Articles
Spotify.com Hits the Spot for Casual and Serious Music Lovers
If you’ve found yourself settling for randomly generated music on Pandora or increasingly expensive tracks from iTunes, Spotify.com may be the answer to your woes. For most people Spotify.com may even eliminate the need for online storage solutions like Amazon Cloud Drive and the Amazon Cloud Player as well as household collections of CDs and cassette tapes. Free Finds Like Pandora, Spotify.com offers limited, free access to its library of 15 million tracks if you don’t mind the occasional advertisement. The key difference is that Spotify gives you instant access to any track in its library. Search for a song… Continue reading...
Google+ Adds Competition to Facebook
Did you see it coming? Google gathered all the pieces: G-mail, Picasa, YouTube, Google Chat, Google Calendar, Google Reader and so much more. They integrated everything under a Facebook-like layer, added even more features and customizable settings then launched Google+. Like it or not, Google+ is a strong contender for Facebook. After all, Facebook was practically an accidental success-rising out of the college social scene and quickly gaining popularity. Its rapid growth has resulted in privacy policy struggles and a moving-target interface. Clean, Sophisticated Interface on Google+ Google+ offers practically everything Facebook offers, but it comes with the instant sophistication… Continue reading...
Decoding QR Codes
For years, grocery stores, book stores and other retailers have been scanning bar codes or UPC symbols to ring up your purchases. And, over the years clerks have developed a variety of entertaining methods for getting their scanners to read the black and white bars. Smoothing out wrinkled packaging, shaking handheld scanners, and performing other jiggles and juggles should ultimately help a computer find the name and price of the item. Whew! That’s a lot of work. Back in 1994, the Japanese auto industry decided there should be a better way, so a subsidiary of Toyota developed Quick Response (QR)… Continue reading...
Search Alternatives from Google
Google has reigned as the dominate search engine for some time. And, when the iPhone and other smart phones came onto the scene, Google didn’t disappoint. Convenient, new on-the-go search options didn’t require typing and produced impressive results, including voice search and image search. It appears that positive user experiences on smart phones as well as the rapid growth of tablets, notebooks and other mobile platforms is influencing the features Google brings to its web browser-based search engine for computer desktops. Images.Google For example, more and more laptops and mobile devices incorporate cameras. You don’t have to hook up any… Continue reading...