Azendoo Allows you to Collaborate On Tasks And Documents Between Multiple Services

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Azendoo Allows you to Collaborate On Tasks And Documents Between Multiple Services

Azendoo is not yet another task manager — it’s the glue that brings together all the services that you already use. The French startup took another approach to task and document management by focusing on third-party integrations.

Let’s say you use Evernote for your to-do lists. Your coworker can assign a task to you in Azendoo, and the service will seamlessly add it to your Evernote account. Whenever you mark the task as done in Evernote, Azendoo will reflect the change on its platform.

In other words, Azendoo is able to turbocharge Evernote with task collaboration. The startup recently won an Evernote Platform Award.

Similarly, Google Drive, Box and Dropbox users can collaborate on the same document — Azendoo will sync the file between these services.

“Azendoo is much more than a shared to-do list,” co-founder and CEO Grégory Lefort told me in a phone interview. “We provide a cross-platform service that syncs all your data.”

Currently, most people use multiple to-do list platforms, such as personal apps like Evernote and Wunderlist, professional services like Asana and Producteev, and even emails and post-it notes. At the very beginning, Azendoo competed directly with existing to-do apps. But it wasn’t very effective because users already had a Box account, an Evernote account, etc.

The team quickly realized that it was more interesting to become the central puzzle piece that holds everything together and removes pain points rather than to convince potential users that they should switch to another service to store their to-do data and documents.

Azendoo currently integrates with Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google and Skype. The startup now has 240,000 users, including people working for Nike and Coca-Cola, people studying at Stanford and more. Some integrations aren’t as effective as the Evernote one, but the company will improve existing integrations to make it work better.

If an integration is not seamless and thorough, it’s not good enough. “We don’t want to create a service for other tech startups. We want people working in marketing, support, sales, education and non-profit to use Azendoo,” Lefort said. Right now, it’s a pretty nifty product with a lot of potential.

Original Post by Techcrunch

Twitter Announces Its First Commerce Product — A “Buy” Button On Mobile

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Twitter Announces Its First Commerce Product — A “Buy” Button On Mobile

After months of reports and rumors, Twitter is announcing its first commerce product.

The company first signaled its interest in this area last year, when it hired former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard to lead its commerce team. Then it started recruiting other commerce specialists, and Recode got its hands on mock-ups of a Buy Now button. Over the summer, people started spotting those buttons in the wild.

So Twitter is officially announcing that Buy button today — in a blog post, the company says it will be visible to “a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time).” As a result, users will actually be able to make purchases directly within tweets. If you see something you want, you hit “buy”, bring up a little information, enter your payment and shipping information while still Twitter (it’s encrypted and stored for future purchases), and complete the transaction “in just a few taps.”

And even though the test is starting out on mobile, a company spokesperson said it will be moving onto desktop soon as well.

Twitter says it’s partnering with a number of companies to make the Buy Now button happen, starting social shopping company Fancy, digital content seller Gumroad, fan commerce company Musictoday, and payments company Stripe. The initial sellers include musicians (Demi Lovato, Eminem, Pharrell), nonprofits (Donors Choose, Glide, RED), and retailers (Burberry, The Home Depot).

Gumroad founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia told me his team has been talking to Twitter about possible commerce features for more than a year: “It was more like a when, not if, question for them.” Where Gumroad is involved in these initial purchases, Lavingia said it’s usually working with musicians (though he wants to go broader), with Stripe handling the actual payment processing. When you make the purchase, the interface is supposedly “native on the Twitter client”, so you might not realize that anyone was involved except Twitter — until you get your receipt.

Lavingia added that creating a purchase experience that’s “really simple and really fast has always been super important for us” and that he hopes that similar experiences will “over time become the norm because of things like Twitter.”

For its part, Twitter describes this as “an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun,” so you can probably expect its commerce initiatives to expand. (We’ve also heard that the company was working on something closer to a marketplace separate from the main river of content.)

This seems like a pretty natural avenue for expansion — not only is it a potential source of revenue on its own, but if Twitter successfully drives sales, that could encourage businesses to become more active on the service and to advertise more.

Facebook, meanwhile, is building out a commerce platform of its own.

Original Post by Techcrunch

App Analytics Startup Adjust Raises $7.6 Million Series C

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App Analytics Startup Adjust Raises $7.6 Million Series C

Well, what do we have here? A European series C round. Berlin-headquartered app analytics startup Adjust (if we can still call the company a startup) has raised a $7.6 million further round of funding from ACTIVE Venture Partners, and existing investors Target Partners, Iris Capital and Capnamic Ventures. Formerly known as Adeven, Adjust raised a $4.3 million round in June last year, adding to an earlier European-style “seven-figure” series A round of funding.

Adjust, which, along with Berlin, has offices in San Francisco and Istanbul, provides an analytics platform to help mobile marketers understand where their “most valuable” users come from, and other info, in a bid to offer ways to “re-engage” those users inside or outside their app — i.e. through various advertising and marketing initiatives and channels — and measure that additional return of investment (ROI).

The company is an official Facebook and Twitter Mobile Measurement Partner and integrates with 300 or so ad networks and partners globally. It boasts the likes of Universal Music, Viacom, Yelp, Scopely, Kingsoft, DeNA, BuzzFeed Inc. and Deutsche Telekom, as clients.

So, what’s an app analytics startup to do with $7.6 million in fresh series C funding? Adjust says it’ll use the new cash to boost expansion in the U.S., China and Japan, and for further product development. Noteworthy, it says 40 per cent of total revenue is now coming from Asia and the U.S., and that the company will use some of the additional funding to open new regional offices. To that end, it has hired Shawn Bonham, who previously for mobile analytics company Upsight, to lead Asian expansion as Adust’s new Managing Director Japan and South East Asia.

Original Post by Techcrunch

Little Zion Church of Christ in Norwalk, United Kingdom was struck by lightning

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Little Zion Church of Christ in Norwalk, United Kingdom was struck by lightning

A Norwalk church was damaged after officials say it was struck by lightning during Saturday’s storm.

It happened at the Little Zion Church of Christ of the Apostolic Faith on Martin Luther King Drive.

The lightning set fire to the steeple.

Firefighters say the damage is mainly to the roof and shingles of the church….

Original Post by Connecticut News 12

Nigeria: RCCG Empowers FCT Youths With Cooking Skills

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Nigeria: RCCG Empowers FCT Youths With Cooking Skills

The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) FCT 1 has concluded plans to empower some youths in the FCT with cooking skills that would enable them become self-employed in the lucrative hospitality industry.

Pastor Godwin Idoje of the Offspring of David Parish of the church disclosed this today while speaking with our reporter on the church’s readiness for the third edition of the church’s annual youths cooking competition billed for September 20 in Abuja.

“This competition was born out of concern based on the trends of events noticed among our youths. We believe that the ability to cook well will contribute to the well-being of the family while making them self-reliant also,” he said.

Idoje noted that it was worrisome that many youths in this modern age especially young women don’t know how to cook.

He said the competition was also borne out of a need to ensure that upon marriage, families are assured of properly cooked and balanced meals, adding that this year’s competition will be held in collaboration with Chef Academy and Kyom NOM electronics.

“More so, good meals at home would prevent people from eating bad or contaminated meals outside and children will be well nourished and that’s why we started this programme,” Idoje said.

Also speaking at the event, Daniel Okiodike of Dechef’s Kitchen said that irrespective of gender, youths seeking employment but have very good culinary skills could be self-employed.

“Food is very important to human existence and it is something we cannot do without; so you must know how to cook. Once you know how to cook very good delicacies, you’ll see that you can even turn it into a very good business and be self employed,” he said.

A three-time winner of a cooking award himself, Okiodike said culinary skills were a form of youth empowerment.

He advised Nigerian youths to see cooking as a lucrative business and shouldn’t be constrained to doing it just for pleasure.

Original Post by All Africa

Ukrainian President: Russian Troops Deployed in Eastern Ukraine

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Ukrainian President: Russian Troops Deployed in Eastern Ukraine

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, declared that Russian troops have been deployed in Eastern Ukraine. The statement comes as new photos released by NATO show artillery, vehicles, and troops moving in and around eastern Ukraine. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, declared that Russian troops have been deployed in Eastern Ukraine. The statement comes as new photos released by NATO show artillery, vehicles, and troops moving in and around eastern Ukraine.

NATO officials stated convoys of artillery and troops can be seen moving into position in a formation that is professional and organized, pointing to evidence that the force is Russian military and not just pro-Russian separatists.

In addition, ten Russian soldiers were captured by Ukrainian forces last Monday, after entering eastern Ukraine. The detained men add to the growing body of evidence of direct Russian involvement, yet Russia has continued to deny that its military has any presence in Ukraine.

As to the evidence of NATO satellite photos, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, claimed that the photos were “from computer games,” as reported by NBC news.

In addition, an unnamed U.S. official cited by multiple news outlets has claimed that 1,000 Russian troops recently entered southern Ukraine to fight alongside pro-Russian separatists. Other reports continue to surface of tanks belonging to Russia captured on video in Eastern Ukraine, and confessions from Russian soldiers as to why they were in Ukraine.

Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government stated that key towns in southern Ukraine were captured by Russian forces, sending the Ukrainian forces into full retreat, reports the Washington Post. President Obama, addressing the recent Russian involvement said, “Russia is responsible for the violence in eastern Ukraine…Russia has deliberately and repeatedly violated sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”

Original Post by febc

Farage: ‘Stand up for Judeo-Christian values’

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Farage: ‘Stand up for Judeo-Christian values’

Nigel Farage has described Britain as a Judeo-Christian country and stressed that we need to “start standing up for our values”.

The UKIP leader was interviewed by Fox News presenter Sean Hannity in the wake of the anti-terror proposals announced by the Prime Minister on Monday.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has also spoken out, saying that we are a “Christian nation” and arguing that we need to “champion” our Christian values.
Division

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Pickles responded to the persecution of Christians in the middle-east this summer as well as the rise of anti-Semitic attacks and protests.

He said: “Aggressive secularists would advocate the suppression of religion in the public sphere. Yet this would only perpetuate the message of intolerance towards others.”

Mr Pickles went on to say: “At heart, we are a Christian nation”. He highlighted that historically, Britain is a country which upholds justice and tolerance towards others.
Salt and light

He said: “Our defence of freedom, the rule of law and the evolution of our democracy have all grown from the seedbed of faith.”

The Communities Secretary added: “For centuries, these ideals have been the salt and light of the nation.”

Pickles also argued that a “cursory glance at European history shows the worst atrocities can begin with turning a blind eye to seemingly small acts of discrimination”.
Freedoms

He said that freedom of speech and freedom of religion go “hand in hand”.

Earlier this year, Pickles made waves after saying that militant atheists should “get over” Britain being a “Christian nation”.

After Fox News showed a video of Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary, Farage said that the rise of radical individuals in the UK was due to a decline in traditional values.

Referring to the rise of extremism in the UK, the UKIP leader added: “A lot of this is our own fault,” and said: “We have been too weak” in defending our Christian values.

Original Post by christian

Brian McLaren: ‘We’ve entered a new era of Bible reading’

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Brian McLaren: ‘We’ve entered a new era of Bible reading’

We’ve moved into a new era of approaching the Bible, controversial Christian author and speaker Brian McLaren says. It’s an era that could see Christians abandoning the idea that there is one ‘right’ way of interpreting Scripture – an era he calls Bible 3.0.

Bible 3.0, as McLaren characterises it, is an approach that sees the Bible less as inerrant and more as being “in conversation with everything and everyone”. It is an approach to Scripture that has been made necessary, if not inevitable, by the unprecedented access readers of the Bible have to a broad range of readings and interpretations of the Bible through the internet. Whereas in the past, Christians might have had to go to another denomination’s church or part of the world to hear a different take on Scripture, today the internet allows us to immediately access a myriad of different interpretations of the same text.

“Now everybody can hear how everybody else is interpreting the Bible,” he says. And the result is that we can no longer assume that all smart, good people interpret it the way our pastor, fellowship or denomination does. “Mastering one way of dealing with the Bible is not going to carry the weight it used to. We’re going to have to deal with the fact that this book is contested.”

Throughout history, he says, the Bible has been contested – by biology, history, psychology, genetics and other intellectual movements. What is different about this era, that is key to Bible 3.0, is the fact that everyone can now be involved in challenging not just what the Bible says, but the way we have traditionally understood what it says. “It’s not just that it’s being challenged and contested, it’s that everybody knows it is being challenged and contested.”

Bible 1.0

In his opening talk at the festival, Greenbelt regular McLaren described Bible 1.0 in terms of the medieval Catholic approach to Scripture, when most Christians were illiterate and had never held a Bible, much less read one. “Bible 1.0 was read and controlled by the religious elite,” he says, and used at times to entrench or exert authority. Bible 1.0 relied on inerrant leaders, the Church elite, to interpret Scripture and explain to ordinary Christians how they should understand the portions of it they had heard.

Bible 2.0

In Bible 2.0, the emphasis shifted from religious leaders to the Bible itself. Situating this era of biblical understanding in the Protestant reformation and the Christian world since then, McLaren says that, “Reading the Bible became a way to challenge the power of those religious leaders,” and that the Bible itself was viewed as inerrant.

In most evangelical and fundamentalist churches today, Bible 2.0 is very much still in force and, as a result, he says we have “started sorting ourselves based on how a certain set of scholars interpreted the Bible.” This is most obvious in the fact that, depending on which Bible school or theological seminary a pastor goes to, there will be certain scholars that one simply could not quote. “There still is a control over the Bible’s interpretation,” he says, even if we have unprecedented access to Scripture itself.

Bible 3.0

The very fact that so many people are now aware of how many different interpretations there are of single passages or entire books of the Bible is helping to move us into the era of Bible 3.0. Under Bible 3.0, he says, it doesn’t matter that the Bible is inerrant, because so many us derive completely different meanings from the same inspired, inerrant texts.

McLaren doesn’t see the world of Bible 3.0 as a threat to Christianity or to respect and reverence for the Bible, though. While he acknowledges that some people will simply go to the Bible for encouraging quotes, without looking for context, broader or deeper meaning, he is confident that Bible 3.0, with its “emerging, collective intelligence” about the Bible, will not mean giving up the idea of inspiration, just “an openness to inspiration coming to you in fresh and different ways.”

He is not blind to the concerns of conservative evangelicals, however. “Bible 1.0 didn’t give up to Bible 2.0 without a fight,” he says. “And it’s very difficult for Bible 2.0 to imagine a world of Bible 3.0.” He remains, however, optimistic. “If we are ready, we are going to discover the Bible as better, deeper and richer than before.”

Original Post by Christian today

Why do we prefer Independence over Interdependence? It’s making us all sad.

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Why do we prefer Independence over Interdependence? It’s making us all sad.

A recent study of more than 5,000 people lifted the lid on the state of the UK’s relationships and found that one in ten people have no close friends and one in five rarely or never felt loved in the two weeks before they were surveyed. The Way We Are Now report published by Relate is one of the largest studies of its kind.

We don’t have to settle for a life of loneliness, and we don’t have to let those in our lives settle for one either. That is because God designed us for connection with Him and with each other. In John 13:34 Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

We can choose to build our bridge towards people and we can notice when they build theirs towards us. That will mean relinquishing any desire to be totally independent.

That can be a challenge for many of us who are used to being self-sufficient. In our Western society independence is something that is prized and encouraged and it is what many of us seek to achieve. We get a job to pay our way, we live on our own, we do our own cleaning, accounts, washing, shopping, DIY and cooking (even if that is only warming something in the microwave). We take that same independent behaviour into our relationships and we’re keen not to be a burden to anyone. In the survey I did for my book Inside Out, 43 per cent of people said they would rather sort out their problems on their own than ask for help.

But I am not sure that is how God made us to function. Of course, there will be people who prefer their own company (23 per cent from the survey) but even the introverts among us could do with others in our lives whom we can care for and know and who can know and care for us. There are proven psychological benefits from having at least one or two close relationships in our lives.

Instead of independence it is much healthier to live interdependently. When we are interdependent we are prepared to ask people for help and to help people when they need us. We open ourselves up to others and allow others to open themselves up to us. We walk through life together rather than on our own. We build bridges to each other’s islands. We learn from each other, we encourage each other, we support each other, we care for each other, we have fun together, we build memories together and we help each other to grow. We realise we are stronger and better as two or more than we are on our own.

I love how in the book of Romans in the New Testament Paul reminds us to love, honour, be devoted to, accept, greet and live in harmony with one another. We are met to interact with each other and be interdependent.

Interdependence isn’t the same as dependence. Dependence is when we have to have someone in our lives whatever the cost. It is when we need other people to function and to feel ourselves. Just like independence, it isn’t a healthy way of living. Other people will never be able to meet all our needs or desires and expecting them to do so will only leave us disappointed. The more we cling to others and demand that they love us the more likely we are to lose their respect and our connection with them.

Connection is an amazing and precious thing. It is given freely and taken freely. It cannot be forced, demanded or manufactured. And we cannot expect our connections to just happen and to endure. We have to be prepared to make deposits in our relationships. That means giving of our time, putting in the effort, giving of ourselves and also being generous with our money and possessions. It means sharing our most precious commodities with others.

We can use our time, effort and money to build bridges or we can use them to build a bigger and stronger fortress on our island. Which will it be?

Original Post by Christian today

The Communion that converts and feeds: Sara Miles and the city

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The Communion that converts and feeds: Sara Miles and the city

Cities are “sexier and more beautiful than Eden”, according to Sara Miles, who founded a hugely successful feeding scheme for the poor in her city, San Francisco. Miles, whose own conversion followed wandering into a San Francisco city church and taking communion, founded The Food Pantry in 2000 as an extension of that experience.

“The food pantry was explicitly modelled on what I had experienced in the Eucharist,” she says, “so it’s not a social service programme. We don’t ask people for ID or to prove anything, because Jesus welcomes everyone.” The Food Pantry feeds 400 families with food provided by local food banks and run mostly by volunteers, mostly from the city’s Mission District, an area known for its cultural, racial and economic diversity.

Miles talks about the group of volunteers that has formed around The Food Pantry based at St Gregory of Nyssa, the church where she dramatically met God when she was 46 years old, as being a ‘Eucharistic Community’. “They are almost all people who came to get food and still get food, but now help out,” she says. “They see St Gregory’s as their place, and they run it.”

Having had a profound supernatural experience of God during her first, almost accidental Communion (detailed in her book, Take This Bread), Miles sees providing food to the poor as more than just “doing something ‘social servicey’,” and her sense of those involved with The Food Pantry being a “covenanted community” is expressed in the centrality of the altar at St Gregory’s. “That altar is the centre of everything,” she says. “We have communion on it, we have coffee hour on it. On Fridays we transform it into this gigantic free farmers market.”

The situation of St Gregory’s and The Food Pantry in the heart of a city have been far from incidental to Miles’ own faith. “One of the things is in san Francisco which was also a huge gift to me, is that nobody goes to church who doesn’t want to,” she says. “Nobody goes to church because their parents do and it’s just what you do. It’s so not done that if you go to church you actually probably mean it on some level.” Miles says that in a secular culture like San Francisco’s there is not much room for ‘going through the motions’ and that going to church is actually “countercultural”.

And while Miles’ background as an atheistic journalist means that many of her friends initially found her conversion odd, others, she says, knew that she was, at some level, looking for God. “People think it’s sort of odd, you know, a little kinky,” she says. “But I also think people are frequently hungry. And we’re living in a time where it’s not as if the secular project is wildly successful. Some people have made me their ‘chaplain’.”

Against this mixed backdrop of seekers and ‘covenanted’ volunteer-beneficiaries surrounding The Food Pantry and St Gregory’s, it is easier to understand Miles when she says, “Paradise is a garden but Heaven is a city,” as she did at Greenbelt festival in August. Talking about her experience of “the Spirit just whipping through the city” one Ash Wednesday (the central story of her latest book, City of God), Miles said that the city “is so apparently impure it proclaims a love vaster than we are used to.”

“Living in a city and being part of the flow of that life is to see that God is bigger and that we are not making him in our own image,” Miles told a packed venue at Greenbelt. “The blessing, as all cities keep showing us, has been let loose. God has left the building.”

Years after her conversion, after founding her Eucharistic community among the misfits and hungry of her city, Miles discovered that Gregory of Nyssa, whose name adorned her church, had written, in a way, of the connection between food and faith. “Gregory says that the way that we are most like God is in our desire: that God desires us and we desire God,” she says. “And that desire, that hunger, is what connects us to God. It’s beautiful.”

Beautiful, perhaps, as the opportunities God presents us in a city.

Original Post by Christian today

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