Shazam

I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like they would be lost without their cellphone. Nowadays cellphones can do practically anything we would ever need and in a matter of seconds, but one of the app's on my cellphone that i would truly have a hard time without is Shazam. Shazam is a music identifying app, just simply hold your phone up to any music playing, press Shazam's button to activate the program, and Shazam will use your phones built-in microphone to listen to the song it hears, creating an "acoustic fingerprint" in a sense,  and match it to one of the songs in its 8 million song database. Thus, identifying the song for the user.

A plus of Shazam is that phone users need not have a smartphone in order to use Shazam, simply be able to get internet access to their phones for Shazam to connect with its database and find the song that matches the clip. As of 12/5/12 Shazam is still in the top 100 "free app" category of the itunes app store, quite impressive for an app that has been around for over 12 years and is currently being utilized an average of 10 million times a day worldwide.

I for one can not count the amount of times that i have been in a store or in a car and heard a song that i instantly liked and wanted to know what the name of it was and who it was by. Having Shazam in my pocket is an extremely easy and convenient way to for me to quickly find out the information i need about a song and even gives me the option to purchase the song and download it directly to my iphone. I can personally thank Shazam for finding half of the music on my music library for me, and will 100% continue to use Shazam in the future.

Extra Credit: HotSchedules

             

                With all the new advances in technology it has made life easier for many people with accessing information. For instance, information with your job is a lot easier to obtain with these new devices in technology. The application HotSchedules is a great application that can be used to stay in touch with what is going on with your employees and co-workers. In order to have this application your job must sponsor it first so if you are a manager of a company reading this pay attention!

               HotSchedules is an application that can be used on any smartphone or tablet such as an iPhone, Droid, iPad and many more. HotSchedules automatically notifies you when there is an update to your schedule for work or if a fellow employee drops a shift giving you access right at hand to pick that shift up yourself! Not only does HotSchedules offer you your weekly schedule but it also shows you everyone who is working on any day of the week. This is a great advantage to have because if you are looking for a certain employee it is very easy to find them. Another great feature of this application is you have access to a full contact employee list. This makes life a lot easier when trying to contact an employee if you do not already have their number or email. HotSchedules also gives you the opportunity to make requests for your managers to see, requests being to either need the day off or to request to work a certain day. The main feature that HotSchedules With all the new advances in technology it has made life easier for many people with accessing information. For instance, information with your job is a lot easier to obtain with these new devices in technology. The application HotSchedules is a great application that can be used to stay in touch with what is going on with your employees and co-workers. In order to have this application your job must sponsor it first so if you are a manager of a company reading this pay attention!

               HotSchedules is an application that can be used on any smartphone or tablet such as an iPhone, Droid, iPad and many more. HotSchedules automatically notifies you when there is an update to your schedule for work or if a fellow employee drops a shift giving you access right at hand to pick that shift up yourself! Not only does HotSchedules offer you your weekly schedule but it also shows you everyone who is working on any day of the week. This is a great advantage to have because if you are looking for a certain employee it is very easy to find them. Another great feature of this application is you have access to a full contact employee list. This makes life a lot easier when trying to contact an employee if you do not already have their number or email. HotSchedules also gives you the opportunity to make requests for your managers to see, requests being to either need the day off or to request to work a certain day. The main feature that HotSchedules offers you is that you have the ability to send and receive messages like an email account on your mobile device. This is a very important feature because it gives you easy access to your managers when you have a problem or an emergency. Referring back to the article by Byrne, HotSchedules is a great application to keep your business and their employees closer by just a click away.

Filtered Information on the Internet

In our first activity we had to google our own names. I googled David Plungas and so much information came up. The odd thing was that the much of my information had been taken from different sites and put together on some "mylife" or "ancestory" websites. This information of my probably had been taken from survey's, information fill-outs, facebook, twitter, and other information sites to be all put together into one.

People use sites like pinterest, facebook, and twitter to categorize all sorts of information. On Pinterest to categorize different subject they use words as in running, sports, food to filter the information. All of those are categories that are tag within other categories also. You can find your way through different areas and interest of that same categories through these filters.

Crowdbooster

The tool that I chose was Crowdbooster. It was the first one to jump out at me and get my attention for tools for social media. Crowdbooster is a tremendous opportunity for businesses to develop genuine, one-on-one relationships with their customers. It Analyzes the performance of your individual tweets and posts with an interactive graph and table to quickly understand what’s working and what is not working for you and your business. Crowdbooster also sends you ideas, or plan of action, to help with your product to get recongized more. You can use this tool for your twitter or facebook apps. It easily helps you find whats working for you and whats is not in terms of effectiveness over social media.

In reading different articles on Crowdbooster it seems that the ease of use is pretty simple. To sign up for one account on Facebook and Twitter it is free. If you are a business and want multiple account it ranges from $39/ a month to $99 a month depending on how many account you want to use. Its relatively simple and does give you some good data for you to use to enhance your twitter and Facebook markets. In reading more it is tough to see what the disadvantages are except the pricing can get a little high for multiple accounts. Advantages, You get access to usual stats around followers, tweets, mentions and retweets for Twitter as well as fans, comments, mentions and likes for your Facebook page.  You can switch between both accounts easily, and create charts and tables pivoting off of dates.

SocialBro Program

 

You ever thought of the best way to be interactive, network or build a community with and feel please to do so. Through social media, many of those three positively words are seen today through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, etc. They all have an identity but it’s you who creates an identity of what you want to be through the social media.  However, it wouldn’t just be the main social media’s of today because a program called SocialBro helps explore the community well. This is what helps technology grow but also get more people involve through the social networks of today. SocialBro helps you get involve with the community by knowing who your followers are, why are they following, what area they are following from and the language that they speak. This shows an effective way to build trust within the community but also build a strong and stable one.  As most of the time twitter would be used as an example and so to have a fast communication with your community you would target your audience by tweeting and sending a direct message to selected users from the search results. It’s easy as 1, 2, 3 because SocialBro wants it to be that way. This will help increase your Klout score because you’re engaging most of the time. SocialBro is interesting because it will let you know when users are on and where in the area because they would want you to tweet at a specific time. That’s how you catch a fan base or as they say more followers to follow you on twitter. As to creating an identity, you would get respect by those following you consistently. SocialBro helps you with that but shows who isn’t following you, check who aren’t following you, check who follow/unfollow you and who are already following you. SocialBro is an interactive program in which I would recommend many users to use. But to use this program you would have to set up an account but pay for whichever category you fall under because the one you pick will support your needs and wants. Although its a pricing program but those that created this program were very smart. This is a new way to computer mediated communication and a very successful one too. 

http://www.socialbro.com/features

MyFitnessPal: Calorie Counter

MyFitnessPal: Calorie Counter is a fast and easy way to lose weight by keeping track of your calories. It has the largest food database, over 2 million foods, of any other calorie counter and amazingly fast food and exercise data entry. It became a very credible app. It was PC Magazine Editor's Choice Selection, Wired Magazine's Editor's pick for lifestyle apps, and is the number one free app on Apple's App store. It was featured in the New York Times, USA Today, Family Circle, Marie Claire, NBC, CNET, Shape, and the Today Show. This app remembers your 'favorites,' can add multiple foods at once, and can save and add entire meals. It has a free barcode scanner that helps you easily find foods you have eaten whereas other apps charge for this feature. The app can fully sync to the web, so you can log from your computer or your phone, which ever is more convenient. Plus your data is backed up online so you never lose it. My FitnessPal also tracks your exercise as well. There are over 350 exercises, you can track both cardio and strength training, including sets, reps, and weight/rep. You can also create an unlimited number of custom exercises. MyFitnessPal allows you to connect with friends and easily track and motivate each other. Another feature is that you can record your weight loss goals. You can customize your goals based on your specific diet profile which includes age, gender, and activity level or enter your own goals if you have specific recommendations. You can also report on your progress. Whether it be tracking your weight or measurements for more motivation.

I have this app and it has really helped me control my eating habits. Not that I had bad eating habits, but this Web 3.0 app helps keep me on track with what my proper calorie intake for the day should be.

In the Campbell and Park article, "Social Implications of Mobile Telephony: The Rise of Personal Communication Society," they explain how mobile communication plays a central role in mass communication. That is exemplified with this app. Since you download to your mobile device you will always be able to add the food you have eaten through out the day while you're on the go, keeping it completely organized at the same time. Cell phones has become a huge part of our everyday life perhaps even part of our identity so having this app at the palm of your hand will make it easier for you to keep your body in check. In class, we talked about community building and I think this app expresses community because you are able to connect with your friends and you can motivate each other to achieve your goal of your desired body and body weight.

Extra Credit-ICQ

 ICQ is an online media company providing communication tools, content and services to an online community of millions of users worldwide (www.icq.com). ICQ is a form of instant messaging just like gmail, yahoo and google. It was established in summer ’96 under the name Mirabilis. It was founded by four young males in their twenties. The reason for this creative website is because they knew that people were connected to the Internet but not interconnected. They wanted to build a community within this service so everyone can feel love and be one. This technology just helps bring people together in a world of information, fun and entertainment. Also it was about networking in a more effective way because to them Instant Messaging was the missing link. This technology made peer-to-peer communication possible! This company had fallen under the great AOL which made success in great ways. ICQ had built communities where people can socialize, communicate and simply hangout with everybody, everywhere. This new program wants to attract any crowd who uses this program but more to the young. Attracting the young is easy because each and every one is up to date on technology nowadays and what to do with it. ICQ gives you everything that you ever wanted because you can play games, share messages, videos, pictures, and more. You are able to download this on your mobile: iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Java, Bada and Mobile-Web Chat. As it was said by Campbell & Park article that mobile devices or mobile communication plays a central role in mass communication and that social change in our society result in the rapid increase for the use of these mobile technologies. With this program at hand, change will come. But also you can have the opportunity to download it on your toolbar, skins, Mac and Linux. This is a free program that many users can get too. As statistics have shown that there are over 42 million active users, 425 million downloads, available in 16 languages, 47 percent female and 53 male users. This is a great program! Everyone should get on this and get out the comfort zone. You can have fun with this program in many ways and make the best out of it. It’s the future of tomorrow and so I would like you to be part of the future!

http://www.icq.com/en