Pursuit of APPiness:  Coinbase Merchant, BriefMe and OneShot

[The app world is very noisy! There are a bunch of apps being developed everyday and we carry a weekly App Fridays column to review the best of what is coming from India but even these are pretty early stage. This new series will feature impressive apps, from around the world that are stable and have impressed us by their use case, UI or UX. Check out bunch of apps featured on Pursuit of APPiness]

Coinbase Merchant: is a Bitcoin client for merchants. Coinbase has one of the most beautiful and intuitive Bitcoin app for consumers on iOS and Android in the US. With this week’s Pursuit of APPiness we wanted to spotlight their merchant app. Coinbase’s merchant app is the reason why billion dollar companies started to accept bitcoin as a payment. For example, Microsoft, Dell, Overstock, Wordpress accept bitcoin because of coinbase integration. The app has done good for the world of bitcoin and there are users who swear by it. The app also lets merchants track orders in their Coinbase account online and generates accounting reports for their bookkeeping.

Coinbase Merchant makes it easy for retailers to accept bitcoin at their location. Merchants have to connect their Coinbase account in order to start accepting bitcoin payments. ‘This app does not allow sending or buying of bitcoin, so it is safe to distribute the app to employees who will not have the ability to withdraw funds from the account.’ To send, request, buy, sell, downloading ‘Coinbase - Bitcoin Wallet’ is mandatory.

Coinbase incentivized merchants to start accepting bitcoins by making payment processing fee free till they touch $1 million in orders. Then a customary 1% will be applied. Apps like these are something we’d like to see in India to be adopted by merchants.

Check it out on: iOS & Android

URL: www.coinbase.com/merchants

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Oneshot: is a simple app that makes it easy to take a screenshot, highlight it and share it on twitter. We all know how painful it is to share excerpts of an article on twitter; OneShot tries to fix that process on iOS. It takes screenshots and allows the user to highlight the selected text. You can add the source link to the tweet and customize the background colors. This helps in people engaging with your tweet without them clicking a link you share every time.

When you come across snippet of an article you want to share – you just need to press the ‘Home’ button and the ‘Sleep’ button to take a screen shot. Then open up OneShot and select the screenshot you just took.

Follow these steps

1) Crop it

2) Highlight portion of the text

3) Change the background

4) Select the source which should be automatically detected from the image

Check it out iOS

URL: http://oneshot.link/

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 BriefMe: a clean news ranking app for mainstream news. While we are being assaulted with information overload every day, apps like BriefMe helps us to stay informed without being overwhelmed. The app has news ranking score and it is designed to make the reading process faster – without you sifting through thousands of content, unlike other apps like Flipboard. The app’s algorithm identifies the top 10 most consumed and shared pieces of content and bring it to your attention. It sifts through business, sports, technology, politics, world and entertainment categories and serves it right in your feed. BriefMe uses big brand names to source top trending content like CNN, ‘New York Times’, ‘Washingon Post’ and it pulls from other 100 sources. BriefMe publishes top 3 stories of the week on their blog that could give you a sense of the news app.

The beauty of the app is you don’t have to open it frequently every 30min for the sake of FOMO. You can check once in a while and you’ll still know the most important news of the day. The app is co-founded by Harvard and Yale grads; Max Campion, Hari Ganesan and Rachel Moranis.

Check it out; iOS, *Android, coming soon.

URL: http://www.getbriefme.com/

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Bonus: MailBurn will turn your gmail interface into WhatsApp like medium for ease of communication. Messaging apps are the default ways of communicating for most of us. But some of our friends and colleagues may use email for communication which makes it cumbersome – in that case for mobile users who constantly connect to check their emails, follow meetings and even replying to the urgent e-mail, MailBurn turns conversations to resemble as chats messages. Give it a shot on your iphone.