Are you looking for a reliable heating engineer in Ayrshire? Contact Burnawn Services on 01563 559393 or visit www.burnawnservices.co.uk

With over 15 years experience we employ time-served professionals and have built up a reputation as one of the best in our field. We offer the one of the best services in the terms of quality and pricing so get in touch today by calling 01560 483399.

Billy Bowie is a well established Scottish company based in Ayrshire, providing Tanker Hire, Drain Clearance, Septic Tank Emptying and liquid waste disposal services skills to Utilities, Industry, Government, Transportation and Domestic customers throughout the UK.

Billy Bowie has over 20 years’ experience in liquid waste management and operates a modern 80 strong UK wide fleet of Jet / Vacuum Tankers Articulated and Rigid, Disab Units, Dewatering Units, Gully Motors and High Performance Tankers all of which are available on self drive.

QR codes have been around for some time now and many businesses do not have them yet – are you one of them or are you asking what is a QR code? Below is an image of a QR code for our company Solutions on Demand.

What do you do with the QR code?
Well you can simply use a QR code scanner on modern phones to scan it and visit or read the message that it holds.

Want to try it out?
Visit your app store and download a free QR code scanner. Launch the application and scan the above QR code – it should direct you to the homepage of Solutionsondemand.co.uk

Why have this?
Well just one solution, it’s a perfect marketing tool for business cards! We will leave you to come up with the ideas of what else you can use it for…

Our IT support Ayrshire field has been very busy recently installing new networks and providing IT support and backup solutions to a number of new customers.

One mention is to a local company who supplies plant hire throughout Scotland www.BlackwoodPlantHire.co.uk

Call 01294 218 088 to talk to our handyman client who provides services throughout Ayrshire & East Kilbride. He can take care of Plumbing, Electrical, Gardening, Carpentry, Painting and Decorating – no job is too big or small!

Handyman in ayrshire

Visit The Hub Stewarton – www.thehubstewarton.co.uk

What is it?

Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, Google+ is basically Google’s latest attempt at creating a social network. Google is cannily calling it a project, rather than a product – perhaps to avoid comparison with its less successful social products. Google reckons that current online networks (no names mentioned) simply don’t cut the mustard and that’s why it’s launching its own version. According to Google’s official blog:

“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

“In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

The idea is to topple Facebook from its throne by making every existing Google product socially compatible. The company certainly has a lot to work with, including Picasa, Gmail and Google Maps and information and functions from all of these will be integrated into the Google+ experience so that you don’t have to sign into different services to share your photos and let your mates know what you’re up to.

Each Google+ profile will centre around the Stream, which is essentially the same thing as Facebook’s news feed – where all of your info and updates from your chums are rounded up and constantly updated. The Stream will be joined by four core elements – Circles, Hangouts, Huddle and Sparks – with Google hinting that these are the starting block for future developments.

Google wants to make sharing online more like sharing in real life – different things with different people. For example, you might want to catch up with your pals about your drunken Saturday night out, but you don’t necessarily want your parents in your chat. You can keep your conversations separate by putting your contacts into ‘circles’ such as ‘Work crew’, ‘Uni mates’ and ‘Parents’.

To put your nearest and dearest in neat little online compartments all you have to do is click and drag them into the relevant circle and then they’ll only get the information that is meant for them. If only real life were that simple.

As the name “Hangouts” suggests, this feature is all about hanging out with your buddies, virtually, of course. You can choose specific friends, or circles, to invite for a face-to-face video chat and anyone in the Hangout can invite others to join as well. According to Google’s demo: “Until teleportation arrives, it’s the next best thing”. We’re not sure about that – it’s basically just video calling.

The difference, it seems, is that you can include more than two people in each chat – something that not all video calling services currently offer.

You know when you’re trying to arrange a night out by having several different text conversations with a number of friends? If so, you’ll know how long-winded and confusing it can become. The idea behind Huddle is that you can turn all these exchanges into one big group chat to save you time.

This certainly has the potential to be a very useful addition to the Google+ mobile offering – we just hope that your friends are slightly more decisive about their plans than the tedious bunch of individuals on the demo page.

Most social networks, Facebook included, have run into trouble over privacy concerns at some point or another, so what is Google+ doing to address it? You’ll be able to alter your visibility settings so that only your name and photo will appear online to people that aren’t in your network. However, if you’re in a circle on a friend’s public profile, then your picture will appear on there (but clicking on it wouldn’t go anyway if your privacy settings are on). You’ll be able to assign different levels of visibility to different aspects of your profile. You can also choose whether your profile is indexed by search engines and, as with Facebook, you’ll be able to block people.

Google+ won’t ever disclose the names of your circles (apparently, even to the people that are in them), although people in circles may be able to see some of the others members of the the circle that they’re in – presumably depending on who posts any kind of feedback.

If you decide you don’t like it, then you’ll be able to downgrade your account, which will delete your
profile and remove any posts, circles and other Google+ content while still enabling access to Gmail and other Google services.

Let the battle commence with Facebook…

Although this merge could literally mean a great threat for Google’s Gtalk (imagine Facebook extending its services from only text to text and voice, that would be huge for the social media environment), it seems that another huge bidder tries to get its claws on Skype. Microsoft, as we mentioned, are set to buy Skype for an incredible amount of money – that’s $8.5 billion! We are talking here about over 3 times more money than eBay paid in 2005 and this could be a great step forward for both Skype and Microsoft.

Why this move, you might probably ask yourself? The answer is quite simple: guys at Microsoft want a larger piece of Internet searchers with their search engine – Bing – and what other way to start this other than acquiring the most popular online voice service available nowadays? With tens of millions of users worldwide, this could be a huge hit for the Internet industry and could shake some big players like Google.

You can visit their website at www.greenhartdriveways.co.uk and you can obtain a free quotation by simply filling out the quotation form on the website.