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Twitter bought TweetDeck a couple of weeks back for a hefty $50 million (figure is based on reports and has not been confirmed by Twitter or Tweetdeck). This is an interesting development, especially as Twitter is almost completely against third-party clients that replicate the core functionality of what Twitter does in it’s official family of apps.
Both TweetDeck and Twitter have native applications for Macs, with TweetDeck having one for PC too. You can find both apps on your smartphone too, whether it be Android or iOS. However, they both compete for web app love since Twitter has it’s official website, and TweetDeck has it’s Chrome web app. Today, we’re going to compare the two and see whether, from a web app-only perspective, the deal is worth it for the web apps. (more…)
Apple took the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone West for their opening keynote at WWDC this afternoon, announcing (or rather, reasoning in the first case) Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and their new service, iCloud.
iCloud is the successor to MobileMe, Apple’s previous set of web apps that synced directly with other devices, whether they be powered by Mac OS X, Windows or iOS. However, iCloud builds on those, providing a much more refined syncing environment for your devices in terms of both data and media. (more…)
The traditional method of writing and drawing has always been pen and paper, but as the rate of technology in the workplace develops, we’ve moved to typing on a keyboard and clicking on a mouse. It’s not so much that people prefer the taps of a keyboard (even if it’s a very nice keyboard) or the clicks of a mouse (even if it’s a very nice mouse), but rather because the efficiency of using a computer to write has become superior. However, there’s one device that is building the bridge between the two different worlds.
The Livescribe Smartpen is an interesting device. You make notes with it and then pen will record your process as well as any audio, should you choose it to. This can then be synced with your computer, or shared with a bunch of services and web apps like Evernote, Google Docs and Facebook. It’s not exactly focused on writing, but more on general note-taking making it a great companion to educational and business use.
We’re used to privacy and security scandals in this day and age. Sony, of course, recently leaked millions of users’ data (including credit card details) from their PlayStation Network just after Apple and Google were accused of tracking their users’ location. In recent years, we’ve come to expect that our data might get leaked at sometime in our online career. The latest revelation, however, comes from Chrome – and it’s accompanying web application store.
The Chrome Web Store was silently purged of two applications recently, both flash-based Super Mario games that were reported to have access to your browsing history, bookmarks and other website data. (more…)
Angry Birds is quite literally, a phenomenon. It’s strange how many people have shed countless hours of their time by flinging angered birds at virtual pigs protected by structures of varying size and type. The Rovio Mobile studio, developers of the popular game, started with humble beginnings in 2003 as Relude, being renamed in 2005 as Rovio. In December of 2009, less than a year-and-a-half ago, they launched Angry Birds and I don’t think they at all expected it to become this big.
Angry Birds was originally launched on Apple’s platform, the iPhone, from launch and was later joined by Android, webOS and Symbian in 2011. It made the jump to mainstream traditional computers in 2011 with the launch of the Mac App Store and the Intel App Up store for Windows.
With Google’s impending launch of their Chromebooks and the continuing success of Chrome, Rovio Mobile’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka took the stage at Google I/O this year to announce Angry Birds coming as a web application. Although it is available primarily through the Chrome Web Store, anyone can point their browsers to chrome.angrybirds.com to launch the same web app.
Traditional hard drives have their advantages. With a traditional hard drive, you own it and it’s your responsibility to maintain it. If you loose it or it falls into the wrong hands, that’s it. However, that also means that you have a much lower risk of your data being passed on or being compromised virtually. The cloud offers it’s own advantages too. You can access your data anywhere and the recent announcements of the retail launch of Google’s Chromebooks are just a testament to this. You can login to any Chromebook and instantly have your data available.
Dropbox is perhaps the biggest and most popular web app for data storage in the cloud, however, it’s recently been facing some security issues for it’s users. In a letter to the FTC, University of Indiana research Christopher Soghoian claimed that while Dropbox encrypted their files, the policy could be reversed by employees, reports PC World. It’s Soghoian’s view that Dropbox have been deceiving in the level of encryption offered.
The internet may have come a long way over all these years, but making money from the internet hasn’t. Advertisements still constitute a lion’s share of revenue for a lot of Internet businesses, primarily those engaged in the content and freemium verticals.
It’s easy to pick on Google for slapping ads left, right and center based on our search and browsing habits. But if it wasn’t for Google there may have been no contextual ads. At least now we usually see only those ads that might actually be useful based on the keyword we are searching for, or the content we are reading.
Google has recently announced that it plans to roll out ads in Gmail that are more in line with your tastes and interests. Unlike lot of other companies, they are placing notifications prominently in our inboxes and after the jump, let us take a look at the pros and cons of their latest announcement.
Google hasn’t been on the kind of slippery slope it has been in the past few months. A loud and wide spread condemnation of their poor search results has been resonating loud and clear in the blogosphere like never before. There are way too many spammy results when you perform a Google Search and it’s also evident that Google is hardly doing anything to make it better, primarily due to the fear of losing AdWords revenue — their lifeline.
With the advent of curated search engines like Blekko and the rising influence of Facebook and Twitter, Google is in a rather uncomfortable spot. Google is now trying to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. One recent attempt at achieving that goal is Google +1.
Like most companies, Google regularly communicates with their business customers via email newsletters, updates on their official blogs, and printed materials. For a change, they’ve decided to publish a short book about data, called Think Quarterly, to a small number of their UK partners and advertisers.
To learn more about the latest experiment by Google and how it can be of use to us – the consumers – do read on.
It’s true; a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s the reason there are so many screenshots in AppStorm articles AppStorm and across the Tuts+ network. To keep your audience engaged, your presentation has to be visually appealing. Once you grab the audience with a striking visual, you can connect with them on an emotional level.
These days I get questions from people who want to move from Microsoft PowerPoint just because it doesn’t do justice to the content on their slides. One of my recommendations to them is SlideRocket. Today SlideRocket has introduced a few new tools to its already well stacked visual arsenal.
