Tourists visiting India now have an innovative way to familiarize themselves with Hindi language through the hinglish project which is India Incredible initiative. A font design that super imposes roman letter on hindi character, tries to make it easy for tourists to read and interpret the meaning hindi script, though it may not help completely to improve hindi speaking skills.
In my opinion it is still a good start to help tourists because Hindi is not primary language spoken across states and reading sign boards on highway and cities in local languages makes it more difficult. This ad below commissioned by DDB Mudra Group also won gold lion award at Cannes Lions 2012 function.
Growing up to the sight of hand painted banners of advertisements and movie posters is embedded in our art culture and almost synonymous to street art of our country. As times progressed digital printing replaced this form of art now on the verge of being phased out completely. You would hardly spot hand painted banners across city skylines or walls and the artists who nurtured this skill are facing hard times.
HandPaintedType is one such project that aims to preserve the typographic art of street painters of India, this initiative is documenting and digitizing their typefaces which is a really encouraging concept, you can visit this site here for more details, We never happened to notice this missing piece of fading trend, if not preserved our upcoming generations would never be able to identify themselves with this form of art.
I am not into skateboarding, however really like the energy from moving frames of this video that captures striking features of Indian street life, don't miss the image of kid with running nose and a monkey cap. This video has being made by Boris Proust from Mo'Fo Productions, this video clip is just the teaser.
If you were to read a lengthy write up of Indian Music, you would probably stop before even starting to get into the details, check out this infographic image that depicts a colorful potboiler of Raga's into one image called Raag Rang.
I really liked this illustration of Lord Ganesha made by an artist from Thailand Saryth Chareonpanichkul, he has put up interesting collection of mythological illustrations.
Most images of Lord Ganesha depict him in serene form, this one looks more like the raudra swaroop of Ganesha. Check out the Deviant Gallery of this artist.
Additional Lord Ganesha images which you can set as wallpapers
This one is surely make you go ROFL, Dancing at Indian weddings in known to bring out hidden talent amongst the unexpected lot of guests too, this guy also seems to have found the right moment to dance like no one's watching all along, eyes closed ;-)
A common gripe of Android mobile users is poor battery life on which a lot has being written about and starting as Android novice user I managed to find some workarounds to improve my phone's battery back up effectively over the last year, I would like to share these tips which may help you as well.
Moving from Nokia N8 to Galaxy S2 and then Galaxy Note, my enthusiasm of migrating to Android was bogged down by battery issues, I gradually got along with this fact assuming maybe Android phones are supposed to last only with 1 day battery back up max. Read lot of posts on battery saving tips, tried almost all of them and downloaded many battery saving apps, task killers etc from Google Play store, eventually it did not help much and as a heavy 3G and Wi-Fi user I started thinking that I may have to just stop bothering about the battery issues.
There was a stage where I started losing my Galaxy S2 battery within 8 hour span, even with heavy data usage S2 battery used to last between 10-12 hours, Android OS has many background processes running which constantly use phone memory and battery power. Onscreen widgets help you to keep yourselves constantly connected with news/social networking updates that you like to have on your phone offering easy accessibility, add live wallpapers and plethora of themes and launchers available for Android that offer enough eye candy to pep up your phone home screen.
If you also happen to download lot of apps out of curiosity to try them or for any specific requirement, they contribute further to the list of battery munching apps which would exhaust your phone battery charge at a higher rate, downloading battery saver or task killer apps would not help in the long run. Android apps with poor API (Application programming Interface) settings are major of battery draining issues, here are some basic steps that you can follow with the phone first:
1) Network Settings - Avoid keeping your phone on 3G/Wi-Fi mode while not using data, In my opinion it does not make much difference on voice calls with 3G network and while you are on the move being on the 2G network is your best bet to save battery drain resulting out of poor coverage in many places, try switching your phone to flight mode during night time.
2) Screen Time-Out and Brightness - Maintain 10%-20% screen brightness for regular indoor use, with a screen time out duration of 30 seconds, you can increase brightness while watching movies, games etc.
3) Manage phone profile: You would get basic option in most Android mobiles to manage phone profile settings however it takes lot of manual effort to customize and switch between these phone profiles every time, however there are apps both paid and free to help you manage these settings, let's take a look at few of them.
Notable Apps
1) Setting Profiles (Paid and Free version): If you are looking to manage only your phone's profile settings, this app would be sufficient to offer ample customization options to configure temporary or automatic settings for managing sound, network, wi-fi, bluetooth, backlight or automate specific tasks.
2) Tasker(Paid): Tasker is one stop solution to manage actions and events on your phone beyond the profile setting and would require extensive input from the user which may feel like rocket science to begin with however it's like writing a visual script to manage your phone they way would think of it as a real smartphone.
3) Onavo Extended (Free): This App helps you compress data usage while using your mobile internet service, which in turn helps you remain within the limits your data plan, What it actually does by compressing media and images goes almost unnoticed in your quality of browsing, you get to see report of how much data you have saved in form of Twitter/Facebook post count, email data usage stats etc.
4) BetterBatteryStats(Paid): This app is a must have to save on android phone battery that would take some time for users to understand the real cause if your phone is getting discharged quiet quick, from the time you unplug your phone from charging, you can check 3 sections on this app.
a) Partial Wakelocks: Display's a list of service/app that has being running in minutes and seconds and the event count, any abnormally high listing on this report needs attention to that specific service or app that you may not be using very regularly.
b) Kernel Wakelock: Display's list of events again in minutes and seconds along with the count, however if you find any abnormal activity here, you can google the event name and you would find probable solutions on various android forums informing you how to deal with that particular process.
For example: After ICS version of Android was released for Samsung Galaxy Note in India, I noticed two events "fuel_alerted" and "l2_hsic" were preventing my phone by going into a deep sleep state and having a high background run count in my Kernel Wakelock list, Solution that worked for me was to switch the phone on Airplane Mode, switch it off and remove the battery for few seconds and re-start the phone again with Airplane Mode on return to your network profile again, problem solved.
However this takes some searching with Trial and Error to fix battery draining issues that Google is not directly responsible for as phone manufacturers tweak Android OS versions with a taste of their proprietary interface UI (example: Samsung's Touchwiz)
c) Other: When you choose the option other from BetterBatteryStats app, you need to see to it that your phone's awake and screen on ratio should be closer to each other rather than a big percentage gap between both of them which indicates that your phone is sweating it's processing and battery power even when the phone screen is off and you are doing nothing with it, and this is where both Kernel and Partial Wakelock screens would help you find the real culprit.
I would also mention few details around Bloatware that comes with Android mobile phones and differs with each manufacturer. These are apps and related files associated with events that do not cause any harm if you happen to disable or totally uninstall them. Rooted devices have easy fix with Apps that can be downloaded from Google Store that automatically uninstall all these apps from your phone, however if you do not want to risk voiding warranty on your phone with Rooting, ICS now offers option to this the easy way as well.
Go to Settings --> Apps and click on the "All" tab which would show a list of applications and processes that you can disable and here's a link to a guide of apps and processes safe to be stopped or uninstalled mostly common to Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note.
You can check the adjoining screenshot which shows my Note still left with 19% charge after a close to 16 hour usage, on which I pushed my phone usage extensively by using Wi-Fi/3G browsing, playing games for almost 2 hours, making few calls and all this without any battery saver app or task killer. Some times I am able to reach 20 hour mark with reasonable 3G/Wi-Fi, voice calls and no gaming on the phone.
Please leave your comments if you also happen to know additional ways of improving battery life on Android phones, I'll give a try to few of them myself and quote those solutions left by you.
After releasing a "Thank You mom" global Ad campaign for the London 2012 Olympics, Proctor and Gamble found the right time to release the "Here's to Dad" advertisement campaign along with a twitter hashtag #herestodad, looks like parents are getting equal attention here on the occasion of Olympic games, watch the clip below.
Here's a set of 3 images with quotes from Inception movie made by me, which was an intriguing piece of cinema that left some interesting life lessons to ponder about.
Lamborghini launches 3 luxury handsets and 1 tablet device, all headed for launch in Russian market. There was a time when we used to see such bling mods for Nokia mobiles, while this one is for Android. Lamborghini TL700 is a phone with gold and crocodile skin casing costing approx $2700, looks like a monster phone by the casing design.
Lamborghini L2800 tablet sports a sapphire crystal display, is not made out of gold casing, thankfully else it would have being one hell of a brick to carry around, estimated to cost around $2200, both the tablet and the phone are running on gingerbread OS version of Android.
What do you think, is Android really worth this bling? read more about this here for details on specs
Intel has being throwing weight behind ultrabook promotions off late and netbook manufacturers are still battling with tablets to survive in the race of portable computing, Asus came up with Transformer Prime to set a new trend in tablet computing.
There are many companies which thrive on iPad accessory market manufacturing portable computing cases one such company CalmCase has come up with an innovative concept of giving you ClamBook which is a laptop dock that would be powered by your Android or iPhone, you get a MacBook Air style device which is made of Aluminum. Their website does not mention about the exact screen size, however it has a 16:9 aspect screen with cinematic sound, ClamBook supports keypad gestures and shortcut keys for Android phone and sweetens the deal further for Motorola based phones that would support Motorola's webtop app.
Your phone is connected with a MHL cable that would allow ClamBook to draw processing power from the phone without draining battery of your handset and charging it parallelly,with Microsoft planning to launch MS Office for Android and iOS by the end of this year, this gadget looks to be a good proposition for computing on the go, with basic apps, browser and increasing muscle power of smartphone processors, ClamBook would work seamlessly with smartphones without the need of worrying anymore about finding a solution for meeting your basic computing requirements, Portable gaming from your phone would also be an interesting possibility to explore on ClamBook because the quality of games for mobile phones is also evolving faster that we could have though.
ClamBook is not available to buy right now, expected to be launched towards this year end, I would be looking forward to this one, do you think this could be a breakthrough device to challenge the rise of Ultrabooks and future of Netbooks.
Daft Punk fans enjoy this Fan made Tron Legacy montage pepped up with energizing techno music which match well to the action clips from the video, time to get PUNK'ed
Nokia is launching The Dark Knight Rises edition of Lumia 900 which would come loaded with claim gotham city game and a dark knight rises app, Nokia has a history of it's obsession with Batman which was evident from previous version of Nokia 5800 Express music phone that featured in the Movie The Dark Knight and prior to this Nokia also launched a clam-shell handset model Nokia 6205 which was loaded with content from The Dark Knight movie.
One of the Nokia handset designer also came up with a weird concept design N19 which never made it to the stores, and another Batman-Spiderman inspired phone as well. check out this article from TechCrunch to read more about this
Few years back your collection of best moments would have being limited to a huge album of photographs, we thought arrival of social media tools made our lives easier by giving us platforms to share these events from our life, however these tools pose a problem of fragmentation which results out of multiple services we use to share across social platforms for which A Toronto based start-up Epilogger is offering an online archiving service that aims to collate photos, blog posts, tweets, maps, check-ins from your event tying it together.
This service is aimed at ad agencies, event planners even regular users can utilize this service to bring together post event collection which could be tedious to go through if you are a social butterfly, why not savor the nectar of your sweet memories in one place.
Satyamev Jayate began on a high note exposing the known but dark truth of our country, Female Foeticide, beyond the killing of female fetus, at every stage of her life a girl child is subjected to hardships, discrimination and second grade treatment from society across all masses and classes, religion and castes, in order to deal with this situation we have a lot of NGO's and Private companies joining hands together and fighting for the cause of women.
One such name emerges in the form of The Girl Epidemic Campaign which is being supported by the NGO Nanhi Kali, dedicated to the cause of education for underprivileged girl child in India and by Mahindra Foundation. This public service ad campaign was shot by Ad Agency Strawberry Frog along with photographer Indrani from Aerofilm who have projected the atrocities committed against girls as an epidemic in a shaky footage style direction that works well with the theme, all they wanted to do is to help raising money to educate young girls by using creativity and innovation.
The Girl Epidemic Site allows you to donate as minimum of a Pencil set for $3 up to a complete package of school requirements for $97, kindly help spreading the word about this site and provide whatever support you can lend towards this cause. Watch the campaign video below
Nokia has traveled the longest mile in the history of mobile evolution, though in troubled waters today. This Finnish mobile manufacturer has a legacy which they can be surely proud of, It can go on connecting people in the coming years, if it is able to disconnect itself from Symbian OS completely now and mark a come back with awe inspiring technology, check out the Infographic pic.
If your fitness plans keep flying out of the window, and the couch potato feeling takes over all your motivation to stick to workout plans which looked promising while joining the nearest gym, you surely would be eager to try something which would get you back on that treadmill and get sweating.
A lot of us using smartphones now have a plethora of options in health and fitness based apps that are loaded with features which track your physical activity, allow sharing of achievements with friends on social networks, reward you with virtual badges on accomplishing your fitness goals, sometimes even this is not enough to get people exercising for their own benefit.
You now have that last chance of making good use of your gym membership. GymPact is a service that utilizes the gamification approach with real money that would get any fitness atheist on his feet working out to save his money. GymPact aims to incentivize your exercise commitments by engaging users to dedicate a minimum 30 minute workout per week and be ready to shell out $5 through your credit card in case you fail to meet this target, so where does the money from defaulters go? it pays up the one's who fulfill their exercise schedule. This service was launched by Harvard students Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer, they have got a good response to this service garnering 20,000 users within 2 weeks of launch. They were expecting a slightly longer break even period of around 6 months, which was achieved in just 1 month of launch.
You can sign up to this service online or download the iPhone app, GymPact is aiming to increase reach of this service by tying up with corporate partners, I feel this is really an innovative service of getting people on the right track with their fitness, on the lighter side of this service I think it's true that guys get jitters with the word "Commitment", however an equal fear of losing money on their credit cards would linger on their minds similar to the situation when they go out shopping with their girlfriends or spouse which is enough to get them serious with their fitness, ladies are you listening to this!
