Desai Tech Solutions

teams up with carriers to speed adoption of Rich Communication Services  An Android client is in the works, which should spread adoption of this major upgrade for mobile messaging.  Better mobile messaging for Android is on the horizon. As part of the Mobile World Congress festivities, the GSM Association announced that it’s partnered up with Google and 15 global carriers to push adoption of Rich Communication Services (RCS) . RCS brings the features found in third-party services like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Hangouts, and others to standard messaging, such as real-time typing and read notifications, support for higher-resolution images, location sharing, and emoticons. Just like with Apple’s iMessage, you won’t have to sign up for another account with a third-party service, as it will be integrated with your phone’s standard messaging. Google has pledged to build a dedicated RCS client thanks to its acquisition of Jibe , a carrier-based messag...

Lenovo REACHit Manages Files Across Cloud Accounts Lenovo's new REACHit service and mobile apps let you access, share, and manage files stored in Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. While doing research for a recent CIO.com article I wrote on cloud storage services , I confirmed something I'd long suspected. Lots of people use, say, Dropbox as their main cloud file depository; Google Drive for collaboration documents; OneDrive because of its integration with Microsoft Office; and so on. So searching for, accessing and transferring files between multiple cloud services is a real-world problem. Lenovo just released a (mostly) solid solution: REACHit , a browser-based service, along with apps for Android, Windows, Windows Phone and, coming soon, iOS. REACHit is free to use, and it is designed to make it easier to transfer and manage files between Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. Setup is simple. I created a Lenovo account in minutes and successfull...

How to Check if an Email Address is Valid and Exists How do you know if an email address exists or not? The easy option would be that you send a dummy mail to that email address, wait for an hour or so and if your message bounces, it is very likely that the particular email address does not exist. The approach works but wouldn’t it be nice if you could check any email address instantly without even sending that test message? The other slightly technical option to verify an email address is by querying the mail server. You connect to the mail server through telnet ( see video ), enter your email address and the other email address that you are trying to verify. If the server response is an error code, the email address is probably not valid. How to Check Email Addresses Instantly Let me share an extremely simple method for checking if an email address is valid and exists or not. Go to the login page of the email service and pretend that you no longer remember ...

Desai Tech Solutions - www.desaitech.in Google Wants You to Design the Internet of Things Impatient for the Internet of Things, Google is providing seed money for reseraching new technologies. Have an idea for how the much-anticipated Internet of Things should operate? If the idea is good enough, Google may pay you to see it to fruition. As part of a new effort to generate more Internet of Things technologies, Google is planning to issue a number of grants to facilitate pioneering research in this nascent field of computing. "While the Internet of Things (IoT) conjures a vision of 'anytime, any place' connectivity for all things, the realization is complex given the need to work across interconnected and heterogeneous systems, and the special considerations needed for security, privacy, and safety," co-wrote Google chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf, in a blog post announcing the research program . The "Internet of Things...

Backup your Emails on a USB Drive for Offline Access How do you ensure that you always have access to all your web emails – even at places where there is no Internet or when you aren’t carrying your own laptop? One of the popular options is that you use a tool like Microsoft Outlook to download all your emails to the computer beforehand and you can then read them anywhere even in offline mode. Both Gmail and Hotmail offer POP3 access to help you download messages using any email client while there are easy workarounds for Yahoo Mail. There are some downsides though. First, most email clients aren’t portable (can you carry emails on a USB drive?) and second, if all you want is offline access to your Gmail messages and nothing extra, Outlook is probably too heavy a tool for that purpose. I have been testing a Windows-only utility called MailStore that seems like an ideal solution for such a problem – the tool is free, there’s a portable version for your USB stic...

Azure outage hits Microsoft Office 365 users & websites Microsoft cloud forced offline yet again Microsoft Azure has suffered yet another outage that left customer websites offline and the software giant's Office 365 users without access to apps and data. The failure also caused the Microsoft MSN service to black out as engineers struggled to rectify the situation. According to Azure’s status page , the problem began at 00.52 GMT on Wednesday morning, affecting access to Office 365 and Xbox Live servers. A spokeswoman said the firm was “investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services. We are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible.” While most of the problems were resolved later in the day, Microsoft said it was still investigating a number of problems affecting virtual machines in its North Europe and West Europe datacentre facilities. “A sub...

Facebook's New Iowa Datacenter Goes Modular to Grow Forever The company dropped its cluster design for a network fabric with smaller server pods. The traffic inside Facebook's datacenters is growing so fast that the company is changing the basic architecture of its networks in order to keep up. The new design, which Facebook calls a data center fabric, doesn't use a new link speed to make the network run faster. Instead, it turns the whole system into a set of modules that are less expensive and more widely available than what the company's using now. It's also easier to deploy and manage, according to Facebook's networking chief. Unlike older hierarchical networks, the modular design can provide consistently fast links across the data center for any two servers to talk to each other. The new architecture was used in a 476,000-square-foot (44,000-square-meter) data center that goes online today in Altoona, Iowa. Facebook plans to use it in all...