Tag Archives: Business Insider

13 apps that will make you wish you had an Android smartphone

FP: In most cases, developers prefer to make new smartphone apps for iPhone first, only moving to Android and other platforms once they get some traction.

There are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

AP Photo/Marcio Jose SanchezThere are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

In most cases, developers prefer to make new smartphone apps for iPhone first, only moving to Android and other platforms once they get some traction.

(Android owners who had to wait months for Twitter’s video app Vine know what we’re talking about.)

But there are some outliers. There are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

Ingress is a unique real-world scavenger hunt game.

 

Ingress is a unique real-world scavenger hunt game.

Google

Ingress is a sci-fi game that sends you on a scavenger hunt through the real world to find “hidden” virtual goodies.

Google developed the game. Here’s the plot:

“A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us.”

So, basically, you run around your town trying to find this illusive “energy” before the bad guys do.

Price: Free

Facebook Home turns your home screen into a Facebook photo gallery

Facebook Home turns your home screen into a Facebook photo gallery

William Wei, Business Insider

Facebook Home adds a Facebook-powered wrapper to your Android phone. Instead of seeing your normal lock screen, you get a beautiful slide show of your friends’ Facebook photos and status updates. You can comment and like those updates directly from the lock screen without opening the regular Facebook app.

Price: Free (Only works on select Android phones.)

DeskSMS makes sure you’ll never miss a message again.

DeskSMS makes sure you'll never miss a message again.

DeskSMS is a nifty app that allows you to forward text messages (and picture messages) from your Android smartphone to your desktop via Gmail, Google Talk, and the Chrome Web browser.

Price: Free

WiFi Analyzer lets you determine how strong a wireless network is in your vicinity

WiFi Analyzer lets you determine how strong a wireless network is in your vicinity

Have you ever been stuck on a slow wireless network?

WiFi Analyzer lets you see how strong networks are around you, helping you to pick the fastest, most reliable one.

Price: Free

Weather Bomb gives a data-intensive view of the weather on your Android device

Weather Bomb gives a data-intensive view of the weather on your Android device

Weather Bomb is an extremely detailed weather app that gives users seven days of data.

There are various views, but our favourite is the graph view, which gives the week’s rain, wind, and cloud forecast at a glance.

Other data includes rain, wind, cloud, temperature, pressure humidity and wave height.

PriceFree

Google Skymap lets you know exactly which star you’re staring up at.

Google Skymap is an open sourced app that lets you point your smartphone up at the night sky to decipher constellations, planets, and stars.

Price: Free

Llama Location Profiles uses where you are to change aspects of your phone like ringer and Bluetooth

Llama Location Profiles uses where you are to change aspects of your phone like ringer and Bluetooth

KnowYourMobile

Llama is a nifty app that automatically switches specific phone settings depending on where you are. You can automatically silence your phone when you arrive at your office or turn Bluetooth on at 7 a.m. to pair with your headphones for a morning run.

Best of all, the app doesn’t use your phone’s GPS, which can drain your battery. Instead, it uses cell towers in your area to figure out where you are.

Price: Free

BetterBatteryStats helps you spend more time unplugged.

BetterBatteryStats helps you spend more time unplugged.

BetterBatteryStats lets you analyze your phone’s behavior, pinpointing exactly which applications are causing your battery to drain. Once you know what the culprit is you can specifically fix the issue.

Price: $2.89

APP Lock password protects specific apps.

APP Lock password protects specific apps.

The premise behind APP Lock is simple: password protect installed applications with a password or pattern. Now you don’t have to be nervous when someone else is playing around with your smartphone.

Price: Free

SwiftKey 3 will change how you type on your Android smartphone.

SwiftKey 3 will change how you type on your Android smartphone.

Business Insider / Matthew Lynley

SwiftKey improves your productivity by helping you to type better.

Swiftkey gives much more accurate corrections and predictions than other keyboards. Very sloppy typing will make sense, even if you miss spaces, and SwiftKey 3 also predicts your next words.

Price: $3.99

Tasker lets you automate everything on your smartphone from settings to SMS

Tasker lets you automate everything on your smartphone from settings to SMS

Tasker is an awesome app that lets you tweak specific phone features like turning the flash on for alerts. You can even cancel specific notification pop-ups.

Tasker features more than 200 actions, triggers, and even an app creation section for making your own app.

Price: $6.49

Friday helps you discover new things to do

Friday helps you discover new things to do

Friday’s makers say that the app brings self discovery to your life by introducing the first passive auto journal.

Friday captures your entire life through your phone and builds a timeline of the things you do. You can even filter and search your life to find the exact information you want.

Friday allows you to share and log your favourite activities that you’ve been doing all day.

Price: Free

Robin is a great alternative to Apple’s Siri

Robin is a great alternative to Apple's Siri

Before Google Now, Robin was the first true Siri challenger.

We love the expanded capabilities of the newer virtual assistant. You can ask Robin for directions, local places, real-time parking, traffic info, gas prices, weather, your Twitter news, and much more.

Robin is disrupting the personal assistant arena, and we only hope that her existence pushes developers to make personal assistant apps feel more like true personal assistants.

Price: Free

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Today

Microsoft Pens 'Unusually Dramatic' Letter on PRISM

By Evann Gastaldo

Add Microsoft’s general counsel to the list of people not happy about PRISM and other government surveillance programs. Brad Smith wrote a letter to Eric Holder yesterday—a letter Business Insider calls “unusually dramatic” in its tone—asking the attorney general to convince President Obama that he should be more… …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home

Snowden Claims He's Torture-Proof

By Kate Seamons

What has a former Navy SEAL calling Edward Snowden “very naive”? This fairly wild statement, plucked by Business Insider from a letter Snowden wrote to a US senator that was published by the Guardian : No intelligence service—not even our own—has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue… …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home

Boston's a Ghost Town: Is That a Smart Move?

By John Johnson As the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev continues, one of the questions getting tossed around is whether the powers-that-be overreacted by shutting down the city of Boston. ( Business Insider rounds up some of the remarkable photos being tweeted of the “ghost town.”) Some samples: Nate Silver of the New…

From: http://www.newser.com/story/166536/bostons-a-ghost-town-is-that-a-smart-move.html

Twitter: The Carnival Barker of Investing

By Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.”Nassim Taleb.

When asked what I read, I always plug Twitter. It is one of the most effective communication devices ever invented, I usually say, with no exaggeration.

Twitter has become so important to finance that it is taking over the role of the Wall Street analyst. As news broke of the Cyprus bailout last month, Twitter was a mile ahead of Wall Street. Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider wrote:

Twitter is increasingly equaling or surpassing the value of traditional sell-side research from Wall Street analysts … Because the [Cyprus] news was so surprising, and because there’s so little time between when the bailout was announced early Saturday morning, and when trading begins Sunday evening, there’s been an aggressive thirst for information and analysis on what it all means. But the sell-side has been fairly slow, and the Twittersphere has come to the rescue.

He is right. When big financial news is breaking, all the money in the world can’t buy the information streaming from Twitter’s free iPhone app. It is indispensable. 

But there is another side of Twitter, as Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein recently wrote:

Toward the end of the election, I pretty much stopped reading Twitter altogether. It improved my life, and the quality of my work. There was so much partisan sniping and gaffe-driven garbage that reading almost anything but Twitter was a huge improvement in the quality of the information I consumed.

Most forms of information are slow-moving, Klein writes. “If I neglect my RSS feed today, the posts will still be there tomorrow,” he says. “The same is true for the books I’m reading, the magazines piled on my nightstand, the tabs open in my browser.” Ditto for conventional journalism. If I check WSJ.com at 4 A.M. or 9 A.M. or noon, I will find the same stories. There is no rush.

But on Twitter, not checking your feed for an hour can mean missing something important. Since there’s no easy way to see what everyone you follow has Tweeted in the last day — to say nothing of the last week — the best way to stay on top of what’s important is to become a Twitter maniac, glued to the screen all day. It’s as if you didn’t know when your favorite TV show will air, and there’s way to record it when it does. Not wanting to miss it, you sit in front of the TV all day, waiting for it come.

But that means having to sit through a lot of soap operas and realty TV shows. Which is exactly how Twitter can feel sometimes. And I feel it’s getting worse.

In decade’s past, top investors wrote their clients once a quarter, maybe even once a year. Top newspaper columnists wrote once or twice a week.

Twitter has sent those expectations through …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Galling Tax Loopholes that Cost the U.S. Government Billions

By Business Insider

Filed under: , , , ,

Paul McErlane, Bloomberg via Getty ImagesGoogle’s European headquarters are on Barrow Street, Dublin, Ireland. Google utilizes the “Double Irish” arrangement to minimize its U.S. taxes.

By Walter Hickey

It’s tax time, and most Americans are trying to figure how much they owe the IRS. Still, many corporations and wealthy individuals have already prepared for the big day by assiduously spending money in deliberate ways to minimize their tax liability.

The result is billions in lost revenue for the government every year.

These are just some of the most galling tax deductions that are perfectly legal.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

The 10 Best U.S. Cities for Retirees

By Business Insider

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Alex Proimos, Flickr.com
By Megan Durisin

Sunny. Walkable. And a low cost of living.

Nerdwallet recently came out with its rankings of the top 10 best cities to retire.

Ranking cities by factors like medical care, climate and cost of living*, they sought to find the kind of places where retirees can kick back and relax but still engage in a bustling city culture when they want it.

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*Cost of living used was based on the ACCRA cost of living index. The nationwide ACCRA average is 100. The numbers noted on each slide are percentages of that average.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

How to Stop Wasting Thousand of Dollars a Year at the Grocery Store

By Business Insider

Filed under: , , ,

Getty Images

By MEGAN DURISIN

One in three Americans could be wasting $2,600 a year at the grocery store, a new survey by recipe kit company HelloFresh found.That’s $50 per week thrown away on items that are either tossed out or never used.

Married couples are more likely to walk away with unnecessary items in their cart, the survey found. But even most singles do: 12 percent of them said they never overspend, compared to 7 percent of married couples.

Although the numbers are striking, Americans still spend a lower percentage of their annual income on food than any other country. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek chart shows the average consumer’s food expenses fell from 16.8 percent of annual income in 1984 to 11.2 percent in 2011.

Even so, $2,600 isn’t something most people can afford to throw away.

Here are a few ways to shave down some of your excess spending at the grocery store:

1. Shy away from brand names. The products with the grocery store’s own label are often just as good and usually come for a cheaper price.

Sponsored Linksadsonar_placementId=1505951;adsonar_pid=1990767;adsonar_ps=-1;adsonar_zw=242;adsonar_zh=252;adsonar_jv=’ads.tw.adsonar.com’;

2. Buy ingredients, rather than prepared products. If you have time to make your own pasta salad at home, you can save money compared to buying the finished product at the store.

3. Purchase produce when it’s in season. Apples cost the least during fall harvest season and berries are more of a bargain in the summer than the winter.

4. Don’t shop on an empty stomach. You’re more likely to overfill your cart in response to your stomach’s rumblings.

5. Skip the bottled water. At a dollar per bottle, the costs add up fast, and you can always buy a filter for your tap water, which flows for a tiny fraction of the cost.

6. Make a list. It takes a few minutes of advance preparation, but it will save you from wandering aimlessly down the pasta aisle, debating possibilities for your Sunday night meal.

7. Learn to love bulk. Buying larger boxes of cereals and crackers can typically save you a few cents on per unit cost, and your snacks will stick around your cupboards for longer.

More from Business Insider:

Simple Household Tips That Will Save You Thousands Of Dollars Every Year
22 Products That Really Do Last A Lifetime
Five Ways Rich People Live Frugally
http://www.businessinsider.com/household-tips-for-saving-money-2013-3

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

16 Big Bubbles That Are Getting Ready to Pop

By Business Insider

Filed under: , , , ,

Alamy

With stocks hovering around all-time highs, many are wondering if equities are the next great bubble getting ready to burst. But stocks aren’t the only things that look frothy: There are a lot of other asset classes that sure look like bubbles.

We’ve compiled a list of the assets that analysts now believe are flashing the warning signs of over-inflation.

If you think we reached the peak of bubble-calls last spring when Robert Shiller diagnosed a “bubble on bubbles,” think again.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget: I’m Not Reading My New Yorker Profile

By The Huffington Post News Editors

You might think Henry Blodget would be thrilled that an exhaustive profile in this week’s New Yorker touts his Business Insider for building an audience of 24 million unique visitors a month with its tabloid spin on the day’s business news.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post

Success Stories: What They Did in Their 20s

By Ruth Brown Did all successful people spend their 20s studying, scrimping, and struggling their way to the American dream? Some, yes—but others were in jail or working retail, as Business Insider reveals in a roundup of what today’s success stories were doing in their 20s: Investment shark and Dallas Mavericks owner… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home

How This Couple Bounced Back From $160,000 of Credit Debt in 3 Years

By Business Insider

Courtesy of Maria Nedeva

Filed under:

Courtesy of Maria Nedeva

By Mandi Woodruff

For most people, tackling the average $8,000 we carry in credit card debt seems like an unbearable task.What if you had 20 times as much to worry about?

UK residents Maria Nedeva, 50, and her husband, John, 64, found themselves facing nearly $160,000 worth of debt just three years ago.

“By Autumn 2009, I was getting a funny feeling that things are not right,” Maria told Business Insider. “When John told me [how bad things were], I thought, ‘My life has just ended and my existence has begun.'”

What’s interesting is that they found themselves in that much debt to begin with. Maria was an associate professor at the time and John worked as a statistician for a software consultancy firm. And even though John’s firm went under as a result of the financial crisis, Maria, who blogs about their debt journey at The Money Principle, admitted their money woes had begun long before.

Business Insider: Other than the financial crisis, how did a university professor and a statistician wind up with $157,000 of credit debt?

Maria Nedeva: We were rather irresponsible when it came to managing our money, but this is a simplification. I suppose, money was never in my world view. An example of this is that four years ago, I didn’t know how much I earn (this is not hard, I get a pay slip every month) or how much a pint of milk costs. Although I have always earned well, money ran through my life like water on really dry soil — without leaving a restorative trace. I suppose my husband didn’t care to manage the family finances either (we have always had joint finances). His attitude was, ‘We’ll earn a lot and it will all be fine.’

BI: How did you balance a household budget that was so clearly out of whack?

MN: For the first time in years we looked at our house insurance and changed it. We changed our life insurance. Competition is a great thing – being 15 years older than when we first got it we managed to cut the premium by half between us. We started cooking (for me it was a steep learning curve) and meal planning. We had to accept that we are ‘cooks’ not ‘chefs’ and buy products for recipes. This reduced waste considerably (we hardly throw away any food) and our food bill halved. I stopped spending $30 per day just to go to work (coffee, lunch and driving/parking).

BI: You also made the decision to take out a debt consolidation loan with your bank. What was that process like?

MN: We had been with the bank for decades and are very good customers … Hence, our bank was very good to us in return and after a discussion with our personal bank manager we had a £80,000 ($126,000) consolidation loan …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

This Is No Netflix Killer

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

When will the market learn?

Spotify is working on a streaming video service, sources tell Business Insider. The popular music-streaming website will also reportedly be considering original content in a move that will challenge Netflix and Time Warner‘s HBO.

Now, Netflix and HBO are singled out in the headline of the story, but Spotify would have an uphill battle if it actually went that route.

Bigger and more seasoned companies have tried to take on Netflix. Why should Spotify succeed?

Video killed the radio star
If the Swedish dot-com darling wanted to take on VEVO or Google‘s YouTube with a platform for music videos, that would make some sense. Spotify’s 24 million active users clearly love music, and serving up eye candy along with the tunes makes sense strategically. It’s a logical evolutionary step for a global online sensation.

The rub there is that VEVO and YouTube are free, and it’s not as if the ads are all that intrusive. It’s a fair trade, and Spotify has no business taking on YouTube and its billion unique monthly visitors.

YouTube isn’t broken. It doesn’t need disrupting.

It also helps YouTube — and its partnership with VEVO — that its parent company is the top dog in selling online advertising. Spotify is going to struggle there, as most of the ads on Spotify these days are from musical artists on the site who want to drum up listeners. Spotify lacks the brand advertising chops — much less the video advertising chops — to make a free site work.

It would probably turn to Google at first to monetize a free video website, and it would be dead in the water if it actually decides to charge customers for something that is readily available for free on YouTube.

Besides, does Spotify really want to remind users that they can create a YouTube play list of music videos and play it on their mobile devices for free as an audio alternative to Spotify itself?

You’ll pay for this
Spotify would naturally prefer to roll out a premium video website. Getting consumers so enamored with a service that they’re willing to pay for it is what sets Spotify apart from Pandora . Pandora may have a much larger base of 67.7 million active users, but only a handful of those earbud-donning music buffs are willing to pay for an ad-free experience.

However, even in the premium space, just 6 million — or 25% of Spotify’s users — are willing to pay.

It’s an entirely different world with Netflix and its 33.2 million streaming customers worldwide. Outside of Spotify’s home turf of Scandinavia, HBO isn’t even available unless you’re paying up for a costly cable plan first.

How does one raise the bar to justify a premium? How does one up the ante to justify a new service over what’s working elsewhere?

Proprietary content, depth of content, and access across devices are the keys to success at Netflix. Is Spotify ready …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

VMware Loses More Than $2 Billion in Market Cap on PayPal / Ebay Rumors

By Reuven Cohen, Contributor

VMware is having a tough couple days after news broke that PayPal was possibly dropping its software from more than 80,000 of its servers. The story begins yesterday when Boris Renski, the co-founder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultancy told Business Insider that PayPal is in the midst of replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers and that the number could grow to upwards of 80,000. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

By Reuven Cohen, Contributor

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultancy as well as OpenStack Foundation board member recently told Business Insider that PayPal is in the midst of replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer, Renski said. “The grand vision for project is, over time, they will replace all of their virtual infrastructure with OpenStack, not just PayPal, but PayPal and eBay, together,” Renski said. That’s about 80,000 servers across their data centers, he said. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Consumer-Facing Stocks Led the Dow Lower

By Matt Thalman, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Even though European officials agreed to a bailout for Cyprus, the terms of the agreement raised concerns with investors today. The small island nation will receive 10 billion euros, which will help recapitalize banks there. Well, all but the country’s second-largest bank, which will be shut down. The agreement not only calls for the closure of the bank but depositors with more than 100,000 euros will likely lose a large portion of their money.

The reason a country with a GDP of roughly $22 billion and fewer than 1 million citizens matters is that many fear the bailout model being demonstrated in Cyprus will soon become the model for all European bailouts. That fear could put stress on banks in Spain, Italy, and Greece if citizens begin pulling funds from financial institutions in those countries.  

With all the fear and uncertainty circling the markets today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed lower by 64 points, or 0.44%, and now sits at 14,447. The other major indexes performed slightly better as the S&P 500 closed lower by 0.33% and the Nasdaq dropped 0.3% today.

Top Dow losers
Shares of Walt Disney fell 1% this afternoon on the heels of a report that the board of directors of Hulu was looking for a buyer. Disney and News Corp. own the streaming video service, which has more than 3 million paying subscribers and generated $700 million in revenue last year.

Reports indicate that there are several buyers interested, but as we have seen in the past, if the price is not right, Hulu’s board will reject the offer. In 2011, a buyout offer was rejected. The possibility that Disney and News Corp. would each buy the other out has also been floated.  

McDonald’s also ended the day lower by 1.04%. Business Insider reportedly received a copy of an internal memo today, which paints a defensive picture of the burger king. The memo discusses the initial launch of McDonald’s McWrap, and claims that 22% of customers ages 18-32 would likely eat at Subway if McDonald’s didn’t offer the wrap. The company calls the wrap a “subway buster” and claims that the millennial age group wants variety and options. The wrap supposedly will give customers choices and the ability to customize their meal.

But the most shocking and damaging information for investors was that the memo stated that “McDonald’s was not in the top 10 of millennial’s (age 18-32) favorite restaurants.” This is a large demographic and one that McDonald’s needs to attract if it wants to remain the No. 1 fast-food restaurant for the next 10, 20, 50 years.

Johnson & Johnson lost 0.08% today after it announced a recall for its OneTouch Verio IQ blood glucose meters. The LifeScan unit of J & J, which makes and markets the device, said that at extremely high blood glucose levels, the device shuts off and does not give any warning to the user. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Built to Last: 22 Products That Never Need Replacing

By Business Insider

North Face coat - Photo: jnb_photos, Flickr

Filed under: ,

jnb_photos, Flickr

By Mandi Woodruff

In an age when the Next Big iGadget is always around the corner and people go through cell phones like pairs of socks, it’s nice to know there are some products that can never be replaced.

In a popular Reddit thread, more than 500 users shared the “trustiest” products they’ve relied on for years — and in some cases, a lifetime.

We rounded up 22 of our favorites.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Teens Reveal the Craziest Things They've Done to Save Money

By Business Insider

Teens Reveal The Craziest Things They've Done To Make Money

Filed under: ,

Tammy McGary, Flickr

By Mandi Woodruff

We speak from experience when we say that translating the jargon-filled, mind-numbing world of personal finance into readable, engaging material for young people is no simple task. But it looks like H&R Block and DoSomething.org might be on to something.

The two companies have launched a quirky new campaign to get young people motivated to save more and spend less.

At the center of the campaign, which features celebrity PSAs from Far East Movement and comedian Michael Kayne, is a simple, teen-friendly challenge: “The Craziest Thing I Did To Save Money.”

Via the site’s Facebook app, young people can either upload a photo or text (“WYR” to 38383) some of the craziest things they’ve done to save. And instead of “liking” or giving a thumbs up to photos, users can “Call BS” or say “I Believe It!” There’s also real cash at stake in the form a $4,000 scholarship for the best saving strategy.

Clever.

Submissions are accepted through April 30, but we had a great time picking out our favorites among the dozens that have already been shared.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance