Gmail Users No Longer Need To Download Attachments, As Google Drive Gets Baked Into The Inbox

Google is releasing yet another update to Gmail today, which sees deeper Google Drive integration coming to the company’s email platform. Now users will be able to skip the whole process involved with downloading email attachments, and instead view and save their files directly to Google Drive without leaving their inbox.

This change comes only a day after Google rolled out new “Quick Actions” buttons, which allow for easier interactions with email messages, with just a click. Similarly, the Google Drive integrations are also designed to speed up users’ interactions with email content, in this case, attached files.

As the feature rolls out, Gmail users will begin to see new thumbnail previews for files at the bottom of their email messages, including both photos and videos, as well as office documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets.

Clicking on one of the file previews will then display the item in a full-screen image format. From here, you can basically interact with the file itself right from your Gmail inbox, with no need to first download then launch the file using desktop software.

However, if you do need to save the item for later viewing, you just click on the Google Drive button that appears when you hover over the preview. From the window that appears, you can click to save the file to your Drive, even choosing the folder where the item should be stored.

If you still need to go the old-school “download” route, don’t fear an arrow button will allow you to continue to do things in the traditional way.

This move not only supports interactivity between Google’s various online services, which could push more users to adopt Drive over competing services like Dropbox or Box, for example, but it also helps with Google’s larger “cloud” agenda. With Chrome OS, the company’s web browser-based operating system, Google forgoes the idea of “desktop software” altogether.

It’s also another effort to make the online software feel more like mobile, and vice versa. When you’re viewing email attachments on mobile, there are already fewer steps involved.

It’s worth also pointing out that the addition comes shortly after an email startup for salespeople, Yesware, bought a San Francisco-based company called Attachments.me, which was also working to better connect email attachments with the cloud.

Even if the latter company had not hit a roadblock in its path to growth, this new feature in Gmail could have presented a serious challenge for such a service to overcome.

Google says the update is available initially to desktop Gmail users, and will be rolling out over the next the week. The company notes it now has 120 million active users for Google Drive – a number Google had not yet released until now.

This puts the service close to and maybe above others also operating in the same space.  Dropbox has 175 million registered (not active) user accounts, Apple’s iCloud has 325 million, SkyDrive has over 250 million, and Box trails with over 20 million accounts.

For Third-Party Developers

In addition to support for standard attachments, the Google Drive SDK will also now allow third-party developers to better integrate their apps with Google Drive, and let users interact with apps and files in Gmail.

Gmail users will be able to choose which app to open their file attachments with from the new file preview feature in Gmail, which will show both suggested and connected apps. And if users don’t see the app they want, a “connect more apps” option will let them pick a new, compatible app again, right from the inbox.

More details on this feature are here on the Google Developers blog.

Facebook Messenger Fights Chat Competitors By Bringing ‘Contact Via Phone Number’ To All

Facebook is continuing its assault on SMS and competitors like WeChat and Line today by expanding its “contact via phone number” feature to Messenger for iOS. The option launched on Android to a select set of testers at the end of October, and is being pushed to all Androiders as well as all iOS users. The update is rolling out now and also brings a cleaner layout, and faster start-up and navigation.

The intent is clear. As I detailed last month, Facebook doesn’t want you to have to switch to SMS to contact someone who you have the phone number of but aren’t friends with. It’s watched as startup messaging apps like WeChat and KakaoTalk that rely on phone numbers have risen to huge user counts. Today’s move could box them out, if it’s not too late.

WeChat is thought to have over 200M users, while its Chinese parent company Tencent’s desktop messaging service QQ is said to over 800 million active users. WhatsApp is thought to have somewhere between 250 million and 350 million users, while KakaoTalk is said to have over 90 million.

Then there’s sticker-messaging app Line, and Snapchat, which sees about as many daily photo uploads and which the Wall Street Journal today said refused a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook.

In case you thought Facebook wasn’t concerned with these competitors, just look at the iOS screenshots in the App Store. Each tackles a specific foe. “Text the people you care about, for free” SMS. “Send photos privately” Snapchat. “Say it better with stickers” Line. “Reach them instantly” WeChat and WhatsApp. “Not just for Facebook friends” SMS, again.

One reason the Asian messaging startups may be gaining ground is they’re getting users addicted to games. Several have their own internal gaming platforms that third-parties build titles for.

Meanwhile, Facebook is pursuing a “social layer” strategy in mobile gaming, hoping to provide login and sharing options to native games rather than running the platform itself. That might not be forceful enough to keep users’ eyes glued while they wait for replies from friends.

Overall, this degree of fragmentation in the messaging market is dangerous for Facebook because it thrives on having all your friends in one place. Messaging generates a ton of user engagment and return visits, plus also helps companies build an accurate social graph of who you talk to most. That’s important data Facebook needs to refine its News Feed relevancy algorithm and ad targeting.

The option to contact someone via phone number within Messenger might dissuade people from using these other apps. It could be especially helpful to budget-minded folks who don’t want to rack up SMS costs. International travelers could meanwhile benefit from avoiding SMS roaming charges.

At this point, it doesn’t look like Facebook will be able to beat all these messaging competitors. At best it can hope to stunt their growth and hold onto its existing users.

Facebook Launches Open Academy To Give Kids College Credit For Open Source Contributions

A perfect GPA isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Advancing an open source project. To help computer science students prepare for jobs (and boost its own recruiting efforts) Facebook today publicly launched Open Academy.

The partnership with premier CS universities sets up a special class where students get college credit for contributing to open source projects.

After a successful pilot at Stanford last year, Open Academy is expanding to a total of 22 universities.

Open Academy students get paired with mentors and an open source project to which they’ll add code. At the start of the semester, all the mentors and students come to Facebook’s Menlo Park HQ for an intensive kick-off weekend.

Then they work in virtual teams from their schools. Mentors teach students about open source, review students’ code and may give lectures too. The winter 2014 session will begin in February.

Through the pilot and ‘private beta’ with other universities including Waterloo and MIT, students worked on MongoDB, Mozilla Open Badge, Ruby On Rails and more Open Source projects. The expansion brings the program to schools including UPenn, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon.

The program could turn kids from theoretical students working on canned classroom coding challenges into real-world engineers building systems people actually use.

“Software development as a profession has many features that are distinct from computer science as an academic subject,” Facebook explains. “Projects are often larger than the people who participate in them; project management and interpersonal relationships can have as much impact on software design as technical issues; and systems are ultimately evaluated by user satisfaction rather than technical merit.”

To be clear, Open Academy isn’t entirely altruistic. Surely, the top-tier computer science students admitted to the program will be given a nudge towards working at Facebook after college.

Facebook is in a constant battle with other tech giants for top engineering talent, and programs from computer science grants to college hackathons to the Open Academy seek to seduce young code ninjas as well as aid them.

Twitter Now Lets Advertisers Target Users By Mobile OS Version, Mobile Device & Wi-Fi Connectivity

Twitter today expanded its ad targeting capabilities by allowing marketers to now more granularly segment audiences on mobile (iOS and Android) by operating system version, device, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Before, the company had only offered the option to identify users by operating system alone, on mobile. The change is an important one, given that 76 percent of Twitter’s install base of 230 million worldwide users access the social service using a mobile device.

The company announced the changes to the ad targeting on its company blog today, also noting that along with the additional capabilities comes an improved analytics dashboard for managing and analyzing the effects of various campaigns.

While for general purposes, knowing whether a customer is an iPhone or Android user can help those promoting mobile apps, there are also scenarios where apps won’t even run on older versions of either the Android or iOS operating system, which would make reaching those users a waste of money.

Plus, users still running an outdated version of a mobile OS may not fit the demographic profile of the kind of person an app marketer may want to reach. An early adopter running the latest edition of iOS 7 or Android KitKit, for example, may be more likely to become an early adopter of a new app versus someone still rocking their iPhone 3GS with iOS 5.0.

Twitter is not the only social service to help drive mobile app installs through ads Facebook, too, has seen its mobile ads become a major growth driver in general, and its Mobile App Ads have driven over 145 million app installs this year, the company announced last month.

Twitter also points out that app marketers aren’t necessarily the only ones who could benefit from its new capabilities, however. Telco marketers may want to reach those users on select devices, or target those who are nearing an upgrade. Other campaigns may have a need to identify users by mobile OS version, device or Wi-Fi connectivity, too.

Already the company allows advertisers to target by other metrics, including gender, interests, and location, among other things, and the updated dashboard allows for a deeper analysis across these lines, showing things like impressions, engagements (clicks, retweets, etc.), ad spend and more.

The additional targeting options are available today on ads.twitter.com, and are soon rolling out to Twitter Ads API partners, too.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2013 Launches With New Online Tools, Previews Browser-Based Code Editor

Microsoft today launched the latest version of its Visual Studio tools for developers at an event in New York City. The new version includes a number of user interface improvements, smarter tools for inspecting existing code in its context and support for Windows 8.1 application development. All of these were previously announced and available in the VS2013 RTM release.

VSO_Purp526_rgbThe surprise announcement, however, is the launch of Visual Studio Online, a set of development services running on Windows Azure that focus on agile team collaboration, Application Lifecycle Management and support for Windows Azure.

The service will also include an elastic load testing service based on Azure that will launch in public preview today, but the focus is currently on making the development process easier for teams, which essentially makes Visual Studio Online an extension of what the company has been doing with its Team Foundation Service.

Microsoft also announced two features that will remain in private preview for now. The first of these includes the ability to monitor web apps running on Microsoft’s cloud platform, providing what the company calls a “360-degree telemetry view of usage, performance and exception data.”

The other feature in private beta is codenamed “Monaco.” It’s a cloud-based code editor that enables lightweight editing for Windows Azure websites. The company is marketing this as an “easy way for developers to get started and make quick updates to cloud services” that run on its Azure platform.

This feature will likely get quite a bit of attention, given that it’s the first time Visual Studio makes an online editor available. The technology behind Monaco, it’s worth noting, is already available in other Microsoft tools, including SkyDrive.

As Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its developer division, S. “Soma” Somasegar, told me in an interview earlier this month, the company decided to keep Monaco in private preview for now and to test it for this limited use case in order to tune it for this specific usage scenario.

The broader vision, however, is to make these kinds of online tools available for other use cases as well, “but in cases where it makes sense,” as Soma told me. The plan isn’t to just copy the desktop experience and take it online, but to make it complementary to Visual Studio. He believes it’s extremely useful in this kind of “quick-fix scenario” and that other use cases will crystallize over time.

Microsoft makes it easy for developers to get started with Visual Studio Online, as many of its features are available for free for teams with up to five members. Teams with up to five users can use the Visual Studio Online Basic plan, and if they need additional seats they can purchase additional user plans (Basic, Professional, or Advanced) or can add eligible MSDN subscribers.

Support for Visual Studio Online is also now included as part of Microsoft’s MSDN subscription service and standalone subscriptions are available starting at $45 per month for up to 10 users (including a license for the Visual Studio Pro IDE). Customers who create an account prior to November 13, 2013 get an additional 90 days (throughFebruary 11, 2014) of unlimited users on the account.

Until further notice, Microsoft is making all other Visual Studio Online services available at a 50 percent discount (which is basically a marketing gimmick given that it won’t say when this promotion runs out. Update: Microsoft tells us the promotion will run until it has a “full financially-backed SLA is in place.”).

All plans include a free monthly quota of the metered cloud services within Visual Studio Online, including cloud build, load testing or Application Insights. The amount of free access depends on the subscription tier.

It’s not clear if Microsoft plans to offer an Office 365-like license for Visual Studio at some point in the future, but Soma did acknowledge that this is “where the world is moving.”

At its free tier, the service lets developers manage an unlimited amount of repositories and projects, track their work items and discuss their code online using Visual Studio Online’s planning tools. As part of the paid service, users can then author work charts, get support for portfolio management and access to team rooms.

Soma believes that the release of Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio Online marks a new era for Visual Studio. It started out as a client-side IDE and then added some server-side tools with Team Foundation Server and Service.

Now, the next big step is making all of Microsoft’s server-side tools on Azure work hand-in-hand with the client-side tools, and Visual Studio 2013 marks the first step in this direction.

Visual Studio 2013, of course, also has plenty of new features, and you can find a full run-down here. One tool Soma specifically highlighted, though, is the ability to sync customizations between different machines.

Most developers spend countless hours customizing their setup, after all, but until now, none of these customizations transferred when a developer moved to a new machine.

Some also stressed that Microsoft will update the old Visual Studio 2012 suite to version 4 today, and the company plans to continue this update cadence with Visual Studio 2013. Its customers liked these frequent updates, Soma noted, and 60 percent currently run the most recent version. He also said that the Visual Studio ecosystem continues to expand, with over 4,300 extensions available in the gallery right now.

Microsoft Starts Taking Office On The Web Seriously

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its Office 365 suite with a couple of new features and licensing terms. Overall, the update was very much in line with the other 100 changes Microsoft had made to its subscription-based Office version for consumers and businesses, but one feature stood out.

Starting this week, all Office Web Apps will feature real-time collaborative editing a feature previously only available to the Excel and OneNote web apps.

This in itself is an interesting move, but while talking about the update, John Case, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Office division, told me that this also signals a new way of thinking about the Web Apps inside of Microsoft.

Let’s take a step back first, though. If you are unfamiliar with the Office Web Apps, just take a look at SkyDrive and upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. Once the file is online, you can view it in SkyDrive, but most importantly, you can also edit it in a light-weight version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity apps.

The Office Web Apps launched three years ago, but have mostly flown under the radar, despite the fact that they are more fully featured than Google’s offerings. Given Microsoft’s control over the file formats, it’s also significantly better at displaying and saving files without mangling any of the formatting.

They also use the same Ribbon menu as the regular desktop Office apps, so regular Office users should be productive in them right from the get-go.

Until now, however, these Web Apps were basically companions to the clients, and Microsoft did virtually nothing to promote them. It looks like that’s changing now. As Case told me, Microsoft is now finally starting to view the Office Web Apps as standalone services.

Case wouldn’t say whether Microsoft is considering a move to a freemium model and package paid services on top of the free offering. If Microsoft considers the Web Apps as a standalone version of Office, though and in the (very) long run, they could become the only version, after all I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s something the company is considering.

Microsoft always focused heavily on the Office desktop clients. That’s where all the money was made, after all. Now that it has moved to a subscription model anyway, adding premium features to the Office Web Apps feels like a logical next step.

Case told me Microsoft plans to invest more into the Office Web Apps in the coming months, so we will likely hear quite a bit more about what the company has in the works for these services.

If Microsoft starts to invest more heavily in this area, it will also provide an even greater challenge for Google, whose online office suite is still unsuitable for anything but very basic editing. One advantage Google always had, however, was that it offered collaborative editing.

That advantage is gone now, but Microsoft has to start emphasizing these features. So far, it probably didn’t do this because it didn’t want to cannibalize its regular Office sales (the Web Apps are “good enough” for many use cases, afer all). If that starts changing, Google better watch out.

Yahoo Finally Takes Its New-Look Homepage Global, Bringing It To Seven Int’l Markets

Marissa Mayer’s repainting of Yahoo’s ‘front door’ has expanded its international reach, with the “more modern” looking homepage now being rolled out to seven global markets, six of them in Europe. The new-look homepage debuted in the U.S., back in February.

The spruced up portal is now available in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and South Africa, Yahoo said today in a blog post.

That still leaves a large swathe of Yahoo’s international markets stickiAnd here’s the new, cleaner-looking Yahoo Spain:ng with the old look homepage, with only the recently redesigned Yahoo logo to hint at Mayer’s ongoing internal makeover of the long-toothed Internet company.

Here’s the current Yahoo India homepage, for instance:

And here’s the new, cleaner-looking Yahoo Spain:

As with the U.S. overhaul, the new-look Yahoo homepage packs in more content than before but does so in a way that feels a bit less hectic with a focus on keeping the overall look uncluttered, despite increasing the amount of data on tap.

The new homepage also includes a real-time news feed with a ‘save for later’ function; a stack of new utilities; and spotlights that act as widget-sized windows onto other Yahoo services, such as Yahoo Weather, Finance and Flickr. The displayed widgets can be customized by individual users.

Despite this new lick of paint there’s no disguising that Yahoo’s homepage is still a portal and web portals were cutting edge circa 15+ years ago.

Making this ‘front door’ to the Internet relevant now, in a digital environment dominated by mobile devices where users don’t need so much hand-holding and simply cherry pick their favourite apps, is of course Mayer’s big challenge. Or one of them. ‘Making Yahoo relevant again’ sums up her chief challenge.

Although the new Yahoo homepage is designed to work across desktop and mobile devices, with smartphone and tablet optimised versions, getting users to actually visit it on their mobile devices is another matter.

Yahoo said today that it will be continuing to tweak its new international homepages “over the coming months” to “make changes and improvements”, presumably as it seeks to find the stickiest combination of widgets.

Yahoo is also continuing to spruce up other portions of its existing estate, giving its finance service a new lick of paint last week, for instance, and overhauling Yahoo Mail in October.

Under Mayer, it’s also been on a hiring spree buying up a swathe of startups, including Summly and bread, and most recently signing up former New York Times technology journalist David Pogue to work on a forthcoming Yahoo consumer tech website.

It’s still not entirely clear whether the Yahoo that emerges from all this updating will mostly just have a fresh lick of paint, or whether Mayer has more radical plans for reinventing the business that involve significant shifts of focus. (Yoogle) (techcrunch) (GNN)

Microsoft warns users of hacker attacks - آپ کا کمپیوٹر ہیک کیا جاسکتا ہے٬ لیکن کیسے؟

Scientists go Old Testament, suggest that all life came from clay - سائنس نے بھی تسلیم کیا “ قرآن “ کو

مردہ شخص قبر سے باہر نکل آیا Man found buried alive in Brazil

Some Ways To Become Rich

Money is one of the most important commodities for every human being born on this earth. Becoming the one of the countable rich person on this earth is probably one of the common dreams seen by almost everyone! Hence, for all those who have that desire of becoming rich, here are a few guidelines:

Form a healthy personal foundation. If one’s life is in turmoil, it is very difficult to keep money or attract flow of money.

In order to acquire noteworthy wealth, it is very important to pay heed to one’s attitude, one’s relationships, one’s ethics as well as integrity. Wealth often tends to come to those who handle it in a proper manner.

Make your mind up ‘ALL’ addictions. Overuse of a specific substance or what we call substance exploitation will greatly reduce one’s capability to attract or keep a large sum of money.

Expenditure should always be less than the spending. Have and use a budget track your cash flow, decide what you need compared to what you want.

Have some money you will never spend. Put some small percentage of your money in some form that is hard to get back or that you would never cash except in dire emergency. Again, if worse comes, you will be able to live in your own house with your cash savings.

We should always learn the rules on how to invest. Most colleges have basic courses like finance, stock investment etc. to make an individual aware on where and how to invest. Make a finance plan accordingly. Review and refine the plan constantly as circumstances change.

Broaden your horizons by spreading your finances in all fields of your life. By spreading the finances, in times of economic meltdown also you won’t lose everything.

There is a simple fact that many people miss: you will never grow wealthy if you spend everything you earn. Regardless of how much money you earn, you need to put some aside in savings.

One’s lifestyle should be such that it should fit within one’s budget that comes out of the income alone.

Lastly set up a crisis fund this should have at least of three months of living expenses. It would be very wise indeed to increase this to six months worth of living expenses.

One could set up a home-equity line of credit (not loan) which you could tap into if the need really arises and you need money for more than six months.

Source: financecareeducation

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