Websites like TrueCaller easily allow people to lookup the name of the person to whom a phone number belongs to. It behaves mainly like a global directory. Truecaller itself has some useful apps too on Android and iPhone. The android app actually displays the name of person if the phone number that you are receiving a call from is not saved in your contacts.
But what if you do not want Truecaller to list your phone number? In the interest of privacy, Truecaller has an option to unlist your phone number.
Enter the right captcha and your phone number becomes unlisted.
I was surprised that it did not send a confirmation code or something on the phone but then it makes sense. If it does not ask permission before listing them, they do not need to unlist them either.
Though unlisting your number is useful for privacy, TrueCaller can be very useful to get notified of numbers which give you those spammy marketing calls which you wished, you had not answered.
Today, they have released the future version (read: beta) of Opera. They call it Opera Next.
Firstly, the browser is already available for Android, and now can be tried on Windows and Mac too. As it is based on Chromium, it apparently shares a lot of similarities with it (take a look at the settings page).
The main focus seems to be on Speed Dial and Discover features. Discover basically allows you to browse through news, you might totally find it irrelevant if you already use something like Flipboard or any RSS reader. The Speed Dial tiles look huge and beautiful, they’re also customisable.
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They have also introduced a new ‘Stash’ feature. It seems like a place for your favourite sites. You get a large preview of them in the Stash tab. But really, I didn’t find a point in it.
Like you’d expect, there’s Opera Turbo, which is the main reason for Opera being popular. It’s called ‘Off-Road mode’ in Opera Next.
The traditional version of Opera used to support share sheets on Mac, I really liked that. Opera Next on the other hand, doesn’t support OS X Mountain Lion’s sharing features.
As you can see, there’s not a whole lot of stuff they’ve released, but as Blink gets better I’m sure you can expect features in Opera (and Chrome).
Hit the link below to download and give Opera Next a try.
With Google+ proving to be gain momentum, the internet giant has finally decided to shut down it’s not-so-successful social network, Google Buzz. Google Buzz has been unavailable to the public since an year and finally Google has announced that all the Google Buzz posts/content will be sent to the user’s Google Drive account.
This move is actually a good one by Google that ensures that the users’ have a backup of their Buzz history. Google will begin moving the data on July 17, and meanwhile you have three other options to access/download your Buzz content. You can choose one among these three :
Google has also announced that moving this data to your Google Drive account and it won’t affect your storage data. No matter how many gigabytes the posts are, Google will move and store them on your Google Drive account and for free.
Google will send the files in two forms. Private and Public. Private file will contain all the private posts made by you. Public file will contain all the posts that you have made publicly. The public posts will still appear on Google Search and also is accessible to anyone who has the link.
Comments that you made on other’s posts will be available only to the posts’ authors and not you.
All the files moved by Google from Buzz to Drive act like normal files in Drive. You can do anything with them. Copy to other folders or delete them, it’s up to you.
If you don’t want your comments to be in others’ Drives or do not wish to have a backup of your Buzz stuff, you can easily delete all your Buzz content right now.
27th May is an important date for all WordPress enthusiasts. It’s the 10th anniversary of the most widely used CMS in the world. From a simple blogging platform to a pretty flexible CMS that drives many complex applications, WordPress, the application has evolved, tremendously.
I think of it as an apt occasion to present to you a story. It is the story of the evolution of the WordPress community in India. It is just my perspective and a point of view.
A brief history of WordPress in India
I’m one of those users that hopped on to the WordPress bandwagon, quite early in the 2.x series. This is the time when WordPress was still a blog and the dashboard menus were horizontal. I know of a lot of users who were fiddling with WordPress, around then, but there weren’t many. These were days when everybody wanted to open a portal (like Yahoo, Indiatimes, Rediff, etc). That’s why Joomla was the most peddled platform, everywhere.
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The bloggers and the entrepreneurs: the Users
Somewhere down the line, blogging started becoming the “in” thing and the focus started shifting from portal like information centric sites to content centric, magazine/blog style sites. Blogger had just become a hit.
Further ahead, blogging started becoming a business. People who were professionally serious and/or passionate about blogging wanted more control on how their sites looked and behaved.
At the same times, elite small businesses were looking for better and cheaper ways of building their microsites. Coupled with better internet access, everyone was looking for a solution that was not as overwhelming as Joomla or Drupal. And I guess, logically and naturally, all these people gravitated towards WordPress.
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The Developers and the Designers: the providers
There was another scene developing gradually, in the background. A lot of new developers, designers and small agencies were discovering freelance marketplaces. The global demand for WordPress development was flooding the job posts on these sites. A lot of these were low-priced simple tasks that anyone could google the solution for and fix.
This system of SMEs outsourcing to SMEs propagated the ease with which WordPress sites could be designed, developed and deployed. These agencies then started proposing WordPress to the local customers, as well.
Popularity means a lot of people
Beyond that, the reasons that made WordPress the most popular CMS in the world, also worked in India. Maybe, it was just a global trend and India just joined it.
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This is a heady concoction: entrepreneurs, passionate bloggers, DIY developers (with no formal qualifications), designers and tinkerers. When a large number of such people start working with a single platform, they are bound to have opinions, views and insights. That gives birth to a need to share: give and take. To share, one must communicate. And, a lot of people spread across geographical areas, talking to each other, sharing knowledge and resources, is exactly what makes a community.
The seeds of the community: WordCamp Delhi ’09
The best communication is face to face communication. In spite of virtual communication, unless a community gathers together, the energy and the buzz of the community is never felt by its members. That’s why we have festivals, celebrations and other social events. In the case of WordPress, the shrewd business logic already had a system of meetups and most importantly, WordCamps.
A WordCamp had to happen in India, sooner or later and so it happened. The first WordCamp in India was called WordCamp India and was an important affair. Held in the national capital, it boasted of sponsors like Adobe and Automattic and was organised by the Delhi Bloggers’ group. The highlight of the event was the presence of none other than Matt Mullenweg.
Beyond that, I personally know nothing about this event. This was before Indians had taken to Twitter or Facebook, as enthusiastically, as now. Besides, googling did not yield much about the event.
If you compare the sessions and the speakers, WordCamp Jabalpur was a definite progression on WordCamp Delhi. The topics were more advanced and varied, the speakers differed in professions and the range of talks was wider. I wasn’t there for even this one (I had just begun freelancing). However, my friend and colleague, Rakshit Thakker attended as a speaker. This was a good event, but the community was still struggling to find its baby steps.
WordCamp Cuttack ’12
Update: This wasn’t there in the original article.Amit brought it to my notice in the comments. The text below is almost verbatim.
This WordCamp was smaller in scale than the others. Held over just a day, it was organised by Soumya Pratihari. In first half there were user focused talks. The last two hours were focused on a workshop for creating plugins. This ended up being a two hour long discussion on WordPress development, plugins, themes, security and how to troubleshoot issues.
Compared to all other WordCamps in India, turnout was lesser. However, this resulted in better interaction between attendees and speakers.
WordCamp Mumbai ’12
Organised by a group of students, in the financial capital of India, this WordCamp courted some disasters. A couple of speakers were sponsors who talked about irrelevant stuff. A sponsor spoke in detail about the intricacies of off-page SEO and pay-per-click advertising to WordPress developers.
It was a sound meetup for marketing, developing Android apps, Windows 8, apart from a few important things about Google. Primarily, it was about the business of search engine optimisation and marketing on social networks. Except for a couple of talks, the event didn’t add any value to the community.
Attendees (including, yours truly) who felt let down, registered their protest, but were ignored for a decent amount of time. Eventually, apologies were issued.
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The organisers had in fact, done a huge service to the community. Observing the fiasco in the background were two people who understood that WordCamp Mumbai was a lesson in ‘How not to organise a WordCamp’.
WordCamp Baroda ’13
One of the two people I indicated above is Rahul Banker, a young professional blogger from Baroda. Picking up the thread from Jabalpur and passing over Mumbai, he organised a WordCamp in Baroda.
This WordCamp had a higher relevance to WordPress and excellent speakers presented some complex topics in simple, easy to understand details. Being held in Gujarat, the hotbed of SEO/Social Media and other forms of digital marketing, the marketing influence was there but not at the cost of relevance.
Attention was paid to minute details like numerous charging points everywhere, fast and reliable internet connections, etc. Everything was well orchestrated and the event was held without any hiccups. This was a prime example of event management.
Also, there were ample occasions for attendees and speakers to mingle informally and discuss things: the true aim of a community event. In the backdrop of Mumbai, WordCamp Baroda was a greater success and according to the regulars, the best WordCamp they had attended till then.
The second person who was quietly taking notes and preparing his own event was Amit Singh. With a bare minimum of sponsors (compared to Baroda and especially Mumbai), his team, according to a lot of people who attended the event, delivered India’s best WordCamp yet.
The event wasn’t as fluid as Baroda was. It lacked a bit in event management. However, that is excusable in favour of its content, enthusiasm and a genuine interest in the actual reason for a WordCamp. This one had something for everyone. From absolute novices to experts, there were more than one session that were useful. Bloggers, developers, marketers and entrepreneurs, all benefited from the event and were all praises.
This WordCamp was also unique for the Workshops that were conducted. These ran parallel to the speaker sessions. Workshops were practical training sessions on using WordPress. They were meant for the benefit of students and novices, and were well received.
Another factor that went in favour of WordCamp Pune was that by then, there were some veterans of previous WordCamps. They were great mentors to the newbies. Questions flew thick and answers were aplenty. Doubts were raised and solved. People disagreed and fought. People agreed to each other too. It was a warm and exciting event.
Speakers were more interactive, drawing more participation from the listeners. In all, a proper community buzz had begun shaping up.
The scenario now
Post WordCamp Pune, there is a definite community that interacts regularly on various online platforms. A facebook page and a site from an initiative called WPHub have sprung up to coordinate and boost the growth of the WordPress community in India.
Meetups have started happening more often. More Indian organisations are building products around WordPress. Still, the only time the community truly comes together is in a WordCamp. By far, the only yardstick that I could find to measure the growth and evolution, is a WordCamp. Although, more WordCamps are being planned, until the next one actually happens, it’d be too early to pass a judgement on the maturity of the community.
A hope for the future
The next WordCamp can only be better than the last. Everyone has higher expectations. People have tasted the benefits of community behaviour. More people who will share knowledge will be discovered. More people will hop on to the ride.
It is guaranteed — the shift is only progressive!
What happened on 27th May?
On the 10th anniversary of WordPress, meetups were organised across the world. I was at the Pune meetup, which had a moderate turnout. We cut a cake and generally chatted. How was your meetup? Do share with me in the comments.
Google integrated every chat platform Google has created into a single one named “Hangouts”. Codenamed “Babel”, Google Hangouts was announced at the Google I/O 2013 event. Hangouts will make cross-platform chatting or messaging a lot more easier.
While Hangouts looks pretty brilliant both on the outside and the inside, it is still in it’s development stages. The Google+ Messenger still exists on the Android ecosystem. Google is yet to kick that and merge that into Hangouts.
Hangouts isn’t as impressive as Google Talks. Hangouts lacks some of the most basic features like displaying the online status of a particular contact properly. The Hangouts app on Android doesn’t show which friends are online at present. But the Hangouts on Gmail for web gives you a hint of the online status – that is, the online friends’ display picture is highlighted with a green line at the bottom.
Removing Hangouts on your Gmail for web can be pretty easy. It’s really simple that it goes unnoticed by most of the people. With just a couple of clicks, you can move to the old, familiar Google Talk.
Log into your Gmail account.
The Hangouts section loads at the bottom left of the screen.
Once it loads, click on the Arrow mark near your name and choose Revert to old chat.
A confirmation box opens up and you should confirm that you want to move to Google Talk.
Once done, you’ll notice the old, familiar Google Talk in the place of Hangouts. Now you can easily see the list of your online friends.
If you ever wanted to upgrade to Hangouts again, just click on the Arrow mark near your name again and click the “Try the new Hangouts” option.
You might want your phone to go on vibrate mode or shutdown at a particular time every day. You might want to switch off your WIFI on the phone when you are in office. Such tasks on Android can be automated with app called Automate It.
The app is loaded with 6 default rules which can be customized.
New rules can be either created or searched from “Rules Market”.
One feature I liked in this app is the experimental Activity Recognition. If you set the trigger to switch off your WIFI in a car or switch it to silent or vibrate mode when you reach your office or college, it does happen but it definitely needs improvement as this fails to trigger sometimes.
Some stuff you can do with this app are set it up to send an automatic SMS on a specific day and time.
This works very well with the usual basic triggers and I have not been having any problems. The last thing to keep in mind is that there are two triggers that could drain your battery if not used properly – location and sensor triggers. Overall, this app is worth the download.
If there is one problem which is common among all major mobile operating systems, that’s app discovery. Apple’s App Store is relatively better than Play Store and even the Windows Marketplace, but they’re almost on the same floor.
AppGratis was one of those companies which tried to solve this problem with their service. For starters, AppGratis shows off a good paid app everyday, which is free for limited time. It was very popular on iOS, but a few months ago, it got pulled off from the App Store as they violated few of its policies. After a lot of drama took place, AppGratis wrote a blog post officially clearing a lot of confusion among users.
They even have started a petition a month back, which got tremendous response from users. Nevertheless, there’s no signs of Apple bringing back AppGratis to the App Store.
Interestingly, they released their app for Android, a few days back – and it’s pretty good.
While there isn’t anything special about the app on Android, it works. They have posted around 15 app deals, i.e. apps which are free for limited time (a single day, or sometimes even more). Just like the iOS app, you can set AppGratis on Android to notify you every day with an app deal.
All AppGratis recommendations are picked by humans – they are essentially tested and hand picked by their team. This is one of the reasons for why AppGratis is so popular. Though, from what I’ve tried, their Android app recommendations aren’t up to the mark. The apps didn’t seem to be of high quality, but I’m sure the recommendations will get better with time.
The Google I/O 2013 event did not feature a new Android version. Instead Google focused on bringing in upgrades to their existing products and services. But recently several sources are hinting the release of Android 4.3 on the June 10th event. Images of a black Nexus 4 running Android 4.3 have already popped up on the web. The images are from a Thailand Mobile Expo. The images show a black Nexus 4 running Android 4.3.
Considering the version ‘4.3’, it is pretty sure that this is just a minor upgrade of the current Jelly Bean version and not a brand new Android version. We have to wait for Android 5.0, named Key Lime Pie, a little longer.
Here are some of those images taken at the Thailand Expo by DroidDog.
The about information on the phone indicates Android version 4.3.
Among the images that have popped up on the XDA Forums, we can notice that the Android 4.3 version will be bringing a new Camera UI. The new Camera UI pushes the settings options to the bottom of the screen in the form of a semi circle, making it easy to access the settings and other controls. This video below shows a better view of the brand new Camera app.
Unverified rumours have also indicated a white version of the Nexus 4 being launched at the June 10th event. The other expectation is a new upgrade of Nexus 7 tablet is expected. The whole theory seems pretty logical.
The only issues seems to be the date. June 10 is also when Apple has its own WWDC event where it is expected to showcase iOS7. Two events by two rivals on the same day will have an interesting showdown.
Ever wanted to download a collection of images from a particular webpage and end up wasting your time downloading each and every image individually? A Chrome extension named “Image Collection Extension” will be helpful.
It is an easy to use extension that quickly scans a particular webpage that you are on and gives you options to download them. There are numerous options to download. You can choose to download those images either to your local hard disk drive directly or choose to upload those images direct to your cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive.
How it works:
Install the extension and a new icon gets added to the right side of the address bar on Google Chrome.
Lookup any webpage with a few images and then click on that icon, it will display all the images in that particular webpage in a pop-up.
You can choose to download them individually or download them in bulk.
Some images can also be excluded from the bulk select.
The extension can be connected to SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. The options are on the right hand side.
The settings section of this extension gives you various options. You can filter the images based on certain image extensions, filter out images based on certain keywords and do a lot more!
Today, Twitter has rolled out an update that allows users to add a phone number to the account. The idea is simple. Every time a users signs-in there is added code that is asked. That code is sent to users via a text message.
So even if someone manages to guess a password, they would not be able to get the verification code from the users phone.
How to activate Twitter’s two-step authentication feature
Visit your Twitter profile on the browser and sign-in. Now on the right-hand corner you will see a gear shaped symbol.
Hover over it and it shows you the options to look up settings. Under Settings >> Account users can see a new option to titled Account Security.
We can add a phone number and also select the option to turn-on two step verification.
Here is a nice video demo by Twitter to help their users out
With this step Twitter joins Google and Dropbox in offering two-step verification for better security.
Compared to the previous WordCamp, this one was more widely publicised and talked about. With participation from across India, 
Update: This wasn’t there in the original article.Amit 
Organised by a group of students, in the financial capital of India, 
One of the two people I indicated above is Rahul Banker, a young professional blogger from Baroda. Picking up the thread from Jabalpur and passing over Mumbai, he organised a 
The second person who was quietly taking notes and preparing his own event was Amit Singh. With a bare minimum of sponsors (compared to Baroda and especially Mumbai), his team, according to a lot of people who attended the event, delivered
Post WordCamp Pune, there is a definite community that interacts regularly on various online platforms. A 
