Author
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
Through the years Google has wished just about everyone who matters a happy birthday with its endearing doodles. On 27 September, Google happened to be marking its own 14th birthday with a simple cake-turned-logo version. And to coincide with this is the 25th billion app download from the Google Play store, which is now just 25,000 short of reaching Apple’s count of 700,000. It wouldn’t be at all out of place to look at a few interesting Google Play apps apart from its own native ones — 14 of them, in fact. 1. SwiftKey 3SwiftKey, which combines with Swype, is a great way to speed up text input on Android. Whether you are typing or tracing from one alphabet to the next, SwyiftKey excels at predicting your words as you begin inputting. The best part is that its predictive algorithm learns from continued use. It also handles spaces and punctuations smartly. It also begins to learn local terms, contacts and more. Users find it indispensible. 2. Pulse NewsThis news app with its square tiles came early to Android, though it first appeared on iOS. You can pick your favourite sources of news and once you have populated the app’s pages with them, you will get rows of tiles with images representing stories for you to read. Pulse will update the way you tell it to and because the headlines are just under each tile, makes for a great way to quickly go through the news that interests you. 3. Avast Mobile SecurityAndroid has been known for the way malware can more easily get to unaware users because of the entire ecosystem being less tightly regulated and monitored — though Google barges into clean up every now and then. Some anti malware solutions such as Avast, which is free, and Lookout, are now considered essential and a minimum defensive against those seeking to exploit. 4. ChromeChrome is Google’s own browser for PCs and mobile devices and it’s one that is becoming increasingly popular. Dolphin and Opera Mini have been popular as well, but Chrome has the advantage of working smoothly to synchronise across devices so that you can take up where you left off as you move say, from PC to mobile. It’s also full of interesting add-ons (on the PC) that add to its functionality. 5. Beautiful WidgetsWidgets or little add-on customisations are what make Android truly special. You can change the whole look of your device and get it to give you information and udates just the way that suits you. There are many collections of widgets, not just individual ones, and Beautiful Widgets is one of them. You can personalise your phone with different looks for all the top-level information such as time, weather, battery status, etc. 6. TaskerTasker is an app for advanced customisation. It lets you set certain actions based on your preferences based on context such as time, location, or event. So it’s when x context takes place, perform x action. For example, at a specific time, you can lock up certain applications so that co-workers or children don’t tamper with them. Read out a status when battery is low is another example. Or, more prettily, change wallpapers when in certain locations. 7. JuicedefenderAndroid devices battery life is legendary — in a not good way, that is. Juicedefender is a widely used app that disables whatever saps the juice out of your device. You can set the rules. 8. Launcher ProThis one is for Android pro’s and lets a user define what the home screens will look like, laying them out for quick access to what is most wanted. 9. ZomatoThis Indian app is a favourite with foodies many of whom don’t leave home without it. The app hooks into your location and recommends eating places or home delivery joints and gives you information, reviews and ratings on them. You can also dial straight out from the app. 10. HDFC Bank Mobile BankingHDFC account holders should check out this one (after duly installing a mobile security app) to add to their bouquet of useful apps. You can do all the regular stuff of daily banking. 11. FlipkartFlipkart and not have an app? Not possible. You can do all your buying on the go making it easier to act on recommendations or something you happen to see during the course of the day. 12. MakeMyTripThe essential travel booking and organising app is on the Android marketplace for those who make it out of town frequently and with short notice. 13. EvernoteJust as much, if not more, an iOS app, Evernote actually looks beautiful on Android and works well to capture all your information from notes and scans to contacts and photos, all in one place. Another app in the same category but with a different nuance is Springpad and this too shines on Android. 14. DropboxThis cloud storage app is a must not just for Android but everywhere else. On Android, its camera upload function (now also on iOS) gave early users some free space. Your photos automatically upload to the camera uploads folder on Dropbox. But otherwise a must for storing work and media files you want to access on the go. mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter
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Eat Drink Code. The opening lyrics of a lively anthem that signalled the start of Windows AppFest, an app-making marathon staged by Microsoft in Whitefield, on the outskirts of Bangaluru on September 21st. The idea was to get a large number of developers together at one venue and encourage them to come up with interesting apps for Windows 8, due to launch worldwide on 26th October. They gathered 3,500, housed them in three large hangers, supplied them with food, music and mentors and asked them to gun for a place in the Guinness Book of World Records: the most participants to successfully develop code in a minimum defined time limit -- 18 hours. Working through the day and much of the night, 2,567!of them managed to do complete their code. A set of requirements and rules were laid down to qualify for successful participation in the Record.In the fast-developing market of mobile devices, apps are a critical dimension, determining the real-life experience the user has with the smartphone and in particular with the tablet. Apple, with over 700,000 apps, some 200,000 of them for its popular iPad, is currently the "app leader" and others, specially Windows, need to offer both quantity and quality to become attractive to customers as serious alternatives.Windows 8 has been around in consumer preview form on the PC and a small number of tablets (mostly for testing) and most of Microsoft's apps have really been on their Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 smartphones such as those from Nokia, HTC, and Samsung. In the wait for Windows 8, these devices haven't been as widespread and will only really start to increase post launch of the new OS. Developers need users to make it worthwhile to create apps and users need the assurance of enough apps to buy a device -- that is the chicken and egg situation that Microsoft (and also RIM for the BlackBerry phones) have had to grapple with for a while now. All the same, Windows 8 has been downloaded over 16 million times globally and needs a large spread of apps from which to choose and use. Developers getting ready to get into "app mode" and code for 18 hours non stopMicrosoft means apps to be usable across all Windows devices, scaling without a problem. Demonstrating how apps were to be the same look and feel for users whether they were using a giant touch screen or a small tablet, Harish Vaidyanathan, Director of Evangalism for Microsoft, said that there were minimum basic requirements such as a 1 GHz processor and 1GB RAM and 20 GB of disk space needed, but essentially that it was easy enough, using free available tools such as Visual Basic, to create apps that would run on diverse Windows devices. Developers would need to optimise and finesse the apps for different screen sizes. After a process of testing and verifying the working of the apps, which takes between three to five days, the apps would work on Windows 8 as well as Windows 7 PCs. For the first time, a Windows Store will be available for consumers who, incidentally, will be able to pay in Indian currency, to buy the apps. He demonstrated a number of apps including one from ICICI Direct, OneIndia, MakeMyTrip and some games to show how the behaviour of the applications was identical on a touch-screen PC and on a tablet. Features such as multitasking, snapping a window to one side of the screen etc were exactly the same on different screen sizes.The apps would also run no mater who the OEM was, because support in the operating system allows this. Developers are also being encouraged by being given a 70:30 portion of the revenue from the app in their favour. As they reach a greater number of users, they get 80% of the revenue. The Windows Store will be available to 180 countries in different languages on launch, according to Harish.The participants created apps in 20 categories and these, if they pass muster, could see inclusion in the upcoming Windows Store. Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman, Microsoft India said, “Windows 8 is ‘Good for India’. In India, Microsoft is making significant investments and working with 1.2 million developers, over 1,000 Independent Software Vendors and more than 2,000 System Integrators to empower them with the tools, technologies and training required to develop high end skills and compete in a global marketplace.”
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If you’re paranoid about medicines, you have every right to be. As with anything these days, there are people who will sell you fake stuff to make a quick buck. Young Nathan Sigworth, the CEO of PharmaSecure, a company with offices in New Hampshire and our own Gurgaon, is determined to fight drug counterfeiting, specially in developing countries. He has persuaded several pharma companies to print certain authentication codes on medicine packets. A user can send this back to a central database and find out whether the drug is real or fake. To begin with, users could SMS the serial number to a number given on the packaging to instantly get an OK message to take the medicine. Or, even whether to buy the medicine. But now, Android users also have the option of using a PharmaSecure app which will scan the number and tell you if it’s safe to assume the medication is genuine. PharmaSecure works with nine drug companies in India and has put codes on 50 million drug packages. You We CanCricketer Yuvraj Singh’s battle with cancer is something that every Indian is aware of. But there is very little awareness about cancer as a disease and how many others it affects. Yuvraj decided to do his bit to correct that and also help cancer patients in need. With Microsoft, he launched an app YouWeCan for Windows Phone. You can try this app and buy it for Rs 565 — it’s what one instance of cancer detection costs, and it will be your contribution to fighting cancer most directly. You can also donate money or volunteer time with the Yuvraj Singh Foundation or use the app to buy YouWeCan T-shirts and ribbons to spread awareness. The app has pictures and content about Yuvraj’s life up to the point of surviving cancer, and includes facts about different types of cancer, and benefits of early detection. With the full-paid version, a large portion of the payment goes to the Yuvraj Singh Foundation for their anti-cancer drive. Hop To Get RewardedIt’s nice to see location-based services beginning to take root in India. With the staggering number of mobile connections in the country, it’s only logical to assume that people will benefit from such services. The Gurgaon-based Hoppr team describes their particular hyper-local service in three words: checkin, rewards, coupons. Register with hoppr.com. Then, when you’re out in the town, you check in at places by sending an SMS to 56660 (toll free) with the name of the place. If they are on the list (and there’s a large list of 3,000 places) you’re checked in and get a coupon for a discount. You can also SMS to get offers nearby. You also accumulate points for checking in and these can be used for further benefits. The nice thing is that you can check in from regular feature phones as well. If you take a look at hoppr.com, you can see a continuous stream of users checking into various places. There is no app yet, although there is one planned for Android.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 01-10-2012)
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Let’s get the objections out of the way. Yes, it’s predictably plastic-ky. In fact, if Samsung doesn’t watch it, it will forever be synonymous with plastic, seeing the use of cheap-feeling material on so many devices, even flagship ones. Of all that I’ve seen so far, the Galaxy Note 800 (also known as the 10.1) is by far the most plastic-ky, with even a little play between the plastic and whatever the rest of the body inside is made of.Which brings me to the second objection. At Rs 40,000 it costs too much. The first-level iPad costs less and while I can understand that Samsung wouldn’t want to position itself as low-end, the fact is that buyers will consider the iPad, too, with its burgeoning ecosystem of apps and a fabulous screen. Which brings me to the third problem. The 10.1-inch screen on the Note 800. It’s bright and even glarey at times; it’s vivid and colourful; but the resolution, at 1280 x 800, is lower than it should be. And it’s in a form that I don’t particularly like — legal-size compared to the A-4 look of the iPad. But take that as a personal preference. BUDGET BOOK The Micromax Funbook Pro costs just around Rs 10,000 And related to this is the particular style of the keyboard which spaces out keys in a way that one is not accustomed to. Writing a short mail resulted in a few errors. I might also have said that the 5-megapixel camera was a disappointment, but I suspect taking pictures with a device of this form is going to be a rarity in any case. The pictures are bright and vivid, but grainy and fuzzy. Better in daylight, of course.But now let’s get down to what’s interesting about the Note 800 and what makes it worth considering. I’d sum it up as: the power and the pen. The tablet runs on a 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor and has 2GB of RAM to get it to work without staggering. In fact, you can multitask by running two apps (from a list of six that can do this) simultaneously. You could, for example, watch a video and take notes at the same time. As you swipe through screens and move across the tablet to get to different areas, it feels fast and fluid. The OS used here, incidentally, is Ice Cream Sandwich, not the more recent Jelly Bean. You have 16GB of storage and can add an SD card. The battery is a 7,000mAh. But the most distinctive feature of all on the Note 800 (and the rest of Samsung’s Note series) is, of course, the stylus or pressure sensitive and fine “S-Pen”. It’s super responsive, and you get a delightful surprise when you start to use it because it feels so natural. And it’s been improved since the previous Note. Tucked away neatly into a slot on the side of the tablet, you can pull it out easily and use it for all kinds of creative and fine work. It’s been said many times that Samsung has proved that tablets can be about content creation and not just consumption and I’d say that’s true. Artists, architects and anyone else who needs to work with the precision of pen and paper will enjoy this tablet. It’s an area where Samsung beats Apple hollow — the iPad isn’t optimised for stylus use. One needs many more apps, but there are pre-loaded ones to keep a user busy. These include PhotoShop Touch. There are many exportable features and capabilities on this tablet. Shape Match, for example, will “perfectise” a shape you draw with the pen. Formula Match will solve formulas written with the pen. Then there’s the ability to turn the tablet into a remote. As with the Galaxy S3, there are plenty of such usability touches that make the device interesting and a good alternative to those who, for whatever reason, aren’t interested in Apple’s iPad. The Big Lowcost TabletWe think of lowcost tablets as being on the small side, kitted out with just the merest basics. The Funbook Pro, from Micromax, may cost just Rs 10,990 or even less in certain places, but it’s a big, landscapey 10.1-inch tablet. It’s the successor to the Funbook which stopped at 7 inches. This tab has a bright, 1024 x 600 pixels display on which I had a rather good time watching strange fish swimming from one end to the other. While this was fluid enough, navigating screens and moving across apps did show up a little stutter; sort of a pause. going from one thing to another.Anyone who needs to work with the precision of pen and paper will enjoy the s-pen in samsung galaxy note 800.The Funbook Pro runs on a 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor and Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich version, which, for all practical purposes, is the latest, as the most recent Jelly Bean hasn’t made it to many devices yet. The ICS truly adds to the tablet as it makes you feel that you’re not getting something severely dated and compromised. There’s 1GB RAM and 8GB of space that you can expand to 32GB with an SD card. These specs are not bad at all, though I wish the tab could work without that frame-by-frame feel that turns up sometimes. This is a really wide tablet when you hold it sideways. And narrow and long otherwise. It’s not the ideal paperback book size, for example. But it’s a nice browsing size. It’s also roomy enough to interest kids who want to get their hands on games — going by the name of the device. It’s a nice size for movies and also for typing, which is specially critical. Overall, while I wouldn’t say it feels premium exactly, I also definitely wouldn’t write it off as being cheap and plastic-ky. It’s a tiny bit heavy, but because it’s landscape you’ll probably be holding it in both hands and it feels safer and more solid-build at whatever weight it is. But it does tend to get a little hot right from the start as you use it. For a tablet with a name like Funbook, it’s unfortunate that there are no design stylisations and it’s the usual Android slab on that front. But it works fine and isn’t slow and sluggish despite the stutter. Battery life could have been better.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 01-10-2012)
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Ah, those belly dancers with their shimmies and undulations and their impossible looking moves! Can you imagine the work that goes into acquiring some of those jaw-dropping skills? That’s if you want to dance professionally, of course. There’s also a school of thought that believes in using belly dance basics for a good whole-body workout. Other than being great exercise, belly dancing has the advantage of being a lot of fun, building in its own motivation — something we all need to keep our daily dose of exercise going. While belly dancing is more a woman’s domain, there are well-known male dancers who do an exceptionally good job with it because they have the muscle strength to drive some of the more difficult movements. As far as exercise goes, something else will undoubtedly work better for men. For women, it’s considered a natural fit and there are some who believe that belly dancing in Middle Eastern culture was also a way of increasing a woman’s ability to bear children without a hitch. That may well be part of the reason why any woman who really gets into this form of dancing begins to feel more powerfully feminine. They soon also discover that it’s as much about mind and soul as it is about body. Women feel more confident and happy with themselves, more centred and able to view themselves positively. What you get out of belly dancing• Flexibility• Toning and sculpting• Muscle strength• Stamina• Posture and graceWeight loss? Only if the choreography involves considerable footwork and some larger arm movements If you can’t get yourself to a class, you do have an alternative: learn by video. Entirely possible, as long as you have a few essentials:But it would be correct to say that there’s nothing simple about belly dancing. One needs to learn moves the correct and safe way and practice a great deal to get it to look good. The challenge, and its bit-by-bit mastery, also adds to how great one feels as each milestone of achievement passes. If you can find a belly dancing class nearby and learn under the watchful eye of an instructor, you are in luck. One of the more fun things to do in a group, it draws you into another world, where oriental charm and atmosphere takes over. A well-selected collection of videosA small dance area where you have some freedom to move aboutA mirror to check on your proper form A yoga mat for preparatory exercises and warm-upsAnything you can wear to approximate a belly dance costume — use a scarf for a hip beltChoosing A VideoA gentle workout, low impact but sustained over 45 minutes and very graceful, is Neon’s ‘Luscious’. This video reviews the basics as well, so you can opt to just use this one, and then strings things together into workouts and even choreography. If you want to move to a more active workout as you learn, consider Jillina’s ‘Shape Up and Hip Out’. In this video, the workout involves moves that are introduced in instalments. The same moves get faster and faster over three workouts. You need two types of videos to belly dance for fitness: videos that teach the basic moves and those that take you through a workout. There are a number of videos for beginners that are easy to follow as the instructor breaks down each movement carefully and takes the learner through several rounds of practice. There are constant safety reminders and posture checks. One excellent basics video is a two-disc set, ‘Instant Belly Dancer’ by Neon of World Dance New York. This set of DVDs, translated into many languages, is a great way to learn the fundamentals because Neon not only explains every move carefully but has a graphic overlay to show the exact trajectory of the move. This technique makes it easy to visualise the move in your mind and you internalise it and will stay safe from the start. You can do all three for a full workout that starts slow, acting as a warm up, and then moves into high gear. You can get videos easily on Amazon, eBay and other stores, or even directly from the dancer if you know what you want. Some of the videos from World Dance New York are available as downloads on iOS. And daturaonline.com offers online classes starting from as low as $2 to rent a short lesson online for a month or $35 for access to a huge bunch of videos, instantly, for 30 days. (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 17-09-2012)
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Yesterday Samsung’s botched up handling of a trip the company had organised for reporters and bloggers to the IFA show in Germany vaulted into social media stardom when it became known that the bloggers were apparently stranded in Berlin, their tickets back home and their hotel accommodation cancelled –- or under threat of being so. The PR disaster that followed for Samsung would make any company cringe. Well, except for Samsung, perhaps. Ironically, it was just such a social media disaster that a colleague, Chitra Narayanan, and I had finished writing about. Online Reputation Killers and the fiasco with Samsung would have illustrated rather well, underlining so many lessons. For Samsung, having just barely emerging from a court case that will forever remain etched into the annals of corporate litigation history, it was not a good time to be in the news for the wrong reasons. Coming out looking like the world’s great copy cat, Samsung nevertheless did manage to get some sympathy for being the target of Apple’s relentless “thermonuclear war” against competition of the Android kind. The blogger incident was relatively minor in the general scheme of things, but anyone skeptical or naïve about how quickly and how ugly things can get on social media, should go back and trace the events that led up to Samsung trending on Twitter. But it’s precisely that ugliness that I like about social media. It means that things are coming out into the open. It means the bare facts are up for analysis, and that it’s time for meaningful introspection all around. The Berlin DiaryYoung blogger, Clinton Jeff, who writes some nice detailed reviews on his blog, unleashthephones.com, was invited to go to IFA Berlin as the guest of Samsung global. He agreed to go as a reporter, not as a promoter, which was what participants of Samsung’s 'Mob!lers' programme were going as. As a result of a series of miscommunications and possibly some casualness about tying up loose ends right at the start, Jeff and another blogger found themselves, to their apparent shock, being asked to don Samsung “uniforms” and man the Samsung booths at the show, demonstrating products to the press. Apart from anything else, how insulting this must have felt to young men who believe themselves to very much be part of the technology press, one can only imagine. They could even have been in the position of showing off Samsung products to their own friends from the media. That, of course, is all besides the sheer impossibility of doing Samsung’s marketing for them when you have gone to report on products. Well, Jeff objected. And Samsung objected right back. Calls to India resulted in the bloggers’ tickets back home and hotel accommodation being cancelled -– although it’s not clear whether this was a threat that was eventually put into action. So, there were the bloggers, stranded in Berlin, far away from home, and quite an expense away. Not an expense many from this part of the world can afford on their own. The bloggers’ plight spilled on to Twitter after tech online magazine The Next Web, wrote on the incident. Outrage on Twitter fed back into the media and soon dozens and dozens of magazines, blogs and websites took up the story. And who should come to the rescue of the bloggers but Nokia. Bailing both bloggers out, Nokia apparently paid for their hotel accommodation, organised their tickets back, and gave them free reign to cover whatever they liked while at IFA. So while Samsung, who didn’t respond on social media for most of the day, got the brunt of the outrage, Nokia got lots of warm fuzzies for being so nice. Eventually everyone came around to looking at both sides of the picture, realising that there has to be more than just Jeff’s perspective here. Others explained the Mob!lers programme in some detail, pointing out that anyone who participated was clear about their role as promoters and fans. Samsung apologised and Clinton Jeff heaved a sigh of relief and everyone was friends again. Hopefully. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t very interesting lessons to learn for everyone. Should a reporter say yes to junkets? The situation with the bloggers in Berlin also raked up the issue of whether they should have agreed to go on a company paid trip in the first place. While the US tech media feels anyone accepting a “free ride” and a “vacation” should expect no less than being owned by the sponsoring company for that period, Sarah Lacey described this in the crudest terms in PandoDaily. Indian writers see it otherwise. Neither can they individually afford frequent trips abroad to cover shows nor can most of their publishers. Besides, there’s little comfort in a ride on a plane for up to 10-15 hours and the vacation involves reporting on products all day. Few would want to sell their souls for a few hours off in the evenings, even if it is in another interesting country. But the key is in clarity between the company and the reporter on what is expected on both sides. A few tweets discussing this:Varun (@varunkrish) 04/09/12 8:14 AMi have even ended up not covering anything if there was nothing interesting Raju (@rajupp) 04/09/12 8:16 AM@varunkrish same here Varun (@varunkrish) 04/09/12 8:21 AM@rajupp and theverge had samsung banners right on top :P .. if ads are okay , travel is okay too .. lets call it travel sponsor :P Raju (@rajupp) 04/09/12 8:26 AM@varunkrish lol! why can't they just do what they believe is right, rather than accusing others. Beats me. Companies need writers as much as the writers need the opportunity to see their products and it’s a mutual arrangement which can only go wrong if one side or the other decides to misuse it. But the fact that it came up for discussion and examination is a positive fallout from what was was a bad day online for Samsung. Blown Out Of Proportion?Looking at it from the PR agency’s point of view, this was an incident that could have been resolved without a fuss if only it hadn’t been “blown out of proportion” the way it was. While this may be true, it’s time to figure out that social media is about proportion. Rather than being taken by complete surprise at how far things can go online and how quickly, this is an age where companies will need to be prepared for such eventualities. Everyone has a voice online and everyone can be an activist -– if they feel they have got a case. This is a new reality and one that companies will just have to contend with. Responding quickly is one way to stem the tide. While people inside the company argue that in a large organisation, involving a mix of global and local, it takes time to find out what happened, guard against blaming the wrong person, and deciding on what needs to be done in accordance with internal policies. In the meanwhile though, half the world will have taken up the cause and the cost of not responding will only escalate. Far better to say something at all -– including reassurance that the issue is being looked into immediately -- and remain silent for too long. Is It True?It’s in times of social crises like these that a good dose of introspection is needed. Was the situation really handled badly? Are there a few policies or something else that needs to be changed? One of the nicest things about social media is when crowd power makes you take a good hard look at yourself and fix whatever is wrong, going on to better times. The Crowd Is ReasonableIf outraged people on Twitter were vociferous in their protest, they were also balanced enough to want to look at all sides of the picture. As the day wore on, it was not as if everyone was just anti-Samsung all the way, but many began to search for facts and discuss the background. With the chapter finally being closed now, mistakes on both sides were very clear. If it can get ugly, it can also get cleaned up. Meanwhile, Clinton Jeff needs to figure out what he owes Nokia. mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter
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An operating system on a device is like the inside of your house. Everything sits in its place, helping things happen, predictably and consistently. But if someone were to sneak into your house and decide to surprise you with a full new décor, rearranging things in clever and modern styles, you would be disoriented and feel like you were in someone else’s house. In fact, if someone were to even move your toothbrush, you’d be vociferously annoyed.In a sense, Microsoft has moved the toothbrush with its entirely new take on Windows, which will reach the consumers across the world on October 26. Not many will have downloaded the Windows 8 preview, but there has been enough clamour and criticism to put them off, much of it too early and quite undeserved. In the past, Microsoft-bashing has been fashionable, but it’s no bigger and ‘badder’ than the other tech giants and it’s only trying to do what they are — get into where the action is, albeit late in the day. Some of the criticism derides Windows 8 as being two operating systems, one bolted on the other; a touch-screen system trying to work on a desktop, and even a “kind of catastrophe” if you were to listen to Valve CEO and ex-Microsoft employee Gabe Newell, who doesn’t quite explain why.The new Windows is like totally redoing your house, using some brand new furniture, and some that is old and familiar. It’s more than an upgrade from Windows 7: it’s a whole re-imagining, engineered to meet new needs emerging from the users of technology today in what Apple is fond of calling the “post-PC” era. Not to say that computers will disappear, but that they are no longer work-alone devices, but instead talk to other computers, smartphones and tablets. In such an everything-everywhere world, Microsoft cannot afford to stay the way it is, on the fringes of the mobile world. By now, it should undoubtedly have been a full-fledged player on the mobile landscape. Coming from a background of being on 92 per cent of the planet’s computers, Microsoft has been more PC-centric, although its activities have spanned a large number of areas, in some of which it has done amazing work (in research, gaming, its Office applications) and in some it has not (mobile, tablets, music). Now, it’s time for a step-change and it’s trying to do just that with Windows 8, Metro apps and working in the cloud.As I sit here with Windows 8 running on a laptop, a tablet and a phone, I know that it takes no expert to see that Microsoft is trying to unify an experience across devices. Much like Apple is trying to do, Microsoft is looking for a way to let users take up where they left off on one gadget without having to think about it. Both Apple and Microsoft (and Google for that matter) are integrating their OS’s into the cloud to make every kind of data available wherever users want it. It’s going to cost us, but that’s the price for using technology seamlessly and on the go.In getting to that goal, Apple has, at the moment, fewer challenges, thanks to its foresight and products that reshape industries. It defined the mobility space with its iconic iPad and iPhone. With its recent release of OS 10.8 or Mountain Lion for Macbooks, Apple is going at it from a different direction: from its other operating system for mobile devices, iOS 6, to the computer, which it is trying to make more touch-friendly.Microsoft is trying to go “Touch-First” on everything with Windows 8. In the process, it looks so different and is such a departure from any previous version that from the home interface, you wouldn’t even know it’s Windows. It’s like coming home to find your front door isn’t where it used to be. The familiar Start bar, which I distinctly remember got its share of ridicule long ago, including jibes about how you had to press Start to shut down, has gone, and in its place is a colourful screen full of live tiles. It takes a while to figure out what’s where and how to do the things one has been accustomed to for years. Even on a tablet, which is so fluid and futuristic with Windows 8, there are moments of frustration. On the desktop and laptops, there is no Touch-First because we have no touch screens. Well, barely any. Our mindsets are not touch oriented when we work on a computer while the OS asks you to explore and navigate in a way that suits a tablet.There’s more than enough time to become familiar with Windows 8, and the coming of the Surface tablet later this year will probably ease this process. Meanwhile, Windows 7 is to be supported for the next seven years or so and many users, both individual and corporate, haven’t even moved from XP yet. With Windows 8, it’s a matter of getting over the shock of a new look and getting used to a fresh take on a familiar OS.mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 06-08-2012)
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Taking it on the chinThe humble one in HTC’s One lineup, this Android mid-ranger is distinctive about the way it looks. It has a “chin” that sticks out and people are either neutral about it or find it ridiculous. This is an extra upward tilting extension of the phone’s unibody. And it does nothing in particular, except mark the phone as different looking and perhaps help with the grip. The screen, which is really nice, is a bit raised, giving this otherwise neat phone no rounded edges and even a slight roughness when holding. The HTC One V is a 3.7-inch phone, dwarfed by its 4.8 inch brother, the HTC One X. But it does have more than one thing in common with it: the very latest version of Ice Cream Sandwich, you can’t get at their batteries, and they both have Bluetooth 4. The chin, when you turn it over, hides the easily openable flap for a SIM (not micro) and SD Card. You’ll need that SD card because there’s barely any storage on this phone: just 4GB, very little of which you can use. It also has a 1 GHz processor which isn’t thought to be adequate to run the software on it and, indeed, there is a bit of a struggle now and then, but it should work fine as long as you don’t push it to the limit. The battery is a 1500 mAh and lasts, though with these phones it all depends on how you use them. There’s nothing humble about the price, which stands at Rs 19,399, though you can get it for a couple of thousand lower if you look. It has a 5 megapixel camera, surprisingly capable for its size and full of settings. There’s also 720p HD video — but no secondary camera. The One V is pitted against the Xperia U which is similarly priced. It’s neck-to-neck between these phones.All in the familyThe Xperia P comes from the NXT clan of Sony smartphones that includes the Xperia S and the Xperia U. They all share a distinctive design, with some nuances. All three have the same straight lines, set off by a transparent band running around the bottom of the handset. They’re unibody phones and you can’t get to the battery or add much-needed storage. Of course, not many people carry a second battery. But storage is another matter. While you can send data off to the cloud, there are apps that need to be on the device. Be that as it may, all three phones are very nice-looking. The Xperia P has an aluminum back, nice to the touch and adding to a premium feel. However, it also makes one feel that the screen would shatter if the device were to be dropped as there’s nothing to take the shock. The Xperia P is the middle sibling of these three phones, priced at Rs 25,799. Another common factor is that they aren’t shipped with Ice Cream Sandwich. All are to get updates though, and these will change the way the phone works. The Xperia P is closest to the S with a 4.0-inch screen (the S has 4.3). Its screen resolution and density is lower than the S’s and so is its camera, which is an 8 megapixel. It does have a secondary camera. And its processor, a dual core, is closer to its younger brother’s. One thing that’s new on the P is a display technology Sony calls WhiteMagic. This is supposed to increase the brightness of the screen. However, what it also seems to do is make the black less black so that it looks grey, lowering vividity and contrast, which is sad because text elements tend to be quite small on this device.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 13-08-2012)
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Looking particularly cool on a Windows 8 tablet, but also available for Windows phones and on Android, is Cocktail Flow. Recipes for drinks, of course, and possibly pretty good ones going by comments of users for whom cocktails seem to have flowed freely. The app is free, by the way. Other than looking good, Cocktail Flow gives you recipes by drink type; say dark rum or vodka or whatever floats your boat. There are also nonalcoholic cocktails, but who wants them. You can choose by colour, by type such as classic or shooter or exotic. You can also choose to go with whatever ingredients you happen to have in your bar. Then, just click to get quick and easy ways of making a nice drink. All you need to do next is appear as if you knew how to make that drink all along — and swig the concoction down the hatch.So, it works like this: you go somewhere, say a cottage in the hills. You walk around and you come across things you don’t want to forget. You take photos or even jot down a line or two, or a note, and you share it via Wyst, which is rather Instagram-like, but with a different focus. Maybe you sit down in a particularly beautiful spot and have an interesting conversation. Before you leave, take a picture and make a note. These will become your stored memories and you can look them up any time. Or let someone else across the world into them. It’s people’s feelings and experiences that endow a place with meaning, and so, sometimes, it’s nice to put them into a sort of collective with others’ experiences.Add A Bit Of Wyst Almost every place on the planet holds secrets and stories. Some of them are buried away in the depths of a history that we can’t reach; some are remembered even now and passed on, and some stories are in the making. Wyst is a little social application with the lofty ambition of making these stories travel from one part of the world to the other by making it easy for people to share their place-associated stories. They can choose to keep them within a small group of people, or just an intimate memory between two people, or they can make them public. Sure, you could share on Facebook or one of a dozen other ways. But when you share on Wyst, your experience gets tagged and plugged into a world map. Others can scroll and explore and when they touch the place you were at, your Wyst comes up — the one you shared. Exploring places through peoples’ experiences is then very interesting. Say you’re going to a wildlife park. You look up Wyst to see what others saw there. Or you could do that when you come back from your trip.Wyst, available free for the iPhone and usable on the iPad, is yet to make its way to other platforms. In fact, it’s yet to be densely populated with users and Wysts as people begin to explore it. On its website, wyst.it, you can see some examples of Wysts.Google+ For iPad All this time, iPad users were 2x’ing the iPhone app for Google+ when they wanted to use that network from their iPads. Now, the iPad app has arrived and it’s nothing short of gorgeous. It’s very visual, with big photographs and the clean lines layout first popularised by Flipboard and adopted by everyone else. Many users sign up and then forget all about Google+, finding it all too much to deal with yet another network that isn’t devoid of its own work. Others who have found a comfort zone in Google+, interacting with like-minded people in the safety of those Circles, will probably welcome a dedicated app. You can manage your profile, people and hangouts from within the app, and, of course, you can engage with your network and upload your own content.Elevate Photos To A Work Of ArtWhen you share photos on wyst, your experience gets tagged and plugged into a world mapPainterly for the iPad is a unique and beautiful app. One of the nicest ways to use it is to pick one of its elegant backgrounds as a base and then pull in one of your own photographs from the camera roll. Then, choosing from one of over 30 brushes, you paint parts of the photo for a really arty and lovely look. There are many interesting modes and combinations to explore and yet the app is very simple, requiring little or no actual artistic skill. Look at some of the examples on the app’s website or watch the in-app tutorial (guides also to be found on YouTube) to see the different things you can do. Two kinds of distinctive looks can be achieved when you pick either Paint or Erase before you start brushing. It’s a great way to while away extra time, soothe your nerves, and make your photos look extra special. It costs $1.99.(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 13-08-2012)
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A few years ago, my Gmail account got hacked. Try as I might, I couldn’t get into it, even when I enlisted the help of a few techies. Amazingly, I could reset my password, but that wasn’t working to give me access to the actual account. All sorts of emails I never knew I’d miss suddenly escalated in importance as I realised I would have a difficult time if I couldn’t get to various bits of information. It was not pretty. It never is. Eventually, the guys at Google had to do something to free up my account.What Wired writer Mat Honan went through on the 3rd of August was far more terrifying and it gives me the chills to hear him talk about it as he has been doing on various podcasts, in addition to detailing on his blog and on Wired how he was “hacked hard”. There was Mat Honan busy being a normal guy, playing with his baby daughter, when disaster struck. First, his iPhone seemed to go dead and when it rebooted, all its data was wiped out. When he went to his laptop, he found his Gmail account was not accessible. And then his MacBook blanked out as well. Next in line was his iPad. But that was gone too.Whoever or whatever was doing this wasn’t finished yet. Honan found that his Twitter account had been commandeered. The whole thing took a mere 15 minutes or so. Fifteen minutes that destroyed his digital life, as Honan says.To read exactly how this awful saga unfolded, just type Mat Honan into search and you should reach his blog. What is amazing is that this was no hack in the sense of breaking into code. Rather, it was a sequence of smart moves that showed how the hackers, if I can call them that, understood the way people behave both online and in customer service situations, and were able to manipulate them to get what they wanted. They used security loopholes in the process to get access to Honan’s Apple and Amazon accounts. From all the information available online to begin with, they had enough to get in easily.The eventual goal for the youngsters who social engineered the break-in seems to have been to get at Mat Honan’s Twitter handle. And perhaps to show what could be done. But they certainly could have done some more damage. While Apple and Amazon shot into the news for their loose processes, one can safely bet that practically every company has a similar weakness, whether they’re tech companies or otherwise.Security specialist Steve Gibson is fond of pointing out that convenience is the enemy of security. We don’t take measures like backing up our data or exploring security and privacy settings because it’s natural to take the path of least resistance and do whatever is easiest at that time. While it’s true that nothing we can do can guarantee security online (or even offline), our only hope is make it inconvenient for anyone trying to compromise our security. That will also mean making it inconvenient for ourselves, but there’s no other choice. For instance, how many of us just use the easiest possible password — combo of kids’ names. Wife’s name and birthday. Part of phone number and name. And then, because it’s inconvenient to have so many passwords for different services, we use the same one everywhere, giving hackers free and easy access to everything at once. Linking all our accounts to one another is also an invitation to anyone with a bit of time and motivation to explore and find what they want. At the very least, email accounts that have “sensitive” information should be separated from the rest. It might also be worth redoing and remembering your security questions, keeping them known to you but not easy to guess.One can’t say that firms and services make it particularly easy to be secure. Both Gmail and Facebook have a two-step system but nobody uses it because it has to be figured out and few people have the time to spare. Google explains it in a video though and all it means is using your phone (something you have, not just something you know) to receive a password you can then use. There are also one-time application-specific passwords that can be used to give access to various other apps that use Gmail.These and more security measures are described online right now because everyone is spooked in the wake of the recent Honan hack. As we transition to a world where all our data is going to be in the cloud, accessible and convenient, enough time will have to be invested in securing our information. It’s also one of the top few digital skills that children must be made familiar with as they grow up in a completely digital age. mala(at)pobox(dot)com, (at)malabhargava on Twitter (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 27-08-2012)
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