WeatherPro

An intuitive app offering weather reports for well over two million geographical locations, feeding in everything from cloud formations and atmospheric pressure to wind speed and humidity, all in enough detail to leave Michael Fish clammy-palmed with excitement. It’s also accurate to the point of clairvoyance, so if you’re travelling to Berlin and it predicts rain, pack your best umbrella.
Available on iPhone (£2.49), Android (£1.99) and Windows Phone (£2.29)

FlightTrack

Follow the path of thousands of international flights on slick, zoomable maps, with detailed information on departure gates, delays and (heaven forbid) cancellations. Great for those anticipating the arrival of loved ones, or particularly nerdy train-spotters looking to up their game.
Available on iPhone (£2.99), iPad (£2.99), Android (£2.99) and Windows Phone (£3.99)

The Samsung Galaxy S3 has become the most successful Android phone of all time. More than 50 million units have shipped but now it’s been supersceded by the Samsung Galaxy S4, one of the most hotly anticipated phones ever. The success of the Galaxy S3 has helped make Samsung the biggest smartphone maker in the world, but it hasn’t been without its fair share of controversy.

First was the news that the Galaxy S3 didn’t fare too well in drop tests and there are complaints that the build quality is not the best. This was particularly exacerbated by the numerous Galaxy S3 vs iPhone 5 comparisons which split the Android and iOS camps even further apart. The iPhone 5 has superior build quality and styling, but the Galaxy S3 scores highly on features and value for money.

With more than 4,000 user responses the Galaxy S3 generally scores well one ease of use, features, design and value for money but there have been complaints that the battery life could be better. This is despite a Which? report that highlighted the S3 as one of the better performing smartphones in terms of battery life.

Read on to find out exactly what we think of the Galaxy S3 in our Galaxy S3 review or, if you’ve already decided go to our Galaxy S3 deals page to find the best deals on the market.

TouristEye is a little different; instead of helping you organize your trip or helping you find the best prices and options for your trip, it helps you build a “wishlist” of destinations where you’d like to travel and experiences you’d like to have. It doesn’t have to be as fancy as a once-in-a-lifetime trip, either: the app is great for planning your annual family vacation (if you get to take one, that is), or if you want to just take a few day trips here or there. Of course, you can build your bucket-list of places you want to see before you die, and you can share that list with friends or family and collaborate with them on them. They can add waypoints and things to check out in the area, specific things to do when you’re there, and together you can plan a trip together. Then, when you’re on the road, you can look back over those plans with detailed information, links, maps, and more.

It’s hard to get ahead if you have debts of any kind hanging over your head. Student loans and credit card debt needs to be paid off as soon as possible. The average annual percentage rates vary anywhere between 20% and 30% which means the balance will end up keep growing if you don’t get on top of it sooner rather than later.

Available from most financial institutions, IRAs are customizable financial plans that you can set up to start saving for the future. If you want to end up saving an amount of money that ends with nine zeroes, you need to do this as soon as possible. You’ll accrue interest on your savings and elect to take an amount of risk in investments to make money off the money you have.

It takes money to make money. Take a certain amount of money out of your paycheck as soon as you get paid and put it in a savings account, to be used for future investments or to simply collect interest.

In short, music costs money for you because there are people who are better than you at it. This is basically the same reason why your car (probably) wasn’t free: you wanted a car that actually functioned at a high level, and the one you could have built with your bare hands out of materials you’d gathered yourself just wasn’t good enough. So you bought the higher-level work of a professional. Nobody charges you for whistling melodies you’ve made up to yourself–but if you want something that’s been vetted as the highest-level work, by millions of people, you need to pay for it or learn how to do it yourself.

A fun thing happened to me when I became a professional musician: I started hearing really high-level music for free all the time. This is the secret that professional musicians don’t want to tell you. Sure, we want you to pay us, but we don’t really pay to see stuff anymore. I spend all day in rehearsals, listening to great artists make great music, and if, in the evenings, my ears aren’t bleeding yet, I can usually get comp tickets to whatever my friends are performing in.

The people who are offering the Zen-like answer (“the big thing that can be predicted is not the real big thing, it does not have true buddha-nature”) are being a little too skeptical. Historically, there’s been a fairly good record of people seeing “the next big thing” (NBT) a respectable fraction of the time, so it CAN be done, without 20/20 hindsight. Here are some successful big-thing anticipations that I am cherry-picking to illustrate when, why and how you can predict NBTs.

1. The moon race/Apollo was the NBT of its time and everybody knew it. It trained a generation of technologists and spawned a huge ecosystem of offshoots we use to this day.
2. Distributed computing was the NBT of the 70s, and Xerox invested in it for a decade to make it happen.
3. As the man told Dustin Hoffmann in The Graduate: “Plastics.” Another NBT that plenty of people saw coming.
4. Container shipping. The entire shipping industry saw it as a grand vision that could change everything, and they just had to wait for the people with the right talents. See my review of the history of the revolution: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/0…

What caused the early warning visibility in each case?