INTELLIVOCAB DELUXE FOR SAT

IntelliVocab Deluxe takes the highly popular IntelliVocab app to the next level. This app is built by students of MIT based on the latest research in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Web Semantics. Not only does it have a lot more words, it lets you add local notifications for the words which you did wrong, hence helping you master the words quickly. It personalizes English vocabulary learning for competitive exams and personal improvement.

It uses latest machine learning algorithms and web semantic techniques to collapse billions of possibilities into comprehensible probabilistic profile information, in real-time. It identifies your weak and strong areas and completely controls your learning environment. All you need to do is interact. The more you practice, the more it learns about you and knows the words which are difficult for you. It ensures you achieve the top scores in competitive exams like SAT.

Features:
— 4800+ words
— Intelligent algorithm to customize the learning experience.
— Practice session which will help you master words that you are weak on.
- Local Notifications for the words which you did wrong.
— Words in practice session are customized based on your expertise level, and your comfort level with the words.
— Two parameters are used to profile users. “Expert Level” of the user and “Commitment level” of the user. ExpertLevel: determined based on the interactions with the words. CommitmentLevel: determined based on the interactions with the iPhone App/AI engine
- Visual representation of Progress Report.

By the way, I was using one of the amazing tool and creating an animated video, do check it out and let me know if you like it :)

GoAnimate.com: INTELLIVOCAB DELUXE FOR SAT by viveknanda1

Like it? Download the best Vocabulary app Faqden.com. It's fun!

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SCRUM in Onshore Offshore Delivery model or Global delivery Model

This type of scrum is called as Distributed Scrum (Agile). There are couple of ways using which you can conduct your Daily Standup meetings in an Onshore Offshore or Global delivery model, but you have to see which one fits better to you.

One way is to conduct a Daily Standup Scrum at an overlapping time for all your teams using the Video conferencing or voice Call.

Personally, it makes more sense to have video conferencing than to have calls as it improves the communication within the team, but I’ve have seen teams those have been successful even using only voice calls.

The format for the Daily Scrum remains the same, everyone in the Scrum team answers the same 3 questions- What I did yesterday, What I’ll do today and Any obstacles?

You can have Scrum Master from any location.

The Second way to do this is by having each team at different locations its own daily stand up meeting. Ideally, in this case each team will have its own daily Scrum stand up meeting in the morning as per its local time and there will be Scrum Master for each of the different locations locally. 

In this case, Scrum masters in each location will keep a track of everything for their respective Daily Stand up meetings and they will again join another Stand up meeting, which will involve Scrum masters from each of the different geographical locations. Now, among the Scrum Masters the team will have a one Scrum Master who will run this (main-) Daily Stand up meeting and instead of answering the 3 questions now each Scrum Master will just answer 1 question i.e. obstacles reported by his scrum team in his local daily standup meeting.

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AGILE - WHAT, WHERE, WHY (BASICS)

What Is Agile?

Agile methodology is an approach to project management used in software development. It helps teams respond to the unpredictability of building software through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints.

Where Did Agile Come From?

In 1970, Dr. Winston Royce presented a paper entitled “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems,” which outlined his ideas on sequential development. In essence, his presentation asserted that a project could be developed much like an automobile on an assembly line, in which each piece is added in sequential phases. This means that every phase of the project must be completed before the next phase can begin. Thus, developers first gather all of a project’s requirements, then complete all of its architecture and design, then write all of the code, and so on. There is little, if any, communication between the specialized groups that complete each phase of work.

It’s easy to see how this development agile methodology is far from optimized. First of all, it assumes that every requirement of the project can be identified before any design or coding occurs. Put another way, do you think you could tell a team of developers everything that needed to be in a piece of software before it was up and running? Or would it be easier to describe your vision to the team if you could react to functional software? Many software developers have learned the answer to that question the hard way: At the end of a project, a team might have built the software it was asked to build, but, in the time it took to create, business realities have changed so dramatically that the product is irrelevant. In that scenario, a company has spent time and money to create software that no one wants. Couldn’t it have been possible to ensure the end product would still be relevant before it was actually finished?

DOUBLE CLICK THE IMAGE FOR CLEAR VIEW

Why Agile?

Agile development methodology attempts to provide many opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development life-cycle. This is achieved through regular cadences of work, known as sprints or iterations, at the end of which teams must present a shippable product. Thus by focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product they yield, agile methodology could be described as “iterative” and “incremental”.

In waterfall model, development teams only have one chance to get each aspect of a project right. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development— requirements, design, etc.— is continually revisited throughout the life cycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project every sprint, there’s always time to steer it in another direction.

The results of this “inspect-and-adapt” approach to development greatly reduce both development costs and time to market. Because teams can gather requirements at the same time they’re gathering requirements, the phenomenon known as “analysis-paralysis” can’t really impede a team from making progress. And because a team’s work cycle is limited to two weeks, it gives stakeholders recurring opportunities to calibrate releases for success in the real world. In essence, it could be said that the agile development methodology helps companies build the right product. Instead of committing to market a piece of software that hasn’t even been written yet, agile empowers teams to optimize their release as it’s developed, to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace. In the end, a development agile methodology that preserves a product’s critical market relevance and ensures a team’s work doesn’t wind up on a shelf, never released, is an attractive option for stakeholders and developers alike.

#AGILE

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A ROARING SOCIAL NETWORKING STARTUP- FOURSQUARE

FOURSQUARE is a location-based social networking website based on hardware for mobile devices. The service is available to users with GPS-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones. Users "check-in" at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by running the application and selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges". There's also a game involved, where users earn points for their activity and unlock "badges." And if you check-in the most to a venue, you become the "mayor." The company has signed numerous partnerships with big brands to promote the service, and is working on business development projects with local merchants.

The service was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude.


Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Foursquare is the second iteration of the same idea, that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. As of June 2011, the company reported it had 10 million registered users. The company was expected to pass 750 million check-ins before the end of June 2011, with an average of about 3 million check-ins per day. 50 percent of users come from outside US and also 50 percent of users are female. Support for French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese was added in February, 2011. Support for Bahasa Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Thai was added in September, 2011.

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A NEW MILLIONAIRE IN THE SILICON VALLEY

Aaron Levie, a 26-year-old CEO, is much more excited about business software than consumer products such as social networking services.
 
Box.net was founded in 2005 as a college business project by Aaron Levie (CEO) and Dylan Smith (CFO). It was incorporated in April of that year. Originally based in Mercer Island, Washington, Box.net moved to Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 2006.

About three years in, he looked at the company and saw a split between consumers and business users. He realized he would have to choose one or the other, and banked on enterprises. It turned out to be the right move: Box.net has made the turn from being used by individuals and small departments to selling directly to enterprises, and is winning contracts away from giants like Microsoft. Aaron led Box.net just got an 18,000-seat deal with Procter & Gamble.

Aaron Levie

In October 2009, Box.net acquired Increo Solutions, the developer of collaborative online document and media viewing tools Backboard and Embedit.in. As a result of this acquisition, Box.net launched two new features in January 2010: an integrated content viewer and the ability to embed these files anywhere on the web.

In fact, the company's customers are growing so fast that Box recently filed for a new $35 million round—just months after closing a $48 million round in February. The company is on track to have more than $100 million in funding at a $500 million valuation. It's also overflowing its current headquarters with more than 240 employees, and is planning to move into a new space early next year.

About Box.net : Box.net is an online content management and file storage business. The company has adopted a freemium business model, and provides 5GB of free storage for personal accounts. A mobile version of the service is available for Android, iPhone, iPad and WebOS devices. Box.net's competitors include Dropbox, Huddle.com, Egnyte, TitanFile, Sharepoint and Sugarsync.

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IPHONE APPLICATIONS BUSINESS: AN INSIGHT FOR DUMMIES

With the popularity of iPhone (for that matter Apple’s all other products such as iPad and iPod Touch) in the global market, the iPhone application market has evolved like never before. There are thousands and thousands of iPhone applications in the market these days. The iPhone apps market has become an ocean of all sorts of apps. Yet, it’s very easy to distinguish a good iPhone app from a bad one. Yes, I’m claiming that not all iPhone apps are up to the mark or as desirable as the hi-tech iPhone/iPad users would want to have.

I thought about this massive explosion of iPhone apps into the market and for no doubt whatsoever it’s the Apple’s well laid strategy to allow anyone or everyone to develop iPhone apps at will. As a result, not only Apple made a significant progress in spreading the iPhone/iPad businesses but also gained a fresh insight into its products from the hi-tech and developers community. What came next was the keen interest of the corporate world, mostly in mobile industry, to develop apps on the Apple’s platform. Certainly, this was a win-win situation for both the Apple Inc. and the developers of the iPhone apps.       

Yet, I would want to highlight the negative side of the iPhone apps evolution. There are iPhone developers and iPhone app developing companies (few startups, few big ones) everyone is trying its very own ideas, few with some vision and others just like that. End result is market with flooded with the iPhone apps.

From a business point of view, the competition is intense, and it takes a lot to turn an iPhone app into a real success. For a company to cope up within the iPhone apps market it is just not about developing a good iPhone app but also about making it available to the target audiences; And if you are thinking it’s just about marketing than you are wrong. It is really important for the developer’s community to first be ultra clear about what app it is trying to develop, who will be using it and what you expect to do about the iPhone app in the future (one time app or any updates in future??) . Market research is so very important aspect of iPhone app business, be it identifying what app you want to develop or what niche domain you are trying to get in, everything has to be clearly defined before any development starts. In fact, Market research also identifies the target audiences and marketing strategy beforehand in order to avoid clueless strategy for selling the app later in the game.

One start-up that has a clear vision of where it’s going and where it wants to be is Faqden labs. I got this rare and invaluable opportunity to review the firstiPhone application that Faqden labs developed. The iPhone app that I reviewed was named “INTELLIVOCAB for GRE GMAT”. I predicted it to be an instance winner with its excellent user interface and even better analytics for learning the GRE/GMAT EnglishVocabulary, and I’m glad it simply produced the results the way I thought it would. It became an instant hit, and is among the top 5 apps in Educational apps today of Apple iTune Store. I have no doubt whatsoever that “INTELLIVOCABfor GRE GMAT” is the best vocabulary building iPhone app in the market at the moment. Recently, Faqden labs launched a similar product with specific focus of SAT students called “INTELLIVOCAB for SAT”. “INTELLIVOCAB for SAT” has a superb UI and analytics just as “INTELLIVOCAB for GRE GMAT” has. “INTELLIVOCAB for SAT” certainly looks the better improved version of Faqden’s first iPhone app. For SAT students take my world “INTELLIVOCAB for SAT” is the best vocabulary building app.

From a user point of view, there is a swamp of iPhone applications out there and buying an iPhone app is one thing but identifying the app that he wants to buy has become an extremely challenging activity on its own. This has evolved a business of another kind i.e. companies like Appolicious who are maintaining the directory for iPhone apps and help users narrow down on their choices. Basically, such businesses are weeding out the unwanted apps on the choices of users and their own intelligent logic. Amazing!! Now we have got softwares to churn out iPhone apps, it is like having an app for sorting out the apps, what a vicious circle :) :) .......      

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