7 Ways Smartphones Are Making an Impact in Our Daily Lives

A few years ago, no one even knew about the term "smartphone." The scenario is totally opposite today, with a truckload of options in terms of smartphone devices that are available in the market. Almost all big mobile brands such as Apple, RIM, Sony, Nokia, HTC, LG and Samsung to name a few, have launched their own smartphone models, and hence, the users are spoilt for choice.

Such is the penetration of smartphones in our lives that we often rely on it for carrying out most of our daily activities. Let us take a look at some of the areas where smartphones help us carry out our tasks with ease.

• Finance and Business

In app stores, plenty of smartphone apps for business and finance are easily available. These apps are used to manage personal finance like keeping a track of your bills and receipts, maintaining your investment portfolio etc.

Additionally, if you are a business professional, these apps will help you catch up with the latest stock updates or help make payments/transfer money wirelessly.

• Education

Yes, smartphones have invaded classrooms as well. Nowadays, kids are more tech-savvy as compared to their parents and can handle the smartphones and the apps in them quite effortlessly. Using their devices, they can learn a lot from various education apps that are easy to use and make their lessons fun.

• Entertainment

When you are bored on a weekend and have nothing to do, you can turn to your smartphone to entertain you. Watch movies, trailers, videos or listen to songs and do much more using lots of other apps that are meant for entertainment.

• Gaming

Advanced technology has turned smartphones into gaming consoles; now you can use your smartphone devices to play a wide range of challenging games such as - arcade games, racing games, puzzle games, role-playing games etc. Also, challenge your friends and fellow gamers to beat your score. Many of the smartphones present today, have touchscreen, which gives an enhanced experience while you play the games on your device.

• Fitness

Smartphones also act as your fitness companion. This is because you can use it to monitor your calories, watch and learn new exercises, maintain a diet chart and do much more. Also, you can use your device to locate various fitness centers/gyms or health spas near in your locality.

• General Utility

With various general utility apps, smartphones let you do so much. For instance, you can enjoy shopping from the comforts of your home, use GPS navigation to get directions, learn new recipes, jot down something important or record reminders in your own voice etc.

• Social Networking

Like smartphones, Social Networking/Social Media is also an integral part of our lives; there are rarely few people left, who are not there on any of the Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest etc. In fact, there are smartphone apps that are entirely dedicated to these social networking sites.

Apart from the above mentioned points, there are many other ways in which you can use your smartphone devices in your day to day lives.

Alan Hall works with PLAVEB, a company reputed for providing Smartphone Application Development and mobile compatible website development services in Los Angeles. He loves to learn new things around in technology, specially smartphone.

How Your Trade Association Can Have Greater Political Impact

There are 90,908 trade associations in the country. With philanthropic and charitable organizations, the number rises to over 1.2 million [1]. In any event there are lots. Every trade association has a dual role: 1) to increase membership and 2) to promote the cause of the organization.

Your association relies on its members and other activities for funding. But it has an untapped and overlooked hidden stream of potential advocates that it could use more effectively.

As a leader of a trade association you may poll your members to find out what are their top issues. You summarize a select few and these are the ones you focus on and go forward with. Most organizations are usually single-issue organizations.

Legislatively, you compete with other associations for the time and attention of lobbyists, legislators, congressional staff members and government regulators. You rely upon your membership numbers and your PAC's campaign giving to support your cause and to gain access to Washington lawmakers.

For the largest organizations often this is enough. But for the smaller and midsize groups they might find themselves struggling to push their agendas forward.

Sometimes, you can rally your membership to take on different activities but generally you can't do it that often. Like any group, your members tend to experience what is referred to as "donor fatigue." They don't want to donate more money, they do not want to donate more time, and they can't take time off work to get on the bus to attend a rally to hold a sign in the pouring rain. While association members as a whole may appreciate the opportunity to vote up or down on issues, they often feel they are left out of the full debate creation and argument process.

So can smart leadership still get them involved?

Sure.

The best association leaders allow their members four things:

1) To come forward with topics of their own concern.

2) Provide a forum for the members to discuss issues.

3) Allow their membership to respectfully debate arguments pro and con on various sides of an issue.

4) Provide a place where members can vote anonymously.

Essentially, they give their members a voice.

The best association leaders also know that family members often influence what the member thinks. The chief lobbyist, it turns out, is often the spouse.

Association leaders recognize that their members are not one-dimensional. They do not have only one issue that matters to them. They may be members of many different special interest groups because there are several different issues that concern them. The member joins different groups that support his cause. So in effect he could be a member of a pro-gun group, a pro-choice group, a clean energy group and a business development incubator. He may be a moderate on social issues and conservative or entrepreneur on business issues.

Some political independents that neither lean left nor right fall into this middle category.

But there remains one highly overlooked element.

Imagine the trade association member is a US voter and a constituent of a congressional district. His alternate issues may span into other congressional districts. In the district they span into may reside friends and associates who support the nature of your particular membership group. But the voter in the other district is not and cannot be a member of your trade association because he simply is in a different profession or geographical area.

So how do you cross the line? Can you take advantage of this? I think you can.

If your trade association members were free to openly debate and vote anonymously in a safe, independent, non-partisan environment, the likelihood is great that they would continue to support your efforts. After all, they are in your business. And if their spouse and friends from other states were able to share in a debate, then they too could bring greater weight to your argument and causes.

But more importantly, all these interested parties are constituents in other political districts. If they are able to lobby their congressman or representative who may sit on key Congressional committees that affect your broader issue, then you could bring a greater force to bear by empowering more people to push legislation forward that supports and benefits your organization.

Can this be done? Certainly.

Let's say your association allocates $25,000 per year to lobby or about $2,000 a month.

If an additional 2,000 voters from 10 different districts contributed $20 a month to support your efforts, you would have $40,000 a month extra for lobbying or almost a half million dollars a year. If these voters were aligned with your cause and made their issues known to their congressman, your impact could increase twenty-fold at no real out-of-pocket cost to you or your association.

The greatest impact any independent constituent group can have are:

1) Clarity of message and singular focus on an issue.

2) Mass of voters who can appeal to the Congress.

3) A real budget to continue and persevere.

Remember, these are real voters and Congress loves to hear from its own constituents.

So, the advocate is not a nameless organization supporting a large, broad membership that may or may not support its overall goals. Working together through social networks, you now have real people putting up their own money to support causes, which are aligned with your organization's needs.

Because voters will have self-identified as constituents to congressional members on committees affecting your organization, your impact in Washington with lawmakers will increase.

Encourage your members to pursue their interests and make public their issues and you may find that your best ally could well be, not just your association member, but also her family and network of friends.

[1] The Center for Association Leadership

John Thibault is the founder and CEO of iLobby. iLobby® is a micro-lobbying matching service that connects voters with professional lobbyists to resolve issues with their political leaders. Put simply, this is lobbying for the little guy. Find out more at http://www.ilobby.co/

HTML5's Impact on Mobile

HTML5 has moved into the vacancy left behind when the W3C, to some controversy, decided the XHTML2 working group charter should not be renewed. The transition to the new standard has implications across the software industry but particularly in the field of mobile web application development. HTML5 offers mobile web developers a reduction in the investment in both time and the costs needed to develop apps for multiple devices. There are some great features which make HTML5 important to mobile developers. It carries the ability to produce similar features to Flash directly from the web, and add-ons are not be necessary with applications written using HTML5. Apple, Google, and many other enterprises have since adopted HTML5 as their main development language. This means web apps built with HTML5 will have a broad appeal over a large spectrum of the smartphone and tablet market.

Not only does HTML5 allow web apps that are as interesting and interactive as Flash applications, it also makes it possible to integrate the web application with the device as closely as possible with current mobile apps. There are new audio and video streaming available, new offline storage capabilities, two-dimensional graphics and improved geo-location services, among many others.

The benefits come together with some undesirable attributes as well, so developers should stay keenly aware of the negative aspects alongside the good. One disadvantage is that HTML5 is not implemented fully on all mobile devices. Some of the leading smartphone makers fall short of completely supporting HTML5. iOS, Blackberry, and Android all marginally support it and Windows phones are falling even further behind. Since HTML5 is the language major developers will be using for web development going forward, any smartphone or tablet manufacturer not already making plans to become fully compatible with the new standard is not likely to be included when early adopters see their products become more highly integrated with web applications written to work for everyone.

This decision seems to settle an old disagreement between tablet/smartphone giant Apple, who famously (or infamously) built their devices to work well with applications written in HTML5 with no support at all for Flash-based content online. By making HTML5 an industry standard, they have guided device manufactures toward making devices designed to take full advantage of the numerous features of HTML5. This is at the expense of time and attention dedicated to developing Flash-based content, instead predicting that its usage would decline. But as touchscreen devices become the status quo, programmers, developers and manufactures may be leaving Flash behind in lieu of HTML5.

For more information about mobile application development, visit Magenic Technologies who have been providing innovative custom application development services to meet unique business challenges for some of the most recognized companies and organizations in the nation.

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