Articles | Shweta Taneja

March 31, 2014June 16, 2016

Articles written in March

An app for a hobby

Write more, sing a better song, take a spectacular photograph or sketch something quickly. Take your hobby to the next level with these aids

VSCO Cam 3.0

Started by a group of people who love taking pictures, VSCO Cam comes with delightful features and its tools give you manual control over the picture. “I love their presets and find the feature of turning on the flashlight and taking a picture, instead of one-blink flash, really, really useful,” says Naina Redhu, a visual storyteller and photographer based in New Delhi.

The tools provide precision, including fine-tuning, exposure, temperature, contrast, fade and vignette. Once you have tinkered with the image, the app shows you the original and the final.

For quickies, it also has preset packs. Once done, you can share it easily on multiple social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In February, the VSCO Cam app released a new version, fully integrating itself to the VSCO Grid, a free photo publishing platform that has become the ‘it’ place for photographers.

VSCO Cam 3.0, free on Google play and iTunes; in-app purchases, or additional features, Rs.55 onwards.

645 Pro Mk II

Released in June, 645 Pro’s new version is a perfect app to convert your iPhone into a manual camera. The features include real-time ISO, shutter-speed readings, focus, exposure control, real-time GPS data and a choice of histograms. The interface can be customized and you can configure the Shutter Release button to behave the way you want it to. This new version allows you to give an old-style, film-look output and save completely unprocessed image data at the highest quality possible. “With 645 I can shoot TIFF or RAW files from my iPhone which are raw and have higher resolution than a JPEG,” says Aneesh Bhasin, a photographer based in Mumbai. “I have managed to shoot a major professional assignment (for a book) with just my iPhone and this app.”

The app also comes with wow features like Film Modes, inspired by classic film stock from the 1960s, which can be edited, personalized and saved unprocessed to process later on your desktop.

645 Pro Mk II, Rs.220 on iTunes.

Read the complete article here.

Snooze away

World Sleep Day went by on Friday and if you still haven’t figured out the best way to nod your way to dreamland, here are some apps and gadgets that can help

Facebook and Twitter got you addicted to notifications; smartphones have been termed sleep killers; and then there is the addiction to late-night TV. According to a 2012 study published in the journal PLOS ONE, light from the smartphone’s LED screen is responsible for convincing your brain that it’s daytime, turning you into a sleepless zombie. The same gadget, however, can sing you a lullaby, be a sleep doctor, even remind you when you need to nod off. We have compiled a list of apps and gadgets that can help you catch some Zzzs.

Sleep Genius

Having trouble sleeping? Sleep Genius uses neurosensory algorithms that were first used to zonk out astronauts in space who couldn’t sleep because they were weightless and couldn’t lie down. The app produces vibrations that simulate a rocking motion like a cradle for your brain. The “noise” it creates has a calming effect and slows heart rate and breathing, creating a lull perfect for deep sleep. It also makes sure that your alarm wakes you up with gentle soothing sounds rather than a sudden blast of noise. Plus, if you want to sneak in a nap, it lets you take an average 30-minute one (you can also set your own time).

www.sleepgenius.com

Sleep Genius, free on iTunes

SleepRate

Developed by scientists who have 20 years’ experience in dealing with insomniacs, this app analyses why you can’t sleep. While you sleep, it uses data from a heart-rate monitor, along with your iPhone’s microphone, to monitor the quality of your sleep and analyse what may be disturbing you at night (barking dogs, snoring partners, it reveals all). During the day, it shoots questionnaires at you, including asking for information about your lifestyle, napping and stress habits. Finally, after five nights, using algorithms developed at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, US, the app sifts through the data and sends a personalized report on how to improve dozing time.

Read the complete article here.

February 13, 2014June 16, 2016

The story of us

There’s nothing more romantic than remembering the things you did together as a couple, be it something as simple as holding hands or jumping off a plane to skydive. This Valentine’s Day, we suggest you put together your memories in a beautiful personal story for your partner. Here are the apps that can help you in the process.

Glossi

Announce your love through an online glossy. Create a magazine of your relationship with Glossi, a free digital platform which lets you drag and drop images, videos, PDFs, audio and animations into layouts inspired by fashion magazines, catalogues and even travelogues. Then add in links, headlines and write a poem or two and you are ready to gift a personal magazine to your partner. This online format can be shared on all major social networks, embedded on blogs and websites and viewed on tablets and mobiles.

Glossi.com, free.

Timehop

How about a time capsule of your relationship? Especially apt for relationships which have seen a few years, you can walk down the memory lane together by seeing the photos and updates from last year’s or last to last year’s Valentine’s Day that you spent together. The app takes your content from Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Dropbox, Flickr and iPhoto. Then it syncs your images together on a Mac. Once you’ve got everything set up, Timehop will show you all social activity on a particular day. It also automatically shows you good times from your past—the app will pick up a post or a photograph which was popular with your friends and feed it into your phone’s app.

Timehop.com, free on iTunes.

Heyday

Forgot to make an extra effort before Valentine’s Day? Plan the day with your partner and then using Heyday automatically record all your moments together. Launched in December, Heyday will stitch your moments with each other by keeping track of the places you go to and the things you see. It also automatically picks up the photos you took with your phone in all these places and creates collages with them putting it all together in a timeline. You can customize the collage with layouts and filters and then surprise your partner by mailing it to her/him.

Hey.co, free on iTunes.

Memloom

Tell your partner how special she is by creating a personal story for her using Memloom. Launched in January, Memloom is a storytelling tool where you can upload the various moments in your relationship, including pictures, audios and videos. Now using one of the layouts offered, stitch them together in a magazine-like format. Add audio narration to give it a personal touch.

Memloom.com, $2.95-9.95 (around Rs.190-620) a month—free for up to five stories— available on the iPad and Web.

Read the complete article on Livemint.com

January 23, 2014June 16, 2016

Supercharge for office

More and more people are using their cellphones as computers, and if you’re carrying a “computer” in your pocket, why not put it to work? A phone isn’t always a good replacement for a computer—good luck filling in giant Excel sheets on a 4-inch screen—but there are some ways in which phones can really simplify your work life, or just take a little of the stress away. We look at new apps that can bust work stress.

RescueTime

If you’ve ever had a day where you go in with 10 items on your agenda and end with all 10 untouched, then you need to look at this free app. RescueTime helps you track how you’re using your phone, and can be used to identify the major distractions that keep you from getting work done. RescueTime is a popular app on Google play, with over 700,000 downloads, and its iOS version is expected to launch in February. The app is simple—all you have to do is install it and it will run in the background. You go about your daily usage without having to check the app, and whenever you want to analyse your phone usage, just open RescueTime and you can see an efficiency score that helps you easily track your progress in cutting down on distractions. RescueTime will tell you which apps you’ve been using, how much time you spend on each, and will also track phone calls, so you know exactly how you’ve been spending your time—it even lists your top distractions. There’s also a handy stopwatch to use in meetings or during exercise.

RescueTime is free with some paid features at $9 (around Rs.550) a month, on Android and browser. The iOS app will launch in February.

Talygen Business Intelligence

Location awareness and being online all the time make phones a great way for employees on the road to check in with their office. Talygen is a paid app that helps employees manage all the paperwork without any paper, so they can focus on the important parts of their job. This tool is useful for small business owners who want to keep track of on-the-road employees or time spent in a client’s office. You can track billable time, work on customer relationship management, expense accounting, manage leave and many other administrative issues.

The app, launched last month, makes it really easy for your employee to check in on the go so that you, as the manager, save time tracking. Everything is organized on the cloud and the data can be accessed through the app. The data can also generate an advanced report which can then be exported into a PDF or an Excel file.

Talygen, $20 a month onwards, on iTunes, Google play, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

Agent

Is your smartphone’s battery always dying on you? Install this personal Agent, a smartphone app which does little things to make your phone, well, smarter. The app runs in the background and saves the battery by automatically dimming the screen when your battery signals low, automatically silences your phone during meetings, remembers where you parked your car and puts your phone to auto-respond when you’re driving. It also allows only urgent calls or messages when you’re sleeping. The app is triggered by Bluetooth and it can also read your SMSes aloud or send automatic responses, or reply to a select list of contacts only. It was launched in November, and the makers are adding more features. “In 2014, the app will be able to call you a cab right before your next meeting,” says Kulveer Taggar, CEO and co-founder, “or pay for your coffee before you get to work.”

Agent, free on Google play.

Limitless

Limitless is meant for anyone who wants to manage their time on devices better. The productivity tool, which works on Google Chrome, gives an update on how much time of the day was spent productively and how much of it on Facebook and Twitter. “We are a behavioural science company that helps users get work done,” says Anup Gosavi, co-founder, Limitless. “If the person has the desire to become more efficient in how they use their devices, Limitless can be the right productivity companion.” The tool categorizes the various websites you visited on your Chrome browser and differentiates with tags like work, social and other learning. At the end of the day, it shows you the percentage you spent in each of those sections. It also has nudges, albeit gentle, to get you back to work. Launched in December, the tool is still in its early stages, releasing updates and building up Limitless for Safari, Firefox and mobiles.

Complete article on www.livemint.com

January 23, 2014June 16, 2016

Rearrange your online life

Click. Share. Like. Comment. Post. Redo. If keeping pace with your multiple virtual lives is getting too much for you, use these tools to reorganize them and get back to your real one. Believe us, you will thank us for it.

Swayy

This one is for the share hogs—the ones who would like to read things from the Net and share but want to avoid hopping from site to site. Swayy, which was launched in September, is a sixth-sense curating site that reads your interests, scans the Web and then serves you the best articles, videos and infographics, also sharing them with your social networks. All you have to do is log into your Twitter, add in your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts via Swayy and let its codes work in the dark to figure out what you like and who you are. “By analysing a user’s social audience and understanding what topics his/her audience are interested in, Swayy can match the user with the most relevant and trending content to help him/her share better and grow his/her online presence,” explains Lior Degani, vice-president, marketing, Swayy. That’s not all, you also get served social analytics—clicks, likes, retweets, new followers, etc.—to share better in future and figure out which of your content worked well with the audience.

Free for two social accounts; $9 (around Rs.550) a month for a paid account, which allows for scheduled posts too.

ThinkUp

Tired of the time they were spending on Facebook and Twitter, the founders of ThinkUp decided to build an app to connect all social networking accounts and sort out the crazy stuff that is posted on them every day. ThinkUp, which launches today, uses bots and smart code to show the most relevant information from your social networks on your screen. So you don’t have to scroll Facebook and then Twitter, and then Instagram, to find out the things that are most important. More than that, ThinkUp also tells you who your biggest online fans were per week, whether your old profile picture was better than the new one, or if your friends like it when you post quotes from famous people. It gets the delight back into the social.

A paid service that costs $60 a year.

RebelMouse

An open-ended space, in its simplest form RebelMouse can be used to collate all your social media streams and put them together in one place for you to see. But that’s not all it does. “We are a full publishing platform that lets you simply create great content and have a beautiful site, mobile Web experience, engagement tools and an analytics suite that is actionable,” says Paul Berry, founder and CEO, in an email interview. With three simple clicks, you get your content from all over the Web on one page. After that, it’s up to you. Do you want to make a website of all the content you are constantly getting? Do you want to curate and clean up and then share it seamlessly with all your social networks? Or embed in an existing website? Or do you want to make a campaign out of it? RebelMouse lets you do all this and more. No wonder the site reached 17.5 million unique visitors in December.

Free for individuals to curate, create and share across social networks. $500 upwards a month for brands.

Flavors

Instead of giving multiple LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Ids to a stranger who wants to connect with you, give them one: your website address. As the name suggests, Flavors.me brings together all your myriad faces in the digital world on to one website and gives you a unique URL to print on your visiting card. The platforms they recognize include social networks (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), location-based networks (Foursquare), blogs (Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger and Typepad), photo-sharing sites (Flickr and Picasa), video-sharing sites (Vimeo and YouTube), even audio-sharing sites (SoundCloud, Last.fm, 8tracks and Mixcloud). Basically, anywhere you might be present. Once you create a log-in Id, go step by step in choosing a template and finalizing how your site looks with social media streams…

Read the complete story on the livemint.com site

December 25, 2013June 16, 2016

Digital star wars

Celebrities are fast realizing the power of social networks and are working hard to engage their fans. Here are some lessons you can learn from them…

Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan has over 8,117,186 fans on Facebook and 7,550,474 on Twitter; at any given point when he logs in to a social networking site, at least 7,550,474 individuals will listen to his opinions and thoughts. And they respond to him, all the time.

Social networks make it easier than ever for everyone to be heard, but real-world celebrities still tend to get the lion’s share of attention. This fan following can make a new release a hit or drive attention to their favourite causes, if they can hold your attention more than other celebrities, of course.

“The superstars can share their personal experiences and get creative in terms of how they want to present themselves to their fans off-screen, which was never possible before,” says Puneet Johar, co-founder and managing director of To The New, a digital services company which has just released a report that compares the activities of Bollywood stars on Twitter. Bachchan has the most followers, and the number has grown most quickly too, at 87% over 2012. Madhuri Dixit-Nene, Akshay Kumar and Sonam Kapoor are among the other fastest growing Twitter users. What can the rest of us learn from this?

Ashish Joshi, vice-president, digital, and business head, Fluence, a digital media company that handles the online lives of Bachchan, Salman Khan and Karisma Kapoor, believes that celebrities really want to increase their digital reach. “One aspect of it is to give something precious to the fans but another important thing that’s there in the back of their head is brands. Advertisers today evaluate a celebrity’s penetration on social media platforms while figuring out a fee for them,” he says.

Keeping it real

Having a social media team doesn’t mean someone else is tweeting for you. “We do not actively control a celebrity’s Twitter page,” says Joshi. “They have to do their own communication. But what our creative team does is build a story around his or her personality, an online story which our sales team can sell to brands as a concept.”

Once they have figured out a story, they guide the celebrity and package the content well. Joshi gives the example of Tuesday Memoirs, a series of Facebook posts where his team uploads pictures of Bachchan from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s on the sets, or during tours, and writes stories around them. “These stories are precious to his fans, it increases his reach on Facebook, and the artiste loves the engagement it provides,” says Joshi. All posting, blogging, writing is done in consultation with the celebrity, though there’s a team from Fluence which acts on his behalf.

“Web presence has to be personal,” agrees Bunty Sajdeh, chief executive officer, Cornerstone Sport and Entertainment, which handles the accounts and online lives of sportspersons like Yuvraj Singh, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Sania Mirza, and actor Sonakshi Sinha. “That is what the fans want.”

Updating Twitter, Facebook and other accounts every day, multiple times a day, is a full-time job though, and not something most celebrities can actually manage. “Virat Kohli tries to keep it personal but we have to help him out a little since he can’t give the fans enough due to his busy schedule,” says Sajdeh. His team keeps more than two million Twitter, and nearly 4.2 million Facebook, fans happy by ensuring all his activities are posted online, but Sajdeh says the actual interaction with fans remains strictly with the cricketer.

Ashwin Sanghi, author of The Krishna Key, who has over 100,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 600,000 on Facebook, says he uses automated tools to keep on top of social networks. He uses an app called Buffer to send updates he has saved in one block every half an hour. “I check Twitter only once in three days to check replies,” Sanghi says.

He adds that it’s important to distinguish between the networks. Facebook is for books and events, YouTube is for uploading lectures, Flickr has photos and Google+ has the articles he writes.

Faking it

The desperate desire for a fan following could lead a celebrity to buy followers and likes. A big following can make a difference, allowing a celebrity to get the next big project, movie, or sign a new deal. It can even make you a celebrity, as it did in the case of starlet Poonam Pandey(@ipoonampandey), who has over 450,000 followers on Twitter. “Paying for likes is foolish,” says Sanghi. “An inflated following might satisfy your ego but will give you no sales. It’s only valid for those who want to show to the world that they are being followed by a large number of people.” Fake likes and followers are so prevalent though that Facebook, Google and Twitter are trying to filter them out.

“For a celebrity, the number of likes and followers is extremely important as most brands check out their online engagement,” says Joshi, “but fake likes just doesn’t make sense. The engagement and reach is pretty low and platforms like Facebook now show how many likes you have and what’s the number of people who are talking about you.” He believes that it’s parameters like reach and engagement, rather than just numbers, that most advertisers are now looking at before signing a celebrity. After all, for a fan, the whole idea is to get closer to the star.

Show me the money

In October, Fluence, along with Twitter and ZipDial, a mobile marketing service, ran a campaign around Bachchan’s birthday. A fan who wasn’t on the Internet could give a missed call to follow the handle @SrBachchan and receive tweets on SMS. “It was a win-win situation, for us, the platform and the fans,” says Joshi….

Read the complete story on Livemint.com

October 16, 2013June 16, 2016

Setting up online retail 101

Looking for ways to succeed in the online retail space? Here are four ways you can reach out to customers

According to a recent report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, the e-commerce market in the country grew to $9.5 billion (around Rs.57,950 crore) in 2012 and is expected to reach $12.6 billion by this year’s end—a 34% growth since 2009. The eBay India Census 2012 states it is selling one mobile accessory per minute and a mobile handset every 2 minutes.

If you are among those who feel that now maybe a good time to explore selling on the Internet, you should do your homework right first. You need to understand how to put up an e-store, what to expect and what kind of consumer base to go after. We looked at the various options available to help you take the first step:

Facebook Pages

For: Designers, people with quirky and unique products.

If you’re in the experimental stage and not looking for big numbers, this is the cheapest way to build an audience.

Set-up involved: You need a computer connected to the Internet and some time to enter the information on the page. Facebook Pages only display content, so you will need to ask people to send money using online account transfers. You will also need to tie up with a payment gateway; CCAvenue offers the most ways to pay, such as credit, debit, and bank transfer, and charges a Rs.1,200 annual charge, and a 5.5% fee on each credit card transaction. You can also check PayZippy, which is cheaper but has fewer options.

Pros: Low initial costs let you experiment, and you can build a dedicated customer base connected to you through personal interaction.

Cons: You have to set up everything yourself and then build up the Facebook Page and garner likes. It is your personality that will push the page’s popularity, which is not something everyone can manage. It is also a time-consuming process, which isn’t very efficient if you’re getting more than 10 orders a day.

Niche online marketplaces

For: Boutique sellers who want to reach a wider audience.

If you have a unique brand that will not fit well with an Amazon or Flipkart, then look for sites like LimeRoad, which sell niche products like handicrafts, art, handmade clothes, and set up a store.

Set-up involved: Besides Internet access, you need photographs of your products. Specialized websites like Qartoos.com, Craftsvilla.com and Indiebazaar.com handle all sales, including payment, and charge you a commission (15-20% for each order), but you need to ship the item to the customer….

….Head onto the livemint.com website to read the complete story

October 8, 2013June 16, 2016

The charge of the portable brigade

Does your smartphone’s battery run out at all the wrong times? These portable chargers and battery packs will keep you powered up, always

Asupercharger that can juice up your phone in 30 seconds? No, we kid you not. Eesha Khare, an 18-year-old Indian-American science student based in California, came up with the idea of a small, portable device that you plug into your phone, and in less than half a minute, your phone battery would be fully recharged. Khare won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award in May because she didn’t want her smartphone dying on her. Currently, Khare is working on getting the device ready as a commercial product. But if you are not too picky about the half-a-minute deadline to charge your phone, here’s a selection of new portable chargers that can revive your phone battery anywhere, anytime.

Devotec Fuel Micro Charger

A nifty looking emergency backup, the Fuel doubles up as a keychain and is about the size of a Rs.10 coin. Its 220mAH battery is designed to give you around 20-30 minutes of talktime or a few hours more of standby. The battery can be refuelled with its supply cable or any micro-USB wall charger and it can store the charge for a month if unused. After getting successfully funded on Kickstarter (a crowdfunding micro-investment platform), the company is about to start distributing its first batch of pre-orders.

Launches in October.

Order at www.devotecindustries.com for $26.98* (around Rs.1,700).

TYLT Energi Sliding Power Case

Now here’s a case that would not only protect your phone from life’s bumps, but also give it a 9-hour talktime boost. The stylish TYLT Energi Sliding Power Case comes with an inbuilt rechargeable 2,500mAH battery to power your phone throughout the day. The case protects your phone from scratches and bumps and lets you charge, sync, transfer data and listen to music easily. All this with barely 9mm added thickness to your phone. Once you plug in the power case, it fully charges your phone first and then charges itself. It takes about 8 hours to fully charge both the phone and the case. Launched in August, the pack comes with two cases, a black and a coloured one to change according to your mood.

Available for iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy SIII; Galaxy S4 cases launch in October.

Order at www.amazon.com for $99.99.

Port Solar Charger

Launched early this year, this elegant solar charger from XD Design latches on to any windowsill to refill itself directly through the sun. The port’s 3.3-inch diameter has five small LED lights which light up green when it’s fully charged. The device’s integrated USB charging cable folds on its side. When fully charged, for which it takes about a day in the sun, the port can supply 1,000mAH of juice to any of your smart devices. But be aware that its size is not enough to fully charge any smartphone, so it’s best used as an emergency top-up charger.

Order at www.xddesign.eu for €59.59 (around Rs.5,100).

ZENS Wireless Charging Cover

This case wirelessly charges two of the most expensive and popular phones in India, the Samsung Galaxy and Apple iPhone series. Launched in June…

Read the complete article on Livemint.com website

October 8, 2013June 16, 2016

Piecing it back after mental trauma

It is Mental Illness Awareness Week (4-10 October) and a key learning during this period is to know and realize that asking for help to cope with trauma is not a bad thing…

You’ve faced something terrible recently—maybe an accident, sexual assault, or witnessed a bloody fight. Your heart palpitates, the vision just does not go out of your head, you get nightmares and feel detached. In other words, you might be going through post-traumatic stress. “Trauma is an act of violence or natural disaster, something which is not in our control,” says Samir Parikh, director, mental health and behavioural sciences, Fortis Healthcare, Delhi. “After the incident, there’s an urgent need to talk about what happened and how you feel about it and not bottle it up. If you ignore how the incident has affected you emotionally, which is what most Indians do, the stress leads to hyperarousal symptoms like palpitations, sleeplessness and nightmares.” According to a study published in the February issue of Journal of Traumatic Stress, about 80% of people experience a traumatic event during their life, of whom 10% develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

The health guide on the website of the National Institute of Mental Health, US, mentions that stress symptoms can even be triggered by emotionally traumatic incidents like the loss of a loved one, retirement, divorce, becoming a parent, having gone through a chronic or acute illness, job loss or facing financial hardship, but according to Dr Parikh, rarely does it develop into PTSD. Surbhee Soni, clinical psychologist and founder of Horizon Expressive Therapy Centre in Delhi, agrees: “In most cases, PTSD develops only in severe conditions like sexual assault, accident or death of a loved one. The symptoms are so physically obvious that a person becomes immobile or loses the ability to talk. It’s also something that is more commonly seen in women than men.” A pilot study published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress in August looked into the issue and found that women are at a higher risk of developing PTSD than men, especially following certain types of trauma such as accident and assault.

Though the first human reaction to any incident is shock and denial, it is normal to experience sleepless nights, anxiety, feel the need to cry, be irritated and develop eating disorders. “In most cases,” says Dr Parikh, “it can be solved by going back to your normal routine at the earliest and talking about it with your family, friends and people who might have experienced the accident with you. A support system is very important.” But if the symptoms do not disappear within a month or two and you are just not able to resume your normal routine, that’s when you need to consult a mental health doctor. Here are some more tips to help you get back on track after you have been through something terrible.

DON’T SLEEP IMMEDIATELY AFTER

Lack of sleep a few hours after exposure to a stressful incident can actually help you deal with it better, according to researchers at Tel Aviv University, Israel. When you sleep immediately afterwards, the memory of the event is consolidated in the head, which means you can recall it in all its reality, even years later. Published in July 2012 in the journal ‘Neuropsychopharmacology’, the study did a series of experiments to deduce that if you don’t sleep for 6 hours immediately after exposure to a traumatic event, your chances of developing trauma-like behavioural responses reduce.

Start now: Be it someone’s death, a traumatic accident or news of something bad, upon hearing about it, don’t sleep for about 6 hours. Talk to your loved ones and try to keep calm.

Read the complete story on Livemint website here

September 4, 2013June 16, 2016

Click to vote

Apps to crowdsource advice quickly and easily.

Cornflakes or eggs, Samsung or Micromax, or just picking the right kind of chair for the study desk—our lives are filled with choices. Some of the choices are easy to make, for some we need advice from our friends and family. That’s where social polling apps fit in. “Social polling, micro polling, opinion gathering and opinion sharing is the most rapidly growing sector of the mobile sphere,” says Gary William Mendel, co-founder, Yopine, a social polling app. “The reason is that we always have and always will love to give our two cents on matters great and small.” These free apps use your existing social networks to offer answers on anything, from which colour suits you better to career decisions. So what are you waiting for? Get out and get an opinion on things or, if you like it better, increase your social quota by giving some free advice to your social connections.

imagoo

Lamborghini or Ferrari? Ice cream or cake? There are no grey areas in the world of imagoo, a social polling app launched in July. The app is a photograph-based poll that allows you to put two choices and ask your friends or the users of imagoo to choose one of them for you. The app gives you immediate feedback and vote on the comparison. You can also browse through other people’s polls and vote for them through the app’s feed. These features sound basic, but can easily keep people engrossed.

imagoo.com on iOS and mobile Web

Loop

Loop lets you make a poll and share it through Facebook, Twitter, email and SMS so your friends and followers can view, comment and vote to help you make a decision. Launched in early August, Loop allows you to create polls through an intuitive user interface. You can ask a simple Yes/No question, add in photos or make it a multiple-choice question. It’s also possible to choose whether you want to make the poll public or private. Moreover, like Twitter, you can follow polls of other users of Loop which come to your feed and you can give your opinion on things. A button called Stats shows you the results in an infographic, which can be filtered by age or gender. The app is also integrated with Amazon and Pinterest so you can build a poll using products and pictures from both these websites. This makes it particularly useful for shopping decisions.

Loopapp.co on iOS and mobile Web

Pingstr

If you like to keep your poll private, then Pingstr is meant for you. Launched in April, the app “is meant more to poll your friends and family”, says Parag Patel, co-founder, Pingstr. Once you create a log in and become a user, you can build a private group. Anyone in the group can send a “ping”, a photograph and a question poll to the other members in the group. The other members get alerts and respond to the ping. You can also put the ping on Facebook to get answers from a wider audience. Patel and his team are already working on version 2 of the app which will have a complete makeover and will be launched next month.

Pingstr.com On Google Play, Facebook, iOS, Window Phone and mobile Web

BuzzVote

Have an opinion and can’t help yourself from saying it aloud? Head to BuzzVote. It allows you to voice your choice and opinion on thousands of questions posted by others. Follow people who ask interesting questions, make a repertoire of questions yourself. Launched in March, Buzzvote also makes giving an opinion a game. The more questions you answer, the higher you go on the BuzzVote Leaderboard, which lists who has cast the most votes, gotten the most votes and asked the most questions. You can share your questions and answers on your other social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Buzzvote.com On Google Play, iOS and mobile Web

Poutsch

Take democracy a step forward with Poutsch, an app which aims to crowdsource public opinion. The app was launched in June by a group of Parisians. Its name has been derived from the German word ‘putsch’, which means a political coup. The design is colourful enough for you to want to log on to the app and give your opinion. You can choose to follow celebrities or social enterprises of your interest so that you can answer their questions at your leisure….read the complete article on the Mint website.

August 14, 2013June 16, 2016

Hacking: How to deal with the menace

The ways in which people can get at your private data, and how you can prevent it.

At a conference in July, researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center in the US demonstrated how an iPhone can be hacked in less than a minute using a malicious charger. Though Apple claims to have fixed the issue in iOS7, the popularity of smartphones makes them tempting targets.

“The vulnerability in a smartphone does not come from its system, which is an efficient and power-saving design,” says Sriram Raghavan, digital security and forensics expert, Securecyberspace.org, a site that is also working on a security-related project with the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. “The vulnerable element comes from the market place, from the tempting third-party apps or widgets you install on your system.”

The Mobile Threats Report, released by networking equipment manufacturer Juniper Networks in June, makes similar observations. According to the report, mobile malware threats through malicious apps grew at a whopping 614% between March 2012 and March 2013. There are about 276,259 malicious apps out in the mobile marketplace with almost 92% of them on Google Play.

“A hacker will use any hole in your smartphone or in your lax behaviour to attack you and install a spyware on it,” says Rakshit Tandon, who is a cybersecurity expert and a security consultant with the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI). Once the hacker gets inside a smartphone, he can change and create emails, texts, SMSs, videos, photos, notes and credit and debit card information.

Here are some ways in which hackers can try to get malicious software into your smartphone’s system:

By asking

Apps can ask for permission to access phone data. Ask why a note-taking app needs GPS access, before clicking “Accept”.

According to a 2012 study, Pausing Google Play, conducted by Bit9, a US-based mobile security firm, 72% of Android apps (they studied more than 290,000 apps) ask for permission for at least one thing that can prove high-risk for your mobile’s security.

Secure yourself: Always read the permissions list before you install an app and tie it back to the app’s features. Be especially wary of apps that ask for your permission to make phone calls, send SMSs, reveal your identity or location.

By installing a repackaged app

If you’re jailbreaking your phone to install paid apps for free, then you’re also making it vulnerable to fake and rogue apps. According to a 2012 study, the Android Malware Genome Project, by the State University of North Carolina, US, 86% of Android malware uses a repackaging technique wherein the hacker downloads a popular app, decompiles it, puts a malicious code into it and then puts it back on the Play Store as a free copy of a popular app.

Secure yourself: Don’t jailbreak your phone or install any unofficial apps, especially if they look like free copies of popular premium apps or have names like “Silly Birds” or “Fruits Ninja”.

Through Bluetooth

Do you have a habit of keeping your Bluetooth on while you are on the go? Bluetooth hacking is easy with software like Super Bluetooth Hack or BlueScanner—these search for Bluetooth-enabled devices around them and try and extract contacts, email IDs and messages from unsecured phones.

Secure yourself: Keep the Bluetooth off at all times when not needed. It will save your battery as well as data. If on, keep it in non-discoverable mode.

By emailing/texting a malicious link

The old phishing trick on emails has come to the mobile phones through malicious links embedded in MMS and SMS. Think twice before clicking that link or opening attachments you weren’t expecting. Even though it might appear genuine, a SMS or MMS from a friend’s phone could be a malware.

Secure yourself: As a rule, do not click on any attachment on the phone. Use your laptop for clicking open attachments or links. Install security apps that can scan attachments and block a link if it looks suspicious.

By offering you a free wireless hot spot

A hacker might offer you a free hot spot in a public place and use the same network to hack into your phone while you browse and read everything you send across the network. Last month, two security experts hacked into a femtocell, a device that boosts wireless signals indoors, to prove that hacking of your smartphone through wireless is as easy as less than $300 (around Rs.18,200) and by using the right technique. “Getting inside a wireless network is surprisingly easy for the hacker,” says Dominic K., adviser, Jarviz Mobile Security, Delhi. “Once inside, the hacker can pick up the signal from phones in a 40-foot radius and capture all your data, including the passwords you type.”

Secure yourself: As a general rule, a 3G network is safer to use than a public Wi-Fi. And needless to say, avoid wireless boosters that do not belong to you.

Through a phone charger

Any random phone-charging kiosk in public spaces like airports, restaurants or parks can be converted into a hacking device by putting a system inside it.

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