Latest Technology Reviews | Mobile | Laptop

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Daughter finds dead mother on Google Maps 18 months after she died

Highlights
- The daughter decided to Google Earth her mother's home just to see how it looked.
- Her mother had passed away a couple of years back in 2015 and the house is sold to someone else.
- She found her mother standing at the driveway watering plants, something she reportedly always did

How would you feel if you suddenly spot your loved one 18 months after he or she has died. This is exactly what shocked a woman who moved from the UK to the US and began missing home. Denise Underhill moved from Tamworth that is near Birmingham to Florida and had an urge to check on her old home. However, little did she know that it would leave her shocked.

According to Tamworth Herald (via TheSun), the daughter decided to Google Earth her mother's home just to see how it looked. Her mother had passed away a couple of years back in 2015 and the property has been sold to someone else.

Image: Google

Interestingly, her mother had been captured in the Google Street View. She stood at the driveway watering plants, something she reportedly always did. The photograph taken showed her mother watering plants with a blue can.

While Underhill said that 'it made her day', but it is astounding that you never know what photos are being taken by Google. This could also have a flip side. Google Earth images have caused quite a stir in the past too. If you remember, a man named Jose Barrera had asked Google Maps to remove the image that showed his murdered teenager.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Movavi Video Converter Review

It can be extremely frustrating to encounter a video that you can’t seem to play – no matter what you try. On PCs, you can sometimes download the necessary codecs or use specialised media players to get around incompatible video formats but on some other devices such as set-top boxes, DVD players, or even mobile devices that may not be an option.

The only surefire way to be certain that you can play incompatible videos is if you’re able to convert them to a compatible format instead. For that, you’ll need what is commonly known as a video converter – and there is none that is easier to use or more effective than Movavi Video Converter.

Intuitive and Straightforward

Unlike other converters that are overly complicated and may have you running in circles trying to figure out how they work, Movavi Video Converter is designed to be as intuitive as possible.

All you need to do to convert MP4 to WMV, AVI to MOV or any other formats is add the video, choose a format, and click the ‘Convert’ button to start the conversion.

Due to its simple and clean user interface, you should have no problem figuring out how to do any of that. Indeed Movavi Video Converter makes it easier still and will let you drag and drop video files into the main window to add them, or use the hundreds of built-in presets that are available to automatically set the optimal video format and settings for a particular device or platform.

All in all, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than that, and even if you have little or no knowledge of video formats you should be able to quickly use Movavi Video Converter to convert your videos and make them compatible.

Additional Features

Although its primary use may be as a video converter, there is a lot more Movavi Video Converter is actually capable of. As you explore its features, you’ll find that you can:

Convert audio and image files between formats.
Create animated GIFs out of video clips.
Extract audio tracks from videos and save them as audio files.
Compress videos to reduce their file size.
Grab screenshots from videos.
Improve the quality of videos and fix common issues such as shaky or blurry footage.
Cut and join video segments to trim out unwanted parts or merge clips together.
Crop or rotate the frame and orientation.
Adjust the audio levels, eliminate noise and normalise the sound.
Insert customizable text fields to create unique captions, titles or watermarks.

Simply put Movavi Video Converter is designed so that you can prepare your videos in any way that is necessary – and then some. In short, if you want to save highlights from a video, extract the soundtrack, or even just improve how it looks – you will have all the features that you need to do just that. At the end of the day its versatility is what makes it all the more appealing, and with its intuitive design, it won’t be long before you can take advantage of that fully.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Pay Per Click (PPC): Growth tips

Managing the growth of PPC

Creating Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns is not as difficult as managing them. You have to manage the campaigns regularly in order to ensure their effectiveness on a long-term basis. Most successful marketers do not hesitate to take risks and try out new things in this direction. Regular account activity is a must for account success. You need to add relevant keywords, negative keywords, split Ad groups and review costly keywords to make your PPC campaign a running success.

However, if you find yourself stuck midway in the PPC traffic, here are PPC management tips that will help you to get going.

Indicators of growth

Rise in Click-through rates:

According to a recent research conducted by WordStream based on a sample of 2367 AdWorld clients, it became clear that the click-through rates segmented by the industry vary between 1.35% to 3.4%. The average rate comes to 1.91% according to this data. If your score lies near it, it indicates that your campaign is doing well and there is scope for expansion.

A higher click-through score also points out that you have a high-quality score and that you are paying less per click. The money so saved can be put back into the campaign.

Improvement in quality scores

Google rates you on a scale of 1-10 depending upon how much it likes your ad. The more you score on this scale, the more the cost-per-click goes down and your impression share increases.

If your score is consistently higher than 5, it means that your campaign is doing well. You can continue with replication of your campaigns and take it further.

Indicators of stagnation

If your campaign fails to produce the desired result, there may be several reasons for it like:

· The ads are being pushed on wrong days or at the wrong time.

· The target audience is being missed.

· Both the display networks and the search engines are not being leveraged effectively.

· The ads are garbage.

· The landing pages are not refined.

How to keep the momentum of the PPC campaign intact?

Once your existing campaigns start offering a good Return on Investment, there are two ways to keep it on the growth trajectory:

1. Rolling out of new Ad campaigns

2. Improvement in existing campaigns

Rolling out new Ad campaigns seems to be an obvious answer if you are growing well. You can continue to follow your existing SEO strategy and add new keywords if need be.

But it must be remembered that introducing new Ad campaigns continually may not be the answer to solve all your reach problems. Remarketing can do the job as well. Remarketing incurs lesser cost than the standard PPC and at the same time targets the people who are already your visitors.

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is an important feature of AdWorld that allows you to customise ads for visitors who are regular at your site. This feature can be used to tailor your ads according to their searches.

RLSA campaigns are known to come with 50% lower cost-per-click and it offers twice the click-through rate. In the same way, the Facebook Ad platform can be used to gather visitor information by installing a tracking pixel on your website.

Top-level keywords and long tail keywords help in attracting a highly specific segment of the audience when you are working with search and display ads in Google. At least 50% of your search optimisation needs to consist on these keywords. Searchers who make use of these keywords are likely to convert into customers as opposed to those who use general and shorter keywords.

Facebook allows you to be even more specific. You can target the audience based on geographical location, demographics, buying habits, interests and employment type.

In short, the hope of grabbing all the traffic is not only in rolling out new ads as it may become difficult to keep track of all your ads. Instead, it makes sense to improve already well-performing ads to stay visible to customers who are loyal to your brand.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

SEO: How to get it right

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not as tough as it sounds. With the World Wide Web becoming denser by the day, it makes sense to have some knowledge about SEO in order to attract more and more visitors to your website.

The main motive of SEO is to enable you to reach out to people who are looking for you. It thus becomes important to match what people are trying to find with the content on your website.

Well researched keywords are the key to attracting visitors who are most likely to turn into customers.

LD SEO Sydney simplifies this process for you.

Finding the right keywords:

- Look out for keywords that are relevant to the content posted on your website.

- Keywords should have a high search volume. It means that more and more people should be searching for them.

- There should be low competition for the keywords as smaller competition will ensure that your website is visible higher in the ranking order.

- Also, one must remember that less popular keywords should make up 80% of your traffic. Incorporate a balance between most popular keywords and less popular ones.

Content Crafting

The next step in the SEO process, after the keywords have been selected, is the formation of content. Search engines have bots that crawl your website to find out the nature of the content. Optimizing the content for certain keywords will influence the bots and give your pages high rankings. It is also important to describe all the images, videos and audio clips so that the bots are able to read them.

The quality of the content should not be made to suffer just to incorporate the keywords. The persuasiveness of the content should remain intact and the keywords should not look forced.

Here are some other things to remember regarding the content:

- Content should have a catchy title that makes a good first impression.

- Keywords should be relevant.

- Choose links that are related to the content on your website.

- Content should be unique, error-free and engaging.

- It also needs to be regularly updated.

Code Optimization

The bots are programmed not just to read the content but also the code of the website. Therefore it is essential to optimise the eight different sections of the code as well. These codes include:

Title Tags

One should make sure that the keywords are placed in the title. Let us consider an example:

<Title> Affordable website design in Melbourne, Australia from Creative Web Designers<title>

The inclusion of the website name in the title in this example emphasises what the website is all about. People are most likely to search for “website design in Melbourne, Australia” or its variations. Each page should also have a unique title tag.

Meta Tags

The Meta tag informs gives the information about the nature of the website to the searchers. This is mentioned just below the website name and link when the website appears on the search pages.

The decision of the people to open the link depends on this tag greatly. The Meta tag should be short and crisp and should include the keywords for maximum impact. It would be great if each page has a unique Meta tag.

Headings

The headings on webpages are in the order H1, H2, H3 and so on and H1 is the main heading that occurs one on each page. Make sure that the heading are filled with keywords relevant to the content on the pages.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps can be referred to as the road maps for search engines that offer direction to the bots to all pages of your portal. You can create two types of sitemaps – HTML and XML. While the XML sitemaps are specifically coded for reading by search engines, the HTML sitemaps are very easy to read for the people too. The visitors can be given an overview of everywhere they go using these.

Domain Name

The name of your website or the domain name is the address where the users access your website from. If a majority of your traffic comes from search engines then it makes sense to name your website as per its nature. Like for examples domain name like buygold.com will automatically rank higher for people searching to buy gold.

URL structure, Alt Tags and Links

Avoid messy and long URLs so that it is easier for the bots to crawl to your website. Do not use extraneous characters (&, %, #, =,*) and avoid using underscores.

Alt tags need to be added to each image for its brief description. Match the name of the image to the atl tag.

Be careful of what links you use on your pages and which pages host your link. Beware of spammy sites and avoid reciprocal links.

Keeping these little things in mind will surely help to promote your website in the best possible way.

Together, technology and teachers can revamp schools

How the science of learning can get the best out of edtech

IN 1953 B.F. Skinner visited his daughter’s maths class. The Harvard psychologist found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. A few days later he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. By the mid-1960s similar gizmos were being flogged by door-to-door salesmen. Within a few years, though, enthusiasm for them had fizzled out.

Since then education technology (edtech) has repeated the cycle of hype and flop, even as computers have reshaped almost every other part of life. One reason is the conservatism of teachers and their unions. But another is that the brain-stretching potential of edtech has remained unproven.

Today, however, Skinner’s heirs are forcing the sceptics to think again. Backed by billionaire techies such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, schools around the world are using new software to “personalise” learning. This could help hundreds of millions of children stuck in dismal classes—but only if edtech boosters can resist the temptation to revive harmful ideas about how children learn. To succeed, edtech must be at the service of teaching, not the other way around.

Pencils down

The conventional model of schooling emerged in Prussia in the 18th century. Alternatives have so far failed to teach as many children as efficiently. Classrooms, hierarchical year-groups, standardised curriculums and fixed timetables are still the norm for most of the world’s nearly 1.5bn schoolchildren.

Too many do not reach their potential. In poor countries only a quarter of secondary schoolchildren acquire at least a basic knowledge of maths, reading and science. Even in the mostly rich countries of the OECD about 30% of teenagers fail to reach proficiency in at least one of these subjects.

That share has remained almost unchanged over the past 15 years, during which billions have been spent on IT in schools. By 2012 there was one computer for every two pupils in several rich countries. Australia had more computers than pupils. Handled poorly, devices can distract. A Portuguese study from 2010 found that schools with slow broadband and a ban on sites such as YouTube had better results than high-tech ones.

What matters is how edtech is used. One way it can help is through bespoke instruction. Ever since Philip II of Macedon hired Aristotle to prepare his son Alexander for Greatness, rich parents have paid for tutors. Reformers from São Paulo to Stockholm think that edtech can put individual attention within reach of all pupils. American schools are embracing the model most readily. A third of pupils are in a school district that has pledged to introduce “personalised, digital learning”. The methods of groups like Summit Public Schools, whose software was written for nothing by Facebook engineers, are being copied by hundreds of schools.

In India, where about half of children leave primary school unable to read a simple text, the curriculum goes over many pupils’ heads. “Adaptive” software such as Mindspark can work out what a child knows and pose questions accordingly. A recent paper found that Indian children using Mindspark after school made some of the largest gains in maths and reading of any education study in poor countries.

The other way edtech can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California schools are using software to overhaul the conventional model. Instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and giving them insight on their pupils. Saved teachers’ time is allocated to other tasks, such as fostering pupils’ social skills or one-on-one tuition. A study in 2015 suggested that children in early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.

Pay attention at the back

Such innovation is welcome. But making the best of edtech means getting several things right. First, “personalised learning” must follow the evidence on how children learn. It must not be an excuse to revive pseudoscientific ideas such as “learning styles”: the theory that each child has a particular way of taking in information. Such nonsense leads to schemes like Brain Gym, an “educational kinesiology” programme once backed by the British government, which claimed that some pupils should stretch, bend and emit an “energy yawn” while doing their sums.

A less consequential falsehood is that technology means children do not need to learn facts or learn from a teacher—instead they can just use Google. Some educationalists go further, arguing that facts get in the way of skills such as creativity and critical thinking. The opposite is true. A memory crammed with knowledge enables these talents. William Shakespeare was drilled in Latin phrases and grammatical rules and yet he penned a few decent plays. In 2015 a vast study of 1,200 education meta-analyses found that, of the 20 most effective ways of boosting learning, nearly all relied on the craft of a teacher.

The second imperative is to make sure that edtech narrows, rather than widens, inequalities in education. Here there are grounds for optimism. Some of the pioneering schools are private ones in Silicon Valley. But many more are run by charter-school groups teaching mostly poor pupils, such as Rocketship and Achievement First—or Summit, where 99% of graduating pupils go on to university and laggards make the most progress relative to their peers in normal classes. A similar pattern can be observed outside America. In studies of edtech in India by J-PAL, a research group, the biggest beneficiaries are children using software to receive remedial education.

Third, the potential for edtech will be realised only if teachers embrace it. They are right to ask for evidence that products work. But scepticism should not turn into Luddism. A good model is São Paulo, where teachers have welcomed Geekie, an adaptive-software company, into public schools.

In 1984 Skinner called opposition to technology the “shame” of education. Given what edtech promises today, closed-mindedness has no place in the classroom.

The Next Sexual Revolution Is Going to be All About Technology

Sex is one of the most powerful, fundamental human drives. It’s caused wars, and built and destroyed kingdoms. It occupies a significant percentage of most people’s thoughts. As such, it’s worth a conversation about how exponential technologies will change our relationship with sex.

DATING IN THE INTERNET AGE

Dating in past generations was local and linear. You had access to a small number of potential mates based on where you lived, where you went to school and your social status. In the 1960s, over 50% of marriages globally, and 95% of marriages in India, were arranged. Today that number has dropped to less than 15% (globally). In 1960, the median age at first marriage for the bride was 20 and the groom was 23 years old. Today, the median age is closer to 29 for women and 30 for men. A cultural shift is happening, and it’s changing the game. Dating has gone digital. As such, it has gone from local and linear to global and exponential. Today, 40 million Americans use online dating services (that’s about 40% of the single population in the U.S.), driving the creation of a $2.4 billion online dating industry.

These services transcend geography and social strata. People are matched from around the world. Between 1995 and 2005, there was exponential growth among heterosexual couples meeting online. (See the green line in the chart below.)

For same-sex couples, the online dating trend has been even more dramatic, with more than 60% of same-sex couples meeting online in 2008 and 2009 (see the green line in the chart above).

The implications of this are staggering. Besides moving the marriage age back, there are a number of sociological effects such as decision fatigue, gamification of dating, and the commoditization of people that will start to have population-level effects as mating behaviors change. And this is just the beginning.

DATING & EXPONENTIAL TECH

In the very near future, we will see machine learning / artificial intelligence-based matchmakers that will find the perfect match for you based upon everything from your genomics to your psychographics. Once you’re on a date, your augmented reality glasses will give you real-time dating info, calling up any info you want to know, as you need to know it. Perhaps you want to understand how she/he is feeling about you, and your AR camera is watching her pupillary dilation and capillary flushing. Like all technology, these applications are double-edged swords. My hope is that this tech actually increases the number of successful, meaningful relationships in the world and, in turn, has a net positive impact. But while dating is one side of the coin, sex is another — and the implications of exponential technology on sex can be shocking.

SEX & EXPONENTIAL TECH

Today, sex has been digitized; as such, it has been dematerialized, demonetized and democratized. Sex, in the form of pornography, is free, available to anyone with an internet connection and pervasive across many platforms. In 2015, just one pornography website reported that their users watched over 4.3 billion hours of porn (87 billion videos) that year. The proliferation of internet connectivity, online video players and streaming, mobile phones, and advertisement delivery networks have propelled pornography into a $97 billion industry. This is causing a number of negative social phenomena. More than half of boys and nearly a third of girls see their first pornographic images before they turn 13. In a survey of hundreds of college students, 93% of boys and 62% of girls said they were exposed to pornography before they turned 18. “Pornography is influencing everything from how teens language and frame sexuality to how and why they pierce certain body parts to what they expect to give and receive in intimate relationships,” says Jill Manning, Ph.D, Witherspoon Institute.

In Japan, a growing population of men report that they *prefer* having “virtual girlfriends” over real ones (i.e. they believe they are “dating” virtual avatars that they largely control). 45% of Japanese single women, and 25 % of Japanese single men aged 16 to 24 claim they aren’t even interested in sexual contact. Given these trends, unless something happens to boost Japan’s birth rate, its population will shrink by a third between now and 2060. In other words, there is serious concern of significant UNDERpopulation. But again, this is only the beginning — as virtual reality (VR) becomes more widespread, one major application will inevitably be VR porn. It will be much more intense, vivid, and addictive — and as AI comes online, I believe there will be a proliferation in AI-powered avatar and robotic relationships, similar to those characters depicted in the movies Her and Ex Machina.

IMPLICATIONS

VR porn promises to offer a virtual world filled with more sex, better sex, endless sex, and new varieties of sex. The dark secret, however, is that the further a user goes into that fantasy world, the more likely their reality is to become just the opposite. Many psychologists believe that VR porn may numb us to sexual desire and pleasure in the real world, leading to less and less satisfying sex. For many, VR (as well as other exponential technologies such as robotics, sensors and A.I.) will act as a complete replacement for intimacy and human relationships, as it is more easily accessible, cheaper, on-demand, and, well, controllable. As the father of two five-year-old boys, this is really concerning to me. That said, are there upsides too? Perhaps a bit of intimacy (if even technological) for those who are infirmed, aged, crippled and thereby alone. We shall see. One thing is for sure: as with every technology in history, from the printing press to VHS and the internet, pornography will be on the front line funding the advance of technology.

How Smashbox is using eye-tracking technology to increase sales

Eye-tracking technology is finally making its way to the beauty space, thanks to a new partnership between Smashbox and the industry’s favorite augmented reality provider, ModiFace.

As an exclusive partner of ModiFace’s popular iOS and Android app MakeUp (which allows customers to virtually try on thousands of different makeup products and has nearly 50 million downloads), Smashbox was the first brand on the company’s roster to test out the technology, which allows them to track what a user is most interested in based on his or her eye movements. Based on this information, the brand can then better tailor their marketing and drivers to purchase — a key goal of the app, which at this point, only allows users to shop the Smashbox line.

For example, a user might stare at one shade of eyeshadow for awhile, without actually touching it. Sensing potential interest, Smashbox can then prompt the user to buy the product or explore it further (rather than prompting them to buy every product, all the time).

Lest anyone has privacy concerns, customers are first prompted to give the app camera access for face and eye tracking, and makeup rendering before it loads.

Although Smashbox could not provide sales figures, it revealed the technology has resulted in a 27 percent increase in overall conversions since it began using it two months ago.

A study Smashbox commissioned to analyze 8,819 of its mobile app users since the launch showed a similar tend: The user pool was divided into two groups, one with a permanent call to purchase button placed at the top of the screen, and another which only saw the call to purchase button if they read the name of a product and/or tried it on. The conversion rate increased from 6.2 percent for the former, sans eye-tracking, to 7.9 percent for the group with the eye gaze–driven purchase buttons.

“Eye tracking provides a deeper level of insight into what users are thinking about by measuring what they are looking at,” said Parham Aarabi, the founder and CEO of ModiFace. Until now, the technology had only been used by the company to help simulate colored contact lenses over users’ eyes. Now, its main goal is to help brands boost their analytics, especially as they relate to what people are paying attention to most online and on mobile, and providing tailored recommendations based on that information.

Smashbox has seen more sales conversions since using eye-tracking technology.

Indeed, the app has helped Smashbox gauge which of its products are being focused on most, including the top-performing Always On Liquid Lipstick (which represented 49 percent of its users’ overall focus) and, the second most popular, Cover Shot Eye Palettes (accounting for 12 percent).

Isn’t it possible that a mere glance could be mistaken for product interest? Smashbox has accounted for that, according to Aarabi. “We can detect this difference [between the two], based on how much time users spend looking at a specific item and the specific directionality of their gaze location,” he said, citing the example of a user gazing at the name of a product while moving from left to right, indicating they’re actually reading it.

Jason Bhargava, an investor in the AR/VR space, said that we can expect eye tracking to be huge for brands across the board in the coming years, a fact backed up by Facebook‘s and Google’s recent acquisitions in the space. “It will be revolutionary to advertising, where one of the biggest problems in the market today is viewability,” he said. “Brands will be able to choose to only pay for ads that the user actually looks at.” What’s more, it will allow for further e-commerce personalization (“recommendations based on views”) and improved analytics for product designers (highlighting, for example, which elements of an outfit or makeup kit catch a user’s attention most).

ModiFace, for its part, hopes to build out this technology so that it can prompt product promotions that are more complex than the basic call to purchase being used now. They also foresee a time when users will be able to virtually try on the products simply by looking at them, ridding users of the usual swipe-based interactions. “It will definitely improve that UI navigation,” agreed Bhargava.

Presumably, the 69 other brands the company partners with, including L’Oréal and Sephora, will want a piece of this pie. But in the meantime, ModiFace will be working strictly with Smashbox to promote the technology at special events held by Decoded Fashion and WWD, the details of which the company could not reveal.

Best 4G Phones under Rs 5,000 in India (2017)

Which is the best phone under 5000?

We have below the list of the best 4G phones under Rs 5,000 for this month in India. These include the best Android handsets from reputable manufacturers in this budget. Some of these handsets are decently equipped with a good processor, RAM and display. We’ve only covered handsets with a minumum HD display resolution. No point going for 3G phones anymore.