How to quit Facebook without really quitting Facebook

 
Pretty impressive post from Lifehacker


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Posted 2 months ago

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Teens and their cell phones

 

A very interesting survey on

Microsoft and Verizon might think all the kids want to do with their new Kin phones is pay absurd data rates for a half-baked Twitter experience, but it turns out Generation Upload is still actually just Generation Text Message. That's at least the word according to a Pew Internet Research survey published on April 20th and neatly summed up by a new Flowlogic infographic published today -- only 23 percent of American teenagers with cellphones use social networks with their phones, while 72 percent of all teens use text messaging. You might argue that Kin seeks to flip that balance, but Pew found that 63 percent of teens with cell phones don't have data plans and the vast majority of teen cellphone plans are part of a larger family plan, so the Kin's $30 / month data rate might be a hard sell to Mom and Dad.

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Posted 2 months ago

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Beautiful Cherry Blossom in SF

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Posted 3 months ago

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Unboxing the iPad

Unboxing the iPad

 
The iPad is on sale today and I got the 16gb one. It's a pretty awesome experience waiting in line at the Apple Store. They are very organized in managing this kind of opening event. Apple employees provided the waiting customers a bottle of water, Starbuck employees running rounds taking orders. The wait is a total of 30 minutes with 5 minutes check out time.

So far my experience with the device itself is pretty amazing. Everything running very fast and with no delay whatsoever. Netflix iPad app running smoothly also.

Here's some pics of the unboxing:

The Box
The box and iPad case
In the Case
Syncing with my Macbook Pro
Tweetdeck Apps on iPad
Netflix Apps on the iPad
Watching "24" using Netflix Apps on the iPad (Good video Quality)
National Geographic World Atlas on the iPad
Email viewing on the iPad
So far that's all the pics I got for now. I'll take more pics and write more review as soon as I can get a chance to play with it.
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Posted 3 months ago

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Google Calendar’s Smart Rescheduler Searches For The Best Meeting Times

Another new feature from Google Calendar to make our life much more efficient.

 

The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. “Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar

product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”

The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).

All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.

Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.

Google Calendar image

 

Company: Google
Website: google.com/calendar
Launch Date: April 13, 2006

Google Calendar lets users create events, manage multiple calendars and share calendars with teams and groups. Users can view their calendar by day, week or month. Calendar has a “Quick Add” feature that lets you input natural language entries… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

 

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Posted 4 months ago

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