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Smart Telecom launches in Uganda, its cheap calls offer new hope!

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Everytime a Telecom launches in Uganda we get about a year maybe 2 of insane offers which we use and maximize and enjoy until they expire then we put our dual Sim phones back to use after returning to our old numbers or make an entire switch to the new telecom.

Am bringing this up because another telecom has launched in the region. Smart Telecom is what ‘you’ called them after a crowdsourced search for name from their ‘fans’ on giveusaname.net

Smart Telecom which uses the prefix 074 has been in the country using brandless sim cards sold by SureTelecom agents using the same prefix. The now ‘sold’ SureTelecom gave a few internet lovers unbelievable offers like unlimited internet for a month and unlimited calls which was definitely a promotion gimmick obviously came to an end.

Now the Aga Khan Foundation owned Smart Telecom has officially launched in full swing with cheap call offers like a phone call at 74 Ugshs, No matter how long the call lasts it will cost the same provided you are making a call on the same network.

The CEO of Smart Telecom says they plan to improve their Internet and broadband capabilities and he says they aim at offering consumers the ability to make calls without pressure of looking at a call while talking.

They have majored on offering cheap calls at 74 Ugx which is certainly low, but how cheap will the Data be?

Lets recieve the bouquet of ‘flowers’  from our new Telecom and lets pray the offers last and we can enjoy these cheap offers for longer.

WhatsApp VoIP feature on iOS leaked in screenshots

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After WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, the CEO Jan Koum tipped us that WhatsApp would soon bring voice call features (VoIP) to WhatsApp.

Since its 2014, a year full of leaks, iPhoneItalia posted leaked screenshots of the voice calling feature on iOS7. The images show a user interface that greatly resembles that of iOS 7 and has a few tweaks such as a camera button next to the voice message sending button, with a native like iOS 7 keyboard.

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The VoIP feature shows a circular button UI and a blurry background. The voice calls will be free on Wifi and cellular networks in a move to compete favorably with other chats apps offering the service.
Only time will tell, how the final product will look like.

Image Source: iPhoneItalia

Zuckerberg called Obama expressing frustration over US Internet spying!

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The CEO of Facebook shared what was on his mind on his Facebook page about Internet security today after news leaked that the NSA was posing as his social network Facebook and posting malware to users.

He expresses his frustration about how spying on Internet users by the US government is killing Internet Security and goes ahead to state that Facebook engineers work tireless to protect user data from criminals and threats but he is doesn’t expect them to be his government. He also states that he called Obama in his post.

strong>Below are his actual words he posted on his wall;

As the world becomes more complex and governments everywhere struggle, trust in the internet is more important today than ever.The internet is our shared space. It helps us connect. It spreads opportunity. It enables us to learn. It gives us a voice. It makes us stronger and safer together.

To keep the internet strong, we need to keep it secure. That’s why at Facebook we spend a lot of our energy making our services and the whole internet safer and more secure. We encrypt communications, we use secure protocols for traffic, we encourage people to use multiple factors for authentication and we go out of our way to help fix issues we find in other people’s services.

The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world.

This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government. The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.

So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the internet we want. Together,we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I’m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.

Source : Mark Zuckerberg

Google Drive slashes prices tremendously! 1 TB now costs $9.99

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The cloud storage service from Google has seen a tremendous price drop in a bid to make cloud storage cheaper and definitely trash competition.

As Microsoft was busy rebranding and asking consumers to switch to OneDrive after SkyDrive rebranded, Google has suddenly decided to pull its scissors on the Prices for its premium packages on Google Drive.

Just in case the 15gb free storage is not enough, Google will let you buy more space in packages of $1.99 for 100GB and a terabyte at $9.9 which is down from a hefty $49.9. The storage space hungry can also buy 10TB for $99.9,

Business users and premium users of Google drive are definitely having a wide smile on their faces and this might attach a switch from rival cloud storage providers like OneDrive, Drop box whose prices are rocket high once compared to Google Drive’s new prices.  Just in case you want to do the math,  you will get 1 TB at the price which Dropbox offers 100GB.

Two million users form the biggest web “hunt” for missing plane

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You must have heard about Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777 plane that disappeared with 239 passengers on board and crew. The plane which went off radar along its route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur has been a trending story on the internet and media.

DigitalGlobe a US based earth-imaging company which provides data from a number of its satellites,  has taken its search for the plane to another level by crowd sourcing users on the internet to search through imagery that was captured by satellite 400 miles above the sea.

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DigitalGlobe provided a large amount of imagery for the area of the Gulf of Thailand and South China city where the plane is presumed to have gone down to a large number of crowd sourced web users.

Through its specially designed website, the service has attracted more than 2 million users to look through the digitally captured images. Yesterday users had tagged about 650,000 objects over thousands of square miles.

We will continue to collect imagery of the search area and adapt our collection plans as new information becomes available – DigitalGlobe

Unfortunately, the web search alongside, 39 planes, 42 ships and more resources has not found anything helpful in relation to Flight MH370.

You can join the search here

Source: DigitalTrends

VLC beta Metro UI App launches on windows 8

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The popular open source media player that has been a desktop software over the years and has been known for its wide range of video and audio playback support has finally arrived on the windows 8 platform, you can now use the app in the metro style of windows 8 alongside other windows 8 apps without going to the desktop.

After a successfully raising £50,000 ($78,136 USD) on Kickstarter , a beta version was released for users with a Windows 8 -powered PC, laptop or tablet with an x86 or x64 processor. Being in beta the windows RT version still has issues and many users complained that the player is not working on the Microsoft Surface 2.

VLC beta for Windows 8 will play all supported formats it had in its desktop version like MPEG-1, H.265, WMV3, MKV, Ogg, MOV, and many other since it has had a reputation to play almost anything.

So if you were a fan of the modern UI in windows 8, then you have got an alternative player you can use, its clean of course and despite a few technical issues like limited support for subtitles and RT devices plus its generally slower than the desktop version.
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We only have to wait until the app leaves the ‘beta’ stage to enjoy its full power, lets hope it doesn’t take as long as the Android app which is still in beta up to now.

Download VLC beta for Windows 8 from here.

Twitter is back after about an hour of downtime!

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Today, Twitter had a lot of downtime and the service was not available for most users both on the Web and on mobile clients even Tweet Deck.

Twitter is now back and is accessible on both mobile and desktop clients after outage for about an hour.

The twitter website first displayed a message saying “something went wrong”  late on the website was accessible periodically and would later on go down showing an error page.

Users who had access to the service, experienced slow page load speeds and website availability websites like isup.me showed the twitter as down in most locations and later on showed that their was slow API connectivity.

Twitter later confirmed this downtime and made a minor update to its status.twitter.com blog confirming that they were working to fix the problem.

This definitely not good for the social network which has long stabilized from its early days when downtime was more common.

Twitter is not the only big internet service to have had major downtime after a previous WhatsApp outage.

Let us know what you think of such downtime for major internet services.

Twitter bans porn on Vine, talk about a cleaner ‘Vineyard’

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It’s only human to misuse things later on publish or promote pornograpy on social networks, chat apps, YouTube and generally anything that shares digital content.

The twitter own 10 second video sharing app Vine shared in an official blogpost of how it wanted to rid its community of pornographic vines.

“we don’t have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet –– we just prefer not to be the source of it.” – Vine

Vine asked its users to report videos containing sexually provocative nudity, close up of genitals even when clothed, use of sex toys, and sexual graphic and animations like hentai are banned.

However according to an FAQ post Nudity in a documentary context e.g. videos of nude protestors, Nudity in an artistic context, e.g. nude modeling in an art class, Nudity that is not sexually provocative, e.g. a mother breastfeeding her child and Clothed sexually suggestive dancing will be allowed.

So for the Holy, the ‘Vineyard’ is a little cleaner.

Facebook rolls out a redesigned News Feed

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Its been close to a year when Facebook rolled out a redesign of its News Feed that they claimed turned Facebook into a personalised NewsPaper. Now Facebook has rolled out changes.

Unfortunately the now old design that was new then wasn’t liked alot. The bigger photos, separated News and black bar didn’t look so nice and wasn’t easy to use. Facebook has called that version of NewsFeed as ‘Experimental’ and it didn’t roll out to every one because of negative feedback from users which took Facebook designers back to their drawing boards.

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The Experimental NewsFeed launched last year

Starting Today, Facebook is rolling out a cleaner News Feed and you will notice the unnecessary options on the left like groups, pages, bookmarks have been thrown to the bin and there are minimal options and a clear left hand side. The right was also cleaned up abit and Ads were reorganized.

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The new 'clean' NewsFeed

News Feed product manager Greg Marra said “People don’t like us moving their furniture around, because you break muscle memory,” He added that the dark-themed sidebar, which collapsed into a strip of icons depending on your screen size, was confusing for most users, he said “That’s a particular design idea that looked cool but didn’t help you get around the site,” Marra says. “You don’t need to relearn anything — that was one of our big themes.”

The new look isn’t a total overhaul and looks familiar with the old News Feed with a few changes such as a large blue bar for everyone and graph search for all Those who selected English as their language.

Am really impressed with the ‘new’ look, Thank Facebook for taking its News Feed for a shower.

Source: The Verge

Finally, Facebook Messenger arrives on Windows Phone

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Facebook said the Windows Phone version of Facebook Messenger that was previously on Android and iOS would come to Microsoft‘s mobile OS during the Mobile World Congress.

Well today, Windows Phone users could get a few a smiles as the Facebook Messenger is now the Windows Phone Store.

It comes with the ability to send both private and group chats and stickers and sharing locations just like the other apps but the Windows Phone version is still missing a few threads to become smart. No chat heads.

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Source: Facebook Messenger for Windows Phone

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