10 of the best virtual reality apps for your smartphone

Get started with VR on your iPhone or Android phone with these 100 apps, spanning films, games, news and 360-degree photo-sharing

You don’t need to spend hundreds of pounds on an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset to give virtual reality a try.

The Android or iPhone handset in your pocket is a VR device in its own right too, especially when paired with a sub-£20 Google Cardboard headset that uses your phone as its screen and works with both Android and iOS.

If you’re getting started with VR on your smartphone, here are 10 of the best apps to explore. They’re regular Android and iOS apps rather than ones requiring Samsung’s Gear VR mobile headset – that’s a separate roundup in its own right for the future.

Note, the recently-launched Guardian VR app (Android / iOS) is not included in this roundup for reasons of fairness, but it’s worth a look: currently it has the Guardian’s first VR film, 6x9, which tells the story of the psychological damage of extreme isolation.

You Tube
Google Cardboard
VRSE
NYT VR
Sisters: A Virtual Reality Ghost Story
Orbulus
Seene
Jaunt VR
InCell VR
RYOT VR

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50 Free Apps To Make You An Incredibly Productive Person

You’re running a million miles an hour, trying to hold down a tight schedule full of tight deadlines on a tight ship. From messages to meetings to managing meddlesome minutiae, these 50 apps can help you work wonders with your otherwise limited time.

Unify Your Inboxes

If you’re like most people, you’ve signed up for at least a handful of email services. CloudMagic (Android, iOS) does an impeccable job of tying popular email offerings together into one powerful, feature-filled app. It’ll handle your corporate mail with ease, along with Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and a host of others, and you can save messages to big-name note taking, list making, and CRM services.

Keep In Touch With Your Team

Instead of relying on a mish-mash of email, instant messaging, text messaging, and phone calls, Slack (Android, iOS, web) does a good job of streamlining things down into a real-time communications tool that can hook into a heaping helping of popular third-party services. You and your team discuss topics in different virtual channels full of updates, images, files, tweets, and links that are open for all to see, which can help keep everyone on the same page. The free offering lets you set up an unlimited number of users, archives 10,000 past messages, and can integrate with up to 10 services.

Procrastinate Smarter, Not Harder

Boomerang (web) lets you temporarily clear messages out of your inbox to return at a time and date you specify. It’s a dead-simple way to turn messages into individual reminders. You can also use it to prewrite messages and schedule them to be sent later as well. Want that client to think you’re working hard on their big, important project? Schedule an email to send out at 3:30 a.m., even though you’re writing it at 2 p.m. They’ll think you’re burning the midnight oil, even though you’re really burning a grilled cheese before a Netflix binge. The free version lets you play God with 10 messages each month.

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Here are 7 health-related apps

There's more to losing weight than computing calories. These apps can help you reach that first level of success much faster than a notebook and calculator

Are you hoping to shed a few kgs in 2016 ? Unfortunately, apps alone won't help you lose weight, but if you have no time for a personal trainer or a fancy gym membership, apps can definitely help you stay on track. Here are seven fitness apps that can track your progress over weeks and months, giving you a better view of the big picture. Load one or more of these great apps onto your device today and stick with them to see those changes.

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10 Android Apps for the Modern Business Traveler

With the holidays behind us, expect business travel to pick up. If you are one who travels for business, being prepared before a trip will make traveling a bit easier to swallow and ultimately more appealing. In the old days (pre-mobile devices and mobile apps), being prepared meant keeping a list and relying on a travel agent to help remember all facets of a trip. Now, with help from smartphones and tablets, it's possible to have all of the trip details—from booking to finding a place to eat—in the palm of your hand. Truth be told, it has never been easier for a busy professional to travel the world. In this eWEEK slide show, we look at some of the apps available on Android through the Google Play marketplace that make traveling easier and more enjoyable. With more than 1 million apps available in the Google Play store, there is a wide range of useful programs at the traveler's disposal. 

Here's a collection of some of the better apps for business travelers seeking simple solutions that make traveling for work less stressful.

Offline Maps & Navigation
Voice Translator
Flights
FlightAware
Kayak
WorldMate
Uber
Planner
Zagat
GrubHub

View the slideshow

The Digital Toolbox for Electrical Engineers: 101 Top Apps

The design and creation of electronic devices and systems requires meticulous attention to detail. Mobile apps for electrical engineers provide a wide range of capabilities that can make life easier for anyone working with electronics. There are apps that provide reference materials, wire-gauging tools, resistance calculators, visual references for resistors and other components, and generally encyclopedic access to all the information an electrical engineer would need to make important decisions about a project.

The apps in this collection cater to users of all skill levels, from pro electrical engineers to amateur household electricians. Many of them are available for both Android and iOS, and some even have a desktop or browser based edition. They’re listed in no definitive order. Most are free or inexpensive, and they’re well worth the price for the wealth of electrical engineering info they put in your pocket.

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Unveiling the winning ideas of PMO Mobile App Contest (Phase-I)

MyGov launched the much awaited and exciting contest for the Prime Minister’s Mobile App on 4th March, 2015 in collaboration with Google. Over the period of the Ideation Phase of the contest (Phase-I), which was held between 4th March to 23rd March 2015, over 9,000 entries were received. Most entries had multiple ideas which the contributors suggested for possible inclusion in the app. Therefore, in terms of number of ideas as part of the entries, more than 50,000 ideas were suggested during this phase of the contest.

While judging the entries, it was decided that ideas would be judged on their individual merit alone. The jury took into account the innovation in the idea, description of the idea, popularity of each idea and the implementability of the idea, among other factors, during an extensive review.

It gives us immense pleasure to announce the top 20 entries (total 21 ideas). Read on for a précis of the actual shortlisted ideas that has been selected, along with the names of the twenty winners. Links to pictorial or documentary explanations, which a contributor may have attached as part of their entry to expand on their idea better, have also been listed below each respective winning entry.

Each selected idea, listed below in no particular order, would win an Android One device from Google and a Certificate of Appreciation from MyGov.

See the list of winning ideas

The world at our fingertips

The mobile phone has helped India leapfrog both the landline and the Internet. What exactly does this mean for a country with one of the largest and fastest growing mobile user bases in the world?

Writing for McKinsey in December 2013, tech entrepreneur Vinod Khosla recalled having said at a telecommunications seminar in Delhi in 2000, “If I were in India, I wouldn’t worry about adding ten million more copper lines. I would go straight to voice over Internet and mobile.” He added, “I didn’t have it exactly right; I missed how big mobile could become and how quickly.”

Between the time of Mr. Khosla’s article and now, India is estimated to have added over 80 million mobile subscribers and mobile Internet users. That’s roughly the same number as the total number of mobile subscriptions in the U.K.

In recent years, mobile phones have twice helped India largely bypass existing technology platforms that would have, on their own, taken decades of effort and billions of dollars of money to touch large sections of the population. The first time, it was fixed telephony. The second time, it was fixed Internet. Mobiles have helped India leapfrog them both.

An app for everything

With mobiles seemingly ubiquitous, Indians seem to be increasingly crafting their lives and work around apps. From tracking pollution in the Ganga (Bhuvan app) to alerting a Kerala snake catcher (King Cobra), there seems to be an app for everything. This is especially true of urban lives. Pick a need, and there are loads of choices: music (Wynk), commerce (Paytm), education (Coursera), groceries (BigBasket), cab (Uber), self-drive cars (Zoomcar), retail (Flipkart), price discovery (OLX), friends (WhatsApp), social networking (Facebook), professional networking (LinkedIn), security (VithU), and so on.

Read the feature in The Hindu dt. 28th Jun 2015

Seven ways to improve your app visibility and downloads

The popularity of mobile apps continues to rise as their usage becomes increasingly prevalent across the consumer and business markets. Mobile apps were originally offered for general productivity and information retrieval, including email, calendar, contacts, stock market updates and weather information. Public demand and the availability of developer tools have driven rapid expansion in other categories.

In India, the usage of mobile apps is expected to grow based on the demand for apps in local languages. With the ability of the devices being able to render Indic fonts improving, the number of publishers offering content in vernacular language is also increasing.

With over a million apps in Apple App Store and Google Play, the challenge that publishers face is that of distribution. How does one reach out to the relevant audience? What are the available options and what are their costs? Here are lessons from seven tactics we used for our apps.

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10 apps every woman should download

Women safety is a key concern today and various steps have been taken to make India a safer place. To ensure a secure environment for women employees, IT industry body NASSCOM felicitated winners of All India App Fame Contest 2013, which focused on creating solutions for women safety.

l. GoSuraksheit
2. Sentinel
3. Nirbhaya
4. SafeBridge
5. FightBack
6. One Touch SOS
7. inE
8. iFollow
9. SafeTrac
10. PanicGuard

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How app developers can get their pots of gold

There are more ways than ever to create and consume content. This is good news for software developers, who now have even more opportunities to strike it rich. Here is a list of things every app developer needs to factor into their projects in order to maximize their chances of success.

1: Do something new
2: Make life simpler
3: Enable creation
4: Share and share alike
5: Good website != good app
6: Collect your compensation

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12 of the best educational apps of 2012

If you have a penchant for learning at home or on the move, 2012 saw a slew of handy apps that could help you in your endeavors.

Indeed, The Next Web covered thousands of apps throughout this year, from nifty new browser extensions, to the latest game-changing Android and iOS apps, so we sifted through the archives and pulled out some of best educational apps of 2012…just for you.

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14 of the best apps from 2012 for designers, developers and creatives

If you’re a creative with a penchant for eking out the best tools to help you produce the goods, 2012 saw a slew of handy apps that could help you in your endeavors.

Indeed, The Next Web Blog covered thousands of apps throughout this year, from nifty new browser extensions, to the latest game-changing Android and iOS apps, so we sifted through the archives and pulled out some of best apps for designers, developers and creatives in 2012…just for you.

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Open Source Compliance in the Application Development Space

This white paper will take an objective, neutral look at app development today and discuss open source license obligations that must be considered by app developers and app stores. We’ll highlight some of the compliance challenges and point out some of the resources available to assist those companies and app developers committed to respecting the open source community and fulfilling responsibilities.

Download it