Apakah Google Siapkan Android Versi Virtual Reality?

Setelah merilis Android 5.1 Lollipop, Google tampaknya telah bersiap untuk mengembangkan Android lainnya. Berbeda dari OS Android sebelum ini, OS Android mendatang dikabarkan akan mendukung virtual reality, sebagaimana dikabarkan oleh dua sumber anonim WSJ belum lama ini.

Menurut kedua sumber tadi, Google telah membuat kelompok insinyur yang berjumlah belasan hingga puluhan orang untuk mengerjakan proyek tersebut. Android versi virtual reality tersebut nantinya akan didistribusikan secara gratis seperti halnya Android standar.

Langkah Google tersebut ditempuh setelah tren virtual reality menanjak akhir-akhir ini, salah satunya dengan telah dibelinya Oculus oleh Facebook seharga 2 miliar dolar. Virtual reality juga telah dikembangkan dan menjadi fokus saat acara Game Developers Conference yang berlangsung di San Francisco baru-baru ini, seperti Project Morpheus dari Sony.

Tim Android VR disebut-sebut dipimpin oleh Clay Bavor dan Jeremy Doig. Clay Bavor adalah salah satu yang berperan dalam Google Cardboard, aplikasi untuk membuat smartphone menjadi penampil virtual reality secara murah. Aplikasi tersebut telah diunduh lebih dari 1 juta kali di Google Play Store.

Selain Sony, salah satu perusahaan yang serius menggarap virtual reality adalah Microsoft. Pada bulan Januari 2015 lalu, Microsoft telah mengumumkan HoloLens, proyek virtual reality yang menjadikan sebuah ruangan menjadi tempat interaktif untuk bermain dan bekerja.

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Bocoran Foto HTC One M9 Plus Terkuak, Apakah Tampil Dengan Tombol Fisik?

Jika bocoran sebelumnya menyajikan dua foto yang diduga warna hitam dari HTC One M9 Plus (yang diharapkan diperkenalkan di MWC 2015 bersama One M9). Nah, bocoran foto kini kembali terkuak, bukan cuma dua tapi empat foto, yang berasal dari sumber yang sama di Tiongkok, kali ini nampak menunjukkan warna silver/gold.

Jika foto tersebut memang One M9 Plus, tampak bahwa HTC telah melengkapinya dengan tombol home fisik, jika rumor sebelumnya benar, tombol fisik tersebut mencakup pemindai sidik jari. Selain itu, bagian depan M9 Plus tidak terlihat terlalu berbeda dari One M9, speaker BoomSound, dan tampak terdapat kamera yang cukup besar. Namun, dikatakan bahwa M9 Plus akan mengusung layar Quad HD bukannya panel 1080p seperti yang ditawarkan One M9.

Tidak jelas apakah One M9 Plus adalah perangkat yang sama dengan HTC A55 yang bocor sebelumnya. Menurut @upleaks, HTC A55 diluncurkan sebagai HTC One E9 di Tiongkok (meskipun kabar lain mengatakan bahwa mungkin akan dirilis sebagai smartphone Desire). Mudah-mudahan saja, HTC akan segera mengumumkan smartphone tersebut.

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UK should begin decriminalising drugs, say Richard Branson and Nick Clegg

Virgin founder and deputy prime minister argue that ‘war on drugs’ has failed and urge UK to follow Portuguese example

A drug dealer poses with cannabis products as he waits for customers in downtown Lisbon. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP

Patrick Wintour, political editor

Tuesday 3 March 2015 17.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 3 March 2015 19.52 EST

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Sir Richard Branson and Nick Clegg are urging the UK to begin decriminalising the use and possession of almost all drugs, following the example of Portugal.
The Virgin founder and deputy prime minister are to address a conference on fighting drug addiction on Wednesday, and in a Guardian article they argue that the “war on drugs” has failed.
“As an investment, the war on drugs has failed to deliver any returns,” they write. “If it were a business, it would have been shut down a long time ago. This is not what success looks like.

Related: We have been losing the war on drugs for four decades – end it now | Nick Clegg and Richard Branson

“The idea of eradicating drugs from the world by waging a war on those who use them is fundamentally flawed for one simple reason: it doesn’t reduce drug taking.
“The Home Office’s own research, commissioned by Liberal Democrats in government and published a few months ago, found there is no apparent correlation between the ‘toughness’ of a country’s approach and the prevalence of adult drug use.
“This devastating conclusion means that we are wasting our scarce resources, and on a grand scale.”
Branson has always made a point of not endorsing party politics, but is willing to endorse specific campaigns, and as a member on the global commission on drugs policy has called for an international rethink on drugs laws.
In their article, they argue: “The status quo is a colossal con perpetrated on the public by politicians who are too scared to break the taboo.”
Portugal decriminalised all drugs at the turn of the century. In the nearly 15 years since, the country has seen drug abuse drop by half, with the money previously spent on prohibition enforcement spent instead on reconnecting drug addicts with society.
In Clegg’s clearest endorsement of the Portuguese experiment, they say: “We should look to Portugal which removed criminal penalties for drug possession in 2001.
“Portugal’s reforms have not – as many predicted – led to an increase in drug use. Instead, they have allowed resources to be re-directed towards the treatment system, with dramatic reductions in addiction, HIV infections and drug-related deaths.
“Drugs remain illegal and socially unacceptable, as they should be, but drug users are dealt with through the civil rather than the criminal law.
“Anyone who is arrested for drug possession is immediately assessed and sent for treatment or education. If they fail to engage, they have to pay a fine.”
Portuguese citizens are allowed to purchase and possess 1g of heroin, 2g of cocaine, 25g of marijuana leaves or 5g of hashish.
They write: “The Portuguese system works, and on an issue as important as this, where lives are at stake, governments cannot afford to ignore the evidence. We should set up pilots to test and develop a British version of the Portuguese model.”
But the Centre for Social Justice, a charity closely associated with the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, claimed charities on the front line in the struggle against drug addiction are opposed to decriminalisation.
In recent CSJ research, nearly three-quarters of charities surveyed were concerned about the effect cannabis use had on their clients and families. More than half (56%) felt the decriminalisation of cannabis would lead to an increase in its use. Less than a quarter (23%) thought it would not.
Commenting on the findings, Christian Guy, director of the CSJ, said: “Drug addiction is ripping Britain’s poorest communities apart. Our network of 300 front-line charities sees this on a daily basis.
“Many are right to be worried that liberalising cannabis laws will lead to more people taking drugs and developing harder use.
“Politicians need to listen to these experts. They are the people who witness the devastating impact of drugs in our poorest neighbourhoods day in, day out.”

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The @realmadrid account is the first sports club profile to reach this figure.

Real Madrid have reached 15 million Twitter followers on their account in Spanish @realmadrid. It is the profile belonging to a club or sports institution that has the most worldwide followers, with 600,000 more than the second most popular account and 1,700,000 more than third place.

Real Madrid joined Twitter in May 2008. Since then, @realmadrid has tried to provide minute by minute information on the team, strengthening bonds between Spanish speaking Madrid fans throughout the world. Last summer, it became the most popular profile of any sports club and now it is the first to reach 15 million followers.

@realmadrid is the first place to announce the starting lineup before each match, as well as providing live coverage of games, the most important club notices and the best images, screen savers and videos. Also, last year, followers were able to participate in digital discussions with members of the first team, find out about interesting promotions from club members and show their passion for the Whites through different initiatives.

Real Madrid has a presence on Twitter with six other profiles:@realmadriden, which provides information in English;@realmadridarab, in Arabic; @realmadridjapan, in Japanese;@RMBaloncesto; @lafabricarm, which covers the latest reserve team news, and @Fun_RealMadrid, which provides information about worldwide Real Madrid Foundation activities.

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Main Street Hub Lands $20M To Bring Social Media Marketing To Small Business

Main Street Hub, a company that helps mom and pop businesses run social media marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation recently announced it has received $20M in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.

The company has raised a total of $40M. The most recent funding before this announcement was $14M in Series B in January, 2014. It has 6000 subscribers who are paying an average of $350 per month using a tiered pricing model, according to company officials.

Most small business owners are swamped just trying to keep their businesses running. They have little time to deal with modern online marketing or monitoring their Yelp page reviews. That’s where Main Street Hub comes in.

For a monthly fee, Matt Stuart, co-CEO at Main Street Hub says his company does all the heavy lifting across online channels for these businesses. “We deliver a combined product using existing communication channels including marketing automation, CRM, social media, reputation management and mobile, web and email marketing,” Stuart explained.

Stuart likens his company to the old Yellow Pages customer representative, who used to call on the store owner and handle all their marketing through a Yellow Pages ad. Today, potential customers are online and Main Street Hub is trying to help get those customers into the store, just as the Yellow Pages did back in the day.

Using a combination of data, content and human customer support, Main Street Hub works directly with subscribers to help bring people into their shops, the goal of every small business owner. They describe their content library that the company has built up over the last five years as “informative, funny or engaging in some way.”

“We help you acquire new customers by reaching out to nearby consumers who are expressing a need online for something you offer,” Andrew Allison, the other co-CEO told TechCrunch.

As Allison points out, a lot of small business web sites are dated and not terribly useful. Main Street Hub sends potential customers to a modern looking landing page. For instance, if someone expresses a desire for a local restaurant for lunch on Twitter, Main Street Hub is watching and will respond with a link to the business website, tuned for whatever device the person happens to be using.

If the customer checks in, leaves a review on Yelp or a comment on Twitter (or takes another online action), it sees that too and may respond on behalf of the business, as appropriate.

There are marketing automation tools like Marketo and Eloqua, but these tend focus on larger businesses, whereas Main Street Hub is entirely focused on small ones. It does count chains and franchises among its clients, but even then the focus is at the store level, Stuart explained.

The founders began what became Main Street Hub when they were students at Stanford Business School. The original business helped people find local car mechanics online, before they pivoted to Main Street Hub. They ran the business for a year from 2010 to 2011 in San Francisco before moving to the current headquarters in Austin. At the time of the move, the company had 11 employees. Today it has 470.

Main Street Hub hopes to use the big influx of money to continue to expand the business, and is looking to add 300 people to the Austin and New York City offices in the next year, including tripling the size of the engineering and product teams.

Product photos courtesy of Main Street Hub.

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Community Marketing Methods

When aiming your marketing efforts at communities, the first consideration is your niche audience. You want to figure out where they spend their time, what their interests are, and where you can find them. Following are some places to begin your search.

Online Communities 

Since the advent of the internet, online communities have made it easy to connect with other like-minded individuals. Online forums foster conversations on specific topics related to the community at hand. You can find forums on just about everything, from parenting and technology to diet and butterflies.

If there’s an interest, there’s a forum. A quick Google search on your topic of interest plus the word “forum” should lead to all kinds of possibilities.

Other Community Marketing places:

•     Social media groups

•     Facebook fan pages

•     Professional groups

•     Geographic communities

•     Build your own online community

**This is an excerpt from Own Your Niche: Hype-Free Internet Marketing Tactics to Establish Authority in Your Field and Promote Your Service Based Business by Stephanie Chandler. Get a copy from Amazon here.

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BusinessWorld

The country’s leading business newspaper represents four decades of professional economic journalism. 

This tradition of excellence began when BusinessDay first came off the press on February 27, 1967. In its maiden issue, the paper pledged "competent and responsible reporting of the news." 
The paper expanded its operations in the years that followed to keep in step with the growing business community, eventually makingBusinessDay Southeast Asia’s first business daily. 
BusinessDay was considered a standard of fairness, credibility and integrity in the journalistic world. The principles behind the paper’s existence were closely guarded by its publisher/president and editor-in-chief Raul L. Locsin. 
At least twice in its history, the paper was able to withstand forces both within and outside the company. First, the martial law years failed to stop its presses. Second, the concept of professional economic journalism refused to die even as a labor problem forced the company to close shop on June 5, 1987. 
The non-striking workers got together barely a month later to form BusinessWorld Publishing Corporation, ushering in the paper’s rebirth under a new name. This rebirth also saw the full computerization of its production process. 
Unlike its predecessor, BusinessWorld has had to compete from the very start with other business dailies and several other papers with expanded business sections. But the paper managed to position itself comfortably in the overcrowded industry. Indeed, not all business papers are created equal. 
Today, the business paper comes out Mondays through Fridays (with a Saturday exclusive online edition) with a national circulation of 117,000 as of March 31, 2014. 
With the paper’s excellent news coverage and style of reporting, a readership survey conducted late last year by an independent research group revealed that subscribers pass their copies on to an average of five other persons. Its subscribers are trendsetters and decision-makers -- leaders in business, industry and government, both here and of governments and corporations abroad that are keen on Philippine business updates. 
General broadsheets included, BusinessWorld ranks fourth in the industry in terms of advertising revenues. This, despite its six days a week frequency compared to the seven days of the other papers. 
Over the last 10 years, BusinessWorld has exhibited remarkable growth. Immediately after its rebirth, the company revived two other products -- the monthly BusinessWorld Files and the annualBusinessWorld Top 1000 Corporations in the Philippines. 
It incorporated World Press, Inc. a wholly owned printing subsidiary, in 1991. In 1994, the company moved to its new home in Quezon City and embarked on its then innovative library computerization program.  In October 1995,BusinessWorld ventured into on-line publishing -- the first in the Philippines and one of the first in East Asia. Codex, its electronic archives, is one of the Philippines’ most extensive banks of the country’s business news and information, published since 1994. Today, it also publishes the award-winning luxury consumer monthly magazine, BusinessWorld High Life. 
The company has been flexible enough to introduce new sections to meet the market’s rapidly changing needs. Despite change, BusinessWorld’s success over the years has constantly been anchored on a firm belief that a newspaper is a public trust.

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UK government finances £8.8bn in surplus in January

UK government finances showed a surplus of £8.8bn in January, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said.

It is the highest surplus for seven years and higher than the revised £6.5bn reported for January 2014.

A better than expected rise in tax receipts means the government is on course to meet its borrowing target for this year.

The surplus means borrowing has fallen to £74bn in the financial year to date, a fall of £6bn compared with last year.

The government's borrowing target for the 2015 financial year is £91.3bn.

January's public sector finance data traditionally shows a surplus, as it includes tax receipts from those who submit self-assessment forms. 

Analysis by Ross Hawkins, BBC political correspondent 

Overground, underground, George Osborne toured London trying to spread the good news.

From the Tube to an Edgware building site he went, clad in hard hat and fluorescent jacket, reporters in tow.

He told them about economic plans, a surplus in the month of January, and high employment.

It was almost enough to make voters forget his unmet pledge to balance the books by now, or the national debt: set at £1.4 trillion and rising.

He is hoping good news, and the fear it could turn sour, will keep the Tories in government.

Labour is busy insisting the recovery spelt out in official statistics isn't felt by ordinary families.

If dressing up helps win their battle for voters' attention and trust, politicians will wear as many hard hats as it takes.

Treasury officials had expected the rise in the number of people working for themselves would mean a bigger surplus this January.

They said that, as a result, the government would meet its borrowing target this year, despite appearing to be on course to overshoot that target for most of 2014.

'Milestones'

Chancellor George Osborne said: "In a week of economic milestones, today we learn that January saw the largest monthly surplus in the public finances since the crisis, putting us on track to meet our borrowing forecasts and halve the deficit as a share of GDP this year."

Labour said the figures were distorted by bonuses at the top which were delayed from last year to this year to take advantage of the top rate tax cut.

"These figures show George Osborne has broken his promise to balance the books by this year. This government is now set to have borrowed over £200bn more than planned, said Chris Leslie, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury.

Tax receipts

The ONS said self-assessed income tax receipts were £12.3bn in January, an increase of £1.7bn, or 15.6%, compared with January 2014.

Meanwhile, Treasury revisions to government spending showed departments spent £1.5bn less in the year to date.

And other revisions, which showed an increase of £0.5bn in VAT receipts and £0.4bn in other tax receipts, all helped to reduce government borrowing.

A £2.9bn payment to the European Commission budget, which skewed last month's borrowing figures, was reduced by £1.2bn in January to £1.7bn as part of an accounting procedure agreed with the Europe Union (EU).

That agreement means the £2.9bn will eventually be reduced by existing refunds and rebates from the EU down to about £850m.

Tax receipts and spending both grew in line with expectations. In the year to date, total current receipts grew by 3.1%, as against the full-year forecast of 3%.

The fall in global oil prices reduced tax contributions from energy companies this year. If the price of oil stays low, reduced tax receipts from energy companies will hit total receipts in the next financial year, warns the Office for Budget Responsibility.

The figures come in the same week that official figures showed Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflationfell to a record low of 0.3% in January, while annual wage rises excluding bonuses grew 1.7% in the three months to December as unemployment fell to 1.86 milion.

Elsewhere, the ONS said UK retail sales fell 0.3% in January from the previous month. UK High Street shops have been reducing their prices in an effort to attract customers, the figures indicate.

Average store prices were 3.1% cheaper than last January. This was the largest year-on-year fall since consistent records began in 1997, the ONS added.

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