19 new stories on The Next Web today |  |
- How to use Activity Monitor to make your Mac faster
- Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation Phone gets reviewed, the Xperia Play holds no more secrets
- A New iPhone Stand Designed for Video Calling
- iPhone app lets you pick that jukebox track without leaving your bar stool
- The secret way to forever unsubscribe from spam texts
- The Beatles have now sold 5 Million Songs on iTunes
- Why you should look up when you’re texting and walking [video]
- Google still presides as the King of Search
- How To Spark An Emotional Connection with 140 characters
- The TNW Microsoft Week: Broken tabs, WebMatrix, and we stare at WP7
- “The Kindle Unswindle”: How to remove its DRM
- For CFOs, Profitably is your virtual life partner
- Canadian ISP is slowing traffic and doesn’t want you to know
- Video: The Death Star Spotted in Minnesota
- Crisis in Tunisia proves Twitter is the best, and worst, way to follow breaking news
- Geoli.st. The evolution of classifieds adds product image recognition and augmented reality
- Google will now pay Apps users for all downtime, no matter how short
- Happy Birthday! Foodspotting celebrates its first year.
- Wait, You Haven’t Written It Yet Microsoft?
- Apple Is About To Register Its 10 Billionth App Download
| How to use Activity Monitor to make your Mac faster Posted: 15 Jan 2011 02:07 AM PST
When you first start Activity Monitor it will show you the System Memory tab:
The long list of names are all the processes running on your computer. These are not just the Applications you’ve launched but also all the background processes needed to run your computer and Mac OS X.
As soon as you see an application persistently using a large percentage of your CPU you should ask yourself if you really need to have it open and then consider closing it. You might not recognize all the running processes and blindly closing them is never a good idea and can lead to crashes and data loss. What I usually do when I see a process using a lot of CPU is Google its name. That is how I found out that Spotlight was trying to index my Time Machine disk with a process called “mds” that claimed 80% of my CPU every time Time Machine started backing up. I excluded my Time Machine disk from Spotlight and my MacBook Pro became responsive again during back-ups. The next thing you can do is order these processes by ‘Real Mem” and “Virtual mem”. If you haven’t guessed it yet “Mem” stand for “Memory” and these tabs show you how much memory is being used by your applications. If Mac OS X runs out of real memory it uses Virtual memory, or a piece of the slower harddisk instead of your faster RAM chips. It is an elegant but slow solution. If your computer is using a lot of Virtual Memory you might want to consider closing down some apps or even upgrading to more RAM. Below the processes are some live updating memory stats that could be interesting. This is what they all mean: Free memory Wired memory Active memory Inactive memory For example, if you’ve been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory. This Inactive memory is available for use by another application, just like Free memory. However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading Mail from the slower hard disk. Used VM size Page ins / Page outs Tip: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full). Adding more RAM may reduce page outs. Swap used Conclusion |
| Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation Phone gets reviewed, the Xperia Play holds no more secrets Posted: 15 Jan 2011 12:35 AM PST The Xperia Play (Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation Phone) has been thoroughly outed, save a demonstration of its real gaming abilities, in various Chinese overview videos over the past few weeks and with the appearance today of a full review of the handset, the device officially holds no more secrets. A member of Chinese mobile forum ePrice was able to meet a friend who had acquired an Xperia Play handset, asking if he would be interested in taking a look at Sony Ericsson’s Android gaming smartphone. Wanting to know more, the member travelled to Shenzhen and was treated with a full overview, capturing more high-resolution photos of the device and a demo video, writing a full review in the process.
The specifications match what has previously been leaked, the Xperia Play will feature a 1GHz processor with the Adreno 205 GPU, it will have a 4-inch FWVGA screen that is capable of delivering a 854 x 480 resolution, a 5MP camera, noise cancelling dual microphones and two speakers. The controls are exactly as you saw them before, the Play will also feature left and right bumper buttons. Test units have all shown to run Android 2.3, this leak is no different, there is also support for MicrosSD, MicroUSB and there is a 3.5mm microphone jack. Again, the only feature we still haven’t been able to get a good glimpse at is the official games supported by the handset. The PlayStation Pocket is in attendance but in each leak the gaming platform has been empty. It’s perhaps the only remaining secret involving the handset. Below are two overview videos and the mother of all handset galleries, giving you a good feel for what the device before it launches at Mobile World Congress in February. |
| A New iPhone Stand Designed for Video Calling Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:32 PM PST
The Vyne is a concept design and it appears to wrap around your neck like a snake, making it hands-free so you're able to chill back on the couch. It's an interesting design and it might be helpful to use while watching media, specifically when you're in a confined place such as a plane seat. As we'd mentioned, this is just a concept and they're not on the market just yet. What do you think? Would you buy one?
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| iPhone app lets you pick that jukebox track without leaving your bar stool Posted: 14 Jan 2011 05:16 PM PST
TouchTunes has installed over 45,000 interactive jukeboxes in bars, restaurants and retail locations across North America. And, if you're visiting one of the locations that carries its jukeboxes, you can use the iPhone to play tunes throughout the bar without actually touching the unit. The TouchTunes music collection is impressive and currently offers over three million licensed tracks available to play. How does it work?
The interactive jukeboxes contain digital music not CD's like the old-school jukeboxes you might be familiar with. This enables TouchTunes to connect its machines with mobile applications wirelessly. The service also links up with Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare which lets users share their song choices with friends. While "checked-in" to a location, users are able to view the songs that have been played (by everyone in the bar) and can add friends to the app from the TouchTunes community. There’s additionally a media player within the app, so users are able to listen to songs but the user must be “checked-in” to do so. Here's the drawbackIn order for the app to work, the club or restaurant needs to have one the TouchTunes jukeboxes installed, so this app is pretty much unless your city has locations that use them. And although the app itself is free, users are required to purchase a minimum plan of five dollars for five credits to play music. It does offer a bonus credit or two with the plans but based on the information within the app, it looks as though 1 credit = 1 song. All in all, the idea of being your own DJ using the iPhone sounds intriguing. However, if the virtual credits do translate to $1/song played, there is no way I'd use this app. But maybe, if I was getting my "cheer" on all night at the pub and decided I must hear some Young MC, in that case, I may consider the notion.Image: Featured |
| The secret way to forever unsubscribe from spam texts Posted: 14 Jan 2011 03:20 PM PST |
| The Beatles have now sold 5 Million Songs on iTunes Posted: 14 Jan 2011 02:52 PM PST
In November of last year, the fab-four made an exclusive deal with Apple to offer their digital tracks on iTunes. A deal that is said to end sometime in 2011. The iTunes Beatles collection currently has 13 remastered albums (17 albums total) like the The While Album and Magical Mystery Tour. And, the band also has a box set for $149, that comes with all of the remastered studio albums, a mini documentary, and a video of the The Beatles first U.S concert from 1964 at the Washington Coliseum. If you’re a Beatles fan, it’s pretty great content. The Beatles and Apple have had a strange past, and had a long dispute over of the name of their companies. Apple Corps, the multimedia company that operates Apple Records (The Beatles record company) had an issue with the similarities in the names. But back in 2007, it was settled and Apple (the tech company) licensed the Apple trademark back to the music company.
GeekTown, The Loop, Image:Beatles |
| Why you should look up when you’re texting and walking [video] Posted: 14 Jan 2011 02:44 PM PST |
| Google still presides as the King of Search Posted: 14 Jan 2011 02:06 PM PST
Up just .4% from the previous month, Google led the pack, followed by Yahoo! with 16% and Microsoft sites (namely Bing) with 12%. The little guys, AskNetwork accounted for 3.5% with AOL LLC Network trailing behind with a tiny 1.9%.
comScore pulled this data from more than 16.4 billion explicit core searches (which excludes contextually driven searches). Google Sites ranked first with nearly 11 billion searches, up 3% since November. Yahoo! Sites came in second with 2.6 billion, followed by Microsoft Sites with nearly 2.0 billion, Ask Network with 575 million and AOL LLC Network with 312 million. Overall it appears that people were searching more in general in the month of December (online shopping anyone?), but only 3% more. Does this data shock you? I didn’t think so. Regardless of Google’s zodiac sign, we predict it will hold the top spot for many moons to come. That is, of course, unless Facebook decides to take a stab at its own social search platform…comScore, DailyGalaxy (Image Credit) |
| How To Spark An Emotional Connection with 140 characters Posted: 14 Jan 2011 01:07 PM PST
Showing a real face: Most companies have a hard time adapting to the conversational style of social media. According to a 360i Whitepaper most companies talk at people and not with them: 12% of all marketer tweets are conversational and only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of a conversation with that brand. People value brands that put an effort into engaging in conversation and brands that keep it personal by letting consumers get to know the twitterer behind the brand. Like with any other tool, it is the person that uses it that really makes the difference at the end of the day. By letting twitterer's personality shine and presenting him/her in your brand's account bio, or with an intro tweet every time the account changes hands, you can establish a deeper connection and facilitate conversation. A great example is Oscar de la Renta with the Oscar PR Girl account, one of the most popular fashion twitterers that also keeps a tumblr blog letting her follower take an insider's view of the Oscar de la Renta world. Initiate conversations: By establishing conversation topics, or setting up a casual date to chat with your followers every week, making use of a hashtag, a brand can create the sense of a community within the noise of Twitter. Toyota did this with the TweetMeme channel Toyota Conversations in partnership with Federated Media, in response to the crisis related to the massive safety recalls of its vehicles. The channel aggregates tweets related to the brand and builds a dialogue around all the popular links on Twitter referencing Toyota. Most recently Moxsie launched #BuyerChat conversation so its fans can give feedback on the featured apparel to earn discounts, points and badges.
Be the biggest fan of your biggest fans: Show how much you appreciate your loyal followers and customers, by taking the time to thank them by congratulating them on their achievements, retweeting and wishing them on special occasions. DKNY PR Girl is doing a great job cheering for her followers with kind words of gratitude and encouragement as well as a lot of humor. Zappos (no surprises here) is another great example of brands that put customers in the center of their Twitterverse. In October for instance Zappos tweeted the interview of a couple of Zappos customers that got married at Zappos Las Vegas headquarters for their 6 month anniversary. Keep it fun: Pushy tweets that market products and services won't get you far. Keep your relationships tight by keeping it casual on Twitter and engaging in conversations that have nothing to do with your brand once in a while. Bergdorfs recently put aside luxury tweets to comment and share their followers’ concern about the new zodiac dates. Tuning into social chat will lift off the mark of the brand-stalker interested only in selling and will help you connect with people on a friendly level, making it more likely that they will spread your message across their networks because they genuinely like you and not just "Like" you. Special giveaways for your fans are also a great way to spread your message. Uniqlo achieved this through a micro-site that encouraged visitors to Tweet about featured items they're interested in to reduce the price of the product. Stand by your followers: Twitter is ideal for service-related issues, especially ones that need immediate response. By "listening" closely, brands often respond before customers reach out for help, by taking notice of their venting on Twitter. Try to keep your assistance speedy and friendly. Many companies have invested in Twitter as a customer service channel of equal value as email and telephone, like Xerox and X-Box. Twitter has also been a valuable tool in case of a crisis or emergency to reassure customers and prevent a backlash. For example, Heathrow Airport recently used Twitter to respond to hundreds of travelers stranded due to snow. What does tweets form the heart mean to you? What brands stand out in Twitterverse?
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| The TNW Microsoft Week: Broken tabs, WebMatrix, and we stare at WP7 Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:42 PM PST
A short note, this week’s post has a few more ‘code-y’ entries, so feel free to skip those paragraphs if they are not to your liking. Let’s get to it! Internet Explorer Tabs Are Refreshed, AgainInternet Explorer 9, the future browser of the majority of the Internet using world is in fact a massive step forward. Better with standards, faster, and more secure it is a product that cannot get to market quickly enough. However, its tabs are in the wrong spot. Instead of being on top of the URL bar, they are defaulted to the side. Microsoft than took the time to add in a feature to allow users to move them below the URL bar. Now, all we need is an option to move them up top where they belong. Please?
WebMatrix Helps New Coders Get CrackingMicrosoft released a great number of free and open-source products this week, the crown jewel of which was WebMatrix. It is a developer stack that Microsoft put together to help new and student developers write code and publish websites without needing to build their own development environment. We were surprised at how popular this post was, to be honest. If you want to see the other neat projects that Microsoft released, including version one of their open-source CMS, head over here. Windows Phone 7 Market Share Going Up Or Staying Flat?Chitika launched some new numbers this week that seemed to point to a mere 10% rise in WP7 market share over the holiday season and month of December. We checked our numbers and found that, at least from where we sit, WP7 is growing at a good clip. Now that the platform has a fair number of handsets in the market, we are seeing smaller percentage increases in traffic from the phone line, but are still expecting an 80% rise in hits from WP7 this month. Sure, we’re a tech blog, but heck, that is still a sharp rise.
Concero Is Microsoft’s New Weapon Against VMwareMicrosoft is a company that all too often has their upcoming products outed a touch before the company wants them to be public, and Concero is just such a product. We don’t know exactly what Concero will be, but generically it is a “cloud management portal" that will "allow customers to oversee both on-premises and cloud-based services,” according to ZDNet. What really caught our eye was that Microsoft directly noted in a job posting that the product is not only to fight against WMware, but is designed to literally take their business. Go Fighting Redmond? Microsoft Says No To Apple’s ‘App Store’ Trademark FilingFinally, in the vein of poking your enemies in the eye, Microsoft called foul in a major way when Apple decided to go after the trademark ‘App Store:’
That is all of the news from the week. Of course, keep your eyes peeled for more TNWmicrosoft around the clock when the news breaks. |
| “The Kindle Unswindle”: How to remove its DRM Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:18 PM PST My Amazon Kindle is one of my favorite devices. But for two computer hackers, the Kindle’s DRM (digital rights management) technology that blocks users from accessing its copyrighted material, was too enticing to leave alone. By removing the device’s DRM, you can read your purchased Kindle books on any device and share them with friends. Two hackers with a weekly Justin.Tv show called Too Smart Guys created the following video detailing how you can remove the DRM (Direct Rights Management) from a legally purchased Kindle. To do it you’ll need The Kindle for PC Application (or virtualized windows or Wine), Python v. 2.6.4., the Unswindle Python script and supporting mobidedrm.py script. Watch this video for step-by-step detailed instructions. |
| For CFOs, Profitably is your virtual life partner Posted: 14 Jan 2011 11:22 AM PST
But what if you are managing a company’s financials? Meet Profitably, currently a 4 person team working out of New York City’s General Assembly. The startup specializes in the next generation of business analytics and financial optimization software for small businesses- not the mom and pop kind, but the kind with 30-40 full-time employees. Profitably is a CFO’s virtual life partner. It’s a software as a service business that looks at five areas of a company’s finances- cash flow, budgeting and forecasting, benchmarks, balance sheets and debt ratios and as the name suggests, profitability. While they launched just months ago, Profitably is already turning its own profit with over 400 small businesses signed up. Profitably partneres with Intuit to provide a secure QuickBooks sync. The Profitably software features an interactive chart of a business’ customer activities such as costs versus revenue, as well as labor diagnosis, employee time tracking and sales issues. All of this information is then migrated to the cloud so users can access it anywhere.
Profitably Walkthrough from Profitably on Vimeo. The service currently costs $50 per month and does not require a contract. While they offer a free 30-day trial period, they are currently running a promotion to give people an entire year of service for the price of one month. |
| Canadian ISP is slowing traffic and doesn’t want you to know Posted: 14 Jan 2011 11:19 AM PST  Michael Geist, law professor and chairman of Internet and E-commerce Law posted earlier today that Rogers, a major teleco and ISP in Canada has not been following CRTC policies. As Geist reported today, recent complaints surrounding Net Neutrality were sent to the CRTC (Canadian Radio Telecommunications Commission) claiming that Rogers was affecting downstream peer-to-peer traffic and was being disobedient with Internet traffic management policies. The CRTC has received numerous complaints over the last four months, that Rogers, the major Canadian telco, had not been compliant with the CRTC Internet traffic management policy requirements (TRP 2009-657). The policy refers to the Internet traffic management practices (ITMPs) which states that ISPs must disclose any information that affects any technical internet management practices.
In a letter sent to Rogers this week, the CRTC stated its concerns with the growing amount of customers that are complaining about Roger’s lack of public disclosure regarding the ITMP policy. This follows more complaints against Rogers a since October where customers complained that the company was degrading the speed-quality (throttling) of both uploads and downloads. As Geist points out, Rogers admitted to these practices and promised to revise its website to meet the ITMP standards. Although according to the letter sent to Rogers, the CRTC states that they need to include more: 1. the fact that download speeds will be affected by Rogers ITMP. 2. the policy page should clearly indicate which download applications might be affected and to what degree. 3. the impact of download speeds should be indicated. The Bottom LineGeeks living in Canada have been well aware of Roger’s ISP throttling practices. And over the last few years, it became increasingly apparent to Canadians using Skype, that the ISP was using traffic shaping tools to slow down the use of the application. It should also be noted that Skype directly affects Roger's (land line & wireless divisions) bottom line and saves customers from paying Rogers long distance fees. These practices are pretty slimy and Canadians should be enraged that their ISPs are deliberately slowing down speeds. Hopefully competition will heat up in Canada and will allow Canadians to make an informed choice based on these factors. Michael Geist, CRTC, Image: Featured |
| Video: The Death Star Spotted in Minnesota Posted: 14 Jan 2011 11:03 AM PST Array YouTube user Hushabye‘s wife wanted him to take a few snow shots. Those were boring so he asked his FX Wizard/Friend Aaron Dabelow to spice it up with a Star Wars fighter plane cameo. Using SynthEyes for tracking, 3DS Max for the 3D and After Effects for the comping… we are presented with “The Minnesota Death Star.” Enjoy. |
| Crisis in Tunisia proves Twitter is the best, and worst, way to follow breaking news Posted: 14 Jan 2011 11:00 AM PST
It appears that right now in Tunisia the president has left the country, the military are in charge, rioting is taking place – in short, it sounds like chaos. As you might expect in 2011, the people of Tunisia are uniting around a Twitter hashtag to discuss the events, express their feelings and share news reports about what’s happening. Revolution at the speed of TwitterAs you can see in the video below, following the stream of tweets using the #Sidibouzid hashtag is an exhilarating experience – real, raw human feeling being expressed and then amplified by Twitter’s megaphone. The problem is that it’s too fast to keep track of. Even if you pause the tweets, or simply use a non-real-time Twitter client to break up the flow, making sense of the events is impossible. Some people are tweeting news, others what they’re feeling, there’s even a few cases of what just looks like “hashtag spam” saying nothing of use whatsoever. The fact that some reports from the former French colony aren’t in English make things all the more difficult to parse. When real-time is no longer an advantageYes, as much as Twitter may be a fantastic place to keep track of news in real-time, we still need good quality filters to block out the noise and make sense of it all. When events are as confusing and fast-moving as in Tunisia right now, Twitter as a news-sharing service simply breaks down. A good example of this is demonstrated in the fact that credible Twitter reports of a military coup began a whole two days before anything actually began to kick off, as we reported at the time. At the moment it’s still mainstream media that we turn to when we want to get an authoritative view of what’s happening in situations like this. A firehose of Twitter talk is simple too raw to make sense of in real-time. Liveblogs like The Guardian’s, pulling together news from a range of sources, are a good way of keeping track of events, while Al Jazeera is doing a good job, as you’d expect from the well-respected Middle East news service. I suspect that there’s a real gap in the market for an automated service that can make sense of live, raw tweets from an emerging situation simply by analysing factors like location, linguistic trends and key phrases to help filter meaningful stories from the situation automatically. As it is, we’re a long way from that. Still, seeing a regime overthrown live via Twitter is certainly yet another landmark moment in the service’s brief but eventful history. |
| Geoli.st. The evolution of classifieds adds product image recognition and augmented reality Posted: 14 Jan 2011 10:26 AM PST
In a similar vein, where does one turn to find great deals on a litany of items such as food, vehicles, housing, and more? Food? Perhaps Groupon is offering a deal that strikes your fancy, but more than likely not. Vehicles? Again, try eBay, Craigslist or simply conduct a Google search. Housing? Your guess is as good as mine. Geoli.st (free) is an iPhone and Android app combines classified ads, buying and selling of items and searching for great deals, into one, easy-to-use app with some incredible new features with its most recent update, Geoli.st Version 2.1. Download the app, launch it, and once Geoli.st determines your location (the app works in the United States, Canada and England), one is presented with deal posts near where you are. Tap on any of the listings and additional information is provided depending on what kind of item another is peddling.
One of the really neat features of Geoli.st is anyone can become the seller of an item in a mere 10 seconds. Sign up, take a photo of the product you would like to sell, Geoli.st identifies the product with its new image recognition feature, which also works if you scan an item’s bar code, and that’s it! That which you’re selling is now up for sale, for free, on Geoli.st’s private social network, or one can opt to share the sale on Facebook and/or Twitter. Concerned about privacy? Likewise. Thankfully Geoli.st has its users covered. With Geoli.st nearby location = “Close Location-based,” allowing sellers to choose an area near where the item is actually sold to protect your true location. Other grand features of Geoli.st 2.1 include increased ability for local business to offer deals and advertise using the app. Companies can place their ads on Geoli.st and users can retrieve full reports on a post complete with number of views, click-through, calls, replies, shares, bookmarks, and even a complete a sale with a one-click payment system.
The killer feature Geoli.st has added, as if those mentioned aren’t enough to draw you in, is a new augmented reality feature. On the “Nearby” section of the app, select “3D View” and Geoli.st posts near you are presented using augmented reality. A super feature which adds mightily to Geoli.st’s appeal.
Geoli.st was a good app. With the new features added in the app’s latest update, it’s truly great. Allowing users to buy and sell items quickly and in a dead simple manner, exchange information on the best nearby deals, and more, all for free, makes Geoli.st an app you’ll want to add to your iPhone or Android device. |
| Google will now pay Apps users for all downtime, no matter how short Posted: 14 Jan 2011 09:22 AM PST
As much as their users would prefer them to never be down, Web-based services do occasionally break down. Until now, Google has had a 99.9% Service Level Agreement with its Apps customers,meaning that it would pay compensation for any unscheduled downtime suffered, but any routine maintenance, or breaks in service of up to 10 minutes, would not be covered. Now the agreement has been updated to remove the need for meaning that if any downtime at all is suffered by paying users of Apps, it will pay credit users’ accounts with compensation. With the cloud-based office solutions market becoming increasingly competitive, Google’s deal is the first time that a provider of such services has offered 100% uptime, with compensation for any break in service however small. |
| Happy Birthday! Foodspotting celebrates its first year. Posted: 14 Jan 2011 09:10 AM PST
My favorite way to describe Foodspotting? “If Flickr and Foursquare went out on a date, ate too many oysters and drank too much champagne, the result 9 months later would look very much like Foodspotting.” Using the mobile app, users can snap a photo of a dish, tag it and share it with friends on Foodspotting or via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. It’s also a helpful guide if you’re ever looking to spark your appetite. Simply open the app and search for photos of food taken nearby. Foodspotting began in 2009 when cofounders Alexa Andrzejewski, Ted Grubb and Soraya Darabi put their heads together to address what they felt was a lack of proper food reviewing apps. A few months later, they launched in beta at SXSW Interactive in March 2009. Over the past year they’ve grown to a team of 8 and struck national partnerships with Zagat, the Travel Channel and Whole Foods Markets for the upcoming Social Media Week. In addition, they’ve been working with 10 new media partners including Thrillist, NYMag and Martha Stewart. After being named one of the top apps of the year by both Apple and Wired, expect even more partnerships and API integrations in 2011. They also revealed an upcoming partnership with a big network channel, but I can’t say who just yet. To celebrate it’s first birthday, Foodspotting has arranged over 100 food-centric Meetups across the world in over 25 countries for its half a million users. Check out this list of Meetups to find one near you.
As an added bonus, Foodspotters receive a Birthday Badge for adding a cake sighting tomorrow. |
| Wait, You Haven’t Written It Yet Microsoft? Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:50 AM PST
Deep in the bowels of the Microsoft developer forums we came across (via Reddit) a forum post so funny, that we just had to share. If you have ever tried to follow recommended directions from a major company, this is for you.
Link to the full thread here. |
| Apple Is About To Register Its 10 Billionth App Download Posted: 14 Jan 2011 07:47 AM PST Apple has updated its website with an app counter which is about to surpass the 10 billionth application download via its mobile App Store.
Apple wants to reward its users so it will be offering a prize to the person who downloads the 10 billionth app, a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card that can obviously be used on Apple’s App Store but also to buy Macbooks, iPads, iPhones and iPods. If you don’t fancy downloading an app, you can enter without purchasing or downloading, head over to this link. You need to be over 13 years of age and you need to be a “legal resident of a participating App Store country” to qualify. Good luck! |
Activity Monitor is a little know gem of an app hidden in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder. It can look daunting when you first launch it but once you look past the information overload and find out what to focus on it can become an invaluable tool.
Find yourself staring at a spinning beach-ball cursor regularly? Do you hear your computers fan start up regularly? Are some apps slower than usual? Activity Monitor will tell you why and help you fix problems.
The processes are ordered by % of CPU usage. This is the first tool you can use to spot problems. As you can see in the screenshot here at one point iTunes was using 99% of my computers processing power. That isn’t good. Especially since I didn’t even know I had iTunes running and wasn’t using it.
TouchTunes Interactive Networks
Mytouchtunes
This past fall, The Beatles collection was 
The numbers are in! Today 
Twitter has challenged brands to reach out to consumers in a completely different way than how they did in the past through both traditional media and marketing campaigns. This social media platform "forced" brands to put their megaphone down and listen to their customers, changing the dynamics of their relationship. Today Twitter is on the agenda of most brands as a communication tool for immediate response to customers' requests, driving sales and taking the brand-customer relationship to a more personal level. Stripped away from glossy images, styled videos, well designed environments, how can brands spark an emotional connection with just 140 characters at their disposal?
If you’re a VP of Sales, you’ve likely heard of SalesForce. Head of Marketing? You should learn about HubSpot. CTO? Check out Zendesk.
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