Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Linkedin For Android



LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) is a professional social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 9 February 2012, LinkedIn reports more than 150 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Czech and Polish. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace. LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol "LNKD".
LinkedIn's CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. executive. The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com (Allen Blue, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Lee Hower, Konstantin Guericke, Stephen Beitzel, David Eves, Ian McNish, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri).
Founder Reid Hoffman, previously CEO of LinkedIn, is now Chairman of the Board. Bhushan Kasvekar is Vice President of Products. LinkedIn is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in Omaha, Chicago, New York, London and Dublin. It is funded by Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. LinkedIn reached profitability in March 2006. Through January 2011, the company had received a total of $103 million of investment.
In 2003, Sequoia Capital led the Series A investment in the company. In June 2008, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other venture capital firms purchased a 5% stake in the company for $53 million, giving the company a post-money valuation of approximately $1 billion.
In 2010, LinkedIn opened a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, received a $20 million investment from Tiger Global Management LLC at a valuation of approximately $2 billion, and announced its first acquisition, Mspoke, and improved its 1% premium subscription ratio.
In October 2010 Silicon Valley Insider ranked the company No. 10 on its Top 100 List of most valuable start ups. As of December 2010, the company was valued at $1.575 billion in private markets.
It was reported that LinkedIn earned $154.6 million dollars in advertising revenue alone in 2011. This number was actually higher than that of Twitter who earned $139.5 million dollars respectively.
In early January 2012, LinkedIn announced it would be expanding their offices into the Financial District of San Francisco. LinkedIn expects to move into their 57,120 square foot office space sometime in the Spring of 2012.
LinkedIn’s fourth-quarter earnings have recently soared. LinkedIn’s shares rose 9.5% to $83.68 in premarket trading. The increase in value is due to its increase in success in the social media world.
On February 24, 2012, LinkedIn announced it's acquisition of the start-up Rapportive, which created a browser plug-in that takes contact information from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and places them into Google's Gmail. LinkedIn has not stated yet how they will use the Rapportive's technology and talent.
In early May, LinkedIn announced it's 2012 Q1 numbers were up 101% to $188.5 million compared to $93.9 million in Q1 of 2011. Revenue for Q2 has been estimated to be between $210 to $215 million.
On May 3, 2012, LinkedIn announced it had acquired SlideShare, deemed "the YouTube of slide shows" for $119 million. It was stated that the purchase was done to give LinkedIn members a way to discover people through content. Slideshare attracts 29 million monthly visitors.
One purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. However, if the invitee selects "I don't know" or "Spam", this counts against the inviter. If the inviter gets too many of such responses, the account may be restricted or closed.
This list of connections can then be used in a number of ways:
A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed second-degree connections) and also the connections of second-degree connections (termed third-degree connections). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone a person wishes to know through a mutual contact.
Users can upload their resume or design their own profile in order to showcase work and community experiences.
It can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one's contact network.
Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.
Job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.
Users can post their own photos and view photos of others to aid in identification.
Users can now follow different companies and can get notification about the new joining and offers available.
Users can save (i.e. bookmark) jobs which they would like to apply for.
The "gated-access approach" (where contact with any professional requires either a preexisting relationship, or the intervention of a contact of theirs) is intended to build trust among the service's users. LinkedIn participates in the EU's International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles.
The feature LinkedIn Answers, similar to Yahoo! Answers, allows users to ask questions for the community to answer. This feature is free and the main difference from the latter is that questions are potentially more business-oriented, and the identity of the people asking and answering questions is known.
Another LinkedIn feature is LinkedIn Polls. In December 2011, LinkedIn announced that they are rolling out polls to their one million groups.
In mid-2008, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn DirectAds as a form of sponsored advertising.
In October 2008, LinkedIn revealed plans to opening its social network of 30 million professionals globally as a potential sample for business-to-business research. It is testing a potential social-network revenue model-research that to some appears more promising than advertising.
Applications
In October 2008, LinkedIn enabled an "applications platform" that allows other online services to be embedded within a member's profile page. Among the initial applications were an Amazon Reading List that allows LinkedIn members to display books they are reading, a connection to Tripit, and a Six Apart, WordPress and TypePad application that allows members to display their latest blog postings within their LinkedIn profile.
In November 2010, LinkedIn allowed businesses to list products and services on company profile pages; it also permitted LinkedIn members to "recommend" products and services and write reviews.
Mobile
A mobile version of the site was launched in February 2008, which gives access to a reduced feature set over a mobile phone. The mobile service is available in six languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.
In January 2011, LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, a mobile app maker that scans business cards and converts into contacts. LinkedIn plans to integrate this functionality into their services in the near future. In August 2011, LinkedIn revamped its mobile applications on the iPhone, Android and HTML5. Mobile page views of the application have increased roughly 400% year over year according to CEO Jeff Weiner.

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Sunday, October 9, 2011

Winamp for Android



Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features. Winamp was developed by American programmer Justin Frankel and Russian programmer Dmitry Boldyrev, and its popularity grew quickly, along with the developing trend of MP3 file sharing.
Playback formats
Winamp supports music playback using MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and WMA. Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC, and ReplayGain for volume leveling across tracks. CD support includes playing and import music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and burning music to CDs. The standard version limits maximum burn speed and datarate; the "Pro" version removes these limitations.
Winamp supports playback of Windows Media Video and Nullsoft Streaming Video. For MPEG Video, AVI and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Microsoft's DirectShow API for playback, allowing playback of most of the video formats supported by Windows Media Player. 5.1 Surround sound is supported where formats and decoders allow.
Media Library
At installation, Winamp scans the user's system for media files to add to the Media Library database. It supports full Unicode filenames and Unicode metadata for media files. In the Media Library user interface pane, under Local Media, several selectors (Audio, Video, date and frequency) permit display of subsets of media files with greater detail.
Adding album art and track tags
Get Album Art permits retrieval of cover art, and confirmation before adding the image to the database. Autotagging analyzes a track's audio using the Gracenote service and retrieves the song's ID2 and ID3 metadata.
Podcatcher
Winamp can also be used as an RSS media feeds aggregator capable of displaying articles, downloading or playing that same content as streaming media. SHOUTcast Wire provides a directory and RSS subscription system for podcasts.
Media player device support
Winamp has extendable support for portable media players and Mass Storage Compliant devices, Microsoft PlaysForSure and ActiveSync, and syncs unprotected music to the iPod.
Media Monitor
Winamp Media Monitor allows web-based browsing and bookmarking music blog websites and automatically offering for streaming or downloading all MP3 files there. The Media Monitor is preloaded with music blog URLs.
Winamp Remote
Winamp Remote allows remote playback (streaming) of unprotected media files on the user's PC via the Internet. Remote adjusts bitrate based on available bandwidth, and can be controlled by web interface, Wii, PS3, Xbox and mobile phones.
Plug-ins
See also: Plug-in (computing)
In February 1998, Winamp was rewritten as a "general purpose audio player" with a plug-in architecture. This feature was received well by reviewers. Development was early, diverse, and rapid: 66 plugins were published by November 1998. The Winamp software development kit (SDK) allows software developers to create seven different types of plug-ins.
Input: decodes specific file formats.
Output: sends data to specific devices or files.
Visualization: provides sound activated graphics.
DSP/Effect: manipulates audio for special effects.
General Purpose plug-ins add convenience or UI features(Media Library, alarm clock, or pause when logged out).
Media Library plug-ins add functions to the Media Library plug-in.
Portables plug-ins support portable media players.
Plug-in development support increased Winamp's flexibility for, for example, a plethora of specialized plug-ins for game console music files such as NSF, USF, GBS, GSF, SID, VGM, SPC, PSF and PSF2.
Skins
Winamp running on S7Reflex skin.
Skins are bitmap files which alter the aesthetic design of the Winamp graphical user interface (GUI) and can add functionality, with scripting. Winamp published documentation on skin creation in 1998 with the release of Winamp 2, and invited Winamp users to publish skins on Winamp.com. As of 2000 there were nearly 3000 Winamp skins available. The ability to use skins contributed to Winamp's popularity early in MP3 development. With the increasing number of available skins, genres or categories of skins developed, such as "Stereo", "Anime", and "Ugly". Online communities of skin designers such as 1001Skins.com and Skinz.org have contributed thousands of designs; also at GnomeArt. Designers see skins as an opportunity to be creative: nontraditional examples have included Klingon, iPod, and Etch-a-sketch designs.
The Winamp skin format is the most popular, the most commonly adopted by other media player software, and is usable across platforms. One example is the XMMS player for Linux and Unix systems, which can use unmodified Winamp 2 skin files.
Winamp 5 supports two types of skins — "classic" skins designed to Winamp 2 specifications (static collections of bitmap images), and more flexible, freeform "modern" skins per the Winamp 3 specification. Modern skins support true alpha channel transparency, scripting control, a docked toolbar, and other innovations to the user interface.
Initial releases
Winamp was first released in 1997, when Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, formerly students at the University of Utah, integrated their Windows user interface with the Advanced Multimedia Products "AMP (MP3 Technology)" MP3 file playback engine. The minimalist WinAMP 0.20a was released as freeware on 21 April 1997. Its windowless menubar-only interface showed only play (open), stop, pause, and unpause functions. A file specified on the command line or dropped onto its icon would be played. MP3 decoding was performed by the AMP decoding engine developed by Advanced Multimedia Products co-founder Tomislav Uzelac, which was free for non-commercial use.
WinAMP 0.92 was released as a freeware in May 1997. Within the standard Windows frame and menubar, it had the beginnings of the "classic" Winamp GUI: dark gray rectangle with silver 3D-effect transport buttons, a red/green volume slider, time displayed in a green LED font, with trackname, MP3 bitrate and "mixrate" in green. There was no position bar, and a blank space where the spectrum analyzer and waveform analyzer would later appear. Multiple files on the command line or dropped onto its icon were enqueued in the playlist.

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Monday, October 3, 2011

Fruit Ninja



Fruit Ninja (known as Fruit Ninja HD on the iPad and Fruit Ninja THD for Nvidia Tegra 2-based Android devices) is a video game developed by Halfbrick Studios in Brisbane, Australia. It was released April 21, 2010 for iPod Touch and iPhone devices, July 12, 2010 for the iPad, September 17, 2010 for Android OS devices. It was released for Windows Phone on December 22, 2010. Also, in March 2011, versions for Samsung's Bada and Nokia's Symbian began to be distributed on their respective official application channels. Just prior to E3 2011 Fruit Ninja Kinect was released for the Xbox 360 on August 10, 2011 and utilizes the Kinect peripheral. In the game the player must slice fruit that is thrown into the air by swiping the device's touch screen with their finger or in the case of the Xbox 360 version, the player's arms and hands. It features multiple gameplay modes, leaderboards and multiplayer. An arcade version called Fruit Ninja FX also exists.
The game was well received by critics and consumers alike; as of September 2010 sales have exceeded three million downloads, with the total reaching four million in December 2010. Total sales across all platforms totaled over 20 million in March 2011. Reviewers felt that the low cost of the game combined with addictive gameplay yielded an excellent value. They further lauded the support and updates provided by Halfbrick, who brought online multiplayer, achievements and leaderboards to the game. Some critics felt the game's difficulty curve was uneven.
In Fruit Ninja, the player slices fruit with a blade controlled via a touch pad. As the fruit is thrown onto the screen, the player swipes their finger across the screen to create a slicing motion, attempting to slice the fruit in half. Extra points are awarded for slicing multiple fruits with one swipe, and players can use additional fingers to make multiple slices simultaneously. Players must slice all fruit; if three fruits are missed, the game ends, but upon reaching scores that are multiples of one hundred (i.e. 100, 200, 300, etc), the player will gain an extra life (unless they have not missed a piece of fruit already). Bombs are occasionally thrown onto the screen, and will also end the game should the player slice them.
A mode known as Zen mode allows players to seek high scores without the hindrance of bombs appearing on the screen. Also available is an Arcade mode in which players have only sixty seconds to achieve a high score. Special bananas are added to the standard fruit which have unique bonuses such as doubling points scored for a limited time, increasing the amount of fruit on the screen, or slowing down the movement of all fruit for a short period of time. In Classic and Arcade mode, special pomegranates are occasionally thrown on screen. In Arcade Mode, it is guaranteed that at the end of each game that a pomegranate will appear. Players can slice these multiple times to get extra points. Similarly, an ultra rare pitaya sometimes appears in Classic and Arcade modes which, if sliced, awards players fifty points.
Multiplayer gameplay is supported on iOS devices through Apple's Game Center application. It allows for competitive gameplay and features leaderboards and achievements. During multiplayer matches the player's blade and fruit are highlighted in blue, while the opponent's are highlighted in red. White outlined fruit are considered neutral and may be claimed by either player. White outlined fruit are worth three points. Players must slice their own fruit while avoiding their opponent's fruit. The iPad version of the game features enhanced graphics and also supports local multiplayer, with the screen being divided in half and each player controlling half of the screen. Players can also share high scores via Open Feint, Twitter and Facebook.
n an interview with GameSpot, Phil Larsen, Chief Marketing Officer at Halfbrick discussed the development of Fruit Ninja. He stated, "we tried a lot of different channels [...] indie games, PSN, XBLA, [...] and we basically did a lot of research about what was happening on iPhone and made a game that worked out pretty well." He then spoke of the company's brainstorming process for new games and said "Fruit Ninja came as part of [that] process, but we identified it as something special [and] decided to fast-track it through." Luke Muscat, Lead Designer for Fruit Ninja stated that he felt the uniqueness of the touch screen platforms and the short development cycle further motivated the Halfbrick to develop the game.
The game was first released on April 21, 2010 for iPod Touch and iPhone devices. It was later released as Fruit Ninja HD on July 12, 2010 for the iPad. On September 17, 2010 Fruit Ninja was ported to Android OS devices. On November 2, 2010 an Arcade mode was announced for Fruit Ninja which adjusted gameplay dynamics. It was released two days later on November 4, 2010. In December 2010 Lite versions of Fruit Ninja and Fruit Ninja HD were released for iOS devices and serve as a demo versions of the game. The game was also released for Windows Phone 7 on December 22, 2010.[4] Phil Larsen stated that due to the quick-release nature of iOS applications that a different marketing strategy is required. "You could have a game rise to the top and fall off in three days. You want to get it up there at the right time and have the right backup plan to sustain it with updates and further press" he said. On January 21, 2011 an update was released for the Android version of the game which added Arcade mode, leaderboards, and an ice blade to the game. There was also launched a Windows port by June 2011. A spin-off edition of the game themed to the Dreamworks animated movie, Puss in Boots was released on various devices.
In March 2011 Halfbrick announced a Facebook port of the game, entitled Fruit Ninja Frenzy. While no release date has been announced, Halfbrick has confirmed the game will be free to play. They described the Facebook port as "60 second gameplay with many powerups, unlockables and achievements". In addition to being a downloadable game on the Xbox Live Marketplace, a token for the game will also be included in the retail box of The Gunstringer, a Kinect title developed by Twisted Pixel Games. On August 24, 2011 downloadable content was released for Fruit Ninja Kinect. Entitled Storm Season the content brings three new Xbox Live achievements and a new visual theme to the game. In mid-2011, an amusement arcade version appeared titled Fruit Ninja FX. In March 2012 HalfBrick announced a partnership with BlueStacks to make Fruit Ninja's Android App available for Microsoft Windows worldwide. The program received over a million downloads in its first 10 days.
Fruit Ninja was well received by critics and consumers. The iOS version sold over 200,000 copies in its first month. In its third month over one million units had been sold. It passed two million units sold in September 2010, with the total reaching four million in December 2010. By March 2011 total downloads across all platforms exceeded 20 million. The Windows Phone 7 version was the top application downloaded the week of December 28, 2010. It was also named one of Time magazine's 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2011. The Xbox Live Arcade version moved over 739,000 units in is first calendar year.
Reviewers were mostly unified in the overall fun factor in the game. Levi Buchanan of IGN stated that the game was "fun, fun, fun" and "an instant pleasure". Slide to Play's Chris Reed agreed and felt that the game was perfect for when a consumer has short moments of boredom. He likened this to playing the game while waiting in line for something and stated "it'll slice the time in half." Jim Squires of GameZebo felt the gameplay was simple and addictive. Geoff Gibson of DIYGamer stated that he could see Fruit Ninja "becoming the next “big thing” on the App Store." Several reviewers praised price and Halfbrick's commitment to continual updates to the game. GameZone's James Pikover stated "perhaps the best part is that this game isn’t even complete." He then spoke of the future game modes to be made available and lauded the value-to-price ratio. App Spy's Andrew Nesvadba agreed that Halfbrick's commitment and updates were "nothing short of spectacular." He also praised the game's graphics and said they were "luscious". The reviewer from BuzzFocus praised the game's inexpensive price and said consumers "should really be downloading this app right now."
The game's scoring system and difficulty were received to mixed commentary. Chris Reed of Slide to Play felt that there should have been an option to increase the game's difficulty curve. Andrew Nesvadba of App Spy felt that since the bonus items were random the ability to beat a high score was made more difficult. DIYGamer's Geoff Gibson also shared this sentiment. James Pikover of GameZone, Geoff Gibson of DIYGamer and Levi Buchanan of IGN all praised the game's ability to boast scores to friends and family via Facebook and Twitter.

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