Google+ Releasing ‘Hangouts on Air’ Feature to All Users

Google+ on Monday announced it would gradually roll out its “Hangouts on Air” feature to the masses over the coming weeks. The feature lets you broadcast live sessions for anyone to watch — just like Barack Obama did in January.

Hangouts on Air can be posted on your Google+ stream, YouTube channel or website by checking “Enable Hangouts on Air.” It also allows you to monitor the number of views, record the live session and share it.

The feature previously was available only to a small group of broadcasters starting in 2011. Google touts the creative Hangouts those people have produced such as live concerts from a living room, classes anyone can attend, town halls with politicians and roundtables about any topic, among other sessions.

“So if you have something to say — as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen — you can now go live in front of a global audience,” Google engineering director Chee Chew wrote in a blog post.

To learn more about Hangouts on Air, watch the videos above and below.

Reference:  http://is.gd/P1NIV0

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Warren Buffett Has No Interest in Buying Apple or Google Stock

Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, isn’t bullish on Apple or Google stock. However, he isn’t betting against them either. 

Speaking at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting over the weekend, the legendary investor said he had no interest in purchasing stock from either technology company, according to All Things Digital. However, Buffett said, “I sure as hell wouldn’t short them either.”

According to the report:

He thinks Apple and Google are too risky of an investment, and he doesn’t know enough about either company to see them as “inevitable” winners. “We couldn’t predict what would happen to Apple 10 years ago and we can’t predict what will happen to it 10 years from now,” Buffett said.

Last month, it was suggested that Apple and Google could soon join the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index. Both stocks are trading near or around $600 per share.

Do you agree with Buffett?

Reference: http://is.gd/ZBU8Ia

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8 Professional Tumblr Themes for Your Small Business

Unfortunately, when it comes to your small business website, image is everything. How you present your company on the digital sphere is important, and as we’ve learned recently, people are searching for the word “Tumblr” more than “blog.”

More and more brands have migrated to Tumblr. The micro-blogging site has become a more serious platform for brands — whether it’s to show brand character, offer a peek behind the scenes, just to keep customers up-to-date on the latest from their storefront.

Some may feel slightly overwhelmed at the thought of juggling so many social media sites — why add a Tumblr to the mix?

First, you should know that it can be done. Tumblr recently made sharing to Facebook easier by integrating with Timeline. That’s a helpful step in your social media management’s direction. Tumblr has carved a niche for itself in embracing a more graphic and design-oriented aesthetic, which is a plus for your company if you’re looking to distinguish yourself in a more meaningful way than you can through a generic Facebook Page.

You should also keep in mind that there are more than 50 million blogs on Tumblr. That is a lot of people who could be looking at your site.

The best place to start is simply setting up a Tumblr — or maybe you already have one. After that, selecting a theme will help your site stand apart and look more professional. The great thing is you don’t necessarily need to spend a ton on a graphic designer or purchase a premium theme, although both of these options most certainly have their perks.

Don’t have the budget or the patience for a custom theme? Here are plenty of great free themes to choose from in Tumblr’s theme garden. Try to go with one that works with your brand and the utility goals of the blog. For example, if you’re looking to inform customers about what’s happening within the company, you’d be better off with a classic blog format. However, if you’re looking for something more visual, a pin-board style theme might be a better option.

Still feeling a little in over your head? We’ve round up eight classic, professional themes for your small business on Tumblr so you can become cutting edge with a simple or bold design.

What theme do you use for your professional blog? Let us know in the comments below.

1. Simple Things

This theme is a basic option for a business owner who wants a simple site, but also desires a more modern look.

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2. Natural Elegance

By going with a darker background, text and images stand out, and your site looks sleek and contemporary. This site is used best when you're taking a graphical approach to your Tumblr.

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3. Simplify

The name of this theme says it all -- simple. This is a great option for a business owner who is just looking for the very basics.

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4. The Atlantic

This theme, stylized after popular news magazine The Atlantic, gives your site a newsy feel that's professional and customizable. It's a good option for businesses with more text-based posts, such as keeping customers up-to-date on the latest from your company.

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5. Art She Said

This theme has a nice italic font that makes text stand out, and its clean, classic look will make your business' site look pretty sharp.

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6. c/c/c/ theme

We really like how elegant this theme looks. It's classic, with a simple pretty font.

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7. Content Focus 1.1

What's great about this theme is the fact that it has more than 60 interchangeable options for its appearance. You can switch fonts, colors and layout to match your company's branding.

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8. Brickway

This theme lets you customize colors and the social buttons at the top give it a highly professional accent.

Reference:  http://is.gd/bTfauK

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10 Top Android Racing Games

Death Rally

Tired of opponents getting in the way in racing games? Blow them up! This game offers plenty of dangerous weaponry that you can use to deal with the opposition. Thankfully, you can earn money to armor up your vehicle, repair damage, and upgrade weapons. You know, so you can cause more mayhem.

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2XL MX Offroad

Motorbikes aren't just for trial racers. No, they're also for racing to the finish line against up to seven other racers. Motocross and ATV bikes are available, with tracks that allow riders to perform dangerous stunts in the air.

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Acceler8

Dirt and sand are the racing terrains of choice here. Off-road vehicles jockey for position around twisty tracks, where the blinding sun proves to be just as much of a challenge as the other racers. You can earn money to buy better vehicles, which makes surviving easier.

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GT Racing Motor Academy

Start a career and race for fame, money, and better cars in this free racing simulation. Tired of beating computer opponents? Take the battle online against other players.

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Parking Frenzy

Ever notice that most racing games just end with cars stopped in the middle of the track? Here's a game where that's just not allowed. Players must try to park cars in difficult spots. Players are rewarded for not hitting any obstacles and for completing the challenge quickly.

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Trial Xtreme 2

Take dirt bikes through challenges they were probably never meant to handle in this trial racer. The gist is that an improperly-armored rider must remain on his bike as he rides across ramps, rocks, and through structures. The ultimate goal is to collect stars in each level, get to the finish line quickly, and perform flips to earn more points.

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Pocket Racing

This retro-inspired top-down racing game has players trying to race time trials around six tracks. Staying on the road is important, as there's a time penalty for going off-track. The game features downloadable ghosts that you can race against. That means you can play the best players in the world any time.

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Raging Thunder 2

This is old-school arcade-style racing in a modern package. It's all about drafting and picking up turbo boosts to zoom past opponents. (If you're braking, you're doing something wrong.) Best of all, the game has a no-nonsense "instant race" function that picks a car and track automatically, then starts up a race.

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Reckless Racing 2

This isometric racing game features players racing around dirt and road tracks. The game's physics system can be a challenge to deal with, but that’s also part of the fun. It also features a cross-platform online multi-player option and some of the best touch screen controls ever.

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Snuggle Truck

In this game, inspired by trial racers, players must try to keep their stuffed animals in their truck, as they race across hazardous terrain. There are medals for completing levels in a certain amount of time with a certain number of animals. On Android, the game is available in both this family-friendly version, and in its original, more controversial Smuggle Truck version.

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Whether you feel the need for speed or the desire to run your fellow drivers off the road, I won’t judge. I will, however, suggest you redirect that energy into one of these Android racing games.

These games run the gamut of racing styles, but they all have the same basic goal: Get to that finish line as quickly as possible! So pick a game, rev that engine, and get going.

Reference: http://is.gd/r53Eh4

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Interactive Billboard Lets You ‘Drag Away’ Abusive Man [VIDEO]

An interactive billboard in London is making it easy for passersby to get involved in stopping domestic violence.

The ad, at the city’s Euston Station, shows a man yelling angrily at a woman. A prompt on the billboard tells viewers to go to /ncdv.org.uk/stop to drag the man away. As the video above shows, when you go to the site, you can actually do so, albeit for a short time.

The National Centre for Domestic Violence, the organization behind this latest effort, isn’t the first to try to do something different with London billboards. Last year, Lynx, the Unilever antiperspirant brand, used an ad in Victoria station to let users see — via augmented reality — angels from the brand’s ads falling from the sky.

Reference: http://is.gd/tvjDOV

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The Government Would Like You to Write a ‘Social Media Will’

By some estimates, nearly a half a million people with Facebook accounts passed away last year, leaving family and friends to navigate what to do with those pages. Leave the account open? Shut it down entirely? Convert it to an official Facebook memorial page? What would you want for your own Facebook profile? And forget Facebook, what do you want tobecome of your email account? 

If you want any say in such matters, you might want to consider creating a social-media will, as the US government is now recommending as part of its advice on estate planning. As per their blog:

If you have social media profiles set up online, you should create a statement of how you would like your online identity to be handled. Just like a traditional will helps your survivors handle your physical belongings, a social media will spells out how you want your online identity to be handled.

Like with a traditional will, you’ll need to appoint someone you trust as an online executor. This person will be responsible for closing your email addresses, social media profiles, and blogs after you are deceased.

Sounds good, but legally it’s tricky territory. As Naomi Cahn, a professor of law at George Washington University, explained to me, “Formal wills become public. So you need to be careful what you put in a will, because anyone in the world could have access to it.” Instead, you might want to consider establishing a trust or just an informal agreement with information about your passwords and how you would like your accounts to be handled.

A further complication is that people’s social-media and other online accounts are not static, nor are their passwords. Cahn says that the average person has 25 password-protected accounts and types about eight passwords a day. Most people will likely not be able to keep their “social-media wills” up to date on that many accounts.

Planning for the care of your online trail post-mortem presents different issues than planning for money and physical objects. In part this is because our legal regimes and social norms are less solidified in these areas, and, in part because they are actually different animals: A Facebook account can become a participatory memorial that many friends and family can return to over the years, in a way that’s not true of your physical belongings. But despite their differences — or, perhaps, because of them — they each require their own plans for after you go.

Reference:  http://is.gd/VmWwHq

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Lenovo to Spend $800M to Develop Mobile Products

Lenovo, best known for its PCs, plans to get into mobile in a big way with an $800 million base in Wuhan, China, dedicated to developing mobile Internet products. 

The facility, set to open in October 2013 and house thousands of employees, is charged with developing and delivering “new mobile internet products and bring(ing) them to its customers even faster,” according to a company statement. Such products include smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices.

The move comes as Lenovo continues to build market share in PCs, a tough segment. Last year, Lenovo surpassed Dell in sales to become the world’s number two player in the category next to Hewlett-Packard.

Lenovo currently offered some mobile devices, including its LePhone smartphones and its ThinkPad tablets (pictured). In the last fiscal quarter, the company shipped 6.5 million handsets and 400,000 tablets globally. Lenovo blamed its relatively slow growth in PC sales in 2011 to the growth of tablets, led by Apple’s iPad. Lenovo was the number two seller of tablets in China last year next to Apple.

Could Lenovo shake up the mobile market? Let me know in the comments.

Reference:  http://is.gd/nNe4di

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Huntsy: A Smart Dashboard for Your Job Search

Ask any job seeker, and he’ll tell you that looking for a job is, in and of itself, a job. It’s time-consuming to prep your cover letter, tweak your resume, follow up and plan your interview, especially when you’re applying for multiple positions. Sure, you could make an intense, color-coded spreadsheet — but most of us aren’t that Type A. That’s where Huntsy comes in — it’s like HootSuite for your job search. Huntsy’s dashboard offer’s a bird’s eye view (hence the owl logo) of your job hunt, offering a bird’s-eye view of your professional prospects. 

“People are applying to many different places — Huntsy is our way to make it easy for them,” says Cezary Pietrzak, Huntsy’s director of marketing. “The category is just so dusty.”

Huntsy’s cleaning it off with a slick UI and an organized and social approach to the intimidating job search. You can create an account via your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profiles (or create a new login if you eschew connecting via social sites), and then install the bookmarklet or Chrome extension into your browser. As you sift through job listings — on a company’s website, LinkedIn, Krop, CareerBuilder, Github, Monster and more — you can click the Huntsy bookmarklet to save exciting prospects. A Huntsy widget will push down in the browser and fill out the necessary details — company, title and job description — by extracting it from the job listing.

The bookmarklet in action

Once you click “Add to Huntsy,” the job will be added to your dashboard, which looks like this:

The dashboard

Within the dashboard, you can schedule interviews and follow-ups, receive reminders to send thank-you notes, uncover professional connections at various companies (if you linked your social networks) and, most importantly, apply to jobs directly. If you’re applying to some jobs in marketing and others in PR, Huntsy can save several versions of your resume and a few different cover letters, letting you emphasize certain strengths and experiences for various positions. When you submit your application, your resume is included in the email as a unique, downloadable link. No longer must you feel as though your application has been thrust into a black hole, never to be seen by human eyes, because you’ll receive a notification the moment someone downloads your resume. This feature enables you to have great timing with a follow-up email, since you’ll know that your resume is fresh in the recruiter’s mind. (The application email also BCC’s Huntsy, so the dashboard can track your actions throughout the application process and help you stay on top of each step.)

If you’re diligent about using Huntsy, then the email notifications and “today’s tasks” could keep you top of your application process, especially if you’re applying to more than a handful of positions. Pietrzak says Huntsy’s streamlining can save job seekers two to four hours per week, in addition to helping the hunt stay organized and productive.

“You start to have a sense of what’s going on in your job search,” says Pietrzak of Huntsy’s guidance tools. Plus, the way Huntsy breaks the application process into small steps makes the user feel like he is “getting somewhere” something every step of the way — a valuable feature, since the job search often can be daunting and overwhelming.

The site launched less than a month ago and has signed up more than 5,000 users, who are spending 10 minutes on the site per session, says Pietrzak. And many of them are coming back — 40% of the visitors are returning, suggesting that they are in fact using Huntsy with some regularity to manage and streamline their job search. The team is working to perfect the functionality and add new features, including calendar integration (for all of those reminders and interview dates) and linking with Google+. Since it’s still new, the bookmarklet can be a little buggy and tends to not fully extract all of the details for some jobs, but a simple copy-and-paste can load everything into your dashboard.

Huntsy is based in New York and was born out of the QLabs hacker community, where the team shares office space with Turntable.fm and Nestio, a Huntsy-esque dashboard for the apartment search.

Does Huntsy sound like it’d be a useful tool for your job search? Let me know in the comments.

Reference: http://is.gd/8HjkZt

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Facebook Launches Two-Filter ‘Instagram’ on ‘Facebook for Every Phone’

One month after its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has added filters to one of its apps. 

Users of Facebook’s app for non-smartphones, “Facebook for Every Phone,” can now tweak their photos with Sepia or Grayscale filters similar to those Instagram offers.

Instagram had nothing to do with the new feature, a Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook. Rather, the apps were developed at an employee hackathon.

The New York TImes reported in August 2011 that Facebook was developing a set of filters for its mobile app “with the hopes of drawing off fans of Instagram.”

Given its recent $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, that is no longer Facebook’s motive. But it could help users of phones that can’t run the Instagram app understand what the fuss is all about.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it would be expanding the feature to its other apps.

Reference:http://is.gd/1MWU8n 

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Tablet Newspaper ‘The Daily’ Launches on iPhone

The Daily, a News Corp.-owned daily news publication that launched exclusively on the iPad 15 months ago, is continuing to expand to new platforms with the launch of an iPhone edition Thursday. 

The app [iTunes link] is relatively basic, lacking the creative design that makes its tablet counterparts so eye-catching and immersive. After bypassing a static screenshot of the cover, users can pull up a menu to navigate and explore stories by vertical. Stories are displayed with an image or video, followed by a headline, text and sometimes a slideshow at the end. Banner ads hover at the bottom of every screen.

Given its lack of a ‘wow’ factor, I doubt the iPhone app will do much to boost The Daily subscriber numbers, but it will allow existing subscribers to access content when they don’t have their tablets on hand.

The Daily launched an Android tablet edition in January and announced in February that it had passed the 100,000 paid subscriber mark. Publisher Greg Clayman told in February that he expects The Dailywill be profitable within “the next couple of years.”

A subscription to The Daily‘s tablet editions costs $0.99 per week (iOS subscribers only), $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year following a one-week free trial. iPhone-only access costs half that — $1.99 a month or $19.99 per year — and is available for free to tablet subscribers.

Reference: http://is.gd/ptmeYC

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