APP SPECIAL ...............Awesome apps for five different needs

Awesome apps for  five different needs   If you are picky about food, enjoy videos on the go or want to find sport venues nearby, here are some cool apps that can add excitement to your phone Get back to play A crowd-sourced free app, SportsJig lets you create sporting events and find play spaces near you. For the latter, you have to choose a sport from the available catalogue and then the map will light up with possible spaces that you can visit. There is also a section, which showcases various offers from gyms and wellness programs in the city. “When I saw my nine-year-old growing up, the aim was to remove hurdles for children and college going kids -where to play and who to play with,“ says Vinay Krishna, co-founder, JigServ Digital, the company that created the app. Plug and play Wingage WiFi is a cloud-managed public WiFi system. It caters to small and medium businesses and aims to build up more footfalls in brick-and mortar stores by making them offer free WiFi to customers, and consequently  increase the time spent at the retail outlets. “WiFi is a basic commodity.Our target is to reach 100 locations in Mumbai and launch the Wingage app that will tell you which location has free WiFi. Once you reach such a zone, the app will automatically catch the WiFi signal.  You don't need a password or any authentication,“ says Chaudhuri, cofounder, Wingage WiFi. Say hi to good food The founders of Quinto clearly enjoy their food. Sahil Khan, co-founder of Quinto says, “The app is more about personalising your  preferences and tastes.“ The app rates dishes in restaurants and not the restaurants themselves, thus focusing on food recommendations at a more granular level. Sahil says, “When you ask our app for a recommendation of, say, an egg roll,  the app might tell you that the egg roll at Hangla's is really good. Similarly, the chicken roll and the mutton roll get their own ratings.“ Apart from rating individual dishes, Quinto can also give you personal recommendations based on your eating preference history. Rediscover video A product of Cinemacraft, Videogram is an app that collates what is trending in video. The app contains options for video feed from several media which it uses to access YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Vine etc. After collating, Videogram returns the most popular scenes from that video after creating  a user interface (UI) for that video. Explaining its uniqueness, Hardik Shah from Cinemacraft says,  “Suppose two Bollywood actors made a video called `bang bang' and it gets  10 million views. We don't know if people have watched the video for  10 secs or 1 min.You are shown multiple thumbnails in a comic book format. We flip the covers and show you scenes inside the video.“ This way, users can preview video before hitting the play button. Paging, motion blur, colouring, saturation are other parameters which Videogram uses to bring out those frames. Real time, on the spot Real time, on the spot SpotChat, by SparkWares, is a geo-location based app where every location, defined by a particular range and boundaries, is considered a `spot'. All you need to do with the app is, check into a particular spot. Once there, you can see other people in your spot and other people using the app can also see you. SpotChat requires a user profile with interests, likes and dislikes listed. The characteristics of the profile serve as effective ice-breakers in a conversation. And you don't need to be a friend of the person you chat with. It also comes with a blocking feature that enables users to prematurely terminate conversations. Till now, the beta version  has been released and further testing is underway . arka bhattacharya ET11DEC15