Monthly Archives: June 2013

[Update] Mobile office for Microsoft Office365 is now available for India

Microsoft corrected their mistake and made available mobile office for most of the countries (including India) within a week of its release.
We noticed Microsoft office’s app on top 5 free apps in Indian app store.But unfortunately for me (& all those old iPhone owners.) the app is only available for iPhone 4 or later devices. The error message says that “This app is incompatible for this iPhone” & needs front facing camera.

appstore-top-freeiphone-mobile-office

God knows, why MS Office needs front facing camera! Even Skype the premier VoIP service doesn’t have such obscure requirement for its mobile app.

Writing a diary daily

Today, I’ve decided to write diary everyday. I should have a lot to write about on the first day of my resolution; but to my surprise, I could barely reach 3rd quarter of the page.
It’s been long since I scribed anything on a diary. I remember when I could write 4-5 pages a day! I guess I should continue this habit of writing daily, if not on blog, least on paper…

Productivity boost: Rotate the monitor to portrait mode

One of the best productivity hack, I’m fond of is rotating the widescreen monitor into portrait mode.
I highly recommend this on your workstation/ production computer. For media consumption such as watching movies, pictures etc widescreen horizontal display is suited. But if you use the computer for work and content creation (blogs, forums, word, excel, emails/outlook etc) portrait mode would benefit you a lot. Just try it on your regular monitor and see the difference. Let me know about your experience. At first it may be bit awkward but later, I’m sure you’ll find increase in productivity. 🙂

Portrait mode of monitors


Buying Dell’s (swivel, tilt, & pivot/rotation enabled) ultrasharp monitors has been in my wishlist for years. But c’mon! It’s twice the price of regular LCD widescreen. So if you dont want to shell out extra for the flexible stand, you can literally rotate your monitor by 90 deg.

Micro-blogging at wordpress

What is your blogging style? thorough, detailed, long or quicky, short, fresh amd relevant?
I’ve many unpublished/ pending posts on this blog as ‘drafts’. Once they lose freshness (mostly news) they remain there in draft-mode. For instance I was writing an article on how Microsoft can launch office suit to iOS device at a premium price without having to share its revenue with Apple’s app store. Before I could finish and publish the article, we have office mobile for iOS- just what I had in my mind.
I must confess, I give lot less time and preference to the blogging than I shlould/meant to. And when I write something I dont release it soon (not good). This makes article stale, irrelevant and remain in draft stage, forever.
This bad habit of mine is about to change. In fact it’s gone already. I’ve decided to push my post as quickly as they pop in my head. I took an inspiration from Seth Godin’s blog, that blogpost doesnt need to be long and thorough. In blogging, freshness and relevance matter more.
So here on you might see me micro-blogging on this space, thanks to wordpress app for mobile.

Google AdSense celebrates 10 years

Today I received a Thank you mail from Google AdSense for staying with them for 10 years. It seems just like last year when I started my blog on blogspot.com and enabled Google Adsense for blogger. Although I’m sure I’m not AdSense member since the 1st year of its inception (definitely not blogging since 2004); I can pretty much say that I enjoyed higher CTR back then. (-meaning that it must be ~7+ years with Google AdSense) 😉

To celebrate this, they are launching AdSense 10 week Masterclass (or what they call AdSense 10 Challenge). It is an open-course and 10 week long covering most topics related to promoting, optimising and analysing your webcontent. Now I always wanted to utilize AdSense, but never seriously invested time for it. In the process, I learned a lot but not created a success formula with adsense. It’s the time, Google is inviting for their online AdSense free course. Why not take advantage of it? I guess I’m getting used to MOOC now. Last week, I participated in Youtube’s creators academy & learned a lot in the MOOC. Today I also got ‘certificate of completion‘ from @YTCreators. The youtube course is now open and self-paced (no time restrictions, no community involvement).

Also learned the long form of MOOC that is "Massive Open Online Course".

Microsoft Office 365 for iOS not available outside USA

Microsoft has released ‘Office Mobile’ for iOS. It’s linked with Office 365 subscription model ( Home Premium $99/ year, per user for upto 5 devices). I’ve been waiting for the native and official MS office app for iOS for long and this is just what the doctor ordered.  20130616-110412.jpgOf course it’d not be as comprehensive as fully featured desktop software or mobile app that we have on WP8 (office app for Windows Phone 8 has more features obviously). The “office mobile” is not optimised for iPad and not made for android devices yet. But (I don’t have those devices so I care less) I eagerly clicked on the link as I read Office blog from my iPhone only to find that the ‘Item is not available‘
The Office app is free to download but is only listed in US app store for iOS.

The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the Indian Store; but it is available n the US Store. Tap Change Store to view this item.

That’s the pop-up message I received.
This is so not fair and so ironic when you promote cloud computing and sell on-demand, go-anywhere, access-anytime, software-as-a-service (saas-based) office 365 subscription service.
Do we have Office 365 subscribers from India? What’s your take on this?