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Sweet Seals For You, Always

blake kathryn
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Xuebing Du

pixel skylines
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tannertan36

JVL

Origami Around
ojovivo
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
NASA
Misplaced Lens Cap
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will byers stan first human second

Love Begins
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
almost home
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@pulkit13
Login with Amazon - The supercool product I work on at Amazon
Login with Amazon - https://login.amazon.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwJCI2lyWMk
While Facebook, Google and Twitter mostly serve social networking needs, Login with Amazon is unique in that it is specially crafted for online retailers to allow customers or potential buyers to use their Amazon credentials to login to their websites. This has huge benefits for the merchant/seller, the customer and Amazon. 1. Reduce login friction : Research has shown, and you would agree, that a vast majority of people are reluctant to "sign up" by creating and managing a new account on an eCommerce website. Ultimately, all we really care about is to have a smooth experience of selecting a product on the website and checking out. Customers prefer to register and login with credentials they already know. With over 250 million registered customers, Amazon is the biggest online store on the planet. It is not an unfair assumption that if you buy a product from an online seller, you probably buy stuff on Amazon too (and therefore have an Amazon account). 2. Leverage security, scalability and reduce operational costs :Millions of customers trust Amazon when it comes to purchasing things online and keeping their credit card information safe. Integrating with Amazon allows online sellers to delegate the responsibility of handling user authentication, payment information management and scalability issues to Amazon, which Amazon has perfected over the years. Sellers need not worry about building a user management system and handling security issues themselves, thereby allowing them to focus more on the development of their website. 3. Integrate smoothly with Amazon Payments : Login with Amazon also integrates smoothly with Pay with Amazon. This allows sellers to not only allow customers to use their Amazon credentials to log in but also purchase products by using their credit card and shipping address information already stored securely with Amazon. Thus, all a customer needs to do is login with Amazon, select and add a product to the cart and leverage information stored in their Amazon account to pay for the product. 4. Become an Amazon customer : Customers who have not yet created an Amazon account get an incentive to create one. Not only is their private information completely secure with Amazon, creating an account with Amazon gives customers the obvious benefit of choosing from a large number of products from a large number of sellers at very competitive prices. Being an eCommerce giant itself, Amazon is viewed as a competitor to every other eCommerce business. And yet, Login with Amazon is actually helping Amazon's competitors. However, as ironical as it may be, the business idea behind it is fantastic - a win-win for everyone involved.
Login with Amazon can be easily integrated on websites, Android and iOS apps.
Birthday # 23: 3 resolutions for today.
I have always been excited about birthdays. Wishes from so many people pour in the whole day and you are constantly reminded of the fact that no matter what happens, your family and close friends will always be there for you. It's a great feeling to have someone by your side, assuring you that there will indeed come a bright sunny day after a cold, dark night. Today, I turn 23. Student life has ended (atleast for the foreseeable future) and I'm about to usher into a new, exciting phase. This is how life works, doesn't it? It's all about these different phases. You end one, you begin another.
Its during these phases that you meet people, form relationships. Some last long, some fall apart quite too soon. But the memories, good and bad, stay intact. I distinctly remember my 14th birthday - a surprise party by my family. Over a hundred people came, with gifts and lots of cards and good wishes. I still discuss that day with my family and friends. How we partied, played those little games, and the loads and loads of people around me, chanting the birthday song like a group of skilled performers, genuinely happy for me I'm certain. Events like these made me more social, confident and appreciative of life and relationships. And then there was one birthday when I was alone in a different city, at the age of 16. Man that was sad, but I figured I needed that experience too. Events like these made me more mature, strong and independent. I've realized that there's a lot you can learn from everything and everyone. And that is my first birthday resolution.
It's June 13. Friday the 13th, and a full moon day too. Will something bad happen tonight? I hope not; this could be a question for any other day. Will I turn into a beautiful, lustrously maned werewolf and then be unceremoniously run over by a bin truck? I don't think so. What's special about this day is that one can call it the unluckiest day of the year, the best day for the worst things to happen, but I am still having a great time today ;) It's all about being optimistic now, isn't it? I just wish everyone strives to be strong and positive in every aspect of life. That is bound to make your ride smoother. And that is my second resolution of the day.
My father has always had an immense influence on me. Has always had, will always have. He's my idol in every which way. People are, in general, fond of giving advices. But it's only when you have someone so close to you that you actually listen, digest and process. Dad always asked me to expect less from others. He said he's realized it over the years, and that people should realize it early in their lives. When your expectations are high, from things or from people, in the end you might end up being proportionally hurt. When you expect less and get something awesome in return, you can be extremely happy because it would be beyond your expectations. And when its bad, you can shrug it off peacefully because you never expected much anyway. Expect less, give more - that is my last resolution for the day.
It's easy enough to jot these resolutions down. Oddly enough they are difficult to maintain. But if you don't give ignition, how on earth will you ever drive the car forward?
Looking forward to staying optimistic ahead. Here's to good and bad times - Cheers!
Here's another idol of mine. Bill Gates and his wife, talking about optimism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug9n5Atk8c
Review of "Coin" : A cool product I recently encountered!
What is Coin?
Coin is a highly-anticipated credit-card sized device that will store all your credit/debit/gift/membership cards, thus avoiding the hassle of carrying or managing too many cards.
You can easily switch between the cards by pressing a circular button, and swipe it anywhere as if it was the original card! Setting its sights on funding $50,000 for the development of the product, Coin reached that milestone within the first 47 minutes! The demand for such a product is apparent.
Watch live demo : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Sx34swEG0 How does it work?
Coin intends to use a revolutionary magnetic strip that changes on demand. You just have to swipe your cards once through the reader that comes with Coin, and the information will sync with your phone over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). While at a restaurant, all you need to do is select the type of card you want to pay with using the circular button and give Coin to the cashier. No hassles, perfectly easy to use. Why did the idea succeed?
Coin solves a real problem.
Coin is a pragmatic solution to carry one consolidated card instead of many. Just about all of us have at least a few payment cards, Coin would allow a single universal card to simulate multiple payment cards with the promise on unlimited cards if one scans them into the app.
I believe the funding campaign succeeded because of two reasons : 1. Though they didn't clearly state the number of devices they would be producing. By setting the $50,000 limit with a price of 50$ each, they made the consumer think the cards were limited. The "Order now before its too late" idea worked wonders. 2. Pricing the card at half the cost for pre-orders ($50 instead of $100) prompted the people to buy one for cheap now, before the price doubles! 3. $5 referral program for anyone who has pre-ordered Coin. This will cause rapid promotion over social networks.
Positives :
1. Solves a real-world problem 2. Easier to manage cards 3. Using BLE ; so if you forget the card at a restaurant, you will be notified as soon as you reach out of Bluetooth range. 4. Revolutionary magnetic-strip technology 5. Elegant, minimalist design
Challenges :
1. The biggest challenge Coin faces is convincing the payment-card companies, acquiring banks and processing companies. They have a set of established rules and guidelines based on history, risk challenges and laws to follow.
A big challenge for merchants is to identify is a certain card is genuine or not. Most companies have certain parameters to adjudge the genuineness of their card. These include : Payment card logo, slightly raised card number and cardholder name, signature panel, CVV2 number, expiration date and a hologram. 2. If the payment card companies can show that the above features were not examined, the merchant could be deemed responsible. This means the merchant might face penalties or lose the whole transaction amount. Whatever the concerns, Coin is a great product I am eagerly waiting for. Its a great idea and if neatly managed, one might find a Coin in the hands of the public soon.
How does Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer balance her work and personal life? Prioritizing and a never ending to-do list.
Inspiring as always.
The new Yahoo Mail !
Edited on : Nov 28, 2013 - It looks like there are several features which are available on the iPhone version of the app, and not on the Android one. Take 'swipe on a message' for instance. My android app does not reveal the quick options that the iPhone version does - 'delete', 'search all messages from this user' and 'star as important'. Added several new points (read on!)
Edited on : Nov 12, 2013 - Yahoo has added the Recent link on the sidebar in Yahoo Mail! A good alternative to the Tabs feature that a lot of users wanted to see again. 'Recent' gives you a list of recently opened emails - this seems better than Tabs because now you won't have many tabs cluttered at the top. This is another neat feature introduced in a series of changes in Yahoo Mail. Read the following for my earlier analysis :
Continuing with my review of the revamped offerings from Yahoo, it is time for a personal analysis of the new Yahoo Mail. Of all the yahoo products, I use Mail the most. I have used it for as long as I can remember. While I was pretty happy with the earlier version too, the new look has certainly brought some pleasant surprises! I am aware of the many complaints that people have been posting on YahooCare, but on a closer look I realized that quite a lot of them have just been repeated. Anyhow, I hope to cover them too in this article.
Positives:
1. Compose Mail window gives the look and feel of Tumblr.
2. Themes from Flickr: Yahoo has made a fresh and instantly noticeable change by integrating themes as images from its popular photosharing service. This has lightened up the look and feel of the app. Find Themes under Tools, and you can select from an array of options. Yahoo has also incorporated the design tactics of its much appreciated Yahoo Weather app, with a clean, translucent UI. High-quality, colorful and pleasing touch to the interface.
3. Swipe through emails to go to the next or previous emails.
4. Loads faster than Gmail : After listening to Marissa Mayer say that, I checked to see if it really did. Yahoo mail does seem to open up faster than gmail on average, although with little noticeable speed difference. Like the CEO said, the aim is to keep Mail simple and fast, so it doesn't have to load video chat (like Hangouts in gmail), which they may experiment with but it may get in the way of users using the product everyday. It might also have to do with the fact that Yahoo Mail, by default, does not load with https (HTTP Secure).
5. Preview Pane: Instant previewing of emails is a great feature. You can add the preview pane to the right or to the bottom.
6. Recent Searches: A list of last 5 recent searches is shown when you click/tap on the search box. Nifty!
7. Quick reply button at the bottom of email. Makes intuitive sense as one would reply to emails after having read the whole mail. To preserve the older view, the reply buttons are provided at the top too.
8. Quick search feature on hovering over an email (desktop). Really handy when you want to see all messages from a sender.
9. Group messages functionality - Having the context of the full conversation intact is important, so Yahoo group related messages together to give you a quick way to add to the conversation. Must say it has been very well managed with the Collapse All/Expand All button.
10. Text Editing options: Yahoo retains its text editing options, something which its competitive offering like gmail doesn't provide.
11. Powerful email search: Yahoo gives options to search emails by sender, recipient, subject, attachments and photos. These categorizations, which are missing in gmail, are handy.
12. Provides features like disposable addresses for free, which were originally provided only with a Mail Plus paid subscription.
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Suggestions:
1. Bringing the Tabs back would delight many Mail users. According to YahooCare, thousands of people have voted for this option to be retained in the new Yahoo Mail. - fixed with the new 'Recent' feature
2. HTTPS should be enabled by default - this change will be rolled from January 2014.
3. The email swiping action on the Android app should reveal quick options like Mark as Read, Mark as Spam, Delete and others which are available on other offerings like Gmail. - only available on iPhone as of now.
4. Add a shared folders/shared travel plans functionality. As a student or an employee who collaborates with other teammates on a project, sharing of notes/plans/project-files is highly important. Including this feature in Yahoo Mail would also differentiate it from Gmail, which doesn't have this functionality.
5. Remove the sponsored add from the top. As soon as the app loads, I want to read the top email because that's the most recent. However, the sponsored add slides down a couple of seconds later at the top, and I almost always click on it unintentionally. I would want to see a better placement for the add. Somewhere in the middle of the stacked emails is a good position to place an advertisement.
6. The kind of ads delivered through partnerships: It isn't only important to provide ads, its more important to provide relevant ones. It would be nice to see ads which tell me about stuff happening around me. Yahoo has always been great at partnerships. With Yahoo's already increasing focus on local search, collaborating with Groupon and Facebook Deals to give relevant local ads can help a lot.
6. Resizing the preview pane. On the desktop, when the Preview Pane has been enabled and placed on the right of the inbox list, it would give the user more flexibility if he could resize the width of either column according to his own preferences. As of now, the width of the inbox list can be increased to a certain size only. Also, the preview pane to the right is not supported on several resolutions.
7. When I click inside the preview pane, and press the down arrow key with the intention to scroll down the message, Mail instead chooses to list the next item in the inbox list. This is a bug I suppose, and something that should be taken care of ASAP!
8. The link to Tumblr has not been provided. As a Tumblr user, it would be nice if I had that link at the top along with other Yahoo products.
Overall, Yahoo Mail looks fresher than ever. It has been kept simple and fast, and it fulfills all the requirements for a normal user. There are several minor issues which can lead to a major impact in how Mail is perceived among users. But this latest Yahoo Mail offering has surely spurred my interest.
Yahoo! Search Mobile App for Android
As The Verge puts it precisely, Yahoo’s march to modernize its core products continues with a significant shift to the mobile space. Having revamped some of its mobile app offerings, Yahoo’s intentions are clear: as the world focuses more on the mobile arena, it must too.
While going through some of their products, I came across the Yahoo! Search Android App. Even after digging through numerous websites, I couldn’t find a healthy, detailed analysis of the app. I’m in no way an expert, but I decided to write one analysis myself.
Positive Points
Does what it says. Gives you really precise results about places/events nearby along with a map view and a list view. It’s a great app to seek information when you are mobile.
Clean, uncluttered interface. No sidebars, no fancy gestures, no ads on the home screen.
Easy to navigate, coz its right there! Intuitively, any user would either select one of the categories or type in the search bar – no other distractions.
Gives you answers, not just webpage links! It’s great when you are travelling and you don’t want to browse through information. Gives you nearby (and relevant) search results directly on a map so that you can quickly pick the best from the nearest! And let’s face it; a map view is definitely better to visualize the location, than just a list view which only tells you the distance in miles.
You can filter results by rating, distance and map preferences.
Useful, everyday-use list of options. Dry Cleaners, Parking, ATMs you name it.
Design suggestions
Missing the purple color – top bar. The black and white interface should be improved to make it colorful with Yahoo’s purple. After all, when I think of Yahoo, I think of purple.
Grid view instead of list view for the categories. Neatly spaced icons in a grid are more visually appealing.
The Y! on the top bar should be clickable to go to the homepage. Maybe even open a sidebar which shows recent searches. A tabbed, browser like interface would also seem appropriate.
There should be tabs or icons for Recently Viewed and Bookmarks too.
Incorporate Yahoo Sketch-a-Search technology. This would be a great add-on for local search. Very interesting, very innovative! See this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzbjyQI0UWE .
Problems to improve upon
Uses Google maps instead of Yahoo maps, hmm I did not understand why they’d do that. Maybe because Google Maps have more annotations and is the most popular?
Instant search suggestions feature is good, but no suggestions are provided while you are browsing. For e.g. when I search for "Los Angeles", I wish it gave me some suggestions at the top, this way I might click on those hyperlinks, increasing the number of pages I visit, and hence the traffic.
Links to other Yahoo products in a sidebar would be useful too. Will help spread the word!
Overall, with a neat interface, modest functionality and simple navigation, the Yahoo Search app is great to use for local searches.
If I can't repair your brakes, I might make your horn louder. But I promise you, I will do something.
James Asquith, 24, from Stevenage, spent a whopping £125,000 to achieve his dream. Over the course of five years he managed to visit all 196 countries from Australia to Iraq and San Marino to Serbia.
My ultimate dream!
Winning the simple, but tricky, Comcast's programming challenge
October 9, 2013:
I attended the USC Viterbi Engg Career Fair today. Amidst fairly heavy rains (rains in LA? and it HAD to be today! ), students from all engineering backgrounds flocked to the engineering quad where a lot of companies, big and small, had set up their tents. With everyone aiming to pitch their employment requests (and bag some cool goodies), it was a sight worth seeing. Hundreds of students, hundreds of resumes, long long queues.
One of the giants was Comcast. They had a whiteboard which had a seemingly simple programming problem to solve. The question was :
int main(){
int i; int n=20;
for(i=0; i< n; i--) printf("-");
return 0;
}
Seems pretty simple right? The condition was that you are allowed to add/modify only one character in the code such that it prints the dash (-) 20 times. And you have to list 3 different solutions.
I was intrigued. They had gift coupons for the first 3 people that could come and solve it. So there I was, a speck in the long queue for Yahoo!, looking at the Comcast board. Anyways, quite a few minutes later, I was able to figure out the 3 ways to do it, and they hadn't yet found a winner. So I went to their stall.
The three ways are:
1. Put a minus ( - ) before the i in the i<n part of the for loop.
2. Change i-- to n--
3. Change i<n to i+n
Sure enough all my solutions turned out to be right, and I was luckily the first one to solve it. I was enthused, they were excited! They took my picture and tweeted it. Now, just waiting for the coupon, and possibly an interview call ;)
One Year in the United States
Exactly one year ago, I came to the United States of America. It was a dream come true, probably the most important life-changing event of my life. I was amazed, dazzled, eyes-wide-open kinda excited on seeing a world so different from where I come. And all of this was just when I came out of LAX and heard the screeching tires of four-wheeled mechanical wonders being driven with purpose on the freeway, 10 lanes on either side. I had finally reached America, I exclaimed like an explorer.
The 'finally' in the last line has more significance for me that you'd deem important. The road to America had been a bumpy one - passport expiry, GRE delay, late arrival of the i20, visa delay, cancellation of flights - I felt like a victorious warrior the moment I landed here. It was indeed a long battle won. But as soon as I stepped on American soil, I realized that my real journey had just begun.
Unlike several stories I hear, I did not come here to escape being slotted by religion, caste or class. I came to the States as an ambitious student, looking for better opportunities, an unforgettable experience, and to see what it was like to live the so-called American dream. After I came here, I realized I had never really, literally, enjoyed studying so much before. No more was it something that had to be done, it was something I wanted to do. (Below : a regular day studying at the Leavey library)
I noticed stark differences in the academic culture. The American system was so much more liberal, focusing on cogitation rather than rote-learning, actual assignments rather than...well..the ruddy useless assignments I did (or did not) during my undergrad. All of this made me conscious of where we lacked, where there was so little scope for so much more talent.
So far its been an amazing journey. I have traveled to the most beautiful places (San Francisco, New York, Miami, Las Vegas and of course LA), had the most exquisite food, met some strange but colorful people and studied my a** off. I miss my people though, my family and friends back in India...but I'm pretty sure the time will come when that will be fixed too.
Hollywood Walk of Fame! gotta love Los Angeles \m/
Dylan's Birthday at Saddle Ranch on Sunset Blvd, LA. Great place to be at, you can ride the bull there!
And the Sony Xperia Z Ultra can be yours for the low, low price of $1239!
New Post has been published on Android Top News
The first device in the world to hit the market with the zeus-like powerful SoC, the Qualcomm Snapdragon, is the Sony Xperia Z Ultra. A behemoth by even my standards, the Xperia Z Ultra is packing some incredible tech. Check out the specs below! Oh, before you look down any…
http://goo.gl/gSz3e
#Sony, #SonyXperiaZUltra, #XperiaZUltra
HTC One with its newly born baby.