Snapchat Launches In-App Meditation Experience with Headspace

Summary

* First announced at Snap Partner Summit last month, Snap Minis are a new way for developers to bring bite-sized experiences to Snapchat.

* Snap Minis are miniature experiences that make a big impact. Each Mini can change the way friends interact with each other.

Snapchat announces the launch of their latest feature Snap Minis and the partnership with an in-App meditation experience with Headspace! The newest feature launched today provides Snapchatters with expert resources related to emotional and physical well-being, while offering daily meditations and tools to help Snapchatters check-in with their friends and stay healthy. By putting resources where friends already meet and share, Snap x Headspace Mini will provide a safe space for friends to practice meditation and mindfulness exercises, and use these new tools to send encouraging messages to check in and positively boost friends in need.

During times of stress, connecting with friends and having moments of relaxation and mindfulness, have never been more important -- and by putting resources front and center where friends already meet and share, Snapchat hopes that the Snap Mini X Headspace feature will provide a safe space for friends to practice meditation and mindfulness exercises, and use these new tools to send encouraging messages to positively boost friends in need.

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What are Snap Minis?

Snap Minis are utilities designed to integrate within conversations on Snapchat, so coordinating between friends is faster than ever. 

Other Snap Minis included at launch:

* Let’s Do It (Snap Inc.) -When you and your friends need to make a decision as a group, Let’s Do It helps pick your next move.

* Prediction Master - From Mammoth Media, Prediction Master serves timely questions on everything from the Stock Market to sneaker drops, so Snapchatters can see which of their friends is the true psychic.

* Tembo - Create flashcard decks with friends on Snapchat, to help cram for your next exam.

Snap Minis Value to Partners and Developers

* Reach & Distribution: With Minis, developers get reach & distribution among Snapchat’s audience of over 229 Million daily users. Minis plug directly into the existing Snapchat global audience.

* Friends by default: Minis have close friends by default, so developers can focus on creating new social experiences to help friends create experiences together.

* Easy to build: Developers have limited eng & time resources: Minis are HTML 5, easy to build and work instantly on iOS and Android.

* Developers can apply to create a Snap Mini at https://minis.snapchat.com/

About Snap Inc.

* Snapchat offers brands one of the most effective ways to engage with a large, growing, unique and unduplicated Millennial and Gen Z audience.

* Snapchat has 229 million daily active users, +20% and +39 million YoY.

Social network with Delhi University students now

Move over Facebook, Orkut. Here comes Delhi University's own networking site, Network DU. With over 2,000 registrations in just four weeks, this site is a virtual campus in which you can look for anyone and anything -- from old friends to scholarships and even information on paying guest accommodation.

Started by Honey Arora, a technical expert, Network DU has all the features of other social networking sites and more.

"Our aim is to get DU more connected through this site. In the IITs and IIMs, the alumni really help their juniors in getting internships and job placements. Network DU will do something similar. Besides friends, a student can get in touch with alumni of the university through this portal and seek help in terms of their career," Arora told IANS.

Of the 2,000 people who have registered, 1,500 are at present studying in the university while the rest are alumni. There is, however, no restriction on a non-DU member joining the network.

Arora himself is not an alumni of the university.

"I was a student of Punjab Technical University. But I, along with some others from IIT Delhi and IIM-Bangalore, zeroed in on Delhi University because I think DU is very tech-savvy," said Arora, who owns Sparks Logics, the firm which started Network DU.

With blogs, music, chat and even an online shopping link, the site gives you all that other networking sites have to offer. It also has debates raging on hot topics like "Should ragging be banned in DU?"with two students in Kirori Mal College getting arrested recently for ragging a junior.

The site also has space for classified information like contact addresses of hostels and PG accommodation around the campus. So if you are looking for a place to stay, all you need to do is log in. Besides this, it has information on the institutes in the campus, scholarships and internships.

Although he is happy with the response that the site has been getting, especially since the advertisement has only been through word of mouth, Arora said that he is planning to go to ex-DU bigwigs like Kapil Sibal and convince them to join the network.

"I am planning to go to Kapil Sibal and ask him to join Network DU and spread some good word about the site. DU has produced some of the most well-placed professionals in the country in every field. If someone like Sibal, who is active on Facebook, joins the site it will make others interested too," he said.

"However I will go to him only after we have got a stronger registration number like 5,000," Arora added.

Arora's mission does not stop at DU. He now plans to create similar networks for other universities.

"I am going to Amity University next and create a portal for their students. The officials of the private universities like Amity are very encouraging and eager to help in such initiatives.

"Money is a problem now but I am looking for investors so that I can create such networks for students of major universities of the country and then connect these networks so that the whole student community can come together in a single platform and interact," Arora said.

Agencies

Madoff crambles out to find friends following scam

Bernard Madoff, the longtime Wall Street executive accused of cheating investors around the world out of $50 billion, scrambled to find friends or relatives to guarantee his bond on Tuesday and keep him out of jail.

In Massachusetts, where the disgraced investor long cultivated a loyal group of wealthy individuals, the state's chief securities regulator subpoenaed Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities and Cohmad Securities Corp, a firm that marketed Madoff investment products.

The two firms must hand over the names and addresses of all local residents who let Madoff invest their money by December 29. They must also deliver notes, emails, meeting agendas related to investments made since 2000, William Galvin, the state's Secretary of the Commonwealth, said on Tuesday.

In New York, Madoff, who was arrested last week, has not yet fully met the conditions of his $10 million bond, according to court papers. He must find three co-signers to guarantee the bond.

If he fails to meet all the conditions, prosecutors could seek to have the 70-year-old Madoff jailed, pending trial. A court hearing was set for Wednesday on bail matters after a Tuesday hearing was postponed.

Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, faces up to 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million if convicted.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been accused of missing red flags about Madoff's investment business, is asking its internal watchdog to probe the agency's conduct in the case.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said he was "gravely concerned" by the agency's "apparent multiple failures over at least a decade" to thoroughly investigate allegations or seek formal authority to pursue them.

As more banks, hedge funds and wealthy investors around the world realize they fell victim to a man long respected on Wall Street for the steady returns that his funds produced year after year, their outrage has grown.

LAW SCHOOL LAWSUIT

"The names and sizes of those exposed to Bernard Madoff keep growing and most remarkable of all is the concentration of investments made by funds of hedge funds which promise their clients a diversified portfolio," said Philippe Bonnefoy, chairman of the asset allocation committee at Cedar Partners, an investment adviser.

A fund of hedge funds is a basket of funds selected by the manager to spread around risk.

New York Law School sued Ascot Partners LP, an investment firm, general partner J. Ezra Merkin and auditor BDO Seidman LLP on Tuesday over investments with Madoff.

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co acknowledged its exposure to Madoff after a hedge fund unit invested heavily with him. Tremont Holdings Inc's Rye Investment Management unit lost roughly $3 billion, nearly all of the money the unit managed, people familiar with the matter said.

Madoff is also closely tied to Carl Shapiro, a 95-year-old Boston philanthropist who gave much of his fortune to the city's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the city's Museum of Fine Arts.

Austria's Bank Medici, a closely held bank serving wealthy clients, also said it was affected by Madoff's scheme, but declined to give a total for its losses.

At the same time, prosecutors and regulators asked people who suspect they lost money to Madoff to come forward.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, which is prosecuting the Madoff case, set up a website for investors who may have been victimized. It also posted an FBI hotline number, 212-384-2359, for investors to call.

SIFTING THROUGH THE PAPERS

Investors were asked to gather any documents related to their Madoff investments and to check the website and others set up by the SEC, the trustee of Madoff's brokerage business and the court-appointed receiver in the case.

Lawyers worried that many of the financial statements that Madoff's firm mailed to clients were not accurate, and that it will take months to sift through the papers.

"This is a mess and it will take much longer than normal," said Douglas Hirsch, a partner at law firm Sadis & Goldberg, describing the work facing the trustee appointed to oversee the liquidation of Madoff's firm.

The Securities Investor Protection Corp, a nonprofit organization that provides limited insurance on investors' accounts, was named as trustee on Monday.

Madoff, who was well-known on the charity ball circuit and supported cancer and diabetes research, also gave about $238,200 to political candidates, parties and committees, mostly Democratic, since 1991, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political giving.

U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, received $12,000, while U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, received $10,000 over the years, the Center found.

The impact of Madoff's alleged fraud may be felt most severely among hedge funds. For example, the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fund Index fell 4.15 percent in November, far more than the preliminary 0.7 percent decline reported last week.

Standard & Poor's said it will review public sector entities, such as universities, that invested with Madoff, to see whether their ratings should be cut as a result of their likely investment losses.

Source: Agencies

Are Google SMS Search, your best friends?

Now you can get answers to all of this and more through a simple SMS at the price of your regular SMS* across India.

Cricket scores and Astro updates on SMS brought a smile to a lot of us, only until we saw the bill at the end of the month. And this was after we were also trying to remember multiple input methods. After speaking to many users about their 'sms' information woes ,we at Google ,have come up with a newer version of Google SMS Search.

The product has been reincarnated, with a new number and tons of new features. Now you can SMS your query to 9773300000 at the cost of a regular SMS and get instant answers. Launched nationally, this service is available across all operators on both GSM and CDMA mobile phones.

The list of features available on Google SMS search is given below. What we do want to add is that searching on SMS will be MUCH easier NOW. No longer do you need to remember complicated strings to put before your query, you can search as if you are searching on Google web search – we will do all the hard work to understand your query and give you the best results on SMS. Hope you will enjoy the change!

SMS Search features-
1.Cricket Scores:Simply SMS "cri" or "cricket" or "cricket India" to receive latest cricket scores.
2.Indian Railways:Send your PNR number to get latest status of your PNR (confirmed/RAC/current waitlist status). Or send "trains between mumbai to delhi" to know trains and get further details of train schedule.
3.Stock Quotes:SMS "Company name quote" to receive stock quotes from BSE. e.g. "reliance stock".
4.Horoscope:Simply send your sunsign (e.g. Virgo) to receive your day's horoscope
5.Local Business Search:Do local search on SMS (e.g. categories such as "restaurants indira nagar bangalore" or businesses such as "pizza hut koramangala"). This is available across 34 cities - Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkatta, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Noida,Gurgaon, Faridabad, Vadodara, Surat, Kanpur, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Rajkot, Ernakulam, Cochin, Gaziabad, Bhuwneshwar, Aurangabad, Lucknow, Nashik, Indore, Panaji, Bhopal, Agra, Guntur, Visakhapatnam, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Coimbatore.
6.News:Send "news" or "business news" to receive latest news.
7.Movie Showtimes:Send "movies delhi" or "golmaal returns delhi" and get movie rating and movie showtimes.
8. Flight status: Flight status for Jet, Kingfisher, Indigo & Spicejet. Simply send "9w502", "It 302".
9.Definitions:Send "define " e.g. "define zenith", "define inflation".
10.Weather:e.g. "weather Delhi".
11.Calculator:"1 kilo in pound".
12.Currency Conversion: "5000 inr in usd".
13.Facts:e.g. "GDP of india" or "population of bangalore".

*Normal SMS rates apply and are determined by the service package provided by the mobile operator.

Source: Agencies