Mark Zuckerberg wants us to run a mile a day in 2016, but he's doing it wrong

It's a commendable goal for anyone who doesn't run and wants to get a little healthier: Run 365 miles in one year.

That is what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is challenging his billion-plus users to do in 2016. "This is a lot of running, but it's not a crazy amount," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "It's a mile a day, and at a moderate pace it's less than 10 minutes of running per day."

He's right in one respect: A mile a day is not a crazy amount, and you'd be surprised how quickly you can get used to it and build up your mileage. (Personally, I started running by training for my first 5K in 2010, when a mile seemed like a long distance; two years later, I ran my first marathon).

But he's wrong in another important respect: A "less than" 10-minute mile is nowhere near what a beginner would call a "moderate pace." It's quite fast, even for many experienced runners.

If you're going into this challenge expecting to run anything less than a 12 or 13-minute mile, you're not only going to be sorely disappointed, you're also going to be extremely sore, out of breath and unlikely to keep it up for a year.

As any seasoned runner will tell you: The first mile always sucks, so take it easy if you can.

There's yet more wrongness in the photo that Zuckerberg posted of himself running in Delhi last year with a couple of fellow Facebookers. We're not just talking about the fact they're all fine physical specimens — perhaps too fine to encourage the beginner runner that anyone can do this.

Nor are we talking about the fact they're all holding their smartphones rather than wearing them on armbands or in fanny packs. (Someone's going to be guaranteed a cracked screen running like that.)

No, we're talking about what is quite clearly a heel strike in Zuckerberg's running form. This is a fancy term for landing on your heel instead of the ball of your foot, and was thought in the 1970s to be preferable because it gave you a longer stride.

Since then, heel striking has been fingered in a large number of running injuries because it sends a dangerously large jolt up through your skeleton that can damage bones and joints over time. See for example this landmark study [PDF] from Zuckerberg's alma mater, Harvard, which found forefoot runners get way fewer injuries.

Zuckerberg has started a Facebook group dedicated to the 365-mile challenge called A Year of Running, so hopefully he'll introduce more tips and nuance as the year goes on. But here's what we'd advise: If you're a beginner, start out really slow — so slow that it almost feels like cheating. Accept that your body is going to take some time to adjust to running, but also that just about anyone can and should do it — the health rewards from even a moderate amount of running make it one of the most efficient exercises around.

And you don't need fancy shoes, you just need proper forefoot running form, which you can practice by imagining how you would run uphill. (If you tried landing on your heels, you'd fall over.)

For more information and a tremendous dose of inspiration, read the excellent Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. And stay safe out there.

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The 10 Chrome extensions you need most

On its own, Chrome is a pretty fantastic browser, but extensions increase its potential exponentially.

So, what are extensions, exactly? Essentially, they're small programs that add extra functionality to your web browser. For Chrome, there are thousands of available extensions which perform a huge variety of functions — everything from extensions that automatically find shopping coupons, to extensions that make your computer run faster. A visit to the Chrome Web Store Extensions page can be overwhelming, so we're going to simplify things for you.

SEE ALSO: 8 climate change apps every tech-savvy advocate needs to download

For Chrome newbies, consider this your extensions starter pack. If you're a Chrome power user, you'll no doubt be familiar with some of these, but you might learn about some you've never heard of before. Once you try any one of these extensions, you won't know how you lived without them.

1. The Great Suspender

If you install but one extension on this list, make it The Great Suspender. As great as Chrome is, it's a bit of a memory hog, which contributes to slower performance and poor battery life for laptop users. This magical extension pauses unused tabs after a user-specified amount of time, saving precious RAM.

If you have a computer with, say, 4GB of RAM or less, this extension will change — and by "change" we mean "speed up" — your life.

2. LastPass

The problem with passwords is that you have too many of them. For that reason, you probably make them all the same or similar, which is easier to remember, but less secure. LastPasssolves both of these problems. It generates and remembers nearly impossible-to-crack passwords for each site that requires a login, all managed through one master password you choose.

LastPass had a security vulnerability earlier this summer (user passwords are encrypted, though, so those were safe), but until a truly more secure method of authentication is determined (think biometrics), it's still the best solution.

3. Giphy

Like emoji, GIFs have become an essential part of the Internet zeitgeist, but it can be a pain to find the exact one to impress all your friends with your vast internet skills. Giphy makes that a lot simpler by integrating a simple Gif search tool right in your browser.

4. Feedly

With the death of Google Reader in 2013, Feedly quickly rose to take up Reader's mantle. For news junkies and those who need to keep up with a particular subject area, Feedly is essential. It compiles all your favorite sources into categorized feeds and a small icon at the bottom right of each page lets you add a feed to Feedly. It's RSS, but better.

5. Grammarly

Grammarly is spell check, but better. It offers contextual spell check and grammar advice, so if you're the sort to get your "its" and "it's" mixed up (definitely not this reporter nope no way), this extension will save you scores of embarrassment. If you're willing to shell out for a premium Grammarly membership, the extension will even suggest better vocab and check for plagiarism.

6. UBlock Origin

Sometimes you just need to turn down the noise. UBlock Origin isn't the most popular ad blocking extension, but it doesn't require much memory to run and lets users specify which sites they want ads blocked on and which they don't. The big power button icon you see when you click on the extension stops ad blocking on the site you're viewing, but automatically turns it back on when you go to a different site.

7. HTTPS Everywhere

For those who value security — and if you don't, you should — HTTPS Everywhere is a must-install. This Extension, created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, switches every HTTP website to load over a more secure HTTPS connection.

8. Honey

Do you ever get the sinking suspicion you're not getting the best deals shopping online?Honey fixes that. When you go to check out at an online shop, it automatically searches for coupon codes and applies them, saving you precious cash. 

9. Save to Pocket

This is one of many "save for later" services, but Pocket is one of the most popular and highly recommended of them all. If you see a great article you won't have time to read when you find it, a click on the Pocket icon saves it for later. It's cross-platform, and you can even tag things you save, which is excellent for the hyper-organized.

10. Milennials to Snake People

Because it's not all about "productivity" — aren't you tired of the seemingly endless stream of baseless hot takes about millennials? Millenials to Snake People is the extension you need and deserve. As the title suggests, this extension changes any usage of "millennials" into "snake people." But wait! There's more: it also changes "millennial generation" to "snake person generation," "Generation Y" to "Serpent Society" and "digital natives" into "Parseltounges."

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Twitter’s Fiscal 2015: Up, Flat, And Down

Twitter did not have a lovely 2015. The world-famous social company saw its revenue rise, its usage flatten, and its share price fall.

The company failed to change the arc of its own narrative during the year: Strong financial performance, but continued failure to grow its user base, the latter of which the market appears to weight more strongly. It brought in a new CEO to turn things around, but so far it still hasn’t found a way to really do a better job of building its audience.

The result? Share price declines that have put Twitter near all-time lows as the year concludes.

Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price - 1 Year | FindTheCompany

The numbers speak for themselves. After its IPO, Twitter shot to more than $60 per share. The company then spent time in the $30 range, the $40 range, and the $50 range. This year, Twitter has seen its value fall further, bouncing around the low $20 range.

For employees who have options priced at a far higher levels, the declines are not theoretical. They are material. And there is a rot that can set in when it comes to falling share prices — the public equivalent of a down round, in some ways — as it becomes more difficult to hire, retain key talent, and keep morale up.

So, what’s happened this year? Let’s take a look.

Twitter’s financial performance

Key to Twitter’s success story — and it has been a success story — is its financial performance. The company has posted strong revenue growth, beaten expectations, and impressively monetized its user base. To its former critics that decried it as a fad, or financial impossibility, Twitter can drop the following revenue figures and saunter away:

• First quarter, 2015: $436 million, up 74 percent, compared to the year-ago period.
• Second quarter, 2015: $502 million, up 61 percent, compared to the year-ago period.
• Third quarter, 2015: $569 million, up 58 percent, compared to the year-ago period.

If you were curious as to how to monetize social services, Twitter has blazed a trail worth studying. The company’s monetary performance is a credit to its management team.

However, there is a cap on Twitter’s future financial performance. While it has done yeoman’s work extracting more value from its existing user base, the firm is still dependent on user growth. That, in the long-term, is necessary to generate new revenue. The argument is simple: If Twitter can’t grow its cadre of active users, it cannot eventually further grow its revenue.

You can only squeeze a rag so hard, in other words.

And, where Twitter has been precisely brilliant regarding its improving top line, it has seen difficulty convincing the masses that using Twitter is what they should do.

Twitter’s stalling user growth

In the second quarter this year, new CEO Jack Dorsey pretty much summed up a significant challenge for the company in a single statement: “Our Q2 results show good progress in monetization, but we are not satisfied with our growth in audience.”

This statement serves as a microcosm for the company. Its financials looked good, but its number logged-in users did not grow as much as the company had hoped. The company’s monthly active user growth had essentially stalled — and for a company whose performance is dependent on its audience, that demonstrated a massive problem for investors.

Twitter MAU Over Time | SoftwareInsider

Still, that doesn’t mean Twitter’s total user base isn’t growing. There’s a whole swath of users that may simply be logged out — which is difficult to track, and something Twitter is working on. The company is also actively experimenting with new products in order to increase engagement among its users. But the best advertising targeting Twitter can do is on users that have built an interest graph, which involves signing up, logging in and following others to get a sense of what the user is looking for.

“One other thing to note, we also are monetizing logged-out users across the network,” COO Adam Bain said on the last earnings call. “This is the first time that we’ve been doing that. It’s going to come in handy as we also begin to run a pilot here in Q4 for on-Twitter logged-out monetization. So we’re going to take some of that learnings and apply it back on Twitter logged-out [advertising] products.”

But while Twitter’s financial performance continues to beat expectations, slowing logged-in audience growth serves as a limitation for the upside for the company. There are a couple of ways to increase its bottom line — it can improve its advertising products and come out with new ones, or acquire its way into new venues of advertising, for example. But in the end, if it’s going to really explode to new heights and impress investors, it needs to re-ignite its user growth as well.

In sum, while Twitter’s revenue has grown, and its user growth has stalled, its shares have fallen.

It’s up for you to decide if the investing classes are being too hard on Twitter. The firm still has a strong cash position, and is worth billions and billions of dollars. The proper question, perhaps, is how Twitter will manage to bolster its larger consumer appeal, without losing the interest of its key content creators.

In the end, Twitter is still a bit of a confusing company. It continues to improve and develop new advertising products, and bought its way into a brand-new kind of video format in the case of Periscope. That’s something that should impress investors, but Twitter’s finding that challenging — particularly because these kinds of bets are, in theory, long-term ones.

And for Twitter to be a long-term safe bet, it has to be firing on all cylinders, which includes finding ways to do a better job of building, measuring, and monetizing its audience.

A representative for Twitter directed us to the company’s 2015 Q3 earnings call when we requested comment.

Google, Tesla And Automated Car Startups: Are We Ready For The Next Big Shift ?

The whole of civilization and evolution of humankind can be summed up as simply getting from one place to another. An average American male spends 699 hours per year of their life driving. That is a total of 48,390 hours, if we consider 70 years as an average life, being on the road, stuck in traffic jams and generally being non-productive. Companies like Google and Tesla are keen to come up with a solution to this problem. Autonomous cars will not only save time but also save lives as nearly 1.37 million people fall victim to road accidents every year. However, as it often is with new technology, people are skeptical more so because their lives are literally at the hands of a computer. Despite, companies are betting on the future of self-driving cars and electric cars.

Traditional car manufacturers in the last few years have focussed heavily on safety and making cars more intelligent, so that the passengers inside are comparatively safer. New age cars are fitted with traction control, automated braking systems, and some of the newer Tesla models can even handle themselves without any human intervention on highways and easily navigable places. The near future promises to bring us fully autonomous cars courtesy efforts from companies like Google and Uber. But, the future for autonomous cars is not as simple as companies like Google are presenting automated cars, not as a personal vehicle, but as a node in the grid of an intelligent and connected transportation system. Where does this place the traditional car manufacturers? And are we even ready for such a sea change? With questions like these, a buzz in our minds, we delve deeper into the new and exciting world of automated cars!

SELF DRIVEN AND ELECTRIC CAR INDUSTRY WITNESSING A REVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT

As the infographic above states, we are in the stage of passive autonomous driving. Heading into 2016, the industry has no clear leader. Google has been working on their cars from 2012 and rumours suggest that they’re ready to branch off the Google Cars Team from the experimental Google X Labs to a full blown company under the Alphabet umbrella. Back in September, Google hired John Krafcik, an auto-industry veteran, as the CEO of the cars project and till now the autonomous cars have logged nearly a million miles (1.6 million km) on open public roads.

Reports suggest that next year we will see Google release these cars in and around Austin, Texas and San Francisco in controlled environments like college campuses, military bases or corporate office parks. Google is looking to position itself as a viable alternative to Uber and Lyft by offering consumers the experience of driverless cars without the hassles of owning one.

Not to be undone, Uber, the startup that is now evaluated at close to $50 billion, is spending some of its investor money in coming up with a viable competitor to Google Cars. While the future of companies like Uber and Lyft hangs in the balance, the traditional automobile manufacturers are stepping up their game as well! Companies like Ford and GM motors are aggressively testing out their own version of automated driving as well. Some like Tesla have already beaten Google to the punch, although their automated cars still require humans to be at the helm should any sort of tricky situation arises. Morgan Stanley analyst, Adam Jonas predicts that Tesla can triple their revenue by 2029 if they follow Google’s footsteps and venture into the on-demand mobility market.

THE ONE MAN WONDER: CHALLENGING GOOGLE AND TESLA

While all the big companies have spent millions of dollars to get their cars on a road, one man by the name of George Hotz has built a car that can drive itself in his own backyard. The genius hacker has managed to turn his run of the mill Honda Acura into an autonomous vehicle. What’s even more impressive, is that Hotz plans to make these kits available for car manufacturers and even car owners at only $1000/unit. 

Most of the current automakers that have implemented autonomous driving to an extent have used the Mobileye technology. Mobile eye has seen dramatic increases in their revenue with their last quarter racking up $71 million, a 104% increase YoY. However, Hotz believes they’re technologically inferior as he says

“They’re a company that’s behind the times, and they have not caught up.”

Hotz and his off the shelf solution may be the new entrant that will kick-start the growth of consumer grade autonomous cars. Being dependent on machine learning and end-to-end deep network algorithms, this implementation of autonomous learning can learn how a real human drive and is better at handling situations than a piece of software that is hard-coded for certain circumstances.

ARE WE READY FOR ROBOT DRIVERS?

Overall, if we have a look at the data, in the three developed countries, there seems to be a universally positive opinion towards driverless cars. There is still a vast number of skeptics who think that letting a computer make such split-second life and death decisions is letting the AI run a little too far. However, with that being said, what most drivers are worried about is the laws and legislatures as nearly 50% across all 3 markets consider that they will still have to pay when their Automated vehicle is involved in a crash!

Some companies are thus taking matters into their own hands and companies like Volvo with their liability promise is reassuring consumers and easing their way into this new market. While the pros of such a society would be manifold, we can divide them into a few main categories.

GAIN IN PRODUCTIVITY

Harping back to the point we made at the beginning of this article, driving is a time-consuming chore, one we could do very well without! If we look at the data for the US alone, we see that the gains in productivity for a year can be to the tune of $422 billion.

REDUCTION IN COSTS

One of the major hassles of owning a car comes from the fact that whenever something unforeseen happens to it, the owner has to shell out a ton of money. In the future, however, Google and Uber will see for us, no one owns a vehicle. This reduces traffic jams and precious biofuel. Also, having the car back to a central hub at the end of the day could mean that companies could perform daily checks for software updates and safety measures which can never be done with personal vehicles. The reduction in the cost of travel/miles comes down from $0.75 to $0.15 a whopping 80% decrease.

BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Paraphrasing Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport

With automated cars running the roads and private ownerships of cars being reduced to a minority, we can expect drastically lower fuel consumptions. With lesser number of trips required, traffic jams will be a thing of the past as, and the rate of accidents will decrease as well.

MANY STILL REMAIN SKEPTIC

As this infographic above clearly demonstrates, our society as a whole is still not ready for human less cars. With more than 76%  saying they would never trust a robot to take care of their children. In fact, we see some of the earliest legislature and legal hurdles that these cars and their companies will have to face are already coming up. Driverless cars have been all but banned by the California DMV, and severe limitations are placed on cars with some degree of automation as to where and how they can use their autonomous capabilities. We can only hope that with positive campaigns from companies like Google and Tesla a change in public opinion comes around!

FINAL THOUGHTS

With a huge number of potential industries benefitting from the move to autonomous cars, one can say that driverless cars are all but an eventuality. As the cost of living and fuel prices increase around the world, the expenses of owning a car and the insurance and related hassles will outweigh the convenience. The success of companies like Uber and Lyft have proven that there is a growing shift in the mindset of daily commuters and with the advent of robotised cars, this trend will continue to grow in momentum.

With help from the Government regarding laws and legislatures as promised by US Secretary of Transportation, the dream of driverless cars all over the world by 2025 seems to be getting more and more in touch with reality. This is certainly an exciting space to look forward to as the duel between consumer electronic companies like Google and traditional car manufacturers for the top spot in autonomous cars heats up in the near future!

China Is Making Domain Name History

Short domains have always been valuable, but if you’re a company today and want to own a short domain name, your price just became a lot higher. And I mean a lot.

There is a market unfolding that very few know about, and tens of millions of dollars are trading hands monthly. Over the last two years, China has become the largest buyer of domain names, resulting in what is likely the biggest story in domain-name investing since the Internet began.

Chinese investors (and other domain prospectors) have been buying up numeric and short-character dot coms faster than Adele can say “Hello.”

George Kirikos, a well-known follower of ICANN policy, tweeted on November 14th: “136 of the 676 2-letter .com domain names are now owned by Chinese registrants, breaking the 20% barrier (20.1% to be exact).”

The same week, TheDomains.com published an article noting Verisign just reported that 3.2 million new dot-com domains were registered in the previous three weeks — more than the entire second quarter.

What was once a market where domain name owners would hold and wait for a company to approach them is now quickly becoming a market with mass liquidity — the missing piece of the puzzle for the last decade.

Three-letter dot coms consisting of traditionally lower-quality letters often sold in the $10,000 to $15,000 range. Now they are catching upwards of $50,000, and more.

Western investors are still trying to catch up and understand the Chinese market. Letters of lower use in English — q, z and j for example — are considered premium in China. Vowels, on the other hand, are not premium. Any domain name with a vowel or a v is considered less valuable.

Ron Jackson, the publisher behind DNJournal, regularly reports sales like Give.com, Amber.com and Classic.com. However, the sales reports today are now almost nothing but short domains. In fact, 9 of the Top 10 year-to-date sales (all over $500,000) are less than three characters.

Even the preferred way to communicate with buyers has changed. Most transactions are agreed upon in China through QQ — the largest instant messaging system in China, but rarely known in North America. Tracy Fogarty of eNaming explains; “Most offers are sent through QQ. Maybe 1 in 10 people use email, even fewer use the phone.”

This explosion has made a lot of people extremely wealthy, but it’s not who you may think. Many industry veterans missed the boat — trying to understand how to analyze what’s attractive to Chinese buyers; others doubt the long-term value of this market, and many are doubling down for what they see ahead. All of the elements for a Hollywood story are happening right now.

One great site that tracks market activity is Chaomi.cc, showing sales history in charts (much like forex, gold or other commodities). As Hong Kong domain-name investor Franky Tong explained, “chao mi“ literally means fried rice, but also means domain speculation. This shows how Western investors may have their hands full analyzing data.

Over the last year, some incredible new milestones in domain-name registrations have been achieved.

• All five-number dot coms are now registered.
• All five-number dot nets are now registered.
• All six-number dot coms are now registered.
• All seven-number dot coms beginning with three eights, ending with three eights or having almost any repeatable pattern are now registered.
• All four-letter .orgs with premium Chinese letters are now registered.

Even with eight-number dot-com domains, of which there are one hundred million, it’s getting hard to find any of the popular patterns that don’t include a zero or four.

Is This A Fad Or History In The Making?

China is a vastly different culture than America, especially when it comes to wealth. Chinese citizens are raised learning strictly about the importance of savings and building wealth versus our consumer-based society.

Wealthy people love to invest and Chinese investors are hungry for portable wealth. The rise of Bitcoin was something quickly linked to China markets, but it couldn’t hold once Chinese regulators put a stop to the acceptance of deposits in Chinese Yuan. Bitcoin also has (and still has) liquidity issues for many owners outside of North America.

Domain names are different. First, the rarity of domain names is perfect and measurable since there are only so many two-letter dot coms, only so many three-letter dot coms, so many four-numbers with an 8, etc.

In fact, what seems like millions of domain names can easily be broken down into premium domain names that have a far lower supply than Bitcoin ever did.

This new demand for domain names is not an easy thing to understand, but some of those who do have acquired almost generational wealth over the past year. Others have made hundreds of thousands.

Short domain names are commodities now. Fads come and go, and this certainly does not seem like a fad in my opinion. Will there be ups and downs? Sure. But we are likely witnessing history in the making — a new history for an established marketplace that never saw this coming.

Maybe you should have ponied up and paid for that domain name after all.

Sundar Pichai Says Mumbai Central to Get Free Wi-Fi by January; 100 Stations by 2016-End

At the Google for India event in New Delhi on Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked about the company's plans for supporting the Digital India initiative. Among the announcements, one of the highlights was the confirmation that Google will be working with Indian Railways to bring free Wi-Fi to 400 train stations. This had already been announced, but the specific deadlines had not been given. Today, Pichai said that 100 stations will get Wi-Fi by the end of 2016, which 10 million people will use every day. The project will first go live in Mumbai Central in January 2016, he added.

Google is tying up with PSU RailTel to implement the Wi-Fi facilities on stations, using RailTel's fibre optic network backbone that connects the stations themselves.

Aside from this, Pichai also announced that Google is exploring ways to bring Project Loon to India. The idea behind the program is to beam an Internet signal via hot air balloons. It's worth pointing out that the Telecom Minister raised concerns about the idea - in a written response to the Rajya Sabha, Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote, "The proposed frequency band to be used in the Loon Project of Google is being used for cellular operations in India and it will lead to interference with cellular transmissions."

The Google CEO also mentioned a partnership with the Tata Trust - the two are rolling out bicycles to 1,000 villages across three states, to teach women about the Internet. The bicycles will be equipped with Internet connected devices, and the people riding them will be trained by Google to educate women about how they can benefit from the Internet.

Pichai, who was born in India, has earlier blogged about how he believes the Internet can impact India, and says that despite the huge growth that has taken place in terms of the reach of the Internet, there are still a billion people who are completely offline, and this must be addressed. The railways Wi-Fi program will bring many of these people online, Pichai believes, and on the blog, he has also promised that the connections will be fast - "many times faster than what most people in India have access to today" - so it can be used for anything from downloading a book or a game for your journey, watching a video, or researching your destination.

Download the Gadgets 360 app for Android and iOS to stay up to date with the latest tech news, product reviews, and exclusive deals on the popular mobiles.

Google Updates “Now On Tap” To Let You Track Packages, Flights And Find Related Articles

Google is expanding the capabilities of its clever mobile feature, “Google Now on Tap,” which offers additional information about what you’re looking at within a mobile application without having to exit and then perform a Google search. Before, the feature supported the ability to find restaurants and points of interest, learn more about songs or artists in music apps, get movie details and reviews, and find out more about celebs and other notable people being mentioned. Today, Google says that “Now on Tap” will also pull up flight status information, package tracking details, and surface related news articles.

The company is also introducing new sharing features and support for more languages.

In case you’re unfamiliar, “Now on Tap” was introduced earlier this year as one of the flagship features in the latest version of Android, aka Android Marshmallow. The idea with the feature is to extend Google’s search strategy on mobile by making it easier to use Google’s service without having to leave your current application.

Instead, by holding down the Home button on their device, mobile users are able to get more contextual information about what’s on their screen. That means if you were playing a song in Spotify, for example, you could press and hold the button to get more info about that song. You could also do a voice query, and ask questions like, “who is the lead singer?”

With the update, “Now on Tap” can also identify things like flight numbers and package tracking info. In practice, that will allow you to quickly check the status of a flight – like, say, right in your text messaging application where a friend just sent you their flight details – by pressing the Home button on your device.

You can also press the button while in an order confirmation email to track your package’s progress – handy, especially during this busy shopping season.

Another interesting addition, and one that stands out as something that’s going a bit further than offering “context” alone is the new “related articles” function. In fact, this is almost more like an alternative to searching Google for a given topic than just a way to learn more about what you’re currently viewing. Instead, when reading an article, you can press and hold your Home button to see a list of related articles appear on the same subject. You can then navigate to a new article with just a tap.

Plus, there’s now a new share icon that will allow you to share what’s on your screen without having to exit your application.

Google says this and the other features will roll out “over the coming days.” In other words, if you’re not yet seeing these things now, you will soon.

Also worth noting: “Now on Tap” has expanded beyond English to include support for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Korean, the company says, with more languages planned for the future.

While “Now on Tap” is an interesting glimpse at the Google Search’s mobile future, unfortunately, the majority of users don’t have access to Android’s latest OS update, or “Now on Tap,” at this time. According to Google’s own data, Android Marshmallow is only installed on 0.5% of Android devices at present.

Microsoft will release Continuum feature for Remote Desktop Universal app on Windows 10 smartphones

When Microsoft announced Windows 10 for smartphones, Continuum was one of the most talked about features among technology enthusiasts. Microsoft has released three Windows 10-powered smartphones till now. However, only Microsoft’s own apps supported the Continuum feature. Slowly, third-party developers started utilising the feature into their apps.

Now, Microsoft is adding Continuum support for its Remote Desktop app for Windows 10 smartphones. This news came from a moderator at Microsoft Community forums where he said, “We’ve heard a lot of buzz around being able to connect to a remote desktop from Continuum for phone. We are excited to share that the Remote Desktop Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app will be released very soon in Technical Preview.”

If you’re not aware, Continuum is a feature that lets you convert smartphone apps into full-fledged desktop apps. Continuum is activated when you connect a compatible smartphone to a monitor through an adaptor via a microUSB port. When this adaptor is used, Windows 10 Universal apps can expand from mobile layout to desktop-compatible layout. Moreover, keyboard and mice can be used in Continuum mode.

Continuum could be a feature that could resurrect Windows 10 back into the smartphone race, but it needs to be implemented by more and more developers in their apps. If that happens, you don’t need to carry a laptop everywhere as your smartphone can behave like a PC, at least for some important tasks on the go. What do you think about this feature?