Thursday, December 2, 2010

Awesome iPhone APPs for this Festival Season

Wonderful App for NEW YEAR!


Send Beautifully Animated Cards to your loved ones on X'MAS!

Holidays are just around the corner! … and so are some really cool iPhone APPs, to celebrate it with

In this fast and evolving era of Science and Technology, modern day man finds it really difficult to spare some leisure time for himself or his family or even his friends, for that matter. No one can be blamed for this, because people need to find means to adopt themselves to the modern lifestyle. Being unemployed don’t help at all, being employed in a firm would help and being employed in more than one firm should definitely help… In the past, people find time atleast for the holidays at Christmas and New Year to spend quality time with their family and friends. Now its tough.

E-Cards to the rescue:

With the increase of the availability of free e-cards online, the sales of traditional cards have declined. Sending an e-card can be a best way to greet someone because they offer many features. It’s fast, has numerous options, saves lots of trees (NO PAPER!) and most importantly its FREE.

Did you hear about the NORTH POLE and the NEW YEAR EXPRESSES?

Modern day e-cards are mainly developed using a technology called Flash. It’s wide range of features helps in creating wonderfully animated cards. But we have a PROBLEM! Apple, one of the world’s leading technology companies, is against it. I don’t blame them; yeah Flash eats up your bandwidth and your battery, which is bad, really bad for mobile devices. Well, if I have to charge by mobile every hour, then there ain’t a point in saying that it’s ‘MOBILE’, right?

Well, you don’t have to worry… People in the Silicon Valley has found a solution for not using Flash, yet creating beautifully animated cards that work for the iPHONE.

Yeah, that’s right, now you can send Beautifully Animated and Hand Crafted Cards to your loved ones, family, colleagues etc.., FROM YOUR IPHONE!

To know the details visit: NORTH POLE EXPRESS or NEW YEAR EXPRESS

Well, thanks to the guys at TouchWeb, we can know celebrate this festival season by letting our loved ones know how much we care and remember them.

Happy Holidays everyone and do try the APP out.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The StartUp An Employee’s Passion or Nightmare

The StartUp – An Employee’s Passion or Nightmare

There is one thing that is a sure bet for employees that join a startup. In employment and non-employment related discussions with friends and family members, they will hear the dreary and almost ear numbing warning, that STARTUPS ARE RISKY.

Money and a high class lifestyle is what most people dream of, while looking for a job. Status and reputation in the economy is what employees struggle to achieve. So, is RISK out of the question? Yeah, obviously for almost everyone, risk is what they are not willing to take. They ask themselves, would Risk bring me Money and Reputation? N

o! is the overwhelming answer they get.

How would I get money if I join a startup and it suddenly closes? Is my job secure? My colleagues earn almost double of what I get in a Startup and they don’t even have to go through half of the struggle and pain that I endure. Would a startup add up to my reputation among others, or would Google, Yahoo, IBM or Microsoft give me a better image? And Oh, I am gonna get married, so, wouldn’t I get a better proposal if I have a safe and non-risky job at a major MNC? The answers to all these questions inside your mind leads to one simple answer DON’T JOIN A STARTUP. Simple as ever, right?

Well, there is a small group among the common man though, who most people initially think are arrogant with a "bring it on" bravado. I would say that they are people who think beyond what a normal person thinks. They are tired of corporate jobs and just wanna get away from cubicle lives that seem too confining and boring. Are you one of them?

Well, I don’t blame people who have got talent but are from developing countries like mine, India, for instance. Parents who dream of getting their child well educated and reach pinnacles that they could only dream of during their lifetime, tend to somehow spend money so tha

t their kids can afford to go to expensive institutions and universities. By the time the highly expensive education is over, their pockets have dried up. Okay, so now we need to find you a job as soon as possible, and that too a good job in a reputed MNC, because I don’t want my neighbors and relatives booing me behind my back. These are the messages that parents start conveying into the minds of their just-out-of-college kids. What are the kids supposed to do? They look for a highly lucrative, safe, non-risky, 9 to 6 behind the desk jobs. Do they really want that? I don’t know you have to answer that question.

“Awakening Your Inner Creativity”, oh yeah, everyone has a little inside themselves, but doesn’t realize it, or should I say they do not want to realize it purposefully. Oh, what can I do, I am just a normal person. There are lots of brilliant guys out there and I don’t want to be a fool among them. Thoughts keep raveling in everyone’s mind.

When will you stand up for yourself? When will you listen to your gut instinct? When will you try something new and different? What you should have is a vision for your ideal personal and professional life. Instead of focusing on what you couldn’t do to make it happen, focus on what you can do. You may get knocked down, discouraged, and even doubt your own san

ity at times (many times), but that’s natural. At the end of the day…It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count; it’s how many times you get up that matter.

So what does all this really mean? Does passion pay? I say YES. Our passions might not always pay dividends to our bank accounts, but they will always pay dividends to our heart and soul. People who stood up no matter what the world said, Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Inc), people who thought out of the box, Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook), people who knew that life is about taking risks, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Founders of Google and people of who believed life and work is about passion, Jack Dorsey (Founder of Twitter), never thought that they would get recognized, famous and rich as they are now, but they stood for one thing and one thing only, what does their heart say.

When you feel stuck you have to give your creativity a metaphorical shake of the shoulders. It is important to stop and replenish your stores of creativity. And you’ll do that by expanding your view, not by narrowing your focus. Then will you be able to jump back in. As Bob Parson, the Founder of GoDaddy said, “when you think you are ready to quit, just know that you are closer to success than you think”.

You may not find immediate results while pursing your dreams, may be you wouldn’t be respected or recognized for what you do, but one day all your life’s efforts will pay off. May be you would have to wait for a lifetime to see the end-results, but atleast I would say that you can lie peacefully in your bed, even if it is the last day you would see of this world, and know inside that you have left your footprints in history.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Be careful, while being online!

In this new age of Social Networking, most people have a very robust online social life, while their offline lives are gloomy. People just accept friend requests, email invitations, online community invites etc..., without having a clue of what and whom they are dealing with. This is how many people have been molested, defrauded, and even killed by people they meet on the internet.

Do you keep your sensitive personal information, private?
Do you have a clue about the privacy policies and settings?
Do you approach email links/invites, regardless of what they are?

Careless usage, could lead to outbreaks that can damage computer systems and might even steal sensitive information from your home/company.

Last week, I overheard one of my colleagues at office bragging about having 2000 friends on FaceBook. What? He hardly talks to anyone in the office and believe me NO ONE LIKES HIM AT ALL!

How many of us are careful while we are online? How many of us are careful with the friends we choose, or rather should I say, with what we share with unknown friends?

People ought to be careful while updating their whereabouts on their social networking sites, especially when they hardly know most of the friends that they have on these social networks. The danger is publicly telling others (who you don’t know) where you are.

Be cautious when you receive links in messages from your friends (especially when you don’t know who the friend is) on your social networking sites.

Be particularly cautious when you accept a person as a friend on a social network. Thieves and spammers with fake identity would lure you into traps and snatch away vital information. This is also called social engineering.

Following are certain tips that people ought to follow while dealing with Social Networks:
http://bit.ly/10BQF8
http://bit.ly/abmVo

Carelessly posting jokes, insults, or even pictures on social networks, could cost you your JOB.

View the video below to know the truth about employers and how they secretly track your social network behaviorism:
http://youtu.be/eRaG9A9syHI

So be careful and stay safe.....

Monday, March 8, 2010

Newspaper and the Internet



Fact: Finally, after centuries of cutting down forests to make newspapers, we can see the end of road for the newspaper. Will it be able to evolve? Or will it die the way of the typewriter? They need to find new revenue and more creative ways to engage their subscribers.

It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are hurting for revenue. Why would someone be willing to receive for fee, when you can download it 5-8 hours earlier online for free? What can be done to place a tourniquet on the financial and subscription bleeding and hemorrhaging money the way they currently suffer from?

What’s missing? Newspaper executives are missing out on a huge opportunity to use their print operations as a supplemental piece to their online edition. Just think of the printed newspaper as a re-cap of the day's hottest topics and most relevant issues. The possibilities are infinite; the online news model is a source for user-generated content and feedback, which builds on the social networking aspect.

News travels faster over the Internet than print media. It has no constraints or boundaries and travels around the world in a few seconds. Newspapers have to start taking advantage of the vast opportunities that are out there in the world of Internet.

Newspaper and the Internet: What the newspaper industry has to be doing is to adopt ways that could help them improvise in the digital era. Some of the potential ways are:

1) Enhance social networking features- Building a huge network of friends, sharing news amongst themselves, commenting and raising debates on topics or current affairs etc… would really drive users to be more interested in News online rather than news on paper.

2) Customize news – Letting a user decide what he/she would see in their own news dashboard, with the options of customizing them further would potentially increase the flow of users towards online news.

3) Easy to use, best designed, yet powerful platforms – A easy to use and well designed platform would generate a positive feeling in the minds of users and would urge them to take a second look at news that’s available online.

4) Interactive features, maps, graphics, slideshows, audio slides, video interfaces etc… would help newspapers achieve a greater feeling in the minds of their online readers or visitors.

If the newspaper industry is willing to spend their time and money or conducting researches on how they would enhance their presence over the internet, they would be well off and away from extinction.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Today State of Newspapers

In the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart. Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet.

Circulation has been falling in America, Western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes Rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.