Remembering The Man Who Believed In “Roti, Kapada, Makan, Bijli And Bandwidth”

In its 25th year, NASSCOM has rolled out this beautiful animated video as a tribute to Dewang Mehta – the man behind India’s unprecedented rise as a software heavyweight. He is the game-changer who can be credited for transforming the perceived Land of Snake-Charmers to an acknowledged IT superpower.

During his tenure as the head of NASSCOM between 1991 and 2001, he took a series of positive strides to catapult the nestling software industry in India to greater heights. His favorite slogan, “Roti, Kapada, Makan, Bijli and Bandwidth” eloquently epitomized the aspirations of the ambitious 21st century Indian.

On his death anniversary (12th April), let us use some bandwidth to thank Mr. Dewang Mehta for establishing the “brand” that India is today!

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How To Unlist Number From Truecaller

Last week we told you how you can find contact details of unknown numbers even before picking up the call. This could be helpful for you in avoiding spam calls from telemarketers. We also told you how easily you can block and filter out spam callers by using Truecaller. The mobile app is also very useful for keeping your  phonebook updated with your friends’ latest addresses, information or pictures.

However a few people don’t find this to be of great help citing privacy concerns which is indeed a valid concern. Since every time you register your phone number with Truecaller, your details also get uploaded in their databases. Apparently even the ‘Contact List’ from your phonebook gets shared along. The app also automatically starts displaying your name and location to the people whom you are calling (if they have TrueCaller installed on their phone).

Due to these reasons some people are opting out of the service and want to unlist their numbers from the service. This can be very easily done in a couple of steps. To easily unlist and remove your number from TrueCaller Search, follow the following simple steps:

Step 1 : Go to http://www.truecaller.com/unlist or Click Here

Step 2 : Type your mobile number with country code (e.g. if your country is India, type +91 followed by your 10 digit number i.e  +91★★★★★★★★★★ ) in the input box next to “Phone Number”.

Step 3 : Enter the CAPTCHA verification code.

Step 4 : Finally hit the blue “Unlist” button at the right side.

That’s it. Congratulations! You have successfully unlisted your mobile number from TrueCaller Search. After clicking the Unlist button, you will get a message on your screen saying – “Your phone number has been successfully unlisted”.

TrueCaller will unlist your number within a few hours once the unlist request has been made. Thereafter anyone who tries to find your number will end up without any results!

We hope this tutorial proved helpful for you. If you still got any concerns, please let us know in the comments section below and we will be more than happy to help. If you find this article helpful, please share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Top 20 Most Expensive Domain Names

A website can be a simple thing to build up, but picking a name for your  business can be a tricky task if you are doing it based on web addresses that are still available for sale. It’s no surprise then that all of the best, usually single word domain names are already taken – ever wondered why almost all generic domain names you can think of are already taken? Or for that matter how much do people pay for them?

Well, the practice of buying and selling domain names is called Domain Flipping – it is the business of identifying and acquiring Internet domain names with the motive of selling them later for a profit. For example, you buy exclusive domain names (like Porn.com, Hotels.com, Beer.com) and sell them at very high prices using services like Flippa. Now, I feel you might be thinking… but no, Sex.com or Porn.com are not the most expensive domain names ever sold, although they do feature pretty high up on the list. Check out which are the most expensive addresses on the internet.

20.

Icloud.com : In 2011, Apple Inc snapped up this domain at a price of $ 4.5 million.  Apple was consolidating all i-domains around the internet, and acquired this domain after acquiring iphone.com, which itself wasn’t that a big deal to be mentioned here.

19.

Clothes.com : Zappos purchased this web address in 2008 for an amount of $4.9 million.  This domain was used to redirect the online clothing-line of the apparel manufacturer. Zappos, a year later was bought by  Amazon in entirety and with this deal, Clothes.com too went into Amazon’s kitty.

18.

SEO.com : It was purchased in 2007 for $ 5 million.  Michael Mann, owner of BuyDomains could foresee the importance of having a good domain name and decided to sell his company and lap up SEO.com with that money

17.

Korea.com : Purchased in early 2000 for $ 5 million, it is one of the only two national domains on this list.

16.

Toys.com : The children’s toy retailer ToysRUS grabbed this domain name in March 2009 for $ 5.1 million. Sounds like a lot of money for somebody toy-ing around!

15.

Asseenontv.com : This web address was snapped up by LA Group in 2000 for a price of $ 5.1 million.  The domain was bought to protect brand name “asseenattv.com” of LA Group.

14.

Casino.com : Buying it for $ 5.5 million, Mansion Limited of Gibraltar surely made a successful gamble for he seems to be making a good fortune out of this domain name. The deal was brokered in 2004.

13.

Slots.com : This one too managed to fetch $ 5.5 million for its new owners when it went under the hammer in 2010.

12.

Israel.com : This one is the most controversial domain-flip of all times. Even Google can’t provide sufficient information on the deal. Though through very reliable sources we got to know that the deal here was closed at about $ 5.88 million in 2008.

11.

Beer.com : Sold in 2004 for $ 7 million to Thought Convergence, this is one of the most under utilized domain names acquired after paying such a hefty some. Today the site is nothing but a blank page and is featuring for resale.

10.

Diamond.com : This jewel of a web address was snapped up in 2006 at a price of $ 7.5 million. The domain is now being used as an online shopping website for diamonds.  The commodity being sold on the site certainly justifies the amount shelled out for acquiring the precious domain.

9.

Business.com : This domain was sold for $ 7.5 million in December 1999. Going by the looks of the deal, business certainly means money!

8.

Fb.com : Your beloved online hangout – Facebook, acquired this domain name in 2010 for $ 8.5 million. The social networking monster obviously couldn’t let the ultimate contraction of its businesses name slip away! Today it’s also being used as the domain for Facebook employee email addresses as “@facebook.com” addresses are available for the public.

7.

Porn.com : You know what you’d find on the website. The 2007 purchase is certainly doing very well for it’s new owner spent $ 9.5 million to acquire it.

6.

Fund.com : Lapped up in 2008 for a whooping $ 9.9 million, this domain was certainly envisaged for financial services but the website is still not live.  Another under utilization of a precious domain name.

5.

Hotels.com : Purchased for “around” $ 11 million in 2001 – as the new owner couldn’t recall the exact price he paid for it in an interview with the BBC. Well a million here or there seems no big deal in the hospitality business!

4.

Sex. com : The biggest deal ever from the porn industry was sealed in October 2010 for $ 14 million.  Quite unsurprisingly, it doesn’t figures even in the top 3. of this list.

3.

Insure.com : The deal happened in 2009 and continued to be the second highest deal of all times for three years, until PrivateJet.com broke the record.  The new owner coughed up a cool  $ 16 million for the domain name.

2.

Privatejet.com : At $ 30.18 million, this deal of 2012 came very close to becoming the most expensive domain-flip of all times, but was pipped at the post by about a cool $5m.

1.

VacationRentals.com : This mother of all domain-name deals took place in 2007 and surprisingly it wasn’t for a gambling or porn site. The $35 million prize was grabbed by Brain Sharples, the founder of HomeAway, who by his own admission bought it only because he did not want his competitor Expedia to acquire it.

Now, if you ever find some appealing domain name which is available,  you may want to grab it right away. Some time later you may go on to sell those domains for way higher prices.  If you enjoyed this list of most expensive domain names, don’t forget to share it on Facebook and Twitter and let your friends know about this lucrative business model.

Twitter Rolls Out A New Facebook Like Design

After months of testing, Twitter finally rolled out a new design that makes the popular micro-blogging service look a lot similar to Facebook.  Twitter’s blog post, a couple of hours back announced the website’s revamped looks.

Though the changes are mostly cosmetic and seem to focus on image resizing, the introduction of “pinned tweets”  allows users to stick a specific tweet to the top of their own timeline, similar to how the old Facebook status would remain in place. That pinned tweet functions much like a promoted tweet for your profile. Twitter now also highlights those tweets that have the most engagement by displaying them slightly larger than the others.

With this development, two of the world’s most traffic generating websites- Twitter and Facebook, look shockingly similar. Both have a giant, widescreen background image with a little square box towards the lower left corner of the background photo which is in all wisdom meant for displaying your photo or a “profile picture”  in Facebook lingo.

Actress Kerry Washington’s Twitter profile displaying her “Pinned Tweet”

The introduction of larger images reflect Twitter’s ambition to become a bigger player in the photo sharing arena. The micro-blogging service had recently introduced the ability to upload four photos in a single tweet, as well as the feature to tag photo in the background of images, instead of wasting space in the tweet itself.
In short, here are main features of Twitter’s new web profile:

• Best Tweets: Tweets that experience most engagement will appear slightly larger than the other Tweets.
• Pinned Tweet: You can now pin one of your Tweets to the top of your page. It could be an away message, promoting your own website, or a tweet reflective of your online persona.
• Filtered Tweets: Now you can choose which timeline to view when checking out other profiles. It’s now possible to filter tweets posted by other people by opting to see only tweets or tweets with photos or videos, or tweets and their replies.

The new profile changes have kicked in today for some of us and will be automatic for new users. Over the week, it will be gradually rolled out for other Twitter users as well. At the bottom of its blog post, Twitter has added a list of “celebrity” accounts that already sport the new design, including The United States’ First Lady, Michelle Obama’s Twitter account.

While it’s certainly a lot of changes for an “accustomed” Twitter user, the new profile still manages to look relatively clean. The looks seem more aesthetic now. Well that’s our take. What do you think of the changes? Or do you have something more to add to the story? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Twitter Now Supports Emojis On Its Web Version

Love expressing emotions while typing on the web? Then we got some good news for you. Twitter has begun showing emoji characters on its main Twitter.com website. Though for now, they come only on the desktop versions of the service.

Twitter Emojis | Screenshot Courtesy: twitter.com/Support

With this, Twitter has rolled out a much awaited feature. The reactions from Twitter fans are mixed though the majority of them seem to be upbeat about this new development.

However, the emojis aren’t supported on tweets that are embedded on websites. Here’s the original tweet from Twitter Support that announced this feature. You can see empty squares here in place of the emojis used.

😍 Twitter users love tweeting emoji from their phones – now you can view these emoji on web! #emojiparty 🎉 😜 👯 🍻 🎈 🎤 🎮 🚀 🌉 ✨

— Support (@Support) April 2, 2014

We hope Twitter fixes this real soon.

TrueCaller – Find Contact Details of Unknown Phone Numbers

It happens quite often that your phone gets ringing on a call from an unknown number and you are perplexed if you should be taking the call or not. It happens, doesn’t it? But you could save yourself the trouble of thinking so hard if you were using Truecaller.

Truecaller is a mobile app which helps you identify the details of unknown mobile numbers even before you pick the call (if your phone is connected to the internet). And it is available across all the major operating systems – Android, iOS, Windows, Symbian and other JAVA based OS.

How Does Truecaller App work:

Benefits of using Truecaller app:

• You can see who the caller is before picking up the phone. The details like the owner’s name, the location, the service carrier and sometimes even the picture of the person flashes on your screen with the incoming call.
• You can sync Truecaller with your phonebook. This will help you Keeps your  phonebook updated with your friends’ latest addresses, information or pictures.
• You can block known spam callers, and filter out calls from telemarketers.
• Truecaller mobile app is available for all popular mobile platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry, Symbian. You can find the download links here.
• You can also use Truecaller online by going to their official website here.

Never Pick An Unwanted Call | Image Courtesy: http://www.truecaller.com

 

Why you should use TrueCaller:

True caller is a completely free service, and helps you identify unknown mobile numbers. You can very easily find details of the caller, saving a lot of your precious time. And if you happen to be a victim of  too many unwanted calls from people selling you things you don’t even need, you certainly will go gaga over this handy app. We recommend you give it a try.

NOTE : If you have a privacy concern and want to unlist your phone number from Truecaller Search click here.

We hope this article proved helpful for you. If you still got any concerns, please let us know in the comments section below and we will be more than happy to help. If you find this article helpful, please share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Flappy Bird – The Latest Gaming Viral Hit – You Addicted Yet?

A new retro arcade-style game has taken over the No: 1 spot for free games on the Google Play and iOS app stores. The game is called Flappy Bird and chances are that you may have heard of this craze. What’s good to know is that the games industry can still surprise you in the form of a brutally simple game and with it shatters the myth that the holy grail of addictive gaming has been figured.

This game has an 8-bit realm of graphics mimicking the style of old school super Mario. The premise of Flappy Bird is simple: the gamer has to navigate through a series of gaps between pipe-shaped vertical hurdles. In order to do so, you have to continue tapping the screen to make the cute 8-bit bird’s wings flap and keep her afloat. The gameplay is very addictive and closely resembles the Mario levels in the air or underwater where punching a button was the only way to keep the Italian plumber alive. Feeling nostalgic? Well, I am!

Tap to Play

Frustrating yet Addictive

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now what’s left the gaming experts scratching their heads is how come a frustrating game with such shaky graphics, bumpy animation and awful edge-detection has accumulated over a million downloads and about 85,000 five-star ratings on Google Play in less than a week’s time of its availability. Sure, the name definitely tries to ride on some of Angry Birds’ popularity, except that only a few taps on the screen have been enough to keep users glued to their smartphones.

Our verdict

Rating: 7/10
Pros: Simple, addictive gameplay, nostalgic (Mario theme)
Cons: No pause button, no option to remove the annoying ads

Have you tried Flappy Bird yet? Are you already addicted to it, or you too aren’t getting what all the fuss is about? Honestly, even I do not understand the appeal here but yes, after a hundred or so tries, my record is fourteen. What’s yours?

Let us know in the comments section below.

Twitter Mobile Update – Introduces Filters, Photo Cropping – Pushes Trending Events to the Top

Have you been a fan of Twitter forever now but always felt let down when it came to sharing photos. Well we got you some good news. If you’re an Android user, your virtual life just got a little easier. The microblogging website’s latest app update adds a simple photo-editor letting you add filters to your images, crop and rotate pics without using a third-party program. These features may also help Twitter in containing users from migrating to popular photo-sharing apps like Instagram, which is owned by Facebook now. The update also flashes a reminder to @mention friends whenever you upload images with people in it, imitating Facebook’s popular photo-tagging trait.

You can choose from 8 Filters

The second update gives users a significant way of discovering events and monitoring real-time trends on the microblogging network. Twitter has pushed its iconic Trending Events right to the top of the timeline allowing timeline users to even have a detailed view of these trends – to the extent of displaying the number of Tweets about every trending topic! Pulling down on the timeline further reveals other exciting features – if there aren’t any new tweets to load, the app will recommend tweets, trending topics and will suggest you users to follow.

Trending Topics

While these new updates to the Twitter feed are available only for Android as of now, the microblogging service promises that they’ll soon bring it to the iOS platform.

Confused with buying a new camera? Let Flickr help you

There comes a time when you realize your camera phone is no more doing justice to your photography talents; when you discover you are extraordinarily good at clicking random pictures  that are garnering a decent number of likes on Facebook. And then comes the moment – in one split moment, you have decided to give photography a decent shot! Off you pop- to get yourself a SLR now. Wow!  But moments into a store and you are at sea. So many lenses – so many models, an ever-widening price range. Suddenly you are lost – you realize you don’t even know what you were looking for in the first place!

The graphs

Now that’s where Flickr should come in. You may have browsed through thousands of images on the image-and-video-hosting website but what you never knew of was this feature – “Flickr Camera Finder”; it’s a very useful feature that correlates the Exif data from all pictures uploaded to the website and creates analytical tools based on that data.

When you land on the main page of Flickr Camera Finder you see three graphs – the first lists the Most Popular Cameras in the Flickr Community, the second indicates the most Popular Point & Shoot Cameras and the final graph shows the most Popular Cameraphones used across the world. Scroll down a bit further and you get a list of names of the most used Camera Brands in the Flickr Community.

A Canon/eos_rebel_t3i specifications

And if all that data was not enough for you to zero in on to one particular device, there are even more useful tools hiding in the Camera Finder stacks. If you select one of the linked camera names on the Camera Finder page, it’ll launch a gallery of photos clicked with that camera by different users. That’s what makes it super useful and interesting — especially if you’re buying a camera for the first time.

Some images shot by Canon/eos_rebel_t3i. By clicking the ellipses on each image page and selecting “View Exif info,” you can see which lenses and manual settings were used for each shot.

At the end of each gallery page, you can further filter your results depending on what you’d like to shoot with your camera. For example, typing “low light,” “macro,” or “action” into the search box will display related results for that camera. You can then compare and contrast the results between cameras by having a couple of windows open and looking at them side-by-side. This is one of the best ways to really see the difference between a smartphone camera, a DSLR, and everything in between. And in fact, we would suggest you to prefer this crowd-sourced analysis over any editorial reviews that you would have otherwise gone with.

Bust lock-down: Now a bra that unhooks only if true love is detected

According to Japanese lingerie manufacturer Ravijour, women are mostly clueless when they’re confronted with true love and who they should take their tops off for. So the company came up with an innovation for these baffled ladies — a bra with a front clasp that only unhooks when “true love” is detected. Yeah… you heard it right! Kill me now! Here’s how the technology works: The bra comprises of built-in sensors that measures the wearer’s heart-rate and other vitals. The data is continually transmitted via Bluetooth to a special app on her phone.

Snapshot from Ravijour promo

The app then processes this data using a special app and measures the heart rate elevation using special algorithms and predetermined data. The software then calculates what the designers call the “true love rate”.

Snapshot from Ravijour promo

And it is only when the wearer’s heart has truly found their prince Charming would it beat in a way that the app would recognize and automatically unhook the brassiere.

Bra automatically unhooks on detecting true love

The engineers at Ravijour say – “It is only when a woman falls in true love does she get excited enough for the Adrenal Medulla to secrete Catecholamine which affects the autonomic nerve and magnifies the heart rate which is distinguished by the sensor and processed by a specially developed iOS app”. So ladies may not worry as not any randomness in heart rates will unclasp the bra. A promotional video brags the bra could help save women from “the animal”, “the technician” and “the flashy guy”.

And since the product comes not from China but from Japan, we think it’s okay to assume this is a safe and “real” product.