All Posts by Himanshu Sheth

|In: Android|Last Updated:

Let’s face it- we have all done it! We’ve all been part of a massive war with someone or the other- the war of Android v/s iOS and iPhone. We all love our smartphones more than we love our partners, parents and kids! With every passing month, the market gets flooded with newer phones that are getting bigger, sleeker and more advanced!

With 4 months gone, let’s take a look at the winning smartphones till now

Samsung Galaxy S6

Samsung finally entered the sleek and shiny league of smartphones with this beauty- a phone with Gorilla Glass protective covering and real aluminium. Its Octa Core processor with an HD touch 2560 X 1440 display with a 5.1 inch screen makes it an object of envy! A high end 16 MP camera with image boosting and image stabilization is sure to capture perfect photos in any kind of settings. The phone comes in attractive colours of White Pearl, Black Sapphire and Gold Platinum. Samsung removed certain features like air gestures and Air View and have fine-tuned this model by enhancing its sound and audio.

This phone is sure to blow your mind as well as of those around you- get one now you’re guaranteed to love it!

Apple iPhone 6

Apple has once again given us a winner with its latest addition to the iPhone gallery- the Apple iPhone 6 with a sleek finish and an HD retina display. It boasts of a high pixel resolution of 1334 x 750 and a ppi of 326. It has a 4.7 inch multi touch screen with IPS technology. Apple finally provides a phone which can take beautiful photos with this offering- its 8 MP iSight camera with five element lens will sure give any other phone a good run for its money. It also offers a finger print scanner in built into the Home Button.

Moto X

With a 5.2 inch edge to edge display and 1080p HD display this phone is hard to resist! It’s a state of the art phone delivering quality performance because of its Chipset Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Processor. It’s 13 MP rear camera provides 4x zoom to catch even the tiniest of movements which is enhanced with a Dual LED Ring Flash. With a battery of 2300 mAh it promises a talk time of upto 17 hours!

Get this sleek and stylish phone today! It’s worth buy.

OnePlus One

This is an epic phone providing you with an amazing battery life and a sharp and clear display. It comes with a tonne of features at a very reasonable price with a full HD display and an awesome 13 MP camera and a 2.5 GHz  quad core Snapdragon 801 Processor.

The phone boasts of a Cyanogen Mod interface which makes the icons and home screen appear flatter giving it a more appealing look. This interface also offers higher security and gives your apps a variety of control on how they should be protected. It offers the best of Samsung and LG at a fraction of their cost!

It’s a tough battle out there with each smartphone trying to win you over with their amazing features and enhanced quality. With so much variety to pick from, go get the best phone that suits your budget and meets all your whims and fancies!

|In: Blogging|Last Updated: | 1 Comment

Subject lines are incredibly influential in deciding the course of your email campaigns. After all they ensure whether someone even opens the campaign; your first step towards engagement. If it weren’t for a convincing subject line no would even bother to open your campaigns. Thus, Subject lines play a very pivotal role in getting the first step towards engagement.

But are subject lines that critical? Yes! Consider a normal advertisement you saw off Facebook or your TV. How long does the ad stay relevant? Only for a few moments. Now consider the fact that the inbox won’t throw out emails if they remain unopened.

Emails linger in the inbox long after they get placed. As one can never truly predict when a campaign connects with a subscriber; a strong and influential subject line can drive opens even if it takes the subscriber a few days.

A subject line is the first impression of your email marketing campaign. And as they say “first impression last”, your subject lines carry more weight-age than you would think.

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Are there any rules to Subject Line creation?

Yes! And No!

This might seem slightly confusing but there are no hard & fast rules to designing a good and effective subject line. Subject lines can be interpreted in various manners, so one subject line might not suit all groups within your audience. Nevertheless, there are some elements you should steer away from when designing your subject lines.

Long and boring!

Studies conducted across various demographics depict a clear correlation between opens and length of subject lines. Ideally and statistically shorter subject lines are better at prompting opens. This is primarily because no one has got the time to read big sentences when only a few words can convey the intention of the campaign. Consider another factor; typically you can see up to 40 -60 characters on your subject line, when using a computer.

On smartphones your subject line are bound to get truncated when casually viewing the inbox. Having short subject lines that give clear and concise intentions connect better with all groups. It’s all about being visible.

It’s all psychological!

In truest essence, subject lines deal with the psyche of the individual and certain words can push the subject line further. Having subject lines designed around particular words can greatly influence a subscriber. Appropriate phrasing plays significant role in determining the effectiveness of subject lines. Here’s a compilation of various categories of keywords that can be deployed in subject lines:

  1. Benefit – If your subject line conveys the benefits of opening the campaign certain words out perform others. For example the word “cheapest” has a negative influence in read rates as opposed to “fastest” or “quickest”
  2. Clickbait – If you’ve been thinking that clickbait keywords still work their magic, you’re wrong. Clickbait words no longer influence opens, in fact they are counter-productive
  3. Commanding words – Commanding words are quite tricky, because no one likes to be bossed around. Words like “register”, “add” or “try” influence opens far more than “buy”, “call” or “click”
  4. Discount and price oriented keywords – A majority of e-commerce brands heavily rely on phrases like “2 for 1”, “clearance sale”, “half off” or mention price drops in the subject lines. The only way these subject lines works are when the discount offered is significantly large. Such words are way too common in the email ecosystem, hence it easy to look past such routine subject lines
  5. Urgency – Subject lines that indicate urgency generate high open rates. However phrasing still acts as an influencer. Consider two subject lines; “30% Off on Shoes, Limited time only” and “30% Off on Shoes, Expiring soon”. The former will pay better results.

Subject lines are quite a tricky affair, but one cannot undermine their worth. It’s vital to devise clever and original subject lines to get audience to open campaigns. One can truly say that Subject lines are skillful art; you have to be expressive and clever, while maintain brevity and clarity.

And as all email strategies of email marketing service provider go; you need to test, test and test some more. A/B split testing with different subject lines can give insight on which work and which don’t. Analysis of these results should aid in developing a psychological angle to identify how different groups respond to different subject lines.

Once you’re clear of varying inclinations of segments in the audience, subject line creation would be a piece of cake. But don’t stick to the same practices for every campaign; innovate to improve efficiency.

About the author

Shantam Dubey is Assistant SEO manager at iCubes.in. You can have a look at his complete profile here

Image Credit* – thephorest

|In: Marketing|Last Updated:

Culture Machine, one of the fastest growing digital video networks in Asia, which has always stood by its promise of providing quality content backed by cutting edge technology, takes its commitment further with the launch of Intelligence Machine platform.

Through its rich data driven insights, Intelligence Machine identifies the content recipe for brands & creators that resonates with their targeted audience and enables them to translate the insights into a reliable programming strategy. It indexes and analyzes over 1.5 billion videos across the digital universe on a daily basis.

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Commenting on the launch, Sameer Pitalwalla, CEO & Co-Founder, Culture Machine said

Social Platforms are the new cable operators; YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are all video platforms and knowing what content to create and to create that content at scale, across platforms, is at the heart of building a successful brand online. Intelligence Machine helps solve this problem and understand audiences and their taste preferences using cutting edge technology.

Venkat Prasad, COO/CTO & Co-Founder, Culture Machine said

We at Culture Machine believe in the power of technology, which will be the key differentiator for success in the digital marketplace. Intelligence Machine provides unmatched insights on the best content type and format’s that resonates with the targeted audience for a given brand or product and enables the user to translate that insight into concrete actions. Think of it as a “money-ball” for content for brands & publishers.

Key features of Intelligence Machine

  • Identifying a brand’s share of voice across video platforms, in different geographies and online communities across earned and owned media.
  • Bench-marking the brand against its industry on digital media and giving them a recipe to improve its standing.
  • Discovering successful content formats for an audience segment in a given industry and topical trends in relation to them.

About Culture Machine

Founded in 2013 by Sameer Pitalwalla and Venkat Prasad, Culture Machine is a Digital Media Company that creates entertainment for the Internet generation by combining cutting edge technology with great content. Culture Machine’s engineering team includes senior data scientists and some of the best software architects in the industry. For more information, please visit their website.

|In: Android|Last Updated:

Ringo, a unique international calling app, that provides high quality low cost international calls without using the internet, now allows its users to make free international calls to any mobile or land-line in the world by providing them ways to earn free calling credit.

Ringo

The newly launched “Offerwall” section enables users to earn free Ringo credits within the app by installing various recommended advertiser apps including games and productivity tools. Each third party app a user installs can earn them up to Rs. 20 in free credits which instantly reflects in their Ringo account. 

Bhavin Turakhia, CEO & Founder, Ringo says  

Many of our users spend up to Rs. 50 each month on making international calls using Ringo which would have typically cost them as high as Rs. 450 had they been using their mobile operator’s network. So, we are already helping our users save immensely on their international calling costs. But now, with the introduction of Offerwall within the app itself, many of our users can eliminate their entire monthly expense of staying in touch with their family or friends abroad through just a few easy clicks. This aligns well with our vision of making high quality international calls affordable for the masses.

Ringo now has close to half a million users worldwide & given the expanding base, the company is also committed to user privacy and security. Ringo screens every offer before including it in the Offerwall to ensure that none of the sponsored apps are malicious in nature, collect any information about the user or ask for sensitive information like credit card details. None of the offers require any payment or any data from the user to avail of the free credit.

About Ringo

Ringo is an international calling app that uses a unique call flow to provide best-in-class call quality at costs lower than other popular calling apps. Ringo calls do not use the Internet, wi-fi or data and instead relies on regular phone lines. Ringo is unlike any international calling app available today and is unparalleled in cost, convenience, simplicity and reliability. Ringo is available for download on iOS, Android and Windows app stores, and can be also downloaded directly from the website

Image Credit* – indianweb2

|In: Mobile|Last Updated:

GadgetWood, India’s first professionally-managed multi-brand repair and support service provider for Mobiles, Smart phones and Tablets, recently entered into a partnership with Xiaomi, the world’s third largest mobile phone company, based in China.

As a part of the association, GadgetWood will provide pick and drop repair services for Xiaomi smartphones and tablets within the next business day of placing the request. This ensures that all Xiaomi owners in India can now enjoy the fastest repair and after-sales product services, without the hassle of shuttling between service centres.

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Jayant Jha, Co-Founder and CEO, GadgetWood commented

The Xiaomi brand has created ripples in the Indian market. With the combined synergies of this globally-reputed brand and GadgetWood, consumers can benefit from a great user experience as well as quick and seamless repair services. The partnership is a testament to the fact that we, at GadgetWood, are committed to solving all technical and usage-related concerns of the Indian consumer through our unmatched services.

 Prior to the official announcement of the partnership, GadgetWood ran a pilot programme for two and half months in Delhi-NCR. The programme was a thumping success as over 500 Xiaomi customers used GadgetWood services to repair their smartphones and tablets with alacrity. Through this alliance, GadgetWood will provide assistance to Xiaomi in India through its innovative technology solutions.

About GadgetWood

GadgetWood is India’s 1st professionally managed smartphones and tablets repair service. We can help you repair all brands of smartphones and tablets you own. GadgetWood helps with problems including accidental damages like broken screen, broken touch and display, damages in body, damages due to water, dead smartphone, broken USB or charging jack, non-responsive devices, dead devices and not only this, you can also take help on most common software problems i.e. software update, hanging problem, slow performance, application download, removing unresponsive apps, data backup and restore, email setup and with everything that you may come across.

GadgetWood guarantees fast and time bound services to its customers with an industry leading CSAT rating of over 97.5%, trained experts and Integrated Support Service Management System. It promises easy access, code of conduct, 100% resolution for any kind of gadget, guaranteed and prompt service and privacy protection. More information here

|In: Blogging|Last Updated:

Blogs can be a very gainful tool if utilized appropriately. Benefiting from blogs is simply a matter of grabbing the awareness of an audience and not accomplishing any sort of selling. You should start your blog with any blog hosting service. A free blog hosting service permits you to initiate blogging straight away without needing any acquaintance of hosting, or programming.

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In this article you will come across 8 topmost ways to successful blogging.

How to begin

The best way to begin is starting with a free service. In case, your blog doesn’t yield any positive results, eventually you are not going to lose any money. A blog is always structured in chronological order, and your newest entry is exhibited first.

If your blog traffic develops greatly, you can upgrade it and make the most recent blog entry the message of your progress. Simply you can type the new blog URL address. It will direct visitors to the new blog site, and continue you following, without difficulty to anybody.

Niche selection

A niche is an aimed product or service. You should make a decision on a product or service offered by you.  Prefer an area which you can passionately write about, and you can use keyword research engines to find well-liked searched topics.

As long as there are viewers for your topic, your blog should be doing well. Any topic can be measured a niche, and it doesn’t matter how large or small the audience is. If there are people who are fascinated in hearing about your topic, you can pick to build your particular audience.

Update on a regular basis

Updating your blog on a regular [if not daily] basis keeps it more appealing to readers, and also it generates fresh content making it more tempting to search engines. In order to retain your blog traffic, it is a necessity to update your blog regularly with manifold entries.

You should attempt to update your blog daily with a minimum of three entries. The best way to achieve this is to plan a set time that you will contribute to your blog every day.

Track your blog

How you’re going to know your blog has traffic or not? It doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing as no one is leaving comments. Many visitors do not comment their first time, but are lively daily visitors.

Blog tracking does not have to be complicated, and typically an Site Meter or Stat Counter will accomplish the job. It would be much better to utilize a service that provides advanced traffic analysis, like search engine information, keyword tracking and referral information.

Always listen to your audience

With the aid of proper page counter, you will observe how others are getting your blog and which keywords are being utilized to locate your blog. In the event, your blog is being located by one or more keywords, then try to focus your blog around these popular keywords to make it more dominant.

Always incorporate these keywords when writing entry titles and maintain the blog more interesting.

Short and brief

The blog entries should be concise and brief. The lengthy articles should be avoided, and you should endeavor to submit blog entries so as to become hours of reading. Many visitors are fond of reading interesting information, and it is good to make available constructive information. Never include any useless information, as visitors will flee sentences that turn away from your theme.

Digital art

Make an effort to incorporate pictures, photos, non-advertising graphics and art in your blog entries. Graphics can give you blog more life, and evidently, the content is the most important aspect and never try to surpass your content with graphics. Be particular about your graphics and ensure they fit the entry topic. Original photos, pictures, graphics and art is greatly recommended.

Be more professional

As a professional blogger, make your own team with one or more other bloggers. This will help create an appealing blog, and more authors signify more coverage since each author will have a particular interest in the blog. The proposal of a team blog is to make it more gratifying for all authors, and maintaining the blog exciting for visitors.

About the author

Lisa Coffey is an expert SEO consultant. She has years of SEO related experience. Her enthusiasm and dedication for internet marketing, technology and writing has made her a colossal symbol on the World Wide Web. Presently she is working with FourQuadrant and you can contact at lissa.coffey@outlook.com

*Image Credit – HopScotchTheGlobe

|In: Marketing|Last Updated:

MicrosoftLogo

Adobe & Microsoft Corporation announced a strategic partnership at Adobe Digital Summit, that will redefine how enterprises manage their marketing, sales and services to better engage with customers across all touch points.

The partnership will include the integration of Adobe’s industry leading Marketing Cloud Solutions with Microsoft’s best-in-class Dynamics CRM and allow brands to deliver experiences that take all customer engagements into account – from reach and acquisition to retention and loyalty. This new integration will help eliminate frustrating customer experiences that result when marketing, sales and service interactions are soiled.

Speaking at the occasion, Kirill Tatarinov, executive vice president, Microsoft Business Solutions said

Helping our customers reinvent productivity and business processes is one of our top priorities. Partnering with Adobe enables us to deliver a comprehensive set of customer engagement processes to enterprise customers to help them be more productive and better engage with their customers. The integration of our industry-leading Dynamics CRM solution with Adobe Marketing Cloud will enable business professionals to maximize their investment in technology and deliver breakthroughs in marketing, sales and customer care.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Microsoft’s integrated marketing management solution, includes capabilities like marketing resource management that are complementary to Adobe Marketing Cloud to provide added value to customers.

The partnership will bring an integrated CRM-Marketing solution to marketers across many industry segments including financial services, travel and leisure.

This partnership offers customers the ability to do the following:

  • Align sales and marketing activities by tightly integrating audiences and their behaviors, which can help guide sales or service calls, identify sales opportunities or inform lead scoring.
  • Find high-value audience segments and provide them with real-time offers on the website or enable targeted display ads.
  • Combine Web behavior data with order history, return history, loyalty status and call center history to not only identify where in the sales life-cycle stage a customer is in, but then also deliver the right content at the right time, whether that content resides on a landing page, in a service follow-up email, or as an alert in a mobile app.

Adobe Campaign & Adobe Experience Manager are now certified on Microsoft Azure. The companies are also working on a connector that would enable data and insights from Adobe Analytics to appear in Power BI, Microsoft’s business analytics service that enables people to see all of their data through a single pane of glass, providing a consolidated view across a business.

About Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud empowers companies to use big data to effectively reach and engage customers and prospects with highly personalized marketing content across devices and digital touch points. Eight tightly integrated Solutions offer marketers a complete set of marketing technologies that focus on analytics, Web and app experience management, testing and targeting, advertising, social engagement and campaign orchestration. The tie-in with Adobe Creative Cloud makes it easy to instantly activate creative assets across all marketing channels.

|In: Books|Last Updated:

I am sure that most us would have watched [if not read] the Ramayana that used to be tele-casted on Doordarshan. Few months back, we had reviewed the book Ramayana : The Game of Life : Rise of the Sun Prince which was aptly written to convey the messages from the Ramayana to the urban audience.

Today we review the second installment of the book titled – Ramayana : The Game of Life: Shattered Dreams.

About the Author

Shubha Vilas is a motivational speaker, spiritual seeker with B.E in “Electronics & Telecommunications” and L.L.B specializing in Patent Law. You can find more about him here

Detailed Review

Just like the previous book, here also the author tries to connect the learning from each instance [of the Ramayana] with real-life [through footnotes]. The book starts off with the dilemma that King Dasratha faces in deciding who should succeed him. It showcases the life of Ram while in exile. The author has beautifully taken the famous Ramayana and given it his own touch. It teaches us that “Despite all odds, how both Rama & Sita shared a very beautiful & understanding relationship with each other”.

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The author helps us visualize the beauty of “being self-less” through the actions of Lakshmana & Bharata. Through Manthara’s character, it beautifully portray’s “How poisonous instincts of one person can lead to the disaster of an entire nation [Ayodhya]”.

The author had to make sure that the reader finds the story interesting [and can co-relate to it] else it would have been “Me-Too” book on the epic. There are learnings on Leadership, Mentoring, Giving-up etc. from each chapter [or I can say from each page :)] which readers can easily co-relate to day to day life.

The Ramayana is narrated in a very crisp & simplistic manner ensuring that the epic gives out more learnings to it’s readers !!!

There are interesting lessons on Management which we would like to share in this article.

Management Mantras

Lord Rama revealed five key management concepts a good leader has to adhere to. These five tenets form the most important limbs of a leader’s portfolio.

Respect Management

The foundation of any leadership rests on respect management. A leader who respects his superiors, allows the flow of energy to descend into his life. With that in mind, Rama’s question to Bharata were:

  • Are you treating your preceptors respectfully ?
  • Are you making sure mother Kaushalya & Sumitra are happy ?
  • Is the venerable Keikeyi rejoicing ?
  • Do you honor Sayujna, the son of Vasistha ?
  • Are you respectful toward, brahmanas, teachers and ministers ?
  • Are women respected & taken care of ? Respect toward them is the root of all the good that happens in society & dis-respect toward them is the root of all evil in the society.

Decision Management

Decision-making with discernment becomes an ornament that brings respect & appreciation from followers. Rama gave Baratha some crucial pointers:

  • Do not deliberate either alone or with too many men.
  • Your decisions should not be made public before being carried out.
  • Neighboring kings should not understand your undertakings before execution.
  • Your decisions should have maximum benefit at minimum cost.
  • Do not delay decision-making.
  • Do not falsely accuse, kill or punish a noble man without appropriate inquiry. Remember that tears of victims falsely accused actually destroy justice givers.
  • Do not release a thief for greed of wealth.
  • Encourage your ministers to be impartial to both the rich and the poor.

Reputation Management

Reputation is like a glass ball. It has to be clean, but before that, it has to be in your grip. People see before they hear; they judge a leader on the basis of his actions before they get inspired by the words. The reputation of the leader imbibes confidence in the follower. Rama’s suggestions to Bharatha were:

  • Do not fall prey to excessive sleep & wake-up at an appropriate hour.
  • Contemplate about the adroitness of your action in the second half of the night.
  • Dress royally. The regal appearance of a king gives confidence to the subjects.
  • Make yourself available to hear your subject’s grievances. First hand interaction with the leader gives hope to the subjects.
  • Do not over-indulge in wealth, religion or delights of the senses. Over-indulgence or indulgence at the wrong time or place creates doubts in subjects.
  • Do not eat without sharing. Not sharing makes one hardhearted & others jealous.
  • Avoid incurring the wrath of Brahmanas by falling into wrong habits.
  • Ensure that servants are not dis-respectful toward you nor should they hasten away in fear on seeing you. Disrespect & fear are two extremes indicating barriers in connections between the leader and his subjects.

Team Management

Team management is to a leader what life management is to a doctor. When a team is managed with grace, the subjects are filled with gratefulness; the team becomes the solution to all problems a leader faces. Rama revealed these pearls of wisdom:

  • One wise man is better than thousand stupid ones; one good minister can ensure the prosperity of a kingdom.
  • Assign tasks according to the level of intelligence, ability, skill, position & status of the employee.
  • Surround yourself with ministers who are not only corruptible & full of integrity but also born and raised in a family that imbibes Vedic values & culture.
  • Train your ministers to avoid flexible decisions that makes subjects fearful.
  • The army chief should be cheerful, wise, courageous, well-behaved, loved by his subordinates, efficient, born & raised in a family that imbibes Vedic values & culture.
  • Honor courageous warriors in public.
  • The army should be paid their salary & daily provisions on time. A delay in wages & maintenance causes servants to be corrupt and infuriated with their master.
  • Select an ambassador who is knowledgeable, wise & skillful, has a presence of mind and knows how to speak to the point.
  • Though three spies, unacquainted with one another, collect all information about your important officers as well as those of your enemies. Do not place your trust on one spy.
  • Do not spy on your own ministers, your guru & the princes. Monitor their actions.
  • Do not house a physician who is an expert at aggravating a disease, a servant intent on bringing disgrace and a valiant warrior seeking kingly power. They can be the cause of your destruction.

Character Management

A leader should religiously avoid these 14 sins. By carefully avoiding these, the leader can suitably manage his character.

  • Giving the material world as much importance as the spiritual world.
  • Carelessness.
  • Procrastination.
  • Lack of appreciation of righteous people.
  • Autocracy in decision making.
  • Avoiding decisions already made.
  • Dishonesty.
  • Revealing confidential information.
  • Indulging in discussions with people of adverse opinions and thus wasting valuable time.
  • Invading enemies from all directions.
  • Respecting bad people.

Closing Thoughts

“Ramayana : The Game of Life: Shattered Dreams” is a breezy read & keeps the reader’s hooked with the learnings [documented in the footnotes]. Overall the book is a must read for all Epic lovers, Management gurus & Aspirants to get the story from an entirely different angle knitting it well with the modern era.

Thanks to Mr Shubha Vilas for sending us the review copy of this book 🙂