Peter Rubin from WIRED brings an exclusive preview of the new Xbox One and its new Kinect sensor.
Watching the keynote last night and then the reactions on Twitter after, I noticed a lot of hate towards the announcement. No games, no backwards compatibility, no pricing and release info, etc. But watching this video blew my mind. I’m not gamer, yet I feel like grabbing the Xbox One when it comes out just to play with the Kinect sensor and the new games built for it.
This is great stuff. The Share My Dabba (Share My Tiffin) initiative is a joint effort between Happy Life Welfare Society and The Dabbawala Foundation that makes use of leftover food from the tiffins and is shared with hungry street children.
Read more about the Dabbawalas here.
Over the last few months, App.net has been maturing into much more than just a “Twitter alternative”. The team behind the service has been slowly rolling out some impressive features and updates to it, making it a very solid product that stands on its own and makes it very different from Twitter. Even though the Alpha web app works very much like twitter, the core of App.net & the API that it offers is much more advanced and includes many different features for users — the most notable being the 10GB of File Storage for every account & the corresponding Files API.
One of the first few apps to make explicit use of this Files API by App.net, is Orbit. The app, designed and developed by Joel Levin and Andy LaVoy, is a tiny menubar app that lets you easily manage your files stored on App.net. Similar to Droplr or Cloud App, you can drag your files onto to the app icon in the menubar. Orbit automatically uploads the file and returns a URL that you can share with anyone.
Clicking on the menubar icon reveals a tray that displays a list of all the files in your account. You can drag any file out of the tray to save it and double clicking a file opens it in the default browser. You can hit ⌘+C (or right click) on a file to copy its link manually or ⌘+Delete to delete the file. At the bottom of the tray, Orbit shows you how much space you’ve used from your quota. You can toggle between values displayed either in MBs or percentage by clicking on them. Orbit also includes the option to upload Screenshots automatically, which makes it very easy to quickly share something.
Orbit is the perfect little utility to manage files in your App.net File Storage. It stays out of the way, but is very nifty when you do need it. Orbit is a Free app and can be downloaded from here.
Mint Pepper for Panic’s Status Board
After Panic released the Status Board app for iPad yesterday, a lot of users, including me, have been waiting for a compatible Mint plugin that will let them view their Mint stats in Status Board.
Today, Maxime Valette, the creator of URI.LV has now released a Pepper for Mint that lets you add graphs for hourly, daily, weekly and monthly stats from your Mint installation to Status Board. He was kind enough to let me test it on my site and was quick to squash a few bugs. The installation of the pepper is simple and it even readily gives you clickable panicboard:// links that’ll automatically install the graph in your Status Board app.
You can download the Mint Pepper for Status Board using this link. Maxime has also open-sourced it on GitHub, so all you developers can get cracking if you want to customize it.
The Noble Houses of the Internet
I came across these Game of Thrones styled banners for the noble houses of the Internet last week. So brilliantly done.
“We Do Not Source”
How Google Managed to Up its Ante In India
Aatif Sumar, writing on UnleashThePhones, lists down 10 steps that Google has been strategically taking over the last 6 months to step up its game in India. If you look at all these as an Indian consumer, you’ll realize how much of a difference they actually make. He also makes a very good point:
Until Google has Operator Billing, all their efforts of making money from customers in India are in vain, since a vast majority of Indians do not have easy access to Credit Cards, or do not trust their Credit Card details being on the internet somewhere. In fact, most people don’t even have bank accounts in India. Using Debit Cards on the Play Store is hit and miss. Operator Billing is the perfect fit in such a market since all mobile users trust their Service Provider enough to purchase something that gets added to their mobile phone bill, or gets cut from their balance.
Consider the approach Samsung has been taking in India — fill the market up with phones for every price slab, offer different combinations of features and introduce their special “Duos” (Dual-SIM) phones. Today, almost every other smartphone you see out there in this country is a Samsung. And then combine this fact with the improvements Google has been bringing to Android lately.
I’m from the Apple “fanboy” club, but I’ll say the Cupertino giant has lost this race before it could even begin.
STAR Becomes IPL’s Associate Sponsor
But STAR’s gain could be pain for rival network Multi Screen Media (MSM), which operates the flagship Sony Entertainment channel, besides SET Max and Sony SIX. Sony competes directly with STAR Plus, which is the market leader in the Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) space.
Associate sponsorship, for which STAR is expected to fork out around Rs 30 crore, would mean the STAR brand would be a prominent feature during telecast of the matches on two of MSM’s channels. STAR will also have a strong on-ground presence, and MSM cannot blur the competitor’s logo.
This is like Google becoming a sponsor on Apple’s App Store and Apple having to display the Android logo all over the place. This is STAR effectively “trolling” Sony.
The Wolverine’s Teaser on Vine
James Mangold, the director of the upcoming move ‘The Wolverine‘ has released this first of a kind “tweaser” on Twitter’s newest video sharing tool, Vine.
Such a brilliant idea.
