Google Launches Audio Streaming System Google Cast

We are aware of Chromecast which is used to stream videos. Now, a new audio streaming service, Google Cast that enables users to transmit their favorite music from their mobile device to their speakers with the help of Chromecast. It is compatible with Android and Chromebook as well as iOS, Macs and Windows. On has to tap the cast button in his or her favorite music or radio app and selects a Google Cast Ready speaker to stream to.

Google Cast product manager Tomer Shekel said in a blog post, “Google Cast Ready speakers pull content directly from the cloud, so you’ll get the best audio quality and can freely multi-task on your phone, tablet, or laptop, all without straining the battery. These speakers will work with a growing list of apps including Deezer, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Pandora, Rdio, TuneIn, and many more.”

It is very easy to search and browse, play, skip, and turn up the volume directly from the apps. You can even ask friends to join in and use the apps on their phones to cast to the speakers.

Google Cast Ready speakers will be available for purchase this spring in the U.S. only. Sony, LG and HEOS by Denon will be the first brands to produce the speakers with more to come later in 2015. Find the below video to understand how it works.

Email Still Key For Work Communication

Pew Research Internet Project completed a  study  which shows researchers found roughly six out of every 10 American workers prefer e-mail as highly important following by internet to their workflow.

The usual Email communication shows as vital for workers with less preferred landline phones, cellular phones and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook rounding out the list.

The report says, “(E)mail and the internet are particularly important to adults who work in traditionally “white collar,” office-based occupations such as professionals, executives, managers, business owners, and clerical workers. They are also critical for the 59 percent of employed online adults who take their jobs outside of the physical boundaries of the workplace at least occasionally.”

The statistics are a bit surprising as nowadays we have seen a havoc growth for social media but still Email continued to the best reliable mode of communication in workplace.

The study’s statistics can be reviewed to determine the cyber attack against Sony Pictures. That hack job ended up seeing countless pieces of information making its way in to the hands of the public including personal information of celebrities and high-ranking Sony officials. So the percentage shows how an email hack can breach the security of an organization.

Apple Faces Lawsuit Over Storage Space

Recently it was seen that Apple is being sued by a pair of Florida men claiming the company has misled users about the storage capacity of its devices. They stated that more than 23 percent of storage space on Apple’s devices will be consumed by Apple’s iOS 8 alone. The complaint alleges that Apple failed to inform its users that installing iOS 8 would take up as much as 23.1 percent of the phone’s storage capacity.

“The defendant fails to disclose to consumers that as much as 23.1% of the advertised storage capacity of the devices will be consumed by iOS 8 and unavailable for consumers when consumers purchase devices that have iOS 8 installed,” wrote Jonas P Mann of US law firm Audet & Partners in a complaint filed in the northern district of California.

“Reasonable consumers, such as Plaintiff, do not expect this marked discrepancy between the advertised level of capacity and the available capacity of the Devices, as the operating system and other storage space unavailable to consumers occupies an extraordinary percentage of their Devices’ limited storage capacity.”

Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, the two Florida men who have launched the suit, are seeking millions of dollars on behalf of a nation-wide class of Apple users, reported Business Standard.

Apple faced similar issue around eight years ago as per CBS News reports. Apple won a battle over the amount of storage space on iPods. The issue was with the 8GB iPod Nano featured 7.45 GB of space, a difference of only 7.5 percent.

Pinterest Launches Promoted Pins For Advertisers

Its been quite few months the promoted pins program was launched in beta with selected brands giving the medium a trial run. Now, as of January 1, any businesses wishing to advertise on Pinterest can opt for it. All the promoted pins look like regular pins but designated with a special ‘promoted pins’ tag.

Pinterest ad chief Joanne Bradford wrote in a blog post that the site’s tests have revealed that promoted pins work as well or better than organic pins. She added, "Brand advertisers achieved about a 30 percent bump in earned media (free impressions!) from their campaigns. That’s from people who saw a Promoted Pin and thought it was good enough to save to one of their own boards. Engagement is strong— the average Pin is repinned 11 times, and that remains true for Promoted Pins (if not higher).”

Pinterest will also launch Pinstitute which is a new program for businesses to learn how to connect with pinners. She explained, "The Pinstitute will focus on two tracks: creative and measurement. You’ll learn what kind of pins perform well, what pinners care about and how we’re thinking about our products in the future. We’ll also get your feedback on what you’d like to see us do so we can help you get even better results from Pinterest.”

Pinterest plans to invite a “select group of brands and agencies” and the first Pinstitute has been set for March. Webinars will go on air once the Pinstitute agendas are all set.

21 Rules For Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies [Infographic]

Social Media strategies might have a lot of different approaches but all the rules should be effective so that people who are on various social media platforms can get engaged with business campaigns.

Here is a nice infographic which explains 21 rules for effective social media marketing strategies.

Source : SocialMetricsPro

How To Use TOR Browser Ignoring Online Tracking

Nowadays we know that our phone calls, texts, emails, and online activities are all being recorded and monitored and there are so many things which we share unknowingly. Some may say that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Yes it is true that only criminals should fear getting caught if the government is spying on all of internet users.

But there is something you can do to protect your information while browsing online. May be you are not a tech savvy person as it doesn’t require you to be an IT expert or technical genius. Using the TOR browser, you can remain anonymous online and protect your right to privacy. Lets see in the below inforgraphic how it works and why to use it?

Source : WhoIsHostingThis

How To Make Your Email Hack-proof

Recent hack of Sony is a perfect example of company security breaches, exposed months of employee emails. Hackers very often hacks confidential information about a company and its customers, such as credit-card numbers and email addresses.

The basic way which is well practiced by hackers is by sending fake emails with malicious links to employee inboxes of a particular company.

Below are five simple steps that will make your email more secure and safe from hackers.

1. Label And Organize :

A lot of emails we receive from different email IDs everyday. You have to sort them into folders. This process will help you make your inbox more secure and the attacker has to know which folder to go to, or to take multiple steps to search for wanted information which is tough job indeed. Always remove any kind of sensitive information from your inbox.

2. Archive frequently :

A lot of corporate email systems allow people to set up regularly scheduled archiving so that emails are moved from the server after a certain number of days and can be saved to a archived file safe into your hard drive or USB storage media.

3. Keep Personal And Official Email Separate : 

Never use your company/official email for personal use. It will allow hackers to look into your company email account with several hacking tricks and resulting exploiting your company's system.

4. Never click on unknown attachments :

Delete the entire email or the attachment in case you receive an email with a link or attachment. You can confirm with the sender that the email sent to him was done by mistake or purposefully.  You can hover your mouse cursor over the hyperlink or right-click on any link from companies such as banking institutions, to see its linking site or activity.

5. Involve IT helpdesk :

Any received email containing a link or attachment strikes you as strange then immediately engage your IT department to look into the security threats.

Google Displays Lyrics In The SERPs

Google has updated its search engine recently. This will include song lyrics as well. Suppose you are searching by a song name with the word "lyrics" it will show the entire lyrics. As of now the service is available for U.S. English users.

If you can’t remember the words to a song you like, you can simply plug in the song’s title to Google Search and the song in its entirety will appear right in search without having to click on any additional links.

A Google+ post by Glenn Gabe showed how it works.

“The hammer has fallen. Google now displaying lyrics in the SERPs,” he posted along with evidence of the new feature: a screenshot of Google listing the lyrics for a popular Kings of Leon song.

But there are searches for both new and classic song lyrics coming up blank. Instead it shows the links to corresponding YouTube videos and third-party lyric sites. So it is observed that Google is not scraping the songs from top lyrics websites but, rather, is trying to obtain the lyrics properly by paying licensing fees.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the release of the lyrics search feature to Tech Crunch saying that “There’s a feeling you get when you turn to a song and you know that the words have two meanings. Well it’s whispered that now if you go search the tune, maybe Google will lead you to reason. Ooh, it makes you wonder…”

Google Says Goodbye To Russia

The Russian parliament passed a bill that explains as of September 2016, foreign Internet companies can only store Russian users' data within the country's borders. As a result of a recent change, the date will be up to this coming January 1, 2015. Google will close down its engineering office, following other tech companies such as Adobe, which left the country in September.

Castellon says, "According to this law, Google would be a content provider that leverages the work of others. From our point of view, Google News, or any other aggregator, is a traffic-distribution mechanism that adds value to the user legitimately and ends in a loss of value on both sides of the table." 

Germany attempted to block Google in a similar manner last month. Google announced in a blog post that the service will be disabled and Spanish publishers will be removed from Google News on Tuesday

How To Boost Your Affiliate Programs In This Holiday Season

Affiliate program is always a good source of income for a lot of webmasters and bloggers. So the effort should also be  prepared for the holiday season to make most of this high-traffic time.

You can follow the below mentioned rules which can be considered while working with affiliate program offerings.

1. Inform Affiliates : You can inform affiliates about promotions prior to the offer as it will be easy and also possible for affiliates to promote your brand.

2. Trusting Affiliates : If you trust your affiliate then it will be good for your online deals. Suppose the promotion is confidential, give affiliates some general information and provide specific codes and details as key dates approach.

3. Encourage Affiliates : You can encourage the affiliates to show up ads for their visitors with special sale messaging at the appropriate times and will revert back to evergreen messaging once the sale is over.

4. Offering incentives/bonuses  : You can inform your affiliates that you will provide some incentives or bonuses for hitting sales thresholds that encourage affiliates to promote your holiday offers.

5. Competitive sale offer : In holiday seasons the offers must be different from other times in the year. These offers should be competitive enough to other brands offerings.

6. Sufficient Affiliate Account Funds : let your affiliates ensure you that they have sufficient funds to project your offers for sale.

7. Online shopping : Online shopping ensures continuous offers from online stores which will never stop after Cyber Monday. There should be separate messaging to last through the whole holiday season.

8. Provide Affiliates Product Offerings : You should educate the affiliates for promoting the most important products of the season. Affiliates love hearing about best-selling products and other high converters in online market.

9. Category Based Product Promotion : Never forget to promote specific products which may bring large sales. even it is found that more specific offers are more effective at catching the eyes of specific buyers.

10. Don’t Show Site Updates : Before big shopping periods, try avoiding site updates. It will be painful if new updates turned into big glitches during a time of heavy online shopping time.

11. Track Your Affiliates :  In case it doesn’t work as it should, you could lose affiliates forever when they see that they didn’t convert as they’d expect. Its always recommended to track the affiliates.

12. Offer free shipping and free returns : You should always set yourself apart from the pack while sharing your offerings over online store. It is the season of giving, after all.

Another very important thing to remember is that while there are specific days over the course of the next few weeks set for shopping activity, your affiliate plan should last through to the New Year to ensure that it’s a holiday hit and it will continue its ongoing deals.

Facebook Releases Stickered For Messenger

Facebook has introduced a new app for Messenger to celebrate the holiday season this year.

It has named as Stickered for Messenger which enables users to add stickers to their photos before sending them to friends.

This new app offers holiday inspired sticker packs, snow globe chat heads and festive frames for New Year’s Eve selfies.

It features 52 categories of stickers to choose from, including – Minions, Pikachu, Burgerhead man and more. Users can add a sticker, and perform drag to move, pinch to resize and twist to rotate it. Stickers can be placed anywhere on the screen.

Facebook stated in a blogpost that “The holidays are an important time for people to be connected with their friends and family and Messenger is an easy way to coordinate activities and keep in touch. All of these fun features will be available over the holidays.”

Stickered for Messenger is already available in the Google Play Store and the App Store.

Google Maps Allows You To Do Window Shopping

Google announced last week that Google Maps is letting people to do some holiday shopping in New York and London as part of their festive special service. The windows are being featured on Google Maps and are those from stores in these two major cities during holiday ambience.

Google Maps blogsite stated that “So much of the fun of holiday shopping is seeing the lavish, seasonal displays in the windows of shops and department stores as you pass by. Starting today, with Google Maps Business View, you can see decked out displays… without braving the cold weather, lugging bags around or fighting for sidewalk space with fellow shoppers. Now grab your virtual reindeer because we’re off to our holiday window tour.”

A few stores in the two cities are highlighted in its website. Also as per The Telegraph reports, it’s not really anything more than an update of Google Street view in which users can, virtually, walk along streets and look at properties.

This is an eye catching  view for the people who may not be able to take in some of those impressive window displays.

Google To Introduce Child-Friendly Versions of Search, YouTube

Google has finally concentrating on the large demographic i.e. under age group 12 by introducing a filtered search. Pavni Diwanji, the vice-president of Google engineering told USA TODAY that it has plans to modify all of its most popular products — search, YouTube and Chrome and this time is for children.

Diwanji, who is a mom to daughters aged eight and 13, told the publication that “The big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids, so there’s a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children. We expect this to be controversial, but the simple truth is kids already have the technology in schools and at home. So the better approach is to simply see to it that the tech is used in a better way.”

The project is full-time and Google is eagerly planning it to get set go, Diwanji didn't confirm that when parents can see the new services to be introduced.

She added “We want to be thoughtful about what we do, giving parents the right tools to oversee their kids’ use of our products. We want kids to be safe, but ultimately it’s about helping them be more than just pure consumers of tech, but creators, too.”

Google will definitely be able to make the Internet a little more kid-friendly. What do you think?

Google Fiber Offering Free Basic Internet Service

Google has surprises for residents of Austin, Kansas City & Provo Texas. It is offering a free basic version of its broadband service to these cities. Google fiber team revealed its pricing for its coming soon Fiber services. It is reported that it will offer 1Gbps service priced at $70 per month and 1Gbps plus TV for $130.

The basic plan comes with a one-time $300 construction fee, but there is no monthly charges afterward. There is an option of paying $25 a month for one year and then receive free Internet for all the following years. It will provide download speeds up to five megabits per second and upload speeds of one megabit per second.

People signing up for the mid-tier plan and the upper-tier plan will have the $300 construction fee waived as long as they commit to one full year.

For $70 a month, users will receive up to 1,000 megabits per second upload and download speeds and 1TB of cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ photos.

For $130 a month, users receive 150-plus TV channels and the ability to record eight shows at once in addition to up to 1,000 megabits per second upload and download speeds and 1TB of cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ photos.

Google has yet to reveal when Fiber will go live. Its website says consumers to “check back in December when we open the first fiberhoods for sign up.”

In future, the company has plans to expand its Google Fiber community across the country with increasing Internet speeds. With high speed fiber-optic networks it will provide better connectivity for millions of Americans as of now.

Google fiber service is available in Kansas City and Provo, Utah. The company has plans to expand Fiber to Phoenix, Arizona and Nashville, Tennessee in near future.

Google May Lose Search Default In Apple's Safari

Google lost its opportunity for being the default main search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox and now it seems that Apple also excludes Google search from its web browser Safari too. According to online news, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing are trying their luck for Apple to become the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser as Google’s contract expires next year. 

Yahoo has already defeated Google by owning the default search title in Mozilla's Firefox. Mozilla’s browser is one of the biggest desktop browser used worldwide. Losing the deal with Apple would be another blow to Google.

Safari is widely used by people worldwide and is the largest share of the mobile market about 45 percent. Its mainly because of the iPhone and iPad users. It is also observed that few Android users prefer Safari over Google’s Chrome. It has already become a hot news that Apple may not renew its search engine deal with Google, which is its biggest competitor in the Smartphone market as of now.

Safari on iOS is already offering users to choose their own default search engine either Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Somehow it is difficult to find the setting to make the switch, so most users just use the current default: Google.

Lets see the future that Google is going to make regarding its search engine deals.

Mozilla Includes “One-Click Searches” To Firefox

Mozilla revealed the new royalty agreement with Yahoo last week regarding 5 years default search provider on Firefox beating Google. Within a week's time it has come up with another news that Firefox is adding  a feature which enables users to search with a single click. When users type a string into the Firefox search box, they will get a list of more organized search options from the default search engine. And even better, an array of buttons below these suggestions will allow users to choose which search engine or site they want to send the query to.

Lets see in the below example. Suppose, a user types "Mozilla" into the search box, they can search the term directly on Wikipedia.

Firefox is built with a set of pre-loaded search engines that are supported in different languages. Yahoo will be the new U.S. default search engine, Yandex will be the new default in Russia, and Baidu will remain the default in China.

This "one-click search engines" section in the settings helps user who can easily hide and show sites and alternate search options. Mozilla is also keep in introducing MDN, Stack Overflow, Yelp and dictionary sites are possible additions.

As per Mozilla the features are "coming soon to a Firefox near you!" but it didn't reveal when these updates will be rolling out. Hope this will help and take ahead Firefox from its closest rival Chrome.

How To Make Money Online [Infographic]

People do search for various ways on how to make money online. There are number of options which can be useful to make money online. As the name might imply, there are a lot of items on this list of ways to make money from the internet (over 200 to be more specific), so be prepared for a lot of scrolling because this is one seriously long infographic.

If you’re ready to make money from the internet, you’ll first need to decide on the general method you intend to use, whether that be selling your old stuff, freelancing or site flipping. Then you’ll need to find the right sites to give you the tools you need to make money from the internet, such as eBay, Elance or Sedo. Fortunately, this infographic features information on both the general logistics and the tools so you can develop a plan to make money from the internet in no time.

Source: Lifehack

Google Introduces Simplified Email Service "Inbox"

Google introduced a new email service named as "Inbox" recently. It will organize emails and display information such as appointments, flight bookings and package deliveries in a more user-friendly and a better way.

Google said it was sending out invitations to selected Gmail users to try out the new service. Users can also email the company at inbox@google.com to get an invitation.

Google says "When you start using Inbox, you’ll quickly see that it doesn't feel the same as Gmail—and that’s the point. Gmail’s still there for you, but Inbox is something new. It’s a better way to get back to what matters, and we can't wait to share it with you."

Here are the highlights of Inbox :

Bundles: It will keep the promotional emails, emails regarding travel or purchase organized automatically. No need for manual labeling.

Highlights: It displays the important info at a glance. You can see order updates, flight status, reservation details, and pictures without having to open the message.

Reminders: You can get the reminders or to-do list to the top of your inbox.

Snooze: You can snooze to-do’s, messages and reminders whenever you want.

The new service is being provided alongside Gmail which was launched in 2004. It will be available on the Web as well as on Android smartphones and iPhones.

Lets see how it works along with Google's much popular Gmail service. Share  and leave your comments below.

The Future Of Mobile Application Development [Infographics]

Cell phone users are rapidly growing faster and it continues to grow and obviously the use of smart phones have also been raised a lot in recent years. 91% of the US adult population currently owns a cell phone and out of that, 61% are smartphones.

1 billion smartphones are expected to be sold out in the coming year, doubling that of the number of PCs. With over 10 billion mobile Internet devices expected to be in use by 2016, the mobile application industry will grow tremendously to match demand and keep up with ever-evolving technologies. Lets look into the below inforgraphic to know the real fact in detail.

Source : http://businessdegrees.uab.edu/

What Do People Use Smartphones For? [Infographic]

Do you have any clue what all smartphone users do with their smartphones? This is really interesting to know how people make use of their smartphones and which apps they access most. Here is the infographic that answers all your questions.

Believe it or not making phone calls is no longer priority for smartphone users. Smartphone has become one-point solution for sending email, surfing internet, playing games, watching videos etc.

Source : www.hotbargainphones.com