In the era of Internet and social media, greeting cards have become obsolete artefacts. But the delightful act of unwrapping gifts in boxes hasn’t lost its allure, or has it, with the cloud offering more and more stunning surprises?
Let’s take a peek at the six greatest surprises the cloud is ready to offer:
The password paradox
A password is designed to let you in and not the others. But there’s a catch. You can remember easy passwords but they are easier to hack into. Complex passwords provide ample security but they slip away easily from your mind. With more and more apps, accounts and profiles you may end up with several passwords. Eventually, passwords give you more trouble than the security it promises. Resolving this dilemma is not difficult, all you need is a password manager and LastPass readily offers a free service.
LastPass lets you store all your accounts and passwords in one vault, where you can edit, delete, and organize your data. It is free to download, simple to install and starts working in no time. Once you save a website’s user name and password, LastPass can autofill the login and save you the time for typing and recollect the subsequent password. With LastPass you can avail seamless browsing and online shopping experience. A premium version is also available costing $12 annually with a 30-day refund guarantee. LastPass Premium provides unlimited sync over unlimited devices and many more features.
To-do lists revamped
Remember the old notepad you used to carry with you with a long to-do list under each date? Well, that’s passé. Everyone who owns a smartphone knows to what extent a task management app can come handy. But we are all in the hunt for the best task management app. But it is time we ended it.
In 2014, Forbes magazine listed Todoist as the best to-do list app. With its ‘distraction-free design’, Todoist allows you organize and prioritize your tasks, set due dates and share it with others. Todoist supports more than fifteen platforms, which enables you to take your tasks anywhere including mobile devices, web browsers and inboxes. Moreover, it includes scope for sub tasks, sub projects, notifications and recurring dates. Also, you can easily add a due date by just naturally typing using the intuitive dates feature. There are also multiple levels of priority which can be color-coded for easy identification. Todoist is available for free in the app market. Todoist Premium has additional features including location reminders, productivity tracking, calendar synchronization and many more. For Todoist Premium you need to pay $29 each year.
Your digital pocket
All of us have had the moment of head-scratching when we encountered something interesting in the web but just couldn’t read or view it then. There are also instances where we wanted to show an intriguing article to a friend. We would then search endlessly through our history and decide that next time we would just save it as a bookmark. But creating a temporary bookmark just for the sake of saving an interesting link seems like a redundant task. This is where Nate Weiner’s Pocket comes to play.
Pocket is a save-for-later service that lets its users save articles, images, videos and pretty much anything interesting in one place. It is available for all major devices and platforms and supports more than 1500 apps including Flipboard and Twitter. This means you can save directly not only from your browser and email, but also these apps. And the best thing is, you can also view your saved data even when you are offline. If you want more powerful features like personal backup of all the web pages you have saved and results search by relevance and date saved, then Pocket Premium is what you need. It comes in monthly ($4.99 per month) or annual plans ($44.99 per year).
Time in your hands
If there’s one thing everyone has in common, it is time. We all have the same 24 hours a day and once lost, it’s lost forever. Time management is a great challenge for many of us. With all the tempting distractions in the digital world, it is hard to track the time that swiftly flies. To rescue you from these innumerable distractions and save your valuable time for more productive activities, RescueTime has hit the app market.
RescueTime is a time-management app that provides a personal analytics service to show how you spend your time and helps you focus and be more productive. It tracks the time you spend on various applications and websites. RescueTime gives detailed reports on your daily activities along with a weekly email summary providing you a gist of your activities and productivity score. It helps you set goals for the day and also better plans every new week. RescueTime Premium comes with features that block distracting sites, track offline activity and gives you daily highlights and notifications. RescueTime Premium costs $9 per month (monthly plan) or $72 per year (annual plan). You can, however, start with a free trial lasting 14 days.
Somewhere in the cloud
Cloud services are incomplete without cloud storage. With large storage space and sufficient security, cloud storage is quickly replacing storage in personal physical spaces. How many of us keep working on multiple desktops and laptops and constantly forget to bring USB drives with us? Surprisingly enough, this very same forgetfulness was the inspiration behind Drew Houston’s Dropbox.
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that lets you keep your files safe and synced and ready to share. Dropbox empowers you to save any kind of file including photos, videos and music in the cloud. You can sync these files across any device including PC and smartphones and any platform like Android or Windows. Moreover, while working on computers, you can access your files offline too. You can share files and folders with anyone and get real-time updates of any changes made. Dropbox’s cloud storage gives you a secure way to store your files and even provides 30 days file recovery so you never lose them again. You can also automatically upload the photos you take with the camera upload feature. Although the free version Dropbox Basic comes only with 2GB storage space, each referral can give you an additional 500 MB and you can add up to 16 GB. Dropbox Pro is priced $9.99 per month or $99 per year and gives you a 1 TB storage space. Dropbox for Business comes with a 30 days free trial and gives you many plans to choose from. This version of Dropbox gives you unlimited storage space.
Say hello to Trello
Trello is a project management app which lets complex tasks done through a simple interface. It enables you to organize projects of any size. You can upload file attachments, add comments, create checklists, add due dates and labels. Besides, you can also share it with your team. Versions like Trello Gold and Trello Business Class are also available, although not for free. Trello Gold provides custom backgrounds, stickers and emoji and costs $5 per month. Trello Business Class gives a central platform to integrate tools and a secure space and costs $8.33 per month.
On cloud number nine
All the six aforementioned cloud services have a basic version freely available. But the premium versions bring out many more interesting features which make them perfect gifts to take someone by surprise. Nonetheless, always make sure you try out the basic version first and test drive the cloud computing service before buying it or gifting it to someone.
For more information on gifting these services, please send an email to services@suyati.com
Gift these 6 cloud services and make a great impression
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