Zappar adds augmented reality to Moonpig’s greeting cards

UK’s largest online greeting card company Moonpig and augmented reality specialists at Zappar have teamed-up to “change greeting cards forever.” The new service, available from Moonpig’s website, allows users to create greeting cards that incorporate their own videos and personal messages.

Here’s how to do it

First, pick a card on the Moonpig site, upload your video or personal video message, select a still for the front of the card and send to the recipient.

Recipient on its end can then bring the card to life using the Moonpig app (which is available for iOS and Android devices), with the uploaded video playing on a smartphone from the front of the card. Moreover, this clip can also be saved to your camera roll…

Pretty neat, though I’m not sure that many users will instantly jump on board. If you try it out, let us know what you think about it in the comments form below. Thanks.

Moonpig (FREE) [iTunes link] [Google Play link]

Zappar (FREE) [iTunes link] [Google Play link]

Voip Calls From Smslisto, Free Sms Service, Mobile Voip

SmsListo is nice voip provider, i think you may not aware of it. But i will its service, plan and offers are remarkable. Initially he had started his service with free sms service, in which you can send text messages to you friends worldwide. Then as site got good response he had started to provide voip call facility to fulfill its users demand. Now from SmsListo you can make pc to phone, phone to phone, mobile to phone, calls.

SmsListo you can not only send SMS for free around the world, call for free over the Internet to their online friends and make free Voip Calls to any landline phone in any direction from the pre-free list. (The list of free destinations is at the top of the page). Acquisition of credit gives you the right to 90 free days. This means that you yourself can create your own free list and to include the countries that are necessary for you. All calls to the chosen country for 90 days are free of charge. After the 90-day free period of their choice will be installed the usual rates of up to purchase a new loan.

New users can try free of charge communication quality SmsListo within 60 minutes. During this trial period, you can make free calls only to predefined Free directions. By registering your account and acquiring a loan, you can significantly expand the geography of their free Voip Calls over the Internet.

Now Mobile Voip application is also available on SmsListo. You can download this application software from the site www.smslisto.com. After downloading install it on you mobile phone and start calling. Recently it is offering totally free voip calls to certain destination. Here is the list of countries in which you can call for free ….

Argentina (Landline) ——————— FREE

Australia (Landline) ——————— FREE

Austria (Landline) ———————– FREE

Belgium (Landline) ———————- FREE

Brazil (Landline) ———————— FREE

Canada (Landline & Mobile) ————- FREE

Czech Republic (Landline) ————— FREE

Denmark (Landline) ———————FREE

Estonia (Landline)———————– FREE

France (Landline) ———————- FREE

Ireland (Landline) ———————- FREE

Germany (Landline) ——————– FREE

Italy (Landline)————————- FREE

Latvia (Landline) ———————– FREE

Luxembourg (Landline) —————–FREE

Norway (Landline) ——————— FREE

Panama (Landline) ——————— FREE

Portugal (Landline) ——————— FREE

Spain (Landline) ———————— FREE

Sweden (Landline) ———————- FREE

Switzerland (Landline) —————— FREE

Turkey (Landline) ———————- FREE

United Kingdom (Landline) ———— FREE

United States (Landline) ————– FREE

United States (Mobile) —————– FREE

Venezuela (Landline) ——————- FREE

Instruction:-

If you exceed the limit of 5000 minutes in one month, you will be charged as per the calling charges. Don’t worry calling charges will be given on the site, it will be cheap, but i think 5000 minutes is quite big talk time offer, don’t you think. It is enough talk time, i don’t think any voip user can exceed this limit. so dear readers enjoy making Voip Calls to worldwide with SmsListo. And don’t forget to use its Mobile Voip application.

http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Voip-Calls-From-Smslisto–Free-Sms-Service–Mobile-Voip/1184536

T-Mobile could sell its tower to raise money

In an aggressive move to raise some more dough, T-Mobile is looking at selling some of its cell towers to help finance its ambitious vision of an LTE 4G network.
Apparently, the fourth largest cell phone company in the United States has gotten the ball moving already, obtaining the services of TAP Advisors to explore a sale, according to Bloomberg. A potential sale could garner as much as $3 billion.
Although this move makes much sense, T-Mobile has yet to come out and make any word of a tower sale official, as the company stated to AllThingsD: “A tower sale remains under consideration.” The company also added, “T-Mobile USA continues to evaluate a tower sale as part of its self-funding strategy, but [we] have no specific plans to detail at this time.”
Reading between the lines, the Bloomberg report might not be off base. Ultimately, we may not know if T-Mobile is indeed planning to sell off some of its towers, but it does bring the suspicion of them working behind the scenes to raise cash.
Regardless, after AT&T failed to buy T-Mobile, the company has been refocused on vastly improving its network. This ramped up dedication grew when parent company Deutsche Telekom signed off on a $4 billion investment to help upgrade the T-Mobile network to support LTE. This caused the company to layout details of its 4G LTE expansion.
Thanks to AT&T’s botched deal, DT will be able to reuse current spectrum as well as spectrum gained as part of the breakup fee. Now the death star will be responsible for making T-Mobile way better, who would have thunk it?

FLA Foxconn investigation reveals multiple labor violations

The Fair Labor Association is back from a thorough investigation of Apple device supplier Foxconn in China. It found, as many have reported, numerous labor-rights violations such as long overtime hours and salaries that aren’t enough to cover basic needs for living.

The average monthly salary for factory workers ranges from $358 to $455. Over 60 percent out of the 35,000 employees surveyed by the FLA said this is simply not enough to support normal living expenses. Over 43 percent said they have either witnessed or been involved in a work-related accident. 14 percent of workers complain that they do not receive proper pay for overtime work, since pay is issued based on 30-minute increments. 29 extra minutes earns them nothing and 59 minutes earns only 30 minutes worth of pay. Normal hourly wages for those involved in the manufacturing of, say, an iPad are generally under $1.
Foxconn has agreed to dramatically revamp the working conditions. Effective immediately, all workers are now required to submit all work-related accidents and injuries that occur in the factory and will begin paying workers fairly for overtime and compensate the ones who have already fallen victim to the current faulty payment system. In total, Foxconn says it will fully comply with China’s laws for working hours and FLA’s 60-hour-per-week standard within sixteen months.
Apple has been heavily criticized for poor working conditions in supplier factories especially because of it has $100 billion in cash it could be spending to improve said conditions. The company is vowing to tackle all of the above issues as well. For a while, Apple has had a Supplier Responsibility page up on its website and recently started updating it on a monthly basis to show progress.
Apple gets the brunt of the disgust but to be fair, nearly every major device maker also uses companies like Foxconn to assemble its devices. That’s the dirty little secret about consumer electronics.
Full details of the investigation are available in PDF form on the official website of the Fair Labor Association.

Nexus tablet to be sold to consumers directly from Google

We all know that Google is working on a tablet of its own. We also know that it will likely debut within the next two or three months, possibly be cheaper than the Amazon Kindle Fire, and likely made by Asus. However, what we haven’t heard before today is that it looks like Google just may reboot the original Nexus strategy and sell the tablet directly to consumers.
The Nexus One suffered from low sales numbers for a handful of reasons. Google hadn’t provided proper support for the device and since it was only sold online, you couldn’t try the device before you bought it. On top of that, advertisement for the Nexus One was limited to online ads only. After the fizzle of the first Nexus handset, which really was a good phone, Google partnered up with Best Buy for the second generation handset. This handset turned out to be the Nexus S and saw better sales than its predecessor, especially when the Sprint version, the Nexus S 4G arrived on the scene.
The strategy behind the Galaxy Nexus is similar to that of the Nexus S 4G. Google partnered with Verizon to carry the device, which just makes a lot of sense. But what about a tablet? It would make sense for Google to offer the device directly, as long as a potential customer has a place to go to see the tablet in person first. Details are scarce as to whether Google will allow for this to happen but only time will tell.
The idea of a Nexus tablet sounds pretty nice if you ask us but if Google does exactly what it had done with the Nexus One and offers it online only, without a chance to try the device out first, it may have trouble finding as many homes as it potentially could. That said, if the Nexus tablet indeed is priced at $149, it may be easier to swallow if you’ve never touched it before.
What are your thoughts on this? If provided the proper customer support and priced competitively, would you consider purchasing the Nexus tablet if you can’t try it before you buy it?

Nokia Siemens Networks CTO: 4G to become 1,000 times faster, significantly cheaper by 2020

Wild predictions are being made about the future of 4G speed by CTO of Nokia Siemens Networks Hossein Moiin. He thinks that by 2020, significant advancements will be made to the technology that will allow for speeds to become 1,000 times faster than they are today while costing as little as $1 per gigabyte, which he says the average consumer will use up on a daily basis.
In order to accomplish this, radio technology will have to be drastically improved by the end of the decade. Moiin believes this is possible by evolution based on a factor of ten.
“We can get 10 times the spectral efficiency, 10 times the performance and 10 times closer cells,” he said. Phew, what a relief with all that speed, huh? According to Moiin, we’re going to need it. A lot. “By 2020 the average person will download one gigabyte of personalised data each day, and it will be delivered for less than $1 a day.”
Carriers are struggling to handle the unprecedented demand for data as it is. Luckily, Moiin suggests the very dense network will “increase the absolute cost but reduce the cost per bit.” Just like everything else, things naturally advance and become cheaper. Cheaper is something carriers can only aspire for at this time, because the amount of money it takes to support wireless networks nowadays is substantial.
By 2020, we’ll likely have (or at least be on the verge of launching) 5G wireless technologies and perhaps that’s what Hossein Moiin is referencing when he speaks of 4G that’s 1,000 times faster than today’s standards. He isn’t so enthusiastic about its development though.
“We will have to do it all again. It’s a lot of work. It gets harder and harder. The front end is much harder, the intellectual part.”

Bump Pay lets you pound fists and magically transfer money to friends

Bump Pay is a new experimental app from the makers of Bump that instead of pounding fists to share contact information, lets you share money.
It works by initially connecting to your PayPal account. Then you launch the app, type in the amount of money you want to transfer and bump hands with the person you want to send it to. Within a few seconds, you lose the money and they gain it.
It’s pleasantly simple.
Bump won’t charge you for any transfers as long as you have a bank account connected to your PayPal account and the app itself is free to download for iPhone and iPod touch. (Bumping iPads would be awkward and possibly costly.)
You might be asking yourself why you’d need to have an app like this especially if you’re the type of person to have money on them at all times. The best answer I can give is the same one Bump uses: it eliminates the common IOU.
There are a few downsides worth mentioning. I noted above that it’s free to transfer money if you have a bank account linked with your PayPal, but if you have only a credit card, a small percentage will be charged. Also, as handy as the whole bump-for-cash thing sounds, it takes two to tango just like the main Bump app.
If none of your friends have Bump Pay or a PayPal account, you won’t get any use out of the app. If you were to suggest for them to download it, by the time that’s done, you probably could have opened up the PayPal app and sent the money the more traditional way.
For many, Bump Pay is a clever new way to share money quickly and easily while you’re with friends. Sadly, there’s no Android version, but iOS users can indulge whenever they’re ready.

Angry Birds Rio gets another 12 bonus levels with more coming

Rovio is one crazy company that knows how to keep its customers happy. Just after launching Angry Birds Space, the Finnish mobile games publisher released another update for Angry Birds Rio. There’s a total of 12 new levels included, though in order to access them you’ll have to finish all levels and collect all fruit. No one said it’s going to be easy and I guess this is the way Rovio wants to keep its clients addicted to the lovely (and angry) avians.
But wait, that’s not all. Rovio will bring even more levels to Angry Bird Rio! The game’s Google Play page says: “this is not the final update for Angry Birds Rio, so stay tuned.” And we thought Rio reached its end of life 6 month or so ago.
All I can say is that other companies should learn from Rovio… Way to go guys!

ChannelCaster joins the personalized news app market

A company called OneLouder thinks there’s still money to be made in the personalized news market, currently dominated by magazine-like app/services like Flipboard and fancy news readers like Pulse. Their new app, ChannelCaster, has been released in the App Store, allowing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users to create and broadcast their own custom channels by combining news and other content from thousands of sources like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, news websites and blogs.
In addition, there are thousands of pre-populated Channels covering things like celebrities, YouTube sensations, news, sports, off the wall entertainment, etc. Moreover, each week a dedicated editorial team will select 10 “Featured” channels to bring new sources of news to the users. For instance, this week’s featured channels include Mad Men, Hunger Games and March Madness.
But that’s not all. If built-in Channels don’t work for you, you can create your own Channel based on any person, topic or trend by mashing together content from multiple sources updated in real-time. You can do this either directly from the app or from a web-based interface at channelcasterapp.com, which [web-based interface] is, let’s face it, easier way to accomplish this…
So how do we like ChannelCaster? It looks promising but I’ll keep using Pulse for the time being. However, we’ll make sure to check it out after some time and see how it’s developing…

Quickoffice launches its own cloud service – Connect by Quickoffice

Everyone’s about cloud these days so why would Quickoffice be any different. It isn’t and it’s launching a cloud service of its own – Connect by Quickoffice, allowing users to access and search across a number of cloud services and devices, regardless of operating system. At the same time, the solution provides users with a “fluid” online and offline document creating, editing, syncing and sharing experience.
Device wise, Quickoffice users can access files on a Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android smartphone and tablet. As for the supported services, aside from Quickoffice’s own service, Connect also works with a number of popular third-party solutions, including Basecamp, Box, Catch, Dropbox, Egnyte, Evernote, Google Docs, Huddle, Microsoft SkyDrive, Springpad, SugarSync and WebDev. Finally, you can share your files via social networks like Docstoc, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Scribd, Twitter and Yammer.
Connect comes with a native mobile application for iOS and Android, a PC or Mac desktop client and web portal for universal document and account management. The service automatically syncs documents to ensure the latest version is always available on any device.
When it comes to pricing, Quickoffice is offering Connect in three flavors: Basic, Premium and Professional, with the last mentioned costing $69.95 per year. During the limited time, Connect Premium will be available for a discounted price of $19.99/year (regular price is $44.99)…

Here’s why tablets are a retailer’s dream [Infographic]

Everyone and their mama are about tablets these days. Their owners use them to play games, get things done, browse the web and even shop online. The last mentioned type of activity is growing and retailers have started noticing, with some of them releasing special apps to make shopping easier.
In a new infographic prepared by Milo, we look at why tablet users today promise to be the most valuable retail consumers. For one thing, they do have a higher disposable income since tablet is not a necessity. Here’s how it all comes together. And if you need a bigger image, you can get it from here.