If you have been waiting for an iTunes like Music store in India that offered “legal” music, here’s an exciting bit of news. Flipkart, India’s most loved online store, has expanded beyond physical goods and they have just added a new MP3 section to their website.

Here’s a quick video overview of what it’s like to buy downloadable MP3 music from Flipkart.

Flipkart’s MP3 Store, like the Amazon MP3 store, offers DRM-free songs in MP3 format that you can download and listen on any computer or mobile device. Or you can save the MP3s to your Dropbox folder and even enjoy them in the web browser.

You can either buy an entire music album or just your favorite tracks. The cost of individual music tracks vary anywhere between 6 and 15 (for newer songs). Also, you download any of the purchased songs a maximum of four times from the Flipkart website.

The “Cash on Delivery” payment option is not available for MP3s so you either need to have a credit card or use your net banking account for purchasing downloadable music. Also, Flipkart’s MP3 store is only available on the desktop browser – you can’t buy music from your mobile phone yet.

This story, [Video] Flipkart Now Selling Downloadable Songs in DRM-Free MP3 Format, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/02/2012 under Mp3, India.

There exist quite a few online services that let you convert files from one format to another. You upload the source file, specify the output format and within seconds, the converted file in the desired format becomes available for download. That’s easy but there are somes limitations with this approach:

1. When you want to convert a file, you have to upload it to the file conversion service. This is not an issue when you are converting files from the desktop but how do you upload files from iPhone, Android or any other mobile browser.
2. Sometimes clients will send you files in obscure formats as email attachments. In order to convert those files in a format that your apps can understand, you will download the attachments to your desktop and then upload them to the file conversion service. That’s work.

Zamzar, a popular tool for converting files online, has added a new option that lets you convert files by email itself. You can forward your email attachments directly to Zamzar, without downloading them to the desktop, and they’ll be converted in no time.

Convert Email attachment into Different File Formats

To get started, you need to forward the input (source) files to a specific email address like format@zamzar.com where format represents the file type of the desired output format.

For instance, if you have a Word document that you want to convert to PDF, you can send the file as an email attachment to pdf@zamzar.com. If you have a PDF file that you want to convert into an ebook, the corresponding conversion address would be epub@zamzar.com or mobi@zamzar.com depending on your ebook reader.

Here’s a complete list of input-output file formats that are currently supported by Zamzar. You can convert documents, presentations, ebooks, videos, audio files, archives and more.

In my test, the converted files were delivered quickly and the quality of the converted files was impressive. There’s no need to create any account at Zamzar and you can convert files up to 1 MB in a single batch. You may go for a pro account to convert bigger files that starts from $7 per month.

One more thing. You can only upload files by email and initiate the conversion process but you’ll still have to visit the Zamzar website to download the converted file. It stays on Zamzar servers for about a day and their download page is actually very confusing when accessed on a mobile phone.

This story, Use Email to Convert Files into Different Formats, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Convert, Email, Internet.

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Amazon has released a new video commercial for the $79 Kindle that targets the one flaw (or limitation) of the iPad – it is nearly impossible to read books on your iPad while you are out in the sun because of the reflective glass screen.

The other point that Amazon is trying to highlight in the video is that Kindle is more value for money – you can get a bundle of two Kindle Fire units and one Kindle 5 unit for less than the price of an iPad.

Here’s the original Kindle ad that Amazon released about an year ago. It uses the same setting – a girl sunbathing near the pool and reading on her Kindle – and they have even hired the same actress – Anna Zielinski – to do the sequel.

On a related note, I have an iPad 2 and the new Kindle 5 (see setup) and I almost always prefer reading long form content on the Kindle. The iPad is good for flipping through PDFs or for watching multimedia content but Kindle is much better for reading text whether you are indoors or outside in direct sunlight.

The Kindle “Pool” Ad [Original]

This story, The New Amazon Kindle Ad Targets the iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Amazon Kindle, IPad, Internet.

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5. The Kindle App for iPad

As some of you may know, this tech blog and my personal blog are both powered by WordPress software. What follows is a complete list of WordPress plugins that work behind the scenes to add new functionality to these sites that’s otherwise not available in the vanilla version of WordPress.org.

These are all free and open-source plugins and you can find them in the WordPress plugin repository.

The Best WordPress Plugins for your Website

1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.

2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 page like labnol.org/googledocs will have links to my Google Docs articles.

4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.

5. Hyper Cache – This is a caching plug-in for WordPress that will help reduce the load on your web server by saving pages as static HTML files. WP Total Cache is another popular caching plugin though I prefer Hyper Cache for its simplicity.

6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.

7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.

8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes – see samples.

9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.

10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.

11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.

12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog. Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.

14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.

15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.

16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.

17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. I am also using XML Sitemap for Images and XML Sitemap for Mobile.

18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.

19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.

20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.

21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.

23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.

24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScript inside your WordPress posts.

25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.

WordPress Plugins – Retired but Useful

The first version of this list was published in 2010 and since then, I have removed or deactivated a few WordPress plugins. Here’s why:

1. WordPress.com Stats – I am using Google Analytics to track site stats and therefore it doesn’t make sense to have another tracking program for the same goal.

2. Akismet – The comments on this site are powered by Disqus and they seem to offer decent spam protection on their own.

3. WordPress PDA – This plugin helped serve the mobile version of this site based on their browser’s user agent. Digital Inspiration now uses a responsive design and thus the same site is served to both desktop and mobile users.

4. WP-Paginate – The paginate plugin provide better navigation and also helps search engines find and crawl deep content on your site. The new design of this site has pagination built-in and therefore this plugin is no longer necessary.

Also see: Essential Linux Commands for WordPress Users

This story, WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under WordPress, Software.

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 Karachi: 

The newest entrant in the market for tablets and eBook readers – dominated by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Samsung – is none other than the Pakistani military.

The Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) Kamra, whose self-described mission is “to produce and support weapon systems for a high state of operational readiness of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF)”, has started up a new

Ever wondered how Express Tribune stores all that data, blogs, articles, video’s and more on its website? Turns out, they utilize a cloud computing service called Amazon S3 (cloud storage solution) which allows sub-editors to obtain computing capabilities through the internet, regardless of physical location. To simplify, cloud computing comprises of massive data centers with [...]

Idiots Guide to Cloud Computing is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.

Amazon today launched Junglee.com in India today and, in its current form, Junglee is more like an online marketplace where you can quickly compare prices of books, electronics, music, apparel and other products offered by hundreds of online and offline retailers in India.

Several shopping stores in India – including Homeshop18, India Plaza, Shoppers Stop, Fabindia, Microsoft Store, Future Bazaar and many others – have added their product catalogues to Junglee so it becomes a little easier for the consumer to research product prices from one central place.

Is Junglee Cheaper than Flipkart or Infibeam?

As you may have noted, the two most popular shopping sites in India – Flipkart.com and Infibeam.com – are both missing from Junglee.com. These sites might have better deals to offer than Junglee so I have a written a simple bookmarklet that lets you compare prices of books on Junglee.com with that of Flipkart and Infibeam in one go.

Is Junglee Cheaper

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag the “Is Junglee Cheaper” button from this page to your browser bookmarks toolbar. Then open any book page on Junglee.com and click the bookmarklet to instantly know the price of that book on Infibeam and Flipkart.

The first version of the bookmarklet works for books only though I might expand it to other product categories later. Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how the Junglee bookmarklet works.

This story, Compare Junglee Prices with Flipkart and Infibeam, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/02/2012 under Amazon, Bookmarklets, India.

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5. Amazon Online Store is Live in India

Amazon has just gone live in India as junglee.com but unlike the main Amazon.com store where most of the products are sold directly by Amazon, their India store is more like a yellow pages-style directory where hundreds of online and offline sellers in India have uploaded their product catalogs.

If you are to a buy a product from Junglee, you don’t buy it from Amazon.com (probably because of the FDI rules in our country) but will be redirected to the seller’s website. The seller is responsible for the shipping, they may have their own refunds and returns policies and each may offer a different payment mechanism.

Amazon in India

Thus, at this time, Amazon in India is mostly looking like a comparison shopping engine. There’s no universal shopping cart (you cannot buy products from multiple sellers in one go) though you can use your main Amazon.com credentials to log into Junglee.

I am still quite happy with this development though as it highlights the lesser-known online merchants in India and one can always use Junglee to get a better idea of the price of a product. It may not have an immediate effect on the business of Flipkart but going forward, that could change.

Full credit to BGR and MediaNama for breaking this story.

This story, Amazon Store is Live in India, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Amazon, India.

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