It’s been a week after Google IO 2015 and there are tons of new things announced in there. Firstly Google IO is the developers conference held once in a year by Google in which they announce their new products and updates. As usually I started the keynote in the Google IO app for android. The 2 hour keynote went pretty exciting through out. With their amazing kickoff minute event last year, I was waiting to see how this year’s going to be and to my surprise this year 60-second countdown was awesome. Alright lets see what actually happened in that 2 hour window.

• Android M

And the series of letters continued. Android M is not going to be a major update like Jelly bean or Lollipop. It’s more like a minor polish over previous version of android. It’s currently available as developer preview.

• Upgrades to Google Play and App Permissions

Good news to developers. Now Google play apps have even more visibility and a new way to showcase their apps. Kid Focus is what groups the apps based on the popular characters. So if you have a Micky in your app, you can find in under Micky Mouse category. Pretty cool huh! App Permissions is notable and more welcoming to android. Now you can control the permissions you gave to app within the app itself. In the previous versions you have to allow all the permissions at the time of installation. Now you can find a permissions tab inside app’s settings page.

• Google Cardboard and Jump

Virtual Reality(VR) is the trending technology in the valley right now and Google hit it in a different. In the last year’s IO they have announced Project Cardboard.Will talk about the Cardboard separately(its pretty interesting). Jump is a new project announced by Google. Jump is an open system for designing 360-degree video capture rigs, which will in-turn capture data to be processed into immersive 3D imagery for VR headsets. Take a look at the camera they designed and it’s awesome.

• Android Pay 

With the tagline Simplicity..Security..Choice, we can say Android Pay is an upgrade to Google Wallet. May be a competitor of Apple Pay.

• Project Brillo

In a sentence Project Brillo Google’s answer to IoT(Internet of Things). And this answer is a seperate operating system for the things around you. I have to dig deep into what exactly it is and will get back to you.

• Now on Tap

When they announced this I thought this was just a minor improvement to Google Now. But trust me it’s really awesome. The contextual understanding by a machine is really challenging. For eg. if you are reading a message in your favorite app which says “Bring clothes from laundry. Don’t forget to book a table at Some Cafe”. On hitting that home button Google Now pops up with brilliant suggestions. One with an option to book a table at that Some Cafe and a reminder to bring clothes. Cool right?

There are many other announcements which include addition of native C/C++ compiling to Android Studio(great news for developers). If you are looking to start learning Android, there is a big news for you as well. Google launched a Android Nano Degree program in Udacity. They also launched a NVIDIA Shield Android TV.

• How can I forget to mention the new Photos App

Google launched it’s Photos app way before. This time they have come up with superb update. Photos is now a separate app(not Google+ photos anymore). Now they are offering Unlimited storage for all of your photos in your Android, iOS and even in your computer. Yes!!! Unlimited storage.

Overall this year’s Google IO has many updates on what’s happening inside Google. Missed Google IO 2015? Here’s the Keynote for you.

But wait is it going to be your next phone ?

Amazon is finally into the mobile market with their so called “Fire Phone”. It is basically an Android phone which runs Amazons’s custom skin. As expected Amazon is deeply integrated into the device. So is the device like the regular smart phone on the market today?

Weird Specs

Amazon Fire Phone is not just an android phone with 5.5″ display. There is something interesting in there. It is android phone but amazon says that the phone runs “Fire OS 3.5”. Why did they even do that!! It has no access to Google play store or Apple app store and hence apps are limited and can be counted on fingers.

Have you ever seen a phone with more than one camera on the front? Here you go this device has 4 cameras other than the two regular cameras.

Amazon call it “Dynamic perspective“. Its a sort of 3D view. Those 4 cameras on the front are called “Dynamic Perspective Sensors”. Don’t be excited with those names! They are the cameras which track the user face in space and the display acts accordingly. Also the sensors help in other attractions of the phone like “Auto scrolling the content”.

The next big feature is named “Fire Fly“. The phone has got a dedicated camera key which on long press activates Fire Fly. Fire Fly is the technology which identifies virtually anything placed in front of it. And since its Amazon you can do the stuff like “buying” from within the results.

Next interesting thing is “May Day“. Hell with the names. It’s just an instant video chat assist from the Amazon customer service and AT&T service too. Some other interesting things include Shake to open notification center, Universal navigation from the left swipe and notifications bar kinda thing opens on swiping from right.

The rest of the specs are typically of an Android phone. Check them out in Amazon.

Finally it’s you to decide to get your phone. Are you a geek or amazon lover? Then definitely this phone is for you.

Check out this cool hands on video from The Verge.

It’s no hyperbole to say that our lives are going to be completely revamped by these wearables.

Imagine a device that can analyze your vitals and streamline the data for you to keep a tab on your health.

How cool would it be to have a tattoo on throat that can replace an earpiece dangling by your side that needs to be adjusted all the time.

Tattoo’s that can check your vitals and release drugs automatically There is no end to the range of products that can be developed. So we bring  to you some of the coolest gadgets available out there.

Here is a list of few things that caught our interest

1. Google Glass !! : Google always does things in style, and well they did it again. Google glass brings instant notifications and alerts
on the go, and the best part is you don’t need a smart phone for this to work . You can get directions, fitness alerts and lot more. One thing that stands out is the alerts and valuable info it pumps in that’s helping  professionals in their work.
But it gives such a dorky look to the wearer but Google is working on it as well.

2. Samsung Gear 2 : Samsung has updated their range of smart wrist watches that stand out among their lot. Mail alerts and Social notifications are available and it has this added Heart rate sensor and Pedometer that tracks your fitness.another cool addition is its WatchON Remote app that lets you control your TV station and your set top boxes. There are other variants like Fit, Neo. Oh!! another thing it comes with an on board 2.0 MP cam, and you can control your phones camera with your gear.  This has got serios competition from the likes of  Sony Smart Watch, fashionable Moto 360, Pebble, Toq and reportedly THE  iWatch!!!!

3. Nod ring : This blue tooth enabled gesture controller enables us to perform almost every action like swipe, scroll, type and zoom. Their introductory video is cool and ‘ll surely blow you away. It tags along with your smart phone and has two customizable buttons on it as well that lets you play games, surf web and lots more.

4. Jawbone UP : Though this doesn’t have a display this tracker keeps a note of all your activities, the time you sleep, calories burned, your eating patterns. All in all this keeps a tab on things you do and alert you about your sleep patterns, food and calorie tracking, and on top of  everything it vibrates asking you to move your butt  cos you are idle for too long!!! Oh crap..

5.Smart Diapers : Yeah. Why not get smart about your child’s piss… What? This is wearable isn’t it… this is not something out of this post’s context. So here we go. These diapers has a colorful box just at the place the baby pisses and this box turns even more colorful once the child piss. All you’ve gotta do is to click a photo of that box and the results ‘ll be on your phone in no time. This is some serious stuff and we aren’t kidding. These diapers can detect some serious UTI, dehydration and Type I diabetes as well.

Check out some other Top-to-Toe  Wearables : Other Cool Wearables

P.S: How many of you still remember the Casio’s Calculator Watch you showed off at school..I do.. Ah!! Sweet memories, Cool aren’t they

Additional links:

1. Incognito wearables

2. Weirdest wearables

3. Even more weird wearables

How do you present your presentations? May be using our old buddy Power Point or Keynote or Slides(by Google) or may be some other stuff from the internet. Here’s a tool for you to take your traditional presentations into a new dimension, “PREZI”. Prezi is a U.S. software company, producing a cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas.

Highlights:

• Easy to use.
• New level of presentation.
• Available in the cloud.
• Desktop versions also available.

All you need is an account and some creativity. This prezi software is limited for free users. Also desktop version is not free. Still you can handle many things with a free account. Also the mobile versions are available for your iPhone and iPad. I think it is easy to start creating your prezi right away or after seeing a few beginner videos which are available in the YouTube. Coming to the question of “what to create?”, of course that is left to your imagination and creativity. Am presenting one of my prezis here.

http://prezi.com/z638ljnjlbdf/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

If anyone of you create your prezi, feel free to comment out your links. Show your creativity. Enjoy!

1. E-mail:

This is the first thing that everyone checks after logging in and also in between your work. So to have a quick glance of the number of emails in your inbox here’s an extension to help you. “Google Mail Checker”. The only limitation here is it works only for Gmail.

2. Social:

The next thing we checks out is our social profile. Many of us may spend more time here. So to get notified when new item arrives and to have a quick look at them these extensions might help.

For Twitter Lovers out there: Twitter for Chrome.

For Facebook : Facebook for Chrome.

For sharing the links quickly : Shareholic for Chrome.

3. For Google talk:

This is one of my favorite extension in the store. Its functionality is the reason for loving it. This one is a must-have.

Hangouts

4. For Task-managing:

Chrome also offers some of your favorite task managing apps which you have in your smartphone. A couple of them are listed here.

Wunderlist

This extension has a special capability of adding the tasks right from the browser which includes the website you are viewing and also the watch later list of your YouTube videos.

Any.Do:

This is my favorite app in my smartphone. Now this is also available in my browser with almost the same capability.

5.  Extensions from Evernote:

These are the must have extensions for Evernote users in particular. They Clip the content for you and also removes the cluster from your webpage.

These are just the few and must have extensions for everyone. Still you can find numerous apps and extensions in your chrome web store. Always aim at getting the best from your browser.

I recently found many people around me facing these kind of irritations and in fact I too encountered. Let me exemplify a couple of such situations. Sony Bravia is the imported television set which my aunt owns. It recently went black while watching it. Then they gave it for repair to a Sony service center in their locality. After a few weeks they returned their TV replacing a few components in it. Later we found out that they completely replaced the components in it with those of another similar model. Now we have been facing the problem of updating its software. One more such situation we encountered with a water tap. When we just called a plumber and enquired about the problem. He just charged us with a 500 rupee bill. Within a week we encountered the same problem with another pipe. What should we do now? We just left it unused. Later an electrician came to repair a fan and saw that pipe problem. He just adjusted the water level through that pipe. That’s it, the problem is solved.

Many of you too might have experienced such situations. If that TV mender has accepted his inability of repairing it, we would have saved our television. Also if we have the basic knowledge of household things, we would never spend the money unnecessarily. I have seen many friends of mine running to a computer mender even for a very minor problems. Just think, that person will never accept his inability and couldn’t find the solution to your problem, then what does he do? He will definitely gets rid of that problem by another way just like in that TV matter.

So the bottom line is that everyone of us should have the basic knowledge of everything. I also observed many of my friends thinking in the same way that a particular branch of engineering has no relation with another and the students too need not have the knowledge of other things.

This is Google-era. If we need to know something, we can just Google it. But I am not saying that we need to repair everything that malfunctions around us. But we should at least try to find out what the problem is.

As a noticeboard:

How often do you check your notice board? A student hardly finds his time to check their bulletin board. Instead you can have a page to notify all the students about the upcoming events. Already many schools opted this method and found it to be more simple and useful. You can also express your upcoming events and other stuff in a beautiful way so that it reaches out most of the students.

Make lessons more exciting:

The world is changing and the ways of education are getting better and better. Static ways of teaching and learning are replaced long back. What I mean by static way is that – learning something from text book with bare lines of matter is harder than learning the same thing from a video or through images describing it. Those methods are being adopted in schools.

So here’s an example of using the Facebook’s Timeline to demonstrate the history lessons.

Its just an example. You can have a group or a page and can use it in a whole new way that make your work more simple and productive.

Real-Time world:

No news media is faster than a social network. According to me the available fastest media on the planet is “Twitter”. No matter what, you can have all the news and the up-to-minute updates instantly on Social networks. One more big asset of a social network is that it brings all of the “similar kind” at one place. You can meet many people with your tastes on a social network.

Organize with “Lists”:

Filtering something is a big boon on the web. We are already familiar in Simplifying our web. But we also need to simplify our social profile. Many of you have liked numerous pages and have lots of friends in your Facebook profile. Then you may feel it difficult to read all of your news feed which is combined of various news. Here you go to have a well-organized news feed. You can find the option “Lists” where you can filter to have a particular kind of news at that place.

All I just demonstrated you are a few examples. You can just think many more better ways to use social media as powerful tool.Obviously we people have a gold mine with us. All we need is to dug it and use in a good way. Comment out your ideas of using social media in many more different ways.

In case of your browser window is closed by any chance like clicking on close button by mistake or by any power interruption or may be because of sudden termination of process may lead to sudden closure of your browser without any warning and that may lead to the wastage of your entire work. Secondly the space configured by the blog’s service provider may have less functionality to format your post in your desired way.

So here you are going to have 5 wonderful and must have tools for bloggers.

1. Windows Live Writer:

This the oldest tool of the five and still it tops the list due to its amazing functionality. You might have heard about this tool and probably you also may be using this, else your next installation should be this one. Writing something locally (Offline), formatting in “your way” and then posting directly from that tool is something really cool. So try this tool, learn to use it and you never uninstall it.

2. OneNote or Evernote:

Even Live Writer is alone enough to type and format your post, but these two tools are more powerful and handy to write and format your content. As they are the note making software they definitely have some better features than the Live Writer. Some of their awesome features include “Auto Save” and “Cloud-Sync“. These two features are must for bloggers as we can write from anywhere and at any time. (You can also use Microsoft Word to edit your content as it is still more powerful than the remaining.)

3. Evernote Web Clipper:

Basically to present anything in a better way, we directly or indirectly need to depend on web (that may be to gather stats or may be to insert relevant images or to find any other content). After we find the matter we will definitely not going to write it down. Instead we may copy it and paste it somewhere. How many times will you do it and for how many things you do it? Or if you want to get the copied matter once the clipboard is cleared, you will never get it back. So to overcome all these thing you need to have this powerful tool to clip the content.

4. Screen Clipper:

At one time or the other you will definitely need to capture your entire screen or some part of it. To do this you need not search for another tool, you already have it! The OneNote Screen clipper is already pre-installed with your OneNote software. The shortcut to use this tool is ” + S” and then to select the amount of area to capture. That’s it, your required job is done.

5. Skitch:

Last but not least you also need an image editing software to blend your images with your content to make it more beautiful. For this you may not require the big software like Adobe Photoshop, but a simple and yet powerful tool. Here comes the “Skitch” to help you. It may be a simple tool to edit images but still it is a simple and adequate tool for a blogger to edit his images on his own.

The biggest boon with all these tools is that they sync to the cloud and make our content available at anywhere, any time and on any device. A small idea to make the live writer sync to cloud, is to save the posts directly in your SkyDrive or Google drive or Dropbox or any other cloud folders in your computer so that they sync the posts up-to-date. All these tools are perfect for those who blog to simplify their work. Happy Blogging!

Google Nose!! I hurried into seeing it. Clicking on it landed me into a page with Google Nose beta on the top of it and a few images explaining it.

Under it there is a two minute video explaining how the Google Engineers made it possible. It was like when you enter a search item in the Google search, it returns some special results on the right of the search results screen. If it a special item which has some special odor, a blue button appears with “Smell” written on it. If the user clicks it, the Google designed such that the it detects the Photons and Sound waves combine to generate some molecules of that particular object fragrance giving the user the experience of smelling it. Try it yourself by searching for Peppermint smells like!!

Finished watching it? I was just unstoppable after I completed watching it. I just broke out laughing. It took almost two more minutes to control myself. Hope you guys got the point. It was April 1^st and Google pranked with the concept of Google Nose. watzonyourmind wishes you all a Funny April Fools’ Day.

Hold on ! All that was my schedule my be a couple of years ago. Now I am not ready to spare my time browsing from blog to blog and checking those notifications. The alternative to save a lot of time is having all your favorite blog feed at one place. This can be done by using a “Reader App” which is typically called a “Blog Reader”. The need for them is quite clear. Not only the time but also you can simplify your work by having all your interests and news at one place instead of searching for each of them in the web. We can just subscribe to a blog’s rss feed and that’s it, all its news and posts come directly into your reader.

There are many readers you can find on the web. One of the major reader is GOOGLE READER. The trending news on the web now is that

Google is now going to shut down its reader.

So now it’s the time for its users to find a best alternative to it. There are pretty good number of alternatives to it. You can simply find the best one that suits you by just googling it. Let me describe a few of my choices.

If you are a windows user, FeedDemon might be the one of the best available tools. It’s a simple and handy tool even for the beginners.

If you are a mac user: Reeder, NetNewsWire, Cream, Pulp, Gruml are some of the reader apps (But some of them are not Free versions).

If you are a windows or a mac user, but still doesn’t prefer to download and install such programs and let them run in the background, you still have good reader apps which are web based.

I have tried many of them and finally arrived at Feedly as my favorite one. Pulse occupied the second spot and Feedspot the third. You can just visit those right from your browser. For chrome users you can find Feedly in Chrome Webstore and they also have apps for iOS and Android.

If you are a windows 8 user, then there are some amazing apps that look great and showing you the latest posts on beautiful live tiles. The best of them are Pulse and News Bento. There are also few other apps available.

There is also a workaround to use your favorite mail program OUTLOOK as a reader. Here’s how.

Go ahead and choose your favorite one and have all your stuff at one place and save time.