I have heard of iPhone users falling in love with their phone. But the true extent of iPhone craze can be only understood, when a survey shows up that 65% users cannot live without their iPhones. Smartphones purchases also are affecting other types of gadgets. For example 60% of iPhone users will not buy a MP3 players and 55% users will not buy a camera.
Here are more such interesting statistics about smartphones and their users in a infographic by Coupon Audit.
What do you think about smartphones? Do drop in your comments.
There are parts of a webpage which you do not want to really use. For example when you see a Facebook public post or profile, it also shows a login box, which you might not be interested in.
Diagrams and charts are useful for people coordinating in a group. I have written previously about Google charts, Lovely Charts and more recently about Creately. On similar lines, Diagram.ly also allows users to create diagrams and share using your Google or Google Apps account and integrate it with your Google Drive account.
The diagrams can be created with many predefined elements based on various categories. For example there are many clipart images, flowchart styled arrows and branches to choose from.
A diagram can be saved on your desktop from the browser itself as an XML file.
More important it can be shared with your friends either by embeding it on a webpage or even sharing it via a URL.
My favourite part of Diagram.ly is that is can be integrated with Google Drive, allowing me to share a particular diagram with anyone form my Google contacts.
It is free and one does not even have to sign-in or register unless integrating with Google Drive. Try out Diagram.ly and drop in your comments.
Today, Flipkart has rolled a new service for Android users. It has started selling e-books from its Flyte store. Flipkart comes across as one of those companies that does not want to be acquired and rather build a large online retail business business. In other words, it wants to be the ebay or Amazon.com of India. Early this year in March, Flipkart introduced selling music in the form of DRM free MP3 files.
For a company that started selling books online, it was only a matter of time it started selling e-books.
Flipkart’s e-book store: How it works
The e-books being sold on Flipkart are available only on Android at the moment. It can be downloaded upto 6 times of different devices.
I checked the prices of some of the books and they seem to be a bit less than their printed versions. There seem to be over 64,000 books available on the store. That is actually a very small number but it should soon see a lot more books available.
Over 4000 e-books on Flipkart’s Flyte Store are available for free.
There are over 4000 free e-books at the moment available for download. Many of these free e-books are all time classics.
Payment options for the books include online banking, debit and credit cards along with Flipkart Wallet. Users will be able to preview upto 10% of the book before actually purchasing it.
At the moment, the app is only available on Android, but I am sure Flipkart will introduce this on other platforms like Apple’s iOS and Windows Store soon.
As tablets keep getting more popular in India, the e-book business will actually get more traction.
According to Hindustan Times, today India would be looking to oppose the any form of internet governance rules set up under the UN.
Internet censorship already exists in many countries, in which many social networks, YouTube and search engines fine themselves blocked in countries.
But ITU’s plans are to take such censorship further in laying down rules for content published on the internet across the world. In effect it would take over all authority from ICANN and give itself censorship powers. ICANN itself does not do any content regulation and more or less confines itself to technical standardization.
The big supporters of the creating new internet governance rules at the UN are not surprisingly Russia and China along with few more countries. Some of these rules will also include issues of tariffs applied by governments on certain sites along with handing over registration of country specific domains like to the governments rather than ICANN.
But it a relief to see India not on the side of countries like Russia and China on issues of regulating content on the internet.
Who else is opposing Net Censorship?
Not surprising one of the biggest opposition to ITU’s plans is from the search giant Google. Google owns YouTube which is a favorite target of many countries which try to crack down on internet freedom.
Would you support content regulation by the UN? Do drop in your comments and views.
Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which according to latest reports has sold over 5 smartphones. Samsung has confirmed that the Galaxy Note 2, itself had sold over 3 million units in the just 37 days. While Samsung has seen success over the past few years, it has not seen such sale numbers in such a short period of time. The final number of sales in Europe and North America will only go higher over the next couple of months, where it is the traditional shopping season.
Samsung Galaxy Note 2 has sold over 5 million units in the past couple of months. The phone is popular in the “phablet” category which is somewhere between a phone and a tablet.
Samsung has Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 which are its flagship products. Though a lot of attention is given to Galaxy S3 and it is often compared with Apple iPhone, Galaxy Note 2 is pretty much a pioneer in the ‘phablet’ category.
Samsung has actually got their bet on larger screens correct. Today almost all phone manufacturers including Apple have increased the screen size on their latest iterations of the phones. It could be because the phones are used more for consuming media content like videos, where having a slightly larger screen seems like a useful idea.
Are ‘Phablets’ here to stay?
Honestly, I am not the biggest fan of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2. The phone has 5.5 inch screen size. It feels too big for a phone and honestly does not comfortably fit into a regular sized pockets.
That said, the phone is preferred by many who are looking at something between a phone and a tablet.
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 selling in such high numbers, shows that Samsung has actually made the right choice. It seems ‘phablets’ are here to stay and we might see more manufacturers doing the same.
Facebook will soon be rolling out a an external advertising network according to GigaOm. Facebook primary source of revenues are Ads it displays on its own website. The Ads seen on Facebook by users are considered to be not as effective as say Google’s AdSense or AdWords.
Another issue for Facebook is that it is being accessed on mobile phones more than the PC browsers. Mobile phone users do not even see many of these Ads, except the odd sponsored story.
Facebook has recently updated and changed its privacy and governance policies. It has confirmed that it shares data on users with advertisers to show personalized ads on Facebook.com. This sharing of data will also be enabled to serve ads on external websites.
Should Google AdSense watch out?
I am not sure how much impact this will have on Google AdSense. Previous attempts to ape Google’s ad machine like WordAds have not really caught on.
Google itself is mainly a search engine and hence seeing ads is necessarily a call to action. Being a search engine, it has a better system in place to predict what people are looking for than Facebook.
How could it impact your Privacy?
The impact on privacy would not be huge as Facebook plugins on external sites already show personalized data. For example the Facebook box on our blog, will display a list of your common friends who have “Liked” our page. But if Facebook allows personal public data like your updates, photos you have shared on external website as part of advertisements, it could make people very uncomfortable.
Just a thumb rule about using Facebook regarding privacy. Do not share anything on it that you want to keep secret or out of public domain.
It will be interesting to see how Facebook plays this out. Do drop in your comments.
Do you know that when your browser connects to a particular, it can also connect to other invisible sites which users have no idea about. For example, Facebook runs its Javascripts of another domain which is fbcdn.net.
Sometimes these invisible sites also track your usage and store information about your browsing activity. Collusion is a handy Chrome and Firefox extension which helps users check if the sites they are visiting are also connecting to other invisible sites.
Just install the Collusion extension for Chrome and start surfing. The collusion icon shows the number of sites that are informed from the page you are viewing.
The sites with a red circle are the advertisers while the grey circles connecting are usually social media sites.
Not all invisible sites which are informed about a visitor are dangerous. Most of them are not. For example most blogs will inform Google Analytics about a visitor.
If user clicks on “Block known tracking sites” the extension then shows which advertisers are known trackers and are blocked. They are displayed in the visualization with a blocked symbol.
If you are interested in more privacy tips, the following posts might be useful.
Ever since Nexus 7 tablet by ASUS was priced at almost Rs. 20,000, I for one lost interest in buying it. The price tag was almost double that of what it is available in India. Apple’s iPad Mini will soon be available in India for Rs. 21,900.
The prices of the iPad Mini in India will be INR 21,900 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi Model.
How wrong is Nexus 7 pricing in India?
The Asus Nexus 7 tablet in India is priced at INR 19,999 is not just over-priced but risks that potential buyers might just opt for Apple iPad Mini. The price difference is only 2,000/- and the “Apple iPad” brand name will surely find more takers.
Whoever came up with the pricing for India for the Nexus 7 for Asus, has probably ended up shooting itself in the foot.
Interestingly because if you are thinking of buying yourself a new iPod Touch in India, you might want to think again. The iPad is taxed at 5% and iPod at 13.5%, which means the price of iPod Touch in India could end up higher than the iPad Mini.
Usually when I want to search for a Facebook page or friend, I just look them up on the search feature. Facebook itself uses stuff that we searched on the site to push ads and related posts on our feeds.
Facebook allows users to check their activity on their account. This includes all the search activity on your account.
Access your search activity on Facebook
Login to your Facebook profile and click on the Activity Log button.
That will show you a list of all your Facebook activity. On the right hand left hand side column you will see a drop-down to select Apps and Posts. From the list select “Search”.
Update: The image below is from an older Facebook design. The Posts and Apps shows up on the left-hand side now. You can simply visit the correct setting clicking on this link.
Now you can see all your search activity nearly categorized under its relevant date. You can delete search activity by clicking on the “Clear Searches” button or delete the queries one by one.
I guess by clearing the Facebook search history, I should expect Facebook not to use that data to serve me ads. I am not sure if Facebook does that or not but there is no harm in trying. 🙂
Facebook is definitely going to treat what people search for on its website with a lot more seriousness than before. It will surely be part of any monetization plan on their mobile platform in the future, so it might not be a bad idea to actually remove your search history on it.
