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Apps

Manage your Online Business with Exly

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The Covid pandemic and the lockdown life that confined us to our homes also served as an opportunity for people to rediscover their passions and create a variety of content in a serious form. Skill-sharing platforms have probably been the most sought-after during this period, leading to the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs. Online marketplaces are popular, but these limit the scope of creating your own identity and brand online. Enter Exly, a ready-made suite of tools to manage your online business with minimum hassles and help you build your brand in a cost-effective way.

Exly, previously known as Myscoot, is a platform built for creators and independent professionals to launch, manage and grow their business online. In its previous avatar as MyScoot, incorporated in 2019, the platform managed to raise USD 1.7 Million from India’s top VC funds like Lightspeed Ventures, and renowned angel investors like Kunal Shah (Founder Cred, Ex-founder Freecharge), Maninder Gulati (Global Chief Strategy Officer at Oyo), and others.

Various content options available within the Exly dashboard

Exly lets you create your website and start promoting your classes, consultations, workshops, recorded content and merchandise with a complete backend solution with analytics and payment systems. What makes Exly attractive is the fact that you can set up your business without any technical knowledge. The Exly dashboard includes tools for scheduling your various types of classes, workshops, courses and other sellable content, each complete with web links, pricing details, reviews and such details. You can set up automated messages based on customer action on the page and create custom emails. The Sales section allows you to set up discount codes and limited time offers in addition to creating payment links.

The simplest way to set up your online content platform on Exly is by creating your basic website right from the dashboard as a subdomain of exlyapp.com. You can choose one of the readymade templates and customise the look and feel. However, if you are an experienced web developer who prefers to use your own domain that is hosted elsewhere, Exly provides a single-line code to incorporate all the ready-to-use tools into the back-end of your existing website. If you have gone through the pains of integrating those multiple plugins, customising and troubleshooting them, you would appreciate such a solution that allows you to concentrate on your core content creation efforts. And the content that is hosted on this platform is not shared on a marketplace and that negates the possibility of copyright and intellectual property infringement.

Exly is indeed a complete suite of tools that include social media integrations and analytics. With the help of lead monitoring and analysis, the platform allows creators to take timely action, thereby optimising their investment and efforts. Another attractive feature is that you pay for Exly’s services only when you start earning from your content.

Launched in December 2020, the platform has grown 15X so far and the founders claim that Exly has helped creators earn more than five lakh USD on the platform. For more information, visit www.exlyapp.com.

Picsart celebrates India’s 75th Independence day by adding Tamil and Marathi languages

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Yesterday was India’s 75th Independence Day and in honour of this occasion, Picsart – which is a social photo and video editing and creative platform – have added two more local Indian languages to increase its accessibility within India. From August 15, 2021, Picsart has now added Tamil and Marathi languages in addition to the earlier-existing Hindi and Bengali languages.  

User can use several India-centric features and local communities can portray their love for India or make other creative content through the platforms offerings like Indian music, fonts, exciting stickers, replays and more. To make Independence Day extra special, Picsart has also further introduced four new Indian text fonts, Indian music, and exciting stickers and replays that will allow users to create special content to portray their love for India.

“75th Independence Day is both special and emotional for all Indians. It reminds us of the sacrifices many made to get us here. Picsart is proud to be a part of the celebration and celebrates it by introducing two new languages Marathi and Tamil in the app alongside the existing languages of Hindi and Bengali. In doing so, Picsart aims to reach the local communities to help encourage them to create content in major Indian languages and share with the world”, said Ravish Jain, Country head at Picsart, India, said in the press release.

Picsart is available for free on Apple, Android, and Windows and can also be accessed on the web. Picsart Gold is available on a monthly or annual subscription basis for those wishing to enjoy premium editing. With Picsart Gold, subscribers have access to millions of stickers, hundreds of fonts, frames, and backgrounds, and an entire library of free-to-edit content and stock photography.

For more information, please visit this page.

Review: BlueStacks 5 Android Emulator

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With a year under lockdown and work from home, you would have equipped yourselves with a decent laptop or a desktop. And if you are a gaming enthusiast, you might be lamenting the high cost of games for your device. The best solution would be an Android emulator that can be installed on your Windows or Mac. BlueStacks has unveiled the 5th iteration of their popular emulator that supports multi-instance feature along with other advanced features. Though this emulator is mostly used for gaming, it can also be used to install and run any Android app that is supported by up to Android Nougat. It supports both Windows and Mac OS.

The final rollout of this edition (GA) uses significantly less RAM and processing power. In fact, BlueStacks claims that the latest version uses up to 50 percent less RAM than the previous version. You can download BlueStacks 5 exe file from the BlueStacks website. Installation was quite smooth and took only a few minutes in our case. The software can run smoothly on a medium level PC with as low as 2GB RAM. However, we would recommend 8GB RAM, SSD and at least a mid-level graphics capability (onboard or discrete). We used both a dedicated gaming laptop and a Ryzen 5 laptop with Vega 8 graphics to try out the platform.

The emulator features Eco Mode that lets you reduce CPU usage by 87 percent and GPU usage by up to 97 percent. It also supports multi-instance, which allows you to create more than one instance of BlueStacks to play or access multiple apps. It supports gamepads and popular game controllers for a console-like experience. Macros can be recorded and played right from the sidebar. Smart Controls allow you to focus on the game without bothering too much with the controls. Game controls can be customised and keys mapped to touch points.

If you are using an Android emulator for the first time, you might find the controls somewhat difficult in the beginning, but only till you get used to it. We tried Call of Duty and Modern Warships along with racers like Asphalt 9, and the gameplay was quite smooth in every instance without any drop in fps observed. The sheer number of games to choose from the Play Store makes it worth the time and effort.

RATING

★★★★★

WE’RE IMPRESSED Smooth gameplay, Works on mid-level machines

WE’D IMPROVE Support for latest Android versions

THE LAST WORD If you are looking for an Android emulator that allows you to customise game controls and consumes less system resources, BlueStacks 5 certainly deserves a look. However, it supports only up to Android Nougat and this could make some later games incompatible.  

Meditate with Petit Bambou

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We are probably going through one of the most disruptive periods in our lives, a pandemic that largely confined us to our homes during the last year or so. The world as we know it — the routines we follow, the people we meet daily in our lives, the commute to work, the nature, timing and duration of work, our sleep patterns — everything has been disrupted.

These times call for not only maintaining physical health but also concentrate on keeping our mental health in shape. Meditation and relaxing techniques have a big role to play in this. Enter Petit Bambou, a dedicated meditation app that is available on both Android and iOS platforms. The app has both free and premium features. While the free version provides access to various calming sounds and a few basic meditation techniques, the premium feature offers much more, including various guided meditation programs.

Guided meditations offer more than 330 lessons, including eight free sessions in the Discovery program. These meditations cover topics such as sleep, stress management and parenting. Other functions include cardiac coherence, calming breath etc. I have never been a great fan of meditation or such programs. In fact, I have used a few apps before and found those to be either clumsily designed or not moving beyond the basic sounds and techniques. However, in my month-long use, I found Petit Bambou quite useful, especially while taking some time off the computer screen or while trying hard to fall asleep.

The premium version offers four packages — ₹249 monthly, ₹1249 semi-annual, ₹1999 yearly and ₹7996 lifetime.

Guardians: a new location-sharing personal safety app, with data security promises

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Truecaller has been used widely across smartphones in India since its launch and today, is one of the most trusted Caller ID and telephone search engine platforms in India, and possibly the world, with over 270 million active users around the world (200 million in India). But now, Truecaller’s makers – the True Software Scandinavia AB –  have stepped up their game and developed a much-needed and controllable location-sharing app for personal safety: Guardians, which is a freely-available app.  

The usefulness of this app is promising for all genders, especially for women – as women’s safety still a pressing issue in India, and on the current occasion of International Women’s Day, safety and security should be one of the many essential factors that must be focussed on looking forward. Guardians’ data-security protocols and useful features are the need of the hour and do make this a desirable app.

First off, the folks at True Software mention that “Guardians will never share any personal information with any third party apps for commercial use, including our very own Truecaller app. This is our commitment to personal safety”, which is good to know and helpful, given the circumstances we find ourselves in today. Guardians needs permission to access: the user’s location, contacts, and phone permission, the latter showing the user’s phone status to the Guardians.

More so, the following are some of the essential and crucial features of the app:

  • User can select their own personal Guardians from their contact list.
  • User can choose when to stop and start sharing their location
  • User can opt to setup a permanent sharing with selected Guardian
  • “If you are just sharing your location for a particular trip, Guardians works quietly in the background”
  • Emergency Mode: Guardians will be notified about the user’s location and situation once the ‘Emergency’ button is tapped. Guardians will be able to follow user’s location. This mode will also share the user’s location with community Guardians who may be nearby, and user will be free to accept or reject their help.

The developers are trying to integrate a mode through which the local law enforcement can be notified and help the user as quick as possible as well.

“There are probably hundreds of apps on the app stores for personal safety and location sharing. But none of them work in a way where you can involve your family, friends, the community at large and the authorities. With this kind of reach, our past four years of research on women’s safety and campaigns like #ItsNokOk, we now understand this problem well. It’s now time to do something about making our cities safer for everyone”, said Alan Mamedi, CEO & Co-founder of True Software Scandiavia AB.

To download Guardians, please visit this page