February, 2009

Gifted Myself A Brand New HTC 3452

If you are following me on twitter then you might already know that I have bought a Brand New HTC 3452 on Maha Shivaratri.
The heavy box comes with:
HTC Touch phone[1 GB card included],Handsfree — Earphone,USB Cable,1 Battery,2 stylus [1 in the phone and 1 extra],Case/pouch,Travel Charger,Manual,CD Rom.
Features Include:..Pros/Cons

If you are following me on twitter then you might already know that I have bought a Brand New HTC 3452 on Maha Shivaratri.
Accessories HTC 3452 Pocket PC
The heavy box comes with:
HTC Touch phone[1 GB card included].
Handsfree — Earphone.
USB Cable.
1 Battery.
2 stylus [1 inside the phone and 1 extra].
Case/pouch.
Travel Charger.
Manual.
CD Rom.
HTC 3452 PocketPC
Features Include:
General Network GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900
Size Dimensions 99.9 x 58 x 13.9 mm
Weight 112 g
Display Type TFT touchscreen, 65K colors
Size 240 x 320 pixels, 2.8 inches
– TouchFLO finger swipe navigation
– Handwriting recognition
– 5-way navigation
Ringtones Type Polyphonic (40 channels), MP3
Customization Download,
Vibration Yes
Memory Phonebook In shared memory, Photo call
Call records Yes
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), 1 GB card included,
– 64 MB RAM, 128 MB ROM
– TI OMAP 850, 201 MHz
processor
Data GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Yes
3G No
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0
Infrared port No
USB Yes, miniUSB
Features: OS Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional
Messaging :SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser: WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML (PocketIE)
Games :Yes,
Colors: Soft Black, Wasabi Green
Camera: 2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels, video
– Pocket Office(Word, Excel, Outlook, PDF viewer)
– Java MIDP 2.0
– Voice memo
– MP3/AAC player
– Video/audio album
– Built-in handsfree
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 1100 mAh
Stand-by Up to 200 h
Talk time Up to 5hrs

First Impression about the phone is very good. The best thing is its looks!
Its small and looks sexy. Anybody who go for looks while purchasing pocket PC can look at HTC 3452 once, I am sure you will be impressed.

Previously HTC had released HTC 3450 which is a slower device, so they upgraded RAM and ROM(almost doubled) and called it HTC 3452. If you want any advice to choose between HTC 3452 and 3450, then we recommend HTC 3452(obviously!).

Lock/Unlock ???
Will this phone work with Vodafone or Airtel etc?
I am in India and I am using Spice/Idea and its working great. And I am sure that, the phone will even support Airtel, Vodafone, Aircel etc, in India. No need to struggle to unlock.
If you are staying outside India, then you need to refer your service providers website or contact customer care to know whether their service support the phone. Or you can leave a comment below this article(please specify your country and more details) and someone may answer you soon. I will also try my best to solve your problem.

Good things first!:
1. Very Good looking Design.

2. Good screen clarity.

3. Speed is almost doubled when compared to HTC 2340.

4. Very simple to use. I have used many pocket PCs, but this one is smallest and simplest and still effective.

5. If you are using HTC 3452 or 3450, then please list some of your experiences in the comment section. I am new to HTC and I still need some time to know more about it….

The Down side of the phone is:
1. It does not have a physical keyboard. It has a very good onscreen keyboard, which works amazingly good. But nothing can beat the physical keypads present in my previous phone Nokia 6630.

2. It has a very good speaker which is placed backside of the phone! So, its not so audible when placed on a table with its screen facing upwards.

3. I was not able to sync the device with my computer and after struggling for some hours I could find the culprit as USB cable which came with the phone. Just used the USB cable of my camera and I was able to sync my phone with the computer with in some seconds. [Hope this happened due to some fault in the cable which I have, and may not happen to others].

Small Size HTC 3452 PocketPC
4. Ear Phone and outspeaker sound quality is not upto the mark.
5. Very small..This can be advantage for some and disadvantage for some. But before arguing, you need to first look at its size. Its very small, and sometimes may sound like a problem.

I decided to buy HTC 3452 because iPhone is too costly in India. And HTC has some good reputation and 3452 can impress anybody 🙂
And while choosing a mobile, do not just see for the list of features that the device has, see for the things which you want and need frequently. If you are a blogger you may need some of the features like Word Processor, PDF readers, and some others(these can be obtained by installing some software, but the phone should support it.) This is just an example. But not all individuals have same needs and wants, so look for the features which you want. — Just my 2 cents.

I will write more about HTC 3452 on this blog, on Saturday and Sunday’s. So that my regular readers who are not interested in HTC phones won’t get bugged up. And for people who are interested in HTC phones can read some tips,tricks about using the phone on Sunday or Saturday.
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Change the font face of the text in adsense ad units

Adsense ads have worked great when we blend the ads according to the look and feel of our website.
Examples:-
1. Change the background colour of the ad unit to the background colour of your blog.
2. Use the font colour of the text in the ad similar to that on your blog.
3. Change the colour of the links in the ad to match the colour of the links on your blog.

These simple tweaks will optimize the ad zone.

Now to add to this blending and optimization, Adsense team has released yet another cool feature to our control. i.e., Changing the font face of the ad unit.

In HTML and XHTML, a font face or font family is the typeface that is applied to some text.
Ex:-
<font face="times, serif">Sample text.</font>

Adsense publishers are now allowed to choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they’ll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters. Latin-based languages include:

* Croatian
* Czech
* Danish
* Dutch
* English (U.S. and U.K.)
* Finnish
* French
* German
* Hungarian
* Indonesian
* Italian
* Norwegian
* Polish
* Portuguese
* Romanian
* Slovak
* Spanish
* Swedish
* Turkish
So if your blog/website is written in some other language(other than listed above) then custom font face will not work and the default[‘Standard AdSense font family’] font face is shown on such sites[Ex:- Ads on pages mainly in Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian, among others, will not be shown in custom fonts].

You can use this feature to your advantage in two ways:
1. If you’d like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the ‘Ad Display Preference‘ section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you’ve created in the past.
font-face-adsense

2. You can also change the font of individual ad unit while creating new ad units.

If you want to change the font face of already existing ad units, goto AdSense Setup tab –> Manage Ads now click on the “Edit Ad settings” of the corresponding ad, that you want to edit. You can find a section called “Font“, which is ment to change the font face of that ad unit.
font-face-adsense

If you apply “Arial” font globally to all your adsense ads, then also you can over write it(for individual ad units) by changing the settings in “Manage Ads” –> “Edit Ad settings” of individual ad units and you can show “Verdana” fonts for a particular ad unit. Other ads will still be showing Arial font, except the one you changed to “Verdana”.

From many days we have been seeing Adsense team testing different font face on our blogs. So Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces have worked well so far in the testing, so adsense team have decided to allow its publishers to select between these font faces.

So when will they give the control over font size ? Hope that would be an ultimate thing to optimize the ad unit.
Actually this feature was/is available to Adsense premium publishers from long time, its good to see adsense rolling many good features to all its publishers. These small features will surely help make more money to all publishers….and Google too!

Get Google Mobile App on your Windows Mobile

After a long wait Google has made Google Mobile App available for Windows Mobile.
WindowsMobile_app_screen
Here is how you can download it on to your phone:
Visit m.google.com using your Windows Mobile and follow the instruction.
Google Mobile App is currently available for all devices running Windows Mobile in the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. It is also available for iPhone, iPod touch and BlackBerry devices.
If you don’t see a download link when you visit m.google.com, then your Windows Mobile device does not support Google Mobile App. [Google Mobile Apps will support more devices soon.]

The advantage of using Google Mobile App, is there’s no need to wait for a browser to open to begin a search, and with search history available to reduce typing, you can get your search results with fewer clicks than before.
You can also access your other favorite Google services like maps, docs, email, calender etc using the Google Mobile App.

Source: googlemobile blog

Yahoo! Search turns 5 — May God bless you long life

Its been 5 years after the launch of Yahoo! search.

Good to see Mattcutts wishing Yahoo! on twitter:

Important milestones achieved over 5 years by Yahoo! Search:
• Opened our search infrastructure and index to outside developers with BOSS.
• Opened our search results page to outside innovation with SearchMonkey.
• Launched Search Assist, still the most sophisticated query assistance technology on the Web.
• Launched a suite of mobile search products including Yahoo! oneSearchTM.
• Acquired, grew, and improved Delicious, a top social bookmarking tool.
• Launched Site Explorer to help site owners to manage their presence on Yahoo! Search.
• Protected users from potential viruses, spyware, and spam with SearchScan.
• Integrated music and video players directly on the search results page.

We wish Yahoo! a greater success.

To read the full article, head to Yahoo! official Blog.

Adsense for Domain Now Available to all Publishers

Adsense for Domain is now Available to almost all Adsense Publishers..if not, then they are busy rolling it to you.

What is AdSense for domains?
AdSense for domains allows publishers with undeveloped domains to help users by providing relevant information including ads, links and search results rather than see empty pages or “page not found” errors.

If you have undeveloped domains, then AdSense for domains can help you make some income. To get started, visit your adsense account and click on “AdSense Setup” and then on “AdSense for Domains”, and follow the instruction.

Previously AdSense for domains was only available for people with huge portfolios(large number of domains, with high traffic). With the opening of adsense for domain to all adsense publishers, even if you have 1 or 2 domains laying around you will now be able to monetize it with adsense.

adsense-for-domain
Never think that you can make a living out of monetizing your undeveloped domains, even if you are having hundreds of domains to monetize. Its good enough if it earns you some good income so that you pay the yearly domain registration charges.
But if you have a already popular domain with TLD (extension) .org or .net etc and if you park the same domain with .com extension, then chances are there that many of your visitors may landup at the .com domain by mistake and you may start seeing more earnings from the parked domain.
For example:
When Darren Rowse started blogging at problogger.net and established a great readership and a huge traffic to his blog, problogger.com had no content(it was an undeveloped domain), yet it ranked very high in Alexa and was receiving a lot of traffic. In such a case if the .com domain is monetized with adsense for domain, then it will yield more income! –> Just an example to clarify. Darren bought problogger.com domain and redirected it to problogger.net later.

Nevertheless, adsense for domains is by far the best way to monetize your undeveloped domains. We have tested with other ad network and they perform very poor and the ads delivered are also not contextual..now wondering how can adsense for domain deliver contextual ads when there is no content on the blog!
Google probably takes into consideration the name of the domain. If your domain is mp3zone.com then the ads served are mostly related to mp3. And if a user comes from search engine then the content matches to the search term.

For a detailed step by step procedure to setup your adsense for domain follow the link to support page.

To check whether AdSense for domains has been enabled for your account, log in and visit your AdSense Setup tab

Facebook Further Explaining Their Policy

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook updated their “Terms“. And there was a lot of discussion about it in the blogosphere, forums and on twitter. According to the new Terms, Facebook now reserves all rights to the “User Content”, means any photos, text, link, audio, video, designs, ads and anything else that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. “Post” means to upload, post, transmit, share, store, link to or otherwise make available on or through the Facebook Service, even if you choose to close your account on the network or if your account gets banned or disabled for some reason.

While its a good practice to read the privacy policy and then signup for any service, but have a look at the lengthy terms on every social networking, social bookmarking, social media sites. If you keep on reading them, you will just have to keep on reading them(as they get updated now and then, making it more complex!).

After reading the changes made by Facebook many people expressed their disappointment. Totally Facebook was in News at many places.

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg(Founder of Facebook) wrote a blog post to clarify the issue. You can read the entire story, at On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.
Here is an important excerpt from the post..

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

Another concern was, Facebook reserves all rights to the “User Content”, even after you choose to close your account on the network or if your account gets banned or disabled for some reason. Here is what Mark Zuckerberg has to say

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.

Mark Zuckerberg also assures(in the blog post) that they wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.

One thing to note here is people who want full ownership and control over their information can turn off access to it at any time, by changing things in their settings panel.

Facebook claims that these changes in their Terms will be made simpler and more clear over time.
For now the issue is bit cleared and Facebook got a lot of attention in a short period of time(Kind of viral marketing 🙂 ).

Update: Facebook reverted to its previous terms of service, with this public announcement from Mark Zuckerberg.

In the blog post, he writes, “Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.”

Make Money From Orkut

Yes you read it right.
Its possible to make money from Orkut, using OpenSocial.

What is OpenSocial?
OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites. OpenSocial consists of both JavaScript APIs and Google Data APIs.

How do I create social apps using OpenSocial?
Social apps are initially created in the same manner as gadgets: with your favorite text editor or within the Google Gadgets Editor. They then can be augmented with the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs, where they can fetch and post social data about friends and activities.

What resources do I need to create an OpenSocial gadget?
Other than a good idea and a few minutes to write JavaScript and HTML, you don’t need any. Google will do all the hosting for you if you want, but you are also free to use your own servers.

Now coming back to the topic, how do you earn the money?
Many of you might be thinking that, nobody can make good income by developing and monetizing the gadgets. But hey there are some gadgets which are so viral and many people use it, so I hope atleast those guys who developed such viral applications will surly earn a good income from it.
Just come up with an innovative idea, which can be converted into a gadget and which will be very much useful for Orkut users. Finally put it into action. There is a lot of difference in coming up with an idea and putting it into action. Learn some basics of programing and then refer to the huge documentation by Google and convert your idea into a gadget.

You can make money by developing gadgets even for FaceBook, Hi5 etc. But Orkut started using OpenSocial recently.

Watch the video for more clarification and proof.

Can I make money on Orkut?
Here is what in the video:-
Yes!!
The lawyers are working out the details, but here are our basic principles:

Canvas page belongs to the app – keep money you earn there.
Advertiser happiness – they want some control over where their message is displayed.
Profile page is user’s face to the world – we should only show content that user has authored or put there.

[We can already see ads in the gadget canvas page of Orkut.]
Now you can start from here to learn from the basic, how to develop a gadget. We hope it won’t take a lot of time to come up with a simple, sample gadget. But remember, all gadgets will go a strict review by Orkut team and they let only those gadgets that they think are valuable for Orkut members.
So invest some time in getting an innovative idea and then start executing it or just start learning about creating the gadget and in the process of learning you will get some good idea(that’s how it works with me).

What I feel is, to get an application viral effect, we need to solve a user problem or provide a very useful application(gadget). If we just come up with a very innovative gadget and if it does not solve any user problem or needs then it will just be in the list of innovative gadgets and not on the users profile.

Download YouTube Videos Officially

Everyone knows that video sites can be addictive. So YouTube had been the 4th most visited site for many years.
It comes to no surprise that people like to watch videos and want to download it to their computers or some other video players, to watch it offline and whenever they want to watch. There are many sites and software to fulfill these needs, those sites and software are also very popular.

Recently YouTube has officially announced that it is now giving video owners the chance to offer their property for download, either for free or for a small fee. Furthermore, the videos will be assigned to a specific Creative Commons license, which will govern how and where they can be reused and altered. Payment for the purchase of the videos will be made by GoogleCheckouts(Ofcourse) and a new My Purchases tab, which is already been incorporated into everyone’s account, will allow you to keep track of what you’ve bought.
You can also visit the Google help forum for any clarifications and recent modifications.
YouTube-Official-launch
Now does this move from Google(YouTube) make any difference to you? Hope not! As many people use to download the videos using some thirdparty software and websites. Now this move will surly hurt those thridparty software and website owners to certain extent 🙁

Since the purchase of YouTube, Google have been paying a lot for the maintenance, development and lawsuits coming on its way!
Hope its trying to get back some money. Recently Google started showing sponsor ads on its homepage, which pay them a lot. It launched adsense for video to adsense publishers. After that it started embedding ads into the video. Now its giving the authority to its users(uploaders — it means the owner of the video!) to charge some fee or to give it away for free.
YouTube-Official-launch
This move will certainly attract some business people in this niche to get started with YouTube, as they constantly search for some means to get the customers for their videos.

Update: “Download this video” link is not seen below every YouTube video because this feature was not available at the time of upload of those videos. New video uploads will have this, if the owner(one who uploads) of the video is willing to give it for free download.

Does this official announcement make any difference to you? And do you think there will be more active users who will be willing to give their videos for Free ? Please share all your opinions about YouTube(The largest Video portal in the internet).