15 Things My Friends Felt When Heard of “iPad” + Photos and Videos

I am living at a place near Bengaluru(Bangalore), where Apple inc is not yet dominantly popular.

Not to blame them – Microsoft is more popular here due to its user friendliness or may be because most government offices in India are using Microsoft Operating System and Office suites.

[ I always feel, how good it would be to a developing country like India(economy wise) to switch to open source software like Unix, OpenOffice etc.]

First thing first: So what is iPad ?
The iPad is a tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. It features multi-touch interaction with print, video, photo, and audio multimedia, internet browsing, and runs most iPhone OS apps. The device has an LED-backlit 9.7-inch (25 cm) color LCD display and uses a virtual keyboard for text input. Prices for models in the United States range from $499 to $829 depending on the amount of storage and inclusion of 3G access.

So ipad is everything, from iPod, iBook and we can use iTunes and the Apps that we are already using on iPod and iPhones.

Photos:

wireless-ipad

safari_hands_browser

safari-ipad

wireless-ipad

performance-ipad

notes-ipad

multi_touch-ipad

maps-ipad

mail-ipad

led-ipad

iwork-ipad

itunes-ipad

ipod-ipad

ipad-1up-us-ipad

ibooks-ipad

home_screen-ipad

hero-ipad

hardware-ipad

hardware-ipad

hardware-ipad

hardware-ipad

hardware-ipad

gallery-software-youtube-ipad

gallery-software-video-ipad

gallery-software-safari-ipad

gallery-software-notes-ipad

gallery-software-maps-ipad

gallery-software-mail-ipad

gallery-software-itunes-ipad

gallery-software-ipod-ipad

gallery-software-ibooks-ipad

gallery-software-contacts-ipad

gallery-software-calendar-ipad

gallery-software-appstore-ipad

contacts-ipad

connect-ipad

calendar-ipad

battery-ipad

appstore-ipad

accessories-ipad

a4_chip-ipad

Some Videos:


https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.15





As iPad is still a new thing to all of us, I thought it would be fun to ask my friends:

What do you think iPad is? [ like: iPhone, iPod, iMac etc.]

I asked those who did not have any clue about what iPad is, to make sure the answers are based on their pure imagination.

My friends replied me with some fantastic imaginary things:

Rajesh: Digital mouse pad.

Manjunath patil: Its a Computation Device.

Navya k: something like inkpad (iPad). or may be like iMac.

Samartha: Digital Keyboard.

Sawti D M:
Who is this ? 😉

Sridhar P:
A combination of both phone and computer.

Raghu: Songs hearing machine.

Prashanth: Its a Notebook. Digital Notebook.

Jagdish: Electronic Device.

Nagraj: iPhone.

Nagbhushan: Digital Sound.

Sagar: Digital Nappy pad.

Kiran K R: Integrated Personal Audio Device.

Janardhan: I don’t want to be bothered thinking of ipod or ipad, but I need mouse pad urgently.

Gagan: Pad sized fully touch screen lap top or touch screen palm top.

In one or the other way, most of them were right with their guess and imagination about the name iPad. I really appreciate them for taking time to SMS me back with their answer.

Fun apart – Many people doesn’t seem to be happy with the new iPad, as there is no Multitasking capabilities, no camera etc. I think Apple Inc., will surly listen to its potential customers and soon patch up and will comeup with new iPad( we may call it iPad 2.0 ! ) as per the expectations of its fanboys.

But the question will remain – who will purchase this sleek, sexy looking(design wise) iPad now? Are you planning to purchase one? Make sure you know what you are getting and what not with your iPad, before placing an order.

Image Source: Apple.com

Is Your Website Really Down or Is It Just You?

it happens sometimes, you are not able to access your blog/website and rest of the world is still enjoying your fabulous writing.This post is to remind people to bookmark this tool, because we have seen people who openup Google and try some keywords to find this tool. They already know the tool, but forgot to bookmark.

Some times it’s difficult to know whether your website is actually down for everyone or only for you!

1. Your IP address might have got blocked somehow.
2. Your internet connection might be the victim.
3. Your browser might have blocked the site, for some weird reason 🙂

Anyway, it happens sometimes, you are not able to access your blog/website and rest of the world is still enjoying your fabulous writing.

To know whether its just you or everyone, we can use this wonderful tool called Downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Most of you know this tool already, but if you forgot to bookmark it, then do it now. And those of you who had not heard of this tool, then take note of it and bookmark – it will surly come handy in difficult times.

I Love the simplicity of the website. There are no ads plastered all around and making you search for the place to put your website URL and hit enter only to get more of ads and some popups and a video playing and then telling “Try Again!”. Don’t worry about such things, Downforeveryoneorjustme is as simple as Google.com.

This post is to remind people to bookmark this tool, because we have seen people who openup Google and try some keywords to find this tool. They already know the tool, but forgot to bookmark. So they try all sorts of keywords – Website down only me, blog down for everyone or just me, down everyone or just me, etc. Instead, if you bookmark it, you will be more comfortable when the need arises.

Alignment of Ads, Two Horizontal And Rest Vertical – BuySellAds

BuySellAds [BSA] is an advertising marketplace for small to medium sized website owners/publishers. Publisher like the flexibility in charging the advertisers and the easiness with which one can implement the ad codes into their website.
And advertisers like the quality publisher websites, ad rotation feature for equal exposure, stats features and the recently added A/B split testing between multiple ad banners etc.

But A Problem..
If you are using 125 x 125 ad format of BuySellAds and you have many advertisers, then you might have come across the problem of aligning them.

Example:
If you want to have 6 ad spots, as shown in below image.

Advertise-Here

[ 2 x 3 – Two Horizontal and rest Vertical ad spots ]

There is no built-in user friendly option to get this to work. One simple solution for this is, you can generate 2 separate javascript ad codes and paste it inbetween 2 separate div or p tags to somehow align it.

But the Problem
1. Using more ad codes means increase in the load time of the website as a whole.
2. All the ads does not get equal exposure. As we can only rotate the ads present in a single block of code and can not rotate between two separate code blocks.
3. Some time we may forget to change the price of advertising on one block, which will some time become unfair for advertisers.

Better Solution
Generate a single ad code with 6(or whatever you prefer) ad spots and add “float:left;” to the A element of the styles array in the ad code.

Before


BannerStyles1240548 = new Array(
    "a{display:block;font-size:11px;color:#888;font-
family:verdana,sans-serif;margin:0 4px 10px 0;text-align:center;text-
decoration:none;overflow:hidden;}",

After


BannerStyles1240548 = new Array(
    "a{float:left;display:block;font-size:11px;color:#888;font-
family:verdana,sans-serif;margin:0 4px 10px 0;text-
align:center;text-decoration:none;overflow:hidden;}",

Caution
Do not copy and paste the above code, as the quotation marks appearing on a webpage will not work properly in the source code. So just manually add float:left; to the A element of the styles array, as shown above.

Finally
1. You have nice looking source code! with less clutter.
2. Less number of javascript code, so faster loading of your webpage.
3. All the ads rotate and thus equal exposure to advertisers.
4. Single change in the settings of your ad code will be applied to all the ads.

Related: CSS Code To align 125X125 Ad Banner On WordPress Sidebar

Dan Schawbel’s Me 2.0 – Book Review

Its one of the most complete book ever written about Personal Branding – which explains everything from finding our passion to the entrepreneurial conquest, and the ways to fight back when things go wrong.

Me 2.0 Build A Powerful Brand To Achieve Career Success – by Dan Schawbel.

Dan Schawbel is a leading voice in the area of personal branding, and he is the author of Me 2.0 as well as the publisher of both the award winning Personal Branding Blog and Personal Branding Magazine.

So he knows what he talks about in his book Me 2.0 so is a goto person/authority in Personal Branding niche.

In his own words and voice – about Me 2.0

Table of Contents
The book is very well structured, logically divided into parts and chapters for easy understanding.
Me 2.0 - the book
Introduction
Part I: The Rise of Personal Branding
Chapter 1: The Brand Called YOU!
Chapter 2: Millennials Enter the Workforce
Chapter 3: Introducing Commander YOU!
Chapter 4: The Many Aspects of Personal Branding

Part II: Command Your Career in Four Steps
Chapter 5: Step 1 – Discover Your Brand
Chapter 6: Step 2 – Create Your Brand
Chapter 7: Step 3 – Communicate Your Brand
Chapter 8: Step 4 – Maintain Your Brand

Part III: Now You Have Command
Chapter 9: Your Entrepreneurial Conquest
Chapter 10: Life-Changing Results
Acknowledgments
About the Author

As you heard from Dan Schawbel himself in the above video – Me 2.0 includes a precious, proven four step process for discovering, creating, communicating and maintaining your personal brand.

The main take away message from this book is – “Every individual can create a brand for himself similar to that of a big corporate, using Internet(social media, social networking, blogging etc).”
Dan also teaches how we can make use of YouTube and other social media sites to endorse ourselves to the world at least cost, if not for free.

We all know how people have started searching for their own name in search engines – commonly called as Ego Searching! or Ego Surfing! Its been evident that more and more people are using this method to know more about what others are talking about them and their company – in 2007, 47% searched for information about themselves online, compared to 22% in 2002 and the numbers are only growing.
Dan shows ways to control the results and to use it to our advantage – in professional as well as personal life.

Me 2.0 stress on being authentic and transparent, and a word of caution for those who try to create a false image, to fit others expectation. As it would cause more damage later, than the short term success.

And the Passion
It advices to take up the niche in which we are passionate about, so that the work becomes more enjoyable and we become more productive, because people find their greatest enjoyment, not when they’re passively mindless, but when they’re absorbed in a mindful challenge – in which they are really passionate.

To help beginners, Dan also gives some blueprints and some self assessment methods to find out our passion and to stick to it and find a job which suits our passion.

It also outlines most of the methods using which we can promote our brand and also cautions not to over do it, as it may annoy the person we are pitching or the audience we are targeting.
It contains valuable information about the marketing strategies, proper timing and the target audience – which may help any business to promote itself strategically.

It also gives many real life stories as examples/case study to prove Dan’s point. All the stories come with some important lessons to learn, which are outlined for us – for effective understanding. It also contains quotes from successful people which inspires us and keeps the attention going to read more.

Recession and bad times – Graduation, Competition, Job, promotion, entrepreneurship
With the recession and bad times going on for job seekers, Dan gives effective plan to stand out from the crowd. He emphasizes the importance of Internet to create the personal brand to achieve career success and business success.
In his own words:

I’ve seen many individuals embrace their own passion, in the workplace and socially, through the power of personal branding. They are excited to wake up each day with the confidence to live the life they always wanted to live – and that is exactly how I want you to feel.

Some of the things which caught my attention – in the book:

  • It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know. With personal branding, this phrase changes to “Its not whom you know, its who knows you.”
  • Entrepreneurship is more tied to imagination than age or education.
  • Don’t live your life in the passenger’s seat. Take command of your life – be the commander YOU!
  • Dan Schawbel: Before, I would wake up every morning and say to myself, “I want to make the largest impact in the least amount of time.” Now I say, “I want to help others avoid the mistakes I made and find real success and happiness in their lives.”

The Book covers, some other effective and important topics like:
Personal Branding ToolKit.
Personal Press Kit.
Pitching the main stream media and ways to make main stream media search for you.
Maintaining the Relationship.
Reputation Management.
Importance of Networking.
Tips for effective networking.
Developing Confidence in ourselves.
Tips for making our resume stand out from the crowd and compel the recruiter not to ignore your resume.
How online life can be a positive or even a negative thing for our recruitment and in achieving our dreams.
Identity theft and its consequences.
and many more..

Conflict with the Dot Com Mogul Lifestyle
While reading some chapters about how to dress and behave – if you are a easy going blogger who follow Dot Com Mogul Lifestyle, then you may feel the suit and dress sense things as lot of work! But hey, to be practical, it all still matters in corporate world. Ofcourse, things may change in the future(as Dan himself points out in the book, to catch up with the latest trends in your industry and not to lag behind), and may be allowed to wear jeans and t-shirt at workplace(as Google Inc and some other companies allow.)

Personal Favorite
Your Entrepreneurial Conquest and the Life-Changing Results are my favorite chapters, as it inspires to apply what we have learnt from the book and helps boost the confidence.

Its one of the most complete book ever written about Personal Branding – which explains everything from finding our passion to the entrepreneurial conquest, and the ways to fight back when things go wrong.

I recommend this book to everyone, and I think its a must have for students and employees, and even for recruiters.

At $11.53 available at Amazon, its a bargain to such a valuable resource available out there. You must simply grab a copy yourself or present one for your teenage child or a coworker, and they will thank you for the book.

Good Reason(s) To Use Socialize Feature Of Feedburner – and a Caution!

There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly. We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.

Feedburner announced socialize feature some days back – i.e., Tweet Your New Blog Posts from Feedburner, automatically.

If you have not yet activated this feature, and you are using some plugin to do this for you – then take 20 seconds off and enable this little handy feature.

Plugin’s consume bandwidth and need to be updated whenever there is an update available. If you don’t take time to update, then you are at some security threat.

So do not think of doing it some day, do it now itself and save lot more time later.

How to enable socialize feature
Click on Publicize tab. On the left side, you can see list of features, and you can also see “Socialize Publish to the social web” option. Click on it and the rest is self explanatory

socialize-twitter-feedburner

The interesting thing here is, Google has started using its own URL shortner. And this may be the only disadvantage, as you might already have your favorite URL shortner or built one for your custom use across all your network’s of sites.

Google may soon start showing stats for the click through rate and the performance of the shortened URL. You can get the clue about this on goo.gl.

googl-url-shortner

Some benefits would be
1. Google will surly start displaying the click through rates of shortened URLs.
2. It may soon integrate goo.gl into its analytics and hence we can get a detailed report of the performance of the shortened URLs.
3. Reliability and Speed matters: We have seen some of the popular URL shortners being unreliable due to its downtime, so we can expect reliable service from Google.
4. Socialize feature comes with lot of option to customize the tweets according to our needs.

  • Select Account
  • Formatting Options
  • Post Content
  • Hash Tags
  • Additional Text
  • Item Limit
  • Keyword Filter
  • Preview

Interesting option
We can use keywords to filter some of the tweets. i.e., Depending on keywords specified, feedburner decides whether to tweet or not to tweet about a particular post.
This feature will come in handy for those, who hesitate to promote their own content frequently and who do not want to tweet irrelevant tweets.

Caution!

feed-update-tweet-limit

Duplicate tweets — be aware! and avoid before embarrassment
There is a option, in the “Item Selection” called Item limit. If you are posting multiple posts(8 posts) at once, then there is no problem. But if you post one or two (or less than 7) article(s) per day, then you must select the Item limit accordingly.
If you post only one article per day and you select the Item limit as 8, then the previously published articles will be tweeted again. i.e., you will be tweeting 7 articles published on your blog recently, other than the one you published on that day. This may annoy your followers. So be careful not to ignore this option.

Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers and nOobs

Being a blog concentrating on social media, blogging, it would be good to have some resources for newbie bloggers or people who are interested in knowing more about blogging, social media and online money making(basics).

Two years ago, I never knew the difference between a domain and hosting. Twitter and FaceBook were far from my thinking. Blogging was far from imagination. Never knew there will be so many people reading blogs more regularly than News Paper, and Tweet more often than they send a text message(SMS – texting) or Call to anyone!

Looking back those days, feels like great memories of ignorance 🙂 Unfortunately, I have many many and many friends who don’t know about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, web-publishing etc. They still think having a live website requires a great deal of knowledge, money and influence. Actually, a friend of mine asked me – how to get permission from BSNL to launch a website. hmm..I got confused for a while, so as to what he was asking. But soon realized, BSNL being a well known Internet service provider in India, many people think that the whole internet and all the websites and everything is controlled by them. Not a bad logic though. And some still think internet is owned by Google.
When I try to tell about the advantages of Twitter and tell them to start using it to their good – the last question they would ask me is, Is Twitter your website? lol…. how good, if it was 😉
basics
Some years back, most news papers, tv News and some online publications tought us how internet is being used to scam people and for betrayal. It has so stuck in the minds of people that, they never dare to do an online transaction. And some people think Google too as a scam, because of various Google Cash Cow like scams. So I think writing about what to trust and what not to, would surly help many people in making right decision.

Not that I know many things. I am still learning and would love to share whatever I learn with like minded nOob friends!

So without hurting the regular readers, I have thought of writing about very basics of internet tools, blogging, Content Management System, how and why etc on this blog on Sundays.

So you got it — most of you may skip reading Technotip.org on Sunday and Saturday.

This post will be used as a document for later reference. Because I am sure, many people will ask what the hell I am writing on the blog. So I can point to this and can tell them that they can skip reading on Saturday and Sunday.

But it would be great, if you can come and help everyone with your valuable comments. Hope you remember your student days, where we learn a lot of complex things and we will be asked some questions related to basics of the subjects and we sometimes giggle to answer it. No one knows everything. So everyone’s comment will add value, even though its a basic thing.

And feel free to(actually I will be privileged) send any of your nOob friends to our blog.

Publish Guest Posts Under A Separate Username

Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense..

Create a user called Guest and then publish all the guest posts under that user name. This approach may help in multiple ways.

1. You can get all the guest posts from few clicks(under dashboard) — See all the posts published under the username Guest.
2. Visitors can see all the guest posts by clicking on the link Guest(if its clickable and displays all the articles published under the username Guest).
3. Visitors/readers confusion as to who wrote the article would be reduced to a certain extent.
Link back to the guest writer’s blog or twitter a/c is a good way to show that the article was written by a guest writer. But if you have your name on the homepage(where you show only post excerpts and show “published by yourname“), then showing “published by Guest” would make more sense to your readers. This way you can eliminate a certain degree of confusion and add more clarity(and good usability). People will be knowing, whether its written by you or a guest writer – before clicking on the read more link.

Guest authors

Showing Authors Photo, Bio and a Link – using a smart plugin
Another nice way to show credit to guest writers is to show their bio, a small image and a link to their website/twitter a/c at the end of the article, in a well structured manner. Did you just say its a tedious job? No its not. There is a good plugin called Author Image, which can do the job for you. It creates a widget that you can insert in a sidebar, or much about anywhere and you can also add author’s description in addition to his/her image.

Who should care for it ?
If you are receiving 1 or 2 guest posts per month, then managing guest posts will not be a big challenge. But once your blog is out there for some more years and you blog consistently, you will start receiving a lot of guest post requests, so you will certainly need some strategy to manage them effectively. So keeping things organized from the beginning is smarter then messing up with things later.

What strategies do you follow to maintain/manage guest posts.

Take Your Site To Clinic – Dr. Google!

Note: This Clinic is provided by Google India and is only for Indian Webmasters.

There is no mention in the blog post by GoogleIndia that only Indian webmasters are allowed to submit their sites. But it can be clearly understood, because its announced on Google India Blog. And in the registration form, its clearly mentioned that the Clinic is open only for Indian webmasters.

What’s it all about ?
Search Quality team at Google will analyze websites submitted to the clinic and has planned to offer constructive advice on accessibility and improvements that can lead to better visibility for your website in Google’s search results.
google-clinic
So how do I submit my site and how much would it cost!
You can submit your website/blog to the clinic for free. And the submission will be open from Jan 6th to Jan 20th , 2010. Also not that, not all submitted sites will make it to the analysis list. This is quite obvious, as there could be lot of submissions and Google Team will even have some other works to do!

Eligibility Criteria
1. Your site must be registered at webmasters tool. This is to ensure that, you are the actual webmaster of the website that you are submitting.
If you have not registered to webmasters tool, don’t think it as a burden. You may ignore submitting your site to clinic, but do not ignore to register at webmasters tool. Its free and very useful tool for any webmaster.
2. Your website must meet all the quality guidelines of webmasters tool.

Also note that: By submitting your site you agree to the use of your website as an example in future blog posts under site clinic banner, by GoogleIndia.

Submit your website here.

A Humble Request
If you are submitting your website/blog to the clinic OR if you feel it will help your followers in Twitter, then please make sure you Tweet about this article. Thanks.

#Indian #webmasters #only Take Your Site To Clinic – Dr. Google! @ http://tinyurl.com/y875wcp (RT)

Source: GoogleIndia