‘The Inbox Is Out And Messaging Is In’: LinkedIn Previews Project Voyager, Its New Mobile App

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals with over 380 million members, is working hard to bring its brand and its platform into the 21st century to make it more relevant to how people do business today. As part of that, company CEO Jeff Weiner — who happens to also be the company’s head of product — previewed a new version of its flagship mobile application today. Code-named Project Voyager, the new app could be going live in a matter of weeks, he said.

Weiner’s preview was delivered at the company’s TalentConnect event in Anaheim, a confab focused on one of the company’s biggest-paying user bases: recruiters. As Weiner described it, one of the company’s most important sets of users is as good a place as any to debut where the company is going. Here’s a rundown of what’s in store:

The first section Weiner described was, fittingly, Home. Home, he said, will be a seamless onboarding process, where the app will be able to weed out what you are interested in and what you are not.

This will essentially be a rebuilt news feed where people can click on news items but also “discard” those that are less interesting, he noted.

“We don’t just want the feed to be about information and news,” Weiner said. It will also include conversation threads and will sort them according to whether people are in your network and  how much you communicate with them.

The next feature, Me, will be a kind of notifications center, “a dashboard experience” where LinkedIn will provide analytics about how much your profile is viewed and who is tagging you or reading your content.

There seem to be big plans for Me. Weiner hinted that it could be looked at as a way of managing your “whole” professional life, which theoretically could bring in work correspondence or other software. Me is also where you can manage your profile.

The third new area, Messaging, Weiner noted, is “clearly the medium where people prefer communicating. Welcome to the 21st century, LinkedIn!” He joked. This is a pretty revolutionary area for LinkedIn, where it is trying to lighten up a little with more human features, such as stickers.

“The inbox is out and messaging is in,” Weiner noted.

My Network, the fourth area of the new LinkedIn app, will give users a run-down of activities of people you know who are on LinkedIn. This will eventually also include a calendar feature, Weiner said, which will “anticipate your needs.”

It’s similar to LinkedIn’s Connect features that essentially push contact information to you on the go when people are in your vicinity, and here it will focus first on areas like pre-meeting updates after you’e synced your calendar to the app. “I can get information before a meeting, but I can also ask for information in real time,” he said.

This is also where connection requests will be hosted.

Search will be another key part of the new app. The experience, Weiner said, will be 300% faster than LinkedIn’s current search experience. “We’re playing a game to see how few letters we can put in before we get the answers to our searches,” he said. The concept here seems to be implementing some AI into the process, tracking what kinds of things you’re already looking at in LinkedIn (and perhaps elsewhere) and using that to anticipate what it is that you will want to look for in the search window.

This will also include an entirely new and very dynamic set of search results, containing features like videos, and the ability for businesses to customize how their search results appear.

Finally there will be an app launcher incorporated into the experience, using LinkedIn to link out to other apps like Lynda.com more seamlessly. This is an example of how deep linking technology is now becoming ever more mainstream, with the feature eventually being able not only to link you to an app, but to a specific section within it. (For example, a particular lesson or training in LinkedIn rather than the app’s main landing page.) “Over time the launcher will get more intelligent,” Weiner said.

More generally, LinkedIn has been making a lot of efforts to expand its profile globally, which has led it to some interesting partnerships such as a deal with Didi Kuaidi, the “Uber” of China. Today Weiner was very focused on his concept of the “economic graph,” which seems to grow in ambition every time I hear it mentioned.

“We would like for 3 billion of people to have a profile on LinkedIn,” he said. “We’d like a digital representation for every job opening. We’ll have a profile for every educational organization, and we’re developing a publishing platform for those to share knowledge to do so.”

LinkedIn’s Messenger Revamped: Introduces Chat-Like Inbox!

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with over 300 million users has finally decided to update its long outdated messaging experience to a much better chat like user experience.

LinkedIn just introduced a new threaded-messaging experience that is much more casual than the old way, and is also aimed towards the young crowd. Chat services are clearly on the rise, and the professional social network has finally recognized the need for a better chat experience. Thread like chat experience has been greatly appreciated in networking applications. Facebook was among the most successful ones to fully utilize its potential by removing messenger from the main application and introducing a standalone Facebook messenger. After the launch of Facebook messenger for Android in 2014, the messenger has been downloaded by over 1 billion android users.

LinkedIn has long since used a boring and un-intuitive mail-like messaging features for its users to interact with each other, which is not very convenient for short conversations. But now things have changed, as the network for professionals has embraced the modern standards for social networking by being much better at messaging. The new design has a minimalistic-look and feel and has a clean and attractive look. By the looks of it, LinkedIn’s messenger looks a lot like Facebook’s Messenger for desktop browsers, and that is not a bad thing.

Along with a much better design, it also natively supports emoji and GIF images along with the usual picture and documents. The good thing about the service is that it is available to all users with or without premium. These new features are already being trickled out to all the desktop users and updates for mobile users should be hitting the app stores for Android and iOS soon enough.

Download LinkedIn for Andriod or iOS.

Reference : LinkedIn

Islam 360 as an app at its excellence!

According to Google, Zahid Hussain is the first person in the world who has made this type of Searchable Hadees project. He is an IT Consultant by profession and his keen interest in religion compelled him to carry out this extensive research work single handedly and took him around five years to come up with this amazing and easy to use Search Engine Application for holy Quran and holy Hadees.

For the ease of the users and readers, he has made the application in such a way that, not even an Hadees or topic, but even a single word from whole Sahih Bukhari can be searched and within a blink of an eye, it gives you all the references from the Holy Book.

Owing to the growing popularity of the Quran Search Engine, Zahid Hussain has been invited to several TV channels during prime time and morning shows, as well as some socio-political talk shows to promote his work and let the common man know about his work.

On 19th August,2015 (last night), he was invited in a socio-political talk show on Pakistan TV Channel. A must listen show, please go through the link below:

Zahid Hussain Interview

Design a smartphone app for NASA & Win $1500 prize money

NASA is calling all aspiring developers to build a smartwatch app for astronauts. The announcement was made over the weekend via The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) on Freelancer.

“We (NASA) are interested in the emerging world of smartwatch technology and are looking to leverage this technology to create a smartwatch app that could be helpful to astronauts. The challenge is to design the general user interface for smartwatch applications for use on the International Space Station”, NTL wrote in the competition description on Freelancer.

NASA’s astronauts currently use laptops, tablets and iPads for communication, work and day to day tasks. According to the NTL, they want a smartwatch to assist astronauts in their tasks by providing a timeline of the past, present and future. They want the app to have the following defining features:

1. It should display an agenda view of the timeline as well as a way to easily navigate to another day in the past or future.
2. It should display color coded cautions and warnings.
3. It should tell whether or not the vehicle is currently able to communicate with the ground through either voice/video.
4. It should also have the ability to set timers for upcoming activities.

NTL is looking for all these functionalities in a single high-functioning app. It should also give appropriate feedback, innovatively displayed, for tasks which should be visible on a small Samsung Gear screen.

The deadline for the task is September 9. So, if you’re interested you have 3 weeks time. To enter the competition head on over to Freelancer.

NTL is the result of a collaboration between NASA and Freelancer. In the hopes to finding a solution, via this platform NASA is crowdsourcing some of the most complex problems faced by astronauts. However, this is not the first time NASA has opted for crowdsourcing. In May, they held the NASA Space Apps competition, which they have each year. The main aim is to find solutions that could be beneficial for not only astronauts but the people on earth.

NTL has already hosted several contests on Freelancer which you can still join. For more details, visit here.

What To Expect From The iPad Mini 4

Multiple recent leaks have indicated that Apple is working on a major new version of the iPad mini. You can expect a more powerful, thinner iPad mini, and it will let you take advantage of all the latest features in iOS 9.

Macotakara and @OnLeaks revealed that the iPad mini 4 will look like a smaller iPad Air 2. Of course, many called the iPad Air a bigger iPad mini, but the current iPad mini 3 is still a bit thicker than the iPad Air 2.

This should change as the iPad mini 4 should be 6.1mm thick (down from 7.5mm), exactly the same thickness as the iPad Air 2. In order to make the tablet thinner, Apple may switch to a fully-laminated display. Other than that, the device will be 3mm longer and the mute/rotation lock switch should disappear.

When it comes to the iPad mini 4’s computing power, 9to5mac found some interesting hints in the beta version of OS X El Capitan. Safari 9’s developer tools show how your website will look like on an iPad mini with a split view.

As a reminder, during the WWDC keynote in June, Apple introduced split-screen multitasking for the iPad in iOS 9. But there was an asterisk. While many iPads will get slide-over, letting you temporarily open another app in a drawer menu, only the iPad Air 2 will get true multitasking — if you have an iPad Air 2, you’ll be able to create a split screen and interact with two apps at the same time.

This is due to the iPad Air 2’s A8X chip and its 2GB of RAM. So today’s leak may indicate that the iPad mini will get an updated system-on-a-chip as well as more RAM, making it at least as fast as the iPad Air 2.

The current iPad mini 3 has lagged behind when it comes to specs. Last year, Apple only added a Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Everything else remained identical, from the A7 chip to the camera.

Yet, Apple wants to differentiate the iPad as much as possible from the iPhone in order to boost its tablet sales. That’s why upgrading the iPad mini to support true multi-tasking is a great differentiating factor.

Usually, Apple unveils its new tablet lineup in a dedicated event in October. But rumor has it that Apple may introduce the new iPads during the iPhone keynote, which should happen on September 9th.