports News' as seen on the above screen capture. Or for that matter to the 'International News'. The app as you would expect is very handy for all you out there who are on the move every now and then and don't get time to get in to the hard copy of the news papers. The best part is that there are so many publications that are available and quite a few countries that you may not feel like left out. With the app speaking so many languages, you would be rest assured to have a ePaper in at least your second if not the first language. Also, since we did mention it a couple para before, you could always download a ePaper to be able to read it while you are not in a WiFi zone or don't want to turn on your mobile data packets. Just make sure to download the paper before you leave home in the morning and you should be good and in nice company on your way to the office. Since the version 4.0 in Google play store, they also offer a SmartFlow which is a  "stream of articles where visual clues will not only enhance your reading experience, they will reveal new gems of content you’ll be delighted to discover".

We finally leave you with a video we found on the play store while looking up the app. Enjoy your time with the app and do tell us how you found your new office going companion to be!

It sure is a killer app for your smartphone!

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LinkedIn Smartphone App Updated With Real Time Notifications

The smartphone apps are getting popular as a way of access-on-the-move within the business of our lives. LinkedIn understands the nature of people using the smartphone app and that is why you see their mobile population grow more than 2 folds in the last year since they provided a completely new LinkedIn app for the Android(s) and the iPhone(s). The reported figure grew from 10% to 23% since 16th August 2011. Not surprising, as the new app launched last year was a nice way to keep user interested. This year just after the anniversary of the new app version launched last year, LinkedIn has provided an update (both launched and coming soon) that people were expecting to see in the app and ones that are highly anticipated and expected.

As announced by Joff Redfern on the official LinkedIn blog post, the new updates bring the features for both the Android and iOS users. There is also a special update only for the iPad. Lets first see the features available on both the platforms: 

Get notified
The smartphone app will now get real-time notifications for the activities like someone liking your shares on LinkedIn, commenting on them. And also when someone views your profile or accepts your invitation. This is not the exhaustive list of course, but it gets interesting already! 

Company pages goes mobile
A massive feature update and one that should boost the number of people looking to follow one or the other update from a particular company they may be interested in. With the Company Pages making their appearance on the mobile version, LinkedIn users can now see and follow all details about a company like who from your network work at a particular company, the job postings from that company and any update that the company makes available via their news updates. 

Job Listings
Access to job listings and openings that you are interested in are directly available within your mobile news stream.

As for the iPad, the app now is available in 6 new languages. These include French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean. A big push for the majority of the user base that are outside US (60% is what Joff reports it to be). The company says it has plans to include more soon. These are good and very handy features and with the ability to edit your profile on smartphone "coming soon" the app will be a very interesting point to keep yourself updated on the professional site. What are your views on the app? Share with us in the comments section below.

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Google Maps Brings Voice Navigation To India

Google Maps gave the Android users searching the transit routes a sigh of relief last month when they enabled the schedule tracking of quite a few form of transits like train, metro etc. And now they make it easier for people on Android to use the navigation feature inside Google Maps from yesterday onwards. Gogle Maps android app received an important update thereby enabling the voice navigation on Indian roads, something that was anticipated for long and one that should please Indian people as well as thousands of tourists visiting the country. We will come back to the voice navigation feature after a couple of paragraphs, first lets look at some brief details on the transit and schedule information update. For people who still aren't aware, Google Maps on Android now has schedules for Delhi Metro Rail, Chennai MRTS, Bangalore MTC and Kolkata Metro. This update to Google Maps was done mid August, not even a month old that is. Not only schedule tracking but users will be able to get correct information about the a particular form of transit like the Delhi Metro for example. You may also tap any station name to see a detailed and an updated layout of the station.

And this is not all, there is more to the details you could be getting out of the app. Searches for a zip/postal code or for that matter a city will have the respective region highlighted for your better look. All the information about the places are now at a single place and your location history will let you get the details on what places you have visited before.

Let's dive in to voice navigation which would be much of a concern to companies like TomTom or MapMyIndia and even Nokia which offers this service already. More so since the earlier two companies mentioned have the feature as premium version. Users wouldn't worry about this though as this brings a lot of comfort for people going to places with an uncertainty as far as the route/directions are concerned. Google India uploaded a video on YouTube introducing the feature in India. Here is a look at that:

We leave it to you to decide which place would be your first choice for the voice navigation and hey just to let the TomTom or MapMyIndia premium user know, there is no price to pay for it. The feature is absolutely free. Although one thing you may miss here in Google Maps is the non availability of this feature in offline mode, TomTom and MapMyIndia users will have a point up here!

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Create ShortCuts in Google Analytics

Having to deal with multiple clicks, especially while you are to draw out a report, is always frustrating, tiring and annoying to say the least. It would be a dream come true to be able to get to a report in a single click thus saving time for that extra coffee break in the day. Google agrees with you and thus now provides a way to create and use shortcuts in Google Analytic to be at ease with your reports extraction.

Google announced the feature last week on their official analytic blog, stating that "Shortcuts help you get to the exact view you want of your data in GA in record time. Rather than having to go through the "find report, add segment, change, sort process daily, with Shortcuts you can do it once, save it, and come back to it in a single click."

Creating a Shortcut is as easy as a couple of clicks and then save. Once you are on the screen of a custom or a standard report in Google Analytic, start by creating the 'Shortcut' button that you will be now able to see on the report's utility bar. On the resulting screen just create a shortcut name to this report shortcut and you are done.

 

Once you give a name to your report shortcut you will land on the new Shortcuts section On the Home tab, with your report configuration saved and your report being viewable on the left of the screen. You will have the below information saved as part of this shortcut (note that the date range and sample size are not saved as part of this creation) ;

• Standard or custom report for context
• Currently viewed tab on the report
• Sort order
• Advanced segments
• Graphed metric

Using the Shortcuts are simple. The Shortcuts that you created are accessible from the Shortcuts section on the Home tab. All your Shortcuts are under this section, clicking any one that you created will take you to the same configuration that you saved. This means that all the segments will be reset once you click on a Shortcut and you will always see the same customization that you saved last time you made changes to the Shortcut configurations. Want to change the configurations of the Shortcut that you are viewing? Just click on the Save button the Shortcut menu after you are done making the changes.

Managing your Shortcuts is done via the 'Overview' option in the Shortcuts navigation drop. The Overview page will present to you all of your Shortcuts and you may view or delete any one from here.

A couple of points that Andrew Seguin from the Google Analytic Team mentions on his post for you to make note:

• Shortcuts can be emailed and exported like any other standard report.
• Deleting a Shortcut will remove that report from any scheduled emails, as with deleting a custom report.
• Shortcuts apply at the profile level, like the rest of reports in Google Analytic.

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Google Closing Feedburner?

Google continues to make acquisitions and further continues to make changes to its services and then sometimes it also decides to retire a few of its services. This time its the FeedBurner! No official announcement yet but to what you and we see and read it seems it will be pretty soon.

The Google Adsense for Feeds blog has announced that its closed. The last post, by Emily Wood from the Google blog team, around end of July this year said "we recognize that we're just not generating enough content here to warrant your time, so we won't be posting here any longer. Thanks again for being an enthusiastic FeedBurner user". So is the case with their Twitter account. And, the already deprecated FeedBurner API is due to be closed October this year.

If anything to go by the closing and deprecation of the accounts and services associated with FeedBurner, it seems like clear indications of the RSS service from search giant being done away with and (may be) for good, considering their expansion and not so great deal coming out of this service. But if that is the case its going to be a shocker for quite a few people (including us) who use their service to serve the new blog posts to hundreds and thousands of the subscribers. Or there may be a case of Google integrating the service somewhere in to another of its products, going by the nature of integrations that the search giant is on for past few months since the introduction of its social network since September last year. Which ever way it may be, the search giant hasn't opened up on which way the tide may turn. We keep an eye on it for sure!

Dan Thornton of 'The Way Of The Web.Net' discusses on the alternatives of FeedBurner here. Turn to his post if you are like us who may be wondering what to next? There is also Jim Connolly from 'Jim's Marketing Blog' who discusses about the alternative that he chose, MailChimp. You may read his post here. And if you want to read what the father of RSS, Dave Winer, has to say and suggest on the status of FeedBurner, head over here.

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Biking Navigation in Google Maps Gets Half a Gig Meter Boost

If you are a rider who loves to jump on the bike and get ready for a trip, chances are you either already know the route or already tucked a paper map in your back pack. If that's event partly true, you are in for a good surprise or rather a gift from Google' Android team. Its time you forget the paper maps and not worry about getting lost on a trip to an unknown path. Its time you pull out your android device and plant it right in front of you on the bike. Your android device is turning itself to your route guide now as Google Maps for Android pushes out an update to the app that is supposed to add around half a giga meter of biking navigation and that too in 12 countries.

Google announced on Thursday that they are "bringing mobile biking directions and navigation" in the 10 countries that already had the option for desktop biking directions. These countries include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

Apart from this the Google Maps Navigation (beta) gets a turn by turn voice guided biking navigation in all the countries that already have biking navigation. "Mount your device on your handlebars to see the turn-by-turn directions and navigation, or use speaker-mode to hear voice-guided directions" is what Larry Powelson(Software Engineer, Google Maps) posted on official Google blog. It was a couple of years back when Google added biking directions to Google maps in US and Canada. With this update there is now around 530K KMs of green biking lines in Google Maps.

Here is how the bike route reads:

• dark green lines on the map show dedicated bike trails and paths with no motor vehicles
• light green lines show streets with bike lanes
• dashed green lines show other streets recommended for cycling

So the next time you plan some time out with your bike, don't forget your android device and do share with us how it went !

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