"Lockheed Martin suffered a cyber warfare attack over Memorial Day Weekend. It increased the number of wounded Americans, namely the defense geeks who, while fighting off the threat, suffered carpal tunnel syndrome." ~ Yasha Harari
Fresh Baked Goods
Laughzilla the Third (2012)
The Third Volume in the Funny Stuff Cartoon Book Collection Available Now.
Smart assistant service EasilyDo has released an update that it says is “faster, more intuitive, and more comprehensive.” The iOS and Android apps now feature an improved task discovery capability, a smarter feed, and more. The company is also releasing premium in-app features, which are initially iOS-only and cost $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year.
So many personal assistant apps have pivoted their focus to a particular vertical – like calendars or travel – because it’s a really difficult space to get right, but you shouldn’t need a dozen apps to manage your life. Our goal with EasilyDo is to create a single tool that’s as close as possible to a real-world assistant that keeps us on track
Now that the company has hit the peak of task types, it’s now focused on refining its algorithm and “secret sauce” in order to help users be more productive each day. Among the many improvements in version 3.0, EasilyDo is making it faster for its engine to process billions of searches in order to display actionable tasks in seconds. As a result, it’s making fast real-time travel alerts complimentary for a short period of time.
The EasilyDo task feed has now been reorganized as well. Tasks, or “Do Its” as the company calls them, have been arranged according to what you care about and when. So weather alerts will be displayed in the morning and traffic alerts in the afternoon when you’re leaving the office.
Users can also take advantage of more features in version 3.0. Birthday reminders can now be sourced from your contacts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. Instead of sending them a social media post, EasilyDo will now give users options to send a phone call, email, or text. What’s more, users won’t have to worry about outdated contact information anymore as the mobile app will parse through email conversations to update your contact list. Lastly, time-based reminders can be set within EasilyDo to show up when you want them to.
With this latest release, EasilyDo is taking the next steps towards monetizing its platform. The company is now offering premium in-app services through a subscription model. Included in this plan are better contact management options, including surfacing and saving multiple contact details from your email. Additional features include being able to receive real-time travel alerts for gate changes, flight delays, and more, along with quick real-time email notifications from Gmail, Exchange, and IMAP informing users of important emails. Subscribers will receive a 10 percent discount on all in-app gift card purchases and executive-level support from EasilyDo.
The company tells us only that the in-app features will come to Android “soon”.
When Facebook launched Paper for the iPhone last week, I was skeptical. The company’s social network is a huge, lumbering machine with a vast array of moving parts; to create such a simple redesign, surely Facebook had to compromise and leave out some of its core features?
To test this theory, I’ve been using the new Paper app exclusively on my iPhone for the last 10 days. The original mobile app is buried in a folder somewhere and I’ve pledged to only use Paper for all of my Facebook interactions, whether that’s sharing a quick status update or digging through my News Feed.
The result? Paper has transformed how I use Facebook and I have no intention of opening the original iPhone app again. It has some shortcomings, but I’m willing to forgive Facebook given this is only version one. What I didn’t expect, however, is for Paper to change my perception of what Facebook is about and how I can get the most out of it.
Back to Basics
Paper has a radical new interface and not surprisingly, I needed a little time to get used to it. That’s not because the ‘flow’ of the app isn’t clear or intuitive, but because I’ve been using Facebook with its recognisable, vertical News Feed for almost seven years. That muscle memory is difficult to forget.
Almost immediately, I noticed that Paper was changing how I interacted with Facebook. I spent more time looking at each status update, linked article or photo individually. Although you can quickly swipe across stories from the top-level view of your News Feed, I almost always expand the first card and examine each of them in turn.
This uncluttered, distraction-free environment felt immensely refreshing. Paper is a slower, more thoughtful reading experience that counters the speed and reactive nature of Twitter. That’s not to say one is better than the other, but it’s had a profound impact on my experience with Facebook.
For one, I’ve been discovering more content. Even though it’s the same News Feed that would be shown in the original Facebook app, the full-screen card layout means that I’m more likely to stop and consider what someone has shared. I open more links, browse more photos and generally consume more.
For another, I’ve been engaging more with what people are sharing. Paper encourages me to spend more time with each story and as a result, I’m more likely to have something to say about it. Over the last 10 days, I’ve written more comments, ‘Liked’ and shared more posts than I would normally with the original Facebook app. Naturally, people are responding to those comments and adding their own feedback to content that I’ve shared in their News Feed.
In short, Paper is slowly bringing me back into the fold.
Before, I felt increasingly detached from Facebook. I would often sign in, address any notifications and then quickly scroll down my News Feed without stopping on a single story. Within five minutes I had already closed the app or my browser tab with a sense of disappointment. I would often mutter to myself: “Maybe I’ve just outgrown this social network.”
But that’s changing now. When I close Paper, I rarely feel like Facebook has wasted my time. Sometimes there just aren’t many stories (or new ones, at least) to look at in my News Feed, but I’m not going to blame Facebook for my occasionally inactive network.
Yet even when my News Feed is a desolate wasteland, Paper has something else to keep me occupied. More news.
Read all about it
When I first created a Facebook account, I was about to enroll at University. In the years that followed, the site became a hub for almost every part of my student life – the parties, the last-minute dissertation surveys, the unloved student radio station – Facebook was perfect for sharing all of that.
As I’ve grown older though, so too has my network on Facebook. The parties have been replaced by posts about weddings, children and job promotions, which are less frequent and exciting than the crazy all-nighters from my student days. This is creating a noticeable hole in my News Feed.
Facebook seems to understand this though and is combating it with a suite of new feeds in Paper, populated by content from some of its favorite publishers. They’re split into 20 categories such as Headlines, Score, Tech, Planet and Cute, each with its own set of story cards that are updated automatically.
Although this isn’t what Facebook was originally intended for, I’ve found it to be a useful and complimentary part of Paper. More than ever before, I’m sharing links to interesting articles and webpages that I’ve stumbled across online.
So rather than finding this content through Twitter or news reader apps such as Circa and Flipboard, Facebook has given me a single place to discover, read and share everything that’s new on the Web. While I’m not using Paper to monitor breaking news, it’s become an effective way to discover stories that I may have missed, or remind myself about articles I read earlier in the day.
All of this has impacted my relationship with Facebook. Paper is sourcing new content for me and not surprisingly, I’m sharing some of it with my friends and family. The knock-on effect is that more people are commenting on these posts, which is giving me yet another reason to come back to Facebook.
The shift
Over the last 10 days, Paper has changed how I look at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg once said he wanted to build “the best personalized newspaper in the world” and at the time, I imagine some people scoffed at the idea.
Yet that’s exactly what I’m doing more of on Facebook these days; sharing, discovering and talking about content from the Web. It’s not as open or fast-paced as Twitter, but that doesn’t mean the discussions I’m having on the social network are any less important or meaningful.
Facebook is still a great place to share photos, plan events and connect with friends and family. I’ll still be doing that too, although Paper has proven that a drop in this type of content can be replaced with news articles for some users.
The bottom-line is that I have no intention of returning to the original Facebook app on my iPhone. Paper feels like a better experience and while it’s certainly not perfect, it has me interested and excited about Facebook again. For someone who was an infrequent user 10 days ago, that’s pretty impressive.
Skype is rolling out a multi-platform update that it promises will make for a more seamless experience across multiple devices, and rectifies one of the most frustrating parts of using the chat platform.
Announced in a blog post today, Skype said it was revamping its platform for its “mobile future” and that Skype chat “is a huge part of that future”.
To that end, users of multiple devices will get synced chat messages across all of them and will also now get read notifications synced across devices. So, it doesn’t matter when or where you sent a chat message from, you’ll see it on all devices and know when the ones you sent have been read.
Users will also now get push messages informing them they’ve got a new chat message regardless of platform.
As well as these tweaks to chat, Skype said it has been working to generally optimize mobile performance and that users should now see improved battery life, as well as quicker startup and resume times.
In future, Skype said it wants to make it so you only receive notification messages on the device you’re actively using, to save on duplication, and that users Favorite contact lists will be synced across devices too.
Notably, the effort from Skype to enhance its chat experience specifically – given that it’s best known for audio and video calling – come in the face of the rapid growth of rival messaging services that are now expanding into audio and video. It only makes sense that Skype extends its services to face the competition and cement itself as a viable option across all forms of communication too.
BBM users with an Android device or an iPhone are set to get an upgrade that will introduce BBM Voice and BBM Channels to the two platforms, among other improvements.
Announced by BlackBerry today, it’s the first time that Android and iOS users will be able to make free voice calls via BBM Voice and it’s also the first time that either platform has included the option of using BBM Channels – a way of curating your conversations by topic. Both features have, however, been available to BlackBerry owners before now.
In addition to this, today’s update also brings easier photo and file sharing thanks to Dropbox integration, and the ability to share your location – the result of a deal with Glympse. These new features are rolling out across BBM for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. There are also more than 100 new emoticons, if that excites you.
After launching a version of its iPad presentation app on the Web, Haiku Deck is returning to its mobile roots with a new app just for the iPhone.
As before, the idea is to give anyone the ability to create and present professional, well-designed slideshows for free. The new iPhone app focuses on the latter, giving users a simple means of reviewing and playing their presentations. In addition, it has a remote control mode that lets you control the delivery of your slideshow and refer to notes while you’re up on stage.
Finally, Haiku Deck also has two gallery modes if you’re lacking inspiration or want some pointers on how to improve your next presentation.
The inability to create or edit presentations with the iPhone app is disappointing, although Haiku Deck says this will be available in the near future. If you’re on Android, however, you’ll have to make do with the Web app for now. “Over time, we’ll look at additional platforms that fit with the needs of our audience,” a spokesperson said. That sounds promising, at least.
Note: The iPhone app will land in the App Store later today. If it’s not there already, we expect it’ll show up shortly.
