Glider-logo

If instant messages reduced the number of e-mail that you sent, social networking sites (facebook) has brought it down to virtually zero. A quick check at my sent items in Gmail shows that in the last 20 odd days I have sent barely 4 emails without counting e-mails related to work. But the amount of mails that I receive has increased with every passing year and its mostly junk. A study conducted on the impact of spam mails showed that a considerable amount of time is spend deleting spam mails. What about those mails which are not considered spam, but are still unwanted? I got thousands of unread emails just because I don’t know why I got it and I found it useless. If I had time, like I did pre-2005, I would categorize each of those mails with relevant labels and then forget about them.

Even with the Gmail Labs’ SmartLabels, I still have too many bulk mails and few important mails mis-categorized as Bulk/Notification. There were times when I wished Google would take steps to make e-mail more relevant and useful. Apparently I am not the only one who thought so. Glider is one company who wants to make email better for you.

Glider, an email client that automatically sorts your messages based on context. -Facebook Page

Glider processes and categorizes your email, privately and securely. - glider.io/learn-more

Disclaimer: This web-based e-mail client is still in beta and the features might not work as it should, yet. If you are brave enough you could ask for an invite on their website Glider.io or through their Facebook Page or through their Twitter account.

Conversation View- Glider

Your conversations with others should show up here. For me, it shows up as Recent Contacts  and unfortunately its mostly bulk emails.

Notification Center - Glider

All those notification mails from your Twitter/Facebook should show up here and that seems to be working well for me, though it is without those thumbnails.

Mailing list is another Box which I have in my Glider Inbox. It lists all those mails I get from various mailing list I am in and that is working pretty well.

Do you have a method of keeping your inbox organized or are you looking for something like Glider? Let me know.

Box.net Upgrade

Box.net is giving a free lifetime upgrade for everyone who uses their android application. The lifetime upgrade will give you 50GB of space, instead of the usual 5GB, and and increased file size from 25MB to 100MB.

I would never say no to free space. The 1GB space in Picasa,  7683 MB in Gmail, 3.25GB in Dropbox etc is never going to be enough. My first hard disk was a monster at 20GB, in 2000. Today that is barely enough to install Windows 7. That is the reason why I jumped up looking for my mobile when I saw the offer from Box.net.

Android Market - Box QR

What you see on the right is a screenshot taken from my Nexus one after installing the Box.net appplication.

Here is how you can get 50GB of free space with Box.net. Trust me its very simple.

1. Download Box.net application from Android Market Place or use the QR code. You can use Google Goggles to scan that QR Image on the left (Select Market instead of browser, if you are prompted).
2. Install the application and log in if you already have an account. If you do not have a Box.net account, just register.
3. Your Box.net will be upgraded to 50GB.

As I said, quite easy.

This offer is available till Friday, March 23, 2012.

Quick tip: Did you know the new version of Dropbox for Android can upload files automatically to the cloud? And they give up to 3 GB of additional space to upload those as you use it.

Related articles

• Box Offering Free 50 GB Space for Android Users (techie-buzz.com)
• Sony Ericsson Offers Xperia Users 50 GB Free Space on Box.Net (techie-buzz.com)

“Forget to Remember” That is what Friday claims it will do.

About the developers

Friday is an Android app from Dexetra, the developers of Iris, a virtual assistant. Even though it does not have all the features as Siri, yet, it shows a lot of promise with constant updates and improvements. Iris (Siri in reverse) was created within 8 hours after Apple announced Siri and that was how many people heard about its developer Dextra and the sibling of Iris who has been gestating for a while now.

About Friday

Many people find it difficult to maintain a diary (me), but I wish I knew what I did a week or a month back. Sometimes I would know what I did, but would have no idea when I did it. Android has some apps which will export your call logs and SMSs to your Gmail inbox or to Google Calendar. This means I know when I talked to who, but it stops there. With Friday on your mobile, it will keep a track of everything you do. It would know where you were at a particular point of time, who you called and what music you were listening to. Think of it as a personal biographer. Who knows, you may need those details when the world wants to know all about you.

I am sure that many people would be worried about their privacy, but Dexetra says, the information stays on your mobile. If you are worried about someone stealing your mobile to find out what you did last summer, you might want to wait before you try this app.

Getting Friday

You can get Friday by invite only, but it is not easy. I have been on the list for a few months now with hardly any luck. Dextra says they will be sending invites this week, but I am still waiting. Hopefully I won’t have to wait for long and I am sure you won’t experience the long wait that I had to endure.

Get in line for Friday here

The opinion of people who tried the alpha version of Friday have been overwhelmingly positive and with Dextra’s work with Iris, they are planning to incorporate the best features of Iris into Friday.

Reviews

Review by Appnomy
Review by Androidtapp

Once I get my hands on Friday, you can be sure there will be a followup post with screenshots and my opinion on how it can make a difference to your life.

Update: The followup post can be found at 2byts

Who doesn’t love free stuff! Here is how you can get 50 free cards from Moo.com based on your Facebook Timeline. I just ordered mine.

Facebook Card from Moo.com

This is how it looks like and you can have your quotes, Facebook vanity URL & E-mail address printed in the back. If you are one of those people who constantly change their cover image, then can have cards printed with each of those cover images, max 50. Did I mention that this is free only for the first 200,000 people?

Here is how you get your Facebook Card.

Getting your Facebook Card

• Head over to https://www.facebook.com/~your-username~/info
• Scroll down to “Contact Info” and hover over the business card icon next to it. and click on Print Cards.
• Follow the instructions.

Remember, only the first 200,000 people will get the free card, so get it soon.

Update: They are giving out 5000 a day, so if you don’t get it today, try again tomorrow.

Update: (26th Jan ’12) I got the cards from Moo and they are really good. But I wish I had put more thought into the pictures and quotes.

Here are some interesting news that I read online recently. Hope you like this tiny digest.

Siri For iPhone

Siri for iPhone

That is one of the hottest news in tech world. A virtual assistant that can not only talk back to you, but do it with a certain amount of (Artificial) Intelligence. That is the dream of every Geek.

Siri (pronounced /ˈsɪri/) is a personal assistant application for iOS. The application uses natural language processing to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to an expanding set of web services. Siri claims that the software adapts to the user’s individual preferences over time and personalizes results, as well as accomplishing tasks such as making dinner reservations and reserving a cab.[1]

via Siri (software) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, I don’t have Apple, and I prefer my Android phone and after some digging I came up with a few interesting applications for Android, maybe not as good as Siri, but I am hoping one of them will develop to something that is really useful.

Iris (Siri in reverse) was created within 8 hours of Apple announcing Siri. Having generated a huge interest, this app could develop to something really really good.

Speaktoit is much more developed than Iris and can update your Facebook and Twitter account, or check in to a Foursquare location.

Jeannie (Voice Actions Plus) has both paid as well as free version. I would spend the small amount they ask for this great app, but I think I am going to wait.

Eva & Evan: Probably one of the most advanced of personal assistants on Android, and a just a little expensive. The free version is pretty good, but the drain on the battery made me think twice.

Get Paid For Your Citizen Journalism With Citizenside [Android & iPhone]

Image by Gauravonomics via Flickr

Do you regularly find yourself in the midst of all the action in your town? If you’re also taking great photos, capturing video footage or writing up quick explanations and putting them online, you’ve probably crossed the line into citizen journalism. Citizenside is designed to make it easy for photographers to submit newsworthy photos and videos and make them available for purchase by major news outlets. Citizenside does all the work finding buyers for your work – all you need to do is keep taking great photos and video footage.

via Get Paid For Your Citizen Journalism With Citizenside [Android & iPhone].

The Litigators | Bookreporter.com

The Litigators

Grisham’s novels are no longer just suspense-packed adventures. He now uses the pages of his bestsellers as a pulpit for commentary on contemporary legal issues. THE CONFESSION was a sermon against the death penalty, and THE APPEAL was a homily against the evil of an American legal system spending millions on the election of judges. The lecture subject of THE LITIGATORS is mass tort litigation, a system that makes millionaires out of lawyers on both sides of the legal battle but does little to compensate the actual victims. Readers are probably familiar with one of the cornerstones of this type of litigation: national appeals to potential plaintiffs through advertisements on television, radio or newspapers. In THE LITIGATORS, the culprit is Krayoxx, an anti-cholesterol drug that may be causing heart attacks and strokes.

via The Litigators | Bookreporter.com.

Disclaimer: The link on the image takes you to Amazon page for which I will be paid.   Codeacademy

Codeacademy

Codeacademy is a site you should be watching if you are interested in learning how to code. Right now the only course available is Javascript, but will change soon since they just received $2.5 million funding. Read more below.

Since it launched last August, the site has become what’s (probably) a global hit. It has users in more than 200 countries, only 30% of which are in the United States. The company has declined to share its current user count, but it had 200,000 within their first 72 hours, and I’ve heard whispers that they’re still doing very, very well.

via Codecademy Raises $2.5 Million To Teach You How To Code | TechCrunch.

Coming Soon – Propeller Last year, when Google tried to purchase the innovative content reader application Flipboard, they were greeted with a confident decline. With a $200 million valuation and over 4 million downloads so far, it’s clear why Flipboard thinks they can be plenty successful on their own. But that decision may come back to haunt them. Google told Flipboard that if the company didn’t sell now, Google would be coming back with a product of their own. That product is going to be called Propeller, and it should be launching next week.

via Google’s Flipboard clone, Propeller, launching next week | Android and Me.

Diaspora is not something that someone built after Google Plus. If anything, it has been around from the beginning of the year. Diaspora is a decentralized social network. It is not hosted on one server or on servers owned by a company like Google or Facebook.

If you want you can host it on your own server, and get your family to join, maybe a few friends too. If you happen to have a killer domain name, you might end up with thousands of users. The server version that you can install on your own server has been available from the beginning of the year and there are many servers available which will allow you to join Diaspora. However, the developers have made the platform available on their servers too.

So you already have Facebook and most probably have Google+, what can you get from Diaspora that you can’t from either of those or from Twitter? If you ask me, not much. The crowds are already flocking to Facebook or Google+, you are unlikely to find some long-lost friend, or an amazingly interesting person who is not on Twitter or Google+. The interface is quite similar to Google+, in fact almost identical. No, you are not going to get anything new from Diaspora, at least not in the near future.

Why am I on Diaspora if that is how I feel?

The idea of my content being on my own server, that is what I like about Diaspora. Diaspora have themselves said that they are not here to kill Facebook or Google+, so lets not argue about that. I would like to have a single gateway to the web. I should be able to upload a picture to one server and decide which social networks should have access to that image. In case someone at Facebook goes crazy and systematically wipes out all the data stored in their servers, I don’t want to lose my data. The web is all about information and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. What Google, Facebook or any other service does is, give you a different way to send/share or create that data. Let them continue doing it, but I would like to have the data with me with right to display given to each of the service. Maybe, in the future, social networks will be able to communicate between each other, just like email does with different domains.

I am on Diaspora because I think this is the right way forward.

If you need an invite, just fill out the below form. Those who had selected “Any future invites” previously will be getting their invites soon.

Update (25^th September):I know that I haven’t been able to send invites for the last few days. The problem is at Diaspora end, all pending invites will be processed as soon as Diaspora fixes the issue.

Update (27th November): Due to some problem with the invitation system in Diaspora, I am closing down the invitation. This post will be updated with useful links that you can use to get Diaspora invitation shortly.