ProAll, a telecom value-added services (VAS) company of India, has entered into a partnership with Atom Technologies, an m-commerce (mobile commerce) solutions provider, for deploying the latter’s mobile payments platform for its Dial N Sing service.

The Dial N Sing service is for professional singers, aspiring singers or even bathroom singers. Dial N Sing subscribers have to dial a unique number to sing along a karaoke track for unlimited number of times, record their song with studio effects and listen to the recording instantly. They can also download their recorded songs from the website www.dialnsing.com.

ProAll will deploy Atom’s IVR solution, mobile application and net banking solutions for customers of Dial N Sing, who can choose from various options of making payments through their mobile phones.

The company claims that the service ensures security of personal details of customers, such as credit card and bank information, while they make payments for the Dial N Sing service.

Elaborating on the tie-up, Kiran Kamtikar, managing director, ProAll, said, “Dial N Sing, therefore, brings recording studio at everyone’s doorstep as now, anyone can record a song in their own voices without any fears or hassle and from the privacy of their homes. Additionally, this facility can also be used to send a song as a gift for the loved ones or friends on special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and festivals.”

“Atom’s single interface for all payment solutions and its stringent risk management practices will make this product even more user-friendly and easy to use for our customers,” Kamtikar added.

Tablets hold great possibility for the use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other such Office Suites, and Microsoft needs to be ready for it, a senior Microsoft executive said.

In an interview to a website, Microsoft’s Office division president, Kurt DelBene, said, “I think it’s open as to whether we get to a point where people do long, rich editing on mobile devices.

So far, Microsoft has enjoyed a mostly dominant status in the office productivity market. It faced challenges in the form of OpenOffice or other alternatives such as Google Docs, but survived.

The company is yet to produce a tablet; while Apple’s iWork for example, which was released some time back, followed by the launch of iCloud, is set to take on Microsoft’s Office and Google Docs as well.

To some extent Android stands a better chance of capturing the market space related to office productivity software. While the standard has been set by Microsoft, the competition from Google Docs and iWork has been gathering momentum of late, and things can soon get dangerous for Microsoft.

Although the company has also showed Office on Windows 8 tablets, the interface remains typically old style – point and click. The Apple product, iWork, remains touch optimized, which is in tune with the times.

The only positive for Microsoft has been the availability of Office on Windows Phone 7 &#151 a key feature of the platform. Microsoft’s OneNote is another positive which is increasingly being used by more and more users for taking notes. Apple’s iWork for iPad sets users back by $10, but once they have it on the iPad they can download it free on their iPhones.

Right now, iWork is great only for creating basic documents. Those who have been using ‘Documents To Go’ on Android, must have noticed that new Android devices come armed with QuickOffice Viewer App which supports Google Docs and Dropbox as well.

Google is working on a Messaging application similar to that of the BlackBerry Messenger(BBM) offered by Research In Motion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Google Inc, whose Android software is the most popular operating system on smartphones, has also recently worked on a messaging application,” the report said.

Recently Apple has also come out with iMessage service, which is almost identical to the BBM.

BBM has been one of the cornerstones behind RIM’s success, the producers of Blackberry phones.

No other details were given in the report. Google currently relies on third party messaging apps like Whatsapp, Liveprofile and Kik. The objective is to keep users on a specific mobile OS and keep them loyal to the brand.

RIM currently has over 55 million BBM users and Apple, when iOS 5 is officially released in the fall, will have millions of users too.

The Microsoft has updated the mobile version of its Bing search engine for iOS devices, which means the Apple users would now be able to search for the right apps for their needs. Searching for the right apps has always been a problem for the smartphone generation, and the Bing App for iOS users intends to do just that. There are close to 500,000 apps in the App Store now, therefore it’s easy for the right apps to get lost in the crowd.

The announcement was made by Microsoft in a blog post. The users will either be able to search by the name of app or by category such as news apps or top iPhone apps.

The blog post says, “Auto app discovery is a unique feature created by Bing. The Bing search engine will surface apps in the context of normal web queries. For example, Thor 3D, Facebook and Hotels in Seattle are some of the queries for which Bing automatically finds the right apps.”

The Bing team also adds, “If an App is not installed on your phone, when you click on the download link Bing takes you to download the app from the iTunes App Store. If the App is already installed and the developer has enabled the launch functionality, then it will launch automatically.”

To check the apps, users need to go to m.bing.com in iPhone’s web Browser or they can alternatively download the Bing app for mobile. There two ways to search &#151 one may be a general search term, which will include app search results as well, or the users can simply search for apps only.

Those developers, whose apps support the Bing functionality, can be launched from within the web app itself, and there are 50 such apps in the market now. Rest of the apps are expected to add this functionality with time.

Since quite some time we all have been hearing a lot about augmented reality and how it can overlay virtual objects over real life objects. Camgun, a newly launched application on Android, takes gaming to a whole new level with incorporation of augmented reality in the best possible way.

One plays by tapping the gun icon in the upper left corner – it will appear on the screen in the same manner as a first person shooter. Then, tap the screen to fire, or tap the crosshairs icon to sight the gun. Press the camera icon to take a photo of the shot. This App is simple which adds to the addiction of just cycling through the weapons, listening to the racking, and shooting whoever is near by.

The look and feel of the Camgun application is a bit more realistic than the existing games all thanks to the added augmented reality kick in the game. Uses need to shoot the opponent and then take a screenshot of the same and boast about it on the internet through Facebook integration that this application has. The game gives the option of choosing from five totally different weapons to kill the opponent, including the Star Wars’ light saber too. Users can adjust the effect of the kill by tweaking the settings of the application to get a more realistic kills.

Munsell, the creator of this application, calls this application as more of a camera application rather than a game. But, with its integrated GPS and Geo tagging capabilities, it gives a whole new meaning to social gaming and would be fun to play as the developers are planning to add more effect and weapons to the application soon.

The Camgun application is available in both paid and free variants. If you do not wish to be annoyed by distracting ads during the kill time, you will have to pay a one time price of Rs 63 to get a paid version of the application. The application is available for Android v 1.5 and above but there are separate versions, one for Android V1.5 and 1.6 and the other one for Android V 2.0 and above.