Awaz Apni

Tutorial: The beginners guide to iMessage in iOS 5

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:33:00 +0000

CNETAnalysis: One of the big new features in iOS 5 – the latest update to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad’s operating system – is iMessage, which lets you send free messages to any other iOS 5 device, provided you have a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. Better still, if you have more than one device, your messages (largely) get synchronised between them. On the iPhone, iMessage works seamlessly alongside regular SMS and MMS messages. If you’ve got a data connection and your recipient has iMessage too, your message will be sent this way, and appears in blue on the screen. If you don’t have a data connection, or your friend has a non-Apple phone, your message will be sent as a regular SMS or MMS, appearing in green. You can receive iMessages using your phone number (if you have an iPhone) or any email addresses that you link to your iMessage account. iMessages use data networks and only work on iOS devices, and SMS messages use the phone networks. Wi-Fi-only iPads and iPod touches can text iPhones with iMessage-linked phone numbers, but the phone needs a data connection to receive them. If you’re abroad with Data Roaming switched off when not on a Wi-Fi network, you won’t receive the message, even though it was directed to your phone number. Furthermore, only iMessages sync between devices: SMS texts remain on your iPhone only, as do any iMessages sent to your phone number. With this in mind, it’s best to tell people to use your iMessage email address instead, which gives you the most flexibility. Set up your email addresses for iMessage 1. Enable iMessage If you haven’t already, tap Settings > Messages to switch on iMessage. You have to sign in with your Apple ID, but you can later remove this address if, say, you want to set your children up with iMessage on your Apple ID. 2. Add more addresses Tap Receive At > Add Another Email and tap in the email address you’d like to receive iM! essages at. Add as many as you want, so long as they’re not already tied to an Apple ID. When you press Return, ‘Verifying’ will appear. 3. Check your email Now check your email inbox. You’ll receive an email with a link in it to prove you own that address. Click Verify Now, then enter your Apple ID and password on the web page, and you’re all set to receive iMessages. Start sending free messages 1. Change your Caller ID In Settings > Messages > Receive At is a Caller ID option. It’s best to use an email address rather than your phone number, to enable syncing between iPhones and other iOS devices. Use the same Caller ID on all devices. 2. Toggle Read Receipts In Settings > Messages is a Send Read Receipts toggle. If you set this to On, anyone who sends you an iMessage will see when you’ve read it. It’s marked as read when you tap into the Messages app and view it there. 3. Add your recipient To send someone an iMessage, you need to know the address they use. The easiest way to send them is to add the recipient to your Contacts app. Tap it, then tap +, and type in the person’s details. Tap Done when you’re ready. 4. Compose your message Tap Home, then Messages. Tap the compose message icon to write a message, then start typing the person’s name. Their full name and address should appear. Tap it, then tap in the text field below to write your message. Tap Send when ready. 5. iMessage or SMS? If you sent the message as an iMessage, it appears in blue. If you sent it from an iPhone and it’s gone as an SMS, it’ll be green – but your iPhone may try to deliver as an iMessage first, then retry as an SMS if it’s unsuccessful. 6. Has it got there? If your message went as an iMessage, you’ll be able to see if it’s been delivered. Look for confirmation in small writing just below the message bubble. If someone’s enabled Read Receipts, you’ll see when they read it. Send MMS messages for free, too! 1. Send a picture ! Tap the Camera button next to the text field to add an image to a message. Take a new photo or send one from your Camera Roll. Tap the image, then tap Choose to add it to your message. A thumbnail appears with the text. 2. How it appears Images take longer to send because of their size, and appear in a separate speech bubble on your and the recipient’s devices. They’re free to send as iMessages, provided you don’t exceed your data allowance. 3. Disable MMS If iMessage isn’t available, your iPhone could attempt to send your picture message as an SMS or costlier MMS. To prevent this, tap Home, then tap Settings > Messages and toggle ‘Send As SMS’ and/or ‘MMS Messaging’ to Off.

KSE down after violence visits business hub

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:56:00 +0000

Breaking News

Current News World KARACHI: Capital market ended lower on Thursday on security concerns after three lawyers were killed the previous

KSE down after violence visits business hub

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:27:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

Current News World KARACHI: Capital market ended lower on Thursday on security concerns after three lawyers were killed the previous

KSE down after violence visits business hub

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:26:00 +0000

Breaking News

Current News World KARACHI: Capital market ended lower on Thursday on security concerns after three lawyers were killed the previous

Muneer Kamal reelected as chairman KSE

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:55:00 +0000

Breaking News

Current News World KARACHI: Muneer Kamal has been unanimously re-elected as chairman of the board of Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) at

Muneer Kamal reelected as chairman KSE

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:41:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

Current News World KARACHI: Muneer Kamal has been unanimously re-elected as chairman of the board of Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) at

KSE vaults as investors indulge in OGDC

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:40:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

Current News World KARACHI: Stocks at the local equities market ended higher on Friday as investors bought energy shares such as Oil

KSE vaults as investors indulge in OGDC

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:40:00 +0000

Breaking News

Current News World KARACHI: Stocks at the local equities market ended higher on Friday as investors bought energy shares such as Oil

Download Top 15 Nokia N9 Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:58:00 +0000

View Comments Share Nokia N9 is one of the most beautiful devices Nokia has ever made. The shape, its body – every aspect of the phone speaks out how much Nokia has put into the phone. The new (not so new now) Nokia N9 is an elegant device that runs on Meego, a Linux-based Operating Read… [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Wonât get a chance to cross-question Ijaz: Zahid Bukhari

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:50:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

CNews World SHAIKHUPURA: Husian Haqqani s counsel in 'Memogate Scandal case, Zahid Bukhari has said that Mansoor Ijaz would n

Wonât get a chance to cross-question Ijaz: Zahid Bukhari

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:09:00 +0000

Breaking News

CNews World SHAIKHUPURA: Husian Haqqani s counsel in 'Memogate Scandal case, Zahid Bukhari has said that Mansoor Ijaz would n

Nothing would be left if govt gets another 6mths: Fazl

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:39:00 +0000

Breaking News

CNews World LAHORE: JUI-F leader Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman Saturday said if the government was given another 6 months it would pl

Nothing would be left if govt gets another 6mths: Fazl

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:03:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

CNews World LAHORE: JUI-F leader Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman Saturday said if the government was given another 6 months it would pl

Nothing would be left if govt gets another 6mths: Fazl

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:24:00 +0000

Breaking News

CNews World LAHORE: JUI-F leader Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman Saturday said if the government was given another 6 months it would pl

Govt built model villages in flood-hit areas: Shahbaz

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

CNews World LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister (CM) Shahbaz Sharif said that Punjab government has built model villages with all th

Govt built model villages in flood-hit areas: Shahbaz

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:23:00 +0000

Breaking News

CNews World LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister (CM) Shahbaz Sharif said that Punjab government has built model villages with all th

In Depth: Which cloud services are right for you?

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:49:00 +0000

CNETAnalysis: Cloud services compared Cloud computing is no longer the future – it’s here. Chances are you already use web-based email, store some or all of your music, photos or videos online, or even just stream your televisual entertainment to your living room straight from the internet. We are slowly being encouraged to store less and less of our content on our own hard drives, and instead entrust it to the servers of a few corporate giants. Whether you’re uploading photos and movies to Facebook, videos to YouTube, saving and sharing work in Google docs, downloading music using your iTunes account or reading books using your Kindle, your details and data are mainly held in the cloud, and it’s a revolution that’s growing. It’s going to affect you in other ways too, as more and more companies – and even governments and councils – are considering using cloud computing to provide the hosting and compute power for their services. Using the cloud is often cheaper, more adaptable and surprisingly, more reliable than running their own servers. Even a couple of years ago, cloud services were seen as something not to be trusted as a substitute for your own backups, but now the world is embracing cloud computing as never before. From the office to the sofa, the cloud is powering our document creations tools, our calendars, our address books and even our viewing and gaming experiences, and with the advent of high-speed broadband allowing apps to handle ever more involved processes and deliver them to us on low-powered devices, it doesn’t take a lot of future-gazing to see that online is the future. Entertainment revolution There is a new revolution coming to cloud computing as well – the entertainment revolution. This year has seen many companies competing to offer cloud services to buy, store and stream your entertainment collections for you. You aren’t just backing up your content! to the cloud – you often haven’t downloaded it at all. Amazon, Apple and Google want to store your music, films and books on their cloud servers, and will let you stream them to your internet-connected devices. All you need is your browser to get to all your entertainment services wherever you are. So which company should you turn to for your cloud computing services? Where should you entrust your beloved music, films and book collections? And what else are these companies planning in the future to make your life more secure, easier and stress-free? We’ve taken a close look at four major players in the burgeoning field of personal cloud services – Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google – and asked which one is for you, or will be soon. Cloud services compared: Google Google’s often-stated mission is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, and what better way to do this than by putting everything online? But nowadays Google isn’t just about information – it’s also about applications that can store, display and manipulate that information in useful ways. Google has been moving everyone onto its cloud web servers for years. If you use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Picasa or YouTube, you are already putting your data onto its cloud servers. With only a login between you and your content on any internet-connected device, Google can truly lay claim to not only seeing the future of computing as web-based, but actually making it happen. Google makes no bones about this. When PC Plus asked Robert Whiteside, head of Google Enterprise UK, Ireland and Benelux, how important cloud computing is for Google, he told us: “Google is taking a ’100 per cent web’ approach to all our services and solutions, meaning we believe applications will be browser based and hosted in the cloud, rather than in a desktop environment.” Google’s cloud computing is already a success. As Robert is keen to point out,! “ Over four million organisations use Google Apps, our flagship cloud product.” And that number is increasing by 5,000 companies every day (up from 3,000 a day last year). Google is even stealing the march on companies targeting businesses, with cloud-based collaborative office products that even Microsoft can’t match. Cloud, what cloud? Google has been very good at getting ordinary people to use cloud computing without them thinking of it as such. Most people accept the usefulness of Gmail and Google Calendar without worrying that the data contained on these services is saved in one of Google’s server farms dotted around the world. Google is so reliable (it has a non-failure rate of 99.948 per cent – approximately a mere seven minutes of downtime a month) that people don’t even think about backing up their emails or Google Docs to their PCs. Most companies see the cloud as a backup solution, but Google was one of the first to see further than that. In 2009, Google Docs came out of beta and allowed anyone to create documents in the cloud via a web browser for free. When Google Docs first appeared it was clunky and felt half finished, but now the documents is produces are customisable, shareable and let numerous people edit the same document in real time – perfect for a work or collaborative project scenario. Google has blazed a trail that has left companies like Microsoft desperate to catch up. It isn’t all altruistic, of course. The more eyes Google gets looking at its web apps as opposed to desktop programs, the more money it can make. Hence the fact that Google has made so many cloud-based apps. The list is being added to all the time; for example, there are Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Blogger, Google Site Manager, Google Contacts and the business offering Google Apps. All of these fill a niche, and often provide a free solution where before you would have had to buy a program or do without. The downside to this is that Google also has a ! record o f letting its less popular services dwindle away. These include Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Labs, Google Health and Google Powermeter. This may seem like a sensible move if few people are using them, but it no doubt alienates those who do. Content is key Google knows that to keep people coming back, it needs to give them access to cloud-based entertainment as well as services – hence new additions like Google Books, Music and the film rentals now available from the Android market and YouTube. Google has always dabbled with content – its ownership of YouTube and Picasa attests to that, as do its projects that aim to digitise books that are out of print and out of copyright, but now it wants you to rent or buy directly from Google, while still keeping the products in the cloud. Google Books was brought to the UK in October 2011. As Google said, “Readers in the UK now have access to the world’s largest ebook collection, with hundreds of thousands of ebooks for sale from major UK publishers like Hachette, Random House and Penguin, as well as more than two million public domain ebooks for free.” These books are then stored in the cloud and accessible via any web browser. Also introduced in October was the Android film streaming rental service. You can choose to rent any of thousands of films and watch them in any browser at any time within 30 days of purchase, with 48 hours to play with once you hit play. A similar service is available from YouTube. There’s also the US-only Google Music, which lets you buy from a list of 13 million songs. You can also upload up to 20,000 songs to its online library, and the service will automatically upload any music you add to your computer’s music folders. This means you can then play these songs from any device with an internet connection – you can access your music wherever you go. This service is free, whereas Amazon and Apple charge an annual fee to store music not bought in their stores. The future is the cloud, and Google has t! he infra structure, the money to spend on research and the vision to ensure it continues providing free apps that are game-changing. It’s not only keeping up with the trends in cloud computing, with free and paid-for entertainment, it’s ahead of the curve, producing products like Chrome OS that rely solely on the web for their functionality. Google is clearly the one to watch for the future of the cloud, and with Microsoft, Apple and Amazon following it closely, the need to keep innovating will ensure it keeps producing services and content with the potential to change how you use your computer forever. The quiet Chromebook computing revolution If there was ever any doubt which company is the true champion of cloud computing, Google need only hold up a Chromebook running Chrome OS. It’s the only company to produce a computer with an operating system that gets almost all its functionality from the internet. For the Chromebook, Google teamed up with Acer and Samsung to produce low-powered netbooks that, when switched on, are essentially full-screen web browsers that only run web apps. It really is a revolutionary idea – so much so that when the device was first released, Sergey Brin hailed the Chromebook as a “new model of computing”. Chromebooks have only minimal local storage, so you can’t install programs like Microsoft Outlook, Word or Adobe Photoshop. But, Google argues, why would you need to when you can, and probably already do, use online programs with these functions for your day-to-day needs? Web apps will let you create documents and spreadsheet, edit pictures and watch movies – all you need is an internet connection. The simple nature of the Chromebook makes it very fast to turn on too – in a mere eight seconds you’ll be ready to surf the internet. We’ve seen this before, of course. This is the idea of the thin-client: an under-powered computer you could take from workstation to workstation in an office so you could work anywhere, with office servers! providi ng the processing grunt as opposed to the devices themselves. However, here the internet provides the connection to the servers making the whole world your office. Sadly, their uptake is currently very limited. Most commentators feel it was too much too soon; that the world, and the internet, isn’t ready for solely web-connected devices. There are other issues too. The price of the Chromebook isn’t that much lower that a normal netbook, and normal netbooks have the advantage that they can run all the web apps a Chromebook can, but still let you install other programs on to it. The fact that you always need an internet connection could be severely limiting in certain situations. Imagine turning up at to pitch an idea to a company, finding there’s no mobile signal in the office you are in and having to ask for access to their Wi-Fi so you can show them your work. The idea has a lot going for it though, and as working in the cloud becomes a reality it may become a more attractive idea. Updates to Chrome OS can be automatically added to the Chromebook via the internet, ensuring you have the latest version of the OS at all times. As Sergey Brin said at its launch: “Ultimately the most precious resource is the user’s time. I think the complexity of managing your computer is really torturing users.” The fact that most of the processing is done in the cloud extends the battery life to 8.5 hours, and if you lose your Chromebook, all your data, photos and files are still merely a login away. So how worried is Google about the slow uptake of Chrome OS and the Chromebook? We asked Robert Whiteside, Head of Google Enterprise UK, Ireland and Benelux whether cloud-based operating systems like Chrome OS could still be the future. “Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, so as more and more of us adopt cloud computing, its game-changing potential will only increase. Two or three years ago, a browser app looked second rate compared to ! a deskto p application, but that isn’t the case any more. A browser application can be very stable and rich.” At the moment we feel the Chromebook is a taste of the future that arrived a little too early, but watch this space… Cloud services compared: Apple With the release of iCloud, all of your Apple Devices are connected as never before. But what if you don’t want to just use Apple for your computing? Before Steve Jobs died, he made a very strong statement at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference keynote in San Francisco: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just being devices,” he said. “We’re going to move your hub, the centre of your digital life, into the cloud.” He was taking about the introduction of iCloud, a service that will automatically update all your Apple documents and iTunes purchases across your suite of Apple devices. Download a track from iTunes on your iPhone and it will be waiting for you on your Mac. Take a picture on your phone and you can show people the result almost instantly on your iPad. Start a presentation in Keynote at home and it will be waiting on your work Mac. It uses the almost-always-connected nature of these devices in an integrated way. As Jobs said, “Today it’s a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up to date across your devices. iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into your apps you don’t even need to think about it – it just works.” There should, however, have been a caveat to this. He was only talking about iOS devices – iOS 5 specifically. Poor old iOS 4 and Snow Leopard users aren’t part of Apple’s new iCloud gang, and neither are those who don’t use Apple’s software on their PCs. Apple has always enjoyed ring-fencing its content to its own software and devices, and the iCloud ! experien ce is only for the iTunes set. If you have an Android phone, you won’t be using any of these new services any time soon. Similarly, although you can get iCloud support for iTunes on your PC, this isn’t the same as just logging in to a browser-based version. You won’t be able to listen to your music at work if your IT department won’t let you install iTunes on your office desktop machine, for example. Apple-only documents iCloud isn’t like Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox or SugarSync, which will let you back up anything. Only files created by iCloud-supporting applications will be synchronised to all your devices. Neither is iCloud as free and easy as other cloud storage apps, which usually offer browser versions that let you download any of your files by logging into a website. Although there’s a website for Apple’s service at icloud.com , this just lets you see your mail, contacts and calendars. You can’t stream your entertainment content from the site – instead it’s more of a backup for when things go wrong, giving you access to Apple’s Find My iPhone service or merely letting you use the site to upload documents created on iCloud-enabled apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote, not edit them online. Of course, if you only use the latest Apple devices, these issues won’t worry you and iCloud will be a fantastic free extra that puts the cloud to work for you. Some of the services are really fun and useful. Take Photostream for example, the newest version of which takes the last 1,000 photos from your Apple device, saves them online for you to see on iCloud, and downloads them to all your devices when you switch them on. It will also let you pause supported games on your iPad and then continue later on your iPhone. The free 5GB of iCloud storage for mail, documents and other backups isn’t to be sneezed at, although it’s not as generous as some other companies’ offerings. That said, this limit isn’t affected by any conten! t bought from iTunes, so your Apple-bought music, apps and books are stored separately. Photostream photos don’t count towards this 5GB, so the offer is more generous than it first seems. Your music in the cloud Some iCloud services are available in the US, but have yet to make their way to the UK. These include iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match. iTunes in the Cloud lets you re-download previously bought content on to your newer gadgets at no additional cost, so everything you’ve bought is available on all your devices. iTunes Match will scan your entire iTunes library and replace each song not bought via iTunes (music you have ripped from a CD, for example) – even low bitrate versions – with 256kbps, DRM-free AAC versions. These can then be downloaded or streamed to all your other iOS5 products, basically putting your entire music library onto all your Apple devices. iTunes Match is a subscription service. Unlike Google Music, which is free, Apple charges $25 (about £15) annually to upload and store music not purchased through iTunes. On the other hand, it’s a very fast service compared with Amazon and Google’s offerings – backing up your entire collection will take hours rather than days. No song is excluded either; you can manually upload any song not listed in the 20 million-strong iTunes library. Another unusual thing about iTunes Match (which may mean it will take a while to get to the UK) is that Apple has obtained permission for the service from all the major music labels. Google and Amazon have gone for a more ‘suck it and see’ approach, describing their services as hard drives in the cloud and not seeking permission for the content – or only striking a deal with some labels. Google and Amazon argue that the tunes are just data, but it could be said that Apple is on a more sound legal footing. It wouldn’t be fun to upload your collection to Google or Amazon and then have access denied due to a legal ruling. The death of MobileMe It’s no secret ! that App le has a poor record when it comes to cloud computing. iCloud started as iTools in 2000, and became a much-mocked subscription service called MobileMe in 2008. MobileMe is now being discontinued, to the chagrin of some dedicated users, with subscribers being transferred to iCloud. They are gaining all its new services, but losing some older MobileMe-only ones like the Gallery, iDisk, and iWeb publishing services. Although iCloud is a revolation compared to these earlier offerings, Apple still isn’t exploiting the full power of cloud computing. For Apple it’s all about the content – films, books, TV and music. Microsoft and Google are all about online collaborative services, where people use the cloud not just for syncing, but for shared document creation online, while Apple has stuck to using it for content delivery. The cloud means you no longer have to plug your iPad into your Mac to update it – it happens automatically and out of sight. This is admirable, but leaves a big hole in its functionality. Where are the online versions of Pages, Notes and Numbers? Why can’t people collaborate on these programs using the cloud? Anyone who needs this kind of service has to go to another company for it, and it may yet be to the detriment of Apple. In fact, it’s already starting to show – Microsoft boasted that in November 2011, Hotmail was being used on two million iOS 5 devices, and was growing by 100K users per day. This may change once the full impact of iCloud is felt, or may be due to legacy use as more people switch to Apple from Microsoft devices, but Apple should be worried that people are sticking to its competitors’ services. A restricted hard drive At the iCloud launch, Steve Jobs noted that “a lot of people think the cloud is just a hard drive in the sky.” Clearly a lot of people do, and with iCloud Apple has challenged this idea by using it to store Apple-only documents. Integration is key to true cloud computing; no one company can provide everything ! you want to do on a computing device. There has to be an opening for other company’s technologies or people start to look elsewhere for a less restrictive service. This is a common complaint levelled at Apple. The cynical see iCloud as just another way to encourage people to just buy more Apple devices, but is that really any different to the ring-fencing demonstrated by Amazon’s Kindle Fire, or the bundling of all of Google’s services from your Google home page? Admittedly, the limits are a lot more delineated with iCloud, but if you have more than one iOS 5 device, there is little doubt that the convenience offered by iCloud and its associated services will be very attractive. If you only use Apple hardware and software, iCloud will give you everything you need. Cloud services compared: Microsoft Microsoft has a history of leading the field with cloud services, having launched MSN Messenger back in 1999 and Hotmail in 1997. Back then, getting a service like email for free was surprising and for the average person, the ability to access email from any internet-connected computer was groundbreaking. In fact, because of this, Hotmail was launched on July 4, American Independence Day, to highlight the fact that it offered you independence from ISP-based email. Those days are long past, and Microsoft has spent years playing catch-up with other cloud services like those offered by Google. Microsoft originally dismissed the likes of Google Docs as nothing to worry about, but that is clearly not the case. Microsoft has stepped up a gear in the last few years and may yet be a cloud computing force to be reckoned with. Being last to the party isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you happen to own the suite of office applications used by most of the world. Google may have made inroads into that audience, but people have trusted Microsoft with their office documents for decades. All Microsoft needs to do is offer the functionality that makes Google Docs so attractive, but designed to look like a! trusted product. Office online This is where the paid-for versions of Microsoft 365 and the free personal consumer service SkyDrive with Web Apps come in. Microsoft 365, launched in June 2011, is the latest version of the clumsily named Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). It’s a subscription-based online version of Microsoft Office, offering online collaboration and document sharing for businesses. Microsoft 365 is Microsoft’s answer to Google Apps, albeit a more expensive one. There aren’t a lot of figures available for its uptake yet, but in November 2011, Office division chief Kurt DelBene said: “We are seeing positive momentum for Office 365. Customers are adopting Office 365 eight times faster than our previous service, and it’s on track to become one of the fastest growing offers in Microsoft’s history.” Of more interest to the ordinary user are SkyDrive and Live Mesh. SkyDrive has been around since 2007, and offers 25GB of free online storage via Windows Live. It also lets you use Web Apps – cut-down versions of tools like Excel and Word – to collaborate online with others in the creation of Office documents. However, Web Apps don’t offer the real-time collaboration of Google Apps. For example, you won’t see characters on the screen as people type them; instead you’re frozen out of the piece of the document where someone is typing, and can only see those changes once that person saves their work and you refresh your screen. However, the actual look of Web Apps is one most of us are used to seeing in Office. It takes a lot of effort for people to learn new icons and new styles, so Microsoft still has the upper hand at least in the familiarity of its product. Live Mesh is a handy free service that lets you sync your files across multiple PCs and locations. Just download the Live Mesh client onto each PC you use, assign the folder you want to sync, and whatever changes you make to documents in that folder will be automatically synced to ! your Sky Drive and to the other PCs in your ‘mesh’ when they are switched on. All work and no play Microsoft is increasingly becoming seen as the business side of cloud computing, but if Apple and Google let you work as well as play, Microsoft could soon find itself left behind. Not that it doesn’t have entertainment-streaming cloud services – Zune Pass is a cloud-based evolution of Microsoft’s Zune media players, which were designed as the company’s answer to the iPod. It’s a subscription-based service that lets you stream music and music videos to devices like Windows Phone 7 handsets, Xbox 360s, Windows PCs and Zune MP3 players. It lets you download TV programmes and rent films too. At its launch in 2010, Craig Eisler, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business Group said: “The integration between Zune, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live is an exciting advance in our entertainment offering. Zune enables users access to the entertainment they want, wherever they want it – and now, more people than ever will be able to enjoy the freedom and flexibility that the Zune service offers.” Well, not quite wherever they want it. Zune can only be used on four Microsoft devices and doesn’t support Android or iOS. Although there is an online version of the service at zune.net , it doesn’t work in a web browser – you need to be on a machine with the software installed. It’s expensive too, costing £8.99 a month for the music streaming service, with an extra charge for TV and film rental. Xbox Live without the Xbox Microsoft has other online content available via Xbox Live, letting you watch films and TV using your Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7 handset. It hasn’t taken these technologies fully into the cloud, but there are rumours that Xbox Live may be integrated into Windows 8. Speaking to the Seattle Times, Microsoft vice president Mike Delman said: “Live has been successful on the Windows Phone. Live will be ! built in to the PC. It will be the service where you get your entertainment.” There are more developments coming for Xbox Live. According to some sources, Microsoft’s developers are looking at services like Onlive, the service that has proved that high-powered gaming can be delivered to mobile devices via the internet, and may be planning something similar. As Microsoft cloud developer Brian Prince said at the GDC China conference, “You will be seeing things in the Xbox platform that are cloud-specific. I’m already doing it, it’s really exciting, but I can’t tell you about it or else I’ll get fired.” So the future of cloud computing could be rosy for Microsoft, even if its present isn’t much to shout about. We aren’t writing off Redmond just yet, even if we would probably look elsewhere for most of our cloud services at the moment. Cloud services compared: Amazon Amazon has a strong track record in the sphere of cloud computing, and is rapidly expanding its online services in the US. It’s challenging its reputation as an online shop, albeit a huge one, and is diversifying into areas that could help you enjoy online services that are better than, on a par with, or totally unique compared with the biggest players in cloud computing. Today it’s one of the largest providers of cloud services in the world, challenging the likes of Google and Apple, and even pipping them to the post to launch new services like its music-streaming service, Cloud Player. It’s also championing a cloud-powered web browser called Silk, which uses Amazon’s servers to load web pages so your device doesn’t need to. Amazon could easily own cloud computing in the future, in much the same way it did in the past. It was one of the first major companies to open up cloud computing to the masses over nine years ago. This wasn’t through cloud services like webmail or online document creation, but by hiring out storage space and raw computing power. In 2002,! with Am azon Web Services (AWS), the company opened up the power of its unused servers to companies and individuals. It made sense – why should the company pay for all that server space and processing power that wasn’t being used when there was a desperate need for it in other companies? Later it refined this offering with Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which allowed anyone to rent Amazon’s spare server capacity by the hour. This is a truly adaptable service that lets companies expand and contract to match demand for their services without having to pay for extra servers that may be redundant the following month. It’s a flexible service that saves people money as customers are only charged for what they use, and its adaptability means businesses can grow in line with their needs without costly infrastructure investment. Despite concerns about storing private or business data in the cloud, EC2 has grown at an astonishing rate. Cloud outage In fact, some people’s fears about the reliability of the cloud were apparently realised in April 2011 when an Amazon outage closed many sites, including Foursquare, Reddit and Quora, some of which were down for days. Amazon released this statement after the outage: “We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services.” We’re only in the first few years of the major uptake of cloud computing, so there are likely to be more teething issues and there seems to be little you can do about them other than having a backup system of your own – which does seem to defeat the purpose of using cloud computing. Tellingly, no cloud computing firm currently offers insurance against lost data. Despite this, a global study carried out by IBM in 2011 said that over 60 per cent of organisations plan to “embrace cloud computing over the next five years”. But Amazon isn’t all about business and web dev! elopment . In 2011 it extended its cloud computing reach to include other, more personal services. It’s catching up with (and even overtaking) the other big cloud players like Google and Apple by offering online film streaming through LoveFilm, online book offerings through the Kindle, music streaming through its new Cloud Player, vetted apps through its Android app store, and personal online storage through its Cloud Drive service. Amazon is on Fire It has also released a modified Android tablet in the form of the Kindle Fire, which lets users store purchased media like books, films, music and apps in the cloud, and access them on Amazon mobile devices. Amazon is cementing its journey from an online store to an entertainment destination. It has embraced this challenge in a big way, not only providing places for content to be streamed from, but even making its own. To do this, it has become a publisher of its own books. This could change publishing forever, with fewer intermediate steps between the author and reader. As top Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti told the Times, “The only necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader.” With the release of Amazon Music Player in America, there’s speculation that it may soon do the same with music. Amazon is muscling in on the turf of Apple and Google, and it’s going about it in a very competitive way. Amazon is so keen to get you using its cloud services to buy its online content, it’s even willing to subsidise the cost of its devices to get you using it. The Kindle Fire, currently only available in America, costs over $10 more to make than its $199 price tag. In much the same way that Sony and Microsoft subsidise their games consoles in the hope that they will recoup their money on games and services, Amazon has brought out a very low-cost tablet that is so integrated with the shop’s selection of books, music and other content, you may never need another media provider. Let’s go to the movies! Amazon has a huge consumer base, and realised it needed to get into online content to avoid being left behind. It acquired LoveFilm in January 2011, putting it on a sound footing to take on Netflix should the American rental service make its much rumoured appearance on British shores next year. As Simon Calver, Chief Executive of LoveFilm International said at the time, “The deal is a winner for the members who love LoveFilm because of its value, choice, convenience and innovation in home entertainment. With Amazon’s unequivocal support we can significantly enhance our members’ experience across Europe.” LoveFilm is also a good way of drawing people into the Amazon fold – it’s already everywhere. You see LoveFilm apps built into smart TVs, on Blu-ray players and on your iPad. The iPad release was a big step for the company – it finally managed to put Amazon content on an Apple device. Upon its release, Calver said: “LoveFilm on iPad is the latest exciting step in giving film fans total control over their viewing schedule and our commitment to expanding the ways in which members can stream movies on a range of devices.” There is still some way to go though; LoveFilm phone apps only let you organise your film and game rentals. Amazon and LoveFilm are staying tight-lipped about when a full LoveFilm player for phones will be released. Netflix is breathing down their necks having just launched in the UK, and Google is already offering an Android movie player. However, we’re sure it won’t be long before we see a phone app that lets you watch Amazon’s offerings anywhere with an internet connection. Cloud music When it comes to streaming music from the cloud, Amazon was a surprise early adopter. It beat Google and Apple by releasing Cloud Player, in March 2011. Although it’s only available in the US, it’s impressive, letting users back up pretty much their entire music collections to Amazon’s servers. Users can then access it from compute! rs and A ndroid devices. As Amazon’s vice-president of music and movies Bill Carr said, “Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music to different devices. Now whether at work, home or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere.” US Amazon account holders can get Cloud Player free, with 5GB of storage, but if they buy an MP3 album from Amazon that increases to 20GB. Music bought from Amazon doesn’t count towards your storage limit. So how does Amazon licence the music stored on Cloud Player? Simple – it doesn’t. As Amazon’s director of music Craig Pape explained: “We don’t need a licence to store music. The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.” Amazon’s Cloud Drive was introduced at the same time as Cloud Player. It gives US-based Amazon account holders 5GB of online space free, allowing them to back up their most important documents and photos to the cloud. So is Amazon the future? There do seem to be gaps in its online offerings. For example, there are no email services or online apps for the creation of spreadsheets or documents, but when it comes to online content, it has most bases covered. It may not be ready for us in the UK just yet though. Amazon is announcing no plans to extend Cloud Player and the Kindle Fire outside of the US, although some people claim to have found loopholes that let them use Amazon’s Music Player on British shores. However, until these services are fully rolled out across the world, they appear to be merely hinting as what is possible, but not quite within reach. Posted by: Maryum

Plea to record Ijazâs testimony abroad filed in SC

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:37:00 +0000

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CNews World ISLAMABAD: 'Memogate Scandal instigator Mansoor Ijaz s counsel on Saturday in a plea filed urged Supreme Court of

In Depth: Why Siri is just the start for natural input

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:46:00 +0000

CNETAnalysis: Beyond Siri: simplifying commands Showing off to non-iPhone owning friends has never been easier. Pick up your phone in the pub, confidently say ‘Siri, what’s the circumference of the Earth divided by the radius of the Moon?’ and barely seconds later, you’re the only one there who knows the answer is 23.065. It’s a magical experience, and a great toy. Compared to what we’ll have in a couple of generations of phones, though, it’s a Speak & Spell. Best of all, voice is just the start of the natural input revolution. Imagine a world with no keyboards, no tiny buttons, no tutorials and no manuals. You’ll just do what comes naturally, and your phone will adapt, using artificial intelligence (AI) to deduce that you’re dictating, or that when you say ‘Order take-out’, you’re going to want Thai that day. Or a million other seamless interactions, combining your camera, location, search, databases, music and more, based on massive databases of information and probabilities and tuned to your personal tastes and past history. It’s going to be glorious. It’s also just on the edge of being science fiction at the moment. But how is this kind of natural input unlocking our world in the here-and-now? That’s one question Siri can’t answer. Fortunately, we can. Beep. Request. Respond VOICE CONTROL: If developers can perfect voice control then it will really open up the power of natural input Like most magic, Siri works by taking an incredibly complex series of actions and hiding them behind a simple flourish. At its most basic level, pressing Siri’s microphone button records a short audio clip of your instruction, which your phone passes to its online servers as a highly compressed audio file. Here, your speech is converted into text and fired back, as a piece of dictation or instruction for your iPhone. There is, of course! , more t o it than this – as part of the conversion process, for instance, the server doesn’t just send back what it thinks you said, but how confident it is about every word. Artificial intelligence is also required to keep track of the conversation and to maintain context by understanding what you mean by tricky words like ‘it’ and ‘that’, or if you were more likely to have said ‘we went to see’ or ‘we went to sea’. That’s the gist, though, and iPhone 4S owners will tell you it often works damn well. At least, it does in the US. One of the few major problems with Siri is that much of the best stuff, like finding a restaurant, has yet to arrive internationally, leaving us with much of the gimmickier stuff. WOLFRAM ALPHA: Siri gets a lot of its data from Wolfram-Aplha For now then, the rest of us will have to just imagine asking it to find lunch, having the map plotted directly, and in some cases, even booking a restaurant with nothing more than the word ‘Yes’. But give it time, these things will come. Siri isn’t the only tool capable of this, though, and while it is currently the most efficient, the competition works in the same way – just two of them being Nuance’s Dragon Go! and the Android-only Iris from Indian startup Dexetra. With Apple’s legendary secrecy in full effect, it’s often by looking at these that we can see what’s going on under the surface, and where Siri is likely to go in future. An assistant in the cloud DRAGON GO!: Dragon Go! pre-dates Siri, but does a similar job – with a wider range of search destinations Knowing how it works, two questions will likely immediately pop into your mind: if all the heavy lifting is happening elsewhere, in the cloud, why do you need an iPhone 4S to use Siri? And why can’t it all just work right on the phone? In truth, the likely answer to the first one is simply ‘because Apple wanted a cool selling point for the iPhone 4S’. The original ! version of Siri was a standalone app that ran on a regular iPhone 4, and on the face of it the latest incarnation isn’t doing anything that really requires the more powerful A5 processor. There are future-gazing reasons why Apple might want to restrict it, but precious few non-marketing related ones as it stands now. What everyone does agree on is the importance of sparing your phone the technical heavy lifting, for two reasons: efficiency and updating. “The original Iris 1.0 did not use a server, everything was being processed from the phone,” explains Narayan Babu, CEO of Dexetra. “Even on powerful phones with dual-core processors, this was inefficient. Natural language processing (NLP) and voice-to-text require real horsepower. When we tried doing serious NLP on Android phones, it almost always crashed. It is also easy to add features seamlessly when processing happens in the cloud, without having to update the actual app.” Those features aren’t simply a question of plugging in more information sources for searches, either. The more people who use a tool like Siri, the more powerful it’s capable of becoming. Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Dragon Go! creator Nuance, one of the most highly regarded companies in the field, told us: “10 years ago, speech recognition systems were trained on a few thousand hours of user speech; today we train on hundreds of thousands. Our systems are also adaptive in that they learn about each individual user and get better over time.” To put this into context, speech-to-text tools have been available for many years, but traditionally had to be trained to your voice by having you painstakingly read out long stretches of prose. Modern equivalents still struggle with strong accents, but now failure isn’t forever. Over time, their understanding of, for example, a Geordie ‘reet’ versus a careful Received Pronunciation ‘right’ can only improve. Beyond Siri: the next-generation The soul behind ! the scre en Giving a computer a name and a voice immediately humanises it. Be honest, have you ever caught yourself thanking Siri, just to be polite? At the very least, do you think of it as a ‘him’ or a ‘her’ depending on the voice? If so, don’t worry. It’s perfectly normal. “We’ve seen long conversations ranging from talking about breakups to movies or even philosophy that people have had with Iris,” admits Babu. Siri does have a human face, though – voiceover artist, Weakest Link announcer, and Tap! subscriber Jon Briggs (@jonbriggs on Twitter). How does he feel about his voice becoming our digital butler? JON BRIGGS: Meet Jon Briggs, the real face of Siri’s English (United Kingdom) voice “I love it,” he exclaims. “I love the fact that I have been chosen to be part of people’s everyday lives, and especially by a company that creates brilliant technology.” Briggs didn’t record his voice specifically for Siri, though – Apple licensed an existing character, ‘Daniel’, previously used in both Garmin and TomTom sat navs. The one recording can handle multiple jobs due to being based on individual phonemes (the smallest parts of sound, of which there are 44 in English) and other important parts of the language, rather than specific pre-built statements such as ‘turn left’. Combined, these pieces can create more or less any sentence you need. “We recorded over three weeks – about three hours at a time, then topped up with anything they were missing after it was all analysed,” Briggs explains. “The sentences were read as flat as possible, only with intonation where indicated, and no pausing unless there was punctuation. Not as easy as it sounds. Pick a sentence and read it out loud and your pauses won’t often fall exclusively where the punctuation is.” As with voice-to-text, it’s a technology with a good way to go before it becomes completely reliable, but whil! e Siri m ay occasionally sound a little sarcastic or irritated, its voices aren’t unpleasant to listen to in the long run. Which of the voices does Briggs himself use? “Which one do you think?!” he answered. We wonder if he ever thanks it… The next big leap SHAZAM: Not all natural-input is command based. Shazam can guess almost any music track after just 30 seconds What all this should demonstrate is that good natural input isn’t simply a question of making individual apps that do everything, but creating pieces that can be combined into many forms. If you want to make an augmented reality system devoted to turn-by-turn walking instead of driving, for instance, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You know your user will have GPS built into their phone and that you can tap into it, you can give it a professional voice far superior to anything you might whip up yourself, and so on. When apps can share what they know as easily as they now tap into our Twitter feeds, expect greatness. The catch is that, for now, development is still largely restricted to a bubble. Only Apple can attach data sources and apps to Siri, for example, with everyone else reduced to half-hearted hacks such as using CalDAV calendars to sneak in round the side. Bouncing between 10 different apps based on what you want to record/look at/scan/find is already frustrating, and is largely self-defeating. Apple, Microsoft, Google… no one company is ever going to create a perfect, all-encompassing natural input system on its own. It’s just too big a job. It’s firmly Apple leading the charge, though, and for a glimpse of the future, you can’t do better than the iPhone 4S. Siri is at least a top-tier assistant, and no other phone boasts as wide a selection of companion apps, or the same seemingly genuine intelligence. Posted by: Maryum

Drug reaction takes three more lives in Lahore

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Breaking News

CNews World LAHORE: Three persons lost their lives in Lahore due to the drug reaction that has now pushed the toll to 85 on Sa

Drug reaction takes three more lives in Lahore

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:30:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

CNews World LAHORE: Three persons lost their lives in Lahore due to the drug reaction that has now pushed the toll to 85 on Sa

Shutter-down, wheel-jam strike across Sindh today

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:51:00 +0000

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CNews World HYDERABAD: The nationalist parties are observing a complete shutter down strike against the 20th amendment in Sind

Shutter-down, wheel-jam strike across Sindh today

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:42:00 +0000

Reported by Geo News Blog

CNews World HYDERABAD: The nationalist parties are observing a complete shutter down strike against the 20th amendment in Sind

Shutter-down, wheel-jam strike across Sindh today

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:36:00 +0000

Breaking News

CNews World HYDERABAD: The nationalist parties are observing a complete shutter down strike against the 20th amendment in Sind

iPhone 5 Rumors: Specs, Design, and Release!

noreply@blogger.com (Muhammad Farhan) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:10:00 +0000

CNET Analysis: www.iphone5promo.info A rumor roundup with all the intro on Specs, Design, and Release! (All current pictures are CONCEPTION’s. Currently the iphone 5 is to far out to see any real pictures.) See The *full* Show! ★ ★ WAY ➚ What is WAY? – See way.tgn.tv Subscribe to my personal channel to be entered in give aways! Personal Channel Live Stream Twitter: Join the conversation at tgn.tv Tell us what you think in the comments below. Click “Like” and “Add to… Favorites” if you like this video! Music by Freeze! — See Freeze.tgn.tv =-=-=-= ★ TGN Social http ★ What is TGN? what.tgn.tv ★ TGN Times http ★ TGN on Facebook ★ TGN on Twitter twitter.com ★ We Are YouTube – WAY! way.tgn.tv

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