Sunday, December 28, 2014

WhatSapp For Desktops

Just Heard WhatsApp Coming to Desktop O.o
WhatsApp is available on almost every mobile platform, including discontinued platforms like Symbian and Nokia Series 40, but has never developed a web client. New reports say WhatsApp will finally come to the desktop, after five years of availability. The new web client will use OAuth, sending a message to the mobile to verify to user on the web client.


Creating a web client has been on WhatsApp users wish-list for the past few years, even with the surge to mobile in developing nations, where WhatsApp is most popular. The web client should have extra functionality for the larger screen.

 Facebook has taken a mobile-first approach for its newest features, but still updates the web client regularly to keep up with new features. Facebook may have pushed WhatsApp to create a web client.
WhatsApp continues to be the dominant messaging app worldwide, with 650 million active users. WeChat, LINE, Viber, Skype and various other messaging platforms are all vying for attention.
It looks like Facebook wants to split the two messaging services, having WhatsApp in Asia and Facebook Messenger in the West. The social network does not seem keen to merge the two services together.

WhatsApp Coming to Desktop


Productive meetings - Steve Jobs




Justin SullivanAmerican businesses lose an estimated $37 billion a year due to meeting mistakes.

Steve Jobs made sure that Apple wasn't one of those companies.

Here are three ways the iconic CEO made meetings super productive.

1. He kept meetings as small as possible.


In his book "Insanely Simple," longtime Jobs collaborator Ken Segall detailed what it was like to work with him.

In one story, Jobs was about to start a weekly meeting with Apple's ad agency.

Then Jobs spotted someone new.

"He stopped cold," Segall writes. "His eyes locked on to the one thing in the room that didn't look right. Pointing to Lorrie, he said, 'Who are you?'"

Calmly, she explained that she was asked to the meeting because she was a part of related marketing projects.

Jobs heard her, and then politely told her to get out.

"I don't think we need you in this meeting, Lorrie. Thanks," he said.

He was similarly ruthless with himself. When Barack Obama asked him to join a small gathering of tech moguls, Jobs declined - the President invited too many people for his taste.


2. He made sure someone was responsible for each item on the agenda.


In a 2011 feature investigating Apple's culture, Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky detailed a few of the formal processes that Jobs used, which led Apple to become the world's most valuable company.

At the core of Job's mentality was the "accountability mindset" - meaning that processes were put in place so that everybody knew who was responsible for what.

As Lachinsky described:

"Internal Applespeak even has a name for it, the "DRI," or directly responsible individual. Often the DRI's name will appear on an agenda for a meeting, so everybody knows who is responsible. "Any effective meeting at Apple will have an action list," says a former employee. "Next to each action item will be the DRI." A common phrase heard around Apple when someone is trying to learn the right contact on a project: "Who's the DRI on that?"

The process works. Gloria Lin moved from the iPod team at Apple to leading the product team at Flipboard - and she brought DRIs with her.

They're hugely helpful in a startup situation.

"In a fast-growing company with tons of activity, important things get left on the table not because people are irresponsible but just because they're really busy," she wrote on Quora. "When you feel like something is your baby, then you really, really care about how it's doing."

3. He wouldn't let people hide behind PowerPoint.


Walter Isaacson, author of the "Steve Jobs" biography, said, "Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings."

Every Wednesday afternoon, he had an agenda-less meeting with his marketing and advertising team.

Slideshows were banned because Jobs wanted his team to debate passionately and think critically, all without leaning on technology.

"I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs told Isaacson. "People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."

3 Ways Steve Jobs Made Meetings Insanely Productive - And Often Terrifying


The Memory


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Memory is an essential human skill, relied upon on as a second-to-second basis for survival, yet still mysterious and poorly understood. Here are 9 things we do know about it, that you’ll wish you knew sooner.

1. Memory is enhanced by forgetting things first.


Conventional wisdom says that if you want to remember something, you should repeat it often, and keep it fresh in your memory. Husband and wife research team Robert and Elizabeth Bjork out of UCLA suggest otherwise. According to their research,

You need to forget a new piece of information at some level before remembering it in order to make that memory robust over time.

The more a new memory fades before you go looking for it, the more it’s subsequent “retrieval strength” improves.

2. Memory thrives on storytelling.


In his 2012 bestseller, Moon walking with Einstein, Joshua Foer tells tall tales of memory champions recalling entire randomly shuffled decks of playing cards, from memory in less than a minute. How do they accomplish these miraculous feats? They get really good at telling memorable stories to themselves while weaving in what they’re trying to remember. Because the human brain is built for storytelling,

The more things you can link together into a narrative, the more readily you’ll be able to recall them later on.

3. Memory is supercharged when new information is visual.


What do we typically associate with learning new technical information? That’s right, textbooks. But the least effective component of textbooks may just be the “text” itself. Yes, we generally find it easier and faster to process information in visual form (if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I’ll just wait for it to come out as a movie,” you know what I’m talking about). But does it help us learn better? Richard Mayer, psychology researcher at UCSB, indicates yes. His research demonstrates that:

Text paired with a relevant visual significantly improves the amount of information retained by novice learners.

4. Memory is made robust by a rich environment.


Some people swear they can write better in the coffee shop with the low hum of conversation. This may be true. As Benedict Carey indicates in his recent bestseller, How We Learn, a large body of psychology research shows that:

Studying in a diverse range of environments can actually improve the robustness of your ability to recall that information in the future.

It turns out, “find a quiet place to concentrate” may not be the best advice if you’re trying to build a memory that will stand the test of time.

5. Memory is not all about repetition.


You’ve heard it before: “Practice makes perfect.” In reality, this common phrase should be updated to say: “A specific type of difficult practice makes perfect.” Back to the Bjork research team again – they found that:

Repetition is key, but is most powerful when “interleaved” with unrelated information to make the brain work harder.

This forces us to have to go back and “retrieve” that information from our long-term memory stores each time we do it, strengthening that neural connection for future use much more than simply repeating something over and over (which offloads some of the work to your short-term memory). So when it comes to practice, there is a level of “desirable difficulty,” as they call it, to any task that will make it much easier to recall in the future.

6. Memory uses procrastination as an important tool.


How many times have you gotten frustrated with yourself for procrastinating on an important assignment? Well don’t get too upset, because research indicates that procrastination is actually an important tool for getting things done. When we’re not actively focusing on something, it allows your subconscious to work on ideas in the background while you do other things. This effect is particularly noticeable during menial tasks (ever wonder why you get so many eureka moments in the shower?) and sleep. Bottom line:

Your brain needs time to integrate new ideas with existing memory, allowing them to percolate and connect.

7. Memory relies on your brain to “fill in the gaps.”


When a memory gets stored in your brain you retain its key features (the shape of someone’s face, what shoes they were wearing, how hard the wind was blowing), but most else is pretty much a blur. But what happens when someone asks you what the clouds looked like that day?

When faced with a fuzzy aspect of a memory (or one that wasn’t actually stored in the first place) your brain tends to “fill in the gaps” with what it “thinks” most probably was the case.

That’s why eye-witness accounts are so unreliable. Each time a witness is asked to describe what they saw (apart from the fact that people tend to see what they want to see), their memory is immediately contaminated with new information that is being transplanted into the past.

8. Memory gets broken up in bits and pieces in different parts of your brain.


The most common analogy for information storage in the brain is that of a computer. A new string of bits gets written in a particular location, and stored in the hard drive. Turns out, that’s not really how it goes.

Your memory is more like a distributed filing system.

Smells go over here. Emotional intensity goes down there. Visual information gets stored here. And then it’s the job of the hippocampus to pull everything back together. To remember it in the same way your brain has to pull everything back together, like a puzzle.

9. Memory gets prioritized by emotion.


Ever wonder why your most vivid childhood memories usually involve an intense emotion (fear, rejection, elation, pride)? As John Medina, author of Brain Rules explains:

Emotions “attach themselves” to new information in the brain, acting as an indicator of importance.

The stronger the intensity, the more clearly and readily you’ll be able to recall that memory.

9 Facts About Your Memory That You Won’t Believe You Didn’t Know

Air Asia flight QZ 8501 travelling from Indonesia to Singapore has gone missing - reports

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