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Who Will Work On My Mobile App?

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If you’re thinking seriously about developing a new mobile application with a team of experts, you’ve likely been inundated—and possibly overwhelmed—with information and choices. Actually committing to building a great app means you’ve first got to have faith and trust in a great company: one that will handle all stages of your application, from concept to deployment to post-launch maintenance.

Understanding the talent required to develop a mobile application is a good way to further understand why you need to trust this complex task to the experts only. There are many different sidesand stages to app development, and for the most important projects, you’re going to need the most professional team to accomplish your goal. Some of the key figures of mobile application development —each occupied by one or many specialists—are the following:

Business Analysts: These important members of staff will help you gather, interpret, and act on important information about the market before designs begin. Determining your audience and establishing how to market to this group effectively are essential tasks that cannot be taken lightly. Once your app is released, they can conduct valuable research into how users interact with the program, giving you a sense of engagement, length of stay, how often it’s used, and so forth.

Creative Team: The best creative teams understand that designs must be compelling. Creative teams will work on the user experience and user interface of your application, making it user-friendly, eye-catching and visually appealing, and easy to navigate. They will also remain open to incorporating suggestions from your own creative team (never leaving you in the dark about how things are coming along).

Development Team: When you work with a top-level company, you’ll get engineers and programmers who know all the ins and outs of every platform, programming language, and software necessary for apps usable on multiple devices. The best applications can be downloaded for Android, Windows, Apple, and other big brands, and the best offer smooth and lag-free interactions. If you want a world-class app, you need to trust programming to a world-class development team — and again, one that will also give you great feedback as they complete the process.

Quality Assurance Team: The best mobile app development companies employ dedicated QA teams to help fine-tune your app throughout the building process. The top companies commit to an agile philosophy that gives you the chance to make suggestions and recommend changes before the release. Testing the limits and scope of your app along with the company will give you peace of mind and confidence that you’re getting exactly what you paid for. Once the application is out in the world, you want to have the continued backing of a great QA team to ensure that the technicians can make adjustments for platform changes and other unanticipated necessities.

Getting a positive return on investment for your application is of course crucial, but choosing the least expensive or quickestcompany is never the wisest option. Make sure your mobile app development team has experience developing similar types of applications and can produce a finished product that meets your specifications. There are certain qualities to look for when searching for the best company to work with, and industry awards can certainly help indicate which ones are the leaders of the pack. The Clearbridge Mobile app development team recently received honorable mentions for their work developing the We 365 Social Mobile App for Free The Children,which was an official honouree at this year’s WebbyAwards. A truly professional app development company will produce a final product that will flourish in the marketplace and give you an ROI that inspires you to ever-greater achievements!

Local Marketing: Keeping It Real

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If you’ve just become the owner of your own business, you’re already one up on the majority of your peers. So now it’s time to take the extra step of maximizing all of the opportunities in front of you to ensure that you will not only go down in history as a business owner, but as a massively successful one to boot. What are the steps you need to take to make sure you succeed in the game?

Keep It Local, Keep It Real

Perhaps one of the most common, yet easily avoidable, mistakes that new business owners make in the Internet age is to concentrate all of their advertising on the wider market instead of the local. This is an especially pernicious temptation to entrepreneurs who conduct all of their business online, and may not even own a traditional “brick and mortar” store.

The fact is, local search marketing should be a key concern of every new business owner, whether you own a real world store front or a purely Internet based company. When residents in your local area do a search for a specific set of goods and services, your company should be the first one that pops up in the listings. But how can you make this happen?

Local Marketing Is The Key To Success

If you are the owner of a company that makes the primary portion of its income through local sales, you’ll certainly need to bone up on your local Internet presence. You’ll need to have ads that are marketed to purely local media sources, as well as a healthy presence on such vital platforms as Google Maps and many more.

The bottom line is, you’ll need to become quickly visible to residents in your area in order to maximize your potential customer base. You’ll need strategically placed, locally targeted ads that contain vital key words and other attention getting content. And you’ll certainly need all of this advertising content at the best possible price, with a full guarantee of quality attached.

You’ll Need To Hire Expert Help

When it comes to ensuring that residents in your area choose your company first, the initial step is to maximize your chances of being the first name that pops up at them when they consult Google. You need to be the most easily accessible, most local, and most convenient company for your customers to do business with.

There are plenty of excellent companies that are available for you to hire. One of the very best in the business is Stodzy Internet Marketing, who have helped thousands of businesses succeed in reaping the maximum benefits from a wide variety of local marketing techniques.

Watch what you Say nowadays because the Devices are Listening!

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We have heard so many news reports in the past about international espionage, and it is a subject that has spawned a great many top quality novels and movies as well. Some of the most intrepid heroes of fiction have been experts in covert operations designed to help their governments to gain a major advantage over all of their rivals.

If you ever thought such actions were limited to the pages of books and the screens in our cinemas, however, it could be time for you to think again. The world in which we live has become increasingly open to infiltration by others, so you can never truly be sure that a supposed secret conversation isn’t being heard by other people.

Most of us would fail to be alarmed by such an issue, though, in part because of the somewhat depressing realization that we have very little to say that would be of any interest to anyone else. Most of our conversations, even if we find them fascinating, would contain no germs of insight that others would feel a great need to listen in to.

This does not mean, however, that we should always assume our conversations are just between us and the people we are talking to. There could a few be secret listening devices in just about any location, so a person somewhere could just eavesdrop on a discussion that you are having without you even being aware of it.

Ears are everywhere now, and not just in the places you expect

And you should never just think that this only happens in government offices and big corporation board rooms, either. Whether you are an electrician in Sussex, a school teacher in Lancashire or a top level executive in the City of London, all of your direct conversations, even if they are only chats, could potentially be heard by others.

While the vast majority of dialogue between people will be of little interest to other men and women, there are times when a listening device could prove to be of crucial importance. It is far easier now to install a covert gadget that those who are in the vicinity will be totally unaware of, so it pays to think carefully before speaking.

This is an era in which it seems new ideas and appliances are coming on to the market all the time, and in some ways it can be hard to keep up with all of these new developments. If you’re one of those men and women who are always keen to know all there is to know about gadgets, you will no doubt love the wow factor of them.

Five UnmissableTelevision Shows you can Stream

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The recent evolution of modern television drama owes a great deal to the internet.Streaming services have relegated problems like bad TV reception to history and recognising the importance of internet safety for children – they have also afforded parents with means of providing their children with entertainment, safe in the knowledge that they cannot access anything that they shouldn’t.

But what about the content itself?This is where streaming services really shine and what prompts audiences to reach into their wallet and who can blame them?While regular television networks continue to pigeon hole you, the streaming services divert their ever-burgeoning revenues toward programmes which take creative risks.In some instances, these risks have paid off spectacularly.Let’s take a look at a selection of the shows that make that Netflix and Amazon Prime membership worthwhile.

Better Call Saul!

Bob Odenkirk reprises his role as Saul Goodman in this prequel to Breaking Bad, which has shown no sign of wilting beneath the shadow of its brilliant parent season.Better Call Saul tells the tale of how a bright-eyed idealistic lawyer James McGill came to transform into the sleazy, underhand lawyer Saul Goodman, who we meet in Breaking Bad.

Those that haven’t yet seen Breaking Bad have a great deal to catch up on before they can appreciate this new spin-off.Those who have will doubtless yearn for more tales from the criminal underworld of Albuquerque, New Mexico – and in this regard, Better Call Saul does not disappoint.

The Man in the High Castle

Perhaps the most obscure entry to this list features its biggest name.Ridley Scott, the director of perhaps the most significant screen-adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel, Blade Runner (and its recently announced sequel) has lent his considerable reputation as executive producer to another Dick adaptation, The Man in the High Castle – a story which imagines how history might have unfolded had the Axis powers won the second world war and subsequently occupied the United States.

Owing perhaps to its controversial subject matter, the series has led a rather charmed life, being picked up and dropped by both the BBC and SyFy before finally finding a home at Amazon, who, having released a single pilot episode, have recently given the go-ahead for work on a full series.If this first episode is any measure of the quality we might expect from future episodes, then audiences are in for a treat.

Marco Polo

This Netflix original is another example of a series which would, in all likelihood, never have been commissioned by a more traditional broadcaster.It documents the title character’s travels to Mongolia and his life under Kublai Khan.The programme credits its audience with a degree of intelligence and unapologetically deals with an area of a history unfamiliar to the west which it doesby using an almost entirely Asian cast.

While the historical accuracy of the programme is, at times, dubious (Polo was never, for example, trained by a blind Taoist monk called Hundred Eyes), its attention to detail is lush and it brings the political machinations of 13th century Mongolia to life as never before.

House of Cards

If television is to be believed, then the politics of 21st century Washington shares a great deal in common with that of 13th century Mongolia.Netflix has recently released the third instalment of its flagship drama, House of Cards, based on a British drama of the same name.In the series, Kevin Spacey plays ambitious governor Frank Underwood, whose ascent through the upper echelons of the White House has been enthralling fans since the series’ inception in 2013 – and seems likely to do so for years to come.

Transparent

The final entry to our list comes from Amazon and charts a family’s coming to terms with the fact that one of their number, played by Jeffrey Tambor, has begun to openly identify as a woman.The series has been incredibly well-received – and deservedly so; while review aggregators are not always reliable indicators of a programme’s quality (or lack thereof), it’s fair to say that any production which Rotten Tomatoes lists as having a 98% approval rating, and MetaCritic describes as having achieved ‘universal acclaim’, must be doing something right.

Since its release, it has drawn respectable audiences over to Amazon and won the Golden Globe award for best television series – a first for an Amazon-backed series.Particular praise has been reserved for Tambor himself, who has picked up another Golden Globe for his troubles.

TrackR Announces World’s Thinnest Tracking Device – TrackR Bravo

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TrackR, pioneers of the Bluetooth tracker space, announce the availability of TrackR bravo, a beautifully designed brushed-aluminum tracking device that locates lost or stolen items. The anodized aluminum TrackR bravo comes in colors of steel, black, rose gold and sky blue, and is available for purchase today starting at $29.99. The newly redesigned app, which integrates with Nest, is also available for iTunes and Android.

“Technology long ago streamlined organization and inventory management for companies, while consumers have been left to use arcane methods like key hooks to keep track of the items that matter most to them,” says Chris Herbert, TrackR CEO & Co-Founder talking with DroxTech. “We envision a world where you can keep a database of your most important possessions and find them with the touch of a button. With TrackR bravo, we created a new kind of personal inventory management system to do just that, by tracking items using your smartphone.”

Track Your Things

Use TrackR bravo to take stock of all your belongings – keys, pets, bikes, purses, wallets, laptops, diaper bags, suitcases, tablets, golf bags and anything else you want to locate in a hurry. Simply attach the coin-sized TrackR bravo to items you wish to track, pair it with the app and then assign each item a unique icon to create a log of all your tracked items. When you need to locate something quickly, just click on the item you’re looking for within the app. TrackR uses a Bluetooth distance indicator to locate missing items within 100 feet and can ring bravo from the app using the manual alarm. Users can even ring their phone, even if it’s on silent, directly from their TrackR bravo to find phones hidden in between seat cushions. TrackR will also track things out of Bluetooth range using the TrackR Crowd GPS database made up of thousands of TrackR users.

Sound the Alarm

For items that frequently go missing, users can enable the separation alert feature to sound if tracked items are left behind or forgotten. TrackR has enabled users to set up Safe Zones within frequently-visited Wi-Fi networks and users’ Nest network to disable alerts from sounding when wandering around the house or the office.

Strength in Numbers

TrackR’s Crowd GPS Network is unique from other Bluetooth trackers because it enables you to find your items after they have been lost, even if out of Bluetooth range, by relying on the thousands of active TrackR users.  When an item goes missing with a TrackR device attached, all TrackR enabled phones will begin to search for that item. When another user comes nearby the lost item, that user’s phone will anonymously ping the TrackR server to update the item’s owner with new GPS coordinates of when and where it was last. This enables GPS tracking of multiple items without having to pay a monthly fee or needing to recharge your device every month.

Crowd GPS Networks rely on a strong and active network of users to find more items faster. The TrackR Crowd GPS network is constantly growing and today has more than 80 updates per minute thanks to TrackR’s active Crowd GPS users. The TrackR Crowd GPS Network coverage map can be found on the TrackR website and is updated every month. 

Stay Connected

TrackR bravo uses a low-cost replaceable battery that lasts for up to a year. Replaceable batteries mean that TrackR users don’t have to purchase a new device every year, which cuts down on users’ lifetime monetary and environmental costs and keeps TrackR’s Crowd GPS users active to find more and more items.

TrackR bravo is iOS and Android compatible and a single device costs $29.99. Multiple accessories are available including a water-proof case/pet collar attachment and a high-end metal key loop A customizable set of three accessories is available for $19.

TrackR Bravo Specs:

  • Diameter: 31mm
  • Thinness: 3.5mm
  • Battery Life: 1 year
  • Tracks up to 10 items depending on mobile device
  • Battery Type: Replaceable CR1616 Battery
  • Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.0 (Bluetooth Low Energy)
  • Bluetooth range: 100ft
  • Crowd GPS range: Worldwide
  • Compatible with iPhone 4s & Later, iPad 3rd Generation & Later and Android 4.4 & Later with Bluetooth Low Energy
  • 29.99

How Technology Can Reach Millions

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Technology has had a huge positive impact in the last few decades on the lives of many, but it has not reached everyone. As clearly presented in Ehsanollah Bayat’s blog, successful businesses can use technology to help many people who may not have access to the latest developments. One good example is the collaboration between the Starkey Foundation and other organizations to give hearing aids to thousands of people who have lived their lives in silent isolation.

Corporate Giving

Corporate philanthropy not only helps the people who receive it have better lives, it also builds the local community creating a better base from which the company draws employees. When a corporation has a strong philanthropic policy, it attracts better employees because they want to work for a company that cares about society. Most employees prefer to work for a company that supports a cause or charity, and they look for that when they are job hunting.

Studies show that employees who volunteer on pro bono projects gain significant job-related skills and are more productive, with higher engagement levels that those employees who don’t participate in charitable giving.

Corporations not only give from their own cash-flow, they encourage their employees to give by using technology to engage employees in corporate charity campaigns. Technology is used to provide feedback on how the contributions are used and to promote volunteer opportunities. The main areas where corporations see their responsibility are in social services that help individuals, environmental causes to reduce pollution, community development to create a more educated work force and promotion of entrepreneurship. According to Henry Ford, a business must make a profit or it will die, but running a business solely for profit will also kill the business because it will no longer have a reason to exist.

The Benefits of Hearing Aids

The obvious benefit of a hearing aid is to promote hearing, but the ability for people who normally couldn’t hear to be able to hear has a far reaching impact on their local community. Smart, enthusiastic people are sidelined because they can’t hear. With a hearing aid, they can fully participate in their own education and gain skills they never thought possible. A hearing aid opens many doors for children and adults and empowers them for a better life while showing them that they can also help others.

In many cases, volunteers and medical technicians from the local health services are trained and given incentives to ensure the long-term success of the philanthropic efforts. This means the hearing aid recipient will enjoy the ability to hear throughout their lives.

Ongoing Support

When thousands of hearing aids are given to deaf and partially deaf adults and children, training also needs to be given in order for them to care for the devices. This service is ongoing for the recipients and includes training in the proper use and maintenance of the device and extra batteries. There are other ways the charity can help communities such as giving hearing-health training to avoid loss of hearing.

Technology in many areas, such as the medical profession, information technology, education and manufacturing have made life easier for many people. Only through charitable giving, can this reach the people who don’t have access. A corporation is perfectly placed to make a great contribution to the less fortunate while reaping the benefits in its bottom line.

Phiaton Announces The Availability Of Its MS 100 BA Earphones

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Phiaton Corporation, a premium manufacturer of high-performance personal audio products, today announces the availability of its MS 100 BA, which sets a new standard for audio performance in balanced armature earphones.

Balancing warmth and detail, without cutting back on bass, these versatile earphones provide high-fidelity listening in a light, stylish aluminum body that adds durability. Double-injection tips bolstered by sound-isolating technology prevent sound leakage and minimize reverberation for continuous sound quality.

“This sub-$100 addition to our line was designed to capture refined details in music while providing pronounced bass that isn’t typical in balanced armature earphones,” said James Baik talking with Techanics, President of Phiaton.

Features of the MS 100 BA earphones with microphone include:

  • Sound-Isolating: Prevent sound leakage and minimalize reverberation with double-shelled housing.
  • In-line Control: Control music and answer phone calls with the touch of a button and without removing your earphones.
  • Tangle-Free Cord: Minimalize cable tangling and touch noise with textured, oval-shaped cable.
  • Aluminum Body: Add style and durability with the aluminum body.
  • Double-Injection Tips: Prevent sound leakage and obtain a more stable, comfortable fit.

The new MS 100 BA earphones are now available for $99 on Amazon, Wired for Less and other partner retailers.

Now Conncet USB Drive Into Your Phones With C-Type Connector USB’s Made By SanDisk

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Looking at the growth market of smartphones, one of the biggest flash memory storage manufacturer SanDisk decided to launch a Dual USB drive for smartphones. SanDisk Dual USB Drive will allow users to store and share information from smartphone and tablet directly without the need the of any USB data cable.

USB-Drive-With-C-Type-Connector

The new SanDisk Dual USB Drive will be having a Type C connector. Although Type C connectors are not in frequent use by the smartphones today, but Analytics predicts that 12% of total handsets will be equipped with this connector by 2016. Standard micro-USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 port will be replaced by USB Type C for a faster transfer speed.

This slimmer and reversible USB Type C design is being released for the first time and it will provide you a powerful solution powerful which could be used both with mobile devices and PCs.

The Type C port is also believed to be headed to Windows 10 devices and Apple’s unannounced next Retina MacBook Air.  “With the rapidly increasing amount of content captured on mobile devices, we know that consumers want easy ways to manage it all,” said Dinesh Bahal, vice president of product marketing at SanDisk.

The SanDisk Dual USB Drive has been build like it has both Type C ports and full-size USB are attached to each other and it’ll be having a memory storage of 32GB.

Continuing the strategy to target smartphone users, SanDisk has recently released a new higher-capacity microSD card. With this new 200GB Ultra microSDXC card, SanDisk broke its own storage record of 128GB capacity of storage on a memory card.

The SanDisk Dual USB Drive is available starting in the second quarter of 2015, but the pricing information is not available yet.

Jibo: First Family Robot In The World.

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Small stature, big personality: Family robot Jibo hits the market.

Jibo, The Family Robot

He stands only 11 inches tall, but Jibo makes a big impression the moment you meet him. Jibo is the world’s first family robot. He makes his debut today. I got a sneak peek when I visited Cynthia Breazeal, a pioneer of social robotics, at the MIT Media Lab.

Yes, Jibo can sing and dance. He can greet you and remind you to call your mother. But Jibo’s potential extends far beyond engaging in casual conversation and completing daily tasks.

Breazeal sees Jibo, along with other social robots she’s developed, as playing a big role in educating children and health care management and aiding the elderly.

Breazeal’s fascination with robotics began with “Star Wars” and she realized after watching NASA land a robot on Mars that not enough attention was paid to robots that engage in human interaction.

She began to focus on social robots that are designed to interact with humans in an interpersonal manner through social cues, such as politeness.

Jibo is the result of years of work and study by Breazeal. She told me that despite concerns from some people, robots like Jibo are not intended to replace humans. “It’s about human empowerment,” she says.

Distinguish Your Company’s Laptops With Vinyl Skins

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As a business owner, you knowthe importance of branding cannot be overstated. Whether it’s through advertising, product placement, corporate copy, uniforms, or any other of the countless other ways a company presents itself to its customers, the essential thing is to create a brand experience.For example, recent studies show that how people think of a company will dramaticallyinfluence purchasing patterns; in fact, it’s often more important than the products or services themselves. Branding is about getting your name out there, creating a narrative and associating your company with a great story.

This is why something like a MacBook skin can be so effective. They can distinguish you from other organizations, unite your crew, and promote your brand wherever your employees work. When peoplesee employees with customized skins on their computers, they think of them as essential members of a team rather than cogs in a machine. And as the above study and many others show, people are always more inclined to think favorably of companies that present themselves positively and with a keen eye for style and presentation.

So what are MacBook skins? These are beautiful, entirely customizable decals that let you add a vibrant color, gorgeous texture, or one-of-a-kind design to the tops, bottoms, and tracker pads of your entire fleet of MacBooks. For example, tech companies can customize their products to look sleek, metallic, and shiny, while other design firms can add a wood, laminate, or bamboo-like grain to their materials—the choice is yours when you check out dbrand and their huge selection of skins. They have dedicated followers (on your favorite social media platform) that swear by their products for the quality, ease of use (not all skins are built the same!), huge selection and cheap shipping options. What better way to project professionalism, unity, and differentiate your brand?

Of course, there’s another side to skins for MacBooks and other devices. They also help protect your investments. There are many ways a MacBook can get damaged, and skins can be vital for protecting against grease, grime, spills, food, nicks, scratches, and other accidents. They provide an added layer against the outside world and an improved grip, meaning that the chance your company’s laptops get pushed, knocked, or otherwise dropped is greatly reduced.

MacBook skins strengthen your brand image by making employees stand out and seem like part of a team. At the same time, the skins protect the laptop from damages that are most often encountered in public places like libraries, cafes, restaurants, and pubs. This means that employees can actually use them out in the world safely, and get people talking about your company. Skins for MacBook and other Apple products are easy to apply, easy to order, and inexpensive, meaning that you won’t have to budget for their implementation or spend precious time applying them. In other words, they’re a quick, easy, and foolproof way to immediately change the look of your brand, and make a lasting impact.