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Developers cannot ignore Android. The old mantra of releasing on iOS and then eventually hitting Android needs to be rethought. Google also needs to step up its game. Google Play is a mess and Android has a very big problem with piracy. Android the ecosystem still sucks, but Android the mobile platform is winning.

"Content is fire. Social media is gasoline."

1. Know Your Audience If you don't know who your audience is, how will you ever connect with them? Most brands have an understanding of their audience's demographics - age, gender, HHI, ethnicity. But you have to go beyond these statistics to get a better understanding of their interests, needs, mindsets, and behaviors to truly make a connection and become an important part of their lives. In addition to the standard methods of audience discovery - industry research, focus groups, and brand surveys - you can also use social media data to build audience personas. Social monitoring software, Facebook Custom Audience, social referrals to your website, and question-and-answer sites are just a few of the sources you can use to learn more about your audience.

2. Provide Value Your content must provide some type of value to your audience. That value could be education, increased productivity, entertainment, or cost savings. To the consumer, it shouldn't seem like marketing, even though we know it is by nature. It's providing long-term awareness and brand recall. It's making sure your brand is right there with the consumer at each step along their path to purchase so that when it comes time to make a decision, you're the first brand that comes to mind.

Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.

Most LMSes isolate students in their particular courses. And once that class is over and once a student has graduated, the information contained there - notes, lessons, assignments, discussions - are lost. Schoology blends a social networking interface with learning management tools, so that teachers and students (and parents and administrators) can communicate and collaborate on academic issues.

as a learning tool, the iPad’s single-screen interface reduces elements of interruption and potentially enhances user orientation to a specific task. An abundance of features can be a disturbance to the cognitive process, and educators often prefer mobile devices without distractive features like messaging and phone calls.

Modern educators are voicing the need for learning to be more contextual and engaging. Mobile phones and digital whiteboards add a level of interactivity, but not a lot of computing power, and a laptop is not always convenient.

The iPad fills this gap by enabling a host of activities such as referencing, collaborating, and creating content. In an August 2010 Wired.com article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet,” the transformation from open Web browsing to specialized apps was a change driven by the Apple model of mobile computing. The iPad leverages this trend by providing personalized choice of content, a big plus for student users.

If you have ever entertained that seemingly laughable thought of installing anti-virus software on your mobile phone, you are not alone.

A few months ago, Kaspersky Labs discovered two Trojan-SMS malware that masqueraded as media player apps for Android devices. Once installed, the malware can send premium SMSes costing US$6 ($7.70) each without the user's knowledge.

the money is still on computers, and cyber criminals follow the trail of money. The increasing number of people using smartphones is a factor, but not a big one yet. There are some banking services on mobile platforms, but the majority of consumers still use computers to access banking services

Information on hangouts can also be pushed to Facebook and Twitter.

The startup was initially funded by Spring Singapore for $50,000 and it recently raised US$500,000 in seed funding in September. It has received backing from big names in the global technology scene. Joichi Ito from venture fund Neoteny Labs, who's also chief executive of Creative Commons and an early investor and board member of Twitter, and Batara Eto, who is co-founder and former chief technology officer of Mixi, Japan's largest social network, have joined foound's board of directors and advisory board respectively.

Blog > Putting Together an Effective Portfolio Putting Together an Effective Portfolio

most freelancers with a decent body of work nowadays will also have an online presence, used, in the main, to display their work. Take as much care with your online portfolio as you would your physical one. Strive for a uniformity and dynamism in your photography of projects, and make sure that images and pdfs saved from the computer are of sufficiently high and consistent resolution. Write concise, foolproof explanations to accompany the work and organise it all in an intuitive level-based fashion, much as you would a website. Sites like Flickr and View Creatives go some way to aiding the freelancer in this professional-feeling endeavour, but you’ll still need to pour energy and vim into the whole enterprise to create the right appearance.

Useful Top Tips Keep things small. A portfolio any larger than A3 is really too big Keep things clean & uncrumpled Loose-leaf sheets are better than ring-bound sleeves Assembling a portfolio should not be a one-off exercise, but a dynamic and continual process Request and absorb other people’s comments and allow this information to flow back into the way you maintain your portfolio Interleave your loose-leaf sheets with a bold and dazzling substrate, though choose something that doesn’t overpower the work contained within If you choose to carry your portfolio on a laptop, for pity’s sake avoid using Powerpoint in your presentations!

Scrolling Long Lists Another big problem with iPhone web apps is presenting very long lists efficiently. Digg has this problem with their stories and comments and they work around it by breaking stories into pages of ten and omitting all but the top five comments. Apple solves this problem nicely in their Mail app by loading 25 messages at a time and putting a link to get more at the end. Clicking it loads those messages and appends them to the end of the list, allowing you to use the joyous flick gesture to scroll the complete list at once. In my view, this is nicer than breaking the list up into separate pages. iUI makes it easy for you to use this convention in your own web apps. Simply create a link with target="_replace" and iUI will load the URL it and replace the <a> with the contents of the URL. Again, the URL should not point to a complete HTML document, but only the fragment you want to replace the "Get More" link with. For an example of incrementally loaded lists, look at the Digg demo again. Scroll to the bottom of the stories list and click on the "Get 10 More Stories..." link.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

When DIYers combine those cheap, powerful tools with the collaborative potential of the Internet, they can come up with the kinds of innovations that once sprang only from big-budget R&D labs. In 2009, a PhD student named Daniel Reetz turned two Canon PowerShot A590s into an improvised high-speed book scanner. He detailed the project on a website, DIYbookscanner.org, where readers have since posted hundreds of tweaks, suggestions, upgrades, and entirely new designs. The open source MPGuino project, which uses an Arduino microcontroller to track gas consumption as you drive, has inspired a small community of fans who help refine and customize the gizmo.

Google announced a new social networking layer that may compete with Facebook but, at the same time, is utterly different. The Google+ project will do some of the same general things as Facebook, such as sending messages to friends, sharing links, chatting, and sharing pictures, but the big difference is that with Google+, you can choose who you want to share these things with