Flipboard 2.0 features

1. A new, visual Content Guide. Tap the Red Ribbon and you’ll see your own table of contents, all the magazines you’ve created, Notifications and lots of other goodies for you to peruse.

2. Commenting on Flipboard. Inside a story, tap the source’s avatar in the lower left-hand corner, to reveal Flipboard Comments. Draw in other Flipboard users with @mentions.

3. Recommended Reading. In Cover Stories, you’ll find More to Read, a personalized list of things we think you’ll love, drawn from your social interactions.

4. Subsections in partner magazines, newspapers and websites. On the second page of tablet editions, you’ll find new sidebars listing subsections for easier navigation.

5. Fast section switching. Tap the section name at the top of any page to reveal related content and subsections.

6. Optional Facebook Open Graph integration, bringing your Flipboard activity to your Facebook page in more meaningful ways.

Today, the company has added  personalized magazine option arrives for Android phones and tablets,  together with the  launch of a new web-based magazine editor.

The journey to the web is a slow step and  Flipboard is cautiously making magazine personalization available for web users. Flipboard head of product Eugene Wei explains:

…the web has mainly served as a companion to Flipboard’s mobile and tablet applications to date. “But,” he adds, “we think the web is super important, and we plan to do more on the web over time…I think a lot of our partners want things like embeddable buttons or badges to help drive more viewership to their magazines.

The new Flipboard web-based magazine editor features

On the newly launched site, editor.flipboard.com, users can create, edit and share their magazines like they do on mobile. Web-only options include  re-ordering the stories, photos and videos within  magazines, deleting content and even changing the order of the magazines under account.

To manage your own Flipboard magazines from the web, you can sign in to the Editor interface now .

There are now top social news apps out there that can filter news according to your needs and expectations. And most internet users now prefer reading news headlines in a more pleasant magazine-style apps. Popular magazine style social news apps like Flipboard are recording downloads in millions and page views are on the roof. The growing use of mobile devices are now making it easier to consume news as they happen. Information can reach consumers quicker and faster on social news apps. And most importantly these social news apps learn your preferences and selects and presents news you actually need to know. The following are 25 of the best social news apps out there you can actually use.

1.  Flud- allows users to create their own news personalities to attract followers.

2.  Circa- Circa relies on a  team of editors who break down notable news topics slides of information.

3.  Google Currents- combines great design with lots of publishers for personalization.

4.  SkyGrid- has a slick interface that gives users the ability to follow hot particular topics and categories

5.  New Yahoo  App-  has integrated the summly news app making it easy to consume news.

6.  AP Mobile  -Comprehensive and content-rich mobile app for local and global news.

7.  NewsBlur-is a personal news reader bringing people together to talk.

8.  Editions by AOL-  delivers a magazine that’s personalized just for you, each and every day.

9.  Flipboard- Flipboard creates a personalized magazine based on your selected social graph.

10.  Smartr – See what your friends are reading on Twitter and Facebook.

11.  NewsWhip- app works by following stories that are trending on social media and media outlets.

12. Pocket-  allows you to save content served by other social news  apps.

13. Prismatic- suitable for readers who tend to use Twitter as a primary source of news.

14.  Pulp – lets you turn your favourite news sites into your own personalized newspaper.

15. Zite- Discover more news based on your likes.

16. Trove is a personalized news and information engine for your iPad.

17. Umano- Umano consists of a collection of voice actors who read aloud a selection of articles.

18. Vodio-  surfaces video news content in an easily digestible format.

19.  News360- integrates  specific news sources via integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc.

20. Readability-  turns any web page into a clean view for reading now or later.

21.  News.Me- Your top stories from Facebook and Twitter delivered to your inbox.

22. Trapit- learns what matters to you and delivers amazing discoveries on the subjects you care about.

23.  My6sense- Get Personalized social and news content with the free my6sense Android app.

24.  Taptu- Taptu is a social news reader that puts all of the stuff you’re into in one app.

25.  NextDraft- delivers curated digests of the news that’s fit to read in an unobtrusive style via a 10-slide format.

How Side.ly works

Once you sign up on Slide.ly with either your Facebook account or an individual account,  you have the option to choose from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pickplz, and Picasa, and your  Google Images, photos from your friends or even from your computer.

After you’ve selected all of your favorite photos, you can drag the photos around to put them in the order that you want.  You can then match it with a suitable song.

You can search YouTube  or SoundCloud for the right music, which are all available from within Slide.ly. You can also upload your own mp3 if you don’t like the selection you have to choose from.

Once the video slideshow is complete, you can easily share the video slideshow on your social accounts or embed the it on your site.

The app lets you quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. You can scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button.

Just one month after launching its  app to the public, Mailbox was acquired by Dropbox, a cloud sharing service last month.  Mailbox team has now scaled the app to deliver over 100 million messages per day.

Mailbox checks your email from the cloud, then delivers it to your phone securely. You can also get push notifications for new messages.

The company said in a blog post.

After 10 weeks of around-the-clock hard work, our engineering team has scaled the Mailbox service to deliver over 100 million messages per day (and growing). We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system. There’s also a new version of Mailbox in the App Store with lots of little bits of goodness, from faster swiping to smarter snoozes.

You should be able to answer why you need to get more followers on Twitter? What is your motivation and what are the goals you have set for yourself to be successful on Twitter. It takes time and effort and yes you can attract thousands of followers like your most admired user.

1. They entertain, inform or educate?

The most successful Twitter users with thousands and millions of followers keep asking themselves how they can serve others with the influence they have on Twitter. They are sharing of themselves and people appreciate it. They mostly share information in their niche. You must identify your “Twitter calling”. Are you there to entertain, inform or educate.

2. They get response

You’ll feel your status and influence increasing and improving when people respond to your work.  How much response do you get from the information you share with your followers. Do they appreciate what you share. Find ways to get response from your followers.

3. They tweet as if it’s the last best tweet they are sharing

Successful Twitter users tweet good stuff not just about themselves, but information or resources the thousands and millions of followers will useful. Share interesting things in your space, not just about you. Take time and search for things that you know will help your tribe and share freely.

4. They focus on quality not quantity

Twitter respect is earned, work for it. You need to invest in it, period. Don’t just tweet anything you find. Stop tweeting about your cat! More is not better. Less could be more when you have nothing to say, but more is attractive when you can maintain the tweet momentum and share quality content at all times.

5. They listen!

Know when to listen. Sometimes your followers speak and give you clues about what they expect from you. Find time to listen and respond appropriately with the right tweet. Twitter influencers use that listening mode to share and even promote others content where necessary.

6. They encourage interactivity

Ask questions. Twitter is great for getting opinions from followers. If you expect your followers to share with you and comment about your tweets and opinions, ask questions they will likely give answers to.

7. They don’t attract the wrong followers

It feels good actually great to be loved and followed. But you don’t want just anybody to follow you. You need people who are interested in what you will say, comments you pass and opinions you share. They are the same people you expect to retweet your content. Work towards attracting the right crowd of followers. Numbers matter but quality followers are invaluable.

8. They  stay human!

Social network is a network of humans. Make it count, your followers are humans and they would love to see the human side of you. Genuine results in not automating all your updates. You might automate some, but without real engagement, real connecting time, you miss out. Sure you can have thousands of followers or fans, but will they know you when you are speaking to them.

9. They measure and respond

Use social monitoring services or Twitter connect and mention to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.

10. And Finally they learn from some the best

Anita Campbell – @smallbiztrends – is the editor of the popular website, Small Business Trends.

Justin Fox – @foxjust – is the editorial director for Harvard Business Review group

Eugene Lee – @eugenelee – is the CEO of Social Text, which was behind the first enterprise wiki and Enterprise 2.0

Mark Bailey – @ventureoutlook – has more than 20 years of business experience and sits on several top-name-company boards.

Nancy Clark – @nancyfclark – advocates for women and business and tweets about business and career resources

You can find the new feature called Inactive Account Manager — on your Google Account settings page. You can now tell Google what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.

How to set up Google Inactive Account Manager

At the settings page

Choose a timeout period—three, six, nine, or twelve months of inactivity—and from there you can direct Google on what to do with your Gmail messages, Blogger posts, Contacts, Google+ account, Google Voice, and YouTube accounts. (Basically, any Google services you’ve used in the past.) After that time period of inactivity, Google will send out a text message and e-mail the secondary address you provide. If you don’t respond in a timeout period, it will assume the worst.

According to Google, “you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.“

Virool achieves this by placing video in a form of content on publishers’ websites that target demographic that the advertiser wants to reach. It also allows website publishers to monetize their web properties by placing relevant content on their site. With  a minimum of $10, marketers can use the self-serve tool to connect to Virool’s distribution system, which then promotes the video using tags and keywords.

According to co-founder and CEO Alex Debelov “The idea behind virality is wrapped up with how good and relevant the content of the video is to an audience. We tell clients that if the work isn’t good, there’s nothing we can do. But we have helped videos with 100,000 videos explode to 5 million. But we can only help it find its audience.”

If you are thinking about how many views you can get using Virool, the company has a message for you:

We have created an auction based system inspired by Google’s Adwords. Your results will vary based on multiple factors, but primarily based on amount you are willing to pay per view and your campaign budget. Other factors that affect speed of delivery are: your maximum cost per view, target country, keyword targeting and gender/age targeting.

And for the  best strategy for promoting video or product, Virool wants you to pay attention to your video content … a lot

We suggest to invest heavily in content, making it interesting, funny and interactive. There are a lot of examples of great YouTube video campaigns that became viral. We found that the best advertisers spend at least in 1:1 ratio on video creation and promotion.It always helps to have some call to action like to offer coupon or discount or chance to win something. That would increase your conversions dramatically.

The good news for you is that FancyHands lets you delegate tasks or your to-do list  to a smart and savvy band of personal virtual assistants.  Requests are usually completed on the same business day. Tasks may take a couple minutes or an hour depending on details.  Detailed reports are written up for each task, stating the amount of time spent and specific actions taken to get the task done.

The startup’s goal is to make life easier for the masses who needs things done for them whilst they concentrate on their core business. They company hand-pick personal assistants all over the US to ensure they’ve got smart and savvy assistants with all the patience and commitment you require from an assistant.

How Fancy Hands works

-You can dictate your task into the app, submit, and an assistant will get started right away!
-You can type your task into the app and add attachments to better explain your request!
-You can hook the service up to Google Calendar to allow Fancy Hands to schedule your appointments!

Some popular requests include:

-find a good restaurant near me and make a reservation
-schedule an appointment for me and add to my calendar
-find this item that I want to buy in stock near me
-research this question that I have about something

Fancy Hands now integrates with task-management and project-management tools: Basecamp, do.com, Asana and Evernote. This means you can automate your task-management service so Fancy Hands does the tasks for you.

Fancy Hands offers monthly rates as well as yearly packages. $25/month for 5 requests, $45/month for 15 requests, & $65/month for 25 requests.

There is now more and full content for users, including a new partnership with Etsy. When you search, you will  instantly get  a magazine out of your results. Most importantly, you can now  collect and save articles, photos, audio and video by organizing them into beautiful personal magazines.

Flipboard 2.0 features

1. A new, visual Content Guide. Tap the Red Ribbon and you’ll see your own table of contents, all the magazines you’ve created, Notifications and lots of other goodies for you to peruse.

2. Commenting on Flipboard. Inside a story, tap the source’s avatar in the lower left-hand corner, to reveal Flipboard Comments. Draw in other Flipboard users with @mentions.

3. Recommended Reading. In Cover Stories, you’ll find More to Read, a personalized list of things we think you’ll love, drawn from your social interactions.

4. Subsections in partner magazines, newspapers and websites. On the second page of tablet editions, you’ll find new sidebars listing subsections for easier navigation.

5. Fast section switching. Tap the section name at the top of any page to reveal related content and subsections.

6. Optional Facebook Open Graph integration, bringing your Flipboard activity to your Facebook page in more meaningful ways.

Your notes can also be quickly stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.

The app offers you the ability to search to find what you’re looking for and when you’re finished with a note you can archive or delete it.

Google Keep is available on Google Play for devices running Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich and above. You can access, edit and create new notes on the web at http://drive.google.com/keep and in the coming weeks you’ll be able to do the same directly from Google Drive.