Facebook Just Fooled You with this Notification to Sign-Up for Saving Free Basics in India

Facebook’s Free Basics has been on fire in India since its inception. First it started with internet.org but even it got a lot of negative response from experts all over the country as it was violating Net Neutrality. And now again Facebook has come up with Free Basics in collaboration with Reliance. Again all the experts started firing Free Basics as it was violation Net Neutrality in the country.

• If you are new here is everything you need to know about Net Neutrality.

In an attempt to save Free Basics from getting banned in India, Facebook came up with this strategy by sending notifications to all the people and signing up in support of Free Basics.

What does the notification say?

This notification is very persistent, and it comes whenever one of your friends signs up without his/her knowledge. A regular internet user who doesn’t has much knowledge about Net Neutrality and Free Basics tend to fall for it and signs up in support of Free Basics which you shouldn’t.
When you click on the notification you see a sign up page in support to Free Basics which reads as:

“To the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, I support digital equality for India. Free Basics provides free access to essential internet services like communication, education, healthcare, employment, farming and more. It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online. And it’s open to all people, developers and mobile operators. With 1 billion Indian people not yet connected, shutting down Free Basics would hurt our country’s most vulnerable people. I support Free Basics – and digital equality for India. Thank you.”

Free Basics gives people access to vital services like communication, healthcare, education, job listings and farming information – all without data charges. It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online. And it’s open to all people, developers and mobile operators.

But Free Basics is in danger in India. A small, vocal group of critics are lobbying to have Free Basics banned on the basis of net neutrality. Instead of giving people access to some basic internet services for free, they demand that people pay equally to access all internet services – even if that means 1 billion people can’t afford to access any services.

The TRAI is holding a public debate that will affect whether free basic internet services can be offered in India. Your voice is important for the 1 billion Indian people who are not yet connected and don’t have a voice on the internet.

Unless you take action now, India could lose access to free basic internet services, delaying progress towards digital equality for all Indians. Tell the TRAI you support Free Basics and digital equality in India.

Read the last line: “I support Free Basics – and digital equality for India.”

Facebook was taking an unfair advantage using this Campaign by fooling most of the people by setting up this trap. When a typical internet user gets this notification he/she might feel that their friends have supported the cause and they also tend to do the same thinking that they are doing it for a good reason which is not.

We guess by this time most of you people fell for this well planned trap. Now, visit Savetheinternet and sign petition to ban free basics completely and save Net Neutrality.

However, as per the latest news, Reliance was suggested to put Facebook’s Free Basics on Hold. Do let us know what do you think about this in your comments below.

– See more at: http://www.alltechbuzz.net/facebook-free-basics-campaign/#sthash.R3A45pDa.dpuf

The Top Android Apps on the Google Play Store

This is an updated list of the top Android Apps that have amassed more than 50,000,000 downloads on the official Google Play store. The data has been screen-scraped from Google Web Search and the Google Play store. You can also download the raw data as an Excel sheet.

Legend: The blue bars indicate the average user rating of an app while orange reflects the total number of users that have rated that app on the App Store.

Android App Install Base 500 million to 1 billion Gmail YouTube Google Play services Maps Facebook 100 million – 500 million GO Launcher EX Twitter Viber Facebook Messenger Voice Search Google Play Books Subway Surfers Google Play Music Tiny Flashlight + LED Pandora WhatsApp Messenger Skype Fruit Ninja Free Dropbox Adobe Reader Angry Birds Talking Tom Cat 2 Free Street View on Google Maps Google+ Hangouts (replaces Talk) Google Search Chrome Browser Google Play Movies & TV LINE: Free Calls & Messages

50 million – 100 million GO SMS Pro KakaoTalk: Free Calls & Text Google Translate Temple Run SoundHound Tango Video, Voice & Text Yahoo! Mail Brightest Flashlight Free ® Advanced Task Killer GO Locker Pou Angry Birds Rio Hill Climb Racing Barcode Scanner WeChat TuneIn Radio MX Player PicsArt Shoot Bubble Deluxe Despicable Me Talking Tom Cat Free GROUP PLAY Shazam ChatON Kindle ZEDGE. Jetpack Joyride AntiVirus Security Pool Billiards Pro Opera Mini web browser Google Earth Flipboard: Your News Magazine

Quick highlights:

• Facebook is only non-Google app in the Google Play Store that has been downloaded more than 500 million times. The others are Gmail, YouTube, Google Play and Google Maps that are mostly pre-installed on Android phones.
• The 50m+ list has 65 apps but the one app that enjoys the highest average user rating is Brightest Flashlight, a free app that turns your Android phone into a torch.
• Facebook has been rated by over 8 million users while 4 million Android users have added their ratings for WhatsApps Messenger on the Play Store. No other app comes close.

Create a Public Folder Where Anyone Can Add Files

Dropbox and SkyDrive allow you to have “Shared Folders” where a folder is shared between all members of the group. Any member can contribute files to the shared web folder and such a thing is ideal for collaborative efforts like for sharing photos with guests after an event. People can view photos uploaded by other users as well as upload their own to the shared folder.

A limitation with these “shared folders” is that the folder owner must invite a user before he or she can add files to the folder.

OneTimeBox, a web app that went live at the recently concluded MIT hackathon(coding contest),  takes a different approach to shared folders. The app creates a disposable, public web folder where anyone can add files as long as they know the unique URL of your shared folder.

There’s no registration required and neither do you have to invite anyone as a contributor. Just share the URL of your folder with friends and they’ll have full access – including delete permissions – to the files in that folder.

OneTimeBox is built using Meteor.js and the source code can be found onGithub. Internally it uses the Filepicker API which uses the Amazon S3 service for storing files in the cloud. The app is neatly designed though you cannot add file to the shared folder from your mobile devices.

Create Price Alerts on Junglee

Amazon owned Junglee.com is probably the biggest price comparison website in India. Unlike other comparison engines that mostly focus on “popular” online sellers, Junglee lists prices from smaller stores as well that aren’t well-known brands but may sometimes offer better deals.

Get email notifications when prices drop

What some may not know is that Junglee offers price alerts, a useful feature that is not even available on its parent Amazon website. You can add one or more items to your watch list on Junglee and the site will send you an email alert whenever the price of a monitored product drops by 300 or more.

To set your price alert, open any product page on Junglee – like this listing ofiPhone 6 – and click the button (screenshot) that says “Price too high”. Next click the “Set alert” button and the product will be added to your watch list. You can manage all your price alerts from this page.

Junglee’s price tracker is reliable but a downside is that it will not show prices from the biggest e-commerce websites like Flipkart or Snapdeal. For them, you can always build your own Price Tracker using Google Sheets.

Find the Most Optimized Ad Sizes for your Website

Go long. Go wide. Go big. Google recommends that AdSense publishers switch to wider ad formats as more Adwords advertisers target these ad sizes, more competition among advertisers leads to higher eCPMs thus translating into increased earnings for the website owner.

The statistics suggest that the best performing banner sizes are the 336×280 Large Rectangle and the 300×250 Medium Rectangle. In addition to standard IAB units, the AdSense program now supports custom-sized ads which may serve even bigger rectangular ads. Will they perform better than the standard ads?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and what is working on my site may or may not be the most optimized solution for some other website. As a publisher, you need to run A/B tests on your site for about a week and only then you can you reach a conclusion based on the CTRs and CPMs of individual AdSense ad units.

Split Testing isn’t a new concept for most AdSense publishers but with the introduction of asynchronous responsive ads, the older methods no longer work. AdSense does offer a new feature called Experiments but that’s primarily for finding the most effective color scheme for an ad unit and not the most optimized ad sizes.

How to Split (A/B) Test your AdSense Ads

Here’s how you can perform split testing for AdSense ads on your own site. I am using the rectangle format for this example but the approach is similar should you wish to run split testing against vertical or horizontal units.

1. type=“text/javascript”>
2.  
3. google_ad_client = “ca-pub-xxx”;
4. google_variations = [
5. [“slot-medium-rectangle”, “display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px”, “width:300px;”],
6. [“slot-responsive”, “display:block”, “width:100%”],
7. [“slot-large-rectangle”, “display:inline-block;width:336px;height:280px”, “width:336px;”]
8. ];
9.  
10. google_style = Math.floor( Math.random() * 3 );
11. google_ad_format = ( google_style == 1 ) ? ‘data-ad-format=”rectangle”‘ : “”;
12.  
13. document.write (
14. ‘
15. + google_variations[google_style][2] + ‘”>
16. + google_ad_format + ‘ style=”‘
17. + google_variations[google_style][1] + ‘” data-ad-client=”‘
18. + google_ad_client + ‘” data-ad-slot=”‘
19. + google_variations[google_style][0] + ‘”>

The Best Online Tools To Know Everything About a Website

How do I contact the owner of a website? Where is a particular website hosted? What other websites are hosted on that same server ? Is the site using WordPress or the Drupal platform? What ad networks are they using to monetize a site? Is the site accessible from China?

The best tools to know everything about any website. Picture credit: Flickr

Here are some of the most useful online tools that will help you know each and every detail of any website. Let’s get started.

• just-ping.com — Use Just Ping to determine if a particular website or blog is accessible from other countries. Unlike other online ping services that have service in a couple of locations, Just Ping has 30 monitoring stations across the world including Turkey, Egypt and China. If the ping results say 100% Packet Loss, most likely the site is inaccessible from that region.
• who.is — If you like to know the contact address, email and phone number of the website owner, this free whois lookup service will help. This is a universal lookup service meaning it can simultaneously query the whois database of all popular domain registrars.
• whoishostingthis.com — Enter the URL of any website and this online service will show you the name of the company where that website is hosted. This may come handl if you need the contact information of the web hosting provider for writing a DMCA Notice or if you are looking to switch web hosts.
• popuri.us — You can use popuri to estimate the relative popularity of a website on social sites like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. It also display the Google Pagerank of a website and the Web of Trust matrix.
• chillingeffects.org — When there’s a copyright related complaint against a website, a copy of that letter is archived in the Chilling Effects database. Anyone can query this public database to know about all the copyright infringement complaints against a particular website.
• myip.ms — MyIP.ms offers a comprehensive report of any website or I.P. Address. You get to know about the hosting provider, the physical location of a website, the IP Address change history of a website and the DNS information.Netcraft also offers similar reports.
• ewhois.com — Ewhois, short for enhanced whois lookup, will help you determine other websites of someone. It looks the whois details, the AdSense publisher ID and the Google Analytics code of websites to figure out other web domain that may belong to the same owner. See example.
• builtwith.com — Use BuiltWith to know the technology stack of any website. It helps you figure out the mail service provider of a domain, the advertising partners, the tracking widgets that are installed on a website and whether the site is using any CDN like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud. See example.
• semrush.com — If you wish to analyze your competitor’s website, this is tool to go with. SEMrush will help you figure what organic keywords are people using to find a website, what is the site’s traffic and which are the competing websites. See example.
• whatsmydns.net — When you buy a new domain or switch from one host to another, the DNS records for the domain change and it may take a while to propagate these changes worldwide. WhatsMyDNS check your DNS records from various locations and it can check your domain’s A, CNAME and MX records.
• modern.ie — This online app will help test your website’s compatibility with various web browsers and detects coding errors that might cause problems. The site is integrated with BrowserStack so you can quickly know how your site looks on different devices and browsers.
• developers.google.com — Find the Page Speed score of any website on both desktop and mobile devices. The higher this number, the better. The Google tool also offers suggestion on how the score can be improved.
• ctrlq.org/sandbox — – The AdSense sandbox solves two problems – it shows the various advertisers that are targeting a website and it will also help you figure out if a particular web domain is banned in the AdSense network or not.
• httparchive.org — The HTTP Archive is a repository of all performance related metrics for a website. It keeps a record of the size of pages, their average load time and the number of failed requests (missing resources) over time. See example.

The 10 HTML Codes You Need to Know for Writing on the Web

The computer keyboard creates “dumb” punctuation marks that may not be acceptable in printed work but are common on web pages. It outputs straight quotation marks (“) while your writing may require curly quotes. You can only type hyphens using the keyboard while an em or en dash may have made your text look more elegant and professional.

HTML Entities for Punctuation

HTML Codes for Punctuation

Your keyboard lacks the keys for inserting the correct punctuation marks but there are simple HTML character codes, on entities, that you can use to mimic the typography of printed books on the web. Here’s a quick guide to using HTML codes for inserting typographically-correct punctuation marks in web writing.

Hyphens (-)

Hyphens, or half-dashes, are most commonly used to join together two or more words. You can type a hyphen directly without using any HTML codes.

• The next-generation iPhone is expected to become available in mid-September.
• The word email contains no hyphen but there’s one inside e-books and e-commerce.

Dashes (– —)

Dashes come in two sizes: the En dash (–) and the Em dash (—). The En dash is longer than a hyphen but shorten than an Em dash.

The En dash (–) is used for suggesting a range of numbers such as time periods, sports scores or page ranges.

• Our bank is open 8a.m.–8p.m., Monday–Friday.
• The players are disappointed after losing the match 3–1 to Spain.
• Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the 16th President of the United States.

The Em dash (—) is used to indicate breaks or pauses in a sentence, to quote sources or to separate a series of words within a phrase.

• We plan to visit London this summer — if the visa is approved.
• My three friends — John, Peter and Richards — are moving to New York.
• “Well done is better than well said.” — Benjamin Franklin.

Ellipsis (…)

An ellipsis (…) is a series of three dots (periods) and two spaces in a row and they are used to indicate omission of one or more words in the quoted material. If the ellipses follow a complete sentence, end that sentence with a period, insert a space, then the ellipsis (…) followed by a space.

• “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.…” — Shakespeare
• “I have a dream … they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr

Quotes & Apostrophes (‘ ’ “ ”)

Your computer keyboard creates straight quotes (or dumb quotes) though what you really need to use are smart quotes (or curly quotes) that can be easily written in HTML. The dumb quotes are best used for writing programming code.

Use double quotation marks (“ and ”) to identify the exact words of a person, to indicate irony or for writing titles of creative works.

• The last episode of “Friends” was the most-watched program of the year.
• Thoreau said that “that government is the best which governs the least”.
• They recalled the “toy safety” buttons as they were contained lead paint.

Use single quotes (‘ and ’) to indicate quotes within quotes. The right curly quotation mark (’) can also be used for smart apostrophe instead of the straight apostrophe.

• John said, “I told her, ‘the traffic will only get worse.’”
• Her answer was, “I’ll call you in the next hour or so.”

Prime (′ ″)

While we often use apostrophe (‘) or quotation marks to indicate units of measurement (like feet or seconds or degrees), the correct symbol is Prime that are likely slightly slanted quotes written as ′ (single) and ″ (double).

• The height of this Ferrari car is 47′8″
• I am currently at 27° 11′ 45.315″N, 78° 1′ 27.1668″ W.

Web Typography: Further Reading & Resources

Punctuation Mark	Symbol	HTML Entity	Code Decimal
Apostrophe	’	’	’
En dash	–	–	–
Em dash	—	—	—
Ellipsis	…	…	…
Single Quote (open)	‘	‘	‘
Single Quote (close)	’	’	’
Double Quote (open)	“	“	“
Double Quote (close)	”	”	”

How to Setup a Professional Branded Email Address

If I will give an option to you to choose an Email address from firstnamelastname@gmail.com and firstname@lastname.com then which one you will choose? Definitely the second one. Its Cool, looks professional and brand-able. These are called professional Domain names which you can setup easily once you Register a Domain name from any Domain Registering Site.

You can setup your Brand-able Email address at Outlook.com . You can get free personal storage from Microsoft’s Skydrive where you can store your Important files secured.

Guide to Setup a Custom Domain Name-

You can make a Custom Domain name from Outlook.com by configuring your domain’s MX and TXT Records. MX record will tell your DNS (Domain Name Server) that you will be using Microsoft Mail server and TXT will verify that you are the Owner of the Domain.

1- Goto Windows Live Admin Center and click on Sign In .

2- Enter your Domain name on the next page.
3- On the next page If you have a Microsoft account then login through it else create a new so that you can verify your Ownership of the email address.
4- Then if you confirm the request and accept Microsoft’s terms of service then you can add domains and manage then on Outlook.com
5- Now you will reach the Windows Live Admin Center’s domain control page where you will get change the MX and TXT record setting. You have to login to your Cpanel which will be provided by your Hosting Provider.
6- You will find the MX Record button there (there anybe slightly change in look at your cpanel) , if you dont find it then contact your Hosting Provider.

7- After clicking on MX entry button, select the Domain name from the dropdown list.
8- After that you need to select email routing method. Choose “Automatically Detect Configuration” there.
9- Add the MX Record string provided by the Outlook.com .
10- To protect email originating from your domain and landing into junk or spam, you need to configure sender ID by adding a TXT record with this value: v=spf1 include:hotmail.com ~all
11- You have to wait for DNS Setting to propage which usually take 30 minutes to 48 hours. You can check the status from Windows Live Admin center’s domain setting page.

12- After setting is done goto the Windows Live Admin Center and click on the active domain. On the left sidebar you will find option to manage accounts on your Domain.
13- You can create your Domain names from there now.
Thats it.

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Add the new Google Maps to your Website with Street View

I have written a new web app that should make it extremely easy for you to embed the new version of Google Maps in your website or blog. Available atctrlq.org, the apps lets you add basic road maps, satellite imagery or even maps with Street View Panoramas to your website (see video demo).

Getting started is easy. Search for a place and pan or zoom to make sure that the Google Maps area you’d like to embed is visible inside the browser window. The embed code, available in the lower left corner, updates automatically as you move around the map.

You may be wondering why would anyone need another code generator when the map embedding options are available on the Google Maps website itself. Well, there are two reasons.

One, Google Maps does not offer an option to embed Street View panoramas. You could do that in the old (classic) version of Google Maps but that feature is no longer available. With the ctrlq generator, you can add interactive street views panoramas just like regular Google Maps in one easy step.

The other reason is that the new embeddable Google Maps are personalized and thus look very cluttered to users who are signed-in to Google. If all you want to do is add a minimalistic Google Map in your web pages without any personalization features, you’ll find my app handy.

Internally, the app uses the Google Maps API to generate the embed code and wraps everything inside the IFRAME tag. With a little CSS, you can even make your embedded Google Maps responsive.

How to Sell your Music on the Internet

It is now easier than ever before to sell your music to a worldwide audience. I’ve been a musician since childhood, and while education, travel and then working for a living got in the way of my dream of becoming a guitar hero, I have never given up hope. Indeed, I’ve spent the last couple of years writing and recording an eclectic mix of songs. The next obvious step was to find some way to get them heard, which is where the advent of social media came into its own.

Where to Sell your Music Online

While MySpace is something of a musical backwater these days, despite Justin Timberlake’s intervention, it is still a place to post one’s songs and updates for a musically oriented audience. Much stronger and with a better sense of community though is SoundCloud. I began uploading instrumentals and songs to Soundcloud several years ago, but then opted for a paid account to get more comprehensive statistics as well as pretty much unlimited space for audio files.

Followers on SoundCloud are commonly fellow musicians and, as with all the other social networks, you get more out of them the more you put in — follow others, listen to their music and leave comments and more people will reciprocate. There is importantly also the option to add “buy” links to other services through which your listeners, audience, fans, even, might pay to download a track or two.

The first potentially profitable option I came across was ReverbNation. It is very similar to SoundCloud — you can create a profile and start adding your music, you can set a price or make it free to download. Also, you can either take all the profits after the site’s commission, or opt to share with a charity of your choice. In my case, I give a proportion of every sale to the Fender Music Foundation.

It may just be my experience, but ReverbNation seems a lot quieter in terms of community than SoundCloud and although I get a steady stream of profile views, few people seem to listen there. Moreover, ReverbNation messages users quite frequently with offers of music promotion, which seem to rely on one having paid for a “press pack” up-front.

The next site that appeared on my radar was BandCamp, which also lets you upload your songs and artwork and set a price. The big advantage is that your fans have the option to show their true devotion and pay more than the asking price if they really like a track or album. I have had some success with marketing on BandCamp, although, again I don’t think I’m ready to give up the day job just yet.

Sell Music on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play

Of course, in the music download world, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon MP3 and Spotify are the primary paid outlets and the most well-known among legitimate downloaders. Getting your songs and music album on to these music sites generally requires you to have proper music management and a record label but there are other ways to get listed as well.

The likes of music distribution platforms like CDBaby and TuneCore take an upfront fee and will act as a proxy for a record label to get your music on to iTunes and other online music stores. Your music uploads will appear in stores worldwide. These services, like Audiam also have a partnership with YouTube and you are paid a share of the ad revenue whenever your music is used on YouTube videos.

DistroKid on the other hand charges an almost negligible annual fee, does not take a cut of the profits and nevertheless allows you to upload as many songs as you like each year. It takes a few days for your tracks to propagate to iTunes, Google, Amazon, Spotify, Deezer and Rdio, but it is a very slick and simple process.

In addition, there is loudr.fm which is similar to DistroKid for getting your songs on to iTunes, Amazon, et al quickly and seamlessly, but with one important difference — it lets you upload and sell “cover” versions of other people’s songs by taking care of the licensing and royalties for the songwriter. The service charges no upfront fee but takes a relatively large cut of any profits from the download stores.

Music Distribution Services – Comparison

Service	Upfront Cost	Sales Commission	Supported Music Stores
BandCamp	None	15% of the total sales	None
ReverbNation	$19.95 per month	None	iTunes, Spotify, Google Music, et al
CD Baby	$12.95 per single	9% of the revenue from music sites	iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Beats Music, Shazam, Facebook, YouTube, et al
DistroKid	$19.99 per year	None	iTunes, Spotify, Beats, Rdio, Deezer, Google Play, Amazon MP3
Loudr.fm	None	15% of the sales revenue	iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and Google Play
TuneCore	$9.99 per year per single	None	iTunes, Amazon MP3, Google Play, Spotify, and more.

 

Obviously none of these music services will make you a guitar hero if you do not have the musical chops and even if you do, you will have to spend a considerable amount of time marketing and sharing the links to see any substantial return. When I was a youngster, going viral was all about getting spots and feeling ill, today, I would be very pleased to go viral with Spotify and to get a spot on the iTunes charts. Rock on!