Ketika Nokia resmi mundur dari panggung bersejarah, saat konferensi pers, CEO Nokia Jorma Ollila mengumumkan persetujuan akuisisi Microsoft terhadap Nokia, dia mengatakan kalimat terakhir: “Kami tidak melakukan sesuatu kesalahan, tapi saya tidak tahu mengapa kami kalah”.
Lalu, bersama-sama dengan puluhan eksekutif Nokia-nya tidak tahan menitikan air mata.
Nokia merupakan perusahaan yang mengagumkan, Nokia tidak melakukan sesuatu yang salah, tapi dunia berubah terlalu cepat. Mereka terlena, terlewatkan belajar, terlewatkan perubahan, dan akhirnya kehilangan kesempatan ! Juga, mereka bukan saja melewatkan kesempatan untuk membuat uang, tetapi kesempatan untuk bertahan hidup.
Jika kita “tidak berubah”, maka posisi kita akan tergantikan. Jika PIKIRAN kita tidak mengikuti perkembangan zaman, bersiaplah utk segera tersingkir !
Hikmah Cerita :
1.Keunggulan kemarin akan digantikan oleh tren/kecenderungan esok, tdk segera merubah cara berpikir akan mati pelan2 !
2.Merubah diri sendiri namanya kelahiran kembali, dirubah oleh orang lain namanya tersingkir !
Berusahalah sebaik yang kita bisa, selebihnya biar menjadi takdir atas ikhtiar kita.
We’ve been posting a lot of guides, features, lists and other social media content over the last few weeks, but today we decided to do something a little more fun. Since it is almost the weekend, we decided to round up the best iPhone games you can find so you can make that commute shorter or to just help you kill some time. Featuring over 20 varied and addictive games, we’re certain that whether you’re a regular gamer or just like to play something every now and again, you’ll find something here that you’ll enjoy.
And for those interested, here are links to every game in the video.
With online transactions nearly hitting the trillion dollar mark, e-commerce has evolved to the point where there are numerous subsections rising and changing our perception of how we purchase and sell products. What was originally the domain of retailers, the Web has not only made the entire process easier, but has empowered both the seller and the buyer to create a more even playing field.
For retailers, their goods get to reach a wider audience while consumers, it means fewer barriers when completing purchases, they can be more informed and gives more power to them in the form of reviews, ratings and feedback.
What this has resulted in is a rapidly expanding sector that shows no sign of slowing up. With E-commerce growing in popularity and the potential of mobile commerce slowly being realised, it’s essential for retailers to try to be ahead of the pack if they don’t want to be left behind.
While e-commerce is constantly developing with new definitions emerging, there are a few main types to keep in mind. The most popular models would be B2C commerce, which is the domain of brands such as Amazon and other online retailers, and B2B, the selling of goods and services from one business to another. B2B tends to generate more revenue than B2C, mainly because in a regular supply chain, there will be many transactions between different businesses as a product is being produced. Items like raw materials and components would be mostly sold under B2B with the finished product usually being sold as a B2C transaction.
Other emerging sections include C2C, which is one person selling goods to another, effectively cutting out the middleman when it comes to the selling of goods. A good example of this would be eBay where consumers buy and sell goods and services to one another and because the people selling goods don’t have the same presence or reputation as a brand, the majority of sites lets you rank users to highlight trustworthiness and their reputation.
Another emerging area is B2M (Business to Machine), which allows businesses and brands to link to remote machines via the internet. B2M technology allows a company to monitor their machines from far away, finding out whether they need to be repaired or restocked, and seeing which products are being sold. This is to help retailers have their products reach areas not usually served by retailers and ensure that their products. This would normally be used by drinks companies like Coca-cola who would place their own branded vending machines in different locations, bypassing the need for retailers.
The final area would be M-commerce, which is the fastest growing e-commerce section and sees the transaction of goods and services through smartphones and tablets.
M-Commerce Technology
As well as movements being made in mobile commerce through carriers, and social payments, we’re also witnessing a complete change in the world of commerce as your phone essentially become your wallet. Contactless payment or NFC (near field communication) has been bandied about for a while, way before it was at the point of mainstream adoption. Now we are starting to see it emerge into the real world, with pretty exciting consequences.
We’re seeing new apps being developed that completely reinvent the idea of payments, totally negating the need to carry a wallet at all. Take the taxi app Uber for example. Not only do you set it up with your credit card, so you need never have cash on you for a taxi again, but it’s been developed in a way that’s native to the iPhone. When it comes to setting up your account, all you need to do is take a picture of your card and it’s done. No entering fiddly numbers on your keypad, simply scan the card and you’re good to go. You never need a wallet or card in the whole process of ordering a taxi again.
And beyond this, the concept of contactless payments within stores is beginning to emerge. This is evidenced by Mastercard’s recent foray into the world of contactless payments, showing that the space isn’t just open for young upstarts, but that established financial players are adapting to meet consumer needs. Mastercard has partnered with the network Everything Everywhere in a five-year deal that will see contactless payments being introduced at over 100,000 stores in the UK, through your mobile. Mastercard is staking a claim in contactless payments here, getting ahead of their competitors and offering consumers a solution they don’t even know they need yet.
Contactless payments are spreading fast, as Singapore has just unveiled a payment infrastructure across the country that will allow people to make ‘one tap’ payments when purchasing an NFC sim and the EZ payment app from Google Play. $40 million was pumped into the scheme, showing that the government is serious about overhauling the current payment system to allow people to top up their phone and pay as they go.
Startups/Retailers To Watch
Stripe
Stripe is a web app, founded in 2010, that allows companies to easily accept credit cards through their website. Its strength lies in how malleable it is for web designers, making it easy to implement in a variety of ways as well as simple to customise to specific, unique specifications.
There is next to no financial impediment to using Stripe if you are part of a struggling business; there are no monthly or installation fees, and using Stripe will take 2.9 per cent plus $0.30 as a flat rate on every transaction it is used in. As for customer support, Stripe does not excel in that regard, but it is very simple to use and will surely ease web transaction for fledgling businesses, while remaining cost efficient.
Etsy
Etsy is an online retail site that specialises in home-made gifts and vintage knick-knacks. It is similar to eBay in that it is a free online marketplace, but it is a niche forum with specifications on what can be bought and sold. Nothing is mass produced, so you can you can expect the quality of goods on offer to be high.
However, you would be guaranteed to find something unique to your tastes. Some will not like what is on offer, and the site obviously has a specific customer in mind, but Etsy presents a boutique, individual alternative to most shopping websites.
Shoptiques
Being an independent boutique has its perks, but if your clientele is immediately limited to those nearby and those who can afford to visit your store on a regular basis; there isn’t much latitude for a large customer base that stretches internationally.
Shoptiques was created to provide small boutiques worldwide with an international method of distribution, without curbing their individuality or charging extortionate rates. Shoptiques compiles the best that 50 boutiques shops have to offer, with reasonable rates on shipping and postage.
Fab.com
Fab raised a lot of eyebrows when it quickly reaching 2 million users earlier this year, becoming one of the most popular e-commerce sites going. It is different in that products sold on Fab are not decided on by market trends and potential popularity, but are purely the tastes of the website’s founders.
They choose to sell what they like and hope that a strong base of consumers will adapt, as they have, rather than copy what is already out there. Fab pitches a lifestyle rather than individual items, and customers have clearly subscribed to Fab’s taste. You won’t go into Fab in search of what you already like, but in hopes of discovering something you will love.
Bombfell
Bombshell will provide a man with anew wardrobe and a fresh sense of style. Using real stylists as well as personal preferences ascertained from their algorithm, Bombshell will decide on a range of clothing that is both fashionable and comfortable.
Users are presented with a new item of clothing every month, and they can either ignore it or purchase it for $69, ensuring that their wardrobe is regularly updated without having to waste time and energy in the shops. It’s a simple site with little financial commitment needed that will keep you up to date, fashion-wise, with a minimum of fuss.
Monogram
Monograms congregates an iPad user’s favourite brands into one app, and alerts them to when they are having sales. It’s a personalised shopping experience that values tastes as well as being cost efficient.
It is well-designed and clearly has an aesthetic edge that will appeal to iPad users, but it is very much limited to the iOS tablet, so it will probably need to expand before it can become a hit among online shoppers, but it had the right idea. Everybody loves a bargain, and Monogram sets about finding them with reckless abandon and only in places that it knows you love.
Shopkick
You could say that Shopkick is anti e-commerce as its main aim is to drive consumers into actual stores in search of quality and value. Users download this app and select their favourite stores, while Shopkick sets about finding offers and discounts that match their preferences, before directing them to their local high streets to take advantage of the best offers.
Obviously, there is an online element and Shopkick will find online and social media deals as well, but it is intent is to benefit the retailers as much as it is the consumer, and by increasing foot traffic and advertising their deals, they are doing just that. Beneficial for all.
Digby
Created by 30 Second Software, Digby is a mobile software for businesses to push their deals and advertise to local users via Digby’s location-based technology and analytics. Their aim is to engage retailers and local consumers online, in the hopes of creating brand loyalty in the real world, also.
This is proper software and not an easily downloaded app, so it will take some effort to implement, but it is sure to effectively increase business and find new customers for flagging businesses.
Delivery Hero If you want to eat, but don’t want to go out to do so (or, y’know, cook), Delivery Hero has a variety of dining options for you. This site, which works on a worldwide basis, has a variety of food delivery options on offer that are a cut above the usual take-away fare.
Delivery Hero is searchable by post code, but is limited to major cities mostly, and all the restaurants on-site are brimming with peer reviews and evaluations to make any potential tricky decisions easier. Pick your dish and it will be delivered. Delivery Hero is an efficient third-party app for food delivery services that will come in handy for hungry mobile users on a regular basis.
Shoplocket
Shoplocket leverages social media to help amateur sellers in a bustling online retail marketplace. Users can simply sync their Shoplocket account to their social media profiles and then start uploading images of items they would like to sell. Payment is conducted through PayPal and Stripe, so as to make it setting up your own pop-up store as simple as possible.
Put down an asking price customise any additional fees that would be required and set about selling your unwanted possessions. You will soon develop a reputation through feedback and be able to share your products across all social media platforms. A simple and effective platform for the modern retailer.
Emerging Trends
Third-Party Service Providers As more businesses want to offer consumers the option to purchase goods directly from their site, but mightn’t have the time or resources to develop a solution itself, third-party providers will come into play, offering a simple way of setting up E-commerce functionality.
There are a number of startups and businesses which provide such services, the most popular would be Shopify, For retailers who don’t have the technical know-how or the resources to properly implement such features onto their site, these services will only grow in popularity.
Behavioral Marketing You know how certain sites track your cookies so they can see what sites you’ve visited and what pages you’ve looked at? This will become more prominent as retail sites optimize their sites so that you’re being introduced to the products you’re interested in. The more you visit a site, the more refined the suggestions become, but the only catch to this is that not all users will be willing to let you track your site activity, so sites will have to notify the user when they’re doing this.
Real-Time Data Gathering Seeing how consumers explore and view your site in real-time can produce a lot of useful data. By studying patterns and where consumers leave the site, retailers can test out different offers and methods to see what the best. So if you have a situation where consumers tend to leave halfway through the transaction process, you could optimise the site so that when this happens, a special offer appears convincing them to complete the transaction.
Mobile
The one trend that is definitely going to happen, no matter what way you’re phrase it. It’s predicted that more than half of all handsets will be smartphones by 2013, and with companies like Square, PayPal and Google pushing the boundaries of mobile payments, the next few months will be very exciting indeed. The biggest retailers have their own apps available, but medium to smaller businesses will optimize their sites to suit mobile users who will become more prominent as time goes on.
It’s the dream for all marketers, to create a piece of content that will be seen by the world. Unfortunately, even if you come up with the greatest piece of content ever made, there’s no guarantee that something will go viral and for the most part, most content that has gone viral has been online for quite a while, or has been created by a popular person or group.
That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, however. With a little bit of work and some advanced preparation, you can improve the chances of your content getting shared across the web. It mightn’t be the next Nyan Cat or Old Spice campaign, but it could be exposure that will get you places.
So while there isn’t a magic formula for success (let alone instantaneous success), there are measures you can take to increase its chances of going viral. Obviously, the first is the content itself. If it’s not engaging, or if it doesn’t resonate with people, then the chances of it reaching a wide audience is very unlikely.
If you want a simplified version of how content goes viral, Kevin Alloca, the trends manager for YouTube, gives three reasons behind the success of viral videos: Tastemakers, participation and unexpectedness. His talk only touches the tip of the iceberg regarding this subject, but it’s a good start for those trying to get their heads around the concept.
So what separates your content from others? Is it funny? Is it insightful? Provocative? Will it surprise people? Also, how does it connect to what you provide? For example, everyone loves funny content, but that mightn’t fit in with your brand if it deals with serious topics, where more emotional and insightful content could work better.
The second is finding a platform and making sure that as many people see it as possible. Make sure you know who your target audience is when you’re releasing it as they are the ones who will share your content. Also, some people will have considerably more influence or reach than others so knowing where to share it with is just as important. So know which friends/users are influential and share it with them, but try to make it personal and don’t spam people with the same message. The more people you make aware of it, the greater your chances are that it will be picked up by other people.
Following the same logic, blogs and sites are also a great way of spreading the word, but make sure that it’s something they would cover and remember to personalise it as nobody likes getting a group email.
Remember that to make something popular, you need to dedicate the time to it. Rarely does something become viral because they took a few minutes to post it online, you need to promote it over the course of a few days before you start seeing results. If you do see instant results, don’t take your foot off the pedal, keep promoting it and create a snowball effect. So in short, create content that has something that will draw people to it and know your approach.
Online Content Distribution
Although creating content is one challenge, the biggest part of the equation is actually getting it out there and making sure enough people see it. Most people think that creating something “viral” means it will spread instantly, but you actually need to give it a bit of a push through a number of different channels. Here are some of the ways you can help kick the content off.
Video Distribution
Although YouTube is the biggest player when it comes to video content, there are hundreds of other video sharing sites where your content might appear. Uploading the content to each of the sites can be a slow and cumbersome process, but thanks to HeySpread, you can upload your content to multiple sites at the same time. Another good alternative is Tubemogul.
Advertising
Instead of thinking that your content is just going to go viral instantly, you might start thinking about giving it a large advertising push when you first launch it. The thinking here is that you need to get enough people to see it before they actually start sharing it. Have a read of this in-depth post on how one single piece of viral content we created made €10,000 in 20 days, the key fact being here that it had some advertising budget behind it initially.
Create Content With An Audience In Mind
When we create content, we do so with a very specific audience in mind. Before we shoot a video or start creating rich media, we ask ourselves: “Who is most likely to cover this and how big is their audience?” This evolution of music video below has over 125,000 views, but not because people discovered it by accident on YouTube, but because we seeded it out to twenty of the world’s biggest blogs that cover music and social media. The content was a perfect fit for their audience so it was easy for them to cover.
Use Photos On Facebook
The quickest way for content to spread if it is good enough is through Facebook. Nothing helps content spread faster than the world’s biggest social network. All sorts of content spreads there, but it is images that work better than anything else. Find photos or images that are massively relevant to your audience or create bespoke images in photoshop that people are more likely to share. The fact that people can see images within the stream, don’t have to click play and they are easy to share makes them massively viral when used correctly.
Spend Ages On The Title
Most people click on links, articles or other content because of the title. People even retweet tweets without opening the link based purely on what the title is. You should consider spending nearly as long working on the title as you do on the content itself. Play around with different options and test out what does and doesn’t work for you in analytics over time. The title is probably the most important thing you will do in terms of creating viral content.
Can you make money from viral content?
If you’re one of the lucky few that has created content that has gone viral, then the next thing you will probably look at is how to monetise your success. The problem is that while you can generate revenue from content, it’s only for the short-term as viral trends finish as soon as they arrive.
There are some instances where you can make a profit, but chances are that unless your content is immensely popular, this figure will be rather small. The most popular location for viral content, YouTube, allows users to monetise their videos through advertising so to generate profit for Google and give a small commission to those who created the video. Yet
You only need to look at the video “Charlie bit my finger” to see that even immensely popular videos take a while to generate such profits. The fact that this $500,000 figure was generated after six years (and the family only monetised the video after it reached 40 million) tells you that it’s best not to exclusively rely on videos for your well-being.
The video “Keyboard Cat” was another successful video, currently it has 26 million views since it was posted five years ago. It’s creator, Charlie Schmidt, made roughly $20,000 in 2009 through it, but a portion of it came from merchandising like t-shirts, phone apps, licensing agreements and even toys. Both videos have generated numerous parodies, which only helped enhance the reputation of the original videos.
In effect, seeing your content go viral can be worth the equivalent of a sizable advertising budget and can earn you a similar amount, but unless you’re able to create similar content on a regular basis, then you probably shouldn’t rely on it too much.
Best Viral Videos From Brands
Roller Babies
Company: Evian Views: 58,479,480
Evian made a video with some babies doing amazing things on roller skates. Now, there are a few subtle details that give away the fact that some CGI and digital manipulation has been used in the making of this ad, though the untrained eye may not pick up on them, but this is a fun ad with cute kids doing funny things. No idea what this really has to do with mineral water, but the “live Young” message was certainly put across.
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
Company: Old Spice Views: 42, 384,960
You know your ad has truly pierce the pop cultural consciousness when you’re just as likely to have seen a reaction or parody video as you have the original, and Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ has certainly captured the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere. Old Spice has now become a major force where it was once little-known outside America, all thanks to charm and humour of Isaiah Mustafa and the quick and innovative direction deployed in this fascinating ad. Oh, watch the Sesame Street version, too,; you owe it to yourself.
The Force
Company: Volkswagen Views: 54,184,541
Follow the world’s most adorably futile Darth Vader as he goes about his house trying to use The Force to move things about. Unfortunately, he’s unsuccessful, but his dad tricks him into believing that he did actually start the car with his powers. It’s a fun ad, with a clear narrative and a good dramatic build that relies on a very basic knowledge of Star Wars, that has clearly made an impact on YouTube users.
The T-Mobile Dance
Company: T-Mobile Views: 35,442,780
This ad is probably the most popular flash mob of all-time, and it clearly has legs, having inspired a number of follow-up ads from mobile phone company T-Mobile. Firstly, it’s an impressive feat of logistics and organisation, and the choreography is great, but what really puts the message of this ad on-brand are the shots of unaware commuters chatting and texting on their phones. Clever stuff, made to be shared and seen.
Official Ojai Valley Taxidermy TV Commercial
Company: Ojai Valley Taxidermy Views: 12,503,496
“Nope. They’re not. They’re dead. They’ve been taxidermised by Chuck Testa.” Sage and surprising words from Mr Testa. This ad for Testa’s Ojai Valley taxidermy business was created by Rhett & Link for American TV show Commercial Kings. It employs a healthy dose of irony and has a taste for absurdity at their subject’s expense. It is unclear as to whether Testa realises the jokes on him, but that really shouldn’t infringe on your enjoyment of this ad or your desire to get dead animals stuffed.
Clever Thief Steals a 42-Inch TV
Company: LG Views: Indeterminable
This ad appears to have been ‘leaked’ so as to cast doubt on its authenticity. It seems to have worked, with many online commenters believing that a man could easily steal a 42-inch TV as demonstrated in the ad, spreading the ad further and generally provoking a conversation about it. It’s a clever ad that takes a while to make its point and the very fact that its branding is unobtrusive is what has made it so popular.
Team Hot Wheels – The Yellow Driver’s World Record Jump
Company: Hot Wheels Views: 12,428,998
Hot Wheels perfectly blend nostalgia with spectacle in this ad, in which a stunt driver breaks the world record for distance jump in a four-wheeled vehicle on a Hot Wheels-style track, like the one he probably raced his toy cars on when he was young. The Hot Wheels logo adorns the ad, but it mostly relies on the death-defying jump being made and the iconography of that bright orange track to get is message across.
Imported From Detroit
Company: Chrysler Views: 15,120,846
This spot, that aired during 2011′s Super Bowl, attempts to reclaim image of Detroit in the wake of the General Motors collapse. It’s really promoting the new Chrysler 200, but it’s a stirring clip that is as much about Motor City’s reputation as it is about the car in question. Eminem, the city’s most famous son, pops up at the end, with a gospel choir in the background, hinting at something more than what is on show in these two minutes and getting people interested in the car and its city once more.
Social media is used for a huge variety of daily tasks, but at its most basic function, it is essentially a way for people to connect with one another. You could become friends with somebody on Facebook, follow a friend on Twitter, or check out a business contact on Linkedin. It’s all about people. Even though most of the platforms and tools are very simple to understand, there are a number of more advances features, tools and dedicated apps that can help you connect, which is what we are looking at today.
Social media has revolutionised how we contact and interact with the world. If older mediums like the telephone allowed for long range communication, social media has broken down these barriers, allowing you to connect with anyone from around the world. The landscape has changed and making connections is no longer defined by location. Following and starting conversations with people is easier than ever and starting a friendship with those specialising in your area of expertise is only a tweet or comment away.
It’s because of this that social discovery has been given due prominence among certain sites. Use an app or log onto a site and you will be asked if you want to source friends and contacts from your email account, your other social media accounts and if you’re using your smartphone, your address book. Discovery is currently the focus for social media and this is reflected on Facebook itself, which introduced subscriptions as a way of bringing together those who may not have mutual friends or reasons to connect personally, making it more similar to Twitter and is currently the basis for Google+’s circles.
This isn’t just limited to these social media sites, however. Many apps, services and startups are using the data found here to further refine this process and connect people in different ways and provide new ways to interact with existing connections and uncover users you mightn’t have considered before.
Making & Maintaining Connections
Unless, you’re very stringent, chances are you don’t know everyone that you’re following, but would like to communicate with them more. While conversations should always be organic, the good thing is that you can do some preparation first before you start making the effort.
Regularly update & contribute
You want to give people a reason to follow you, and the only way you can do that is to post interesting, relevant content regularly. Nobody going to follow an inconsistent or inactive account so if you’re commenting or replying a lot, make sure you don’t neglect your own profile.
Choose your platform
Chances are you will only be able to update two different profiles at best so choose what site is the best fit for what you do and stick with it. Do you focus on business? Then use LinkedIn and join groups relevant to your expertise. If you know there’s an active community on Twitter, then devote your attention to that. A little bit of research can go a long way.
Identify those you want to connect with
Chances are there are people out there who are regarded as experts in your field, be it on a local, national or international level. Find out who they are and what they usually talk about online. Some might focus only on items relating to their profession, while others may variate and post a mixture of serious and lighthearted topics.
Take part in discussion
If you see something being discussed that you can contribute to, don’t dwell on whether your comment will be interesting or not, get into the conversation. You mightn’t always get a response, but that’s ok as you will get a response, provided you not being spammy.
Know where you will get a response
Ok, so this one is more strategic than organic, but you do want to be noticed For example, a person like Robert Scoble is very popular on Google+ and Facebook and regularly gets numerous comments whenever he posts something, so the chances of him being able to respond to your comment is rather small. Someone who has a more modest following would be more likely to respond. Build up your relationships bit by bit and before you know it, you will be regularly interacting with those who you though were unreachable.
How Much Can We Really Find Out About Someone?
An increasing number of private and public organizations are starting to run background checks on potential candidates, competitors and people already working within their organization. While it isn’t every company that does thus there are many who have started dabbling with the new tools and services. Here are some of the tools that can be used for social media background checks.
Who Views Your Facebook Profile
Believe it or not, this is one of the most searched terms on the web as people try to discover who can track their browsing habits on Facebook. Given that many people use Facebook to stalk (not literally) their friends and connections, many are worried that people will be able to see their movements on the social network. Despite hundreds of apps and false scams, there is actually no way at all to see who browses your profile on Facebook. It just isn’t possible no matter what you read.
Who Views Your Linkedin Profile
The one social network that does let you see who has been looking at your profile is Linkedin. This allows you to see who is trying to connect with you from a business perspective, who is trying to hire you and lots of other great information. Linkedin has been especially smart though in turning this into a premium feature, which you have to pay for, and many people are now starting to do. You can access it here.
View Profile As
Google+ first introduced this feature last year, but it is now pretty much standard on every single social network if you look for it on your profile. Essentially with some of the privacy settings being so hard to understand, this allows you to see what your profile looks like to others. So trying to hide from your mom or dad on Facebook? Worried about what photos your boss can see? Use the “View profile as” feature to select a connection and see how they see your social media profile. Then adjust privacy settings as desired.
Find Out Who Unfollows You
Nobody ever likes getting unfollowed on Twitter and with hundreds of followers, it can be hard to figure out exactly who is unfollowing you, but thanks to Qwitter, you will be sent an email with the name of the person as soon as they decide to hit that button.
Social Intelligence
This year old start up provides reports on everything that people do on the internet and on their social media profiles, including searching mostly public information. TOS;DR
Fixing the biggest lie on the internet – “I have read and agree to the Terms” – Terms of Service Didn’t Read (TOS;DR) is a new project putting together terms and conditions of all third-party services and highlighting just how they use your data and what conditions they impose when you use the service. The site highlights where services go right and where they fail, so it’s worth checking to see just how much of your information is exposed and what it’s used for.
Connection Apps
If you’re having problems finding new contacts, there are a host of apps out there that will solve that problem. From business to personal to everything else in-between, you will find an app that will suit your requirements. Here’s a brief taster of the type of apps you can find out there. ManageFlitter
For: Twitter Cost: Free, $12 for Pro version
As well as letting you manage your Twitter followers, and schedule tweets to be posted at optimal times, ManageFlitter also lets you find people to follow on the site. You can filter people by location, by keyword, and find those who have either mentioned or retweeted you in recent times. The only problem is that this is only available through the pro version which you will have to pay for the privilege of using it.We Follow
For: Twitter Cost: Free
WeFollow is effectively a giant directory of Twitter users rounded up in the one place. Breaking it down by most influential and by most followers, you can find dozens of new users to follow through keywords, so typing in ‘social media marketing’ will give you more specific results than just technology. You can add yourself to the list and give yourself specific tags so that other Twitter users can find you.Sonar
Sonar gives an immediate social media background check on everyone in your immediate vicinity by compiling data from Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you recognise someone (but can’t quite place the face) or just like the look of somebody at a bar or function, Sonar will give you a headstart and some potential ice breakers through mining their social media activity. This is a seemingly catch-all method of making connections, even if it definitely veers in stalker territory, but hey, that’s your risk to take.Highlight
For: iOS Cost: Free
Highlight is quite a passive, ambient app that works away as you go about your day. Highlight will monitor the people around you, bringing social media information about them to your phone. This app will also notify you when friends of yours are nearby and generally help you make and renew social connections. Highlight makes it easier to turn mutual friends and interesting passers-by into actual friends, again, at your own risk.Xobni Smartr Contacts
For: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Gmail, Outlook Cost: Free
Smartr Contacts is an address book app that takes all your contacts from your social media profiles and groups them together into the one place. With a nice interface and a handy tutorial to get up to speed (while the app is fetching contact info), Smartr Contacts’s effort is more versatile than iOS’ native phone book, and automatically updates when it detects phone numbers and email addresses. You have to set up an account at Xobni.com (the group who created the app), but once that’s done, you’re free to update your contact list.
Situationist brings an element of compliance to the whole “looking up hot strangers” shebang, allowing you to create a profile and upload a profile picture for fellow Situationist users and strangers to view. Users also list a few quirky ice-breakers in their Situationist profile, such as “hug me for exactly 5 seconds” or “Compliment me on my haircut”. The app is moderated to keep it from getting too seedy and is supposed to add “an unpredictable thrill to everyday life,” according to the app’s creators, who are inspired by the Marxist avant-garde, of course. As a result it is not available on the iPhone App store, revolution!
Continuing the whole personal connection theme (that’s how we’re phrasing it), LikeBright aims to connect friends with friends through the power of Facebook. All of your Facebook friends’ connections are on display and if there’s someone you would like to meet, you can let them know. To try and not make it creepy, those who are selected by users are told that someone is interested, but you won’t be shown. Instead, it gives them a list of people to choose from and if they choose your profile, you can then arrange the details from there.
In addition to connecting you with surrounding strangers on Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, Ban.jo also uses Gowalla and Instagram. Much like the above applications, it will alert you when friends are nearby so you can make plans, but a helpful map feature is included, allowing you to chart exactly where friends are, etc. Realistically, Ban.jo is more focused on your current friends and allows your to surf their social media profiles while also viewing the map feature in a split-screen format. It is a helpful way of translating social media into the real world that is cleanly presented and easy to navigate.
By using the Glassdoor app for Facebook, you can scan your friend list for basic professional information. If a friend or acquaintance of yours works at a company, Glassdoor will tell you via one of its company pages – Facebook friends who are working or have worked there will be listed on such a page. Glassdoor bases itself on the belief that who you know is more important than what you know when it comes to finding a job.
The database is filled with reviews and salary information to give you the inside scoop on your favoured companies, and anonymity is said to be guaranteed, so you can be honest as possible when evaluating your own salary or employer. By using Glassdoor’s Inside Connections, you can leverage your address book to further your career ambitions.
When we stop to think about the ways technology has impacted our lives, the obvious ones like the workplace, entertainment and how we learn and consume information comes to mind. But what we don’t realise is just how much it has affected our personal space. With more and more people in the world, there’s less space to work with and so more efficient means of using this space is needed.
Of all these spaces, the kitchen has undergone the greatest change. What was the home of cookbooks and large unwieldy stoves has now become sleeker and better designed. Now, you’re more likely to see iPads and other devices helping you with your cooking, brewing coffee for you and room temperature. Also, the introduction of tablets into the kitchen has meant anyone has access to thousands of recipes and can become a competent cook in their own right.
Below, we gathered the best ways to take advantage of this as well as giving you a glimpse into what might feature in the kitchen of the future.
Concept Designs
Renewable energy kitchen
The Philips design Proves project designed this concept kitchen,which is designed to cut the environmental impact our kitchens have and convert waste into energy. The waste material, which can come in the form of vegetable scraps among other things, is collected, burned and fed to a cooking range and gas mantle lights.
This may be a concept device, but it shows the direction that technology is going down that this might be a feature. The ‘Innovative Laser Device for Cutting of Foodstuff,’ created by Andrey Kokorin, would have cooks placing foods in a spherical pod to be cut into custom segments using lasers. The device was entered in this year’s James Dyson Award.
Mobile Induction Heat Plate
If you’re out and about, you can use this device to cook food, using your smartphone as a remote control. Using NFC-tags to provide instructions, your smartphone also remembers what and how you previously cooked.
Prisma Toncelli Kitchen
Italian company Toncelli Kitchens created a high-tech kitchen worktop allowing you to eat and cook while using your tablet. With a Samsung Galaxy tablet fitted into the kitchen counter, the tablet allows users to control kitchen functions such as adjusting cooking temperature and fridge temperature among other things.
A smart cooker that’s activated solely by touch. The hobs automatically recognise how large pots or pans are and adjusts the hobs to cope with this.
Retractable Kitchen Bench
If you’re tight for space, web developer Tim Thaler created a motorized retractable kitchen island, all controlled by using your iPhone. Pretty handy but expensive to put together, reportedly costing somewhere around the region of $4,000.
So you want to go the extra mile and make your kitchen stand out from all the other normal kitchens out there, or you just want some handy gadgets or tools to make things more efficient, well read on.
A built-in coffee maker that is controlled entirely from your iPhone or iPad. Brewing coffee that is up to barista standards, you can even add hot chocolate as well as juices to create a hot and cold drinks menu, all completely hidden away.
Effectively a large screen 32″ HD tablet built into your living room table, this one from Australian company, Touchscreen Solutions, lets you browse the web, read the newspaper online or browse your documents. You also have the option to add a wireless keyboard and mouse, a DVD/blu-ray, webcam, headphones and microphones to enhance the experience.
If you regularly refer to your iPad for recipes but have nowhere to put it, then it’s worth getting a stand so you can place it. The Belkin chef stand comes with a stylus that lets you browse recipes and the web without having to touch the screen, which is handy if you don’t want to get the screen messy. Belkin also has a kitchen cabinet mount which lets you hang your iPad on a cabinet or shelf.
We’re getting to the point where we can use our smartphones to control every aspect of our lives. This thermostat lets you to control the temperature of your house remotely or manually when you’re home. The clever bit is that this can program itself by tracking the temperature settings that you use over a week and change the temperature based on when you change it yourself.
If getting a stylus isn’t possible, you can opt for this cheaper alternative. Covering your iPad with a clear plastic sleeve and sealing, you can prevent flour, oil or any foodstuff from staining your beloved tablet. Heineken BeerTender
If you’ve come home after a long week and you need something a little bit stronger to take the edge off, you could do worse than install one of these in your kitchen. Storing five litres of beer at serving temperature of 38 degrees, the BeerTender comes with a LED display keeping you updated to how much beer is left and the temperature it’s being served.
Foodily is only compatible with Apple devices, but it is a useful little app, and it’s free to boot. The app has a greater social element than most others would, perhaps, encouraging you and your friends to share tips and recipes and allowing you to compile the best and most popular user-uploaded recipes that the Foodily community has to offer. Your can fill your daily feed with the latest recipes from top chefs or you can specify it to match your foodie interests, all before you decide to share your endeavours with your friends and Foodily users.
Image originally from stayyounggodancing.wordpress.com
How to Cook Everything For: iPhone, iPad Cost: $9.99
How to Cook Everything does its best to live up to its ambitious title and is one of the most comprehensive, in-depth and cookery knowledgeable apps on the market. From the mind of the New York Times‘ Mark Bitman, How to Cook Everything houses over 2,000 recipes; it should prove inexhaustible and easy to use for the average user as everything is explained in simple terms and the app has over 400 illustrations. It is optimised to reflect the cooking experience and there are many helpful details – the display will never dim while you are cooking and recipes are easily bookmarked, for instance – and it just seems to have everything covered.
Zolmo’s easy recipe app, endorsed by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, has a total of 60 recipes for you to learn and try out for yourself. Oliver gives step-by-step instructions accompanying video and photo to guide users through the process, and there are tips about ingredients, equipment and little shortcuts littered across the app. The shopping list feature will help you in your preparation, and the app is well-designed and easy to use, with a clean yet homely aesthetic that is intent on making this app as easy to navigate as possible and teaching amateur chefs a few key recipes. The app has not been updated since January, but its original content is sufficient. iGrill For: iPhone, iPad Cost: Free, actual iGrill: $79.99
iGrill is a wireless meat thermometer that will allow you to monitor the temperature of your food from up to 200 ft away, as it is cooking in the oven. It is bluetooth-enabled with multiple probes (that are easily stored after usage) so you can keep track of a few different dishes at once. You will be required to buy the actual monitor at a steep cost of $79.99, but the iGrill app will give you the time to do other things as your meals cook and give you peace of mind when you cannot afford to be stood next to your oven or grill barbecue for the duration of the cook.
The AG Wine Guide is more like a wine encyclopedia than anything. It has detailed guides to all the distinguished and popular wine-producing regions, and its simple interface will enable users to become wine experts in no time at all. It is an intelligent app that will expertly advise you on what wine you should choose to complement your meal. Wine is an intimidating subject that can be rife with snobbery and navel-gazing, but AG do their best to make it less intimidating. Also, his app also knows everything you would ever need/want to know about grapes, so there’s that.
Everybody can read a recipe book, and yet not everybody can cook – something must be getting lost in translation, and this is where Ratio comes in. Not only does ratio give simple recipes, but it puts a greater precedence on the measurements and, of course, the ratios of your ingredients, so as to ensure that you will have consistent success when cooking. Its dedication to the numbers may seem impractical at points (who measures eggs in volume?) and it may boil cookery down to a formula rather than an art in some minds, but it is especially helpful to first-time cooks and those who just don’t get cooking.
Some of you may want to step beyond a dumbed-down recipe book and add a more professional element to your repertoire, and at nearly $50, The Professional Chef certainly costs as such, but it provides a true education in the culinary arts. The app contains 850 recipes and 750 images, but its interactive features and tips are what will really enable you to raise your game in the kitchen, and provide knowledge that only top chefs could possibly administer. Every part of this app, from the guides to the design, is top-notch, and the attention to detail is astonishing. This is a premier app and a must for iPad users who want to start taking cookery seriously.
BigOven For: iPhone, Android Cost: Free
Much like How to Cook Everything, BigOven’s database is tireless, but BigOven is even more so. With over 250,000 recipes, you will likely never get to discover the very depths of BigOven’s knowledge, but that doesn’t matter as BigOven has an extremely competent search feature, so you can find any particular dish that may pique your interest; it even gives ideas for creatively disposing of your leftovers. You can add your own recipes, rater others’ or share them with your friends; either way, you’re unlikely to become bored with BigOven any time soon.
Gordon Ramsay Cook With Me HD For; iPhone, iPad Cost: £5.49/$4.99
The sweariest chef going has his own Apple compatible app for you to enjoy as well, and it comes with HD video, ingredients lists, step by steps and shopping lists to make your culinary experience as easy as possible. There are visual aids where possible and a cacophony of great recipes for you to try out, even if you have no experience in the kitchen whatsoever. Everything is clearly designed and the text is very large, so you can just put your iPad on a stand and get going as soon as possible.
Cooking Tutorials
So you have the equipment, the apps and the gadgets, but you might want to find inspiration or just admire other people’s recipes. Thankfully, there are numerous sites that provide recipes and guides about cooking better on the Web. Even if you’re not interested in cooking, you will certainly enjoy looking at photos of the numerous recipes that are on display.
The online video cooking school, Rouxbe provides you with high-quality instructional cooking videos and breaks them down into easy to understand step-by-step guide so you can focus on getting the basic skills right. This is handy when you want to go through a specific step again without having to drag a slider-bar around to find the start.
The most popular cooking website out there, AllRecipies is a brilliant resource for cooks of all levels. With a quick and easy section for beginners to video tutorials, it should be your first stop whenever you’re trying something new.
The best way to think about Plummelo is that it’s a search engine for recipes. If you want to make something from specific ingredients, you can ask the site to give you suggestions. You can also search dishes by location, courses and difficulty.
If you’re looking for delicious recipes to admire and look at, then Open Source Food has thousands of recipes to choose from. All recipes come from its members and is updated regularly, bringing food-lovers together.
A handy food site which focuses on catching your attention through stunning photos of recipes and cooking. All the images are crowdsourced so while TasteSpotting has its own blog, it also takes in recipes and dishes from other sites. A handy reference for when you want to mix things up, or just look at some amazing food.
When you reach the stage where you want to learn some advanced skills, Epicurious has numerous guides covering every area you can think of. From seasoning to quick recipes, it also has a regular section where some of the top chefs give advice and tips on preparing dishes.
Another great website following the same presentation style as TasteSpotting. The emphasis here is on sharing and commenting as each item is presented in the same way as Instagram where you can like and bookmark certain recipes.
Because not everyone is a meat eater, The Vegan Stoner is stylish and brilliantly presented make cooking a cinch, photos are crisps, ingredients are presented as mini- cartoons, and the step-by-step guide is incredibly easy to follow.
Always helpful and never Stone Soup only gives recipes that use no more than five ingredients and provides handy tips for those who are living on a budget, but don’t want to sacrifice quality.
Advertisers are having to become more and more innovative to capture the public’s attention, and bus shelters are a popular spot for them to deploy the best and brightest ideas. Many companies recognise bus shelters as an important spot for ambient advertising as consumers can be sat around for a long time and need something to keep them occupied and dispel boredom.
This list of 100 bus shelter adverts highlight the ads that are most alluring, funny, creative and eye-catching from around the world. Some are decorative, some make you think and some just mess around with bus shelters in crazy and dumb-founding ways.
PlayStation 2
Agency: Unknown
This Malaysian bus stop is sure to have made a few commuters late for work back in the day, as it is covered bubble wrap. And who can resist bubble wrap? The bubbles were covered in PlayStation 2 buttons (triangles, crosses, circles and squares), marking the cross-section between ambient advertising and gaming practice.[Via WalYou]
Quicksilver
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi
Extreme sports clothing Quicksilver attached a quarter pipe skateboarding ramp to the side of a bus stop in a bid to encourage youths and hooligans into the open as well as to promote their brand.
Formula 1 has been growing in Asia and the number of Grand Prix races held in the Far East has grown in the past few years; this bus station was augmented to promote the Singapore Grand Prix and is decorated in the style of chequered flags, with a model F1 car on top.
Brazilian soft drinks company Guaraná Antarctica really got in the mood for the last World Cup, replacing bus shelters across São Paulo with actual goals. Gimmicky, but this surely played into the national mood.
We’re not really sure what this ad is trying to say about the Wonderbra, but it is certainly eye-catching. Just be careful around glass when you’re wearing one in the future.
Who is Marge Simpson without her distinctive tower of blue hair? The Comedy Channel clearly think that the Simpson family matriarch would be somewhat lacking without it, so they’ve defied the dimensional restrictions levied upon them by Canada’s bus stops to promote The Simpsons in syndication.[Via La Criatura Creativa]
McDonalds
Agency: DDB, Stockholm
This advertisement for the Golden Arches is sure to spark curiosity and engage commuters, and it’s a bit clever too. Solve the puzzle and find the message – then, maybe go to McDonalds and get a coffee.
These Swedish ads for Heinz ketchup are not the most original – we’ve seen plenty of these kinds of ‘half-full container’ ads across the internet – but the agency has taken note of the larger scale and filled it with full-sized tomatoes. They’re most likely fake, but this is still kind of quirky.
Agency: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Canada, Starcom Worldwide, and Astral Media Outdoor
Adverts for this Pixar classic without balloons would be somewhat pointless and far less colourful, so actual balloons, attached to bus shelters, are an original way of extending this classic promotional image beyond the parameters of the traditional bus shelter ad.
Australia Post’s ‘Personalise Your Post’ campaign turns a mirror to commuters nationwide, quite literally. If you’re bored at an Australian bus stop, take a second to consider what you’d look like on a stamp.
This expansive ambient advertisement transforms a bus stop into an over grill. We’re not sure if it will warm people up on cold winter nights as they wait for their bus home, but it certainly looks great.
To promote Colormagic, a detergent that protects colors from fading out, Perwoll created a colour-blindness test to be displayed at bus stops. At its centre is a bottle of Colormagic, made out of rolled up socks and clothing, that may take a few seconds to find.
Coca-Cola has installed vending machines at bus stops in a clever ploy that spread their brand excuses and gives consumers a new way to buy the soft drink.[Via Crooked Brains]
National Geographic
Agency: Unknown
This partly translucent National Geographic bus shelter ad is visually striking and is sure to capture the attention of passers-by and give them a taste of the kind of visually-striking images broadcast on the National Geographic television channel.
The Discovery Channel gave people the chance to become an astronaut for a few seconds; you just put your face in the hole and take a picture. A quick, fun way of getting the message across.
Absolut pushed the boat out and full redesigned an entire bus stop to push their new brand of lemon vodka, complete with comfy seats and a bushel of lemons on the roof.
The interactive example of ambient advertising plays on the how adorable you find golden Labrador puppies, so it is a pretty sure bet that most will find this extremely effective.[Via w5blog]
March Against the Terrorist Organization FARC
Agency: Sancho BBDO
This ad is creative and required effort on the part of its proponents as they chained themselves to their bus shelter in order to promote their cause and their march. Sure to alert people to their message and turn a few heads.
Israeli cheese manufacturer Tnuva created a new brand of mini Bulgarian cheese and so created a correspondingly tiny bus stop to promote it on. Quirky and fun.
This Indian heat powder company knows hot hot and humid India can get and sympathises with those who have to wait for buses in such, so they fitted a bus stop with an oversized air-cooler to refresh waiting passengers.
Complete with the tagline “Bring Life Anywhere”, Aquario Mania has decked bus stops out with aquariums, filled with swimming, exotic fish. A wonderful way of promoting the aquarium and giving people a taste of what’s to come.
This Lego ad tries its best to blend in with it surroundings by partly recreating them with Lego, but they can’t resist a bit of an imagination and throw in a couple of Lego monsters to excite any younger passers-by.[Via Ads of the World]
Specsavers
Agency: Smart
Specsavers have a popular slogan in the form of “You should’ve gone to…” and this ad shows how they are using clever visuals to recycle it. In this case, a moped has been “driven through” a bus stop.[Via Ads of the World]
Homeplus Tesco Virtual Store
Agency: Cheil Worldwide
Have you ever sat at a bus stop and wondered where you’re going to find the time to do your weekly shop? No worries, Tesco in South Korea are allowing you to get it over with as you wait for your bus. More ambient shopping than advertisement.
What better way is there for a fish company to promote the freshness of their fish than to give examples? Fische Franke filled advertisement boards with water and fresh fish just to highlight how fresh their product is.
Ikea, quite simply, put one of their sofas and print advertisement at a Parisian bus stop. Quite a change from a hard, plastic bench that was surely much appreciated. A happy surprise for Paris’ commuters.
To promote Streetview, Google turned a bus shelter into web browsing tab. The shelter is transparent so it appears the scene behind is a Streetview image, and it is completed by the inset map and Google logo.
Fitness First
Agency: Unknown
At one particular shelter advertising health club Fitness First, commuters in Holland could sit down on the bench and have their (or a group’s) weight measured. It’s unclear whether it convinced/guilted people into joining the gym or not, but it’s certainly raises a giggle.
Touchscreens will feature regularly in this list, but Yahoo! set the standard pretty high with their effort. Setting up shelters across San Francisco, commuters could play games and compete against other neighborhoods to see which one was the best.
McDonald’s Steaming Coffee
Agency: Unknown
To convince commuters to avail of their free coffee offer during breakfast, McDonald’s installed a steam machine into bus shelters which activated every so often. The effect was that it showed the coffee in display steaming which was bound to catch attention.
Amnesty International
Agency: Jung Von Matt, Germany
Proof that not all ads have to be quirky or funny, some can carry a serious message effectively. In Hamburg, commuters would be greeted by a normal ad showing a couple together. However, a hidden camera spots when commuters aren’t looking. When it does, it changes the image to a scene of domestic violence. A powerful message made more poignant by its tagline, “It happens when nobody is watching.”
To promote the message of saving energy, the world’s largest energy saving lightbulb manufacturers created this Cape Town bus shelter which only lights up when someone sits down on its bench.
This shelter provided commuters with three USB ports so they could recharge their smartphones, iPods, or other electronic devices. The ad was to promote Glaceau’s vitamin water which claims that it will leave you revitalised after drinking it.
How do you convince people to book flights and go on holidays? Let them know how cold it is so that they’ll want to travel to someplace warmer. That’s what Norwegian Air Shuttle did with their campaign, setting up digital thermometers in bus shelters for this very purpose.
Following the theme of the last ad, this is either really clever or just a cruel way to tease people. In New Zealand, commuters were given the temperature of Fiji as a way of convincing them to book flights there.
Digital canvasses were installed around the German city of Hamburg, and anyone with a Bluetooth phone could use it to spray their own graffiti. The campaign was to help promote fashion designer Marc Ecko’s clothing range.
To promote the launch of its new Chocolate handsets, LGE installed five touchscreens in London, Manchester and Glasgow. The devices featured information about LGE’s new products as well as trailers for the James Cameron film Avatar, which was due for release at the time.
Channel TEN
Agency: MarketForce, Australia
Promoting Big Brother Australia back in 2008, 20 bus shelters were fitted with Bluetooth transmitters across the city of Perth. Any users within range of the shelter would get an anonymous text saying that they were being watched at the bus stop they visited. If that sounds creepy, users got a second text 30-40 seconds later revealing the nature of the text and an advert for the show.
A fun campaign to promote the odder aspects of science, this shelter had a sneezing machine fitted in which, when the button was pressed, would squirt out some water and provide a voiceover. Thankfully, the water was harmless.
Australia Department of Environment and Conservation
Agency: Marketforce Perth
To acknowledge those who opted for public transport instead of driving their own cars, Australia’s Department of Environment and Conservation set up bus shelters which gave a round of applause whenever someone sat down on the bench.
Designed for bored commuters, Cadbury followed Yahoo!’s example by creating their own touchscreen game, ‘Splat the Egg,’ which is exactly as it sounds.
Nokia NSeries
Agency: JCDecaux
Another interactive ad, this time from Nokia promoting its Nseries phones back in 2009. At the time, the campaign gained interest with it boasting 261,847 ‘hits.’ It is fun hearing those being interviewed saying that it’s ‘current’ and ‘amazing’ though, showing that hindsight is such a wonderful thing.
HMV – Virtual Store
Agency: Unknown
UK commuters were given the opportunity to purchase DVD while waiting for the bus. Through the use of QR codes, they could scan and purchase them, where they would be later delivered to their homes.
If you remember the Evian rollerskating babies (or more likely, struggled to forget about them), they continued the campaign by setting up interactive touchscreens across U.S. cities.
3M
Agency: Unknown
How do you promote industrial strength security glass? Create a shelter with $3 million placed inside it and challenge people to break it open. The reality was that only the $50 on top were real, but that doesn’t make this any less clever.
American TV station, Spike TV decided to brighten up U.S. bus shelters by installing some colourful lightsaber displays. The installation was to promote Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, when it became the first basic-cable channel in the U.S. to air all six Star Wars movies.
To warm up commuters and tempt them to book flights to 78 summer destinations, Air Asia built heating units into three shelters located in Sydney.
Mr Kipling
Agency: 101 London
A cake dispensing machine set up in 19 different locations in England. Lesson: If you’re promoting something, free cake works wonders.
McCain Foods
Agency: Beattie McGuinness Bungay
A smart campaign where a fibreglass 3D potato was installed. When you pressed a button on the ad, a hidden heating element warms the potato and releases the aroma of an oven-baked jacket potato around the bus shelter.
Making the wait for a bus that bit more fun, Bruno Taylor installed swings at numerous London bus stops. It’s not exactly advertising, but still a creative way of looking at familiar things.
The Salvation Army in Canada created a series of ads featuring homeless people reaching out for necessities such as milk and blankets. What made it effective is that the objects in question were real and located at the top of the bus stop. It also brought the same principal to supermarkets.
This Coca-Cola ad was printed on Velcro so that when people interacted with it, their clothes would stick. This was to show that Coca-Cola’s grip bottle makes sure you won’t drop it as easily.
Promoting its coverage of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, etv created this glass-shattering ad.
Rubbish Since Monday
Agency: Unknown
To show how much waste we generate weekly, this bus stop ad was filled up with rubbish every day until it filled the entire board.
Science Alberta
Agency: MacLaren McCann, Canada
Asking the question of invisibility, this ad makes it look like nobody is at the bus stop, but walking closer shows that what you originally saw was just a poster.
With discarded clothes near the bus stop, this ad makes it look like the person in the photo has escaped to a much warmer climate and urges you to do the same.
Je*s Jeans
Agency: Bruketa@Zinic, Croatia
The blurb reads: “At this moment, your bum is completely exposed. If it were a sexy pair of jeans, it would attract attention all the time!
Highlighting the purity of its vodka, Absolut got three artists to create pieces of art formed only from folds. No ink or chlorine was used and only 100% cellulose paper was used. These were then installed in bus shelters around Paris.
This bus shelter measured how load commuters are by measuring the decibel count at each bus stop. This was to promote the Lithuanian festival ‘Eurobasket 2011.’
Transforming the bus shelter into a dog shelter, commuters were made aware of the conditions homeless dogs are living under and hopefully convince them to take part in the Pedigree Adoption Program.
To promote their new fruit smoothie range, McDonalds turned a traditional ad into a giant 3D strawberry, mimicking the look and feel of a real strawberry.
Not a campaign per se, but still pretty cool. Dubai currently has 900 air-conditioned bus shelters in the city and this video shows the first batch being introduced as far back as 2008.
Foundation Abbe Pierre
Agency: Unknown
You wouldn’t think it, but this campaign shows that some people live in dwellings that are barely the size of a bus shelter.
A brilliant piece of marketing here. To highlight the fact that guide dogs let their owners make their way round as if they can see, this ad only uses the image of a transparent dog to get the point across.
To show that they have zero tolerance against graffiti art, shelters promoting the graffiti inspired Adidas Cope collection were tagged by the organisation.
Using the same principle as the Amnesty International ad mentioned earlier, Zaps’ add uses a camera to see if people are looking at it. When they are, the ad is clean, but when they’re not, cockroaches appear.
Highlighting the plight of homelessness, commuters who sat in this bus stop were greeted by a cardboard roof and a message alerting them to the problem many homeless people face. The ad was made for United Way of Greater Milwaukee.
A brilliantly clever campaign where, to help raise interest in pursuing a career in public health, commuters were asked to plug their headphones into the stethoscope provided to hear a patient’s heart.
Over the past year, Facebook has made drastic changes to its site. From the introduction of Timeline for personal and brand pages to the introduction of the subscribe button, the platform has undergone significant changes. These changes has turned Facebook from a place to connect with friends into a multimedia portal, with journalists and multimedia organisations placing greater importance on the site..
The subscribe button has helped quite a bit in getting high-profile journalists to use Facebook over other sites, but for those starting out or trying to better engage with readers, there are a number of ways to help you engage with readers, and develop your presence on the site.
Profile Vs Page
There are pros and cons to choosing whether you use your profile or create a page. While profiles already give you access to your friends, Facebook pages does give you access to analytics, where you can find out what demographics like your page and what location they’re based among other things.
Also, you can target status updates or posts to these demographics, which is useful if you’re dealing with a local story. However, the problem is that in creating a page, you’re starting from scratch so a lot of self-promotion would be needed to make people aware it exists.
Subscriptions
Turn on subscriptions
By turning on subscriptions, unknown users can view your public content freely. Subscriptions divide your status updates, photos and general activity into public and private categories, so you can share your work and professional links with the world and yet keep your personal or more colloquial updates from going beyond close friends and real-life acquaintances.
Facebook is a social medium to be shared by friends, but subscriptions allow you to use the sites popularity to help share your journalistic content. It’s quite simple: go into ‘Account Settings’, click on the subscriptions tab and tick the box to turn them on, and you can start using Facebook for your working life as well as your social life.
Subscribe button
More for your personal blog or main site, Facebook has numerous widgets that allow you to install a subscribe button onto the site. Handy for building up page and brand awareness.
Subscriber settings
While you know how subscriptions work, you mightn’t realise that you can customise what subscribers can and cannot do. Such options include allowing users to subscribe in the first place, who can comment and what subscriber updates you should be notified about.
Lists & Curation
Filter your feed
Feeds tend to have too much filler these days as brands take up space with massive photos and your Facebook friends get marginalised to make space for them. You can manually filter out annoying people and pages and therefore focus on the people that matter to you, whether they are friends or fellow professionals.
It will take a bit of effort to streamline your feed to your specifications, and you can do this by unliking/unfriending or simply clicking next to a post in your news feed and choosing to hide all posts from this friend/user in future. It will most likely take a while to get it right, but you will have filtered out a lot of noise at that point, leaving yourself open to only important and wanted updates – social and journalistic.
Makes lists based on interests
Interest lists are a simple way of compiling posts, pages and people into one easily-digested feed. It is certain that there are already many interest feeds on Facebook that overlap with your interests, so that saves you the hassle of creating one yourself.
Pre-existing interest lists can also be particularly specific, so you can really focus on the aspects of a profession or business that matter to you most and keep up to date with the most important figures in every field.
Follow other journalists
Much like interest lists, people/friend lists help you to compartmentalise your news feed along certain criteria lines. By creating lists of fellow journalists, you can easily keep up to date with your colleagues and peers, what they’re doing, what they’re writing, etc.
It’s an easy way of filtering everybody else out of your feed and allowing yourself to focus on fellow journalists and their Facebook activity, whether it is purely for professional purposes or just keep them all in the one place, so you can read their statuses and click through their photos as they arrive in your feed.
Follow staff/colleagues
If you want to create your own list for others to follow, a good place to start is to create a subscription list featuring staff members or your colleagues. Certain media outlets like Buzzfeed and CNN have already done this and provided your colleagues have already activated subscriptions, it’s a good way to get the message across.
Follow your competition
If you want to see how other outlets are covering certain stories, you could do worse than to create a list solely for that purpose. This could be more to build up your knowledge about a specific area and bringing you up to speed with what’s going on.
If you’re interested in Apple, you can create a list of Apple reporters to learn more and see how they cover the topic. Also, it brings all their material to the one place so you don’t have to resort to Google searches every time you want an update.
Compile a list of experts
Relating to the last entry, bringing those from the top into the one feed can be a useful way to gather sources or get ideas for stories. If you’re writing a piece about social media and journalism, you can get in touch with someone in your list who covers said topic and add to your story.
Follow industries
If your job requires you to keep up with industry and brands, creating a list dedicated to them is a simple way of bringing their updates to the one place so you can keep tabs of official updates.
Use social reading apps
Trending articles tend to take up a significant amount of space in a Facebook news feed from day-to-day because so many people are reading content via social reading apps. Obviously, the Guardian is the worldwide leader when it comes to integrating social media with journalism, and such apps are a simple way of spreading articles quickly, even if it is an advantage solely held by the largest media outlets.
Big news sites have found their readership dropping with the rise social reading apps on Facebook, proving that they are growing in stature and influence.
Storify
Popular among journalists in curating and bringing together social media sources to report a story, Facebook is one of many sources that you can use to develop your story. Of course, you also have the option of sharing your Storify post on Facebook through your page or profile.
Timeline archive
While you can do this with your own profile, it’s handier if you’re using a Facebook page instead. If you’re covering an event or story that will last a while, you can create an archive by creating a Facebook page dedicated to that story and adding links chronologically.
You can add previous events to it if the event has developed significantly, but you could create a good resource dedicated to it if done properly. The only problem with this is that may take a bit of time to put together, especially if you want to make it comprehensive.
Profile & Posting
Update feeds manually
Whether you use your profile or page, it’s better to include some kind of personal update instead of automating posts. Not only does it look better, but adding a personal touch will result in more engagement. Besides, nobody wants to engage with a robot so adding your views or opinions to a story will show that you’ve put thought into the topic and will give users more incentive to respond.
Instagram & Facebook Camera
A picture can paint a thousand words and if you want a post that will definitely be engaged with, images are the best way to go about it. As well as showing your subscribers and fans what’s happening, you can post it onto Instagram (and cross-post via Facebook and Twitter to further spread your message if the image is sufficient on its own), or use Facebook camera and give your image a status update.
Also, you can tag the photo’s location on both Instagram and Facebook photos to give your photo extra context. Sharing videos also follows the same concept.
Location settings
Covered earlier with Instagram and Facebook camera, you can also tag posts when you’re using your mobile settings to show where they were posted from, or from your desktop if you want to update old photos and images. This is useful if you want to add context to your status update or any old posts you may have missed.
Provide teasers for stories
If you’re working on a story, but want to build up anticipation for it, it’s a good idea to let your followers/fans know what you’re doing. That way, those who do care about the piece will look for it once it’s up live.
Know when to post
If you’re posting something online that isn’t time sensitive, you want to make sure that as many people see your post. As a rule, posting your update. According to bit.ly, Wednesday at 3pm is the best time to post although any time between 11am to 4pm is a good time for posting. This is important if you want to give your post the best possible chance for interaction.
Edit before posting link
When you’re posting a link onto your page, remember you can edit the heading and blurb underneath as well as choose the thumbnail. This is handy if you want to give the link a catchier heading, or add different details to the blurb. Remember that once you post, the only way to change the link is to delete it.
Interaction
Sources for stories
If you’re doing research and you’re not really sure where to start, a good way of getting the ball rolling is to post a status update concerning what you’re looking for.
Unlike Twitter, your friends will see your message and will be more likely to respond to your query either directly or at least point you in the right direction. With 950 million users, there’s definitely someone out there who can help you with your query.
Use polls to get instant feedback
Polls are a fun way of attaining user feedback and creating a debate, which can, of course, lead to more sharing of you and your site’s content. Simply create and question and add in a few answers before posting to set the ball rolling.
If it is a particularly inflammatory question or a question based on a divisive issue, then you are likely to provoke a bigger and more passionate response, but you can use polls as a form of evaluation for yourself as well, and learn more about what your readers want from you as a source of journalism.
Private messages
Also, if you’re getting in touch with someone you don’t know, dealing with a sensitive subject or just have a message too long to be a post, then direct messages are a great way of getting in touch. Remember that you can message anyone on Facebook, regardless of whether you or your friends know them or not.
Live stream
Unfortunately, Facebook is removing this feature in October, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be used before this. Simply this plugin lets you add a comment box that updates in real-time. It’s usually alongside the live streaming of events so people watching can chip in with their comments. When October comes, Facebook will replace it with the comments box plugin.
Tagging
Tagging can come in handy if you want to alert a specific group or person to updates, or possibly bring them into the fold if you feel they could add a unique viewpoint to the discussion. Make sure it’s someone who can add value to the discussion and not a random friend.
Crowdsourcing
One person can only cover so much and it’s always possible that certain details will slip through the net. As Facebook is more intimate than other social media sites, asking for subscribers and friends to contribute their views, opinions or advice (if you’re looking for feedback) is a great way to help develop a story. Just don’t rely on it too much, otherwise it will look like you’re letting your subscribers do all the work.
Respond to discussion
Just because you posted something and people responded doesn’t mean it should end there. Make sure you respond to any thoughts, questions or views that might come up. If you have a lot of people responding, then it’s best to be selective, but make sure you show that you’re listening to people’s responses. That’s the most important thing.
Visibility
Public posts
While Twitter and Google+ have their own streams for updates on events, Facebook’s allows you to post items privately or publicly. Most people post status updates and images publicly so you can go into search with your keyword, click the search button and on the left hand side, click on public posts. You’ll see the latest status updates relating to that subject.
Vanity URL
If you want people to find you on Facebook easily, you can change your URL to your own name to make the process faster. If you’re using Facebook pages and you’ve created your first, you can also change that straight away. From your second page onwards, you’re required to have at least 25 fans before you can change.
Public search
You mightn’t realise it, but you can control whether or not your profile appears on any of the major search engines. In settings, you can decide whether you do appear or not so check to see that its activated otherwise you’ll make it harder to be found.
Privacy Settings
When you’re adjusting your subscription settings, you should also consider looking at your privacy settings as well. This is important as it controls whether certain details such as your email, your mobile phone number, and who can send you private messages, who can post on your wall and whether you want to limit viewing old posts (in case you want your personal profile to be more professional).
Profile & Pages
Pinning & favouring posts
If you want to prioritise a post so that it’s the first thing people see, you can pin certain posts by clicking the pencil icon at the top-right hand corner of said post. Pinned posts will stay at the top for a week, or until you pin another post. You can also favourite posts, which will make increase its size so that it covers both the left and right-hand column.
Browsing Facebook
If Facebook’s own search function is too limiting (And let’s face it, it could do with a lot of work), you might want to try out a third-party app. One such example is FBInstant which lets you search Facebook for status updates, related pages and events. It’s slightly more advanced than Facebook’s own search, but if you want a snapshot into what people are talking about, it’s a good place to start.
Page insights
As mentioned earlier, there are pros and cons to whether you use pages or your profile for posting content. One of the main benefits that pages bring is that you have access to insights, which lets you see what demographics engaging with your page, where your fans come from, their main language and what town/city they come from. You can also post targeted updates so that it’s only seen by fans in Europe or those who speak English. Handy if you’re covering a specific event and don’t want to bombard those uninterested with numerous status updates.
View profile as…
IF you’re finding that your profile isn’t being engaged with as much as you would like, it could be that some of your posts aren’t marked as public. If this is the case, click the cog icon beside messages and click ‘view as.’ You will get to see what your profile looks like to the public and your friends and see what posts can be viewed publicly.
Blogging
Add follow buttons to your website
Much as you can add buttons for people to press and recommend certain articles, you can also offer the same option for ‘liking’ the whole site. People tend to surf Facebook more than any other site, and this is a way of ensuring that your site gets their attention as part of their news feed.
Post content and photos to your Facebook page and they will show up in Facebook fan’s feeds, thus giving you another automated outlet and further enabling people to share and spread your content with little encouragement.
Introduce sharing to your website or blog
Facebook is obviously one of the quickest ways to ensure that your content spreads as quickly as possible, and there are simple ways of instantly harnessing their social clout for your website or blog.
If you are registered with WordPress, then you can sync your blog with many social media outlets beyond Facebook (further details below) and automatically post articles to Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. every time you publish. You can also add buttons to every page that give users the option to share articles with a social media platform of their choosing, further promoting interconnectivity.
WordPress plugin
If you have a WordPress blog, you can install a plugin which will allow you to automatically share articles as soon as you post them. Instead of a standard post with link, you can cross-post posts to both your personal pages and any Facebook pages you manage. As well as writing a status update, you can also tag friends and pages when you’re posting so your content can reach more people.
Comment box
As well as being able to cross-post, you can also use Facebook’s comment box within your blog so signed-up users can comment directly. This is handy if you’re concerned about anonymous comments or trolling as it will get users to provide their own profile when posting a comment.
Facebook + Journalists
If you’re looking for more updates or additional advice about using Facebook as a journalistic platform, this is a good resource. Useful if you’re looking for case studies or examples of using the platform.
When you’re juggling different responsibilities and managing sites day-to-day, it can be quite difficult to find the time to research or improve your knowledge about a particular topic. There are a lot of resources out there, but figuring out which ones are worth reading and which ones are best to ignore can be tricky when you have a limited amount of time.
So we decided to compile a quick list of resources you absolutely need if you want to get ahead, A lot of these resources will provide tips, tricks, advice, guides and thoughts that will have you thinking about social media in a different way. Covering the usual suspects (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.), the more advanced guides (SEO, blogging, viral) and everything else in-between, there’s content here that will keep you busy for days, no matter what your priorities are.
– Learn the best SEO practices from the people who designed said search engine in the first place: Google. A comprehensive read that will have you coming back again when you want to brush up on your knowledge. Other guides worth reading include Search Engine Land’s SEO guide and SEOmoz’s guide.
– If the above guides are too dense for you, this is a more straightforward way of learning the best practises for SEO from Words In a Row, Website Helpers and WebConfs.com (The last link is useful as it provides you a scoring system to show which SEO practises work).
– If you want a resource to the biggest marketing blogs in the world, the AdAge Power 150 ranks the best resources using tweets, likes, shares and search engine ratings.
– If you’re having problems understanding Google Analytics and how well your blog is performing, Google itself has provided a step-by-step learning guide, called the online conversion university, to bring you up to speed.
Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be more organised? With so many things happening at once, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s going on. Thankfully, many developers know this and there are numerous apps out there designed to make organisation better, improve your workflow and do everything else in-between. We’ve picked out 50 of the best apps that will certainly help you improve your productivity, no matter where you are.
Social Media Apps
LinkedIn For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost: Free We couldn’t have a productivity list without mentioning the most famous app for professionals. Keep up to date with the latest news from your sector and with your connections wherever you are. It also helps that its perhaps one of the best designed social media apps out there.
Facebook Pages For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost: Free If you’re the admin of a business or brand page, this is essential if you want to keep up with the latest developments and updates relating to your page. Answer posts, measure post performance, access quick analytics and respond to private messages while you’re on the go.
Twitter For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost: Free Less for the social media purposes and more for finding new snippets of information, Twitter can be a treasure trove of information if you use it right. Come across a tweet you find interesting? Bookmark it by using the favorite function, see an article you want to read for later? Save it onto Instapaper and read it later.
Readers
Pulse For: iPhone, iPad Android Cost: Free A beautifully designed news reader, Pulse brings together all your favourite news sources, blogs and social networks and presents them all in one neat and vibrant design.
Flipboard For: iPhone, iPad Android Cost: Free The most popular news reader out there, Flipboard is also another elegant and visual news reader, feels more like you’re reading a digital magazine. The fact that you can link up Flipboard (and Pulse) to your social media accounts only increases its usefulness.
Amazon Kindle For: iPhone, iPad Android
Cost: Free Considering that the Kindle is a mobile reading device, it was pretty obvious that it would eventually make its way to smartphones and tablets. Not content with just giving you a way to read your ebooks, there are a number of different settings to play around with such as Sepia style, which lets your ebook look like a classic book.
Instapaper For: iPhone, iPad Android
Cost: Free Perfect if you come across articles or posts, but just don’t have time to read them, Instapaper lets you save articles you come across for future reading, allowing you to keep track of them until you find the time to read them later. Again, handy if they’re feature articles or important posts that you need to keep updated with
Zite For: iPhone, iPad Android, WP7
Cost: Free The self proclaimed “personalized magazine,” Zite (taken from the word ‘Zeitgeist’ meaning the defining spirit of our times) evaluates those stories floating around the web and picks the ones that best reflect your own personal interests. The more you use it, the more intelligent it gets, so that after a few days, it will perfectly reflect your reading habits.
Organisation
Remember The Milk For: iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry
Cost: Free The original organising app, Remember the Milk takes everything you need to do and presents it in a simple and straightforward interface. Not content with just being an app, you can sync it with Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Siri and Twitter to name a few, making this the omnipresent to-do list.
TeuxDeux For: iPhone
Cost: Free A simplistic, but beautifully designed to-do list app, TeuxDeux doesn’t waste time complicating things. Instead, it presents a very clear list, calendar and lets you mark off any completed tasks.
Clear For: iPhone
Cost: Free Another simple to do-list app, but this time, the results are a lot more colourful. Keeps things simple and to the point, it’s probably the only to-do app that is controlled solely by gestures.
Cheddar For: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free A brilliantly simple app that does exactly what expected of it. Instead of trying to pack it with numerous features, Cheddar just focuses on providing a straightforward experience that’s easy to pick up.
Astrid To Do List For: iPhone, Android
Cost: Free The personal assistant which will always remind you as to what you should be doing, Astrid links up to your browser account to help you keep track of everything you need to do through voice activation (which is more accurate than you’d think), notifications, lists and syncing accounts with friends to help you plan events better. A fun interface also helps make this app stand out from the others.
iDoneThis For: iPhone
Cost: Free Designed for teams to use, iDoneThis is best described as a to-do list for groups. Enter in tasks, mark off completed tasks in the evening and the next day, get an email digest showing you what everyone has achieved, and bask in the glory of completing day-to-day tasks.
Any.DO For: Android
Cost: Free Any.DO is much like a To-do list that is easily synced with all devices so you can gather all your tasks. You can mark tasks off as you go along and shake the screen to remove them once completed. It also responds to voice commands, so you can add and remove tasks by speaking as well.
Storage
Dropbox For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost:Free Cover anything even vaguely related to cloud storage and you’re required to mention Dropbox, and for very good reason too. With 2GB to play around with (and extra 500MB provided you complete a few tasks, sharing files and documents has never been easier
Google Drive For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost: Free A fast rising contender to DropBox, Google newest cloud storage app is planning on taking the limelight away from Dropbox. The two major advantages this has over Dropbox is that it gives you 5GB to start off with and it links up automatically to Google Docs so while it’s not near as popular as its competitor, it could catch up sooner than you think.
Box For: Android Cost: Free Box is much like a mobile version of DropBox in that it allows you to share and view files across devices and between users. There is little lag, so you can view documents instantly and always have your files at your fingertips for when you need them.
EverNote For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost: Free, $5 per month/$40 per year The quintessential organiser app, Evernote lets you store anything anywhere – ideas, images, videos, notes – anything you need to be reminded about, you can save here. Its versatility and ability to take notes while on the move is what makes this app so popular.
Communication
Viber For: iPhone, Android
Cost: Free If you want to focus solely on making free calls, Viber uses your Wi-Fi/3G connection to make calls instead of having to rely on your service provider. Handy if you’ve free 3G data to play around with.
WhatsApp For: iPhone, Android
Cost: Free, €0.79 The popular texting app works the same way as Viber, except you can share audio, videos, images, contacts and your location to flesh out your message. There’s also the scope for group texts too if you want to discuss topics on the move.
Voxer For: iPhone, Android Cost: Free Acting like a walkie talkie app, Voxer lets you record voice messages that your friends and colleagues can later listen to and reply. You can also record yourself voice memos if you feel writing will take too long. Ending messages with “over” optional.
Skype For: iPhone, Android, WP7 Cost: Free Hold calls and meetings wherever you go. Of course, the quality of Skype on your phone really depends on whether you’re connected to a Wi-Fi or not, but it’s certainly an app worth including.
Cloudtact For: iPhone, Android Cost: Free A very handy app that instantly updates all your contacts whenever someone changes their contact info, ensuring that your address book is always up-to-date. You can also hook it up to your Mac address book and your Gmail account, making it more comprehensive than it first seems
Email & Organisation
Sparrow For: iPhone Cost: €2.39 Yes, it has been recently acquired by Google, but if you’re looking for a reliable email provider, Sparrow is still the best example out there for iPhone.
Gmail For: iPhone, Android
Cost: Free The popular email client for obvious reasons, it’s automatically available for Android users, but the Gmail app is worth a look for iOS, despite not being as versatile as Sparrow
Doodle For: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free A scheduler which helps you find the perfect time to hold meetings among a group. Simply create a poll, invite the people you want involved and communicate with them as you decide upon the best times.
Due For: iPhone, iPad Cost: Free A very handy reminder, alarm and timer app that hits a balance between minimalistic and stylish. One interesting feature is that it lets you schedule a task to occur every week, so if you have to meet up with a client every Tuesday at 1pm, Due will arrange that so you never forget.
Documents
Quickoffice Pro HD For: iPhone, iPad, Android Cost: Price differs between smartphone & tablet versions Perhaps the most comprehensive Microsoft Office editing suite you will find for iPad. Alongside editing Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, you can also access, manage and transfer files through Evernote, Google Docs, Dropbox, email and various social media sites as you sift through all your documents. A must have if you regularly use these products.
Google Docs For: iPhone,iPad, Android Cost: Free Considering how much it’s been used worldwide, Google’s cloud sharing document creator was always going to be included. Great for sharing ideas with colleagues and friends, being able to see real-time updates as they happen is great when you’re hammering out ideas or compiling documents.
CloudOn For: iPad, Android Cost: Free CloudOn rather handily allows you to use Microsoft Office programmes (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) on your iPad or Android mobile device and will allow you to sync such files with Box, DropBox or GoogleDocs. It functions as you are used to Office functioning on your desktop and is also equipped with Adobe Reader.
Picsel Smart Office 2 For: iPhone, iPad, Android Cost: €8.99 Another handy office app. A bright and colourful interface with a versatile edit feature (including the ability to view documents in 3D) means that it’s a worthy alternative to Quick Office Pro.
Springpad For: iPhone, iPad, Android The useful app is better thought of as a personal assistant instead of a simple organiser (although it can be used as that), allowing users to discover new content through what they post. Its smart sorting means that it will add extra info whenever you post something. See a gadget you’re interested in, post it and Springpad will look up reviews, prices and gather additional info to help you make a more informed decision.
iA Writer Available: iPhone, iPad Cost: $1.99 The minimalist app is handy for when you need to drown out noise and unwanted distractions. There’s also Focus mode which lets the surrounding text fade into the background so you can just focus on the sentence at hand. Best results is to connect your iPad up to a bluetooth keyboard and work away.
Documents To Go For: Android A decent app which allows you to view any Microsoft office files on your Android device. Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can be viewed on the free version, but there is also a premium version, costing $14.99 at time of writing, which lets you edit files, download view and edit files from Google Docs and transfer files from smartphone to desktop. Not the most visually pleasing app, but it gets the job done
Finances
DashLane For: iPhone Cost: Free Allowing you to make mobile payments faster and safer, Dashlane takes all your payment information and uses it to produce instant checkouts for whatever you’re purchasing online. A time-saver for those who regularly purchase online
Slice For: iPhone, Android (Only in U.S.) Cost: Free Letting you keep track of what you purchase online, keeps your online receipts and places them all in your inbox, so you can organise your purchasing habits.
Scanning & Printing
CamScanner For: iPhone, iTouch, iPad, Android Cost: Free
CamScanner is a cloud-enable app that gives you smartphone’s camera the ability to scan. If you take a picture of a document or chart etc., CamScanner will quickly and efficiently crop the image and save it in .pdf form, ready to be sent and shared worldwide.
Cloud Print For: Android Cost: Free
Success using Google’s CloudPrint is reliant on having a CloudPrint-ready printer at your disposal, but the app ostensibly allows your to print documents from your phone, and it will be able to handle everything from JPEGs to PowerPoint presentations. Simple to use and easy to sync with DropBox.
Reminders & Shortcuts
SwipePad For: Android Cost: Free
Multitasking is a commonality of smartphone usage, and SwipePad aims to make it effortless. With SwipePad, you can configure a menu of shortcuts to your favourite apps with a quick swipe of the screen, and you can fill it with all your favourite apps, so they are easily available at any time.
My WorkClock For: Android Cost: Free
If you have a problem with organisation or are having trouble juggling multiple tasks, the MyWorkClock app may be the app for you. The Android time-keeping app will monitor when you punch in/out, overtime and remind you of deadlines and jobs that aren’t finished yet.
1Password For: iPhone, iPad, Android Cost: Free
Many of us haphazardly use the same password for all our internet sign-ins, which leaves us at risk, but is much easier than having to remember multiple strong passwords. 1Passwordformulates strong passwords for everything, stores them in your web browser, helps you remember them and is easily synced across mobile devices, so all you need to do is remember the master password.
Miscellaneous
Vlingo Virtual Assistant For: Android,Blackberry Cost: Free
Vlingo is Android-compatible answer to Siri, allowing you to control your phone and execute tasks with your voice rather than with your thumbs, though there are supplementary handheld controls. With Vlingo, youcan send texts and emails, voice dial, search the web and get directions among other things, so it’s just as effective as its iPhone counterpart.
AirDisplay For: iPhone, iPad, Android Cost: $9.99/£5.99
AirDisplay turns your mobile device into an external display for desktop, Mac or Windows. It is not really effective enough to move videos between your desktop and mobile, but it is perfectly adequate for moving photos, iTunes, documents browsing windows and conversations between the two completely wirelessly.
Robin For: Android Cost: Free
Currently in beta mode but already capable of many things, Robin is a personal assistant for when you’re driving. With gesture activation, you can ask Robin to update you about anything you can think of. It’s very similar to Siri, but Robin is more versatile and a good alternative to Google Now.
iTranslate For:iPhone Cost: Free, ($1.99 or €1.59 for plus version)
With over 50 languages covered (20 of which have spoken translations), iTranslate is incredibly handy for when you’re abroad, communicating with those from different nationalities or just trying to learn a new language. The free version also offers a number of in-app purchases if you want to upgrade.
DocuSign Ink For: iPhone, iPad, Android, Cost: Free
DocuSign enables professionals to securely send documents between companies for signing, but it alternatively can be used to collect data or payment; it’s an efficient way of conducting important business with electronic signatures and cloud computing. It’s all legally-binding and simple to use, a great innovation.
Tripit For: iPhone, iPad, Android
Cost:Free Tripit is a travel itinerary app available to Apple and Android devices; it takes care of all the notoriously problematic parts of organising a trip away and handles things like directions, reservations, tickets and rentals once you have forwarded them to the app. It recognises upwards of 3,000 different travel-related companies and should see that you no longer have to frantically rush to the airport because you lost your booking reference.
Friday: The Personal Assistant For: Android Cost: FreeThe Dexetra-designed Friday: The Personal Assistant keeps a record of everything you do one your Android phone, from phone calls and texts to photos taken and social media posts, so as to create an easily-searched database of all your activity for when you need it.
Other Devices
There are generally a bunch of different services that do the same thing for every different platform and some that work across all devices. Have a quick search online for something relevant to your own phone, but as you can see from this video it can be as easy as sending a text message as soon as you notice that your phone is lost or stolen.
Protecting Your Web Browsing
Chrome
Chrome’s in-built security measure are reassuringly good as well as astute; the Google browser will redirect you to a warning message before it would allow you onto sites suspected of containing malware or phishing.
These settings are default ,but can be disabled on the wrench menu, and they are further supplemented by ‘sandboxing’ and Google’s regular auto-updates. With the ability to force the SSL, users can only view websites with the https:// prefix if they choose to further increase their phishing protection, which is especially important on sites where personal and banking details are exchanged.
Incognito represents Google’s stealth browser, if you want to keep your history and downloads from being recorded, or are just wary of public Wi-Fi connections, there is a helpful clear data feature for when you want to rid yourself of cookies and any information that Chrome may have collected.
Unlike other major browsers mentioned blow, however, one cannot set Chrome to ‘Do Not Track’ and prevent advertisers from gathering data for targeted ads, although Google want to incorporate such a feature by the end of this year.
Google has separated the browser into components – the browser, renderer and plug-ins – to ensure that Chrome crashes as little as possible and that one of the three crashing will not crash Chrome altogether, and is the pre-eminent web browser with regard to security. Google will continue to bolster Chrome’s security, but its excellence and structural innovation practically negates the need for any additional security plugins.
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is trusted for its reliability and ease of use, but it is not secure as its main competitor, Chrome. However, Mozilla offer several add-ons to embolden Firefox’s security features. With over 13 million downloads, Adblock plus and Adblock Plus Pop-up Add-on make up Firefox’s first line of defence against pop-up advertising and ad windows. No Script is also renowned for its effectiveness; it will only allow plugins such as Java and Flash to run if hosted on a trusted site for fear of click-jacking attacks.
Better Privacy, meanwhile, will protect Firefox from super-cookies, i.e. cookies that cannot be deleted, though it does not work retroactively, of course. Web of Trust accomplishes much the same thing and will warn you before entering any untrustworthy site intent on scamming you or using your details for ill, while Stealther is the Incognito of stealth add-ons and will disable browser history, history, cookies, disc catche, auto-fill forms among many other things.
It is vigilant (perhaps overly so) in maintaining your web browser security while using Firefox. All of these add-ons are easily available through Firefox’s own add-on page and are heartily recommended by Mozilla anyway. Ultimately, Firefox isn’t as security-focused as Chrome, but it is intent on offering users the best supplementary security products available to them even though they cannot build them in like Google have and are produced by independent engineers.
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (IE) is hamstrung by its dependence on ActiveX technology, which is becoming increasing outdated and obsolete, much like IE itself. You can turn ActiveX, though this will prevent you from using sites that rely on ActiveX, of which there are surely some.
Recent editions of IE have allowed users to decide if they want such apps to be enacted at all times or only for certain sites via the SiteLock ATL app, so you can toggle ActiveX on and off as and when it is needed.
IE 9′s SmartScreen Filter is the primary built-in defence against phishing and malware and the introduction of the Tracking List to IE’s latest edition sees that Microsoft has a renewed focus on protecting users from malicious third parties. IE is still the only browser to offer help via email and telephone, but its widespread use makes it more susceptible to security threats and malware.
As IE is still the default browser for company networks, IE Controller is the most useful security app available. Controller allows you to prevent ads, monitor access and log traffic data as well as control ActiveX controls, the execution of scripts and programmes, and requests to restrict and control files. Just to be awkward, however, it is only downloadable as a .zip file.
Safari
For a youth-orientated browser, Safari’s security apps naturally have a social media focus. Apple offer disconnects for Facebook, Twitter and Google+, allowing you to browse the internet without fear of details exchanged with social networking titans being taken by third parties.
The Facebook app is far more comprehensive and offers protection on over a million sites, while the Twitter and Google+ editions will give you a warning before stepping into dodgy territory. Twitter Disconnect only protects on 20% of sites carrying the Twitter widget and the Google app covers a mere 25%. While disconnects aim to protect the user, Ghostery provides the user with intelligence, helping them detect third-party activity and control their interactions with large companies, with regard to scripts and images.
TrafficLight aims to slow you down as little as possible while still extensively bolstering your browser security by partly functioning as part of a cloud network. It will perform a number of checks on various pages and ensures your anti-malware protection is up to scratch.
CookieStumbler is Safari’s main cookie defence and works easily enough. Once downloaded, it will ensure you are not susceptible to cookies; it is unobtrusive and exceedingly simple to use. Much like with Firefox, all of these apps are available on the Safari App store and easy to download right away.
Password Tips
Considering it’s the most basic part of online security, you should put a little bit of thought into using different passwords. Considering the number of different passwords we use, it can be difficult, but while there are password managers apps out there to help you out (found further below), some of you may only need passwords for two or three sites. If that’s the case, keep these rules in mind when you’re thinking up some new passwords.
Avoid repetition
An obvious suggestion, but whatever you do, don’t use the same password for every site you’re signed up to. If someone does manage to hack your account, you can be pretty sure that the rest of them will fall like a house of cards. Make sure they’re different enough to
Mix it up
When creating your passwords, make sure you’re placing different symbols into it so that they’re harder to crack. Looking at the chart below, you can see how much symbols, numbers and even uppercase letters can improve your password security.
Change it regularly
It’s normally good practise to change your settings so that you don’t fall victim to any hacking attempts. A good rule is to change your password every two to three months to keep protection up. Add complex passwords for your smartphone
For iOS, you can give your phone a complex password (one that isn’t four numbers) and use that to strengthen your phone security. Just go into settings, general and then password lock. You will see simple passcode in the centre so disable that to enter a more comprehensive password.
Android phones also have a nine point unlock system which lets you create 389,112 possible combinations so you should be relatively safe through that.
Log off
Another obvious one, but if you leave yourself logged into your profiles and someone else gains access to your computer, then you’ve only yourself to blame. Always log out when you’re finished to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Password Management Apps
Sometimes just having the basics isn’t enough. More often than not, you will need something that will help you keep on top of all the different passwords and accounts that you have active. Here are a quick selection to choose from.
One of the more popular password apps out there, 1Password helps create strong, unique passwords for you, helps you remember them and then stores them in your Web browser, ensuring secure protection as all you need to remember is your own master password. It also uses the cloud to keep 1Password in sync with all your computers and mobile devices. Handy to say the least.
LastPass
Cost: Free (Limited Features) $12 a year
Platform: All desktop and mobile platforms
Another popular password management app. Lasspass is similar to 1Password in that it saves and syncs all your passwords with different devices and browsers. Packed with a whole range of features and the Freeware version means that it’s well worth a try if you’re looking for an alternative
KeePass
Cost: Free
Platform: All desktop browsers
KeePass is an open-source program which for a free app, offers a lot of features. Offering multiple user keys, password groups and database transfer among other things, it certainly punches well above its weight.
Clipperz
Cost: Free
Platform: All desktop browsers
Another free app, except this time Clipperz lets you download a read-only copy of the application and your password data. Storing it as an encrypted HTML document, you can access your account online and access your passwords through your master password.
We’ve been posting a lot of guides, features, lists and other social media content over the last few weeks, but today we decided to do something a little more fun. Since it is almost the weekend, we decided to round up the best iPhone games you can find so you can make that commute shorter or to just help you kill some time. Featuring over 20 varied and addictive games, we’re certain that whether you’re a regular gamer or just like to play something every now and again, you’ll find something here that you’ll enjoy.
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