Play With Google’s Psychedelic New Interactive Music Video Cube

Play With Google’s Psychedelic New Interactive Music Video Cube

Wednesday, July 2, 2014 / No Comments

It’s called The Cube, and it’s a trip. Built by Google Creative Labs as “an experimental platform for interactive storytelling”, The Cube is an in-browser manipulateable 3-D box with a different video and audio track on each face. It debuted online today with indie dance band The Presets’ new single “No Fun”. You decide what to watch and hear by clicking and dragging The Cube to show a single side or a combination.

And no, Google didn’t take some bad acid. The whole thing is a multi-pronged promo. The Cube only runs in Google Chrome and Android, it links to buy the song on Google Play where it’s exclusively available for the next 48 hours, and it’s sure to help Google recruit designers by showing it can do art, not just algorithms.

And since The Cube is embeddable, you can play with it below. There’s a story about a girl in a bathtub and a dude dancing himself silly laced in with technicolor heads and pulsing

This isn’t Google’s first foray into weird, interactive msuic videos. The Chrome Experiments has done two with Arcade Fire. “The Wilderness Downtown” used your address and Google Maps to customize the video with aerial shots of your home. “Just A Reflektor” employed your phone and webcam to let your movements control the action.

But rather than a one-off experiment, Google is calling The Cube a “platform”, indicating more art could be built on it eventually. It was conceived by the Google Sydney Creative Lab team and demoed last month in person at the local Semi Permanent creative conference. Google hooked up with The Presets to show what The Cube can do, but the possibilities go far beyond music.

Imagine a short film told from six different perspectives simultaneously, or using The Cube for interactive data visualizations. Groovy.

For more on the making of The Cube, check out the behind the scenes video below (you’re probably gonna want to pause The Cube itself first)

Google Launches Drive For Work With Unlimited Storage For $10/Month

Google Launches Drive For Work With Unlimited Storage For $10/Month

Tuesday, July 1, 2014 / No Comments

At its I/O developer conference today, Google didn’t just launch a completely revamped version of Drive. It also launched Drive for Work, a new version of Drive and Google apps for businesses that comes with a number of extra security features. The one feature most users will notice first, however, is that Drive for Work doesn’t have any storage limitations.

If you’ve followed along, this doesn’t come as a major shock. Google already reduced the price of Drive storage drastically earlier this year. As Google Drive’s director of product management Scott Johnston told me earlier this week, IT departments shouldn’t have to think about storage anymore, but as many services moved to the cloud, storage pricing was somehow left behind.
Now, with a $10/month/seat Drive for Work subscription, users won’t have to worry about that anymore. To clearly show that Google is serious about this, the team has also raised the maximum file size for uploads to 5 terabytes. Nobody in their right mind is going to upload a 5 terabyte file to Drive anytime soon, but if you feel like testing it out, be Google’s guest.
The regular Google Apps for Business account is still available for $5/month/seat, too, and users on those accounts will also get access to the new web interface and updated mobile apps.
While unlimited storage is the most eye-catching feature of Drive for Work, though, it also comes with a number of other tools that businesses have been asking for. Just like the current $10 Apps for Business plan, Drive for Work includes support for Google Apps Vault, for example, which allows companies to retain files and emails for compliance reasons.

The new subscription also gives companies access to the Drive’s audit features so they can track who accesses which documents and where they are shared. In addition, Google has launched an Audit API so that companies can create their own dashboards based on this data.
Drive for Work, Google tells me, also offers enterprise-grade security and compliance, including a SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Type II, SOC 2-audit, ISO 27001 certification, adherence to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, and can support industry-specific requirements like HIPAA.
In a similar vein, Drive for Work also allows businesses to set more fine-grained access controls and lets them turn certain Drive features like sync on or off for different business groups (in case you don’t want your legal team to be able to sync files, for example).
As Johnston told me, companies of all sizes have been asking Google for these features. While tools like Vault may seem most useful for larger corporations, many small- and medium-sized businesses have been asking for many of these features, too — not necessarily because they need them now, but because they want to know that those tools will be there as they grow.

Google Play For Education Goes Beyond Tablets, Now Available For Chromebooks, Too

Google Play For Education Goes Beyond Tablets, Now Available For Chromebooks, Too

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Last November, Google launched Google Play for Education, a portal for teachers and schools to more easily buy Android apps, books and educational YouTube video, and distribute them to their students. At the time, the program was solely focused on tablets, but starting today, the team also launched support for Chromebooks.
With the revamped Google Play for Education, teachers can now give students access to Android apps and Chrome apps, books and videos from a single site. According to Google, about 10,000 schools currently use Chromebooks (and some of them use both Chromebooks and tablets).
As Rick Borovoy, Google’s product manager for Google Play for Education, told me earlier this week, the team decided to start with tablets because it was especially interested in the use cases that tablets enable in a classroom. At the time, Borovoy wasn’t completely sold on the idea that schools would be interested in having students read books on their Chromebooks or that they would be interested in Chrome apps for their students. Teachers, however, immediately started asking Google for a Chrome OS version of the store and Borovoy and his team started piloting this program earlier this year.
On the Chrome OS side, Google Play for Education works very much like it did before. Apps are curated by a select group of teachers, for example. Borovoy noted that consumer app stores tend to provide users with an overwhelming number of choices, so the team wanted to give teachers a smaller number of apps that were previously vetted instead.

Just like in the old version, they also get access to Google’s bookstore for schools where they can then rent or buy books for their students starting at $1 per student for 60 days of access. Borovoy noted that most of the interest from schools right now is in trade books and that most aren’t all that interested in textbooks in e-book form.
Schools can also set up purchase order accounts with Google, so that it’s easier for teachers to go ahead and make purchases for their classes or just for individual students who may show an interest in a specific topic, for example. Previously, this often meant that teachers would pay out of their own pockets and then try to get reimbursed — which doesn’t always happen. With Google Play for Education, schools can simply give teachers the ability to make purchases (up to a set limit).
“Our goal is to find the pain points and untapped opportunities,” Borovoy told me. By offering support for both tablets and Chromebooks, he said, “schools don’t have to think device first.” They also don’t need to involve IT when they want to add an app to their students’ laptops or tablets, something that can be a major hassle and take away any spontaneity from teachers, especially in school systems where the IT departments are often understaffed.

Get to Know Your Neighbourhood Better with Shout, the Locality Based Social App

Get to Know Your Neighbourhood Better with Shout, the Locality Based Social App

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An app that lets you shout anything and everything to social media users within 1 km radius, Shout is the new locality based app from Idea Labs. If you are wondering if it really is shouting, your updates are termed as shout. A tool for self-expression and interaction, Shout doesn’t ask you to add people to your circles or wait for their friend requests to be approved.

Shout was created by Ashutosh Vikram, Thirukumaran Nagarajan and Sharath Loganathan, alumni of IIM,Kozhikode.
Shout, Echo and Shut up

So basically a shout is your update. If a receiver likes it, he can echo it which increases the visibility of your shout. With each echo, the radius of your shout increases. If he doesn’t like it or disturbs him, it be can be made to shut up. Shut up is used to differentiate noise from shout. There is a comments section as well where you can talk and interact with fellow users.

The audience is default, set by the geographical position you are in. If you want to reach a particular radius, you could move and set a new one.

Stay connected to your neighbourhood

This is a huge relief. You dont have to necessarily add friends and maintain circles.You could ask for help or even say hi to a person in the specific geographical region.You could also find  the nearest restaurant or complain about the bad roads. Essentially it is a good way to stay connected to your neighbourhood.

The Alter Ego
We hardly reveal things or shout what we want to when our identity is disclosed. In this app, you could choose an option called the Alter Ego where you can mask your personality and choose to be someone else, probably with a catchy nickname. It is an opportunity to give a virtual personality to your alter ego.
Launched in April 2014, the app has around 2000 downloads so far and is being used in over 10 countries. With a user-friendly interface, Shout lets you sign up with your Google or Facebook account.
The app does not use GPS oriented location but selects it from the network. Hence the battery drain is very low. Currently focused on building a huge customer base, the team expects to monetize by creating a local marketplace within the application.
Currently available in Android, the app will soon be in the iOS platform. Click here to download the app.
There are various other apps with the same name and similar features, some even with a shouting range of 20kms! Will this app stand out?

Google Glass Service Could Make All Customers Feel Special

Google Glass Service Could Make All Customers Feel Special

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There are many reasons companies should consider making a Google Glass investment aside from making their customers feel good. Personalization works. Emails with personalized subject lines tend be opened more and clicked on more, as surveys have found. Customers find personalized ads more engaging and educational. Conversely, customers become irritated with ads that are irrelevant.

Virgin Atlantic recently announced the expansion of a pilot project in which flight attendants use Google Glass to meet and greet customers. For the initial project, the airline equipped the concierge staff in its Upper Class Wing at London's Heathrow airport with Google Glass so they would have easy access to such information as connecting flights or loyalty points.

Virgin Atlantic ultimately decided on Google Glass instead of tablets or smartwatches, which it had been contemplating, because looking at a watch might give people the impression that the staff members were bored with their clients, while tapping through a tablet and not maintaining eye contact might be distracting for both passenger and attendant, reported Skift. 

The Drawbacks of Tablets, Smartwatches

Other companies opting to use smart devices at the point of sale or point of engagement likely will come to these insightful conclusions as well. A tablet can work well and stay unobtrusive in many customer engagement scenarios, such as a retail store.
However, for scenarios in which a company wants to provide a lot of handholding and personalized one-on-one service (translation: these are high-value customers), smart glasses may be the best bet among options available on the market today.
Another reason smart glasses work in this context: The service reps are expected to be wearing them, much like they are expected to be wearing ear pieces and communicating with larger a network of agents or a customer service desk. In other words, the customer can see that this is no glasshole, but someone in a corporate uniform who has a legitimate reason to be using the technology.
In short, the customer service case for Google Glass, or smart glasses in general, is a strong one. Virgina Atlantic's pilot project suggests the possibility that at some point in time companies will offer all customers the same personalized, one-on-one service currently reserved for their most well-heeled clients.

Personalization Pays Off

There are many reasons companies should make this investment aside from making their customers feel good. Personalization works. Emails with personalized subject lines tend be opened more and clicked on more, as surveys have found.
Customers find personalized ads more engaging and educational, a Yahoo survey has found. Conversely, customers become irritated with ads that are irrelevant.

Automating Customization

However, there is a downside to being able to automate the personalization of customer service. Too often nice little touches such as using a customer's name come off as insincere, especially if the underlying policies are not customer-friendly.
"Oh hello Mrs. Brown, how was your flight? Really, your luggage is missing and this is the vacation you've been saving for and dreaming of for 25 years? Well, I am sorry, Mrs. Brown, but it shouldn't take more than 24 to 48 hours to locate and deliver your suitcase."
Google Glass probably is not completely immune from awkwardness, though. Imagine the above conversation with an agent wearing Glass, who might be able to intersperse her comments with observations about how the trip Mrs. Brown took from Florida to New York last year went off without a hitch, and even mention that when her husband travels, he

usually brings his luggage on board. "So, Mrs. Brown, you can see that as an airline we usually are on the ball."
Google Glass has great potential to bring customer service to the next level. Companies just have to make sure that besides having the infrastructure, back-end systems and employee training in place, they have customer service policies that are at least as nifty as those glasses.

Google Shames Apple’s iOS For Adding What Android Did Years Ago

Google Shames Apple’s iOS For Adding What Android Did Years Ago

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Apple’s Tim Cook insulted Google at WWDC earlier this month saying “Android dominates the market in malware”, and quoted an article calling the fragmented open operating system a “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities.” Well Google punched back this morning at its I/O conference when Sundar Pichai put up a slide showing Android’s progress over the years, noting “If you look at what other platforms are getting now, widgets, custom keyboards, many of these things came to Android four, maybe five years ago.”

And the Google fanboys and fangirls went wild.

Pichai never said Apple, but he was clearly jabbing at the recent announcement that iOS 8 would include widgets and custom keyboards. And to play a little defense, Pichai then described how Google was fighting Android malware by forcing all security updates to be pushed through Google Play so hackers can’t send them straight to unsuspecting victims.

For years, the fight between Apple and Google on mobile has been about iOS’ beauty vs Android’s power. But now Apple is opens up more developer flexibility, and Android is getting the new “Material” design overhaul. As the two mobile operating systems converge, expect this fight to get even dirtier. “Android is for robots!” “iOS is for toddlers!”

And poor Windows Phone wishes someone would at least make fun of it

Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

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Prepare to further isolate yourself in a world containing only the news and information you care about. A new mobile application called Pipes has just launched a simple tool to help you find and follow any topic, from Apple or Google to the FIFA World Cup, or whatever else you want.
The app is similar in some ways to short-form news reading apps like Circa or Yahoo’s News Digest, or alerting tools like recent TechCrunch Disrupt participant Notivo, as it’s also designed to offer mobile-friendly access to news and information. But in Pipes’ case, the app isn’t about offering you bite-sized summaries, but instead provides feeds of popular articles on the subject matter at hand, as well as tweets, and even the item’s Wikipedia page, for reference.
According to co-founder Vinay Anand, who built Pipes along with Siddarth Goliya and a small team of mainly 20-year-old engineers, Pipes’ backend today crawls data from over 10,000 sources every hour, allowing you to track just about anything.
“The two of us really felt the need to personalize news,” explains Anand. “We really feel that people have specific things they want to track and want to be alerted on it and that’s exactly what Pipes allows you to do,” he says.

How It Works

Pipes is well-designed and straightforward to set up and use. From the main screen, you just click a plus (“+”) button to add a new pipe (aka, topic). You then enter your search term or keyword, and tap to add it to your homepage. You can also shake your phone for a suggestion of trending pipes to add, which is fun, if a bit less practical.
After adding your topics, each appears in its own section on the main page, waiting to be explored. You tap into these for lists of links to news articles, which pull in the full article’s text in most cases via RSS feeds. From here, you can also bookmark items as well as share them via text, WhatsApp, Email, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

You can also customize push notifications for your pipes, while controlling their frequency.
Separate sections point you to the topic’s Wikipedia page and related tweets. I don’t care for the decision to only pull in hashtagged tweets here, however, as I find there’s a lot more content discussed on Twitter than the tweets from those devoted to hashtagging everything they say. Plus, Pipes’ selection of tweets feels curated and stale, as it didn’t update with a pull-to-refresh gesture during testing. The tweets aren’t time-stamped either, so their only purpose now it seems is to give you a sense of the conversation, or to point you to other articles that may have been missed in the “News” section.
Meanwhile, a “Top Stories” section on the Pipes main screen lets you break out of your own little world a bit to see other popular news items.

 

The overall look-and-feel of Pipes and the functionality it provides is compelling. However, ultimately the app will have to face down other more popular competitors like Flipboard or Bloglovin for casual news readers, or RSS feed-reading utilities like Feedly or Reeder for hard-core news consumers.
The co-founders have worked on several business ventures together in the past, including two that failed, one that Anand describes as a “moderate success” and now Pipes, their fourth venture. This time around, they’re funding development through money from Doodle Creatives, their Mumbai-based design and development shop, but have not taken in outside funding.
Pipes is a free download on both iOS and Android.

And Finally,Orkut to Shut Down on Sep 30th

And Finally,Orkut to Shut Down on Sep 30th

Monday, June 30, 2014 / No Comments

Orkut, once a darling among social networkers is finally shutting down.
Orkut was extremely popular in emerging markets India and Brazil, but Facebook came and conquered the entire market. We earlier hinted of Google+ replacing Orkut , but even Google plus has failed to take off.
“Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell (or, tchau). We’ll be focusing our energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.
We will shut down Orkut on September 30, 2014. Until then, there will be no impact on current Orkut users, to give the community time to manage the transition. People can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016). Starting today, it will not be possible to create a new Orkut account.
It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service. We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.” [official announcement]
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Good bye, Orkut. You were great. Sadly, you won’t be missed.