Believe it or not, we have all become slaves of various social media sites. Not a single day passes when we don’t open our social accounts. Some use these sites to stay in touch with friends and relatives, some use it to keep an eye on competitors, and some may use it just for entertainment. It’s a bitter truth that we cannot live without social media.

Normally people open different browsing tabs for different sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, but how about an easy way to access your favorite services directly from your Desktop?

Enter Pokki, an app for Windows PC that can install shortcuts to these services on your Desktop. The Pokki store includes vast range of different apps. Some of these are Facebook, Tweeki (Twitter), Instagrille (Instagram), Gmail, Headlines, Mixtape, myTube (YouTube), Calculator, Wikipedia and more. All these apps are based on the latest technologies, like HTML5. What’s more, you can save your browser tabs and use these apps instead which can be easily accessed from taskbar, also these apps are very lightweight and doesn’t consume much resources. They open in a snap and can remain running in the background.

To start with, you can browse, search and discover useful apps on Pokki. Click on category names like education, games, music, health, social, shopping, etc from the sidebar or click on “Popular” to browse popular apps on Pokki marketplace. Hover your mouse over an app to know more about that app.

If you find an app interesting, click on it to see detailed information and screenshots of the app. These screenshots help you understand what the app looks like and what features it has.

To understand this better, let’s look at Tweeki, which is a lightweight app for Twitter. Click on the “Download” button to download and install this app. After installing, you will be able to see the shortcut on your taskbar. This app brings the functions of Twitter into a clean and clear interface. Call it a mini or mobile version of Twitter.

This app can display the timeline, direct messages, trending topics, top users, mentions, searches, and more. When starting this app for the first time, you will be prompted to sign-in with Twitter and authorize it to access information from your account. After you authorize it, you will be logged-in immediately. The first tab which you will be able to see is the “trends” tab. This tab will display trends, suggested users and top tweets. The second tab is your Twitter Timeline from where you can read tweets, reply, favorite, send a direct message, retweet and compose a new tweet. This is where most functions of Twitter can be performed. The third tab displays tweets that have mentioned you. The fourth tab displays direct messages, and the last tab allows you to search on Twitter. Overall it can be said that this app can do pretty much everything that Twitter’s online interface offers.

Tweeki is just one example but you can find many such apps on Pokki. These apps are lightweight, can be accessed from taskbar and can save your tab in browser. So go ahead, install these apps and get access to your social life faster wthi Pokki.

==== About the author ====
Saqib is a technology writer and loves writing on web apps, social media, Android apps and anything that makes computing and mobile life easier. He writes on Technostarry. You can also follow him on Twitter.

On May 8, at the CTIA Wireless 2012 show in New Orleans, Nokia announced that they are partnering with a bunch of top-tier brands to bring their various apps and games to Windows Phone, with a lot of those apps and games being exclusive to Nokia’s Lumia line of Windows Phones.

Some of the highlights from their press release:

PGA Tour (exclusive to Lumia for 12 months)

In addition to live tournament scoring, highlights and player information, the app provides interactive, augmented coverage of select events and holes, showing each player’s exact position and scoring information. This allows fans to “get inside the ropes” and follow all players competing on the PGA TOUR.

ESPN (exclusive to Lumia until May 2013)

This app already exists on the Lumia devices, and is in addition to the ESPN ScoreCenter app that is available to all Windows Phones. The Lumia app will see some functionality updates and in addition, the ESPN Fantasy Football app (another Lumia exclusive) will be made available later in the Fall to align with the NFL season.

Rovio

After a back-and-forth on whether they are going to build Angry Birds Space for Windows Phone or not, Rovio is now building a dedicated design and development team to create games for Lumia and other Windows Phone devices. That’s quite a scoop for Nokia from the rather negative start that the game maker had with Microsoft and Windows Phone.

Nokia and Rovio will partner to develop innovative new consumer products and content exclusively for Nokia Lumia smartphones, alongside cross platform multi-channel integrated marketing initiatives.

EA

EA will be bringing some of their most popular titles to Lumia and other Windows Phones, including FIFA, Madden NFL, NBA Jam, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR®, Mirror’s Edge and Yahtzee to add to the several titles they already have in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Groupon (exclusive to Lumia for 6 months)

There is already an official Groupon app which is going to get some major updates, including a cool and innovative augmented reality feature to find deals near you.

Tripdots (exclusive to Lumia for 3 months)

Tripdots helps vehicle owners optimize their driving behaviors while connecting with other vehicle owners and sharing driving efficiency achievements via social networks. The app lets users monitor the operation of their vehicles to enable cost savings through better understanding fuel economy.

PayPal

Yet another “key” app missing in the Windows Phone ecosystem is for the popular PayPal service. PayPal is going to work with Nokia to not only bring their app to Windows Phone, but also use functionality like Live Tiles to enhance the user experience.

AOL Entertainment Hub (exclusive to Lumia for 3 months)

Whether you want to listen to one of 55,000 radio stations via SHOUTcast, stream free music albums with AOL’s Listening Party or view Trailers and Movie listings, the AOL Entertainment Hub delivers everything you need.

Yet another app where Live Tiles are going to be used to enhance the user experience:

“The live tiles on Nokia Lumia helped us create an awesome app that makes it easy to stay in the know on what’s happening in Film, TV, Radio, Concerts and Music right from your home screen,” said Sol Lipman, Director of Mobile First products at AOL.

TIME magazine

Utilizing the stunning Windows Phone UI, the app will enable users to view TIME.com content, receive breaking news alerts, watch rich media content including video and share stories via the Windows Phone People Hub, while delivering the latest news and stories to users first via Live Tiles.

Newsweek – The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast app delivers the latest content through Live Tiles and combines the unique style of The Daily Beast with the Windows Phone UI to deliver a stunning experience. For users who only have minutes to digest the latest news, the app also delivers The Cheat Sheet – your one stop must have reads from across the world – uniquely designed for Windows Phone.

Box app for Windows Phone

Box, another oft-requested app, will finally come to Windows Phone with support for nine languages.

We’ve come a long way from designing and delivering presentations and speeches on acetates and projectors. Thanks to the continuing evolution of technology, we have access to sophisticated tools for creating more interactive, innovative and entertaining speeches and presentations.

You only have to look at the recent trends in phones and tablets to see that hardware has become more lightweight and sophisticated. We’ve reached an age where we can access all media via one medium. Therefore, let’s look closely at how these emerging trends are having an impact on the way we are delivering speeches and presentations.

iPresenting
iPads and iPods are a game changer for delivering presentations. These devices are great tools for viewing or delivering presentations and can also be used as virtual mice. The introduction of iCloud further enhances this trend. It provides instant access to information via the cloud, making it easier for users to access their data remotely. Furthermore, the devices are so lightweight that the entire presentation process is much easier and more convenient.

Mobile Phones
87% of people in the world own their own mobile phone, equating to 5.9 billion people. Therefore you cannot ignore the importance of phones for giving speeches. They can be vehicles to store your presentation, and there are also apps which can enhance or help facilitate your presentation, such as timing or speaker note apps.

In addition to this, ‘Twitterfalls’ are an increasing trend which encourages audience members to participate in live interaction with the conference which they are attending, paving the way for instant feedback on presentations.

Kinect Presentations
Kinect is an absolute game changer when it comes to delivering presentations. Microsoft has already spoken of their plans to extend Kinect’s useage from being only for video games. In February of this year, they launched Kinect for Windows. Although the company’s examples of how the device can be used for business focused on the service industry, we doubt it’ll be long until the system is fully utilised for giving breath-taking, interactive and perfectly timed presentations.

==== About the Author ====
Katie Nunnington is a content writer based in the UK. She is mad about technology and travel. More examples of her work can be found at http://barcelona.venuehunter.co.uk

A lot of the details around Windows on ARM (WOA) architecture were revealed via a recent blog post by Steven Sinofsky, the President of Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft. Once WOA details were out, the discussion then turned to whether WOA tablets would truly compete with the iPad or not. Would the presence of the Desktop environment, albeit in a restricted fashion, make it clunky? Is it truly no-compromise, considering that today’s software will not work on those tablets? The arguments go on.

What should be recognized though, is that unlike Apple, Microsoft does not really build the WOA tablets, so it relies on its partners to build them. It can be debated whether Microsoft *should* build a tablet themselves or not, but it is clear that they alone do not control their destiny.

So, what will ultimately determine the success (or failure) of WOA tablets? The ecosystem, of course! Microsoft has done its part in building a touch-friendly OS, bringing a touch-first mentality to building apps, creating a development environment which will let apps work on “all Windows devices”, and built a marketplace which will help developers reap the benefits of being in front of hundreds of millions of customers all over the world.

I discuss three aspects of this ecosystem reliance which will determine how well WOA (and more generally, Windows) tablets do.

OEM designs

The iPad has been a phenomenal success for a variety of reasons. One of them is the design and the build itself. When you pick up the iPad you can feel that a lot of thought was put into the shape and the dimensions of the tablet. Many Android tablets come off feeling cheap, but the iPad feels exactly the opposite.

What the Windows OEM partners will have to do is go beyond just the iPad. They will need to think hard about the design and come up with something that does not look like a cheap knock off of the iPad, and no, that does not mean just adding a microSD card reader and USB ports. Having those connectivity options is a nice advantage, but the tablet itself should feel good to look at and hold in the hands. These tablets will have to manage sturdiness and long battery life with lightness.

Finally, just because they can, OEMs should refrain from making tablets in all kinds of sizes (yes, I am looking at you, Samsung). There is an advantage in offering a choice of sizes, but there is also a practical limit to what should be done in reality. Don’t confuse the customers with too much choice!

There has been a lot of discussion about Windows 8, Metro-style apps, Intel vs ARM, etc., from the time Windows 8 Developer Preview was released at //build/ last year. A lot of the discussion and debates have to do with unclear communication and secrecy from the Windows team at Microsoft. For example, what exactly is the deal with Windows on ARM devices? Are they going to be a hard cutoff from today’s Windows and not have a desktop experience at all, or will they have a desktop experience? Will the desktop experience be open for all developers or only certain developers (like Microsoft Office) to provide signed apps for ARM which use a restricted desktop?

(Ed: On February 9, Steven Sinofsky posted details about Windows on ARM on the Building Windows 8 Blog, so some of the secrecy has been taken away. However, the points made here are in fact reinforced by the details revealed in the post.)

Those discussions and speculations aside, I truly believe Windows 8 is a huge opportunity for developers. In this post, I will tell you why I believe so. First of all, some math: According to Canalys, there were 415MM PCs sold in 2011. This is after accounting for a decline in sales per original projections! Even though smartphones have exceeded the number of PCs sold, that PC sales number is still a very large number.

Now, let’s assume that those 415MM PCs are split 60-40 with regard to sales to businesses vs. consumers. Taking a round number of 400MM PCs a year gives us about 160MM PCs sold to consumers a year. I am ignoring business PCs for now because let’s face it – they are not going to Windows 8 for some time, and even if they do, there is a strong likelihood of them turning off Metro via IT policies. Consumers on the other hand, won’t have the ability to turn it off, and all new PCs will ship with Windows 8 (Intel or ARM).

Need bragging rights as a developer? Don’t have enough points and badges from Xbox Live? Well, Microsoft has the answer for you, Visual Studio Achievements!

In what seems to be an effort to rile developers up through ‘gamification’, Microsoft has announced a beta campaign called “Visual Studio Achievements”. By installing the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, you can unlock badges and earn points by simply writing code that you were already going to write! Analysis is done in the background each time you compile your project to test it. When you hit a certain objective, you unlock an achievement.

Next comes the leaderboard. All the points and badges you earn are tallied into a score and you’re stuck up onto an online leaderboard with all other registered developers who are taking part in the campaign. You can view challenging developer points, avatars and maybe eventually see what they are working on. It would be a great way to get developers to collaborate on ideas and projects.

If sharing your achievements with alike developers wasn’t enough, you can share badges through Twitter and Facebook. This can help you raise awareness for your application, and get recognition from your peers.

There are over 32 different badges you can unlock, from as easy as loading more extensions into Visual Studio, to as hard as having 50 different projects tied to a single solution.

There are fun badges, like the “Potty Mouth” achievements which rewards you for using 5 different curse words in a project, or the “Time for an Upgrade” badge that is unlocked if your project takes over 10 minutes to compile. It’s a simple way to add a level of fun to programming and give developers a way to show off their skills.

Nokia is very strong in location-based services and to demonstrate this strength, they have a few apps pre-loaded on their Windows Phones, like Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport, Nokia Pulse and Nokia City Lens. I got a chance to look at Nokia Drive and Nokia Transport at the Nokia booth during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Nokia Drive is the free turn-by-turn navigation app that comes pre-loaded on Nokia Windows Phones. It lets you search an extensive database of points of interest (POI) and also get directions to a specific address. Nokia Drive comes in 50 languages and in 100 countries, and allows downloads of specific maps to the phone so that it works even when the phone is not connected to the network.

Nokia Transport is in beta, and it is an app which lets you get from one place to another via public transport (including walking). The interesting part about this app, as you will see in the video, is the ability to pin a certain route to your Start Screen. This pinned Live Tile then keeps you updated with the next 3 times of departure for your route. This app demonstrates the beauty of the Windows Phone OS: pinning the route to the Start Screen allows you to get to that route instantly without opening the app and then searching for the route, and the Live Tile which keeps updating the route timings throughout the day.

Nokia Transport comes with information on public transport in 450 cities in 46 countries.

Enjoy the videos below.

Nokia Drive and Nokia Transport

For my hands on with Nokia Lumia 900, see this post. For a walkthrough of the Nokia ESPN app, see this post.

Google has just announced via the GoogleTV’s official blog that they will soon be rolling out a major update for its Google TV platform.  With this update, the big G is hoping to revive this dead platform.

Google has focused on four main areas in this update, which are as follow-:

1) Keep it Simple – The whole interface of the Google TV has been redesigned, and is now much simpler. The home screen is now customizable, and users also get an ‘App drawer’ similar to their Android handsets.

2) Make it easy to find something – Google has vastly improved the search feature of with this update, and has made it easier for users to find content from Live TV, Netflix, YouTube, HBO GO and more services. There is also a dedicated “TV & Movies” app, which lets users browse through 80,000 movies and TV episodes from across a bunch of services.

3) Make YouTube better on TV – The software update will tightly integrated YouTube with Google TV, and make it easy for users to find their desired content on YouTube.

4) Bring more apps to TV – Lastly, the software update will bring a bunch of apps for Google TV through the Android Market. Developers can now port their Android apps to TV, or create new ones. Right now, more than 50 developers have released apps specifically for Google TV.

The software update will be coming to Sony devices from early next week. Logitech devices like the Revue will get the update soon after.