Gmail Notifr

Gmail Notifr sends you notifications about the received e-mails and other events in your Google account. It supports multiple accounts, checks mail at a specified interval, has Growl and sound notifications and has no background daemon processes installed as Google’s official notifier. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5+ (Leopard).

Dateline

A subtle replacement for having the date shown on the Menu bar, Dateline gives you a linear calendar on your desktop within a transparent window. One very useful feature is that it has direct access to iCal when double clicking on a day.



The background and text colors are fully customizable along with transparency to make it blend seamlessly with your current desktop. This application requires Mac OS X 10.5 and higher.

Facebook's Latest Shot At Survival

 With users shifting from computers to smartphones for accessing Facebook, the company is now working really hard to monetize this platform. Zuckerberg will now let advertisers place ads specifically on smartphones, something that the company had never done before.

 
WSJ has reported that Facebook did not give a break up of its mobile advertising revenue in its $3.7 billion last year indicating that the amount was not significant enough. Advertisers were given a package for ads and mobile ads were a part of that. This was acting as an obstruction for advertisers who wanted to place their ads on mobiles.

 
All that is about to change as Facebook gets smarter. Ads will now be allowed to appear on user’s news feeds too. The company will allow brands to pay per post. The fee will be based on a bidding process that charges advertisers per every thousand ads viewed in the News Feed or per ad clicked on by a user. This way even regular brands can use facebook as an advertising tool.

 
This move was inevitable as Facebook was losing money through the mobile platform.But the company must be very careful because these ads could create a nuisance for users. We all remember how Twitter had to remove the ‘Quick Bar’ due to widespread outrage among users. Facebook must be careful as it is already losing users and user time. A postIPO research concluded only two out of five people access FB every day.

 
Zucky’s company must remember that a mobile screen is much smaller than the computer screens so the ads must be designed in a way that they blend in with the news feed and don’t annoy users too much.

 
One way or other users can expect the social networking sites to come up with several other ways to earn revenue now as they have truckloads of investors to satisfy. Let us just hope that these money making ways don’t make our beloved Facebook a thing of the past.

5 Reasons Big Data is Big Deal

The world is growing fast and so is technology. But is it really technology that plays a major role in this growth? Well researches have revealed that technology has an impact on the growth but only with the help of a silent partner, and that’s Big Data.  Big data are nothing but large amount of data that continuously keeps on growing. Later when these data’s start to turn itself into complex ones, the analysts applies large algorithms, statistics and finds solutions to existing problems. Big data has the power to revolutionize the world and better the technology itself.

 
Below given are 5 reasons that made big data the real “BIG DATA”.

 
1. Big data is big in business:

 
Big data are not just any data that accumulates time to time. These data’s are collected from all the sources that you see in your day to day life. From details of shipping crates to simple data’s that are stored in your mobiles, big data’s are all around your daily life. Sensing these data’s and by using sophisticated tools to combine them, big data’s are used as competitive advantage for every industry and to improve their intelligence.

 
"It's a revolution," says Gary King, director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. "We're really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched."

2. Big data’s fuels culture:

 
Advanced computer tools are now introduced to the main stream as there are much better access to Internet data’s, natural language processing tools and  pattern recognition tools. We now are living in such a world that applications can interpret big data are also now being introduced to the common citizen. One such example is Apple’s coveted virtual iPhone 4S assistant Siri, which is an application that can interpret big data and simply distribute it to its users.
3. Big data can predict future:

 
Big data’s are also now being used as real time answers for most of the daily and future problems. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are the best examples that provide real time data. One such example is, The Federal Bank of New York has asked to keep a note on the comments that pops up on these social sites. These real time data’s are to be categorized into “positive, negative or neutral” posts and analysts are to run tests on these data’s and they are sure that they can come up with a result from the public opinion on certain insurances and policies.

 
"I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand," says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. "It's something you can only do with Big Data."

4. Big data could fight cancer:

Another sector that can benefit from big data is the medical sector. Many of the well known medical foundations has started taking the initiatives in collecting big data, analyze and to take measures in finding the cure. "Big data collection and computing is allowing us for the first time to get a complete molecular characterization of cancer," said David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UC-Santa Cruz.

"I think you're going to start to see this sort of big data effort on several fronts -- partly because of supercomputing capabilities that we haven't had until recently and also because of wireless devices that are increasingly being used to transmit data," Haussler said.
5. Is Big data Big brother?

 
Although big data is in the path of revolution it has its own downfalls too. Potential findings of false discoveries, misinterpretations all can grow along with the evolution of big data. False facts can turn itself into base of certain misconceptions. Analysis and patterns from searches in search engines; social media posts all can justify this misconception. So is big data the real deal? Evaluations are still to be done for an answer.

Motorola’s smart watch gets social with improvements

Motorola’s wearable Android, the MotoActv, may bemarketed as a fitness tracker, but with each new software update, it becomes a smarter smart watch. The company has released software upgrade version 7.2which improves tracking for golf shots, fitness zones via heart rate monitors and map views after a workout. After installing the software update, owners will also have direct access to Facebook wall posts and Twitter messages from their Bluetooth connected Android phone.

I like Motorola’s approach to this class of device because while I’ve seen and tested a number of wearable connected devices, few have delivered either a positive experience, wide range of useful features, or both. Instead of putting out a half-baked product, Motorola designed and marketed the MotoActv to fitness enthusiasts from the beginning and recently added golf functions while a few smart watch functions went along for the ride. And even those — notifications for email, text messages and caller ID — were first limited to Motorola-branded phones.

 

1. 

NextPrevious

Picture 1 of 5

motoactv_mr7_facebook

Eventually, the smart watch features were extended to all Android phones, not just those made by Motorola. The company also fixed initial battery issues and at that point, I bought myself a MotoActv for my daily running: The integrated GPS provides route, elevation, pace and time. Once I realized the accelerometer could track steps, I ended up wearing the MotoActv every day, and I still do. But I haven’t been using the phone notification feature. Now that the updated device includes support for Facebook and Twitter, I may enable that feature.

I’ll also be taking full advantage of the more detailed golf tracking included in this software update. Ironically, I just played 9 holes with the watch yesterday, using it to track every shot on the course (and there were quite a few of them!). Here’s an example of the data tracking:



But I had commented to a fellow golfer during the round that I wish the MotoActv didn’t treat all putts the same: It only captures how many putts used on each hole. Lo and behold, just a day later, the new software update allows putt tracking for short, medium and long putts, making the data capture even more useful.

Interesting to me is how Motorola still isn’t positioning the MotoActv as a smart watch, although I think most would consider it one if they knew the capabilities. Then again, many people haven’t yet heard of smart watches. It’s a clever move to instead market the device as a known item — a fitness tracker — and then keep adding smartphone-assisted functions and other improvements. Motorola’s MotoActv may be the best smart watch to date; just don’t call it a smart watch!

Microsoft rolls out more social Bing search, includes insights from Facebook and Twitter

 Microsoft on Friday rolled out a revamped Bing that includes insights from Facebookand Twitter in the biggest overhaul of the search service since its launch three years ago.

"Most things in life are better with people you trust," Microsoft said in a release announcing that the changes promise in May have arrived.

"The new social features in Bing make it easy to exchange ideas, share opinions and take action, giving searchers the same confidence they get from bouncing an idea off a friend."

Google in January meshed posts from its social network into search results based on a similar belief that people value input from friends or others they respect.

The new version of Bing features a "social sidebar" that will list Facebook friends who may know something about a query topic, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft has been doggedly working to increase its share of a lucrative Internet search market dominated for years by California-based Google.

Microsoft in late 2007 paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook.

The investment put Microsoft in a position to build a relationship with Facebook, which has a stated mission of making the Internet more social.

60% employers to monitor their employees‘ Facebook, Twitter pages by 2015: Gartner

Many employers already monitor their workers' Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages - but the practice is set to increase, a new report has revealed.

A new report by data analysts Gartner has claimed that by the year 2015, 60 per cent of employers will monitor social media pages of their employees.

The 'Big Brother' monitoring will be driven by security worries about employees leaking information or talking negatively about their workplace.

"The growth in monitoring employee behavior in digital environments is increasingly enabled by new technology and services," the Daily Mail quotedAndrew Walls, research vice president of Gartner, as saying.

"Surveillance of individuals, however, can both mitigate and create risk, which must be managed carefully to comply with ethical and legal standards," Walls said,

Most employers will use their monitoring to prevent security breaches - but simply having the technology at their disposal will be a huge temptation to managers who want to know more about their staff.

"The development of effective security intelligence and control depends on the ability to capture and analyse user actions that take place inside and outside the enterprise IT environment," he said.

Walls predicts that the practice, which is increasingly common in America, of asking for Facebook passwords as part of job interviews, will fade out of fashion.

Earlier this year, Facebook said it has "seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people's Facebook profiles or private information."

Debate over the legality of employers forcing job applicants to hand over their passwords has raged on since the rise of social networking.

It has become common for managers to review publicly available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates.

But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.

Companies that don't ask for passwords have taken other steps -- such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview.

Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.