Even Nokia thinks there?s a Windows Phone app gap of sorts

Microsoft?s Windows Phone platform may boast 165,000 mobile apps but Nokia thinks there?s more work to be done in order to grow sales. Some key quotes from Nokia Vice President Bryan Biniak in an interview with International Business Times last Friday?highlight the ?app gap? challenge while also setting the bar higher for mobile app experiences. Here are a few key quotes from Biniak:

?To give you a reason to switch, I need to make sure the apps that you care about on your device are not only on our phones, but are better. I also need to provide you unique experiences that you can?t get on your other devices.?

This is the same point I?ve made in the past when discussing the challenge facing BlackBerry. And it?s why that company and Microsoft are currently fighting to be the third smartphone platform that?s well behind iOS and Android: The incumbents have not only the apps that people want today but they have the developer support for apps people will want tomorrow.

?People rely on applications for their day-to-day life and if you don?t have something which I use in my day-to-day life I?m not going to switch [operating systems] because I don?t want to compromise the way I live my life just to switch to a phone.?

There are plenty of happy Windows Phone customers that have every app they need, but I?m not one of them ? even though I like the interface and many of the new handsets. However, I fit directly in the example that Biniak provides: There are a few key apps I use daily that simply aren?t on Windows Phone yet. So why would I, or anyone in the same situation, switch?

That?s a challenge that Microsoft continues to face because current smartphone owners are used to having the apps they want and need. Those on feature phones may better fit the Windows Phone target customer since they?re not yet app addicts. And that could be why Nokia has released a number of relatively low-cost Windows Phone handsets over the past two years: Its best bet to grow hardware sales may be in the low- to mid-range handset markets.

Biniak continues to suggest that the challenge for Windows Phone isn?t hardware, nor the platform itself. It?s about the apps. Nokia seems to be doing its part when it comes to hardware but Biniak almost sounds frustrated by the software side of things:

?We are releasing new devices frequently and for every new device, if there is an app that somebody cares about that?s not there that?s a missed opportunity of a sale.?

He?s right: If a potential customer finds that a shiny new Lumia can?t run an app they want, why would the experience turn into a sale? It likely won?t.

Much of this situation has to do with timing. Had Microsoft been quicker to migrate away from Windows Mobile sooner, the platform would have arrived prior to iOS and Android becoming the smartphone behemoths they are today. Now that these two account for more than 90 percent of smartphone sales, getting consumers ? and developers, for that matter ? to make a switch is much more difficult.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/07/29/even-nokia-thinks-theres-a-windows-phone-app-gap-of-sorts/

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Buy Good Door Appliances For Home Improvement | Dads Shed

Regardless of where they are located, whether on a bathroom door, bedroom door the entrance to your home your kitchen cabinetry or anywhere else, unique door knobs and handles can make a statement for you without saying a word on bathroom vanities Australia. For that reason, you want to find the most innovative and unique door handles that you can find for every door in your home. It is easy to discover for yourself the difference that a bit of imagination and unique styling combined together can make every door in your house stand out.

You can find door handles that have been crafted from brass, porcelain, stainless steel, brushed nickel and much more. Any one of these can add a touch of panache or traditional flair to any cabinet door. In addition, there are many more traditional door handles available, that will accent your home due to the incredible craftsmanship that has gone into them. Doorknobs are found on more than just entranceways; they are also on kitchen and bathroom cabinetry, dresser drawers and much more. Because doorknobs are so widely available in your home, you may want to find a distinct and exciting new door handles Australia that makes a statement for you without saying a word. Surprisingly, door knobs are available in more sizes, styles and materials than you can imagine, which will make sure that your home has the most unique and stylish touch on every door and cabinet.

You can find wonderful shapes such as flowers, cars, butterflies, stars, balloons, pencils and many more, you are certain to find the perfect knobs Australia or cabinet handle for your children. You will be able to accessorize their doors, dressers, bedroom cabinets and more, without spending a lot of money. In addition, you can also find the exemplary array of finishes and designs in door handles.

Tags: appliances, bathroom vanities Australia, door handles Australia, knob Australia

Source: http://www.dadsshed.com/3459/buy-good-door-appliances-for-home-improvement/

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At least 6 dead in France train crash near Paris

A view of the Bretigny sur Orge train station, south of Paris, after a train derailed Friday July, 12, 2013. A packed passenger train skidded off its rails after leaving Paris on Friday, leaving seven people believed dead and dozens injured as train cars slammed into each other and overturned, authorities said. (AP Photo)

A view of the Bretigny sur Orge train station, south of Paris, after a train derailed Friday July, 12, 2013. A packed passenger train skidded off its rails after leaving Paris on Friday, leaving seven people believed dead and dozens injured as train cars slammed into each other and overturned, authorities said. (AP Photo)

Rescue workers transport a victim from a train that derailed, in Bretigny sur Orge, south of Paris, Friday July, 12, 2013. A packed passenger train skidded off its rails after leaving Paris on Friday, leaving seven people believed dead and dozens injured as train cars slammed into each other and overturned, authorities said. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

French President Francois Hollande, right, speaks with victims at the site of a train accident in the railway station of Bretigny-sur-Orge, Friday, July 12, 2013 near Paris. A packed passenger train skidded off its rails after leaving Paris on Friday, leaving seven people believed dead and dozens injured as train cars slammed into each other and overturned, authorities said. (AP Photo/Kenzo Tribouillard, Pool)

Rescue workers transport a victim from a train that derailed in Bretigny sur Orge, south of Paris, Friday July, 12, 2013. A packed passenger train skidded off its rails after leaving Paris on Friday, leaving seven people believed dead and dozens injured as train cars slammed into each other and overturned, authorities said. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

People are evacuated after a train derailed, in Bretigny sur Orge, south of Paris, Friday July, 12, 2013. A packed passenger train skidded off its rails after leaving Paris on Friday, leaving seven people believed dead and dozens injured as train cars slammed into each other and overturned, authorities said. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

BRETIGNY-SUR-ORGE, France (AP) ? A train carrying hundreds of passengers derailed and crashed into a station outside Paris on Friday on one of the busiest days of the year for vacation getaways. At least six people were killed and dozens were injured, officials said.

The crash was the deadliest in France in several years. French President Francois Hollande rushed to the scene at the Bretigny-sur-Orge station, 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Paris. The Interior Ministry said some 192 people were either injured or being treated for shock ? of which nine were in a critical condition.

Four of the seven train cars slid toward the station, crushing part of the metallic roof over the platform. Images on French television and on Twitter showed gnarled metal and shards on the platform, and debris from the crash clogging the stairwell leading beneath the platform.

Some 300 firefighters, 20 medical teams and eight helicopters were deployed to get survivors out of the metal wreckage, according to the Interior Ministry.

The accident came as France is preparing to celebrate its most important national holiday, Bastille Day, on Sunday, and as masses of vacationers are heading out of Paris and other big cities to see family or for summer vacation.

Hollande praised "the mobilization of the emergency services," and reached out in "solidarity with the victims' families." He said an inquiry has been launched to determine the cause of the accident.

"The inquiries will be public so that there is absolutely no doubt on what happened," he added.

Witnesses reported that the train was not moving at an excessive speed, deepening the mystery of what happened.

"I think it's genuinely too early to start to give this or that hypothesis. Now, we're still in the emergency operation," said Interior Ministry spokesman, Pierre-Henry Brandet. "There's some long work ahead from experts that will allow us to know the exact circumstances and the exact causes of this drama."

Ben Khelifa, a 20-year-old accounting apprentice whose commuter train was on the adjacent track, told The Associated Press that the derailed train "was unrecognizable.

"There was nothing but metal scraps," he said. "The train just collapsed, just like that, on its side... There was blood."

He added that he was one of a number of passengers in the adjacent train that went to help pull trapped survivors out of the wreckage. "People were screaming, people were asking where their children were," he said.

Another witness, Bazgua El Mehdi, 19, told Le Parisien newspaper: "I heard a loud noise. A cloud of sand covered everything. Then the dust dissipated. I thought it was a freight train, but then we saw the first casualties ... Many passengers on the (train) were crying."

It was unclear whether all the casualties were inside the train, or whether some had been on the platform, or how fast the train was traveling. The head of the SNCF rail authority, Guillaume Pepy, called it a "catastrophe."

The train's third and fourth cars initially derailed, which then knocked the other cars off the track, Pepy said. "Some cars simply derailed, others are leaning, others fell over," he said.

The Interior Ministry said six people died in the crash and nine were in critical condition. Earlier, Interior Minister Manuel Valls had said seven people died.

The SNCF said the train was carrying about 385 passengers when it derailed Friday evening at 5:15 p.m. (1515 GMT; 11:15 a.m. EDT) and crashed into the station at Bretigny-sur-Orge.

The train was headed from Paris to Limoges, a 400-kilometer (250-mile) journey, and was about 20 minutes into the scheduled three-hour journey.

A passenger speaking on France's BFM television said the train was going at a normal speed and wasn't meant to stop at Bretigny-sur-Orge. He described children unattended in the chaotic aftermath.

Trains operations have been suspended in Bretigny-sur-Orge for the next three days.

___

AP writer Thomas Adamson contributed to this report from Paris.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-07-12-EU-France-Train-Crash/id-9a948d19f15a45f4939e6bf72ddafc62

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More on GOP money man's "unfit for human habitation" rentals

TAMPA ? The dead body decomposed for two weeks inside an 84-square-foot apartment.

He died inside his cramped motel room, police said. Officers found garbage and clothes strewn about. The air reeked. The tenant was 70, dead of natural causes.

No one had seen him for days. Then the landlord told someone to go find him. The rent was due.

The landlord was Tampa Port Authority Chairman William A. "Hoe" Brown, a GOP State Committeeman and prominent Republican fundraiser for candidates ranging from Pam Bondi to Mel Martinez.

That February 2009 incident, revealed in police records, shows that problems at Brown's properties in Seminole Heights go back much farther than the chairman has said they do.

A inquiry Monday by the Tampa Bay Times led Brown to apologize and remove five squalid mobile homes he illegally rented behind his property management office at 106 W Stanley St.

Earlier this week, Brown said he put them there late last year. When told police records show a trailer on the property before last year, he acknowledged Thursday night that one unit had been there since 2006.

Among the records proving tenants lived behind Brown's office well before last year was a 2006 domestic violence case in which a man punched his girlfriend, police said, in "the trailer ... located behind the house" at 106 W Stanley St.

Story here

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tampabaycom/blogs/buzz/~3/bWOj7ulk8H4/2131082

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DealCurry.com : Green Tree Homes To Raise Funds

Chennai based residential developer - Green Tree Homes is in talks with PE investors to raise around R50 Cr to its ongoing products, BS states.

Presently, the company has five ongoing projects which are designed to develop a total of 3 Mn sft in and around Chennai. The projects would be funded through internal accruals and sales revenue and rest by PE investment.

Two Projects are designed using prefab technology. It is also looking to apply the technology in a budget apartment township of a total expected project sales value of R400 Cr coming up in Tamil Nadu.

Green Tree Homes is a Chennai based real estate company promoted by a group of environmentally conscious architects and designers. It has over one Mn sft of residential and commercial spaces.

Its current projects includes - Greenn Athens, Greenn California, Luxury apartments Green 201 and Green 101, Greenn town.

Greenn Athens, a villa community between ECR and OMR was launched last year. The project spread across 3.16 acres of land comprising 40 villas each ranging from 4000-5000 sq ft.

Green Tree Homes has also floated a new company- Town & tower Systems Pvt Ltd with plans to produce and market prefab building components for itself and other real estate development firms. It is also setting up a manufacturing facility with a capacity of 5 Mn sft every year in Chennai to serve the market. The new venture would involve an investment of R50 Cr.

In this space, ASK Property Investment Advisors invested R147 Cr in its investee firm - ATS Group?s Gurgaon residential project.India Infoline, through its PE fund ? IIFL Domestic Series 1 invested R115 Cr in two residential projects across Mumbai and Gurgaon late last year.

Kotak Realty Fund was investing R120 Cr for a 20% stake in Parsvnath Developers' SPV.

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Source: http://www.dealcurry.com/20130711-Green-Tree-Homes-To-Raise-Funds.htm

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The Lost Great Novel of Middle Age

Illustration by Jeff Zwirek

This essay is adapted from Ed Park?s introduction to the new edition of Russell Hoban?s novel Turtle Diary, out now from New York Review Books.

You hear that a lot about things you?re supposed to read. My own shelves are crammed with books I mean to get around to sometime. Yours probably are, too. So you may think you don?t have room for Russell Hoban?s novel Turtle Diary, which comes swimming back into print after nearly four decades, as patiently as its titular reptiles traverse the oceans stroke by miraculous stroke: ?Thousands of miles in their speechless eyes, submarine skies in their flipper-wings.?

This is what the best books do. They have all the time in the world. They never get lost. They find their way to you. What if I told you that Turtle Diary, about two loners on a mission to liberate the sea turtles from the London Zoo, is like a lot of things you already like, while being so much its own stupendous thing, that it?s become one of my literary yardsticks?

For Turtle Diary is a disquisition on loneliness as perfect and inexhaustible as the Beatles? ?Eleanor Rigby? or Chekhov?s ?Lady with the Little Dog,? a work of art that vibrates on a new frequency each time you read it, depending on the weather in your life. Like Nicholson Baker?s The Mezzanine, it?s a breathtaking lattice of metaphors, everything standing for everything else, and on every page, the inventive similes?like those of P. G. Wodehouse, J. G. Ballard?provide a steady stream of delight. Birds called oyster-catchers ?walked with their heads down, looking as if they had hands clasped behind their backs like little European philosophers in yachting gear.? Though its ?he wrote, she wrote? chapters don?t crescendo into the blood-curdling shriek of Gillian Flynn?s ingenious thriller Gone Girl (or, for that matter, the crazed fan letter/late reply of Eminem?s ?Stan?), the alternating POV generates a beautiful urgency here. And like Haruki Murakami?s Norwegian Wood, it?s the most emotionally direct (and, to my mind, finest) novel by a writer whose other remarkable books tend to resemble trips down the rabbit hole.

Turtle Diary is one of the great novels of middle age. Those of you not yet at that nebulous stage of life (as I wasn?t, when I first read it), those of you comfortably or uncomfortably past it, don?t shut the cover yet. It?s a book that can help you, even if you don?t think you need help. (If you?ve read this far, you do.) It offers solace to anyone who has ever looked at her situation in life and wondered, as one of Hoban?s characters does, ?Am I doomed?? (Answer: No.)

I?m going to make you need this story, do a better job of it than the one done by bookstore clerk William G., the first of the novel?s two fortysomething diarists.

"Today one of those women who never know titles came into the shop. ... This one wanted a novel, 'something for a good read at the cottage.' I offered her Procurer to the King by Fallopia Bothways. Going like a bomb with the menopausal set.

She gasped, and I realized I?d actually spoken the thought aloud: 'Going like a bomb with the menopausal set.'

She went quite red. 'What did you say?' she said.

'Going like a bomb, it?s the best she?s written yet,' I said, and looked very dim."

In Turtle Diary, the inside slips outside, the private turns public. What ensues is often embarrassment, fumbling, and regret, but also a rekindled sense of life and emphatic, even amazing action. ?I?ve precipitated a harmless fantasy into an active crisis,? worries Neaera H., Hoban?s other diarist, once she and William have decided, nearly wordlessly, to launch the turtles out of their tanks and over hundreds of miles back to the sea.

Neaera has a public face?she?s a successful children?s-book writer and artist?but she?s as mummified by loneliness as William is. ?My married friends wear Laura Ashley dresses and in their houses are grainy photographs of them barefoot on Continental beaches with their naked children,? she wryly observes. ?I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and I don?t keep cats.? But what friends? We never meet any of them. Interacting with one of William?s coworkers, she notes, ?I could feel my face not knowing what to do with itself.?

She describes herself as ?a more or less arty-intellectual-looking lady of forty-three,? who ?looks, I think, like a man?s woman and hasn?t got a man.? When William, a divorc?, first sees her in the bookshop (an event that doesn?t happen till Page 45), he pegs her as an ?arty-intellectual type about my age or a little younger. ... Not at all bad-looking.? But when she asks for a book about turtles, he feels a sort of magnetic repulsion: ?I don?t really want to talk to a woman who?s accumulated the sort of things in her head that I have in mine.? Look at all the lonely people.

It takes more entries still before these two skeptical, cautious souls establish, almost telepathically, that they?ve both been fixated on the captive turtles. (?Had I in fact said it? That first day at lunch I?d talked in code, talked about hauling bananas. Had I ever said turtles??) They join forces, and both lives change. ?I didn?t know how lonely I?d been until the loneliness stopped,? one of them notes.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/07/russell_hoban_s_novel_of_middle_age_turtle_diary_reviewed.html

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Cars that look around to work out where they are

YOU are driving home when your car screeches to a halt under a bridge. It hasn't broken down, it's just lost. If driverless cars are going to navigate safely, they need to know exactly where they are all the time ? and if they rely on GPS they are likely to lose their bearings every time they enter a tunnel, go past a skyscraper or drive under a bridge. Now a new system can pin down the location of a travelling car to within 3 metres without the aid of GPS ? just by looking around.

The geolocation system, designed by Marcus Brubaker and colleagues at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago, uses two simple cameras mounted on the car that survey its surroundings as the vehicle drives along. Software uses this camera data to work out when the road curves or is straight and then compares the layout of the route and its intersections to a map of the area from OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced mapping application. An inexpensive onboard motion sensor helps tell when the car has changed direction.

As the cameras pass by an increasing number of streets, the system eliminates the locations on the map that don't match up until it has worked out exactly where it is. On average, this process is completed after just 20 seconds of driving.

This method may sound too simplistic to work on the exact grids of a metropolis like New York, but according to Brubaker, it can pick up on the small differences in the size of each city block to pinpoint location accurately ? even in Manhattan.

When it was tested out on maps covering 2150 kilometres of roads within the city of Karlsruhe in Germany, the system placed the car to within 3 metres of its actual position as measured by a GPS unit.

Brubaker unveiled the GPS-free system at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Portland, Oregon, last month.

Junsung Kim, who works on autonomous vehicles at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says the paper is promising but that even better accuracy will be needed to ensure that vehicles know which lane they are travelling in.

"Self-localisation without a GPS is one of the most important technologies to make autonomous driving part of everyday lives," says Kim.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The driverless car with its own sense of direction"

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