Mobile Photo Connect conference bestows first-ever app awards

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Mobile Photo Connect, the three-year old, all-day mobile photo conference held yesterday in San Francisco, featured what has now become its signature event: the Show & Tell in which app developers get four minutes each to tell the assembled crowd about their product. The conference hosted 30 high profile apps and services, in addition to targeted panels, spanning a range of both new and existing apps. The Next Web was part of the first-ever (and certainly not the last) judging panel where I and fellow judges photographer Jen Pollack Bianco, start-up expert Jim Beddows and online photo specialist James Joaquin slugged it out behind the scenes to bestow the…

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Free Microsoft course teaches ‘absolute beginners’ to code Windows 10 apps

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Ever wanted to code an app, but have no coding experience whatsoever? Don’t worry, Microsoft has you covered. The company is offering an ‘absolute beginner’ series of video lessons for anyone looking to learn how to code a Windows 10 app. More specifically, it’s a series on creating Universal Windows Platform apps that can potentially work on a variety of devices including PCs, phones, tablets, a Raspberry Pi, HoloLens, and Xbox. That said, Microsoft recommends you have some basic understanding of coding in C#, so it suggests you check out its C# Fundamentals series first. The course is laid out in…

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Microsoft copies Facebook and adds Likes and @Mentions to Outlook

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Microsoft wants email to learn some tricks from social media. The company today announced it’s bringing Likes and @Mentions to Outlook on the Web. Indicated by the classic thumbs-up, Microsoft says the Likes are meant to help you endorse a specific email, or bring attention to it. Or as on Facebook, it could simply be used to acknowledge you’ve read something or empathize with it, without having to type a full response. As you might expect, you’ll receive a notification when someone likes an email, and it will show up highlighted a top the message. Meanwhile, you can also tag people…

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QuizUp is becoming an NBC TV gameshow

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NBC has revealed that a new 10 episode trivia show based on the popular app QuizUp is in the works. The show will put in-studio contestants in direct competition with viewers at home using their mobile devices. The in-studio players can win up to $1 million if they are successful in the eight rounds. At-home players will receive the money allocated to the round they win only. To be one of the at-home players, you will need to qualify through the app. And even if you don’t make the grade, you can still play along with the TV show in…

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11 fitness technologies that won’t let you skip leg day

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Not a day goes by without a new fitness app, activity tracker or connected device promising to turn you into the ultimate athlete or yoga master. Fitness is such an active market that simply keeping track of it on Index probably has me burning more calories than I could eat in a day! Whether you’re a fitness freak or not, there are countless tools available to help you set goals, monitor progress and share your achievements. Fitness technologies make sure you don’t get off track and reduce the chances of a valid excuse to skip a workout. Though most are probably…

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Twitter is rolling out more ‘Buy Now’ buttons to your timeline

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Twitter is preparing to expand its e-commerce presence in a big way. The company today announced it’s planning to roll out the ‘Buy Now’ buttons it introduced last year to many more merchants and brands. For reference, the shoppable tweets look like this: Fanny packs FTW! This one is exclusive to Brit+Co. Shop to it on Twitter! http://t.co/1vzgotySzE — Brit + Co (@BritandCo) September 30, 2015 The Buy Now button will be available for merchant platforms such as Bigcommerce, Demandware and Shopify, including brands like Best Buy Adidas, PacSun and many more. Previous stalwarts included Fancy, Stripe, Gumroad and Musictoday. When…

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OpenStreetMap just got a big boost thanks to Maps.me

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Russian internet company Mail.ru Group has announced that its Maps.me mapping app has been open-sourced, making it available for developers to freely embed maps in their own apps. Based on data from OpenStreetMap (OSM), Maps.me offers fully offline navigation, which the company says makes it ideal for use by humanitarian groups, activists and volunteers in rural areas of disasters or political conflict. Often, these are the least mapped areas of the world, and those with the worst infrastructure for providing connectivity; the company says OSM’s crowdsourced approach make it ideal for these under served places. And now that it’s open source, humanitarian organizations can modify…

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Foursquare now lets you make OpenTable reservations without leaving the app

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Foursquare has partnered with OpenTable since 2012 to make restaurant reservation times available for viewing, but today a small update will now allow users to book tables straight within the app. Before, when there were OpenTable options on a Foursquare listing, you were redirected to the mobile Web or another app. With today’s update, users can browse availability and reserve a table without leaving Foursquare. The app pulls in your name and phone number from your the Foursquare account to make booking fast and easy. Foursquare says the integration is powered by Button, a mobile startup that allows different apps to connect…

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BBC iPlayer starts move away from Flash for all devices

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The BBC is trialing delivering its streaming iPlayer services via an HTML5-based player, rather than the Flash player it has been using across many devices. The organisation has already been using HTML5 for streaming to iOS devices, but desktop users still got a Flash player by default. This is now changing though as the company reassesses the position that the benefits of Flash outweigh the move to HTML5. “We’ve been regularly evaluating the features offered by the most popular web browsers and we’re now confident we can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party…

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