Google’s New Modular Phone May Be the Last You’ll Need to Buy.

Google’s New Modular Phone May Be the Last You’ll Need to Buy

• By Mat Honan  
• 04.16.14  
• 6:30 am   

The Ara prototype. Photo: Norman Chan/Tested.com

At the Project Ara Developer’s Conference in Santa Clara, California, the moment of unveiling was a bit of a letdown. When project lead Paul Eremenko got ready for the big reveal — finally showing off Google’s vision for a modular phone with working, user-interchangeable components — he had to dampen expectations from the enthusiastic crowd. “You should temper your applause,” he warned, explaining that the device had been damaged the previous day. “We did crack the screen, and the phone doesn’t quite boot.” A disappointment, sure, but it did little to actually temper anything.
Project Ara is Google’s attempt to reinvent the cellphone as we know it. Instead of a slab of glass and metal that you have no ability to upgrade, save for buying a new device, it’s an attempt to launch a phone where all of the main components are interchangeable via modules that click in and out, attaching via electro-permanent magnets. Despite being highly customizable, it will only come in three main sizes, helping to eliminate the kind of device fragmentation that currently plagues Android. Google plans to roll out a “gray model,” a very basic device that costs as little as $50, as well as higher-end handsets that could go for as much as $500 and up. The former will be released first — around this time next year if all goes according to plan — and will likely be a smaller, Wi-Fi-only version. This bare-bones model will be followed by the higher-end ones eventually. But Google’s initial objective is to ramp up a hardware ecosystem that moves at the same pace as the software it runs.
It’s ambitious, to say the least.

Image: Courtesy of Google

There’s a certain prescience to the damaged prototype. It bears one of the most common injuries you’ll see on a smartphone: a cracked screen. In theory, this is just the kind of issue Ara will solve. But because it came directly from Germany, and because there is no way to replace the module here in the United States, it’s just another broken phone.
It also drives home another point: When Ara devices do hit the streets, they will only be as good as their support network. For the support to work, you’ve got to have a lot of modules, and a lot of access to those modules. Project Ara needs a network of retail stores where people can do things like pick up a new screen. It also needs enough developers making modules to sustain that kind of retail presence — and it needs it globally.
Google is working to make things easy for programmers and hardware manufacturers to work with the Ara standards, but for many items — anything that uses radio frequencies and thus requires FCC approval for example — it’s going to need buy-in from consumers too.

Google’s willingness to try something so ambitious in public is energizing, particularly in the era of the get-rich-quick smartphone app.

All of this makes for a heady and optimistic yet extremely uncertain future. Ara is a project from Google’s ATAP (advances technology and projects) group. ATAP is philosophically and structurally based on DARPA; it was one of the few things Google kept from Motorola when it sold the company to Lenovo.
And honestly Ara, at least as a concept, is fantastic. Who wouldn’t want the ability to some day print out new parts for their smartphone at home, expanding its life expectancy to six years and beyond? Google’s willingness to try something so ambitious in public is energizing, particularly in the era of the get-rich-quick smartphone app. Project Ara’s goals could transform the industry, give people greater control over their own devices, and free them from the annual cycles of obsolescence. It’s flexible platform suitable for everyone, everywhere, from every walk of life.
Or, it could be a catastrophic and very public failure. A huge embarrassment. This is what Google does best. Its willingness to take big risks and make big bets knowing they may not pan out is a remarkable attribute in a publicly traded company.
The Project Ara conference is an important first step for the initiative. It’s the first time Google is looping in developers and laying out the technical groundwork. There will be two more conferences this year, where presumably we’ll see more modules and hopefully working prototypes. Whether or not Google can pull this off remains to be seen. But it will be one of the most exciting stories to watch in technology during the next year.

Image: Courtesy of Google

SDL Customer Experience across all channels, devices, languages and cultures.

MediaBUZZ

SDL Customer Experience Cloud for seamless global customer experiences across all channels, devices, languages and cultures

Today’s businesses have to meet their customers’ expectations of getting consistently integrated experiences across all channels, devices and languages. But can they master the challenges? A recent CMO Council study, for instance, reveals that only 12% of CMOs have a real-time, well-integrated view of customer interactions across their enterprises and a Harris Interactive Customer Experience Impact Report study reports that 60% of customers would pay more for a better customer experience.
To address this gap, SDL just launched the SDL Customer Experience Cloud, a unified suite of offerings, to help marketers create and deliver seamless global customer experiences across all channels, devices and languages. By integrating web content management, campaign management, social intelligence and analytics, SDL Customer Experience Cloud gives companies the power to optimize multi-channel customer experiences from any device, understand brand health and product perception in real-time, and adjust campaign strategies to increase marketing effectiveness and impact revenue—from a single interface.
“The Customer Experience Cloud packs all the critical elements of customer experience management into one accessible suite and delivers on our vision that every marketer can meet the expectations of their global customer base and remain connected and responsive throughout the entire buyer journey” states Mark Lancaster, CEO, SDL.
“With thousands of customers all over the world, it’s especially important to have technology that allows us to engage with our user base in real time, in any language and context, from anywhere,” said Mark Terauchi, general manager, Corporate Brand Office, at Fujitsu. “We believe SDL can provide us with the ability to deliver a comprehensive customer experience, and the new releases from SDL will help us to advance our customer strategy more effectively.”
Based on customer demand, SDL has spent the last several years integrating its Customer Experience Management products to work together and to deliver the entire solution in the cloud.
Highlights of this new release include:

• A single intuitive user interface across all SDL’s CXM products that has been significantly enhanced to provide a seamless marketing user experience that is modern, easy to use and easy to deploy.
• SaaS delivery model for all SDL products, available now, with continuous enhancements quarterly throughout 2014.
• Industry-first, integrated CXM Suite which enable marketers to create engaging, personalized and contextual customer experiences leveraging real-time data to drive better marketing decisions.
• SDL Social is the only social intelligence solution with real-time analysis of social data and conversations across all social channels to effectively predict buying and brand advocacy across the entire customer journey.
• The introduction of SDL Language Cloud, the industry’s first cloud translation solution offering both machine and human translation for radically simplified global translation – enabling marketers to engage customers in their preferred language across all interactions quickly and cost-effectively.
• SDL Web Content Management is the first to enable marketers to easily target and drive consistent, contextually relevant digital customer experiences across all channels and devices from a single, intuitive interface.
• SDL Marketing Campaign enables campaign testing, simulation, optimization and advanced segmentations – enabling customers to drive large-scale campaigns faster and more cost-effectively.
• SDL E-Commerce provides advanced digital merchandizing features, which give retailers precise control over campaign context and prioritization over the placement of product and offers across search, navigation and promotional activities.
• SDL Analytics provides real-time customer intelligence to understand, target and convert customers across the entire buyer journey.
• SDL Documentation enables seamless post sales customer support by providing easy access to online materials including manuals, support information and other important documentation.

“By 2017, 70% of customer communications will be digital, contextualized and consumed on demand with multiple channels, including Web, mobile devices and social media. Enterprises are taking steps to provide a more personalized and engaging customer experience for traditional communications such as transaction documents, marketing collateral and point-of- purchase displays. Today, only 22% of those customer communications are digital — the majority are still paper-based,” SDL’s CEO says.
With more than 1,500 global enterprise customers — including 72 of the top 100 global brands — and 400 partners, SDL is one of the only vendors with a truly integrated, comprehensive customer experience management offering. And SDL Customer Experience Cloud empowers the entire organization from marketing through to customer support to understand, create, manage and deliver contextually relevant customer experiences that drive better marketing decisions, e-commerce success and long-term customer engagement.
By MediaBUZZ

Mobile operators turn to machines for growth

Mobile operators turn to machines for growth

Major mobile operators that find their traditional roaming, messaging and voice businesses under threat are turning to machines for growth.

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AndroidPIT.com

Top apps for your new Android smartphone

Loie Favre (translation) 2 days ago

3

Did you just open a present this holiday season to discover a brand-spanking new Android smartphone? If you did, well you’re a lucky duck and now it’s time to start having some fun with all the amazing Android apps that are available in the Google Play Store. A fair warning though, many are a waste of time, so here are the ones that all new AND continuing Android users should install.

© AndroidPIT

Finding and managing files: ES File Explorer File Manager

Depending on the brand of shiny new toy which you pulled out of the tissue paper, you may or may not have a file explorer, but this is something indispensable for Android users and the app for this purpose which may have been pre-installed on your device may not suffice. To start, we highly recommend getting ES File Explorer File Manager which is really intuitive and easy to use and is available in a variety of languages.

Music player for heavy and heavy listeners alike: Poweramp

Here’s an Android multimedia player whose functions will make your head spin. Whether you always have earphones glued to your ears or you just want to listen to music on your phone once in a while, there’s a huge chance that Poweramp could be made for you. It’s easy to use, filled to the rafters with functions, supports a huge number of file types, has different skins, an equalizer….need I say more?

© Max MP

Poweramp is available for a free trial for 15 days and afterwards you’ll have to pay. If you want to try a free app that does the same thing, check out Winamp, which is equally as stable and has a simple user interface.

Watching videos: VLC

You might have heard about VLC Plus Pro thanks to its PC version. Even though this version isn’t yet 100% complete, we consider it to be a super useful app and one of the most effective for movie watching on your Android tablet or smartphone. The application allows you to add subtitles, it will adopt to your screen size and to top it all off, it is extremely user-friendly. Nonetheless, the app, as it is still in its beginning stages, can sometimes be a little buggy. If you don’t feel like testing a new up-and-coming app, then try MX Player.

© VLC

Saving your files with a backup app: Helium

Though I’m sure you could survive without this next app, we strongly advise using it. It will allow you to save your apps, data, SMS, contacts and pictures in the occasion of theft, loss or other unfortunate circumstances. Backed up apps will also be retained in the occasion of sending your smartphone back to be repaired by the manufacturer, during which case it comes back a clean slate, all data lost. With Helium, it’s easy! Simply check the apps that you would like to save and choose backup.

Taking notes: Any.Do To do list

Smartphones are one of the rare things that you carry along with you at all time and comes in handy for quickly ‘jotting down’ notes or thoughts throughout the day. Any.Do is a well-rounded app: it organizes for you, while helping you out. I you choose the word ‘grocery’, Any.Do will suggest a sentence like ‘go grocery shopping’ or ‘go grocery shopping for...’’ and all you have to do is click on the contact icon to add the name of the person. This is just one of the great examples of how Any.Do can be useful in your every day life. If you get hooked on this app, you’ll never let it go.

Keeping up with the Joneses: Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Instagram

Here we’ve grouped all of the most popular social networking apps. These are obviously all available for Android and are often updated. Facebook and Twitter also have widgets that allow you to be ‘in the know’ with your friends in a more in your face kind of way. Instagram has also integrated video to make some cool short snippets. Skype allows you to place calls via mobile data or Wi-Fi. But just for your information, these aren’t the end all and be all of social media apps, there are more coming into the limelight, like Viber, Vine, Cinemagram, Line, Wechat…

Getting in touch: WhatsApp

If you don’t know WhatsApp, then you have probably just acquired your first smartphone! This app has become the bread and butter for iOS and Android users worldwide. With instant messaging, photo transfers, sounds, groupe conversations, most are using it on a daily basis and as a replacement for the common SMS or text message. Though it’s not the only app of its genre (nor is it the best), you are sure with WhatsApp that you will be able to keep in contact with most of your friends and family.

Great all-around game: Clash of Clans

Clash of Clans is an excellent mobile game. It combines strategy, action and management and what’s more, it’s multiplayer. Its success is probably in large part due to its easy usage and the lack of ads. Not only that, you don’t need to be constantly connected and need not fear having to dish out tons of cash in order to actually progress: Clash of Clans has multiple platforms and has more than a million players around the globe. You develop your own village and join or create clans to become the lord of your guilde.

Working with documents: Quickoffice

If you want to open documents, edit them as well as view spreadsheets, give Quickoffice for Android a try, it’s sort of like Microsoft Office for PC. You are able to use your smartphone, or better yet a tablet, to rework your docs, slide presentations or graphs. Obviously, working with office docs on your computer is a lot more ergonomic, however if you buy yourself an attachable Bluetooth keyboard for Android, it’s almost like you are sitting at your good old desktop again.

© AndroidPIT

Being tech, apps and Android savvy: AndroidPIT

Evidently, you can’t forget about installing AndroidPIT to keep on top of all your Android, smartphone, tablet and app news, as well as take part in the forum and discover lots of new stuff to do with your device.
What other applications have you installed with your new smartphone?

(originally by Joséphine Dusol)

Google takes on plumbers and doctors with Helpouts

Tuesday 5 Nov 2013 8:30 pm

Google is offering lessons via Helpouts (Picture: PA)

Back in the day, you would have to sign up for classes in a draughty community centre if you wanted to lose some weight.
Boiler troubles would see a pricey plumber stroll around your house tutting, while health complaints meant trudging to the doctor and reading ancient magazines.
But Google thinks it can solve these problems (and more) through video chats with someone miles away.
It has launched Helpouts, which allows the public to pay for consultations on everyday hobbies and problems from their armchairs.
But with some sessions costing hundreds of pounds an hour, it does not always come cheap.

Udi Manber, a vice president at Google, wrote in a blog post: ‘Most of the world’s useful information still resides in people’s heads.
‘You might need a quick answer to a problem you’re having right now, guidance completing a project or help with learning a new skill.’
At first, Helpouts will offer lessons in eight categories including art, music, cooking, fashion and health.
Users choose experts based on their qualifications, availability and ratings, with a money-back guarantee if they are not satisfied.
The internet giant has stressed it will check the credentials of medical professionals on the site.
It plans to take a 20 per cent cut of the fee experts receive.
More than 1,000 people have signed up to offer their expertise so far, as well as brands such as Rosetta Stone and WeightWatchers. CNET’s Luke Westaway said: ‘Those with know-how in, say, playing instruments or gardening could use Helpouts to earn extra cash passing on their expertise.’