Apple releases iBooks Author

Apple ‘s new declaration about the new iBooks Author tool is expected to be one of the best technical design by the Cupertino based technology major. The tool is prescribed as a boon for the academicians and teachers who are interested in making quick iBooks mixing all the other types of media in one single iBook. And the apps is provided absolutely free, of now.

As ebook making is a cumbersome process involving the mixture and amalgamation of various technologies. According to the some experts by adding and inducing interactivity to books which Amazon and other competitors can hardly match. Apple has made a move to challenge Amazon.  With capacity to produce various types of content for broader devices, Adobe’s software can cost thousands of dollars, while Apple’s iBooks Author app is free.

The other interesting facet of the new iBook is that it works accordingly with different type of programs which need to type and edit text and other media. But Apple has restricted its commercial distribution explaining the clause as, “If your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.”

 

Online Ad spending in US would pass print in 2012

US online advertising expenditure is about to surpass total advertising spending in print newspapers and magazines according to the estimations of various research organizations.  eMarketer has come up with a report, that online advertising spending will grow by 23.3 percent to 39.5 billion dollars in 2012, while print advertising spending would   33.8 billion dollars this year from 36 billion of previous year’s estimation.

“Advertisers" comfort level with integrated marketing has reached to new levels than ever before. More and more of bigger brands are putting stake on dollars online.  The company showcased that that online ad spending has rose to 23 percent to 32.03 billion dollars last year while total ad spending rose 3.4 percent to 158.9 billion dollars. Overall, total media ad spending in the US may grow at an estimated rate of 6.7 percent to 169.48 billion dollars this year, on account of upcoming presidential elections and London Olympics.

The anti-piracy bill on hold by the US Congress

US lawmakers, finally, after unexpected online protest by online companies have finally decided to postpone the scheduled January 24 bill in the US Congress. Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, followed suit, said that they can move further on after a wider and contentious agreement on the bill.

The bills learnt to be as PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) in the Senate and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House, are aimed at curbing access to overseas websites that deals in pirated content and counterfeit products, like as movies and music. The legislation has been on the higher agenda for the entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical companies and other industry groups who alleged online piracy causing them loss of billions of dollars in a year. However, technology companies are opposing it as an attack on internet freedom as it would increase activities of frivolous lawsuits against them. The public sentiment also diverted towards online companies when big internet companies lobbied against the bill.

On Wednesday, protests turned off the entire internet when Wikipedia and other popular websites went into dark for 24 hours. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others protested but also remained online for a while. The protest has the immense support as many sponsors of the legislation comprising senators Roy Blunt, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, John Boozman and Marco Rubio, had to withdraw the support. The indefinite with drawl received the appraisal from the internet community and anger from Hollywood.
Lawmakers, technology companies and the entertainment industry do also expressed their solidarity to fight against the online piracy and copyright infringement. Reddit.com, leading the protest said it is happy that things have been slowed down, yet the problem of piracy needs to be addressed and reach at a conclusion

HTC Explorer

The HTC Explorer is a phone with a simple attractive interface in affordable price range. With a compact body the cell phone only has a 3.2 inch display. It is not suitable for Heavy browsing but activities like twittering, etc can easily be carried out on it. It has 600 MHz processor, that is quite fine for messaging and networking games. Running on Android 2.3 Gignerbread has easily used buttons for the central screen to accomplish all the imperative and necessary tasks.

It weighs around 108 grams. The rear of the phone has a rubber casing with a strip of metal down the middle, but is does not provide much shock resistance to the phone. The rubber provides some extra grip. The rubber casing on the back is nice. On the around edge there is a suitable positioning for a power button and a volume rocker. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack and a micro-USB port for charging or for connecting the phone to a computer. The phone has a 512MB of internal storage and only 116MB of that is usable. MicroSD card provide advantages to take benefit to take photos or download apps.

Its 3.2-inch screen has a 320x480-pixel resolution, which is quite poor. HTC Explorer Screen has not a great resolution. The screen is quite bright and handles colors rather effectively.  As an Android device, there are good number of thousand apps on Android market to make use of. It is easy on the phone to create an account with the existing Gmail address. The phone is appropriately made for social networking keeping the core objective into the mind. One can be promptly added to the friends detail on the phone.

HTC Explorer Facebook automatically adds with the calendar and provides all the recent updates. At the back of the explorer is a 3-megapixel camera. The phone is easy-to-use without any fancy gimmick.

Self-healing iPhone cases to arrive soon

Car manufacturer major Nissan has announced the world’s first self-healing iPhone case, that are known as to repair itself when is scratched. The company has made this phone case in collaboration and in assistance with the University of Tokyo and Advanced Softmaterials Inc, the self-healing paint as Scratch Shield. The shield initially developed for the Nissan and Infiniti car, however, is also extensively used in the smartphone industry as well.

This paint is prepared from polyrotaxane, as the any change to the chemical coating would be filled back by to its original shape and fills the gap. Nissan though has not explained how far it can or the blemishes can heal but is confident about the scratches and blemishes surely to be filled up. After the passing of the prototype text, the case would go into production from later this year. The case is initially for the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Facebook has come up with new set of applications

Facebook has created a new set of application for its massive pool of users and profile holders.  With new featured apps a user would able to post slightest of details like from photos or what they cooked for dinner and other their personal tastes and interests. Facebook has launched a new set of about 60 new applications which allows user to share tiniest details of their personality on facebook profile.

A user on facebook is already provided with utilities like sharing music and listening to applications as spotify or other articles which they has to read through Yahoo News and other services. The news apps by the Social media giant cover a wide range of areas including food, fashion, travel and reading. Some of the latest apps Ticketmaster are   Rotten Tomatoes and Pinterest the web.

Protests against SOPA/PIPA spreading like a wild fire

The important and major websites are on strike in coming days against the draconian laws placed before US Congress that provides immense power to giant media house to enjoy the power to blacklist and disconnect any website on the charges of accused of copying and picking content from the other related website.

Wikipedia is going offline for 24 hrs to protest law same is the status of Google, Amazon, Facebook which are protesting to stop SOPA facilitating copyright infringement. These bills are learnt as SOPA (the “Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (the “Protect Intellectual Property/IP Act”).

The major websites in the wake to register protest against these bills are going on strike on tomorrow while replacing their homepages with a call to action SOPA and PIPA.  Reddit started it from the day of action last week, and it has spiraling very fast and with pace and Wikipedia has also joined the rage to keep the fire burning.  Dozens more companies, nonprofits, and services have expressed their desire to join the expressed either going offline completely or partially. WordPress, The Internet Archive, Diaspora*, and Identi.ca are among the top companies to join the protest.

The sites still remaining online are post alerts or notices for their users to post alert and notices for their uses. Craigslist has already put a major alert on its particular metro hubs. Google also joining the protest as its putting a link to an anti-SOPA page on google.com may be below the search box in order to receive the millions of clicks. Amazon and Microsoft have also their intention of being against the SOPA and PIPA.

Samsung Galaxy Note

Samsung seems to have arrived with a desire to bring revolution in the 5-inch tablet segment with their new release Galaxy Note. Samsung has described as a large smart phone instead of small tablet.
The Galaxy Note is big is size, it can be termed as the stretched and bigger form of the Galaxy S II. From its features it is aptly credited as a phone instead of a smart phone. Despite its large size, the phone is comfortably thin and light in weight. The entire phone is made is of plastic except for its display. The Galaxy Note has the power button on the right and a volume rocker on the left. All the buttons are on the phone are exactly at the top.

At the back side of the phone there is an 8 mp camera with LED flash and a loudspeaker near the bottom. The battery cover on the Galaxy Note is seems to   thinnest ever observed on any device. Below the cover is the massive 2,500mAh battery.  The display on the Galaxy Note is its biggest feature and USP. It is a huge   5.3-inch, Super AMOLED display. The Galaxy Note is the first smartphone to have an HD display. That’s 1280 x 800 pixels in the palm of your hands. It is made of PenTile matrix layout for the subpixel. The big size of the display makes it advantageous with respect to the features like as video playback and web browsing.

Galaxy note has a dual core 1.4GHz Cortex A9 with the same Mali-400 GPU and 1GB of RAM. For the storage it has 2GB phone memory, 16GB USB storage (of which 11GB is available to the user) and microSD expansion up to 32GB. There are other additions like an FM radio, voice recorder, and stop watch and countdown timer. Video playback is one of the things this phone ought to be purchased. Finally, it has a battery charge up of 24 hours.

Huawei Media Pad tablet

Huawei's MediaPad is a 7 inch tablet that can catch anyone’s attention immediately, made of uniform metal construction, excellent fit and build quality it is a great tablet to all surfing and watching movies. At its back there is situated an adjustable removable triangular panel which hides SIM and microsSD card.

The screen display of Huawei Media Pad tablet has a resolution of 1289x 800 pixels. The tablet runs on Andorid 3.2 OS on a dual core 1.2 Ghz processor with 1 GB RAM with 8GB storage expandable microSD card. In the device Android 3.2 is fitted appropriately accordingly due to its proven capacity for the smaller devices. On performance it is suitable for navigation, running apps, multimedia and gaming. It is quite excellent for the multimedia playback, its MediaPad is fantastic. The tablet supports the most common and popular video formats and plays HD movies without a pause.

Its sound is too loud because of dual speakers. Both the speakers are located at the same side of the tablet. At its backside there is located a 5mega pixel autofocus camera that enjoys an average quality images in daylight. Video recording can also be carried out in this in 720p HD resolution by both front and rear cameras but they make excessive noise. Along with wi-fi connectivity and mixed use of apps and multimedia, the MediaPad can easily ensure a 5 hour battery backup. At present, the MediaPad is the only 7-inch Wi-Fi + 3G tablet running Android 3.2 tablet in India. It comes on an easy price range of Rs 22,000.

 

IBM researchers developed 12-atom magnetic memory bit

The researchers achieved this feat by the use of scanning tunneling microscope. In the process a bit of image was stored in 12 atoms. At present it took about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard disk. According to IBM this is the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit. This can bring a new revolution in the field of making the denser forms of magnetic strip and computer memory for hard disks and solid state memory chips.

The research also found that below 12 atoms the bit used to lost information. A bit can have a value of 0 or 1 and is the most basic form of information in computation. The magnetic fields of bits developed from traditional ferromagnetic materials can make an impact over neighboring bits if they are placed too densely with each other. However, the process from the lab to production would take some time.

   

How to behave on Facebook, Twitter

The way to socializing has been changed to a greater extent with technological innovation and inference of social media as a mean to communicate with each other. The present day life is much entangled around World Wide Web, a good number of emails, social networks, discussion forums, instant messages and many other modern means of communications.    
   
Like some code of etiquettes in normal there are certain methods to behave on Facebook and Twitter as well. Internet etiquettes or 'netiquettes' are generally they are referred in cyber world, help to get a better perspective of online behavior and communication. There are certain rules to follow in order to behave properly on social media sites.

•    Typing anything in capital letters online is meant as way to shouting or yelling. Avoid using capital letters unless you feel it to be very necessary. If you have posted something in capital letter then explain and delete.  

•    Emoticons or smileys are a fun way to express yourself on social media sites, however employing too much of emoticon in single post can irritate others.   As a rule, for a small post never put more than two emoticons in a single sentence. Avoid using them in email conversations.

•    Make use of Acronyms only in an instant message or chat. However explain the meaning of them, if someone seeks for their explanation.  There use in an e-mail is as rude and crude.  


•    And there is no need to say that the correct spelling, grammar and punctuation is also necessary on a social media site like any other publishing media.

 

How to make a good sale on social media

The social media now in its true sense has become viral for people. Now people have become more accustomed with social media and the social behavior represented by it. After having the good understanding of social media in 2012, it would be used by people as popular mean to do business and communicate with target market and consumers.

To enter into and exploit the band wagon of social media, smart marketers are testing, tweaking and experimenting with lots of things on social media. They are extensively testing with like and trust, the best way to sell anything on social media. It is path full of patience and concentration, but once the way is clear you can move ahead to sell anything in the environment and atmosphere of social media.
But selling approach on social media is bit different from the conventional selling. The old method can only work in way when advertising efforts are based on stumbling.    But there are many innovative ways to sale on social media that can break jargon of old and rudimentary method of social media.

•    Start with modifying your messages. The 140 character message should be something like that people may reply back instead of clicking, which people

•    The next important method to social media marketing is targeted messages. The message should be targeting to the specific market instead of entire Facebook or Twitter.

•    It is just impossible to buy a product merely by writing a simpler tweet. It does not contain enough information to develop trust. First of all provide the valuable piece of content to a user. Provide your prospect with piece of information that he is looking for. Provide something free that is far better from the most one’s paid stuff.

•    After this it is time to get engaged with your customer. Ask your prospect along providing information for to share there views, rate things and to help them to make the entire world a better place to live. Make a feedback form and socialize it. Make it simpler to be email, tweet and like.  And in the end ask for the order.

After this much effort, finally convert your lead into a sale.

  

   

iPhone SJ: The next great version of iPad by Steve Jobs

The news is quite popular and common in cyber zone about the next generation iPad. Though there is not any concrete information about it in the market yet. There is some abstract talk about the device. Designer Antonio De Rosa has developed an iPhone SJ mockup as inspired by Steve Jobs. This design suggest iPhone JS to be attractive and catchy for others. It is likely that next version of iPhone may have a new quad-core processor and a 10-megapixel camera.

Facebook, Google may go under prosecution in India

The government on India on 13th January 2011 sanctioned the prosecution of 21 social networking sites including Facebook and Google for carrying alleged to be based on communal ground. The government blamed the social media sites for promoting hatred between communities. A Delhi metropolitan magistrate’s in the capital city of India directed the ministry of external affairs to get summonses served on the companies, primarily 10 overseas web companies. The Delhi court refused to stay criminal proceedings against the websites and warned that they could in a similar manner they are prohibited in China.

“The sanctioning authority has gone through the materials produced before him and after considering and examining the same, he is satisfied there is sufficient material to proceed against the accused persons,” the Centre said in its report to metropolitan magistrate Sudesh Kumar.

Netflix video streaming, a perspective and a review

Netflix's streaming-video with around 20 million subscribers has emerged as a sort of digital TV network. It is emerging as potential contender to HBO.  Navigating Netflix is a big advantage in itself. Its DVD library is quite extensive and its streaming video provides the patchwork of high-profile new additions, familiar favorites and stray oddities. It is in negotiating with different movie studios and channels. It is also focusing of original programming as well.

Some of the popular programs that are streamlined are “House of Cards," produced by David Fincher, and an episodic return for the cult comedy "Arrested Development" to before the theatrical movie. Since its beginning in 2007, Netflix has changed itself to a greater extant.  As a new offering to the viewers it is providing the first three seasons of Breaking Bad, the first season of Downton Abby, all five seasons of Friday Night Lights and the first four seasons of Mad Men. Recently in the last three months of 2011 the Netflix viewers saw around 2 billion hours of movies and TV shows.

Most of the 2011’s best documentaries have been streamed on Netflix. The king of Brazilian Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, "Senna," is now available on Netflix. Netflix also has given birth to the culture of cult comedy. For serous activities Netflix has collection of a mixture of movies like Naked City, Kansas City Confidential, Scarlet Street, The Big Combo and Detour. Netflix is success is credited largely due to its huge collection of movies and soap operas.
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HTC Radar with WP 7.5 Mango OS

The Radar is HTC's mid-range category phone and it is provided with Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) operating system.  The Radar has a 3.8in 480x800-pixel S-LCD display screen. With total weight of 137 gram, the phone is quite light and flexible. The set similar to other HTC handset is entirely is made up of a single sheet of aluminum. At the back side of the set there is a soft touch pads in contrasting colours that helps in having the better grip on the phone. The phone is powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and is equipped with 512 MB RAM. Other interesting features of the phone are a 5 MP rear and VGA front camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS, and a 3.5 mm jack.

The chipset and processor are surety of excellent performance of this phone. For the multitasking the phone set has Qualcomm chipset. The cross-functionalities in the phone occur between webOS and iOS. The phone has no space for a microSD card and has only the onboard memory. The call quality of the phone is good. Its battery life is also evenly satisfying as it allows capturing dozens of pictures, moderate level of browsing and emailing.   The battery has backup upto 24 hours. The 5 MP auto focus camera can be used with a 28mm wide-angle F2.2 lens and a BSI (back-side illuminated) sensor. The end result is stills of 2560х1920 resolution. It also has a VGA front-facing camera for self-portraits and video calling. The Internet Explorer on Widows Phone is to the lines of the latest version for the 7.5 update and it improves the user interface.

Acer launches the world's slimmest laptop

Acer released the world's thinnest laptop computer in Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The lunched model Aspire S5 has a 13.3 inch screen and is 15mm thick. It weighs just less than 1.35 kg (three pounds). The Acer is in mood to launch four more models of the laptops as reveled by the Acer’s chief executive J T Wang. "By the second quarter of this year we will have four models of ultrabook and more to come."

The release of laptops is scheduled after the release of Windows 8 by Microsoft later this year. On the occasion Acer also declared that soon it would come with free service that would allow its users to store video, photos, music, and documents through internet Cloud and access files from and widows 8 or Android software powered gadgets. He also elaborated that ACER is also modify window to work well with Android and other platforms as well. 

Sony's website once again under attack

Unknown hackers once again has attacked Sony’s website for its supporting the controversial SOPA (Stop Online Piracy) bill. After this attack the Sony Pictures website, its database and the company's Facebook page was compromised. According to raise their point hackers updated videos and posted pictures on the sony website. However, it was removed later on. According to the hackers they were able to gain access to sony’s website as its admin panel was not properly encrypted. In another interesting incident the website of website of steel producing company Arcelor-Mittal, was hacked by a Belgiun by being company’s action to close down one of its factory in Belgium. This hack was operated due to weakness of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities in the website.

Sony Ericsson to release Xperia S and Ion at CES

According to various media news Sony is coming with its newer version of phones including Xperia S and Ion at CES.  Both the phones are expected to be with 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 4.3- inch screen with a 720x1,280-pixel resolution and a very updated 12 megapixel camera capable of recording 720p HD. Xperia  X is expected to be based on Android Ginger bread instead of Cream Sandwich.

LG Prada Phone, a new slicky set in competitive smart phone market

The third LG Prada Phone has good improvement over its predecessors. This LG Prada is of the svelte design model. With 4.3-inch touchscreen and decent specs it is good offer for the competitive smart phone market. Running on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS the phone has been assured to be updated for the next year. It will be release in Western Europe and South Korea in January. The Prada case comes in black colour.  The back of the phone has a lovely textured pattern which presents a semblance of leather coat.

The 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen has LG's Nova technology that brings brightness to double capacity. The thickness of the phone is 8.5mm. The Prada Phone is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor. It has 8GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for extending the memory. With an 8-megapixel camera it can shoot upto 1080p resolution video.