To infinity, + beyond...
There doesn't seem to be a definitive post from Google about this, but the rose-tinted Lars Fosdal has written a pretty comprehensive guide to Gmail's neat filtering feature. If you have a gmail address that you use, the fact is that you now have (pretty much) an infinite number of email addresses, all going to the same mailbox. If your address is 'emailaddresss@gmail.com' then by putting a '+' after your Google id then anything you want before the '@gmail.com', then you'll be able to get emails to that address - so if I'm signing up to a newsletter, I can use the address 'emailaddress+newsletter-mail@gmail.com' - and my mail will be delivered as normal to my inbox. I can set up filtering in Gmail to make sure that messages to all my different email addresses get to the right place, and instantly, all my clutter is tidied up. Thanks, Gmail!
More ways to take money
Hot on the heels of Square, the mobile credit card reader, Amazon have announced Amazon Local Register, a combination of software and hardware for iOS and Android (as well as Amazon Fire devices) that will allow small businesses to take card payments easily, which means that a raft of mobile traders will now find it easier to keep their businesses running when they're out and about with their market stalls/ mobile coffee vans/ hot dog stands. Amazon's also undercutting Square with an initial flat fee of 1.75% (although this will go up in 2016). Let's see who wins this particular battle for mobile card payment domination.
Yo
I know it's not a new app, but Yo has made it into 'app of the week' this week because it's stepped away from it's single-use 'yo' messaging to something far more flexible. It now plugs into the fabulously automatable IFTTT, and you can get notifications of new videos on YouTube from your favourite channel, or even when your server is down. You can now attach a url to a Yo (Yourl?) and Yo even supports hashtags now (and there's a trending hashtag page too). Find Yo for Android here, and for iOS here.
Not quite Skynet
Twitter has just filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Matt Southern has been through it and found that around 8.5% of Twitter accounts "used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated action". In other words, they're bots. Shall we all take another look at our follower list?
