Review Of Web

Review: BlackBerry Bold

ROW — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:37:38 +0000

BlackBerry Bold 9000 is a smart phone from the stable of Research In Motion (RIM). The phone is often compared to the likes of the Apple iPhone. But in reality, they’re two different phones and a direct comparison between the two of them is often misguided.

Blackberry Bold has a screen size of 480×320 but lacks a touch screen interface. The phone is bundled with a keyboard which is slightly different from its contemporaries with a slight angular shift in the keys. This angular shift means that it takes just that bit more of time to adjust to, but once you do, the layout works like charm.

The build quality of the phone is superior in comparison to its predecessors and the addition of quite a few layers of gloss on the body gives it an incredibly attractive look. Though critics do say that the chrome finish on the phone is borrowed from the iPhone, it suits the Blackberry to the hilt.

One of the most important features of Blackberry - the email -hasn’t undergone any drastic change from the previous models. There are a few improvements with respect to the ability to view pictures and attachments and a full HTML support. Though these may seem to be basic improvements, they add a whole new dimension to the phone.

This phone supports all the current technologies such as 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi without any significant loss in the battery performance. The bundled browser renders pages very quickly without any noticeable lag and the addition of the full HTML support only means that the phone can now be used to view pages in a more complete form when compared with its predecessors.

One aspect of the phone where RIM has improved significantly is the User Interface of the phone. It has been tweaked enough to include new high resolution icons.

The menu and the organizer have been cleaned up a bit but not enough to warrant any special emphasis. While media capabilities are not the key aspects of a business phone, the Blackberry Bold could have done well with significant improvements in multimedia category by introducing a better video playback capability and of course a better media manager.

What is the cost of BlackBerry Bold in US and in India?

The Blackberry Bold retails at $249 under contract from AT&T in the United States and Rs 31,999 under contract with Airtel in India.

BlackBerry Bold Tour

Here is an official BlackBerry Bold video tour

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Review: BlackBerry Bold

How to password protect your PDF documents for free?

ROW — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:02:40 +0000

Finding a free utility to unlock pdf documents is just a matter of single search on Google. On the other hand, Google does not throw up impressive results if you search for something like how to password protect a pdf file. Most of the results points you to the paid utilities.

Here is a software and step by step instructions you can use to password protect your pdf document for free:

The utility is Pdf creator from PrimoPDF

Once you download the PDF creator and install it. It will appear in the print dropdown. (File > Print). Click OK to convert any document to PDF.
You will see the screen shown below. Click on Security button.
On the next window, enter the ‘Password to Open’ which will allow you to password protect your pdf . You can also enter ‘Password to Change Security’. This option allows you to change security settings that:
1. Allow users to print my PDF
2. Allow users to copy text and graphics from my PDF
3. Allow users to add comments
4. Allow users to change my PDF, including editing text and adding or removing pages
Click on OK in the screen shown above. Click OK again on the last screen.
Your free password protected PDF is ready. Enjoy!

Also see the cool utilities from A-PDF. This company has come up with various solutions to perform operations on PDF files. Some of them are Batch unsecure PDF files, Put page numbers on bottom of PDF, Insert date time stamp to a Acrobat PDF, Split PDFs at pages matching specific text pattern. Check them out.

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How to password protect your PDF documents for free?

BecomeABlogger is LIVE. Registration Open For Next 5 days Only.

ROW — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:35:35 +0000

Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up on a news that BecomeABlogger – an online coaching programs for bloggers – is LIVE now. The doors are only open for 5 days and then they will shut it again for the rest of the year!

Last time they opened doors, they were bombarded with a flood of new members signing up, and they had to close the program to the general public for a few months to take care of their new members.
It’s one of the best and is recommended by dozens of professional bloggers around the world. Go see for yourself over here . You can also read our review here.

[PS: In case you are still confused take a look at this detailed free report and this free video to find out whether this program is suitable for you or not]

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BecomeABlogger is LIVE. Registration Open For Next 5 days Only.

How to find the URL of a twitter message?

ROW — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:04:03 +0000

It may sound very trivial but noobs to twitter find it hard to get the URL of a particular tweet posted on twitter. Here is how you can locate the URL step-by-step:

Go to the tweet you wish to get the URL for.
Hover the mouse where date and time is mentioned. (bottom left)
If you are on Firefox, right click and "Copy Link Location". If you are on IE, right click and copy shortcut.
Paste it where ever you like. Enjoy!

In case you are still wondering what is twitter, here is a great video that will explain you the concept in plain English

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How to find the URL of a twitter message?

Want to become a pro blogger? Read this free report.

ROW — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:57:39 +0000

Interested in blogging but don’t know where to start?
Have already started blogging but don’t know how to move your blog to one level up?

If you fall in any of the situations above, read on…

BecomeABlogger.com is the brainchild of Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick who have made significant gains in the field of professional blogging. This is an online coaching program that proposes to put budding bloggers’ blogs on steroids – that is to drive crazy traffic to a blog, to the extent of getting ranked as one of the top blogs on the internet. This program was first launched in 2008 and saw a huge success. They are re-opening the doors to this program for a short period, now it going to be re-launched on 29th/June/2009. They will keep the registration site open only for 5 days after which it will again close for probably a year.

If you are serious to make a mark in the filed of pro-blogging, I would recommend you to check it out. To find out whether this program is really suitable for you or not, first go through this detailed free report. This report includes details on how to successfully market a blog and make a whole lot of money from it.

Here is my brief review of the report:

They have categorized the strategies to become a successful blogger into individual milestones and provide with easy methods to achieve them:

The first milestone according to BecomeABlogger.com is to discover the true passion with yourself and work towards it. They suggest connecting with people over public platforms such as Facebook and making use of Skype towards achieving the same.
This process is followed up with an attempt at reducing the time spent on information gathering mechanisms by making use of popular tools such as Google Reader which helps you to collect information from various sources at a single most comfortable location. Information related to your area of interest can also be obtained by making use of two very different kinds of search engines that are human driven such as Mahalo.com and Clusty.com. These search engines differ from Google and other popular search engines in that they do not make use of any complex algorithms and are mainly concentrating on providing results that most other users are looking for.
The third milestone towards becoming a successful professional bloggers is to test out the niche that one is planning to work on. According to them, such a niche check can be done to by making use of search engines such as Seesmic.com.
Once you establish that the niche indeed suits your blogging needs, you can make your blog more attractive by adding interactive content on your blog and promote it on platforms such as Twitter.com etc.
Apart from these methods, there are more methods that BecomeABlogger.com intends to share. Those details are available to users at the Premium Member’s Area on the website which will open on 29th/June. The premium member’s area provides instructional videos at affordable prices which are indeed helpful to all budding bloggers.

If you want to see more details on the points discussed above, get this free report.

[Update:

BecomeABlogger has just released one of their premium content videos to the general public (no cost)...Check this link for video.

Inside the video, Yaro talks about what he calls "Impact Marketing Techniques" - the kind of tricks he's used himself to drive hoards of new traffic to his own 6-figure income blog.

Now, what makes this video so special?

Well, normally you'd have to pay for it.

But not today...

You can watch it at no cost right now, without one of those silly optin forms - nice for a change really. I just thought I'd let you know about this powerful video, because no matter what you do online, you can never know enough about how to drive crazy amounts of traffic to your blog. Here is the link again]

Post from: Review Of Web

Want to become a pro blogger? Read this free report.

What is a virtual agent? Review of Virtual Sales Assistant

ROW — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:35:45 +0000

What is a virtual agent?

A virtual agent sometimes called a virtual smart agent, or an intelligent agent, is a script which is programmed to be able to perform a wide variety of tasks such as providing information regarding the services on offer, or respond to user query, or as in a large number of cases, provide sales services.

One major advantage of using such scripts is that they eliminate the need for a human representative to be available for customers’ needs. These scripts are completely automated and therefore, once installed successfully, they work independently of any kind of human involvement towards running the script or moderating it. This also helps service providers by the way of reducing costs that could have been otherwise incurred on hiring individuals to perform the same task.

There are various vendors of such scripts with the effectiveness and features provided by such scripts varying widely across vendors. Almost all of the scripts available have features such as having custom agent for your site, log un-answered queries on your website among many others.

Which virtual agent service we prefer?

Virtual Sales Assistant (VSA). The VSA, along with providing all features like its competitors, also provides some additional features which are unique to it.

The VSA allows you to train the virtual agent to handle various types of queries. Once the training is completed, you can analyze the performance of your virtual agent by making use of the in-depth statistical data provided by VSA. Incorporating HTML in chat windows is also an option provided by the VSA. This helps in providing better support in the form of links or web addresses of related information.

VSA also has the ability to integrate videos into your chat script which can help in understanding the concept of the sales agent. It also allows you to customize the script and insert and/or edit the default names provided by the script. VSA is superior to most of its competitors in the sense that it allows for an unlimited installation of the script, which translates to the fact that once the script has been bought, you can integrate it to any number of your websites. This essentially helps you in case you sell more than one product or are involved in marketing the same product through different websites.

VSA provides all these features and facilities along with a lifetime money back guarantee at a minimal one time price of $97. The price also includes a variety of “How to” videos and source files of the script. At its price, VSA offers the best value for money among its competition.

Check out Virtual Sales Assistant

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What is a virtual agent? Review of Virtual Sales Assistant

Review: Nokia N97 vs Iphone 3G S

ROW — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:04:47 +0000

From the day Nokia announced its latest smart phone model, the N97 at the Nokia world 2008 in Barcelona, the battle between two of perhaps the biggest companies with the most ardent fan following had begun.

Speculations were rife back then about the features that N97 would come packed with and how the iPhone would stand in comparison to it. Now that the N97 is here, it is only befitting to begin comparing the two. iPhone has had a stranglehold in the smartphone market. Even the arrival of G1 didn’t do much towards taking significant amount of market share from the iPhone.

With regards to the physical measure, the N97 is slated at 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9mm (LxWxD) as compared to the iPhone 3G’s 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3mm (LxWxD). The N97 weighs about 150g while the iPhone 3G weights about 133g. The iPhone 3G boasts of a 3.5 inch screen at a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. The touchscreen facility of the iPhone is provided by a capacitive touch screen. The Nokia N97 on the other hand has a 3.5 inch screen at a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, which implies that at the same screen size, the N97 is better with its better screen resolution.

What makes Nokia N97 formidable is the fact that it is shipped with a fully functional slide out QWERTY keyboard to go with the virtual keyboard. Such a fully functional QWERTY keyboard is significant in that it helps in keying in longer texts such as sending emails. The iPhone 3G though, lacks such a keyboard and the users have to rely only on the virtual on screen keyboard.

The multimedia features offered by the Nokia N97 and the iPhone 3G are directly influenced by their respective companies’ services. The iPhone 3G S provides access to the iTunes store which has a huge range of content while the N97 provides its users with the access to the Nokia Music Store for their music needs. This feature apart, there is very little to choose from with both supporting popular video and audio formats such as MP3, AAC, MPEG4 etc. N97 though, has a slight bit of an advantage over iPhone in that it supports WMA, Windows Media 9 and Flash Lite.

The Nokia N97 comes equipped with a camera on the front for video calls and a five megapixel camera with LED flash and video capabilities. The videos are shot at a decent 30fps. In comparison, the iPhone 3G only offers a 2 megapixel camera without flash and without any support to record videos. The recently launched version of the iPhone, iPhone 3GS is an improvement over the earlier versions in that it has a 3 megapixel camera which has features such as auto focus and video and voice recording features.

On the navigation front, the iPhone 3G makes use of A-GPS and Google Maps while the Nokia N97 has A-GPS and an electronic compass to go with Nokia Maps for the navigational requirements of the users.

Internet and communicational features on both phones include HSDPA and WiFi connectivity with the N97 supporting Bluetooth 2.0 and support for Flash Lite 3.0 which implies that web pages can be rendered more completely on a N97 as compared to the iPhone 3G which lacks any kind of support for Flash content.

Cost of iPhone 3G S and Nokia N 97 in US:

The base price of iPhone 3G 8GB variant has been greatly reduced recently and is now available at $99 at the Apple store while the price of the iPhone 3GS 16GB and the 32GB variants is fixed at $199 and $299 respectively. These prices though are subsidized by the network providers and therefore cost less. The Nokia N97 is priced at $600

Cost of iPhone 3G S and Nokia N 97 in India:

In August’08, Iphone 3G launched with a price tag of around Rs 31,000 Considering the major debacle it witnessed in the Indian market, my guess is this time it should be tagged between Rs 20,000-25,000. Nokia N97 is expected to cost approximately Rs 33,000 in India.

Release Date in India: The exact date for 3GS is yet to be announced for outside US markets. In India going by the previous year launch it should come around 2nd-3rd week of August.

Guided Tour of iPhone 3G S

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Review: Nokia N97 vs Iphone 3G S

How to redirect blogger pages from one page to another page of same or a different blog?

ROW — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:44:45 +0000

As we all know blogger doesn’t provide an option for 301 redirect on a page by page basis. The only option left with us is meta refresh redirect.

Say you want to redirect http://xyz.blogspot.com/2008/11/about.html to http://www.xyz.com/about/

Here is the code that you will need:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://xyz.blogspot.com/2008/11/about.html"'>

<meta content='0;url=http://www.xyz.com/about/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

b:if>

Some points to note:

You need to place this code just before the head section closure ie before tag.
Take note of spacing before and after equals to sign and also there should be two (==) and not one (=) equals to sign.
content = 0 means. The browser will wait for 0 seconds before redirecting to another page.

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How to redirect blogger pages from one page to another page of same or a different blog?

Review of eLearning Softwares. Articulate vs Adobe Captivate vs Lectora.

ROW — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:36:38 +0000

Last week we discussed and reviewed Learning Management Systems. Today we will review some of the best eLearning softwares present in the market.

The first question that comes to mind is - what is the difference between an LMS and an eLearning software? Well, an LMS is used to host training content and track results while an eLearning software is used to create the training content, such as presentations, quizzes, which can then be hosted in an LMS.

For our review we have picked three most popular eLearning softwares. Articulate Rapid ELearning solution, Adobe Captivate and Lectora.

Articulate Rapid ELearning Solution:

Articulate is one of the favorite tools for providing e-learning solutions. It enables you to create high quality e-learning products quickly and easily. The Articulate Rapid e-learning solution makes use of Microsoft Power point for all of its functions. Once installed successfully, it adds an extra option labeled ‘Articulate’ on the same. What sets the e-learning solution apart from many other of its competition is the ease of use. Once you are done with creating a presentation, you can use the ‘Articulate’ option on your power point software and add animations that you want and make a Flash file.

Any learning software also needs the ability to handle questions. ‘Articulate’ does just that. It has a range of built in question handling options with various question types. If these aren’t enough, you could always use the ‘Quizmaker‘ software which is a separate software and develop your questionnaires in a better way. It has the ability to publish SCORM and AICC compliant courses and the ability to incorporate graphics and media.

Articulate Studio Standard edition is priced at $999 while Professional edition ‘09 is priced at $1,398.

Adobe Captivate:

Adobe Captivate is part of the Adobe e-learning suite and it allows users to create elearning courses without any programming or multimedia knowledge. Adobe captivate has a wide range of features such as Text-to-speech functionality, ability to produce the output files in a wide range of file formats that includes AVI, which can be used for web streaming and publishing on youtube.

An exciting feature of Adobe Captivate is the ability to let users customize the widgets. Widgets can be created using software such as Adobe Flash and then customized to meet the requirements of the particular course. Existing Power Point slides can also be involved in the projects you create using Adobe Captivate. Presentations can be imported and synced with the captivate files by using the options provided.

The software also has built in templates to make it easy to provide good instructional material without having to incorporate a lot of changes. Adobe Captivate is priced at $249 and does not include other Adobe software such as Flash, which need to be bought separately.

Lectora:

Lectora is again one of the most popular eLearning tools which is developed by the Trivantis Corporation. It can be used to create elearning courses and presentations. Lectora also has the ability to import files from the Microsoft Powerpoint format and incorporate the content to produce elearning content in various output formats raning from a HTML web page, video files and even an executable file.

Lectora supports industry standards such as SCORM, AICC etc which allow for the development of open architecture guidelines for interoperable learning content.

Among the various features of Lectora include the ability to import questions, use multimedia content to produce stand out elearning courses. Lectora supports a large number of automated tools such as title wizards, table of contents, media library, resource manager etc. These tools can be used out of the box and thus provide a great value for money. The basic version of the software is priced at $495 . Add on features can be obtained for a nominal price.

Check out Articulate Rapid eLearning suite, Adobe Captivate and Lectora.

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Review of eLearning Softwares. Articulate vs Adobe Captivate vs Lectora.

Confused over the terms blog, RSS, twitter, social networking? Check these creative videos.

ROW — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:29:12 +0000

Check these videos, produced by the very creative team of CommonCraft. The way they explain complex things is really commendable. Other than being simple, their USP is that the videos size of all videos created by them is nearly 3 minutes in length.

Even if you are a internet veteran, see these videos. I’m sure you will love them.

What is World Wide Web (WWW)?

How to use Google effectively?

What is a blog?

What is RSS?

What is Twitter?

What is a wiki?

What is social bookmarking?

What is social networking?

What is phishing?

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Confused over the terms blog, RSS, twitter, social networking? Check these creative videos.