Desai Tech Solutions

8 awesome (and sometimes free) conference call services   Conference call services want your business — even those that offer free plans — and their feature sets are getting better all the time.   Conference calls are a big part of work life today — sometimes too big. Because we spend so much time in meetings, we want conference-calling systems that that launch quickly and work flawlessly so we can get the information we need and move on to other pressing matters. The capability to browse a post-meeting transcript or zoom through an audio recording would be big bonuses, especially for fastidious note-takers who don't always catch everything in real time. The good news is that the leading conference call services are full of features that take the sting out of group calls and online meetings. Standard f...

How to Search by Date in Gmail   If you're looking for an email or chat from a certain date in your Gmail archives, follow this simple search technique. If that's not enough, we've thrown in a few more advanced search terms to help you out.     1 Open Gmail search.   On a computer browser, the search bar is visible at the top of the screen from any Gmail page. On a mobile device, you may need to touch a magnifying glass icon to open the search bar.       2 Search for emails after a certain date.   To search for emails after a certain date, type   after:YYYY/MM/DD   into the search bar, replacing those letters with an actual date. For example, write   after:2015/03/29   to search for emails written after March 29th, 2015. You can use the word   newer   instead of "after."     3 Search before a certain date.   You can probably guess this already, but the search "before:YYY...

Bill Gates gets real about free software  Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is a very rich man -- rich enough that despite ardent efforts, he's struggling to give away his mountains of cash. To a certain strain of free software advocate, Gates is rich because he spent decades burying free software, once dubbing it a " new form of communism ." But in a Reddit AMA , Gates came across as anything but an emperor of evil. Not generally known for his sense of humor, Gates seemed relaxed and, yes, funny. When asked what people get for the man who can buy himself anything, he quipped, "Free software. Just kidding." [ Free tools! Get the most out of Windows with 15 open source tools for system admins . | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with InfoWorld's Windows newsletter . ] Much of the conversation revolved around the humanitarian work that Gates and his wife, Melinda, spend the majority of their time doi...

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...