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Google is Taking Over the World 2012 [Video]

Friday, February 24th, 2012

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Since its launch in 1996 Google as quietly emerged as the most versatile company in the technology industry.

In this video Anson Alexander discusses the different services offered by Google (also listed below) and how Google has avoided anti-trust claims thus far.

As Google continues to enter new markets and innovate at an exponential rate, the questions begin to arise as to whether or not Google can and will “take over the World”.

List of Google Products and Services: Google Search Google Chrome GMail Google Docs Google Calendar Google Sites YouTube Google Automated Car Google Heads Up Display Glasses Android Operating System Google TV Google Analytics Google Adsense Google Adwords DoubleClick for Publishers Blogger Orkut Google+ Google Earth Google Energy ($40 million in wind farms in North Dakota) Google Translate Google Wallet Google.org (To raise awareness for climate change, poverty and public health)

Posted in business, future, Google, internet, Technology, Trends, Videos | No Comments »

The Future of Technology 2012 [Video]

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Future Technology 2012

After the announcement of the Google Heads Up Glasses today, I felt it was a good time to film a short rant on where I think technology is leading us.

We can already ask our phone any question we want with Siri, we’re going to be able to see situational information about the environment around us with our glasses pretty soon and you better believe we’re going to have nano bots traveling through our bloodstream to help out our white blood cells in the near future.

What does this mean for life in 2020? How about in 2050?

Posted in anson, future, Technology, Trends, Videos | No Comments »

How Facebook Timeline Will Change Lives

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

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Now that almost everyone has received the Facebook Timeline update, I’m ready to publicly declare some of my own opinions on the update and some of my predictions as to how Facebook Timeline will change lives in the future.

Before I really get in to why Facebook Timeline is so revolutionary, I would like to preface by noting that there are some obvious privacy concerns with Timeline and there can be a creep factor involved if you have not properly configured your Facebook profile.

See also: How to Prepare Your Facebook Profile for the Timeline Update

All the creepiness beside however, Facebook Timeline is a really really powerful tool. I have been using it since September and I love the opportunity it provides in regards to looking back at my own life as well as the lives of those close to me.

Effectively Gauge the Direction of Your Life

As you become more active with Facebook Timeline, you can more easily see the evolution of your life, the accomplishments you’ve reached, the friends you’ve met and the places you’ve traveled. It really gives you a better idea of how you’ve arrived at whatever point in life that you’re currently at.

It also allows to take a look back and better understand how the decisions you’ve made have shaped the direction of your life. Many people say the best way to prepare for the future is to look at the past – with Facebook Timeline you can do that in your very own life.

Your Great-Grandchildren Will Appreciate Facebook Timeline

I don’t usually bring my personal life into my blog posts but for the discussion of Timeline I am going to make an exception.

My grandfather died more than a decade before I was born. I’ve heard stories of him and seen him in a few photographs. Other than that, I don’t have a great idea of who my grandfather really was as a person. If he had kept an active Facebook Timeline (impossible at the time), I would have a much better idea of who he was.

Obviously when posting on your Timeline you need to be conscious of what you want other people to know about you and what you don’t. Once you hide all of the stuff that you want to keep private, you’ve got an autobiography containing rich media content for the world to see.

Imagine if your relatives from 200+ years ago had Facebook Timeline profiles! How cool would that be?

Facebook Timeline or similar services will serve as great ways to remember loved ones. If you’r parents are on Facebook, you know that your grandchildren will know so much more about their great-grandparents than you know about your own.

Facebook Timeline could be displayed at wakes and funerals to remember the passing of loved ones. I also anticipate that Facebook will offer a way to publish your Facebook Timeline profile into a print version to have a hard bound autobiography of your life.

Final Thoughts on the Future of Facebook Timeline

As I mentioned earlier, the creep factor that comes along with Facebook Timeline is something that one needs to be aware of. Make sure you group your friends into different groups and post your status updates to only the groups that you would like to have access.

Once you get a handle on managing your privacy on Facebook Timeline, you can then sit back and enjoy all the benefits it allows. The older I get, the more interested I become in the lives of my passed family members and by keeping my own Facebook Timeline profile, I am confident that those who come after me will have a way to gauge who I was as a person, what aspects of life I was most interested in and what I enjoyed the most in life.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

Posted in facebook, future, history, social media, Technology, timeline, Trends | No Comments »

Cancel Spotify Premium Free Trial Reoccurring Payment

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

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For those of you who have tried the Spotify Premium Free Trial you may or may not be aware that after the 30-day free trial period is over, your credit card will automatically be charged for another month of Spotify Premium.

In order to avoid Spotify charging your card, you need to cancel the Spotify free trial before the 30 day period has ended.

Like most free trial cancelation processes, there are multiple confirmations that you need to go through to finalize the cancelation.

Top 5 Spotify Apps for 2012

Monday, February 13th, 2012

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Spotify announced the release of Spotify Apps Beta in November of 2011. The social music giant is taking a play out of Facebook’s playbook by allowing third party services to connect and interface with Spotify.

Since the release of apps for Spotify, users have had some time to test and provide feedback on the first batch of Spotify Apps.

See also: Try Spotify Premium with Free Trial

The applications for Spotify that were part of the Apps Beta launch included apps that provide suggestions for new music, information and lyrics on music currently being played and other applications to help improve your social music experience.

: TuneWiki

The TuneWiki apps for Spotify turns your social sharing service into a free karaoke machine as well. Play a song in Spotify and then head over to the TuneWiki apps to see the lyrics of the current song as the artist sings them.

This is a great addition to Spotify in case you can’t quite understand what the artist’s intended message is. Now only if you could turn on an “instrumental only” version of each song to host your very own Karaoke parties!

We Are Hunted

This app is great for those who want to listen to the most popular artists or artists that are rising up the charts.

We Are Hunted uses current ranking from the music industry to provide top charts for multiple genres of music including Rock, Pop, Hip Hop, Alternative and Electronic.

Using this app alongside the Billboard app ensures that you will never miss out on today’s most popular music.

Songkick Concerts

This app could have easily been ranked #1 in terms of usefulness when talking about apps for Spotify. The SongKick Concerts app will can through the artists in your Spotify playlists and notify you when and where your favorite artists will be playing live.

It can be a daunting task to aggregate data from across the web and determine which of your favorite artists are close enough to go see but this great app makes the task significantly easier.

Last.fm

The Last.fm Spotify apps automatically tracks your listening statistics to show which tracks you listen to most often. It also allows the user to create playlists based on commonly listend to artists and tracks.

The most useful feature of this app is that it will provide the user with song and artist recommendations based on your listening trends. This is a great app for those of you who enjoy the randomness of Pandora but also prefer the control over music selection that makes Spotify so practical.

Billboard Top Charts

This app is exactly what you would expect the Billboard Top Charts app to be. From directly within Spotify, users can view the current Billboard Top Charts and play songs directly from the app.

This app is a must for those who enjoy staying up to date with the newest and hottest hits. GA_googleFillSlot("InPostLeaderboard"); All Currently Available Spotify Apps: Last.fm

Personalized recommendations based on the music you play.

Songkick Concerts

Track your favorite artists so you never miss them live.

Billboard Top Charts

Billboard Top Charts highlights songs from the popular weekly charts.

Rolling Stone Recommends

Hear the best albums, songs and playlists, by Rolling Stone editors.

We Are Hunted

Add the world’s hottest and new music to your collection.

Top Lists

The hottest tracks, artists and albums.

Soundrop

Discover, share and listen to music with friends.

TuneWiki

Get synced lyrics and sing along to your favorite songs!

Moodagent

Instant playlists to match your mood.

Radio

Create radio stations of music based on any song or artist.

Pitchfork

The Essential Guide to Independent Music and Beyond.

ShareMyPlaylists

High quality curated playlist & a unique playlist generator.

Top10

Create & share Top10 playlists of the music you love!

The Guardian

Latest reviews from our critics.

Posted in app, apps, music, Products, social media, spotify, Technology, Trends | No Comments »

Facebook Loading Slow 2012

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

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Update 02/07/2012: Facebook has been rolling out a new photo viewer over the last week that may be contributing to the “slowness” of Facebook lately.

Regardless, the issue seems to be less widespread for the time being – any further developments will be added to this article.

Please inform me through the comments section below if you think the Facebook slowness issue has resurfaced.

Facebook Loading Problem:

As many of you have probably noticed, there seems to be a problem with slowness on Facebook today.

The problem is evident when both using Facebook itself or accessing a site that interfaces with Facebook’s API – any site on the web with a Facebook like button.

I have noticed on multiple pages not affiliated with Facebook, that they will not finish loading and instead, continue to display a “waiting for www.facebook.com” message in the page load status indicator at the bottom of my browser.

This problem has also been verified by some of my colleagues.

It is one thing for Facebook to be slow or have issues when a user is actually using the Facebook.com domain. It is another thing when almost every page on the internet is having trouble loading completely because it is hooked up to the Facebook API.

I will be keeping an eye on this issue throughout the day and updating this post when more information is available.

If you have any details on the issue, please leave them in the comments section below.

It would be great to hear how widespread and severe the Facebook loading issue is.

Posted in error, facebook, fix, internet usage, news, slowness, social media, Technology, Troubleshooting | No Comments »

Top 15 Cell Phone and Smartphone Quotes of All Time

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Smartphone Cellphone Mobile Quotes

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Whether you call them cellphones, mobile phones or smartphones, our modern pocket-sized communication devices are taking over our lives one phone call at a time.

As the capabilities of our mobile devices have increased, so has the discussion on what effect smartphones will have on our daily lives.

See also: Top 20 Social Media Quotes of All Time

Below is AnsonAlex.com’s list of the Top 15 Mobile, Cellphone and Smartphone Quotations of All Time. Some of them are informative, others are funny and some are just down right smart!

I tried to pick the shorter ones because I believe shorter quotes are more precise, eloquent and memorable. Enjoy!

1. “Three objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders: keys, money and mobile phone.”

– Jan Chipchase, Nokia

2. “A Eurobarometer survey of almost 1,000 children in 29 countries found most had telephones after age 9.”

– New York Times

3. “Cell phone dependency is now called compulsive communicating. Chain dialers call continually to get another fix.”

– Spokesman Review

4. “At one time, I hated the iPhone – but that was only before I used one for the first time.”

– Chris Pirillo

5. “Apparently we love our own cell phones but we hate everyone else’s.”

– Joe Bob Briggs

6. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.”

– Steve Jobs

7. “An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.”

– Steve Jobs

8. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

– Steve Jobs

GA_googleFillSlot("InPostLeaderboard"); 9. “The greatest polluting element in the earth’s environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment.”

– Dr. Robert Becker, two-time Nobel prize nominee

10. “Email, instant messaging, and cell phones give us fabulous communication ability, but because we live and work in our own little worlds, that communication is totally disorganized.”

– Marilyn vos Savant

11. “Clearly, the days when parents admonished their kids to use cell phones only for emergencies are over.”

– Ben Rogers

12. “It seems an intuitive understanding for most people that production [talking] on a cell phone is harder than comprehension [listening]. But the fact is that both result in poor driving performance.”

– Tate Kubose

13. “To be happy in this world, first you need a cell phone and then you need an airplane. Then you’re truly wireless.”

– Ted Turner

14. “You know, a cell phone’s like a guy; if you don’t plug him in every night, charge him good, you got nothing at all.”

– Catherine Coulter

15. “Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.”

– David Mitchell

Posted in cellular, General, inspiration, lists, Mobile, quotes, smartphones, Technology | No Comments »