DuoLingo, the popular language learning app for iOS, has now launched for Android devices.

DuoLingo currently offers lessons for learning Spanish, German, French, Portugese and Italian. English can also be learned with Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese as the base language. 

One of the main reasons for DuoLingo’s popularity on iOS is the way in which it gamifies the learning experience. The service is completely free and features no ads; it makes its money by providing a translation service, which is powered by its users. 

Interestingly, the creator of DuoLingo, Luis von Ahn, is the guy who created ReCAPTCHA, which helps to digitize books.  There’s a good TED Talk here that explains the business model for ReCAPTCHA and DuoLingo. It’s a funny presentation – we’ve all seen an inappropriate CAPTCHA or two. 

DuoLingo is currently available for Android smartphones with a tablet version of the app due to launch very soon.  

The big news this morning is the flickr is now offering everyone 1 terabyte of FREE photo storage.

With a whopping 1 terabyte you can store an incredible 873,813 4 megapixel photos or 218,453 16 megapixel images. You can not deny that this is impressive.

So with so much storage how to make best use of it?

No doubt you use your Android phone for taking pictures. You may store the photos on the phone memory or an SD card, but do you back them up?

If you do not back them up, or do so at irregular intervals then why not take advantage of auto uploading.

Auto-uploading can backup your pictures to the cloud within minutes of taking picture or video on your phone. Meaning should you loose the phone, delete the image off your phone, there is always a copy online to access at any time.

Such auto-upload services can work over WiFi only or over a mobile data connection too, the choice is yours.

You may have heard that Dropbox offers such a feature, it works well (I use it all the time) but there is limited free storage. This means occasionally you need to go in and delete content.

Naturally flickr now seems the ideal option with so much storage. You will  probably only have to go in and delete or edit photos every year or less!

Flickr offer an Android app but that allows upload but you have to initiate the upload which is frustrating. It works well but you would have to keep doing uploads every so often.

The solution? A £1.99 app from Google Play Store called FlickrFolio.

I have got to be honest I have been using it for only a short period of time at the time of writing, but have tested it thoroughly in that time and all is working well.

You can set whether it uploads over WIFi or data connection or whether it uploads when the phone is charging or not.

It automatically uploads images as private so the whole world doesn’t see pictures unless you specifically ask it to.

You can too force it to upload older images you may have on your phone too as well as video.

We have all lost photos or data at some point and realise only after the event how important it was.  With this service there is no excuse and for just £1.99 this is a fantastic price.

I strongly encourage you to try this app and backup your valuable photos and videos now.

PushBullet is an app that solves a minor frustration that you will likely have suffered often as an Android user, but not found a good all-in-one solution to remedy: having data on your desktop that you want to push quickly to your mobile device. PushBullet enables you to easily push notes, addresses, lists and files straight from your computer to your handset and displays an alert in your notification bar for easy access.

This is by no means new in terms of functionality – Chrome to Phone, Pocket or the syncing of the Chrome app can push URLS/save web pages for easy access, Evernote can push notes, Google Drive could push lists and AirDroid/AirDroid 2 (public beta now available here) can be used to wirelessly transfer files – but PushBullet simplifies the process and provides one app for all four functions.

To use PushBullet, you need to download the app from the Play Store and register your device (you can sign up with your Google account), then register on the PushBullet website. It’s a seamless process and it’s only access to your email address that the app needs, not your entire Google account. Once you’ve completed the sign up process, visiting the PushBullet website will take you straight to the web interface, so a bookmarklet in your browser can help to make the process of sending data to your phone even quicker.

Having tested the PushBullet service, it works nicely and lives up to the simplified process that it describes on the website. As with any cloud-based service, we would recommend against pushing any particularly sensitive files that you don’t want others to see.