Slightly over a month later, the designers have second thoughts (or third thoughts). Now, the navigation is moved back to the left.

THEN: Navigation on Top

NOW: Back To The Left

Google Shifted Navigation On Its Search Results Page (Again) originally appeared on GreyReview.com on December 14, 2012.

Nevertheless, the hashtag helps P1 management to get an unvarnished sense of customers’ frustrations and take steps to respond to the complaints. Painful in the short run, but useful in the long run.

This Hashtag Is Quite Depressing To Follow originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 30, 2012.

Each with competencies in a specific product spaces. But they are aggressively moving into each other product spaces:

Google
Current product leadership: Search, online advertising
Moving into: Smart devices, apps ecosystem, social networking, cloud computing

Apple
Current product leadership: Apps ecosystem, smart devices, online media distribution
Moving into: media streaming, social networking, mobile advertising

Amazon
Current product leadership: E-commerce
Moving into: E-books, media streaming, cloud computing

Facebook
Current product leadership: Social networking
Moving into: Search, media streaming, e-commerce, online advertising

These unceasing movements are occurring partly because of the high degree of relatedness of today’s digital technologies. In the ever-expanding internet universe, synergistic convergence is the disruptive force.

Four Giants Of The Internet Age originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 30, 2012.

The new iOS game is the Grand Winner of the PONG Indie Developer Challenge, the Game & Guide reports:

The $50,000 grand prize winner of the Pong Indie Developer Challenge, Pong World is a reimagined take on the pop culture classic and the first-ever official new PONG game for smartphones and tablet devices. In the game, players choose one of many Pong paddles and battle against opponents on various themed boards, experiencing the game in either classic mode or all-new gameplay modes including Blitz and Hotseat.

Return Of The 40 Years Old Videogame: Pong World By Atari originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 30, 2012.

Rich Moore, the director of Disney’s latest animated flick, Wreck-It Ralph, gets on Quora to answer some interesting questions about the movies. From his answers, we get to learn how his team managed to get licenses for all video-games characters appearing in the movie, the meaning of story watchdog, and his advices for aspiring film makers. I’m sure Director Moore will share more interesting insights on Quora in the coming days.

In the old days, only reporters got the opportunity to ask movie directors questions and the reporters shared the answers on mass media i.e. newspaper and magazines. Thanks to Quora (and other social media tools), ordinary mortals can now get unvarnished perspectives directly from the sources.

When Quora was launched, it became quickly known as the go-to site to discover interesting inside stories of Silicon Valley startups. The Q&A site has since extended its reach to cover a wide range of topics like food, music, sports, and travel (among others). People get to learn and understand many things on the site. For this, Quora must not die!

Questions Asked by Quorans, Answered by Director Rich Moore

Read Quote of Rich Moore’s answer to Wreck-It Ralph (2012 movie): How did Disney get all the intellectual property licenses for all the video game characters used in Wreck-It-Ralph? on Quora

Read Quote of Rich Moore’s answer to Wreck-It Ralph (2012 movie): What did Steven Markowski do as the “Story Watchdog” for Wreck-It Ralph? on Quora

Read Quote of Rich Moore’s answer to Breaking into Hollywood: What is good advice for teenagers today who want to make and direct movies? on Quora

Read Quote of Rich Moore’s answer to Wreck-It Ralph (2012 movie): Who designed the ending credits/titles in Wreck-It-Ralph? on Quora

Read Quote of Rich Moore’s answer to Wreck-It Ralph (2012 movie): What are some of the (less obvious) video game references in Wreck-It Ralph? on Quora

Wreck-It Ralph Director Shares Behind The Scene Tidbits On Quora originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 29, 2012.

In the totally revamped Explore page, a user can find collections like What’s Good Nearby, Suggested Users, and Top Picks. Top Picks, for example, lists food recommendations and the list is based on the user’s current location. Using your GPS, the app can also guess which restaurant you are at and show you what others have eaten, liked and commented. A StumbleUpon-sort button on Burpple would be nice to aid serendipitous discovery.

Top Picks Collection on Burpple

Burpple has created some nifty app interface designs and good designs define its personality. And its community seems to reciprocate by posting highly attractive food photos. There are no filters (yet) but the app can auto-post food postings from your Instagram account.

It is a pleasant experience to open up the app each day and browse through the many beautiful food photos posted by the Burpple community. For me, discovering and learning new dishes from around the world is the best use case for the app.

Seven months old after launch, the Burpple app now has over 150,000 moments posted from over 3,300 cities in 115 countries (see infographic below). Top cities include Bangkok, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta, Melbourne, San Francisco, and Tokyo. Dinners made up 40% of the total food moments on Burpple.

Burpple is based in Singapore. It was founded by Elisha Ong, Dixon Chan, and Daniel Hum and they have officially launched the app on May 8, 2012. The privately funded startup now has a team of six.

Latest Stats

Burpple App Growth: Over 150,000 Food Moments In More Than 3,300 Cities originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 23, 2012.

A year ago today, South Korean startup, VCNC released open beta of its couple app called Between. Since its launch, the couple app has been growing aggressively.

In July 2012, the app reached the 1 million downloads mark. Back then, it has 460,000 monthly active users with users exchanging a total of 4.5 million messages with one another. As of today, the Between have surpassed 700,000 MAUs, according to founder / CEO Jaeuk Park. Daily, users exchange a whopping 12 million to 13 million messages and posted 150,000 to 200,000 photos.

Over the course of a year, the total number of messages shared on Betweeen (so far) has reached 1.8 billion. And the total number of photos shared is 40 million. Impressive growth stats from this amazing app for couples.

Couples Shared 1.8 Billion Messages, 40 Million Photos On Between App originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 23, 2012.

Another Southeast Asian nation, Philippines is the world’s most emotional society, ahead of El Salvador, Bahrain, Oman, Columbia, and United States.

Survey respondents were asked questions like ‘Did you feel well-rested last yesterday?’ ‘Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?’ and ‘Did you smile of laugh a lot yesterday?’

On the survey, Businessweek reports:

Not many Singaporeans answered “yes” to those negative questions. But not many answered “yes” to the questions measuring happiness: Had they smiled yesterday? Learned something interesting? Felt respected or well-rested? Only 36 percent of Singaporeans responded affirmatively to either the positive or the negative questions… one reason Singaporeans are so dour is their lack of satisfaction at work. According to Gallup’s research, only 2 percent of the country’s workers feel engaged by their jobs. The global average is 11 percent.

According to Jon Clifton of Gallup, “If you measure Singapore by the traditional indicators, they look like one of the best-run countries in the world. But if you look at everything that makes life worth living, they’re not doing so well.”

O’ Emotional People, Where Art Thou?

By the way, Kristen Stewart is a popular stony-faced actress.

Image credits: Marina Bay waterfront.

What Do Singaporeans and Kristen Stewart Have In Common? Emotionless originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 21, 2012.

Below is the six months trend of followers growth for @NajibRazak account on Twitter:

Twitter Followers Growth of @NajibRazak

Over the past two years or so, the Malaysian Prime Minister (and his social media team) have been actively leveraging Twitter and Facebook to earn goodwill among Malaysians. He has also hosted several face-to-face meetups with his fans from both social networks. The earned goodwill could be pivotal in the upcoming Malaysian General Election for the Prime Minister’s coalition government.

Graph: Twittercounter

Malaysia’s Most Popular Twitter User Is Prime Minister @NajibRazak originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 20, 2012.

It is now almost a year since the release of version 2.0 and high time for another major upgrade. The production of the new Path 3.0 is undoubtedly already goes full steam ahead. Nevertheless, I hope the upcoming iteration comes with variants of these features:

• Private Sharing: You can post moments for your friends & family on Path to see. Or you can choose to keep postings for your eyes only. There is no way to privately share specific photo with another person on Path. Maybe the company does not see the point of adding another privacy control within an already personal network. But even within an extended family network on Path, the ability to share some moments with only my wife is pretty handy.
• More Automation, Please: As a smart journal, it would be nice if Path allows me to enter my daily schedule i.e. where I’ll be and when I’ll be there. At each preset time during the day, the app activates the GPS to check if I’m already at the pre-defined location. If yes, Path app checks into the location without my intervention. Other than manual input, the app can also access Events on Facebook and Calender on Google.
• Voice: Currently, Path users can post text, photo, and video. Why not voice? Not critical, but it is still nice to have. I can imagine seeing voice posting beautifully display on Path as audio spectrum à la SoundCloud.
• Reliving Past Moments: Over the past two years, I’ve posted close to three thousand moments on Path. However, it is no easy task to revisit your old moments. Its new iPad app helps but only in a limited sense. In landscape mode, the app compiles daily moments into a single page. Maybe something like Remember This? on SnapJoy is a good start and is especially useful to browse post moments. The time spent using the app can be increased with such feature.
• Personal Analytic: Path can help me to understand more about my life. I use Path to ‘record’ my daily activities. To create more value, Path should crunch my data to extract some interesting insights about my lifestyle. Interesting stats include frequently visited places (based on check-ins), persons you’re with the most, total photos posted, total hours spent watching movies, etc.

Path is already a beautifully designed product. The above-mentioned features can make Path even more useful for its 3 million users and catalyze yet another growth spurt.

Path 3.0: My Wish List originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 15, 2012.

As of end of Quarter 2 2012, Facebook exceeds 200 million users in Asia. There are now 204.9 million Facebook users in Asia, which is roughly 27% of Facebook’s non-US/Canada user base.

Facebook opened its door to everyone worldwide on September 26 2006. In Asia, Facebook took 49 months to reach the 100 million users mark. With its unabating phenomenal popularity worldwide, the social networking giant took just 20 months to add another 100 million Asian users.

However, Facebook users growth in Asia has been slowing since the beginning of 2011, from its peak of 21% in Q4 2010. In second quarter of 2012, its Asian user base grew by 5.5%.

Asian Hot Spots for Facebook

India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam are still Facebook’s growth hot spots in Asia.

In February 2012, India surpassed Indonesia to become the top Facebook nation in Asia. Since 2009, Facebook uptake in India has been growing at double-digit quarterly growth rates. But its growth of 8.6% in the last quarter marked the first time in more than 3 years that India registered a single-digit growth rate. With 121 million Internet users in India, Facebook penetration rate in the world’s most populated country is 41%.

The other Top 10 Asian nations are also experiencing Facebook users growth deceleration. Only two nations in the Top 10 grew at double-digit pace in Quarter 2 2012, which are Japan and Vietnam. Japan continues its strong quarter-on-quarter growth and is very likely to overtake both Malaysia and Taiwan by early next year. Roughly 10% of 101 million Internet users in Japan are Facebook users.

Vietnam registered the highest growth in Quarter 2 2012 at 55%. There are now over 5 million Facebook users in Vietnam and Facebook penetration is 18%. This may be a sign of a more Facebook-friendlier stance by the Vietnamese government.

Among the top 10 Facebook nations in Asia, Malaysia’s growth is the lowest at 0.1%. It seems Facebook in Malaysia has hit the saturation level at 71% penetration rate (as per total Internet users of 17.7 million). Taiwan is poised to clinch the No. 5 spot from Malaysia.

Image credits: Boats

In Asia, Facebook Exceeds 200 Million Users But Growth Deceleration Continues originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 1, 2012.