Satish | Technotip.org

Battery problem with your Phone? Try this before purchasing new one

Battery problems are common with mobile phones these days. As the cost of the phone goes down the quality of some of the key components reduce significantly[Most of the times!]. Their one year warranty will be of great use most of the time!

Ok, today on our Sunday Mobile tips we have a simple but yet sometime a great money saving tip for you.
If your mobile phone starts showing battery weak suddenly and if it keeps popping the same message each time, even after hours of charging, then you must read this article till end 🙂
Mobile_Phone_Battery
Most of the time this is due to a software problem. Mainly the 3rd party software you use on your phone. And you believe it or not, some times the call dropping and other problems also start due to overloading of your phone memory.
As a quick solution for these kind of problem, just restore your phone to “factory settings”, and your phone will start working normally.

While this is not a case most of the time, but its better to check before going and purchasing a brand new, branded battery, which will cost you a lot.
Hope this tip helps atleast some of you. Please share your tips, tricks or any other things that you have experienced with your phone.

Free ebook download -“Tips, Tricks and Strategies to Make Money Online”

The ebook is finally out for Download.

Writing an eBook with collective effort:
Some time back Daniel scocco from DailyBlogTips cameup with an idea of writing an eBook with collective effort. The project was to group together the ideas and tips from different people, in a way that it would benefit both the collaborators and the end user (i.e. the readers).
People participating/contributing to the ebook were supposed to write about “Tips, Tricks and Strategies to Make Money Online” in not more than 200 to 300 words. This is indeed a good idea, which would bring value to the readers as well as to the participants, as we were assured of link backs to our blog.
I always admire Daniel’s work and the community he has build around his blog. I just wanted to be part of the community and wanted to take part in the group work. And ofcourse the traffic and the boost to our brand awareness was an additional reward.

What most of us had expected?
Daniel and most of the participants had expected that this ebook will bring in a lot of traffic, when it is released on DailyBlogTips.com. Thousands of internet users were expected to download it, and hundreds of visitors would be visiting to each blog, if things happen as Daniel had planned.

But what happened?
Fortunately quality of most entries was good, but unfortunately the tips and tricks were too broad to make sense under a single ebook.
And as usual, Daniel did not compromise, and so did not release the ebook on DailyBlogTips. He is committed to provide value to his readers, which is a very good commitment indeed, and very less people can actually deliver this commitment.

What’s the fate of the ebook ?
But as promised, Daniel took the pain with pleasure and spent some time to collect the entries and formatted, styled them under a simple ebook anyway. Now we are free to release the ebook on our(participants) blog.

What I feel is, this ebook gives us a chance to know what other people around the world think about Making Money Online. So I made my mind to give it to our readers.

So how can I download the ebook?
While announcing the ebook writing project it was made clear that the copyrights belong to everyone who participated, and that we can’t give away a direct download link to the ebook, we must require people to subscribe to our RSS feed or email list before they can download it. Its a rule of the project and I must follow it to keep the interest of other participants.
So please take a moment to subscribe to our email or RSS updates to get the download link for this ebook. You can always unsubscribe after downloading(Oops I shoot my own legs 🙂 ).

Finally, I would like to thank Daniel of DailyBlogTips.com for holding such an interesting and valuable project. Atleast the intention was good, outcome is not in anyone’s hand. And thanks to all the participants who have shared their knowledge and experience in the ebook, which may help our readers to gain some knowledge. And last, but not the least(actually the most important), the readers of the ebook, thanks to everyone who invested their time in reading this article and put their effort in downloading the ebook. You can freely distribute it to your friends, friends of friends and friends of friends friends, relatives and to whomever you want. Thanks again.

Interest Based Advertising — Are you really Interested ?

Google has officially announced to show ads based on the interests of the users.

Example of Interest Based Advertising:-
Meet Mary
Mary’s favorite hobby is gardening. With Google’s interest-based advertising technology, Mary will see more relevant gardening ads because she visits many gardening websites. Here’s how that works:

1. When Mary visits websites that display ads provided by Google’s AdSense program, Google stores a number in her browser (using a “cookie“) to remember her visits. That number could look like this: 114411.

What is cookie?

2. Because many of the websites that Mary visits are related to gardening, Google puts her number (114411) in the “gardening enthusiast” interest category.
3. As a result, Google will show more gardening ads to Mary (based on her browser) as she browses websites that use AdSense.

How do I manage my preferences?
You can go to the Ad Preferences Manager to add or remove interest categories.

Using a different computer or clearing the browser’s cookies
Anytime we start using a different browser or computer, our cookie number won’t carry over because it is specific to the browser we used before. When we clears our browser’s cookies, the number is deleted and Google no longer knows that a user of that browser may be interested in gardening and golf.

Opting out
If you prefer not to receive this type of interest-based advertising, you can always opt out by clicking the “Opt out” button on the homepage of the Ads Preferences Manager. After you opt out, Google will not collect interest category information and you will not receive interest-based ads. You will see the same number of ads as before, but they may not be as relevant.
But once you clear your browser, your optout setting will also be lost. So you can make use the optout plugin, to opt out of these behavioral or interest based target advertising permanently.

How does the Google advertising cookie opt-out plugin work?
The plug works like this: When you clear all cookies in your browser, the plugin automatically sets the DoubleClick opt-out cookie again, so that cookie is effectively not deleted and your opt-out setting stays enabled.

How long will the Google advertising cookie opt-out plugin last?
As long as you keep the plugin installed, it will ensure that the DoubleClick opt-out cookie is set in your browser.

How do I remove the plugin if I change my mind and want to receive interest-based advertising?
You can uninstall the plugin at any time and then opt back into interest-based advertising.

* To uninstall the plugin in Firefox, select “Tools” -> “Add-ons” and click “Uninstall”
* To uninstall the plugin in Internet Explorer, go to the Control Panel, select “Add/Remove Programs“, select the plugin, and click “Uninstall“. In Internet Explorer 6.0 and up, you can select the “Manage Add-ons” menu option to uninstall the plugin directly from the browser.

Advertisers Interest!
In addition to ads based on interest categories, Google also allows advertisers to show you ads based on your previous interactions with them, such as visits to their websites. For example, someone who visited the website of an online sporting goods store can receive ads about special offers from that store. Advertisers cannot use this technology to identify you personally, but it enables them to deliver much more relevant ads to groups of users who previously visited to their website.

Here is a video to help us understand about Ads preferences:

Google further clarifies some of the points:-
1. Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google’s ad serving.
2. Choice – We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
3. Control – You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn’t deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.

To participate in Google’s Interest-based advertising beta you have to fill out the form.

Many people strongly feel that this is a threat to their privacy! But I don’t see anything new, in placing a cookie and getting the user info by websites. Even Google had previously cleared the misconception that they try to access users private data!. People around the world getting so much addicted to using Google products that Google can already be knowing most of the user behavior!. And the the webmasters most useful tool Google analytics can already track user activity on a website which has analytics codes installed. Google is now using this to its advantage, by making use of these data and showing more specific and more relevant ads to the web users.
Google is shooting to its own leg by giving the optout option 🙂 But again Google highly believes in keeping the trust of their users inorder to grow in the business..and this is one of the things which we have learnt from Google and admire Google a lot for.
Only thing to make sure is, how apt the ads will be delivered. How relevant the ads start showing. Google is cleaver, as it doesn’t launch any of its product before through testing in its Beta program(we can see many Google products in Beta from years!). As always we need to wait and see how this works for Google.

And one more thing we see around the web is, many people are telling that the keywords based advertising or the contextual advertising is dead! But hey, this program is still in Beta, and there are many advertising programs like CPM, CPC, CPA(Cost Per Action), CPD(Cost Per Day) etc. Non of them killed contextual advertising. Ofcourse they took off a major market share in advertising industry and again its just a part and not the whole thing 🙂
I feel that, if atall these Interest Based Advertising succeed, it will just be a smart advertising which will bring in more conversions. But contextual advertising will still play a major role, as there are many cybers, offices, colleges, schools, public places where there is a computer(with internet), where Google won’t be able to track the user behavior, as most of these places cookies will be turned off by default or Google will trace such places and start showing contextual advertising as it can’t track the user behavior at such places:)
To conclude, Interest Based Advertising can’t replace contextual advertising. Ofcourse it will take a major advertising share, if it succeeds in getting more conversion and users Interest!

What do you think about Interest Based Advertising — Are you really Interested ?
Does this solve any problem ? or does it create any ?

Please share your thoughts in the comment section.

An Interview with Chitika(CHIH-tih-ka)

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 2 billion monthly impressions across more than 30,000 websites. For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a proven channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is an easy-to-use platform for earning daily ad revenue.

What does Chitika mean?
When Chitika co-founders, Venkat Kolluri and Alden DoRosario left Lycos in 2003 to start their own company, they sought a name that would suggest the speed with which its customers would be able to put up ads on their Web sites. Chitika, which means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu (a South Indian language), captured this sentiment and Chitika Inc. was born. Chitika introduced its online-ads service in January, 2004.
Chitika-eventfamilypic
Since the start of the company it has been mentioned in many of the mainstream media and has been one of the favorite for many “A” grade bloggers. We also use chitika, its been so great in terms of income generation so far. Haven’t seen us, using Chitika, that’s the secret of Chitika(premium) ads. They are invisible to direct visitors!

Ok, without much delay, here we present you the interview that we did with Ryan Travis Director of Client Services
Chitika, Inc.

1. We are very much curious about all the guys behind Chitika, and we want to have a look at your office. If you have any video or photographs(of your employees and office) then please share it with our readers.

Ah – sorry – I don’t have any pictures other than what you can see on our family page!

2. Do you read blogs? If yes, then which are your favorite blogs?

Yes I definitely do read blogs. For keeping up with business, I love to read ProBlogger, TechCrunch, ShoeMoney, and many others. For pleasure, I read PitchforkMedia.com (great for news), Stereogum, N4G, and lots of other sites (I’m a big music and video games nerd!).

3. We know that Chitika was started in 2003. So its not that old, so how could you manage to get the exposure? What do you think, was a stepping stone for Chitika?

Well our first major step was actually somewhat of an accident. Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) came across our ads and began using them, and they worked really well on his sites. He ended up writing a very positive review on the performance, and we really got a lot of exposure from that.

More recently, our Chitika | Premium ads have taken us to an even bigger audience. Our original eMiniMalls ads worked great only for sites about products, but now our new Chitika | Premium ads are doing fantastic on all types of sites (finance, travel, etc. – and don’t worry – they still work great on product sites too!).

4. How do you define success?

Heh.. that is a good question! I would define success as meeting or exceeding the goals that you have set (or that are set for you).

5. What are the mistakes you see your publishers and advertisers are making, in using Chitika

Well I am on the Publisher side so I can only speak for publishers – but the biggest mistake that I see constantly is placement. Publishers will often put our ads in placements that are just not good at all, and then they get upset when they don’t get any clicks on the ads. It is very frustrating! We try to fix this by sending out emails and creating pages to educate the publishers, and by putting up placement guides like this one.

6. What repels you the most from a blog/website(animation at your face advertising etc) ?

Yes – extremely animated ads (“shoot the monkey”, etc.), and especially ads with sound. I really hate hearing “Congratulations, you have won a free iPod!”.. that drives me crazy!

7. What are the new year resolutions for Chitika?

In 2008, we surpassed Ask.com in monthly search-targeted ads served. The next largest provider is Microsoft, and in 2009, we want to surpass them too.

8. How is Chitika differ from other ad networks?

We do a lot of things differently from other ad networks, but I would say that the main difference is in how we target and display our ads. With Chitika | Premium ads, we will only display to search engine traffic, and we will target the ads to what the user was searching for.

This allows us to show extremely relevant ads, and gives the users a good experience. Regular readers who come to your site directly will not see the ads at all – which makes them happy and keeps them coming back.

9. What inspired the idea of targeting the search engine visitors ?

The basic idea is this: better targeted ads means more money – for both publishers and advertisers. If we can target the ads to what people are searching for, then that is really a win-win situation for everyone involved.

10. We see you in twitter, helping your publishers in all possible manner. How do you manage your time?

Ha – terribly! That is something that I am really trying to improve on. It is hard to find a balance between helping everyone out individually, and forming higher-level plans of projects and different items I want to do. I’m still trying to figure out the correct mix, but I feel that it is extremely important to get out there and interact with our customers, no matter what size their sites are.

11. How big or how small is Chitika, as a company?

We are medium-sized. You can see some of us on our “Family” page – that shows the people who have been here the longest. Also – we are currently hiring for several new positions.

12. What all features are in your to do list of Chitika?

Too many! If I list them all here, I might take up all the space on your server 😉

13. If you knew what you know now when you first started Chitika, whats the one biggest tip you would give yourself today?

Do crazy stuff. I think that we all tend to get a little caught up in our worlds of trying to meet our numbers goals, and we get scared to try new/wild ideas. I have found that some of our most successful projects were the “crazy” ones.

14. Strategies used to promot Chitika ?

Lots – but mainly we rely on word-of-mouth. If we do a great job at helping publishers make money, then they will talk about it.

15. Your advice for all chitika publishers/advertisers to make the most out of chitika.

Try new things, and track them by using channels. It is amazing how much improvement you can make by just testing out little changes, like placement, link colors, etc. You should try a lot of different ideas, and see which ones work best. Check out the Chitika Blog for tips on where to place ads, and different ways to customize them.

16. Please tell something, that you would like all your advertisers/publishers/ and others to know about Chitika

Our ads work best when used together on the same page with AdSense – we are meant to be used as a compliment for AdSense, rather than a replacement. Our most successful publishers use both together.

Hope you enjoyed the interview. Ryan is really helpful for all the publishers. If you are a Chitika publisher, then feel free to contact him, if you have any problem or if you need any suggestions. Thanks Ryan and Chitika for the interview.

If you have not yet tried Chitika, then please give it a try. Chitika premium really works like a charm on many sites. Signup for chitika. And please leave your valuable comments in the comment section.

Blue Screen of Death — On HTC touch 3452

One of my friend also own a HTC Touch 3452 and he had read my blog and was knowing that I also have the same phone.

He had trouble restoring his phone to factory settings. Last week we had written an article about “Resetting HTC touch 3452 and 3450“. He was very happy after seeing the article on our blog and rushed to format his phone.

While formatting / restoring he remembered that his Memory Card was still inside the phone! So he again rushed to remove the card before the phone restarted automatically(after confirming the restore activity).
To his shock, after the phone got restarted it started showing a blue screen(similar to that we see in Windows computer OS, when there are some major errors!).

He was in a hurry so I couldn’t get a screen shot of it. The blue screen had a message that, he should not remove the battery while the phone restarts and it said to click on the “Yes” option(there were two options “YES” and “NO” on the screen) to continue the booting of the device.
But to his surprise when he clicked on the “Yes” button with his stylus, it never responded to the touch. He had tried all other means like, using the top most button to switch OFF/ON the phone, removing the battery and putting it back. But nothing had worked. He was tensed and finally called mobile service center, but they never responded to his problem but instead told him to submit the phone to their service center and they would test it for a week and tell him the result 🙁
Obviously no one likes his personal phone to be in someone’s hand so long!

Simple solution to this problem is….there are 2 buttons on the phone, below the screen. Its main function is “accepting”(in green colour) and “rejecting”(in red colour) calls. Just press the green colour button and the device will restart by itself and everything will work normally from then.

htc_touch_3452_3450
As the device is a touch screen phone with no external keypads in it, people tend to forget two keys present on the phone. In the above case, as the OS has not yet loaded, so the touch functionality also wont be working. So we need to work using the minimum keys present on the device.

New Chat & SMS Widget inside Classic Yahoomail!

I was using Yahoomail as usual, and suddenly something popped up with a water bubble bursting sound. I could see a blue widget above my email folders. I never did anything to get this. No settings, no modifications, no plugins. I was just checking my mail and the blue widget appeared and after a refresh it disappeared. I used the back button in my FireFox browser and took the screen shots of the chat & sms widget.
It had already imported all the contacts and mobile numbers from my Yahoo! messenger.
It looks cool, loads fast.
Here are some screen shots:

It appeared in the Classic Yahoomail and not in the upgraded version of YahooMail. Upgraded version of Yahoomail already has a separate portion for chatting. But this is something new and better, as we need not move from the inbox to start chatting(some what similar to that in Gmail.)

Click above image to see in full screen

Tab for multiple user chat
Did you notice this widget in your Yahoo mail? Hope this is in the initial state of testing. And Yahoo! will rollout this feature to all its users some time in the future.

Got the Chat and SMS widget back in my Yahoo Mail again. Its not disappearing now. Its nice to chat and adds more fun to its already famous Mail

Adsense Homepage Changed — Login Problem!

We just tried to check our adsense account. But to our surprise, we saw the adsense homepage being changed. But wait…that’s not the reason for our surprise, as we already knew that homepage is going to change shortly. The surprise is, we were not able to log into our adsense account!
Hmm..we immediately visited our blog, and the ads were still delivered on our blog. Meaning, we are not banned from adsense for any anonymous reasons!
So we think its the problem from their end.
adsense-homepage
The new homepage looks clean. And there is a link called “solutions for publishers!“, which has the link to all the products from Google which are useful for publishers.
The problem is: When we click on the “Already using AdSense? Sign in »” link it takes us to the log in screen. Which basically increases the number of clicks!
adsense-login-screen
And when we type our Gmail ID and password(associated with adsense), it takes us to “Manage Account“. Where it shows all the Google services we are presently signedup with. Now if you click on the adsense link, it will again take you to the new Adsense homepage and again to the same login screen, when you click on “Already using AdSense? Sign in »” !
So we are still not able to log into our adsense account and there are no official words yet about these changes on adsense blog.
I am sure that adsense team will already be working hard to fix the problem. Just waiting for their final words on their blog.

Did you notice the new adsense homepage? Do you think its better than the old one. We know that it doesn’t make much difference for people using adsense from many years, but it will surly make a huge difference for the first time visitor.
And the important thing…Are you able to log into your adsense account? Did you encounter any problem while logging in?

” The issue is confirmed. Many people are facing the same problem. Interestingly enough, if you try to log into the same account using some other computer or with other browser in the same computer, there is chances that you see the same old login screen and you can normally log into your adsense account. Hope Adsense team is testing something new and will roll out things to everyone soon or if the login problem persists, adsense team may roll back this new change and may show the usual login screen. Lets hope for the best 🙂 “

“If you have any urgency in checking your adsense earnings and impressions then go ahead and log into your analytics account, if you have integrated it with your adsense account, to get all those details. Just a temporary work around 🙂 “. But remember Analytics will not show you real time updates!