Facebook Is Forcing All Users To Download Messenger

Facebook is taking its standalone app strategy to a new extreme today. It’s starting to notify users they’ll no longer have the option to send and receive messages in Facebook for iOS and Android, and will instead have to download Facebook Messenger to chat on mobile.

Facebook’s main apps have always included a full-featured messaging tab. Then a few months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger app installed hadthe chat tab of their main apps replaced with a hotlink button that would open Messenger. But this was optional. If you wanted to message inside Facebook for iOS or Android, you just didn’t download Messenger. That’s not going to be an option anymore.

Soon, all iOS and Android users will have a hotlink at the bottom of their Facebook app that will open Messenger.

Notifications about the change are going out to some users in Europe starting today, and they’ll have about two weeks and see multiple alerts before the requirement to download Messenger kicks in. Eventually, all Facebook users will get migrated to this new protocol. And you can bet some users are going to be angry.

The only way to escape the migration is to either have a low-end Android with an OS too old to run Messenger, use Facebook’s mobile web site, or use Facebook’s standalone content reader app Paper.

In an onstage talk I did with Mark Zuckerberg in November, the CEO revealed an explanation for today’s change that Facebook’s PR team just referred me to:

“the other thing that we’re doing with Messenger is making it so once you have the standalone Messenger app, we are actually taking messaging out of the main Facebook app. And the reason why we’re doing that is we found that having it as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that.” 

Essentially, Facebook sees Messaging within its main apps as slow, buried, and sub-optimal overall. Its numbers probably indicate that people message more and have a better experience on the standalone Messenger app.

But forcing users to adopt a new messaging behavior could be very unpopular. Not everyone wants to manage multiple Facebook apps on their homescreen or stick them in a folder. A portion of Facebook users may prefer to keep things simple with one app for everything Facebook, even if it means it’s slower and it takes more taps to get to their messages.

Facebook was criticized for its bloated main apps but this announcement seems like an over-correction, swinging wildly in the direction of each function having its own app. Obviously there’s merit to only having to maintain one mobile chat interface. It promotes faster feature development and better stability. And once users go through the chore of setting up Messenger and adapting to its style, they may enjoy it better. Personally, I like Messenger’s clean look and feel, playful sounds, and quick performance.

Still, a unilateral forced migration is the exact kind of change Facebook users hate, and this will only breed more paranoia that their social network could change without their consent. Taking a slower “We’re switching everyone eventually, so you might as well do it now” approach might have gone over better than “Your familiar chat interface will be destroyed in two weeks whether you like it or not”.

The only real explanation for moving this quickly is that desperate times call for desperate measures. Facebook is fighting a war overseas for the fate of messaging. While it bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, it still has to battle lean standalone messaging apps like WeChat, Kik, KakaoTalk, and Line. Unless forced, users might have stuck with the old Facebook app’s messaging interface instead of seeing there was something that could better compete with these other apps. That isn’t going to make this change much easier to swallow, though.

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HOW TO MAKE THE BEST OF THAT LOW MEMORY DEVICE

It is common knowledge that all fingers are not equal. This is also evident even in the devices bought by different individuals. This is more so because to a vast majority of people in developing countries like Nigeria, the major factor that influences the purchasing decision when it comes to mobile devices (phones) is the price tag. Unfortunately, after finally gathering enough courage to "cough" out the money required to purchase the device of your dreams, the sad reality strikes even more often on people who buy low budget phones, and that beautiful life you envisioned before buying the phone can quickly become a nightmare.

To avoid spanking yourself and feeling like an idiot, here are some tips that would make your life easier.

1. Ensure that there is an antivirus software installed on the phone, for android, iphone, symbian, windows phone users.

2. Avoid storing heavy files on your internal phone memory, store them in sd-Card instead.

3. If possible, install apps on your memory card also, to reserve space on the device memory.

4. There are some RAM booster apps on different appstores that would help you reclaim space in your RAM from time to time therefore increasing device performance and speed.

5. If your device has multi-tasking capabilities, ensure that you close all unused apps, even when the system offers a promise of doing that for you. That is important because, when you need that space the most, it may not have dawned on your device's garbage collector to clear the unused apps yet.

6.  Most importantly, dowload and install only apps you really need. Since the resource (memory) is scarse, it is just appropriate to install only the most important apps. Apart from the ones mentioned earlier in this article, you might want to install a game, a currency converter, a multi-purpose document and news reader, an additional web browser and a few others that are perculiar to your situation. But avoid bloating things up by installing unnecessary apps or installing multiple apps that do the same thing.

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MediaFire Takes Its Desktop Apps Out Of Beta, Removes File Size Restrictions

MediaFire, the popular online file storage and image hosting site, today announced that its desktop apps for Windows and OS X are now out of beta. The integration looks similar to what Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive do in that they seamlessly integrate themselves into the operating system’s file managers and save dialogs.

Using the desktop apps, MediaFire allows desktop uses to quickly upload their images and instantly share them with others. As part of this update, the service now allows users to follow files and track new files shared by users automatically. It also essentially lifted its file upload restrictions and both free and paid users can now upload files up to 20 gigabytes in size. It’s also launching 1 terabyte storage plans. For a limited time, those will cost $2.50 per month or $24.99 per year. That’s significantly cheaper than Google’s new plans for Drive, but the functionality of MediaFire is obviously also far more limited that of Drive. If you’re just looking for online storage, though, this may be worth a closer look.

For developers, the company is announcing a set of new APIs that will help them integrate the service with their own applications.

In the next few weeks, MediaFire will also launch new native apps for iPad and Android. The company isn’t releasing all that much information about these apps yet, but they will include automatic photo syncing from Android devices.

All of this clearly amounts to an attempt by MediaFire to position itself as a more fully-featured online storage service. In general, the service doesn’t quite get the attention that some of its competitors get, but it does have a very large user base. With all of the larger players now making a very aggressive push to compete with Dropbox and similar services, it makes sense for MediaFire to also try to gain a bit more mind share as well.

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Marvel’s iPhone App Turns Sketches Into Tappable Mobile App “Prototypes”

Marvel, a UK startup founded last year by ex-employees of Enpocket (acquired by Nokia), is on a mission: to put creating a mobile app “prototype” within the reach of almost anybody.

The company’s first offering, built on top of Dropbox, lets you turn sketches, wireframes, and Photoshop files synced with the cloud-storage service into a tappable (or clickable) demo of how your mobile app will work. It does this by letting you add ‘hotspots’ and transitions to your images so that the resulting prototype can be navigated as if it were an actual app.

Now Marvel has applied this simple idea to an iPhone app of its own which lets you photograph paper sketches of your app idea and tun these into interactive prototypes too.

Aimed at designers, UX experts, product managers, students and businesses that need to quickly prototype ideas to share with clients and teams, Marvel’s iPhone app (and its original web-based offering) couldn’t really be any simpler.

To begin with you draw your app screens on paper, a whiteboard, or on the back of a napkin in true folklore style, and then use your iPhone to take a snap of each sketch, which can be designed for either iPhone or iPad.

Next, using the Marvel app, you apply ‘touch’ hotspots to each image and in turn link your screens together in the way you intend the app to be navigated.

Finally, once you’re happy with your prototype, you can share it via a unique mobile-friendly URL over email, SMS or Twitter. Meanwhile, your Marvel prototype is synced with Dropbox and linked to your Marvel account so that you can continue working on it at a future date.

In addition, any changes you make to your ‘screen’ images, even via another app such as Photoshop, are synced with Marvel due to being built on top of Dropbox. This also means the startup is able to offer its core service for free without limits since it isn’t providing cloud-storage.

“In the past, if you wanted to see your app or web designs and ideas in anything more engaging than PDFs and Powerpoints, you needed to have the skills and the time to code it into an interactive prototype. This often puts prototyping out of reach for many businesses and individuals as they simply don’t have the time, money or developer resources,” explains Marvel co-founder Murat Mutlu.

“What if you could create a prototyping tool that didn’t just help designers and businesses, but anyone with an idea, no matter what level of design and technical skill they had? Marvel was designed and built to do just that,” he adds. “We’ve designed Marvel to be ‘pick up and play’. No maze like interface and gunk you don’t need. The aim of Marvel is to create your prototype and just get out of the way so that you can concentrate on the important stuff.”

Along with Mutlu, the startups other co-founders are Brendan Moore, previously a Solutions Engineer at Nokia and Navteq, and Jonathan Siao, who also worked at Nokia. All three went full-time with Marvel after the company raised a £60k investment from Haatch in November.

Mutlu cites Invision as its main competitor in what is an increasingly crowded space. “They are extremely well funded, have a huge team and a 2.5 year head start. But there’s still an opportunity to take a different approach and do something bigger, more meaningful and with a better experience,” he says.

To that end, while Marvel is free to use, the startup plans to move to a freemium model with a “Pro” version offering additional features, such as team collaboration and further service integrations.

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Taking a shower without a towel, how cool is that?

Showering is great, I’m a big fan. But drying off? Laaaaammmmmeeee. All that towelling, it’s enough to make you need another shower, am I right? New York-based startup The Body Dryer realizes this, and they’ve created a device to help you skip the towel and get dry a better way.

The Body Dryer dries you from the ground up, using a device that resembles a bathroom scale but that shoots air up to rid your body of all that excess water. The whole point of the thing is supposed to be to get rid of bacteria that can accumulate and grow on towels, which are apparently a breeding ground for that kind of thing (who knew).

The Body Dryer uses forced “ionized air” which can be set to blow either hot or cold, and the company wants to make them not only for home use, but also for commercial installations in gyms and other high traffic shower zones. At retail, this thing is supposedly going to sell for $250, but backers can secure a pre-order for just $125 while the Indiegogo campaign is going on. Already $30,000 of the $50,000 the company needs to hit production has been raised.

I didn’t include the video up top like I normally do for these projects because it includes the shameless use of scantily-clad women, which is completely unnecessary and frankly a bit stupid, but I still really do want to stop using towels and lighten my laundry load, despite any questionable marketing choices the company may have made.

As for drying time, the project’s creators claim around 30 seconds from start to finish, though this will vary slightly depending on your height – shorter people will dry faster, as they’re closer to the source of the outgoing air. Shipping on the devices is expected to take place in September, and so long as Dyson doesn’t come up with a competitor in the meantime, color me interested.

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Printic Lets You Quickly Build Photo Books From Your Smartphone

Printic, the smartphone application that lets you order Polaroid-like photo prints with your own custom captions, is now expanding its product lineup to also include photo books. The books are similar in style to those from competitor Mosaic(owned by Mixbook), with a black linen hardcover and cut-out windows on the front, allowing you a sneak peek at some of the photos inside.

The Paris-based startup, founded by Benjamin Grelié, Florent Malbranche and Nicolas Reboud, has been steadily improving their Printic app in the months since its 2012 debut. It now offers boxes of “printics,” as it calls its mini-photos, as well as calendars, in addition to the new book.

Like the prints, the book also ships in an attractive orange box, which makes it feel more like a gift – as many photo book orders today are, of course. You can pick out 20 photos to be featured in its 24 pages, and then with an editor, you can tap and hold photos to rearrange the order, crop photos, or tap on a color picker to customize the pages’ background. Photos are printed on high-end glossy paper, and can include those not only from your Camera Roll or Gallery, but from social networks like Instagram and Facebook.

In the future, the company will consider offering additional themes, stickers and caption controls as options, if users demand them, but for now, explains co-founder Malbranche, the idea was to “create a simple tool and see how people react.”

While the book is, as noted above, reminiscent of thoseMosaic sells today, but the customization options it offers now and in the future will be a differentiating factor. Mosaic’s larger vision is that people don’t have time to build out photo books, especially from mobile devices, so its service is more automated. In addition, adds Malbranche, “we also wanted to provide Europe and Asia with such a tool – we didn’t have any book making app so far,” he says. (Printic’s books are also available in North America.)

The books sell for $29.90 / 24,90€, and taxes and shipping are included in the price. That’s a bit pricier than Mosaic ($20), but Mosaic’s flat rate doesn’t include the tax and shipping fees.

The company, whose app has been download just under a million times to date, is now growing at around 30% month-over-month, and is still bootstrapped for the time being as the company is profitable.

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StoreDot promises to recharge your phone in just 30 seconds, but not until 2016

Running out of power is pretty much the biggest pain of modern day smartphones, and while sitting around waiting for them to charge isn’t usually the end of the world, there are still better things you could be doing.

Enter StoreDot, an Israeli technology company with a special battery and charger that can supposedly cut re-juicing time down to around 30 seconds. The prototype charging unit, designed for the Samsung Galaxy S4, was demoed for the first time at Microsoft’s Think Nextconference in Tel Aviv, Israel, today – but most of the innovation comes in the battery pack itself, rather than the charger.

As special batteries are required, there’s no need to worry about the effect on the long-term life of your existing battery pack. In fact, the company says that in addition to charging faster, StoreDot batteries will “withstand thousands of charge/discharge cycles, prolonging battery life expectancy considerably”.

Check out the impressive but bizarrely-noisy-for-a-silent-movie clip below for a demo.

It’s not the first time nanotechnology has been applied to speed up charging in smartphones, 18-year-old Eesha Khare bagged a runner-up spot at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair in Maylast year.

While it might seem like one small dream come true – any reduction in charging time is welcome around here – the technology is still a long way off making it to market. The plan is to go into mass production in late 2016, StoreDot’s CEO Dr. Doron Myersdorf, told TNW.

In essence, what we have developed is a new generation of an electrode with new materials – we call it MFE – Multi Function Electrode. One side acts like a Supercapacitor (very fast charging), and the other is like a Lithium electrode (slow discharge). The electrolyte is modified as well with our nanodots in order to allow for the multifunction electrode to be effective. Although not quite there yet, we are aiming for the same capacity as a Li=ion battery (~2000mAh). Self-discharge is similar to Li-ion as well. We anticipate to reach this goal in one year. Mass production in planned for late 2016.

Myersdorf added that the company counts “a large Asian smartphone manufacturer” among its strategic investors – and judging from the video, there’s a fairly good idea which company it might be.

It doesn’t stop at smartphone batteries though, StoreDot calls the underlying technology ‘Nanodots’ and has just scored $6 million in funding to further develop it. According to the company, its “nanoscale crystals” made up of “chemically synthesized bio-organic peptide molecules” could be used in other consumer electronics, such as displays.

“The breakthrough technology in StoreDot Nanodots is that they demonstrate diverse physical and electrochemical properties at nanoscale, including visible luminescence, showing red, green and blue colors that enhance new generation display technology,” thecompany says.

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