Sunday, September 8, 2013

TECH APPS SPECIAL .............Made In India Apps


Made In India Apps

Keep in touch with friends, find a place to eat while on the road and get reminders when you need them

Take A HIke
Among the top positions on the Google Play store and also available for the iPhone is the relatively young  messenger, Hike, developed by Softbank and Bharti Telecom. Hike has a simple, clean, friendly interface with lots of stickers, including some that you can select to depict your mood. It’s meant to be an India-centric app, offering a unique offline messaging solution with which you can send a message to a contact who isn’t online or even on Hike, and have the other person receive it as an SMS. This is not charged.
 
You have a bank of SMS credits and get more by inviting others to join. Hike also allows group messaging and the creation of a ‘circle of friends’ who will be the only ones to see your mood status. Sharing pictures and videos is also a feature. Hike is free.



On The Road With On The Way
What if you're between cities, driving hard and long, keeping your eyes peeled for a good place to rest and eat? On The Way is an Android app that lives to step into just such a situation. Put in your starting destination and the end point and the app will fire up a map. Make sure your GPS is on.

Your map will be dotted with places to eat, including dhabas, ATM outlets and places to see. Click on a point and you can see phone numbers, precise directions, broad description, cost of a meal for two at an eating joint, and a more detailed map. In a sense this app is reminiscent of Nokia's City Lens, which is based on an augmented reality concept — you point anywhere and an overlay appears with similar information about places around you. On The Way, while not being as sophisticated, can help you plan your stop way ahead of time.
 
Actionable And On Time 
Shifu aims to give you reminders smartly, when it makes sense.  Rather than bombard you with notifications, Shifu, for Android, learns from the behaviour of users, and spotting typical patterns suggests things you might want to do when you have time. Shifu can, for example, remind you to buy a book you wanted when you’re visiting a book store. Most usefully, the app learns what your free time slots are, from the data you put in, and reminds you to do stuff when you have, say, ten minutes at hand. This way, you can be productive a lot of the time. When you call someone and find the person unavailable, you later get a reminder to call again. Rather than getting pull-down notifications, you can permit Shifu to take over your wallpaper and turn it into a reminder space.

 


Mala Bhargava- See more at: http://www.businessworld.in/news/science-and-technology/app-reviews/made-in-india-apps/1046925/page-1.html#sthash.C9RzdFLU.dpuf

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