Today Dropbox has redesigned their website's file management portal and updated the Android app to the include the automatic background uploading we saw in the beta test earlier this month.
The new website design, as shown in the screenshots below, is brighter and more spacious. In addition, it includes a lightbox feature that allows you to easily flip through larger images. It will show up once you automatically upload some images.
Once you download the new Android version and allow automatic uploading you will get 500 MB of additional space added to your account when your first photo/video uploads. Your entire current photo and video library will upload automatically, then whenever you take a new photo or record a video it will be uploaded to the "Camera Uploads" folder in your Dropbox account. Over time an additional 3 GB of space will be added to your account when you automatically upload more images and videos; they have not disclosed the specifics of how this increase will work.
Download the new Android version today from the market and let us know what you think. An updated iOS version will be coming soon as well as new Windows and Mac desktop clients.
ScreenLeap's founder, Tuyen Truong, and team members set out to make screen sharing simple. After extensive research, coding, testing, and feedback they have succeeded. This is screen sharing even your grandma can use! The initial web app offers:
2 click instant sharing (1 if you grant perpetual permission)
No user account for either end
Nothing for the viewer to install
Anyone with a browser can see the shared screen
Many will argue that this already exists. It does on a feature/product level with services like GoToMeeting, WebEx, and JoinMe available. Although, none can match the simplicity and universal availability of ScreenLeap. Did I mention it was free? It is, and always will be. They plan to monetize it by proving additional premium features that are available for a charge.
What makes this so powerful is that I can share my screen with my wife on her Chromebook, on my parent's iPad, on my friend's Android phone, and of course on my brother's Windows laptop; all at the same time and in real-time. The viewer is simply on a webpage built with HTML and JavaScript while the presenter allowed a Java plug-in access to broadcast their screen.
Upon arriving at screenleap.com the presenter will click "share your screen now" to start the session. Once that is done you are given a link people will use to access the broadcast. If it is not easy to send the link you can verbally give them a share code to enter in the field at the top right of the homepage. The sharer is able to see how many people are viewing and also limit what part of the screen is shared.
What does the future hold? "We want to really nail the screen sharing experience first and make it work reliably for everyone. Remote desktop control and live collaboration are follow-up ideas that we are definitely looking into," Truong says. Follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
Floq is on a mission "to make all types of questions and answers global, open and shareable" says Jonah Cacioppe. The service has been in development for over a year with Jonah Cacioppe (co-founder and CEO), Michael Kruger (co-founder and CTO), Brinley Ang (developer), Rod Pattison (developer), Chris Cacioppe (designer), and David Jardine (marketing) making up the six person team. Floq is tied to, and partly owned by, Integral Development. ID is primarily owned by Dr. Ron Cacioppe and Jonah and is providing some of the workspace, infrastructure, as well as the initial pool of data.
Floq's web application provides the ability to compare your group's survey results with other similar survey answers within the industry. Doing this provides a benchmark to strive for as well as deeper context to the respondents' answers. Questions and answers are anonymized with the questions being constantly compared to show you if your question has been asked before.
Imagine asking if a person prefers iOS or Android. While setting up your survey the autocomplete feature shows you that the question has been asked before. The previous results divulge that Android is selected more often overall, but the demographics of your team have not been asked. The answers you receive from your survey will benefit you as well as contribute to the community by providing more data for that question. Perhaps your small team prefers iOS but you see more people in general like Android. Another way this could benefit you is if you have a very small team to include their answers with a larger data set to receive a more accurate answer. This type of tool could be immensely beneficial.
Looking ahead they plan on integrating the Q&A with social networks to further expand the platform. A survey library will also be coming so that people can search a repository of pre-made survey templates that anyone can contribute to. The lessons learned and technology platform may also be used for other things such as ratings, polls, and tests.
Floq can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The user interface and design are very slick! It is in very early private beta testing and has some issues here and there that they are working on.
Mentimeter was created as a tool to interact with and engage an audience. While attending the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden the four founders discovered that they were not being actively engaged by the teachers. After seeing the same thing occur in their professional lives they set out to change how speakers interact with audiences. The solution needed to be simple, fast, and always available. They also didn't want it tied to a classroom; it had be accessible to anyone anywhere.
Steve Jobs and Apple's creations strongly inspired them to design products with "a holistic user experience", says co-founder Johnny Warström. As you use the product you will notice everything from the text entry to the gently animated dynamically resizing chart just works. The other founders are Henrik Fräsén (management and digital marketing), Niklas Ingvar (design and testing) and Kristoffer Renholm (architect and coder); Johnny heads up marketing and customer interaction.
Mentimeter allows you to quickly create custom polls using a web interface. Once the poll is created a unique code is given for the group being polled to enter at vot.rs to access the voting page on their mobile phone, tablet, or any connected device. A QR code is generated as well for anyone that has a reader app. The public results URL is provided for people to see the results while a special administrative one is created for updating, closing, or resetting the pole. Code for embedding the results is provided for easy publication which I have included below the post; be sure to vote over to the right.
The architecture has been built to allow for incremental expansion using a Ruby (Sinatra) REST API hosted on Heroku and a PHP frontend. All content is published from the frontend, but Wordpress is used in the background for their content management system. Raphaël Javascript is used to get the presentation view to scale correctly on all sized devices; AJAX polling updates the view when live votes come in. Finally, Backbone.js syncs the Document Object Model with the API.
Looking to the future they want to maintain Mentimeter's simplicity while adding more interesting features. Some of those features will be user accounts so that people that want to can more easily retrieve questions, saving and comparing historical data is on the horizon, as is additional question controls for professional lecturers. Mentimeter has a blog and is on Twitter.
This video shows how it looks in real-time when numerous votes come in:
