Service

Technotip.org Android App + App Service

Going forward I’ll be more active with blogging and will concentrate on writing about business ideas, entrepreneurship and startups. Will also continue writing about tools to run business and online marketing and online sales.

Today we’re excited to announce the release of our android application. It has a clean look and feel and has minimalist and straightforward options.

A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.

We had built this app some months back and had distributed it privately to some of our readers/friends and checked with them constantly for their feedback. After using the app for 10 days they said they are more likely to read the articles via the app than directly from the website. Mobile app display felt more comfortable for most of the users and hence we made some minor changes after getting real users feedback and today we are excited to release the app for everyone to download and take maximum advantage of it.

You can download our app from Google Play Store.

Features
1. Has a list of 8 recent articles on the homepage and user can navigate to older blog posts.
2. Clear reading experience with bigger fonts on article page.
3. Facility to bookmark the article and read later from bookmarks section.
4. Cache the recently viewed article for offline reading.
5. List of pages.
6. Search facility.
7. List posts based on Category.
8. List posts by author/contributor.
9. Invite others to our app via WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email.
Option to rate the app.
10. Facility to directly share the posts and pages with others from inside the app via – WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, SMS, Email etc.

Service
I’ll build your WordPress sites android application for you. You can see more about it at Android App Service For Your Blog

While on the service page, read how you’ll be earning a lot more than you invest for the development of your blogs android app. Also you can do your research and know for yourself how many active mobile users are using their mobiles to read content online.

Here is the link to Google Play Store once again for Technotip.org Android App

Target Advertising – What We Can Learn?

Target advertising has become a major success in web advertising industry. We see this in action every day on most of the websites.
Google has implemented this into their adwords system so the ads may seem more and more relevant and according to the user interest.

Example Ad:
Orkut has a lot of users from India and it collects various user data like internet speed, demographics etc — get a clue from their advertise page This is used effectively for advertising.

Video: Airtel Broadband ad on Orkut — Target Advertising

Airtel broadband ads are more targeted to low bandwidth users and these ads show the ease of uploading photos to Orkut using their high speed internet connection.

Take away message:
1. We can learn how to advertise our content, product, service effectively.
2. We should sell at a place where we have our potential customers.
3. The ad copy must convey the message properly.
4. Showing the result in action.
Ex: Showing how your product has helped someone reach their goal or improve their business or life.

Is your a/c used to SPAM Twitter?

Have you ever noticed a Tweet from your Twitter account, which you did not tweet!

When people come across such situation they straight away think that their account has been hacked. But its not the case always.

There are many services built around Twitter and most of them use Twitter API for log in or authentication purpose. While using such services, be careful while you share your Twitter ID and Password. Read the policy properly. Recently I saw a service which required my Twitter ID and Password, to let me use their service. With curiosity I read their policy page. There they had clearly mentioned that, they will periodically use our Twitter account to Tweet about their service, for promotional purpose!

After reading this policy, I started searching for the policy page of “Instantly Increase your Twitter Followers” kind of services. And found that many of them had the same policy. After reading this policy, I started noticing those automated, promotional tweets from some peoples or tweeples account. Most of them never know that their Twitter account is being used by others.

If the service you are using is intentionally evil, then they will not let you remove yourself from that service. In such case, use your Twitter account settings > Connections tab page to disallow any of these services from using your account. And change your password, for more security.

The above image is just an example and it doesn’t showcase any fraud or scam companies that are trying to misuse your Twitter a/c.
Of course, not all services that use Twitter API for authentication are bad. Most of these services respect users privacy, but some services are misusing this facility. So do not hesitate to kick them off, from accessing your account.

Even worst cases, have you shared your Twitter username and password with any service, which do not use Twitter API for authentication? If yes, then first change your password without fail and never give your username and password again.

Twitter allows only trusted parties to use their API, but still no system is 100% perfect, so no exception to Twitter.

Interview with BuddingBloggers + Contest

Today we have Satish Gandham, UG student from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, a blogger @ GeniusHackers.com and the founder of BuddingBloggers, for the interview. Whats interesting about him is, through BuddingBloggers program, he is providing free domains and top class ad free hosting and lots of other freebies for able bloggers. He was kind enough to give us a interview. So we could ask more about his new service BuddingBloggers.

Here is the interview:-

1. What is BuddingBloggers service about ?

The common problem faced by many bloggers during the initial stages of their blogging career is not having a reliable hosting and a domain name. So we are going to provide able bloggers with free domain names, top class ad free hosting, and freebies like premium wordpress themes. We motivate them and keep them inspired.

2. What are the long term benefits for you, as a company? Because you do not even show ads on the websites that are hosted by buddingbloggers!

We place our badge and our sponsors badge on the participants’ blogs, that will help us build our brand. We also place 5 sponsored links (Like the blog rolls) on the blogs, that will help us pay the domain and the hosting fee. We will also place ads on your support blog, right now there isn’t enough traffic any, I prefer clean look over the few cents from adsense.

3. Under Whose name will the domain be registered?

I’m currently registering the domains under my name, later they will be transferred to w3mixx.Com, My future web solutions company.

4. If someone already have a website, and needs to terminate as he/she is not able to pay for his domain and hosting. In such case will you provide free hosting, for already existing domain and transfer the hosted files to buddingbloggers?

Yes, We will renew the domain and provide free hosting.

5. Is your program permitted only for bloggers?

Our program focuses primarily on bloggers, but we are also open to people who are keen to make their web presence felt.

6. Please share about your business model.

We just want to help upcoming bloggers, and build a strong community, where a member of BuddingBloggers gets a special respect among the bloggers community.

7. How are you different from your competitors? And what do you do to standout off the crowd?

We provide top class web hosting. We will never shut down. Our service is almost ads free, we provide guidance and technical support. We organize contests to keep the bloggers motivated. We have prizes for the best and innovative bloggers.
For every participant we accept, we set some reserve money which will back him up in case if we ever have to quit this project. (This is not to hint that we are going to quit some day,” Hope for the best, plan for the worst”)
Your blog is completely secured with BuddingBloggers, we will never let you down.

8. Do you place any ads on the sponsored blogs?

We don’t place any ads except for the small sponsorship badge and 5 unobtrusive text links.

9. Is BuddingBloggers affected by the “First mover advantage theory”. As I see that there were and still are some other services giving free domain and hosting.

We haven’t done full fledged advertising yet, so can’t comment on that.

10. Why do you think people will use your service?

One obvious reason for which i would have wanted to use this service 2 years ago.
“They either don’t have money or don’t have the credit card or paypal to pay for the domain and hosting”

11. What are the common mistakes that people do, after registering their domain/hosting from buddingbloggers?

The common mistake I see is when they apply, Most of the applications we get are incomplete, and we simply ignore them.
They can not expect us to give a free domain name if they don’t have the patience to fill the application.
Once they are in, its our mistake if they screw up or not active. We either have not selected the right participant or we haven’t provided the right support.

12. How big / small is your company?

Our company is very small at the moment, I work from my hostel. HackMinded @ HackersLane.com and Saurabh @ vlovers.com (participants of BuddingBloggers) help me in reviewing the applications and maintaining the forum.
We don’t have any physical office right now. We may have one after I get out of college next year.

13. Can we know about the configuration of the server you use to host the websites?

We are currently having a VPS at Doreo, we will soon be moving to a dedicated server. We are planning to setup our own data center next year.

14. What about the uptime records of the servers?

Doreo has literally 100% up time, they are pricey and they provide the value for the price.

15. Do you think, a serious blogger who want to earn his living from his blog should go with his own domain & hosting or he has to obtain it from BuddingBloggers?

I think they should join BuddingBloggers, we are providing all the services for free including the technical support, joining BuddingBloggers will give more exposure to their blog.
We have lots of contests and freebies to keep them motivated.

16. What are your advice for a person who is new to blogging and want to create an account with blogspot.com or wordpress.com ?

If you are serious about blogging, buy your domain and start with wordpress as you blogging platform. If you cannot afford to buy a domain or hosting, give us a try.

17. What are the strict rules(policies) that your customers should follow, in order to be your customer?

Have the passion for blogging and blog regularly.

18. Earning opportunity using your services?

Participants can monetize their blog in every possible way, we don’t place ads from any ad networks. So they can use adsense, adbrite, bidvertiser, chitika, clicksor etc..
They can also write some sponsored posts.

19. What are the future plans for BuddingBloggers?

We want to build a strong community and give it a status where people take pride in being a member of BuddingBloggers. In future people who can afford to buy own domain and hosting may join BuddingBloggers just to be a part of the community.

20. You are having a blog which is already popular, did this add to the popularity of buddingbloggers?

Yep, I blog at GeniusHackers.Com, I think it is popular 🙂

21. Is this your full time job?

No, this is not my full time job. I’m doing my final year of Bachelors in Chemical Science and Technology @ Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

22. How do you define success?

Success is reaching the goals you set for yourself, at the end you should be happy with what you have done and be able to enjoy it.

23. Is there a story for the birth of BuddingBloggers. If so, then please share with our readers.

I started blogging for fun, my first blog was huntme.wordpress.com. I had no plan to monetize my blog initially, I started getting 1000+ page views per day within 10 days.
This traffic going useless bothered me, so I offered some downloads related to the posts on some free web hosting account and monetized that page with adsense. The results were quite good. When everything was going smoothly, one day my blog was suspended as i was diverting traffic from it to my downloads page with ads. After that i had to hang around with some free web hosts as I was not having a paypal account or credit card to pay. When this wordpress and other free posts kicked my blog out after getting established, all the time and effort I put in my blog for months was wasted.
Now I have an established blog and making enough money from it, so I wanted to prevent at least some bloggers from facing the problems I had in my early days of blogging career.

24. Please share the story of “your journey to blogging” and online world as a whole.

I started blogging just to improve my writing skills, I blogged for myself. Luckily people liked what i wrote and my blog was successful 🙂 , unfortunately that was banned. Then I had to hang around with some free webhosts, until I found a web hosting company accepting payment from online bank transfer. I bought a domain and hosting, from then there is no looking back 😀 .
I used to spend lot of my time on developing new content, tweaking the blog look and design. PHP and HTML/CSS that I learned as a hobby came in very handy in maintaining the blog. I won a premium theme in a contest at BlogOhBlog.Com, that premium theme gave a new look and authority to my blog. That’s the first tipping point of my blog. Then there was blogging idol contest @ DailyBlogTips.Com where we had to increase our feed count, I started a rapidshare give away. That kicked my feed count from 500 to 6000+ in 3 months (Unfortunately i couldnt win that contest as this idea stuck to me when the contest was about to close )

Hope you all enjoyed the interview. For more details and latest updates about the service visit BuddingBloggers. And please pass this interview link to all your friends to whom you think it will be of some use(ad free, Free hosting + Free Domain ). And please share your thoughts in the comment section.

Contest: Tweet this article and we will select one lucky winner and will give you a domain(of your choice) for free. The domain will be registered in your name for 1 year, and you are free to host it anywhere. I sponsored this contest to motivate people to spread the news about BuddingBloggers service, it will surly help many people.
Even though you are not in need of a domain, please make sure that you tweet about this article, it may help someone following you.

RT: Enter the chance to win a free domain. Follow @technotip, visit http://bit.ly/kM7dH and RT to help your followers

Yahoo! Geocities: Closed

Note: Present customers need not to worry till later this year. But Yahoo! Geocities is closed for new registrations.
Yahoo-geocities-closed

There will be no changes for the existing customers account. You can continue using the service till Yahoo! announces the exact date of the closure. Yahoo will announce about the data backup and will update its help center to help its existing customers take back their data safely.

Note that both GeoCities Free or Plus accounts will be closed later this year. So existing customers need to think of their data from now itself, though Yahoo! says not to worry about your data till this summer. As soon as possible, we need to redirect our customers to our new website. So if you have any serious blog/site in GeoCities, it is advisable to move as soon as possible, as Yahoo will not be opening any new channels for free hosting.

Yahoo-geocities-closed

On the foot steps of Google, Yahoo is closing its free hosting service later this year. According to Yahoo! the reason for this closure is to encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web hosting plan to consider upgrading to their award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service. Yahoo! has a hosting business and why will it be willing to shoot at its own leg by providing free hosting!

Google had shut down GooglePages.com and it allowed its customers to transfer the existing data to Google sites. Google sites does not support css and java script, thus making it almost worthless!
On the other hand Yahoo! does not have any plans to open another free hosting service.

Will it encourage people to signup for award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service? There are many other free hosting services available. Whats your thoughts about this move from Yahoo!

For anyone looking for a professional hosting, we suggest Doreo host and you can try it for free for 45 days.

Free Domain and Hosting — Interview with HyperWebEnable

HyperWebEnable is a web 2.0 company offering reliable web services and online advertising based on the foundation of robust web techniques. HyperWebEnable is located in Bay area, California.
hyperwebenable-logo2
As far we know, hyperwebenable provides free domain(also free renewal) [www.yourdomainname.com] and free hosting. Seems to be unbelievable right? But its true. They have some innovative concepts, which enables them to give all these for free.. We were excited to talk to the CEO of the company Mr.Lakshman Kumar. And here is the interview with him. You can also ask him questions in the comment section, if you have any!

1. We are curious to know about your service. Please explain briefly.

Hyperwebenable.com is the service which provide users with complete
website for the blog rather than sub domain. We provide complete domain to the user like yoursitename.com; While most other blog services provide sub domains like
yourblogname.freeblogservice.com. We want to provide maximum service to the bloggers by providing email services and add on features for their blog.

2. Whats the long term benefits for you, as a company?

We are a fast growing business. With 500 domains currently registered
under our service and 4 million monthly impressions and growing, we foresee a bright future down the road.

3. What are the common mistakes that people do, after registering their domain from you?

The most common mistake they do is not updating there blog often and do not generate any traffic for there website.

4. How big / small is your company?

We have 3 team members in US and we have 3 developers in support center in Hyderabad in India.

5. Can we know about the configuration of the server you use to host the websites?

All our servers are quad core Intel dedicated servers .

6. We see that you have partnership with Guruji. Ghost, VYEW, CPME2PLaY. Can we know whats the benefits of these partnerships for you as a company and for your customers?

We have partnerships with other companies to provide more services for the user like ghost for webOS service and vyew for web conference service and guruji for search service to the bloggers.

7. Do you think, a serious blogger who want to earn his living from his blog should go with his own domain & hosting or he has to obtain it from HyperWebEnable?

We are providing all the services free and also we provide support if your blog has issues. Why pay money for services that we already provide for free?

8. What about the uptime records of your servers?

we are maintaining 99.6% uptime for our servers until now.

9. We can see that, there are some very good blogs using your services. And we have also seen them getting lot of traffic. And we have heard that, you provide lot of support, tips and tricks to get traffic and build the site. Can we know more about this?

When we provide the domain to our customer we also provide them with tutorials and optimization tips for SEO. For generating traffic the most important thing is to get link backs and the easiest way to get the linkback is by submitting links to blog directories and link share with other members.

10. Please share about your business model.

Our business model is, we provide complete services to the bloggers and in turn we place 2 banners in your website which generates revenue to provide the service.

11. Is this your full time job?

No I work full time in a company. I spend 3 hours for hyperwebenable and we have full time team of 3 people in Hyderabad .

12. Whats your advice for a person who is new to blogging and want to create an account with blogspot.com or wordpress.com ?

Most blog service have very few features, compared to ours. They do not provide email and they do not provide ftp service and you can’t add more features like forum or cms for your blog. Most of all we provide the kind of support and flexibility that most bloggers miss.

13. Share some of the strict rules(policies) that your customers should follow, inorder to be your customer?

Only one simple rule is to be active and generate good traffic for the website provided by us.

14. Earning opportunity using your services?

User can earn money from the blog provided by us. May be by placing some Google ads or any other ads in their website. We do not have any restriction on the number of ads or type of ads they put on the website.

15. What are the future plans for HyperWebEnable?

We are planning to grow faster in coming days and reach 1000 websites in end of this year and also planning expand our services to wide range of people.

16. Why do you think people should use your service?

Our service is more flexible and transparent compared to other blog service and we provide more control to the users, on their website.

17. Is there any fixed number of ads served by you or is it fluctuating?

We usually place 2 banners in the website provided by us.

18. Under Whose name will the domain be registered?

The domain will be registered under HyperWebEnable.

19. If someone already have a website, and needs to terminate as he is not able to pay for his domain and hosting. In such case will you provide free hosting, for already existing domain and transfer the hosted files to hyperwebenable?

Yes we will provide free hosting service even in such cases. But the site will come under our terms and conditions of service.

20. Presently your Office is located at ?

We do not have physical office every one works at home its virtual
office every one is connected by Internet by VOIP services

21. Do you read blogs? Which are your favorite?

I do not have time to read blogs and I do not have blog of my own.

22. By your name, you seem to be an Indian. Can you please share about your past and present life with our readers?

I am Indian, I am from a village of Andhra Pradesh. I am presently in
silicon valley in california USA. I have done by computers engineering from SV university in Andhra Pradesh. Later I worked in Hyderabad for couple of companies like Orillion, ADP wilco and Wipro for 3 years.
I have moved 2 years back to USA and I started hyperwebenable.com
service on first quarter of 2008.

23. How does your day look like? You seem to be a busy man!

My day starts with going to my full time job and back by 7:00 at evening and at evening I start working on hyperwebenable.com for 3-4 hours and talking to Indian team.

24. Whats your opinion about Internet Business and the real world jobs? Which one do you prefer and why?

Running internet business takes more time to earn revenue to survive but once you get enough revenue to survive its always better then the normal job. You can work on your choice of time.
But normal job we have to travel to office and work on the office timings.

We had a nice time chatting with Lakshaman Kumar, CEO of hyperwebenable. For more details and latest updates about the service visit hypewebenable. Hope you enjoyed reading the interview. And please pass this interview link to all your friends whom you think it will be of some use(Free Domain & Hosting 🙂 ). And please share your thoughts in the comment section.

Get SMS alerts of your schedules from Google Calendar

We can’t be infront of our computer all the time to see our Google Calendar, for our next schedule. So Google has implemented SMS alert feature to its Google Calendar service. The SMS supports 38 languages so far.

Setting up the SMS alert is very easy. You should have your cell phone in your hand while you setup the alert, as you need to verify you mobile number.

Here are some self explanatory screen shots to setup Google Calendar SMS alert…

Make use of this Google Service without fail. This can help a lot. If you don’t have any near important schedule, then, keep a schedule of your loved ones birthday and an important date in your life and Google Calendar will remind you through SMS.

Send and receive Orkut Scraps on your SMS enabled mobile phones[India&Brazil Only]

Orkut is a very famous Social networking site in Brazil and India. I have heard that, in Brazil, if 20 are in a cyber, 18 of them will be accessing Orkut. Hope this is not the case in India, but still Orkut is a popular site to get in touch with friends and family.

But its difficult to be in front of computer all the time to get in touch with friends and family. So Orkut had introduced a separate version of Orkut for mobile internet users. But as we all know, most of the service providers charge high rates for providing mobile internet.

So now Google’s popular social networking site Orkut has introduced yet another cool feature, by which we can use Orkut from our cell phones without internet connection. Yes, I am talking about the SMS feature. Orkut had introduced SMS feature in Brazil long back. If you are from Brazil, then click here to learn more.

So I was expecting Orkut to release the same kind of feature in India too. And the day came soon, and now we can use orkut’s new SMS feature, to scrap our friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications.

I always had a thought that Google may merge its Orkut and dodgeball.com to give us a great social networking site. Now Orkut SMS service would look more similar to dodgeball.com( by Google ) service.

To get started click here. There you will see option to specify your mobile number to receive notifications. You will have to verify your mobile number first to start using this service.

When I first saw the list of service providers, I felt like, I am missing something. And suddenly I could realize that, Big players like Airtel and Vodafone where missing from the list! Hope they include them as soon as possible, orelse they will be loosing many customers, before acquiring them.

I use Spice SIM in my Nokia 6630(“3G enabled iPhone will be released on Aug 18th and Aug 22nd by Vodafone and Airtel respectively, in India”. And I will be purchaing iPhone with Airtel soon..).

Spice charges 2Rs for sending mobile verification SMS.

Though I used my Spice number to signup for this service and sent the verification code to the correct number, still this service is not yet activated to my number. I received no confirmation message from Orkut either.

And surprisingly I spotted another aspect….which I have not shown in the above video. When I click on the link “Having Problem?” It shows the following message

Currently orkut SMS works only in Brazil. If you are still not able to register your mobile number visit the SMS help page.

Here is the screen shot…

What should we call this…an error or is this SMS feature still in pre-launch mode in India or is it a pre-registration or whatelse ?

Is this Me alone or everyone else having the same problem with registering their mobile number?