WATBlog.com : 10 Essential Apps For iPad

Now that you have bought your dream gadget, the iPad, you must be busy getting used to it. But have you found out the right apps that would make your iPad experience more fruitful?

If not, here is a compendium of ten of the popular iPad apps for your use:

• Early Edition: This app allows you to organize all your news/RSS feeds in a newspaper style, thereby giving you a wonderful news reading experience.

• Netflix: This is a boon for you if you do not have a Netflix account. It allows you to select and watch a movie (in HD quality) in a fraction of seconds. No doubt, it is assumed here that you have a 3G or Wi-fi connection already.

• Flickpad: This photo app allows you to stream the photos that your friends have uploaded on Facebook. Supposed to have gained Flickr’s support, it gives you the liberty to flick through your photos.

• Phototransfer: If you have your iPad and your computer hooked on a same Wi-Fi network, you can easily transfer your photos from the former to the latter, without having to use iTunes or iPhoto.

• Twitterlator: This Twitter app for your iPad gives you a smoother experience, like TweetDeck, while you tweet out to the world.

• Penultimate: This is the ultimate app to help you capture your hand written notes. You can now flaunt your handwriting on your iPad too.

• Things: This Mac only to-do- list creating app has now come for your iPad. You can plan your day judiciously.

• Instapaper: This bookmarking app helps you bookmark a webpage or an article on to the Instapaper’s database ,thereby allowing you to retrieve them as and when you want to read them.

• iBooks: This is Apple’s bookstore, as already seen on the release day, for buying and downloading ebooks of your choice.

• iWork: An office suit for your iPad that will include word processor, spreadsheets etc.

If you have more apps in your knowledge, you can add them up hereunder. Wish you have a wonderful time with your iPad, loaded with one or all of these apps.
WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India

WATBlog.com: Bubble Motion (video interview) Voice Blogging Thats Getting Louder

A new trend, voice blogging, is rapidly patronizing users in India. Bubbly, a service launched in February in India by Bubble Motion, allows users to send voice messages to multiple followers. Imagine an audio version of Twitter. Bubbly is a cell phone service that aims to bring social media to the masses.

Users can follow friends, family, celebrities, religious leaders, and BBC News by typing in the person’s number or access code, then *. They’re notified when there’s an update –- a friend inviting a group of classmates to a bar, a short news update from BBC News, or a message for fans from a Bollywood star.

We interviewed the Founder of Bubble Motion Thomas Clayton in an exclusive WATShow interview below:

Some more details on Bubble Motion’s bubbly service: The voice messages are generally only 30 seconds long. Followers are notified when someone updates a new voice message. Bubble Motion earns money by taking a cut of the airtime used to listen to the message. It’s free to send a message. The major source of revenue then are celebrities where thousands of fans dial in to receive their voice updates. Bubble Motion also hopes to offer video Bubbly messages, where followers can easily dial into watch homemade videos, or even give users the option of including text – making it a true mobile Twitter.

Around 80 celebrities are already using the service and more are joining each week. They have also roped in content owners like BBC, Bloomberg, UTV, and Balaji Telefilms, among others.

Besides India, the company is in the process of launching the service in 6-7 other major countries throughout Asia and expects a similar success...WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India

WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India: Google’s Pac-Man Just Cost the World 4,819,352 Hours of Time

WATBlog covered Google’s addition of Pac-Man to the list of their famous Google moments. After having made the game free for all (and having me play it for over an hour), the verdict is out. As awesome as the game is, it just cost the world 4,819,352 Hours of Time.

RescueTime is a web-based time management tool that keeps track of what you do and for how long when you are on your computer and they did an analysis of the impact Google’s Pac-Man had on the world.

A lot of people, including me, Google stuff that we already know the link of. More often than not, I prefer searching Google to find a webpage as opposed to browsing my own history. RescueTime informs us that an average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views. That’s roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view. They did an analysis based a random sample set of 11,000 people.

A few points from RescueTime’s blog post (check original here) :

* The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on the day Pac-Man was part of the landing page.
* According to Wolfram Alpha, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23.
* That implies that Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
* $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr
* For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time.
* $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

Now, Google gets 610 million visitors a day (Contrast that with Facebook which just managed to clear the 500 million mark (after having done so earlier in April))

If just a doodle could cost the world 4.8 million hours of time, imagine the potential of an ad on the landing page! So far, Google has refrained from advertising anything except Chrome (and Nexus One).

Truly, the data revealed by RescueTime might seem amusing, but it gives insights into the behavior of the typical Google user (which includes almost all the people browsing the net) and what the Internet Giant can do if it decides to flex its muscles. Also, as of now, the famous modification of the Google Logo (called the Google Doodle) inspire interest.

Earlier, Google Doodles were a novelty. Now, there’s a doodle for almost every occasion (with most people being surprised when there isn’t one – there was a major discussion when the Christmas doodle said Happy Holidays). Consider what Google could achieve if the doodles were ads. Of course, Google has maintained a very strict policy of a minimalistic homepage and no ads on the front page, but assume it wasn’t an ad. An indication of goodwill from Google could crash a website!

Now, compare that to Facebook. Today, according to Facebook’s own statistics, users spend an estimated 500 billion minutes on the network every month, which translates to 278 million hours every day. Imagine the potential! Read @
WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India