Reality to Virtualism - why I think it's bad?

I have nothing against technology, in fact I am one among the tech lovers. But I think these days its getting way to much blurring the lines between the real and the virtual world. To analyse what happens when we enter into a virtual world, I started playing the game Yoville and Happy aquarium in Facebook. I wanted to find out why was that so addictive. So, Starting with Yoville first, to explain to people who don't know about it, its like a virtual game that you play through your Facebook account and you get to make so called 'Friends' and what is far more exciting you have different places like beach,restaurant, coffee place, Hair salon's and what not. Don't get way too excited, there are many more things in this . So, Out of curiosity did make an account, but my motive was to find out how it gets addictive in a few days.



First few weeks it was all about making friends, did make some, oh! Just forgot, you even get your own house, I mean you can build houses with lavishing swimming pools, backyard, frontyard, buy and sell things, yard sale, get invited for a house party, have a fashion pagent - like Woah, yes! It's sure addictive, but why? That's when I got the answer Virtual worlds can just gobble up you from the real world. This really makes me think why do people really have to do this? For money? Is it really worth it, is the question that pops up in my mind every time. Once we created this whole new world we call technology, which is now an integral part in every aspect.

Another thing I noticed with my little investigation is that, people were forgetting the fact that they are in a virtual world, talking about real life scenario's, it was like a mirage, which they never noticed. In my knowledge it's high time people move away a little bit from the technology in certain circumstances like these. The worst part you buy coins with your own hard earned money, and it's sad that people do it too with heights of addiction. 

Why I like Rebecca Black?

It's Friday,Friday which was an overnight sensation and one of the highest disliked videos of YouTube which accounts to about 80% of the total ratings in YouTube was sung by Rebecca Black. Receiving a lot of hate comments even after 4 whole years of broadcasting that on YouTube, this teen is still strong. Never discouraged by these, and hitting the instant high pedestal on TV shows she is now one of the most popular american singers, be it love or hate. Of course as of date this song has earned $20,000 dollars as of now, estimated by Forbes and has entered Billboard Hot 100 songs. 


Her next shot was 'My Moment' released on the same year. This song even though it received a lot of hate and a bit of love made things flip over. Her confidence after been dealing with a lot of hate is adorable. For any teen that would have been a severe nightmare when you wake up everyday to hate and you choose to pursue your dreams instead. Parodies and Jokes all over YouTube has never deterred her. Why bother when its all for the good?! 

Youtube has been a path for many of young teens to explore out there talents and also be recognized by it. Many singers have been given a chance to do big live events based on their YouTube careers. Never we can downgrade the efforts of anyone who works hard to bring out what's efficient in them. One of my favorite quotes recently have been to truly believe in the fact that, every expert was once a teenager. 

Best android apps for an organized lifestyle

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Of the 1000 emails of self promotion by various stuff that we have subscribed to, we are bound to miss some of the important emails and have suffered the consequences.We all would been there someday or the other. Do you have a problem with switching back and forth from your official mail to personal mail or from yahoo to gmail or even had two gmail accounts which you were never able to be logged in at the same time. K-@ mail, this app is an absolute life saver at such situations. 
Design and usability: This app has one of the simple design that you would have imagined with great user experience and usability. It is very easy to switch between different email accounts be it yahoo, gmail or Hotmail which also has a automatic setup facility. The other function that you might like are the colored markers for mails between different accounts which makes it easy to filter official mails, so you don't miss them. The other facility that makes it more usable is the immediate notifications from all your accounts, which at times even a dedicated Gmail app misses. There are facilities to view a combined inbox, which makes things easy at the end of the day to be able to organize and plan for the next day. Its very quick and responsive with search results. Its easy to mark some mails that you receive along the day to be important and read it later, so you never miss them by any chance.

Drawbacks: The only thing is that it takes some time to retrieve some emails. 



You want most of the data you store to be accessible anytime, anywhere. Aspiring to be a Journalist and being designing my hobby, most of the time I am out there having to organize and write down things, upload, and use them anywhere I want to to. Mega is a secure cloud storage service that gives you 50GB for free.

Design and Usability: This app is really handy at many times. You can upload things very easily from your phone and use it later. 




Push bullet is one of the best apps that I have been using for a long time now. Basically the major advantage of this app is that it is lightning fast when it transfers files, pictures, links, bookmarks from your PC to mobile and vice versa. Never miss another phone call or text message again while using your computer! Pushbullet automatically shows you all of your phone's notifications right on your computer. This means you can see who's calling or read text messages even if your phone is on silent or in another room. 

It is a simple notepad app that has more uses than you think it would have. Its very quick and responsive. So, you can add notes easily, add checklists which is a lifesaver at many times. The colornote widget is another thing that really helps because you can place it on screen, especially so that you don't forget. The other useful feature that this app possess is the automatic save feature. When you are in a hurry to note things, you write them down and close it, and now you have not lost it. This makes me happy. You can color coordinate and organize. 

Real time translated conversations with Skype Translator

Skype who roll on with the tagline 'We keep people together, wherever they are' are now in the process of creating real time translated conversations to break the language barrier across different countries and various conversations. This idea was initiated over an year ago with many attempts by the Microsoft research team to make this a success story.Chris Wendt, program manager of the Machine Translation team says “We felt speech translation was a very natural evolution of the text-translation work we’ve been doing,” .This technology would help people from various parts of the world to successfully communicate with others thus breaking the language barrier that might hold them back.

The problems that are faced in creating a technology that translates real time conversations as noted is the 'disfluecy', where there are a lot of pauses and unusual utterances while talking and also use of the social media way of talking or the internet slang. We can understand how extremely difficult it will be  to recognize and translate all possible accents and languages, this initiative by Skype is highly appreciable and would find high level of usage in both professional and personal life.

Once these are fixed, the skype translator is scheduled to be made available for windows 8 beta app by the end of this year (2014).