The Sky's The Limit

A view of Penang Bridge (13.5 km ), making it the longest bridge in Malaysia as and the fourth-longest in Southeast Asia

Innocent Boy

I am a boy. An innocent boy. I wonder why people can't live together here. I hear voices, whispering, running around frantically.

5 Money Moves Everyone Should Make By Age 30

Millennials, the current generation of 20-somethings perhaps best known for their tech-savvy ways, are growing up. The oldest members of the group are now turning 30, which means they increasingly have adult money issues on their minds. The need for long-term savings accounts, retirement funds, debt payments, mortgage payments, and family-related costs are among the responsibilities weighing them down.

The good news is that the financial services industry wants to help. Eager for younger customers’ business, they have been busy analyzing millennials’ financial challenges and trying to figure out how they can best reach out to them. As a result, a handful of financial services companies recently released money tips for millennials. Here are five of the best ones:

Save like it’s 2009. Savings rates tend to go up during recessions, which is why personal savings rates shot up in 2009. The fear of financial instability appears to motivate people to squirrel more money into the safety of bank accounts rather than squander it on new shoes or a new smartphone. Millennials could use some of that motivation, since many have yet to start padding their bank accounts or saving for retirement.

A recent Wells Fargo Retirement Survey found that 2 in 3 millennials consider themselves “savers,” with men more likely than women to do so. Still, just over half of the group says they haven’t started saving yet — but plan to by age 30. The reason for that lack of saving? Most respondents said they simply didn’t have enough money.

Those who had found a way to start saving tended to have some help from their employers; most of those saving for retirement are using employer-sponsored plans, the survey found. Around half of those saving are putting away between 1 and 5 percent of their income, 31 percent are saving between 6 and 10 percent, and 14 percent are saving more than 10 percent. (Financial advisers generally recommend saving between 10 and 20 percent of your income over your working years, with the goal of replacing 80 percent of your income during retirement.)

Karen Wimbish, director of Retail Retirement at Wells Fargo, urges millennials to get started with saving as soon as possible in order to benefit from compounding interest. Having more money in the bank, she says, can also provide a confidence boost when it comes to achieving long-term goals.

Get over your fear of the market. Given that millennials came of age in the era of Bernie Madoff and the subprime mortgage crisis, it’s no surprise that more than half profess a lack of confidence in the market, according to the Wells Fargo survey. Women are particularly wary, with two-thirds saying they are not confident in the market. The problem with this distrust of the market is that millennials could lose out on the chance to benefit from its long-term growth. After all, millennials saving for retirement have decades to ride out any bumps.

Confront loan stress. Student loans are a huge source of worry for millennials. Most respondents cited it as their biggest financial concern in the Wells Fargo survey. The survey also found that millennials were about twice as likely as boomers to feel overwhelmed by their debt (42 percent versus 22 percent).

Chat about money on dates. Okay, maybe not the first date, but USAA financial planners suggest talking about money, and credit histories in particular, with long-term mates. USAA put out a release urging millennials to ask their partners how much debt they have, as well as get an overview of assets, before exchanging vows. The reason? A bad credit score can derail post-marriage plans, from buying a house to purchasing a new car.

Get a job, not a degree. Obtaining advanced degrees can make sense in a lot of situations, but USAA financial planners also warn against using school as a second-best option when the job market doesn’t work out. Returning to school often means building up more debt, and if the degree isn’t directly related to your future career, it might not pay off in the long run.

Rain Drops Fall From Heaven

Rain drops falling in my head,and never knowing when it will end.Should I run for cover,or let another rain drop fall in my head again?I would love to dance in the rain,and knowing somehow it’ll help erase the pain.

Social Media: the next generation of upstart apps gunning for Facebook

Social Media: the next generation of upstart apps gunning for Facebook

Facebook, the ubiquitous social networking site, is the brightly burning star of Silicon Valley. It has reached an unprecedented scale with 1.1bn users every month, growing faster in Africa, Asia and South America by subsidising mobile access for a new generation of users for whom Facebook is the internet. In established markets, it is aggressively positioning itself as the web's default identity provider on tens of thousands of third-party sites. And now on mobile, its new android super-app Home channels all your mobile content through your Facebook account. Business, it seems, is booming.

Accepted wisdom among consumer internet companies is that most people only use seven apps – if your business wants to be big, it has to be one of them. For 751m people in the world, Facebook is one of those seven apps. Its latest financial results showed revenue up 38%, and nearly a third of its $1.25bn (£0.8m) advertising revenues are now generated by ads on mobiles and tablets. It's a remarkable turnaround in 12 months for a company once almost derailed by the absence of a convincing mobile strategy.

But there are still challenges for Facebook that can't be fixed with algorithms. Most immediately, it has to hold the attention of notoriously fickle internet consumers. Veteran entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell knows this only too well; at 23 he founded the social music network Imeem, which was later acquired and then folded by MySpace.

"There's a lot of instructive lessons from the fall of MySpace, which was over-monetised, did a lot of user-hostile things and was very vulnerable to disruption. It went from the number one site in the world to zero and it's interesting that it happened so quickly. People are fickle and will move if there's something better – and if that wasn't true, we'd all still be using MySpace."

Facebook's surprise $1bn acquisition of photo-sharing app Instagram last April demonstrated its defensive strategy to keep the competition at bay. "The Instagram deal was not about what the company was worth, but what it was worth to Facebook to take it out of competition. And they can't afford to keep doing that," said Caldwell. "The next big thing will be some mobile app built by a guy and a girl in a garage somewhere."

Facebook also faces a more human problem. While its engineering is world-class and its business increasingly robust, it has demonstratedlittle sensibility or empathy for the true human condition, the unpredictable and unique human behaviour that can't be averaged, or aggregated or predicted.

Regular controversies around inappropriate content include two graphic videos of beheadings that Facebook refused to take down for more than seven days, while it defended publishing an unexpurgated video of a woman beating a baby.

Facebook will point out that, like other consumer sites of scale, it has to automate content moderation and rely on users to flag content – yet poor and inconsistent decisions are made by individuals when extreme cases surface in the media.

Facebook's monopoly of our online identities and model of monetising our data has raised the hackles of privacy campaigners from the outset, yet Facebook is at pains to point out that it does not "own" our data. Rather, it has to provide a framework that gives the site permission to handle our material. It is also under such intense scrutiny that real abuses of data are more likely to take place in darker corners of the internet.

Its mantra "move fast and break things" illustrates a certain mentality, a corporate developer culture created in the image of its maker, founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the process seems to ignore the ethical and interpersonal implications of these rapid developments, and its powerful datasets are inadvertently creating far more controversial insights.

Psychologist Dr David Stillwell at the University of Cambridge psychometrics centre has identified ways of concluding a person's sexuality, religion, politics and even IQ from their "likes" on Facebook. "These companies are probably measuring personality and IQ without realising," he said. "The data goes into the black box and it determines which user sees which advert, but it's also quite likely that behind the scenes where no one knows what's happening, this black box is also working out people's IQ, or sexuality, or religion too. There's a big gap between what people in the industry know is possible and what consumers understand."

Nonetheless, there is an increasing consumer awareness about the value of their data and online identity, a resentment that our social transactions are being used as the basis for an advertising business and a concern about the concentration of power in these tech giants. That's fertile ground for building an alternative, argues Caldwell, who says it is becoming clear that large-scale consumer web businesses supported by advertising are largely "a mirage".

"When a company is aggressively focused on growth and revenue targets, they start to do things that aren't favourable to users," he said. "Facebook and Twitter are both backing off from their 'brand new forms of advertising' line and are instead turning into standard advertising businesses selling IAB units. For Facebook that's a large departure from their pre-IPO strategy."

Launched in August 2012, Caldwell's new project App.net is a subscription-based, advertising-free social network. Far from a utopian ideal, he says the principle of a personal cloud of data which can be shared between trusted apps in an ad-free space is an idea that will catch on. It's a different league to Facebook at 100,000 users – many of those brought in through a limited free tier introduced two months ago – but the site is proof that there is appetite for a new, more user-centric model. Facebook's real customer, after all, is the advertiser – not the user.

At the modest scale of App.net, interacting with users is far more manageable, but Caldwell points out that much of the social impact of Facebook won't be understood for many years. "The second and third order of these sites is changing the human experience," he said. "The inventors of television didn't think through what would happen 30 years after they put those tubes together – they were engineers."

SOCIAL MEDIA: THE NEXT GENERATION

PHEED wants to be everything to everybody, but has started with tattooed hipsters and creatives who want one social app to rule them all – video, audio, photo, text and even live broadcast. The format is familiar to anyone who has Instagrammed or Vined their way through recent months, and a few celebrity early adopters have helped boost it to the top of the app charts, ahead of Twitter and Facebook, several times.

INCREDIBOOTH is a pocket version of the inescapable photobooth concept – as seen at every wedding of note this summer. Just as Hipstamatic exploited nostalgia with Polaroid-esque photo filters, Incredibooth relies on our memory of photobooths that allowed four different pictures to be taken in sequence. The next challenge is finding a way to leave your photos in the slot for the next punter.

1SE One second of video doesn't sound much, but it's enough to put you right back in the moment. One Second Everyday gives the user either an ambitious target of remembering to video something every day, or an ingenious way of summarising everything you've shot.The result is an approximation of what you will see when your life flashes before your eyes before death, but in a good way.

KIWI, FOR MAC DESKTOP

One of the most popular apps on App.net, Kiwi is a good gateway drug for the App.net platform. It's Twitter with more characters (256 instead of 140) and no advertising. This is early adopter territory, and you'll need to make new friends or persuade old ones to move over. But it's a beautiful user experience, and you can then explore more on App.net including Climber for video messaging and Photolicious for images.

+Varghese Mathew

Minimalist Beach Home Design

This minimalist home design with the most natural style is the creation of Marcio Kogan who is a Brazilian designer. This house is located in Laranjeiras in the southern zone of Rio de Janeiro. This house has ultra wide openings and lots of wood surfaces and stone walls make the  house design look modern and keep it warm and comfortable. In all there are 6 bedroom all having attached balconies. First floor has the kitchen and maid rooms, living rooms, bar and games room.

NOKIA LUMIA 920

Nokia Lumia 920 is a smartphone developed by Nokia that runs the Windows Phone 8 operating system. It was announced on September 5, 2012, and was first released on November 2, 2012. It has a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Krait CPU and a 114 mm (4.5″) IPS TFT LCD display, as well as a high-sensitivitycapacitive touchscreen that is covered by curved Gorilla Glass. It supports inductive charging (it can be charged by being placed directly onto a charging pad) and is compatible with Qi Inductive Charging; further, it features an 8.7 megapixel PureView camera with optical image stabilization for still images and videos. It comes with 32 GB internal storage, but has no card slot; hence it cannot be expanded with memory cards. Its touchscreen also can be used with the gloves worn by the user.

GENERAL	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 - RM-821, RM-820
	3G Network	HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100 - RM-821, RM-820
	4G Network	LTE 800 / 900 / 1800 / 2100 / 2600 - RM-821
		LTE 700 MHz Class 17 / 1700 / 2100 - RM-820 (AT&T)
	SIM	Micro-SIM
	Announced	2012, September
	Status	Available. Released 2012, November

BODY	Dimensions	130.3 x 70.8 x 10.7 mm, 99 cc (5.13 x 2.79 x 0.42 in)
	Weight	185 g (6.53 oz)

DISPLAY	Type	IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	768 x 1280 pixels, 4.5 inches (~332 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes
	Protection	Corning Gorilla Glass 2
		- PureMotion HD+ ClearBlack display

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes
		- Dolby Headphone sound enhancement

MEMORY	Card slot	No
	Internal	32 GB storage, 1 GB RAM

DATA	GPRS	Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
	EDGE	Up to 236.8 kbps
	Speed	HSDPA, 42.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps; LTE, Cat3, 50 Mbps UL, 100 Mbps DL
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual-band, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v3.1 with A2DP, EDR
	NFC	Yes
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0

CAMERA	Primary	8 MP, 3264 x 2448 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, optical image stabilization, autofocus, dual-LED flash, check quality
	Features	PureView technology, geo-tagging, touch focus
	Video	Yes, 1080p@30fps, video stabilization, check quality
	Secondary	Yes, 1.3 MP, 720p@30fps

FEATURES	OS	Microsoft Windows Phone 8
	Chipset	Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon
	CPU	Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait
	GPU	Adreno 225
	Sensors	Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
	Messaging	SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
	Browser	HTML5
	Radio	No
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support and GLONASS
	Java	No
	Colors	Black, Gray, Red, Yellow, White
		- SNS integration - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic - 7GB free SkyDrive storage - MP3/WAV/eAAC+/WMA player - MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player - Document viewer/editor - Video/photo editor - Voice memo/command/dial - Predictive text input

BATTERY		Non-removable Li-Ion 2000 mAh battery (BP-4GW)
	Stand-by	Up to 400 h (2G) / Up to 400 h (3G)
	Talk time	Up to 17 h (2G) / Up to 10 h (3G)
	Music play	Up to 67 h

MISC	SAR US	1.08 W/kg (head)     0.91 W/kg (body)
	SAR EU	0.70 W/kg (head)
	Price group

TESTS	Display	Contrast ratio: 1065:1 (nominal) / 2.107:1 (sunlight)
	Loudspeaker	Voice 61dB / Noise 64dB / Ring 65dB
	Audio quality	Noise -78.9dB / Crosstalk -75.0dB
	Camera	Photo / Video
	Battery life	Endurance rating 44h

+Varghese Mathew