Meet Mynd: the iOS calendar app that keeps track of how you spend your time

Built by former Good Technology employees, Mynd helps users stay on top of their schedule and then lets them look back and see where they’ve been, who they met with and more.

           Yes, there’s another app about to launch that wants to help you stay productive and on top of your daily tasks and appointments. But this one, Mynd, also wants to help you decide if you’re spending your time wisely.

         Mynd goes live in the iOS App Store Wednesday morning, where it will be free to download. The app is a calendar that uses your contacts, maps, location, and Facebook, Evernote and LinkedIn accounts  to present a picture of what your day looks like. It will prompt you at the appropriate times to get ready for your next appointment; it’ll tell you when to leave for your doctor’s appointment in order to arrive on time, will dial you into your next conference call and show you the weather for where you’re going. It will also surface the Evernote notes that are related to particular meetings.

          When you open the app you aren’t presented with a traditional calendar view. You see a home screen of large panels that show you, all at once, your next upcoming appointment time, a picture of who you’re meeting with, the current weather report, the location you’re headed next, how many miles you’ve traveled today, and the number of appointments you have to go. It’s a lot of information elegantly presented. Instead of overwhelming the user with info, it actually makes the day seem manageable. Managing time is the app’s main feature. And its most important feature allows you to look back at the end of the day or page back through the week, get a quick summary and make a judgement about where you’ve been, who you met with, etc.

        “It’s at the core of what we’re about: time as the basis of presenting you with all sorts of relevant and interesting info about how you’re spending this valuable commodity of time,” Max Wheeler, founder and CEO told me.

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Apple's iPhone activation servers experience Up, Up and Away

iPhone users reported being unable to activate their new iPhones due to issues with Apple's activation servers on Thursday.

      Apple's iPhone activation process experienced hiccups Thursday, with users reportedly unable to activate their new phones.

           The check-in process phones home to Apple before users are able to use the device, leaving new buyers out of luck. The security measure has been a source of frustration during previous product launches, when the servers were swamped with new owners.

Apple declined comment on the apparent downtime, which was reported earlier Thursday by MacRumors.

The issues came as Apple's developer site and most of its connected services near a full week of unavailability. Apple temporarily closed the site down last Thursday following what it says was an attack by an intruder. This Thursday's connectivity issues are believed to be unrelated.

Update has been rolled: The issue has now been fixed.

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6 YouTube Tricks You Probably Don’t Know

              This post intends to deliver tricks that will add more dimension to your experience on the YouTube platform, and allow you to enjoy some of the little-known shortcuts, hacks and special features you can use on Youtube.

1. Specific Start Time

         If you want to share just a certain portion of a video with a user, you’ll notice that there is no official option to do this. Normally you have to inform others which minute they can pull to start from. Bet you didn’t know that there is a handy hack to send a link to a user or embed a certain portion of the YouTube video in your website. Skip the fluff and get to the good stuff.

Here is how it works. Consider the following Youtube Video URL:

                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00ikilDxW4

After the URL link add #t=01m08s to set the starting point of the video at 1 minute and 8 seconds.

2. Auto Video Replay

            There are certain times when you get obsessed with a Youtube video, whether it’s a really catchy song or a funny video. Isn’t it annoying to always have to hit replay everytime you near the end? Why not activate the looping feature?

The what now? Let’s use the same YouTube video. Just replace youtube with the text infinitelooper in the URL and hit enter.

        It will redirect you to another YouTube third-party platform where you are also provided with the option of looping selected portions of the video.

3. Auto High-Definition Video Play

        Sometimes when you play a YouTube video the video quality has been set on default for you, usually at a lower quality video resolution. To prevent this from happening you can force the system to permanently play videos in an HD format.

        Grab the extension called Magic Actions for Youtube available only for Google Chrome and Firefox. Enable the option Auto HD in the extension and select the video resolution you would like to be played automatically. You can also set the mouse wheel to scroll up (and down) the volume of the video.

4. Accurate Keyword Searching

        There are a billion videos on Youtube so trying to find that specific Youtube video you want to watch is an adventure by itself. You might find yourself crawling through dozens of pages hoping to land the video you actually want to watch.

The solution for this time-consuming exercise is to add allintitle: before the keywords you are search for. What it does is basically provide you with only videos that include the chosen keywords

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5. Omit Keywords

          You can opt for specific keywords to be in the search, or out of it. Let’s say you are searching for a tutorial about ‘register domain.’ Using the most conventional search form you will find tons of videos about how to register domain using Godaddy.

If you want to find other options that are not GoDaddy, you can always exclude the keyword from your search results i.e. ‘keyword -excluded keyword.’

Here is how it should look like.

6. Watching Videos with a Slow Internet Speed

           Youtube has released a robust feature called the ‘Feather Beta’. This feature is dedicated to users who want to run videos on a very slow internet connection. The system basically cuts down some bytes that limit the speed of video streaming in your browser.

To opt-in the feature you simply go to http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta and join the beta feature.

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New iPhone 5S photos leak appear

New iPhone 5S photos appear, specs hint at 12 MP camera, higher CPU clock, quad-core GPU

           

          Parts for the iPhone 5S have leaked quite a few times before, and now we have another batch of what seems to be chassis waiting to be stuffed with internal silicon.

          The more interesting part here are the claimed specs accompanying them, which say that we'll get a 4" 2272x1280 pixels IGZO display accounting to whooping 652 pixels per inch<ppi>, meaning high brightness at frugal battery consumption, the same A6 SoC like in the iPhone5, but clocked higher, and a quad-core PowerVR SGX544MP4 GPU, instead of the tri-core unit we have now.
         

          The source also confirms 2 GB of RAM, NFC at last and the elusive fingerprint scanner we've been hearing about for a while, linked to mobile payment system of sorts, though we have to see the two gigs of RAM listed officially to believe them. As for the camera, it gets downgraded a bit in terms of resolution from the last leaks, claimed to be 12 MP instead of 13 MP now, but a dual LED flash system is confirmed. 

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Actual Mobile Paying Device Through Credit Card

For those who fear Virtual Money Transfer and The Under Developing Countries GOOD NEWS !!!

iZette

           Enter iZettle, a Stockholm, Sweden-based company which wants to solve this problem by introducing a credit card reader which does work with smart cards.

           Instead of swiping a card, this little device lets you insert them into iZettle to read the chip contents. In that sense iZettle is not plugged on the headphone jack but on the Dock connector, making the device bigger than Square but I guess something’s gotta give.
         
          Aside from the regular card processing, users will also be able to share their spending with friends on Facebook and Twitter a la Blippy. The short iZettle promo video follows.

Same Kind of Thinking from Ezetap an Indian Company

Bangalore-based Ezetap has launched a new mobile point-of-sale device that will cost a lot less than similar products in the market, while meeting global security standards and RBI guidelines.

Rapid growth in India's online retail and financial service sectors is leading to a demand for secure point-of-sale devices, as companies move towards non-cash based transactions. Overall, credit and debit card based transactions in India are expected to touch 862 million this year, a growth of 33% over last year, according to a report by Atos Worldline India.

"India is the toughest market, very competitive and cost sensitive," said Ezetap co-founder Abhijit Bose, who expects to sell one million devices in the next two years. The Ezetap device, will be priced at around Rs 2,900, consists of a lightweight card reader that can be plugged into any smart device or feature phone used by a retailer. Customers need to only swipe their cards on the mobile to complete the transaction.

"Most people prefer cash on delivery. And it became difficult, when they did not have exact cash at the time of delivery," said Abhinay Choudhari, co-founder of online grocery store BigBasket.com, which has about 1.5 lakh customers. Experts said with the government promoting digital payments, the mobile point of sale market is expected to soar. "Millions of mom-and-pop businesses, or kirana shops, cannot afford expensive integrated point-of-sale solutions," said Uttam Nayak, group country manager for India at Visa.

There are a number of companies that offer mobile payment solutions, including Mswipe, Prizm Payments and Synergistic Financial Networks. "It is a very competitive space," said Nayak who expects the insurance and ecommerce industry to be the biggest adopters of mobile point of sale solutions.

Ezetap has bagged banking customers, such as Citibank and Yes Bank, as well as those in the ecommerce, telecom, insurance and hospitality sectors. The company has launched operations in Kenya and expects to enter the South-East Asian markets in the next three months.

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The New Mac Book Air

All The Air You Need Through Out The Day.

     

EXTRA JUICE

The 11-inch MacBook Air now lasts up to 9 hours between charges and the 13-inch model lasts up to an incredible 12 hours. So from your morning coffee till your evening commute, you can work unplugged. When it’s time to kick back and relax, you can get up to 8 hours of iTunes movie playback on the 11-inch model and up to 10 hours on the 13-inch model. And with up to 30 days of standby time.



           

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