How To Erase Your Ex From Facebook

Nowadays it's rare to share something like a photo or status update on Facebook and not have it live on permanently.
But what happens when you want to rid yourself of that digital baggage in the case of a break-up or falling out with someone?
That's where KillSwitch, a new Android and iOS app launching today, steps in.
"KillSwitch is for anyone fresh out of a break-up looking to move on. What if they have a lot of pictures of their ex and they don't want to be reminded of that?" Co-founders Erica Mannherz and Clara de Soto told Business Insider. "KillSwitch is also for anybody that has had a falling out, be it a friendship or coworker, any relationship that you really don't want to have evidence or traces of on Facebook."
KillSwitch works by discreetly identifying a "target" from your list of Facebook friends, it will then find every photo, status update, and post related to you and the individual and will wipe all traces from Facebook without them finding out.

All images are then put into a hidden album that only the KillSwitch user can view. This is to make sure you don't regret doing something in the heat of the moment.

"We have a friend who deactivates her Facebook profile after every break-up," Mannherz and De Soto said. "We don't see KillSwitch as a vindictive tool but part of a greater healing process."
Killswitch is very simple to use because everything is done from behind the scenes, seamlessly.
The app is available for Android starting today and iPhone very soon, for $0.99. We haven't been able to test it, so we can't vouch for how well it works. So, buyer beware!
A portion of the proceeds will go to the American Heart Association so "broken hearts can help mend broken hearts."

Original Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/killswitch-app-2013-2#ixzz2KuI50FJq

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Trintme, A Classier “Bang With Friends,” Lets You Find Facebook Friends Who Want To Hang Out, Not Just Hook Up

If you kind of liked the idea behind viral sensation Bang With Friends, the controversial Facebook app that lets you privately nominate friends you want to hook up with, but balked at the idea of using an app that’s all about the sex, then you might find newly launched Trintme to have some appeal. The name, a combo of “true intentions,” is not as clever, sadly – seriously, people, stop making up silly fake verbs! – but the app is similar in spirit. And a little classier, too.
Like Bang With Friends, the app works on top of Facebook, allowing users to privately indicate their interest in their Facebook friends or friends of friends using one or more simple icons that express how they feel. These include things from the more platonic ”you’re cool” and the casual “let’s hang out” all the way up to the player-baiting “hook-up” and the seriously hopeful “romance.” The company worked with its advisors, Stanford Sociology professor Dr. Daniel McFarland and relationship expert Dr. Karen Ruskin, on the app and how to properly translate people’s feelings into these clickable emoticons.
Your true intentions are never revealed to others on your network, of course, or embarrassingly posted to your Facebook Timeline. Instead, everything is kept private until there’s a match. Then, both users are alerted via email and can proceed further if they so choose. After 30 days, your “trints,” as these digitally expressed feelings are called, are discarded so you can start over again.

Based in Mountain View, founder VS Joshi said he had the idea after catching up with a woman he knew from his past asked him why he had never asked her out when they were in college. “I thought of asking her out a hundred times,” he says. “But I didn’t take the next step because I didn’t want to spoil another good relationship.”
He candidly explains that his experiences with women didn’t typically go well back in those days. “When I took my next step, it was always a disaster. That’s okay, you get rejected. But my relationship with these girls was never the same after. There was always this awkwardness,” he says.
Feeling awkward while navigating the messiness that comes with living a real life? That sounds like a good app idea.
Joshi began working on Trintme about 18 months ago. During private testing, it seems there are quite a few people out there who can relate to his experiences – for example, a test in April saw 1,420 students register over 2,500 intentions on the site, and produced 301 matches. But here’s the promising metric: of that original user base, 60 percent returned the following month to the site to try, try again.
Right now, the idea is to see if the app can go big, not worry about the revenue. (Classic). But if things work out, there’s room for monetization options like charging users to see matches, working with partners on offers for date night, automatically resetting intentions monthly for a small fee, and more. None of these ideas are set in stone, however, and currently the app is free to use here.
Trintme is not the only app to run off with the Bang With Friends concept in recent weeks. UK-based Would Love 2 just launched a similar product. But Would Love 2 is an iOS app, while Trintme is just a website for now.
The company is basically bootstrapped, having won a couple of startup competitions following its participation in the Babson College Venture accelerator program. There’s just Joshi, two engineers and a designer involved.
Bang With Friends went viral because…well, it’s hilarious. It’s also easily understood. But there’s a chance that it wasn’t just the joke that caught on with people – it may have also tapped into users’ dormant desire for a more dating-focused layer to Facebook. If that’s the case, then there’s potential for a new breed of apps to carve out a niche in the online dating market – a market that doesn’t always work. I’m not sure that one with a name like “Trintme” will catch on, but stranger things have happened.


Original Source : http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/trintme-a-classier-bang-with-friends-lets-you-find-facebook-friends-who-want-to-hang-out-not-just-hook-up/

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How Instagram Can Help You Find Love

it turns out Instagram is great for more than just stalking friends and celebrities through their filtered photos.
Santiago Perez Grovas, @santiagopgm, and Taylor Dee, @thisgirl_, credit Instagram for their relationship, Jessica Fee of Mashable reports.
Before Instagram became incredibly popular, Dee stumbled upon one of Grovas' pictures featured on the popular page. But at first, Dee thought Santiago was a woman. 
"I thought, 'Wow, this girl's amazing! I love her pictures' for about four about four months," Dee told Mashable. "And then he posted a picture of himself and I realized he was a guy."
It wasn't until a few months later that Dee actually popped up on Grovas' radar. Grovas posted a competition to his page, asking people to submit photos of themselves and virtually "cheers with him."
Dee won that contest, and the two started chatting via Kik and FaceTime. They've now been together for almost eight months, even though Grovas lives in Mexico City, and Dee lives in Colorado.
But Dee and Grovas aren't the only couple that got their start on Instagram.
A couple from Seattle met on Instagram after one woman, Bailey Gate, noticed Ryan Williams' photos on Instagram, Joanna Stern of ABC News reports.
Another couple, Robin Coe and Matt Flemming, also found love thanks to Instagram.
"I think (Instagram is) such a cool window into someone's aesthetic and someone's life," Coe told ABC News. "Mat is an avid cyclist and he takes photos of what he is seeing, I got to see what he was seeing through his eyes. I got to know a lot about him just through his photos."

Original Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-instagram-can-help-you-find-love-2013-2#ixzz2KuG8v1Xv

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Here's Microsoft's Latest Attempt To Scare You Away From Gmail

Microsoft released a new video today in its "Scroogled" campaign against Google.
This time, it's warning people that Google will snoop on your Valentine.
The goal is, of course, to get people to leave Gmail for Microsoft's alternative freebie email service, Outlook.com.
Google is just "a habit" that people can't seem to break, Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s director of Online Services and the voice for the Scroogled campaign, told TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois. Weitz even admitted that his own girlfriend can't break the Google "habit."
He also admitted that Scroogled is a very negative campaign, although today's Valentine's Day video is less in-your-face than the one Microsoft released last week.
The bigger question is, aside from giving the world a chuckle, does it work? Do people really care that Google is analyzing the words in their emails so they can post more relevant ads, as Microsoft claims, particularly with a free service?
Our guess: probably not.
Here's the latest attempt to convince them they should:

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With Its Latest Update, Bump’s Mobile App Replaces USB Flash Drives

Bump, the flagship contacts, photos and file sharing application from the company by the same name, is today getting an upgrade on both iOS and Android in order to support file-sharing to and from your computer. The ability to “bump” your phone with your computer was first introduced in May 2012, but at the time it only supported photos. With the new release, users will be able to share any file from their phone to computer, and vice versa.
Bump Technologies co-founder and CEO David Lieb describes the added functionality, saying, “we’ve kind of turned Bump into an unlimited and ubiquitous USB drive. So you can throw your USB drive away, as long as you have a phone with Bump on it.”
For those of us who are earlier adopters of new technology, the USB analogy may seem a bit “old school” – after all, many of us have long since moved on to cloud services. But it speaks to the kind of users the company is targeting with its technologies.
“What we try to do is build products that ‘normal’ people can really engage with,” Lieb explains. “So yeah, you can do all these things if you’re set up on some cloud-syncing solution, but what we find is that normal people don’t really know how to set all that stuff up…we want to build stuff that has low cognitive overhead,” he adds.
In terms of the new file-sharing capabilities, Lieb predicts some fairly “normal” use cases, like backing up your phone’s contacts or saving videos from your phone to your computer, for example. These files are actually stored on Bump’s servers, though not publicly. Instead, users are given a URL if they want to share the files or photos with others. Most don’t do that, though – they simply click the save button to download the item they transferred to their computer.
Lieb says there’s no plan to turn Bump into a hosting service for files and photos, but it will continue to work with partners to integrate options for saving files to the wider web. Currently, Dropbox is the only one that has been integrated so far, but he says some users are now asking for Evernote, too.
Expanding upon Bump’s phone-to-web solution goes after another pain point the company has faced – the need to know other people with the Bump app installed in order to find a use case for the app. Originally, Bump offered a way for two people to share data between phones. With this Bump to computer feature, however, you can take advantage of the service all on your own.

While today, only around 5 to 10 percent of Bump’s users are “bumping” with their PC, that traffic is trending upwards, growing by 50 percent over the past couple of months. Bump to date has seen 125 million downloads, but it won’t reveal its current install base or active users. Lieb would say that a “large number” of those still have the app installed, and when the company pushes an update, over half of those users would relaunch Bump to see what’s new.
For what it’s worth, the app is still in good standing on the iOS App Store, where it’s currently ranked #24 in the “Social Networking” category. On Android, it’s #19. (source: Distimo).
The updated mobile app is available now for both iOS and Android, from the Bump homepage here.


Original Source :http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/with-its-latest-update-bumps-mobile-app-replaces-usb-flash-drives/

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Tech companies eye humanities students to fill workforce shortfall

AHMEDABAD: Technology companies are eyeing a pool of about 5.5 lakh students in close to 1,000 colleges of the state offering non-technology courses to meet the shortfall in trained non-technical workforce. A database of outstanding students from faculties like Arts, Commerce, Science, Education and Law will be prepared after assessing them according to their abilities. These will then be showcased to the industry.

Original Source : http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-02-07/news/36972593_1_lakh-students-outstanding-students-ites-sector

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