Google Drops Prices of Google Apps in India

Google Apps is $5 per user per month (or $50 per user per year) but if you happen to be in India, the deal just got a little sweeter.
Google has just dropped the prices of Google Apps in India by as much as 40% and you can now sign-up for Google Apps for 150 or $3 per user per month (or $30 if paid annually).
With Google Apps, each user gets a 25 GB Gmail mailbox, Google Drive with 5 GB of storage, unlimited email aliases (nicknames) and a host of other Google products. Users can buy additional storage space for Google Drive starting at $40 per year for 20 GB.
You can either configure your existing domain to work with Google Apps (for custom email addresses) or you can choose a trial sub-domain of the form <yourname>.mygbiz.com to test Google Apps before switching to your custom domain.
Also, if you are a one-person company, you can still sign-up for Google Apps for free through the App Engine route.

Amazon Appstore for Android Available in India

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The Android Appstore at Amazon is a good alternative to Google Play for several reasons.
Amazon frequently has deals in place where you can download premium Android apps and games either for free or at a discount, and best of all, you can test drive Android apps in the browser without having to buy them.
The Android App store was previously available to customers in the US, UK, and few other countries but Amazon has quietly added India to that list as well. Android users in India can now download apps, both free and paid, from Amazon’s Android store as long as they have an Amazon account.
To get started, open your phone Settings and under Security, make sure that the option Unknown Sources is checked. This is important since Amazon will install apps to your phone from outside the official Google Play store.
Now open the link – amazon.com/appstorelanding – in the mobile browser of your Android phone to download and install the Amazon Appstore app (APK). Launch the app and log in using your existing Amazon.com account to start downloading apps. You can also download apps from Amazon’s website and your purchases will auto-download the next time you launch the Amazon Appstore app on your Android phone.
I tried downloading some free apps and a paid app and the transactions went through without a hitch. It automatically used the existing gift card balance in my Amazon account to pay for the paid app. The only downside is that the test-drive feature for Android apps on Amazon.com is still not live in India.
Also, you aren’t allowed to return apps after purchase. The Google Play store does however allow you to return apps withing 15 minutes of the purchase window.

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Parents can open the Settings options in the Appstore app to disable the in-app purchasing option.

Update: According to the app’s release notes, Amazon’s Android Appstore is now available in 200 countries including India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa.

How to Use Flickr as a Photo Backup Service

Flickr, the original photo sharing service, now offers 1 Terabyte of free storage space and that should be enough to store your half a million photos securely in the cloud.

Contrast this to Dropbox which offers 2 GB of storage space or Google Drive where you get 5 GB for your files and photos. Flickr offers 200x more space with one minor restriction – the size of individual photos should be less than 200 MB. That shouldn’t be a concern unless you are a professional photographer dealing with pictures in the RAW format.
Armed with 1 TB of space, Flickr is now a good candidate to house your entire collection of digital photographs. You may set the default privacy of your online photo albums (Flickr calls them sets) as private and and search visibility as “hidden” and thus no one else will be able to search or view your pictures stored on to Flickr.

Uploading your Pictures to Flickr

Flickr offers a browser-based uploader but it isn’t quite suitable for uploading hundreds and thousands of photos in a batch. There are however a couple of desktop software titles available that will make it relatively easy for you to transfer your picture collection from the computer to the Flickr cloud.
The official Flickr desktop uploader, available for Windows and Mac, was last updated in 2009 but it continues to work just fine under Windows 8 as well.
You can simply drag desktop folders on to the Flickr uploader and it will automatically extract all the image files from the folders and sub-folders. Also, you can go to Tools -> Preferences to change the default privacy before adding new photos to the upload queue.

Convert the Mailto Hyperlinks into a Contact Form

Websites use the mailto protocol to convert plain-text email addresses into hyperlinks. When someone clicks an hyperlinked email address,  it opens a new message in their default email program allowing them to quickly compose and send an email to that particular address.
Some website owners hide their email addresses but instead offer inline contact forms allowing visitors to reach them directly without having to use an external email program.

Convert Mailto Links into Contact Forms

SquareSend offers the best of both worlds. The service will auto-convert the mailto hyperlinks on your web page into inline contact forms and, to get this to work, all you have to do is insert a single line of JavaScript into your web template.
To get a taste of how this thing works, click my email address amit@labnol.org - this is a standard mailto link but instead of opening a message in your email program, you should see a modal contact form in the browser.
Getting started is easy. Create an account at SquareSend with the email address that you would like to use in your mailto links and then copy-paste the following snippet of JavaScript code into your blog /website template. That’s it.

// Replace with your own email address
Email Me: <a href="mailto:amit@labnol.org">amit@labnol.org</a>
 
// The SquareSend JavaScript will load asynchronously
// without affecting the load time of your web page
 
<script type="text/javascript">
  (function() {
    var ss = document.createElement('script'); 
    ss.type = 'text/javascript'; ss.async = true;
    ss.src = document.location.protocol + '//squaresend.com/squaresend.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; 
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(ss, s);
  })();
</script>

When someone contacts you via the SquareSend enabled mailto link, you’ll get a copy of the message in your primary mailbox and a copy will also be delivered to your SquareSend account. The service supports custom parameters allowing you to easily customize forms.

SquareSend is a freemium service. You can associate up to five different email addresses with your account and the free plan would allow you to receive up to 50 email messages per month.

Bonus Tip for WordPress users

The email address on your web page can be easily harvested by spam bots but if you are on WordPress, there’s a little-known function called antispambot that will hide your address behind HTML characters making it nearly invisible to spam bots.

// This will appear as a regular email address to humans but spam
// bots will only see some weird HTML characters
 
<a href='mailto:<?php echo antispambot("amit@labnol.org"); ?>'>
 <?php echo antispambot("amit@labnol.org"); ?>
</a>

Just use the above snippet wherever you wish to display your email address and you should be safe. Human visitors will see the regular email address while bot will see some weird HTML characters.

Make It Easier for Users to Complete your HTML Forms on Mobile Devices

Your website include a couple of HTML forms. There’s a search form, an email newsletter form, a contact us form and, in the case of blogs, there could be a comment form as well.
It takes a simple <form> tag to integrate any HTML form into your web pages:

<form>
  <input name="email" placeholder="Your email address" />
  <input type="submit" value="Subscribe to newsletter" />
</form>

Fill this HTML form on your mobile phone or tablet and a virtual keyboard will pop-up as soon as you highlight the text field of the form. There’s a little flaw though.
The form requires you to enter an email address but the important “@” or “.” symbols are nowhere to be found on the on-screen keyboard. You have to switch to the numeric layout to access the @ symbol.

We can however make one minor change to the original HTML form and it will force the virtual keyboard to show the “@” symbol and the “.” (period). Try this modified HTML form on your mobile phone (or tablet).
All we have done is added type=email to the input field of the HTML form and the mobile phone – be it an Android or an iOS device – will automatically show an email-input friendly keyboard to the user.

<form>
  <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Your email address" />
  <input type="submit" value="Subscribe to newsletter" />
</form>

The other big advantage of setting the input type as “email” is that your HTML form would automatically not accept values that are not valid email address. In older browsers, you would have to add the validation logic in JavaScript with HTML5 forms, that is no longer required.

And this isn’t just limited to email. HTML5 supports a variety of data types for the input field though the most interesting ones are URL (for entering web addresses in comment forms) and tel or number (for entering telephone numbers in contact forms).
Use the correct data type with your form fields and it will trigger the appropriate keyboard on mobile devices and you are also saved from adding manual basic validation to your forms. You may also consider using attributes like autocapitalize=”off” and autocorrect=”off” for input fields where users are expected to enter non-regular text.

WhatsApp soon to be banned in Saudi Arabia

image source: http://allthingsd.com/

WhatsApp may soon have to shut shop in Saudi Arabia, if the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) were to have its way. A communication platform tool like WhatsApp is very hard for the state to control. It also is increasingly used as a substitute for international calls and texts and this is a major revenue killer for the telecom companies.
Saudi Arabia has been trying to get a stronghold in controlling the cyberspace in the age of smartphones and easy Internet. The kingdom has also been trying to get the communication platform companies like WhatsApp to follow the rules laid down by the Saudi telecom providers. The telecom regulatory authority has already banned Viber, and WhatsApp could be facing a similar fate soon. The CITC chief Abdullah Al-Darrab said that WhatsApp could be banned before July 9 when the holy month of Ramadan starts.
CITC has not mentioned how these communication platforms have broken the kingdom’s laws. The choice is simple. Either these service providers should allow monitoring by the State, or they will be blocked in the country.
Incidentally, there are 15.8 million internet users in the country and the number of YouTube video watchers is three times as much as in the US.
One of the reasons for the clampdown on these internet service providers and communication platforms is that the telecom operators like Saudi Telecom Co, Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) and Zain Saudi are losing out on revenue on international calls and texts.
There are around 9 million expatriates in the country whoearlier provided good revenue generation to these phone companies. But now with the internet and communication service providers like Skype, WhatsApp and Viber, the revenue generation has fallen as a majority chunk of these people are using the internet to make calls back home in other countries.

Battery Technology To Get A Boost With Wearable Technology

Image Courtesy: http://gadgetsteria.com/

The erstwhile unglamorous battery may find its place in the limelight in the near future. Wearable technology like bracelets which can monitor physical movements, wearable glasses and clothing with in-built sensors all use the battery technology, and are hailed to be the next big technology revolution, experts say. Forrester Research of the US conducted a study in which 5% of the people said that they use some form of wearable device that monitors movement. Of all the people who participated in the research, 28% said that they use wearable computers on their wrists, and 29% said they clip on wearable devices on to their clothing. 12% of the participants said that they were interested in trying out the wearable glasses.
All this wearable computer technology runs on battery, and giving it a technological shot in the arm hold the key to the next big revolution in the field of technology.
The wearable computing technology however is still in a nascent stage, somewhat how smartphones were in the mid-2000s. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook expressed hope in the wearable technology revolution, saying that this area was ripe for exploration and it is only a matter of time before this technology takes off.
Many people are of the opinion that this technology will become widespread and popular only when Apple patronizes it. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotmanis of the view that Apple is the entity that creates the market by introducing a device, and it is Apple devices that set the stage for others to start developing similar technology.
The race for introducing the next big wearable technology device has started, with Apple and Samsung working on developing the smartwatch. Google on the other hand is working on Glass, a wearable headgearcomputer, which can perform various tasks for you without you having to move your hands.

Google Aims At Simplifying Web For Indian Users

image source: http://lunadigital.tv/

Indian internet users will be able to find answers more quickly from now onwards to all their common queries, announced Google India. A new initiative has been started by Google India, which will help simplify the way Indian users use the internet. The initiative is called ‘Start Search India’.
Sandeep Menon, Director, Marketing, Google India said that the initiative is aimed at the new Indian users who are joining the internet every day. The internet service provider aims to provide more convenient methods for these users to search and browse information and data on the Internet. He said that there is also a growing number of internet users who access mobile internet to search for common queries like restaurants, flight status, weather and movie timings. The new search will be able to return results to these common queries in the form of information cards on top of the search page.
There are almost a billion users in the country who are accessing the internet via internet mobile. While announcing the new Start Search option, Menon mentioned the top search trends in India. The top trends include travel, education and yoga. He said that people from cities like Chandigarh top the list of internet users who post their queries for the smallest of requirements on the internet.
People from cities like Chandigarh are using the Google Trends option to conduct their internet searches. Google Trends clubs the information to the most common queries made by people in a country, over a given period of time. It shows the most popular information on the internet.
Google has also launched the Product Listing Ads, a new ad format, which will help better the online shopping experience for users. This ad format lists all information about the brand, price and range of products so that the internet user can make an informed choice. These will be sponsored ads and will appear on the right hand panel of the search screen.

How Much Customs Duty You Have to Pay for Importing Goods into India

You have to pay taxes, also known as customs duty, for importing mobile phones, tablets and other goods from a foreign country into India. These taxes are often payable at the port of entry (like the airport).
A package forwarding service service in India has shared the current tariff chart and it should give you a good idea of what kind of taxes you can expect to pay for importing the various categories of items into India. Here’s the chart updated after the 2013 Union Budget:

Category	Items to import	Customs Duty
Books	Books (educational)	0%
Computers	Laptop, Computers	16.85%
	Computer Printers	16.85 %
	Laptop Battery	28.85%
	Hard Disk (Internal)	6.03%
	Hard Disk (External)	16.85%
	Processor	6.03%
	Other Computer Peripherals	16.85%
	Cables & Wires	25.85%
Tablets	iPad	16.85%
Mobile	Mobile Phones	6.00%
	Phone Accessories	28.85%
Music & Games	DVD/ CDS (movie)	28.85%
	Software DVD	16.854%
	DVD Players, Blu-Ray	28.85%
	iPod	28.85%
	Video games	28.85%
	Gaming Consoles	28.85%
Photography
	Digital / Video Cameras	28.80%
	Digital Still Image Camera	16.854%
	Web cameras	28.85%
	Camera Lens	28.85%
Everything Else	Television	28.85%
	Sports Equipment	16.85%
	Hand (wrist) Watches	28.85%
	Cosmetics, Stationery, Toys	28.85%
	Sunglasses	28.85%
	Electronics and Car parts	28.85%
	Apparel	23.90%
	Shoes	28.85%
	Kitchen, Dining	28.85%
	Artificial Jewelry	28.85%

How is Customs Duty Calculated?

It is important to note that the calculation of import duty is done based on the assessed value of an imported product and not the invoice value. Let me explain.
Say you have purchased a mobile phone from Amazon or eBay and have asked the seller to ship it to India. The value of the mobile phone listed in the invoics is $500. The customs officer in India may however assess the product’s value as, say, $600 and in that case, you will have to pay 6% customs duty on $600 (the assessed value) and not $500 (the invoice value).
And other than customs duty, you’ll have to pay shipping charges, broker fees, CESS and service tax for getting an item into India.
There are no taxes on importing books while the customs duty on mobile phones has recently been hiked from 1% to 6%. Also, you may import goods up to the value of INR 5000 duty free provided they are sent as gifts to you.

Determine if your Mobile Phone will Work in Another Country

You are planning to buy a cell phone from an online shopping site of another country but are not too sure if that phone will work with the mobile networks of your country. Or consider a slightly different scenario. You are travelling but how do you determine if your existing cellphone will be compatible with carriers of the foreign country?

Will that Cell Phone Work in my Country?

Well, there are basically two factors that may help you determine if a mobile phone will work with cellular operators of another country or not. Here they are:
1. GSM and CDMA are the two most prevalent standards in the mobile world. As a first step, determine the technology (GSM or CDMA) used by the mobile carrier of the foreign country where you are planning to use your phone.
Wikipedia has dedicated sections – see pages for India, Europe and Asia Pacific countries - that list the standards used by various carriers of a particular country. If that carrier is on GSM, you would need a GSM-compliant mobile phone and the device should be unlocked meaning it should be able to accept SIM cards of other carriers.
2. The other important factor is the frequency band  that carriers are using in the country where you are travelling to.
For instance, mobile networks in India use the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz frequency bands while GSM carriers in America operate on 850 MHz and 1900 MHz frequencies. Thus, if you are planning to buy a mobile phone from Amazon.com for use in India, the phone should support the 900 / 1800 MHz frequencies.


You can use the Phone Finder database at GSM Arena  to determine the 2G and 3G frequency bands that are supported by your mobile phone. Then check the mobile operator’s website (or Wikipedia) to determine the frequency bands they are using for their 2G and 3G networks. If the frequencies match, your phone should be compatible with that mobile network.
To summarize, find the frequencies supported by your cellular operator and compare them with the frequencies listed in the technical specifications of your mobile phone. They should match for the phone to be compatible. A quad-band unlocked GSM phone will be compatible with most GSM networks worldwide.

A Less Confusing View of World Time Zones

If you ever need to schedule an online meeting or a conference call with your co-workers who are located in different cities and countries, EveryTimeZone.com should come handy.
In Every Time Zone, you just have to drag the green bar to see the corresponding time (and date) in the different time zones of the world. The shades of blue indicate the hours of the day and the lighter the shade, the more suitable that time would be for the meeting for colleagues located in that particular time zone. The app works offline too.

Find a Common Meeting Time Across Timezones

TimeZen.com is another useful web app for finding a common meeting time across multiple timezones. While Every Time Zone provides the world time at a glance, Time Zen lets you pick cities where your colleagues are located.
To get started, add one or more cities to the list and then move the slider to see the time across each of these cities. The green area on the slider represents the time when all the selected cities are in the time range of 8am – 10pm which is generally considered a good time for a global meeting /conference call.

Amazon Affiliate Program Goes Live in India

Amazon earlier this week launched amazon.in, an online marketplace for books and DVDs in India. The new shopping site, according to a press release from Amazon, includes a selection of over 200 million books (physical books and not Kindle ebooks) while mobile phones and digital cameras will be added to the catalogue in the coming weeks.

The shopping experience at Amazon.in is quite similar to other Amazon sites though their Indian store is the only one that offers Cash on Delivery as a payment option. You do however need to pay an extra fee (39) for COD.
Other than the marketplace, Amazon has quietly launched Associates, their popular affiliate program for bloggers and website owners in India. Amazon will pay 10% commission when visitors follow affiliated links from your website to Amazon.in and make a purchase.
To get started, go to affiliate-program.amazon.in and sign-in with your existing Amazon account. Fill in the form and they’ll manually approve your site with 24 hours. Once you are approved, you can use your Amazon Affiliate IDs to link to products listed on amazon.in and earn referral fees for sales that happen via your affiliated link.

How to Build Affiliate Links for Amazon.in

You can easily build affiliated HTML links from your Amazon Associates dashboard but there’s a simple way that will create clean affiliate hyperlinks.
All products listed on the Amazon website have a unique ASIN code and for printed books, this ASIN code is the same as the 10-digit ISBN code of that book. For instance, the ISBN and ASIN code for Sheryl Sandberg’s latest book is 0753541637. This code can be found on the Product Details section of any Amazon listing.


Once you that have the ASIN/ISBN and your Amazon Associate ID, just build an HTML hyperlink in the following format.

http://www.amazon.in/dp/ASINCode/?tag=AffiliateID (see sample link)

Competing online book stores like Flipkart and Infibeam offer 6% and 5% commission on books respectively while eBay’s affiliate program is not available in India. Since Amazon India pays a higher commission (10%), blogs and websites owners in India are more likely to link to the Amazon.in website and that is likely to push them up in the organic search results.
Also see: How to embed Amazon book previews in your website

Google brings Android Nation store to India to spice up its retail market

image source: http://ibnlive.in.com/

In order to enhance Android penetration in the Indian retail market, Google has come up with an imperative marketing move. Google is planning to open the traditional brick and mortar stores with the name “Android Nation” to promote its mobile operating system Android and the products that it supports.
A renowned US company is partnering with the Spice Global of BK Modi for setting up these stores all across the country.  “Android Nation” will first be introduced in New Delhi around the end of this year.  This project will be spearheaded by Modi’s son Dilip Modi and will focus on promoting 3G phones & phasing out 2G slowly and gradually.
Android Nation is already a popular name in Indonesia and India will be the second country  to host these Android stores. Spice Global is not new to this business and is operating with more than 800 Hotspots in India that sell mobile phones and their accessories. After opening their first Android Nation store in New Delhi, they are planning to expand their franchise by turning about their 50 Hotspots into Android Nation stores in India.
These stores will sell and promote Android based smart phones and tablets offered by brands like Samsung, Sony, HTC,  Asus and LG. These stores will also serve the customers as an Android experience centre where they can find information about popular and latest Android apps, can interact with Android experts, buy latest accessories for their Android devices and download Android software updates for the mobiles and tablets.
Google has come up with these stores to give its potential customers a hands-on experience on its products in their pre-purchase phase. This would be Google’s first step into Indian retail market which is quite similar to the exclusive stores of its counterparts Apple & Microsoft.

Quantum mechanics to provide most powerful cyber security

Image source: http://www.stanford.edu/

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has reported that a team of Australian scientists is working to create a cyber-security method which will be impenetrable and will be the most powerful method conceived till date. For this purpose the theory of Quantum mechanics is being used. The new technology is being developed for the Australian government which has cyber security high on its agenda. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has reported the development of the new cyber security method.
The team is working on a technique they have named quantum cryptography. Cryptography constitutes three participants — the sender, the recipient and the hacker, who hacks into the communication being sent and decrypts the code and information. All this is done without the sender or the receiver’s knowledge. Quantum cryptography that has been developed is a system that can prevent the hacker from intercepting the communications by changing the messages or by destroying them completely.
Morello of University of New South Wales mentioned that Quantum computing can help to grow the data security capabilities of a country. About the quantum cryptography, Morello said that the new technology would help any kill or destroy any data being intercepted instantly. He also said that quantum cryptography would prevent access to the data by detecting hackers, and altering the messages if they are intercepted.
He added that the problem in carrying out the entire theory is in making the computer with the technology. A quantum chip can only be made by introducing a single phosphorous atom into a silicon chip.
Chief of QuintessenceLabs, Vikram Sharma said that the new technology is too hard to decrypt, which is the mainstay of the research. He did add though that the quantum computers of the future could pose a threat to this technology as codes can be broken through similar technology.

Facebook introduces video on Instagram

image source: www.androidcommunity.com

Instagram is an amazing and fun way app for sharing your moments with your friends and family by capturing photo and video. The popular photo sharing app offers the unique photo features and tips for videos for its users.
Facebook launches video on instagram. Facebook is using instagram, popular photo sharing app for adding video and following the steps of twitter, using the video sharing app Vine.
Kevin Systrom, co-owner of instagram has stated that the users can use the app for sharing 15 sec video by taping the video icon. Users can also filter or edit their videos to change the contrast and add different effects. Instagram users, those are using the latest version of instagram can record the video clip by tapping on the same camera icon which they use to click the snaps. This has become possible as mobile phones have become snappier and are equipped with better cameras. The internet connections used by mobile phones users have also become faster. These developments have significantly contributed to achieve the video sharing feature of the Facebook’s app.
Users can record the footage for 15 seconds or till the time your finger is on the red button. Instagram offers the unique features for capturing the scenes by using different angles and alongside you can record another video clip. After recording the clips users can post it and share it on the instagram.
Systrom is impressed with its mind blowing feature “Cinema” which adds stabilization to clippings.  Instagram is the first and only Company; Facebook has bought and running it as a separate application. Before buying instagram, Facebook is known as smaller “aqui hires”. Facebook has analysed that more than 16 billion pictures have been posted and shared on Instagram so far, and users together like approx 1 billion pictures every day.

How to Get RSS Feeds for Twitter with the new API

The old Twitter API is no longer available and therefore all the existing RSS feeds of Twitter have stopped working as well. With API v1.1, Twitter has switched from XML to JSON format and the other big change is that all requests to the Twitter API must now be authenticated with OAuth.
In simple English, you can no longer subscribe to any of the Twitter streams – be it search results, timelines of users, users’ favorites or even Twitter Lists – in your RSS Reader. There is however any easy workaround based on Google Scripts.

Twitter RSS Feeds

What we really need is some sort of a parsing program sitting between Twitter and our RSS Reader. The parser would fetch updates from Twitter at regular intervals and convert them from JSON to RSS which we can then subscribe in our favorite RSS Reader.
This can be easily accomplished with some simple Google Scripts. To give you an example, here are some RSS feeds that are generated using the new Twitter API v1.1 and are served from the Google cloud.

• Timeline of @labnol [Twitter Timeline]
• Favorites of @labnol [Twitter User Favorites]
• Twitter List curated by @Scobleizer [Twitter List RSS]
• Search results for labnol.org [Twitter Search RSS]

How to Create RSS Feeds for Twitter API 1.1

Step 1: Setup a Dummy Twitter App

Since the Twitter API now requires authentication for all requests, we will have to create a new Twitter App that our Google Script will use to communicate with the new Twitter API.

• Go to dev.twitter.com, sign-in with your Twitter account and create a Twitter app. Give your app any name, description, website (any URL) and put https://spreadsheets.google.com/macros/ in the callback URL field. Click Submit.
• Once the Twitter app has been created, make a note of your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret Key.

Step 2: Configure your Google Script

• Click here to copy the Twitter RSS script into your Google Drive. Put the Twitter Consumer key and Secret in line # 28 and 30.
• Go to File -> Manage Version and choose Save new version.
• Go to Publish -> Deploy as Web App and choose Anyone, even anonymous under Who has Access. Click the Deploy button.

Step 3: Deploy the Twitter RSS Feed generator

• Now that you have deployed the Google script, go to Run -> Start and grant the necessary permissions.
• Choose Run -> Start again and the script will require access to Twitter. Grant access and you’ll get an email with links to some sample RSS feeds for Twitter.

That’s it. You can now generate custom RSS feeds for any Twitter Timeline, List or Search Results by simply change the value of “q” parameter in the feed’s URL. As always, you are free to use, modify and distribute the Google Script with attribution.

Download Files from the Web Directly to your Online Drives

I have put together a little web app that will let you save files from the web directly to any of your cloud drives be it Dropbox, Google Drive or Windows SkyDrive. There’s no sign-up required, you don’t have to install any extensions and the app works on mobile devices as well.

Save files from the web to any of your cloud drives, directly.

Copy Internet files to your account, via the cloud

To get started, put the URL of any web file in the input box, pick a storage service and copy of that file should appear in your cloud drive in no time. You may even put web page URLs in the input box and in that case, the HTML page will get saved to your online drive.
There are a couple of benefits. One, if you are on a mobile phone or a tablet, you can quickly save any file from the Internet to your online drives without using a single byte of 3G data connection as the file transfer will happen via the cloud.
The app can work as a proxy as well allowing you to download files from websites that may otherwise be blocked /inaccessible in your country /workplace. All you need to know is the URL of the file.
Chromebook users may find this even more useful as the SkyDrive or Dropbox clients cannot be installed on these machines.
Similar to Podcast Gallery, the file saving app is also powered by Ink File Picker. Alternatives include SideCloudLoad and URL Droplet but they only work with Dropbox and also have certain limitations on the file sizes that you can transfer.

See more tutorials on:

DropboxGoogle Driveskydrive

1. Download Web Pages as PDFs with Chrome for iOS
2. Save Web Pages to your Google Drive
3. Open Files from the Internet Directly in Your Desktop Applications
4. How to Easily Transfer Files Across Cloud Services
5. Use Google Docs To Compare Two Text Files Online
6. Sync Files Between Your Computer and External USB Drives

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  Now that Instagram supports video, I think I’ll use the app more frequently and even experiment with short video tutorials.
• Get the Chrome App
  You can install the Digital Inspiration app in your Google Chrome and access the website from the browser’s start page. Writing a Chrome App is easy.
• Follow on Foursqure
  Curious to know about my favorite places or where I have been to recently. Follow me on Foursquare and you may get a hint.
• Follow on Flickr
  With 1 TB of space, I think Flickr is awesome again. You can expect to see software screenshots, memes and sometimes personal pictures on my Flickr page.
• Follow on Pinterest
  On Pinterest, I mostly curate historical art (especially from the Mughal era), tech cartoons, UI elements and also my favorite gadgets. Also see: Stuff I Use.

Going forward, the YouTube video tutorials will also be available as downloadable podcasts on the iTunes store.