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. 

K-@ mail:

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. 

Mega cloud storage: 

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. 

Pushbullet:

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. 

Color Note:

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. 

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). 

Source: The official Microsoft Blog

For more information about this, follow this link.

"This could change the way we view and interact with art"

Not so long ago I did a research on how people perceive virtual communication, to be precise concentrating on what impact that the youtube vlogs have on their audience, whether the clip culture pretends to be real when it is not really the whole picture about a person's life. My findings from that research was the fans of the famous youtubers who I might call here as the 'Youtube celebrities' knew that they were subjected to a hyper real or environment but most of the time the content produced tends to blur the lines between reality and hyperreality. 

To explain it with an example that I have quoted in my research where I concentrated on Bethany Mota's vlogs, who is a Youtube teen who produces content on makeup and some parts of her life that she likes to share with the people around the world. Talking about both the ends, starting with the Youtuber's end, most of the vlogs are filmed in their bedroom,car, or even on a picnic. What this exactly does is create an artificial environment which undergoes a lot of editing, lighting and we see just the best bits, which is critical and is not easy to comprehend the difference between what is produced and what happens in reality. 

To be fair to the Youtubers part who are similar to any other individuals who deserve privacy and also the same treatment everyone needs. The exact problem arises when they produce a content that looks like it is going to showcase most of there life when we leave out the other part. So, the audience of these celebrities are trying to take more advantage/ which naturally happens when we tend to consider someone very close to us, when we really cross the border and are not able to take in any other flaw about them even if the YouTubers themselves tend to agree. (Of course, to Err is human). The strong cult that they have grown over years make it difficult for them when there happens a sudden change in there life which they don't want to take in as a part of the youtubers life. 

But we cannot forgot, what they do is also a business and they can very well take advantage of their audience and play a part of manipulating there mind. It's the human nature that when I strongly believe in a person whatever they tell to me is going to be true and also If they recommend me something, then my mind insists me to go out and buy them if it is a product or use them if it is a service. This is none less than a celebrity endorsement that we see on TV. There is more sense of endorsed content when we watch it on the television, because it definitely strikes our mind that happens on TV is edited. 

When we see the problem of blurred lines between the content that doesn't seem like a content but looks like an interactive venture (hyper realism). Ofcourse, I truly support YouTube on providing a platform for a lot of people in connecting the world which was not made possible before Youtube. There are many many advantages of youtube as it helps in crowdfunding, connecting the two worlds, a great platform for exhibiting the new talent and projecting them, some errors like this can be avoided by just changing the perspective and the way the content is perceived by both the producers of content and also the audiences/fans of the content.

Here is a link to the research report on how people perceive virtual communication and the impact of vlogs on the audience.

Drizzly mornings, hot coffee with still the steam rushing out of the mug, sitting by the window, inhaling the fresh air with the mild tinge of mud breezing in through my window, listening to The Fault in Our Stars from which every sentence lingers in your mind with the spatter of the rain on my sunshade can be quoted as a blissful morning. At last its time to relax after all the night time studies, pulling through an all nighter (Which I wouldn't recommend! seriously my eyes hurt even now! lol, just kidding), delusional sleeps, exams are finally over. I went to a lot of places as soon as my holidays started.

This time in my holidays I was a little confused on what was I doing all my life, and what I really want and wish to do. This confusion broke out as I try to convince myself what I was dealing with was the right way. But, Convince is the key there, I wish to do what my heart wants to do and I live by that. So, this time convincing it to do something was never a choice for me. What I wanted to do this time in my holidays was to go out and feel the nature. It had different choices, as I was going with my family. The last call was Wayanad and Coorg. Coorg is a kind of place that one will fall in love with at first sight. It is a bliss to be at the top of Talakavery which is one of the remarkable places, and to be there for the second time without the rush is totally a magic. All you can see from the top is the mountain ranges and clouds which give you chills midst the really cold climate that one can die for. (And from chennai though, you can understand! :p) 

So, why I felt the need to explain about my trip here is that, I recently checked out the video that literally answered all my querries on what I was feeling. Liked the way that my mind kindoff alerted me to do the right thing at the right time.

 





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