Category Archives: Applications

Connected to keep track of contacts and conversations

Effortless personal contact management has been the promise of countless web services for years — Etacts, Gist and Plaxo come to mind — and yet most of us still manually manage our disparate contact databases and address books, which is almost always a messy process.

Perhaps Connected can get us back on track. “The main goal of the product is to help you build, maintain and leverage your relationships,” says founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi.

The web- and mobile-friendly application hooks into nearly every social network, contact database and calendar repository on the web to automatically build out a comprehensive contact and company database, free of duplicate entries.

In Connected’s perspective, your contact database includes everyone you email via Gmail or Outlook, the people you’ve scheduled meetings with via Google Calendar, and the folks you call and text via Google Voice. It also extends to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Evernote and so forth, connecting the dots between communications — email, Twitter DMs, @mentions, Facebook messages, contacts tagged in Evernote notes et al. — across all these services to build a real-time conversation history for each contact.

Connected’s higher calling is to eliminate the manual contact entry that other services mandate and to help you better mange your professional network without the management.

“Really good sales people spend a lot of time managing and building their professional networks,” says Rekhi. “Connected is a next generation contact management solution that helps the rest of us be much more efficient.”

Even with its most basic features, Connected seems sexy; but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what the app can do. Connected will email you each morning, for instance, with a daily agenda that not only includes your appointments but any relevant social and/or news items on your contacts or their companies.

Connected comes with a rather substantial (at least for personal use) monthly financial commitment. You can access the produce free of charge for a 14 day trial period, but afterwards you’ll need to pay $9.99 per month to maintain access.

iPad 2 achieves invisibility

http://www.techhim.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/invisible-man.jpg

Levity Novelty LLC has today released an iPad app that provides simulated invisibility of the iPad 2 screen on a table or other environment, even as the device is moved. The Invisibility™ app is available in Apple’s online App Store for US$0.99.

The Invisibility user simply takes a photo of the table, then lays the iPad flat on the table or lifts one corner. As the user rotates the iPad around its center, or a corner, a perfectly stationary image of the table underneath remains clearly visible.

By all appearances, the screen has disappeared and the user is looking through the iPad as it moves. Users can even see the inside edge of the iPad through the screen, as well as shadows seemingly cast on the table by the empty iPad frame.

Dream of Invisibility Achieved
From the Arabian Nights to the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter’s cloak, storytellers have dreamed of invisibility. Magicians use mirrors and sleight of hand to astonish audiences and make objects disappear. While the Invisibility iPad app can’t yet be adapted to the size and flexibility of a garment or cloak, its core method – combining cameras, motion tracking software, and a large display – can some day be combined to make a greater range of objects disappear.

Read more at the original website

Microsoft office 365 to launch soon

Microsoft spokespeople have been coy about when the Office 365 cloud service will launch, saying only that it will come out later in 2011. But CEO Steve Ballmer has revealed that it will launch in June.

Speaking in Delhi, India, to an industry group last week, Ballmer said, “We’re pushing hard in the productivity space. We’ll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June.”

Ballmer also recently announced that Windows 8 will be released in 2012.

We’re checking with Microsoft’s public relations firm to see if June is the official launch date for Office 365.

The cloud service will replace the current Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and include access to Exchange, SharePoint, the Lync unified communications suite, and both desktop and Web-based versions of Office tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office 365 beta has attracted more than 100,000 customers, and was recently expanded to become a public beta available to anyone.

In April, Microsoft would only say that Office 365 will launch later this year, but a midyear launch would make sense given the competition Microsoft is facing from Google Apps.

Angry Birds for free on Chrome app store

Bosses beware! Gaming sensation Angry Birds is now available on the Web browser. This could very well mean that employees, who till now played solitaire or switched tabs to move to other gaming sites at work, now have a killer of a game to kill their time with.

The game featuring birds destroying the pigs who stole their eggs, with the help of a slingshot is addictive and has been, according to the developer, Rovio Mobile, downloaded over 140 million times.

When Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man game with an interactive doodle, that allowed users to play Pac-Man right on the Google home page led to, according to analysts, a loss of $120 million to the British economy. Wonder the damage Angry Birds can do?

Angry Birds attack the Web, work hours at stake

At the Google I/O developer conference Rovio Mobile announced the web version of Angry Birds which is now available on Google’s Chrome Web Store. But that doesn’t prevent users on other browsers from enjoying the Angry Birds experience. We have tested the game on Mozilla Firefox 4, Opera 11 and on Internet Explorer 9. While it plays smooth on Firefox and Opera, it’s buggy on Internet Explorer. The game can be played in two formats, standard definition and high definition.

The Chrome app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has an average 4.7 star rating.

The Chrome version of the game is a beta release and includes 63 levels out of the 120 in the original game and an additional seven special Chrome levels. But not everything is going right with the release. “Those nasty pigs don’t want you to proceed past Level 1-20. We are flying fast and are working on the fix,” says the description on the Angry Birds page on the Chrome Web Store.

While the mobile phone is the hot platform for game developers, but the Web is still thriving as a platform for gaming and this appearance of a popular game from an app to Web avatar further establishes the fact.

The Web version of the Angry Birds game is available at chrome.angrybirds.com

Via IBN Live

Beam Music, Movies, Photos from iPad to Mac With AirServer

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2011/05/AirServer.jpeg

AirServer is a Mac app that turns your computer into a receiver for AirPlay. We have seen this kind of thing before, in the shape of Banana TV, but AirServer works better, and adds in some functionality not found in Banana TV.

AirPlay is what lets you throw content from an iPad or iPhone wirelessly to speakers or your TV. To do this, you need to have an AirPort Express next to your speakers, or an Apple TV hooked up to your TV. Bluetooth speakers show up in the list, too. What you can’t do is beam movies from your iOS device direct to your big-screen iMac.

AirServer is a $3 app that adds in this last piece of the puzzle. With it running on your Mac, a new entry will show up in the AirPlay popover of any iOS device on the same network, as you’d expect.

Music just appears magically from your Mac’s speakers, or whatever speakers are hooked up to it. Movies open after a second in the Quicktime player, and it’s on-screen controls let you play, pause, scrub and change volume on the Mac itself.

Both of these (usually) work just fine in Banana TV (although that app can also use its own video viewer). The difference is with photos. With AirServer, you can not only view individual photos, but you can also run a slideshow. Pick your album in the Photos app, choose slideshow and a popover will pop, erm, over to let you choose a destination. You need to select a photo in that album to see the popover, and the promised transition is replaced by one photo simply appearing to replace another, but it works.

via Wired