Bored by Facebook?

This is a guest post by Daisy Atkinson. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

This is something I’ve been hearing a lot lately, and just mentioning the name to a friend while he was excitedly tapping away on Twitter, seemed to bring him up short. ‘Well, I never really use Facebook these days, there’s no need.’

Now this really shocked me. Throughout school and university we, like everyone else we knew, had communicated tirelessly through Facebook. The popularity of which caused some people to shut down their profiles during exam time just to avoid failing from ‘Facebook addiction’.

So why is interest for the network now waning? Facebook engulfed the popularity that Myspace once had, but now, with the advent of an entirely new generation of social networking tools, each with their own unique selling point, has Facebook had its day?

Facebook-Addicted-girl

Survey and Statistics
A poll conducted by Ipsos, taken from a sample of 1,032 Americans, revealed that just over a third were using Facebook with less frequency than they did six months before. Those polled described the reason for this being that Facebook had, for them, become ‘boring’, ‘not relevant’, and even, ‘not useful’. This is a shocking report when, in a digital age, the importance of social networks
has never been so apparent for communication, marketing and research both at work and at home. What is even more surprising is the idea that the most prominent social network of this digital era is now losing clients.

According to another survey of 1000 Americans, an astonishing 80% also admitted to never having bought products as a result of advertising on Facebook. From a business perspective, this is an extremely worrying statistic, especially for the thousands of companies using Facebook for the purposes of e-commerce.

It is to be expected that Facebook’s most popular age bracket for users is 18-34, as this encompasses the generation in which it began, however, what is slightly surprising is that Facebook retains its popularity with this demographic when there are far more complex social networks available to what I would consider to be the age bracket most fluent in social networking.

Complaints about the network often concern the enormous catalogues of photos that stagnate on profiles, or vast amounts of spam from the variety of games available on a network that was never designed to be an interactive gaming site. I must admit that I recently fell victim to Tetris on Facebook one boring Tuesday evening, but with my attention now firmly turned towards the burgeoning social networks, neither has held my attention in recent months.

There are other options out there that are not necessarily bigger than Facebook, but a hell of a lot better in satisfying your specific needs.

Twitter
Even one of Twitter’s directors recently stated that he still hadn’t figured out the basis of Twitter’s appeal, but in my opinion the key lies in its constant state of flux. The ability to post photos, videos, comments, links, and likes cover a lot of the popular aspects of Facebook but with much faster and simpler processes.

Facebook-sucked-me-in-help-me-get-out

Instagram And Facebook
Instagram is the new and more interesting approach to photo media, as it allows the user to have a more interactive relationship with their product by altering the outlook of photos. Facebook has played a blinder by getting involved with this application, as it has revolutionised the users’ approach to storytelling through photos, and has enabled Facebook to adapt to its requirements through Timeline, making the photos more accessible according to date and event.

Before the arrival of Instagram, unless there had been a particularly interesting event in the last few days, Facebook didn’t produce anything more appealing, visually or textually, than any other social network.

Of course the simplicity and size of Facebook has attracted, and will continue to attract even older generations wishing to publicise their antics online, but the functionality and appearance leave a lot to be desired for the more discerning social networker.

Facebook chat for instance, while reaping the benefits of its new arrival during what I consider to be its most progressive stage, is still one of the most limited real time conversation applications around today.

Despite its relative drawbacks, the social network has successfully retained a global following for a number of years, and through some trial and error periods spent optimising layout, has stayed ahead of the social networking game since its
creation in 2004.

If Facebook continues to create connections with developing applications like Instagram it may survive a little longer, but my prediction is that this generation of more demanding social networkers will flock to something new and shiny for a piece of the action.

Author Bio
Daisy Atkinson is an English graduate from The University of Liverpool. She currently works as an online marketing intern at Quick Lingo, for whom she
writes articles, manages their news portal, The Daily Polyglot, and operates their various social media platforms. Daisy also writes for FE News and for a number of other online publications.

10 Platinum Ways How Digital Electronic Signatures Have Altered Business And Corporate Dealings For The Better

This is a guest post by Anna Stacy. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Mull over the last decade and you’d witness that a vast majority of business and corporate processes have shifted to a more technologically rich environment – the World Wide Web – and that too at an astounding rate.

Today, over a billion people worldwide are investing progressively in business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and even government-to-consumer (G2C) processes on the Internet, which has become the ultimate breeding ground for various business brands.

With the emergence of fully automated processes, things have become even more convenient. Similarly, electronic signatures have enabled various business transactions online to be approved, accepted or signed without turning towards the traditional – rather more costly – ways of paper-based hand signatures.

Electronic signatures offer a paper-free way to digitally sign a document using a verified electronic symbol [image] or process associated with a document. To understand the process better, check out the ten platinum ways that have minimized much of our everyday business problems or issues pertaining to the driving an e-business more smoothly and productively:

digital-signature

1. With the automation of the verification or signing process using electronic signatures, it offers a more easy way to execute various transaction processes online and reduce the time it, otherwise, takes for businesses, governments, and citizens to make any sales or purchase orders, gather any management approval or even apply for a government program or job online.

2. You can easily execute any business deal or perhaps sign an important legal document sitting in one corner of the world across another safely and securely.

3. You can sign documents frequently and transfer it online. If, for instance, the technical security (such as encryption on transporting data online using the Internet) or your organization’s internal security (such as for clearing gateways) is breached, hacked or failed to offer the essential security, your data can fall in wrong hands and consequently, misused or mishandled for selfish gains. However, with electronic signatures, your documents are completely processed in a secure and automated environment.

4. Traditional paper documents are manually analyzed or carried out with limited computer support; however, unencrypted digital signatures can be analyzed in a completely computerized way, without any third party involvement of any sort.

5. Electronic signatures can confirm the identity of the signer, verify the genuineness of a document, and also enable non-repudiation from the legal perspective.

6. For business transactions, these electronic signatures can offer a greater efficiency and fast turnaround, while eliminate any costly printing requirements including paper cost, or time consumed in fixing typing errors. You can accelerate sales, track all business contracts in real-time, and also automatically store and manage all the signed agreements in a secure vault maintained virtually.

The manual process involves painstakingly going through the process of purchasing paper and that too of high quality, getting the document printed on it, then signing it manually and sending it via fax or scanning it and then emailing it and vice versa when received by the party. Not to mention the high maintenance charges that your printer, scanner and fax machines takes…to simplify the calculation, digital electronic signatures can reduce this entire process and cut down your expenditures cost to thousands of dollar per annum – that’s almost 70% of cost cut down for you. The cost of sending each item is virtually NOTHING! No paper cost, no stamps, no envelops or fax paper. Instead of relying on expensive courier services.

7. Many laws and regulations have been made in attempt to address the effectiveness of electronic signatures in order to accommodate any technology changes over time since, by all means, this digital process offers more flexibility depending on the assurance-level requirements for any particular business or personal work execution or deployment. A bill was passed by the US government to legalize this digital signing process in order to authorize contracts electronically, rather than people relying on handwritten signatures.

This isn’t just limited to the US, legislations concerning the validity of digital electronic signatures have been passed in the European Union and the European Economic Area, China, Switzerland, Turkey, Korea, New Zealand, Moldova, Peru, India, Russian Federation, Guatemala, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Malaysia, Uruguay, Japan, Philippines, Switzerland, and also United Nations Commission on
International Trade Law.

8. Using electronic signature capabilities, your organization can bring in more of the traditional paper-based processes online, reduce business costs, and invest the amount saved on more productive ways to expand the business. Where time is money, imagine all the valuable ways to expend this time that you can save and conquer heights of success and business prosperity.

9. Not only this, this process use highly advanced and 100% secure means which leads to gathering trust of more customers or key stakeholders and hence increase customer satisfaction owing to the sense of their information’s authenticity and integrity that you provide them with. The process involves information being delivered from one party to another, one desk to another or even one country to another without any human involvement. No one can, hence, copy the signature and use it for malicious self-desires by some third party intrusion.

10. Companies can easily dispatch product notices, bank balance statements, and other disclosures to their customers via the Internet in substitute to the time-taking postal
service.

If you haven’t switched to this innovative and highly-advanced process of document signing yet, you’re missing out on many added benefits that you can otherwise seek with process of digital electronic signatures.

Author Bio:
Anna Stacy has in-depth knowledge and experience of Electronic signatures solutions. Her basic forte lies within process optimization and process re-engineering, and has a long-term obsession with e-sign. She is a leading source of what’s hot and what’s not in the online digital signature space.

Adsense New Ad Format: 300×600 Ad Unit

Bigger Is Better! (Bada hai to behtar hai)

Google has finally announced yet another Large Skyscraper, 300×600 ad unit. Which has both Text as well as image/rich media ads.
Since this is new ad format, currently only text ads are running on most of the websites. Once advertisers start taking notice of this, and start exploiting the potential of this big beast, we can see some creative which take up half of the page!

From previous tests conducted by Google, bigger ads have been performing better than smaller ad units. So we guess, 300×600 ad unit would yield more.

You can see them on our site sidebar. Sometimes it looks so awkward, but we have to see it’s performance over time.
I’m looking forward to see image/rich media ads on our site. It’s an opportunity for brands to showcase their creative effectively.

Adsense-300x600-ad-unit

Get to it:
My ads -> New ad unit -> select 300×600 ad unit

Google Nexus 7 Tablet In India

Google is all set to launch its entry level tablet Google Nexus 7 in Indian market for a price tag of Rs. 19,999 which is almost twice as much as it’s dollar rate in United States(which is $199).

The 7-inch Table, built by Taiwanese manufacturer Asus, has the following features:

Google-nexus7

OS: Android Jelly Bean (Android version 4.2).
Processor: Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, which clocks at 1.3 GHz.
1280×800 resolution with 7-inch IPS display screen.
1GB RAM.
1.2 megapixel front camera.
4325 mAh battery.

1. 9hrs HD video playback
2. 10hrs Web browsing or e-reading
3. 300hrs Stand-by time

..and ofcourse supports large number of apps present in android market place!

It had a 8GB variant which was replaced by a 32GB variant for the same price in the US market. Not to forget, it also has a 3G variant.

Look at some of the offers present on Amazon for Nexus 7

YouTube’s New Feature: InVideo Programming

YouTube has launched InVideo Programming, wherein you could select one of your / or any video and showcase it on ALL your videos. Cool thing is, you can change this any time and it’ll apply to all your videos. Also insert a water mark like image in any corner of all your videos and help boost your branding.

It helps Drive viewership to a specific video and reinforce channel branding using InVideo Programming across all your videos.

InVideo-Programming-youtube

With InVideo Program, there are lot of possibilities:
We could promote one particular important video and get more eye balls to it.
We could include a special promo video, entertaining, educating as well as calling the user to take action and subscribe or do something.
We could agree to help in any good cause and all youtubers could include 1 video in all their videos, that would significantly spread the message, than simply changing the DP in social networking sites.

Activate InVideo Program Feature:
You’ll see it under the menu shortly, once it’s publicly available to all (YouTube Partners)

Until then, you can find it hidden inside settings.
So goto Settings: Under the “Channel settings” you’ll find “InVideo Programming”.

A Billion Users On Facebook!

Connecting a Billion people is not an easy job. Frequent outrages, law suites, drawbacks ..all part of the success, Facebook reaches more than a Billion active monthly user mark today.

Here is a message from its founder, Mark Zuckerberg:

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.

If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

We have been hearing this for a while: If you ask people, what’s the highly populated place ? People would say, Facebook!

As Facebook hits 1 Billion monthly active users, they have also released their first official ad



And a story of an Indian, using Facebook to get back his memory:



We all know how much time we spend on Facebook wasting 🙂 but still can’t deny that it’s a place most of us enjoy watching our friends and share stuffs about yourselves.

Make Energy and Light Effects in Photoshop With Custom Brushes

This is a guest post by John Lewis. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

So your fun little cover band decided to give it a shot and record an original album in your basement. While creating the cover art, you got stuck. You just could not find the right lighting effect, and the first album HAS to look cool!

Rather than scouring the internet, why not just create your own effects with the tools Photoshop already has? It really is a quite easy, and learning to manipulate the tools in Photoshop is always to your advantage.

Step 1:
Create a new new document , and select the Custom Abstract Brush. Set the size to 2500 X 2500px set to Grayscale with a 300 px/in resolution. Double-Check your settings below:

photoshop-brush-1

Step 2:
Use the Ellipse tool to draw a black circle at the center of the canvas. Right click on the circle layer, go to Layer Style and select Blending Options. First reduce the opacity to 0%, then add an inner shadow with the following setting:

photoshop-brush-2

Now go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and enter anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5px for the radius.

Step 3:
Add a layer mask by using a large soft black brush with the hardness set at 0% to remove the top left portion of the circle.

photoshop-brush-3

Duplicate this layer until the area on the bottom right darkens to your satisfaction.

Step 4:
Make a new layer below the circle, grab that large soft black brush again, and click once on the center of the canvas. Reduce the opacity to 20%, and now the circle should like this:

photoshop-brush-4

Press Ctrl+G to group all the circle layers.

Step 5:
Make a layer above the circles and fill it black with the Paint Bucket. Grab a soft white brush and make one spot on the center.

photoshop-brush-5

Now to have fun, go to Filter > Distort > Wave and have with the effects until you’ve distorted the circle to your liking. Apply the filter twice more by pressing Ctrl+F when you are finished.

photoshop-brush-6

Step 6:
Invert the colors in the image by pressing Ctrl+L, and setting the Layer Blend Mode to Multiply.

photoshop-brush-6

Add a layer mask and remove any unwanted areas with a large soft brush. Repeat this technique until you have the desired amount of this effect.

photoshop-brush-7

Step 7:
Make another layer, and use the Lasso tool , set the feather to 30px and follow the example:

photoshop-brush-8

Make sure at this point you have the foreground color set to white and background to black, go to Filter > Render > Clouds, and hit Ctrl+D.

photoshop-brush-9

Push Ctrl+L, and in the levels window increase the contrasts. Use the following settings;

photoshop-brush-10

Set the layer to Multiply, create a layer mask, and again remove unwanted areas.

photoshop-brush-11

Step 8:
Now for some more fun! Make a new layer with black as the foreground. Grab a round brush around the size 25px with a hardness of 100%. Go to Window > Brushes and use the following:

photoshop-brush-12

photoshop-brush-13

photoshop-brush-14

photoshop-brush-15

Paint over the canvas as you wish. When finished, go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and apply a radial blur with an amount of 2px.

photoshop-brush-16

Step 9:
Open this photo. Press Ctrl+L, invert the colors and set the Layer Blend Mode to Multiply. Press Ctrl+L again once at the levels window, follow the example below:

photoshop-brush-17

Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. You can now name your lighting brush!

Step 10:
Make a new layer and use that shiny new brush to click once over the canvas, anywhere you’d like. You can move it quite easily.

photoshop-brush-18

Step 11:
Create a new group, switch the Blend Mode to Color Dodge and create a layer. Use a soft white brush to paint on any of the areas you’d like to enhance and reduce the opacity as wanted.

photoshop-brush-19

Look at that! You’re going to have an all-star album cover! Your band is sure to make the Top 40! Well, maybe the local college radio station? You have to start somewhere, after all. Enjoy your new brush and the light effects. Rock on!

This post is written by John Lewis and he works at PriceCollate as a writer.