Why are mobile market giants like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Research in Motion and the likes trying to compete with iPhone in the “touch” department. iPhone is a breakaway success because it changed the way people perceived a cell phone. Multi-touch has definitely been a revolution. Unless the other players come up with something that capitalizes on the drawbacks of the iPhone, while simultaneously rewriting the concept of a cell phone, iPhone is only going to have clone competitors!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: iphone, nokia, sony ericsson, apple, samsung, research in motion, business, future, telecom, mobile

This is an article that stemmed in my head when I was thinking about starting my own web 2.0 based business. Considering the various factors that go into any such business, one of the chief concerns that pop into this is the web-design itself. The typical way this would work is I approach a Web-designer and buy a design / pay him to develop a design for me. And then I buy the design from him. The web-designer, if he’s smart enough would charge for

1. Time for designing
2. The design itself
3. Implementing / Customizing the design for a webpage.

Now, thinking as a smart web-designer, if you think that the Web-site is going to be a hit and will involve evolution of the site itself, you’d swarm the entity [person/firm] who’s enrolled you to create the design into a maintenance contract. This would ensure you that you are paid enough money for enhancing the current design. This could also be offered by you as a designer for a certain amount of money.

Thinking as an smarter web-designer, with a little bit of know-how on the Web2.0 upcoming boom, with enough money slowly being pumped in, you can advertise yourself as a Web2.0 Web-designer [basically pastel shades, with Aqua like alpha, AJAX based interfaces yada yada yada] and what you can actually do, is if you feel that the web-site is going to a tremendous hit, you should try and rope in a “percentage cut model”. IOW, depending on the traffic, you can ask for a cut of the profit that the website is making. More like an investment. Now, depending on your experience you’ll know how to rope in your customers and offer which model ;-)! However, this is just a suggestion that I thought many web-designers may not have thought about.

As a web-designer, what do you think about this particular business model? Is it good/bad/so-so? Lemme know in your comments.

Posted by gurupanguji.

Ok looks like both google and yahoo are in getting into a very festive mood and are looking to increase there PR. Here are some new bunch of Easter eggs from them.

Easter Eggs from The Yahoo Santa.

Flickr increases storage limits.

First of all Flickr has increased the upload limit for free accounts from 25MB to 100MB per month, ( on a side note for free accounts  did you know that this is just a marketing ploy because you cannot upload more than 200 photos even if you are using less than 100MB. You won’t find it anywhere in their FAQ or help site but when you hit the 200MB limit your older photographs starts disappearing) and for the pro account they increased it to unlimited uploads with no limits again read the fine print since there are certain limits but nothing you should be bother about if you have a Pro account. 

Flickr Easter Eggs 

Go to any Flickr photo and try posting a note on any of your photos using the following words

ho ho ho hat : you’ll get a Santa hat which you can drag around to put on anyone :).

ho ho ho beard :  you’ll get a Santa beard
Check it out here
Thanks to boing Boing originally discovered by http://a.wholelottanothing.org/

Psst Yahoo photos has Unlimited uploads with no upload limits

Ok this has bee there for a long time since Yahoo revamped Yahoo Photos, but most people don’t seem to know about it. Yahoo photos went for a complete revamp and it looks really slick but like the new revamped Yahoo mail it makes use of really heavy AJAX which runs a bit slow on the Firefox browser but runs fine in I.E the interface is still buggy though. Again read the fine print.

We offer free, unlimited storage! So upload as many photos as you want.
Keep in mind – we did build a couple of procedural limits into the uploading process.
First, we limit each album to 300 photos. So if you’re uploading into an album and you reach 300, Yahoo! Photos will stop uploading. If this happens, re-start uploading from where you left off. You can direct photos into All My Photos, or a different album, or into a new album you create.
We also limit uploads per day to protect ourselves from abuse. This will probably never be an issue for you, but if you’re uploading several hundred large photos (2-5 Mb) we encourage you to do this over a few sessions. We apologize for this limit, but ultimately it’s for the good of all our users that we manage this type of abuse.

But in this case it sounds very reasonable.

Easter Eggs from The Google Santa.

Join the hunt for Giant toys on Google earth

Head over to google earth and search for Giant toys on Google earth.

Hello boys and girls. Ready to find some toys? Santa has hidden a treasure trove of presents somewhere in Google Earth (actually, it was a few of his elves, but you get the idea) . Every day from December 12th until Christmas Eve, a clue will appear outside Santa’s North Pole workshop which, if you can solve it, will lead you to a toy hidden in a Google Earth satellite image. And every day, the location of the previous day’s toy will be revealed.

Note: To participate you need to download and install the Google earth and The Santa Tracker and Toy Hunt you read more about it on the official google Santa page

Read the announcement at the official google blog.  

Picasa web Gets lots of new features.

Picasa Web Albums has many new features.
Uploading videos. Until today, only users that paid for extra storage could upload videos. Now everyone can do that, but only using Picasa.
Prints. You can now order prints for your photos.
Tags. Picasa Web Albums lets you tag photos.
Search. You can search your photos and your friend’s public photos. Google looks at photo captions, photo tags, album titles, album descriptions, and album locations.

Courtesy googlesystem

Update: A lot of people misunderstood what I meant by Link spamming. First of all Modifying and releasing the themes with your link in the credit is not at all wrong. But when you do underhand stuff like adding NOFollow Tags to the original authors and on top of that making minimal changes and try to hid your link in the credit it is VERY VERY Wrong.
Update: Since a Lot of people don’t know or can’t seem to understand I added an explanation of the NOFOLLOW tag from the Official Google Blog.
Update:Melvin Ng the owner of
http://wpthemegallery.com/ has resolved the issue with Sadish here and has removed his links from Sadish Themes.
Update: Thilak said he released those themes a long time ago.
Update: This Topics of this post was not in order of Priority. If you feel that not giving Credit to the Orginal theme owner and Adding NOFOLLOW Tags is ok they my friend you have a major crisis with your moral values that is all I can say. But you are right its not illegal.

Explanation of the NoFollow Tag read more from the Official Google Blog

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

We’ve also discussed this issue with colleagues at our fellow search engines and would like to thank MSN Search and Yahoo! for supporting this initiative. Here are a few guidelines for anyone else who wants to join the cause.

I might be kicking up a lot of dirt and upsetting a few people here. Originally I was going to write about Link Spamming after I caught a few well know blogs actively doing it, but after reading the post on wpthemes: Please Respect our Copyright, CopyBlogger: Is it ok to steal Someones Design and the recent fiasco where Google got royally screwed from blogger all over the blogsphere for copying the IE7’s Promotion Page design from Yahoo. I decided to generalize it. to include Plagiarism, Splogs and Paid Reviews. Some of these terms might not sound familiar to the average Joe or reader but if your are a regular blogger you need to know these things.

• Link Spamming
• Plagiarism And Splogs
• Paid Reviews

To understand some of these terms you need to know what SEO is, most average Internet surfers know what this is and I can already see some people yawning so don’t worry I am not going to go into it much. If your a noob when it comes to SEO then head towards the end of this post to read a brief introduction to SEO. We’ll tackle more serious issues here. So what do Link Spamming, Plagiarism, Splogs and Paid Reviews have in common? Its WordPress. Its a well know fact that most of the top bloggers TechCrunch, Scoble use WordPress heck even Matt Cutts Google’s Engineer and SEO Expert uses WordPress even though Google has its own Blogging platform Blogger. Apart from the excellent blogging features which other free blogging platforms lack it is an excellent tool when it comes to SEO and also because of the large number of excellent themes which are SEO Oriented.

Link Spamming

If your on wordpress you know what Askimet is and chances are that you get a lot of spam Comments which Askiment catches for you. The purpose of these spam comments are to leave a link on your blog to their site that they rank well in search Engines for that particular keywords(A typical Black Hat SEO Technique). A while back I found that some people had found a legitimate way to link spam using Wordpress Themes/Templates.

Case 1: http://tech-buzz.net/ I noticed it when I chanced upon a blog run by Thilak called Tech-Buzz while searching on Technorati, he seemed to have a high Technorati Rank since a large number of people seemed to be linking to him his blog. What he did was, modify Themes/Templates to a certain degree and release those Themes/Templates on his website while adding his link to the footer of the theme with those of the original theme owners and designers. At first it was hard for me to notice his link since he seemed to have hidden it somewhere inside the source code Check out Coalitionagainsthate.org , http://www.scottgrizzard.com or http://www.nhlanalysis.com they are all running one of Thilak theme which is originally a K2 theme modified into a 3 column by John T P (who is Currently seems busy trying to get into the Top Techorati ranking with a Technorati Fav exchage SIGH People) which was further modified by Thilak. But the funny thing is you won’t notice the link added by thilak in the footer of the theme it is cleverly hidden (Hover your Mouse over the T in word TripleK2 to see his link) you need to go to the HTML source to see the link to his blog but it gets worse he added a NOFOLLOW Html Tag (Special HTML Code to tell search engines not to take the link into account) to the original authors links.

Case 2: http://www.kaushalsheth.com/ This guy’s themes get regularly featured on http://planet.wordpress.org/ The official aggregation of blogs talking about WordPress from around the world. While I appreciate what he does by porting other people’s CSS/XHTML themes to wordpress he also makes it a point to leave a sponsored link in all his themes.

Case 3. http://wpthemegallery.com/ Collects themes from different locations and adds a link to his site and distributes them.

Its more of a matter of ethics here since most of the Themes for wordpress are released under GPL or Creative Commons Share Alike Licence then these people do have a right to modify and add their links i.e. without removing the original copyright links. Though Case 1: is very questionable.

Plagiarism and Splogs.

I don’t have to define Plagiarism, Splogs are Blogs which are automated using programs that steal other people content word for words this mostly done using software called scrapers. These Scarper site are leechs that feed off other people content and have Google Ads(Adsense). Initially when I had switched to partial feeds on Scribez a while back few of our authors and readers voiced their displeasure since Full Feeds are one of the most common ways by which these scraper sites work (Scribez currently has Full feeds you might want to read http://www.fullfeeds.com and debate on Full Feeds Vs Partial Feeds ). Lorelle hates full feed. The Cartoon below illustrators this very well.

Case 1. http://33rockers.com/ The Previous Owner of 33rockers.com (its been sold to Warren Cardinal) Karthik Kastury was caught plagiarising by Maxpower Ironically Thilak seems to be very upset that Karthik Kastury was stealing his content.

Case 2. People are so lazy in the blogsphere that they blog about what other people blogging and leave a link back to the original source because they are too lazy to write their own content. While technically not plagiarising or Splogging a lot of blogger especially tech blogger make it seem that this is OK. Which is also why Thilaks blog got banned from DIGG.

My URL has been banned (reported as a middle man), but they never lifted the ban.. more over they give rude replies when I tried to contact them

Example of a Splog: http://digitalnewsflash.com this site feeds of other people RSS Feeds.

How to deal with sploggers and plagiarists

What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content Dealing With Website Plagiarism: When Someone Copies Your Blog Content ?

Paid Blogging

This is a grey area a lot of blogger out there in the blogsphere seem to be divided over this issue. I am talking about services like payperpost.com and reviewme.com which pay the blogger to write a review for a particular product. payperpost.com is more controversial since you have the option on not disclosing to your readers that your being paid to write a review. This could lead to a more sophisticated form of spam example a company which is just starting out could pay blogger to blog about them this not only help to achieve their Viral marketing strategy but also helps boost their presence on Search engines to outdo their rivals. Jason Calacanis has a good post about it here and Labnol both have confirmed this in Matt Cutts own words “Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.”

Why Bother with SEO in the first place

SEO is a vast subject I am just going to touch upon it here. I suggest you read up Aaron Wall’s blog if your interested to know more about it especially his article on Search engine relevancy he is one of the best SEO gurus out there. For the average blogger this is not a big issue but if your a pro blogger or are trying to reach a wider audience you need to know about SEO since 80% of the traffic on the Internet is generated from search engines and if the search engines cannot find you then your losing a major chunk of your audience. SEO are factors which if implemented correctly help to boost your reach and visibility on search engines. Factors for SEO can be divided in two categories

• Internal SEO
• External SEO

Internal Factors

Without getting too technical these are factors which the the blogger has to take care of such as the Content on your blog the keywords/Keyword density that you use, the way you code your Website/Web pages. With wordpress and some of the excellent themes developed by the community members this factor is not such a big issue. Which is why blogs on Wordpress.com and wordpress blogs in general have a better chance on search engines than blogs created on blogger, live journal etc (I’ll do a post on this later on why wordpress is much better if your into SEO than other blogging platforms)

External Factors

These factors are how many website are linking to your website/blog etc that why you see people building up there Blog rolls.

Here is a intresting Easter Egg in FIrefox 2.0
Type about:mozilla in your address bar. you’ll see the following screen with the words.

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

It sure sounds funny and a bit ominous as well. So what does it all mean. It is a well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of web browsers. This not the only verse you can view the rest of the verses that have appeared throught the development and releases of the mozilla based browsers at http://www.mozilla.org/book/.

Explanation of the Verse from the Book of Mozilla

The 7:15 chapter and verse notation refers to July 15, 2003, the day when America Online shut down its Netscape browser division and the Mozilla Foundation was launched.

In the HTML source of www.mozilla.org/book, this verse is accompanied by the following annotation:

<!-- 15th July 2003: AOL closed its Netscape division and the Mozilla foundation was created -->
<!-- The beast died (AOL closed its Netscape division) but immediately rose from its ashes (the creation of the Mozilla foundation and the Firebird browser, although the name was later changed to Firefox). -->

The “beast” falling refers to Netscape being closed down by its now parent company AOL. The “great bird” that rises from the ash is probably the Mozilla Foundation, which was established to continue Mozilla development. The bird rises from the ash like a Phoenix — a reference to the original name of the Mozilla Firefox browser (known as Firebird at the time this verse was written). The bird casts down “fire” and “thunder” on the “unbelievers”, which is a direct reference to the Mozilla Firebird (now Firefox) and Mozilla Thunderbird products, which became the main focus of Mozilla development a few months before the events of July 15. The fact that the beast has been “reborn” indicates that the spirit of Netscape will live on through the Foundation (which is made up mostly of ex-Netscape employees) and its strength has been “renewed” as the foundation is less reliant on AOL (who many feel neglected Netscape). Again, the “Mammon” is probably Microsoft, Mozilla’s main commercial competitor.

You can find a better explanation on each verse on the Wikipedia site.

source Wikipedia and Labnol

The guys over at CrunchGear recently had a post featuring a new set of wheels.

…D’Vinci Forgiato Radurra wheels…made from 2-inch thick polycarbonate….They’ll be available for about $2,000…

We thought it would be really cool if we showed you something a little more exciting.

What you are about to see is something called the TWEEL. The TWEEL is a revolutionary tyre that was unveiled by Michelin recently. The TWEEL uses no air and therefore there is no question of it bursting or becoming flat.

Here are a couple of pics of the TWEEL in action.

With such innovation it is no surprise that Michelin was awarded the Gold Medal for Innovation by The Intermat innovation commission in Paris.

Here’s something funny to play with for a while. Web 2.0 Logo Creator written by Alex P. is a logo generator site which was designed to parody the wave of various ‘Web 2.0′ application logos with the (beta) tag and everything.

The graphics generated can be saved and uploaded to your website, or you can just copy and paste the provided links to the images wherever you wanna share them.

Just type your text and choose whether to have your text show a reflection and/or the (beta) tag included, then click generate and watch the site work its magic. Here are just some of the ‘web 2.0′ logos I generated with Web 2.0 Logo Creatr:

And something we all wanna see:

How cool is that? So if you’ve just written your latest web application and wanna join the ‘web 2.0′ parody, go check out the Web 2.0 logo creator. A great time killer!

This Article was written by Justin and blogs at http://justinb.wordpress.com

I managed to grab some screen shots. It disappeared as soon as I refreshed. They don’t make sense. I get a feeling that most probably we will get the ability to view the visitors by region which is the one missing feature on the stats page.

This is the blog stats Page.

And this is the feed Stats Page

Technorati tags: Wordpress, Statistics, Stats, Blogging, blog

On September 19,2006 Moixa Energy announced the launch of an innovative and revolutionary product called The USBCell Battery . These one of a kind rechargeable batteries have a memory stick like end which when plugged into any powered USB drive gets charged and can later on be used like any other normal battery.

Here are some of the specifications:

• Battery Type

• Rechargeable AA NiMH Battery 1.2v 1300mah.

• Battery Chemistry
• NiMH - Nickel Metal Hyrdride.

• Product Specifications

• Built in Intelligent Charger.

• Charge by powered USB.

• Also can be charged in approved NiMH Chargers.

• Technical Specifications
• 90%+ Charged after 5 Hours by powered USB.
• Also rechargeable by approved NiMH charger at 250ma for 7 Hours.

• LED on the side will light up to indicate charging .

• Will flash for 10 minutes after charging is complete as an alert and switch off after that.

If you want to you can read the following material too

• USBCell Battery User Guide
• USBCell Battery Technical Specification

The USBCell Battery is most definitely the best thing to hit the conventional battery scene in a very long time. Well how much will they cost you? As of now a 2 cell pack would set you back £12.99.

‘Time to recharge the battery market’

Update : This post was posted through Writely although editing of post heading and addition of tags had to be done via Wordpress.

Please look at the link below for a updated version

Part 2 Top Ten Best Free Wordpress Themes and Templates

Part 1 Top Ten Best Free Wordpress Themes and Templates

Update: This post is about a month old I have found much better themes and templates. I am in the process of writing part 2 of this series please subscribe to the RSS feed to keep your self update. http://scribez.wordpress.com/feed/

This is a list of the new ten best Free Wordpress Templates available on the Internet. Wordpress is an amazing open source blogging platform. Which means anyone out there on the internet can take it and use or modify it. One of the best things about Wordpress is the large number of free templates available. In fact there are so many free templates available for Wordpress that it has become overwhelming to find the best quality templates. I have tried my best to collect the best free Wordpress templates available out there. A lot of great designer and programmer are out there, who have spent there time and effort to develop these free Wordpress templates. I see a lot of people using the same free templates over and over again hopefully this will help you discover new free templates available for Wordpress. Even though I am listing only the best free Wordpress templates you can always go through the website of the author who designed these free Wordpress templates and discover more quality templates. Most of the templates here are rated according to their design in fact if you compare their features they might not score so high. But you can always modify them to suit your own need. For example K2 is great template with support for a huge variety of plug-ins by default. With out further ado I present you the ten best free Wordpress templates.

I have tried my best to select templates that follow the latest design trends and those that follow unconventional design techniques. The free wordpress templates are not given in any particular order or rating.

Fluid Solution is a 3 column Wordpress theme made from a template provided by Arcsin. It supports widgets and is yet another clean , simple theme which you can try out for your blog. from kaushalsheth

Demo: here Download: here Arthur: Sixshootermedia. & kaushalsheth

Typography is 2 column Wordpress theme in shades of white and green with right sidebar and as usual supports widgets. The most striking part of this theme is it that it doesn’t use any kind of images. The design was developed by Jaykay of Sixshootermedia. Give it a try. Its really a cool theme. from kaushalsheth

Demo: here Download: here Arthur: Sixshootermedia. & kaushalsheth

Origami Theme/Template for Wordpress is cool green wordpress theme/template which uses SIFR Technique to enhance th fonts shown in the theme. The great thing about this theme is that in the top bar there is a option to switch between fluid and fixed layout , Increment font size move the colums right or left.

Demo: here Download: here Arthur: Leevi

Balance is clean and nice looking wordpress theme from thoughtmechanics The highlight of this theme is the the collapsible and expandable menu on the top. A very clean wordpress theme/Template with an unconventional layout.

Demo: demo Download: balance Arthur: thoughtmechanics

Foliage is a Wordpress theme created and distributed by 5thirtyone. One of the only dark themes that made into these wordpress themes. It also has a few cool hidden features like the expandable menu on top.

Demo: Unavailable Download: Here Arthur: 5thirtyone

This is another Sixshootermedia Css Template converted into a wordpress theme/Template by negative99. A very clean looking layout.

Demo: Here Download: Here Arthur:Sixshootermedia & negative99

A great wordpress theme/template with a ton of features inbuilt and built for blogs with multiple authors. Built by glued ideas it is one of the best wordpress templates out there. For a complete list of features look here

Demo: Here Download: Here Arthur:glued ideas

Flight Wordpress theme/Template by fahlstad is a clean template without seeming very garish.

Demo: Here Download: Here Arthur:fahlstad

Hemingway Pearl is a beautiful mod of the original Hemmingway Wordpress theme/Template. Though if you’re not a fan of red you could always change the colors to suit your needs.

Demo: Here Download: Here Arthur:confusedweb

A three Column template by devlounge one of the better three column wordpress templates out there.

Demo: Here Download: Here Arthur:devlounge

This Post was cross posted from bluesaze
I am working on the second Part of this Series so if you know of any other cool Wordpress themes drop me a comment or line.

Other Notable wordpress Themes and Templates which did not make it to this list are

1. k2 with a huge variety of styles and mods

2. kaushalsheth has a huge collection of excellent themes.

3. ilemoned a nice bright Green wordpress theme/ template

4. sixshootermedia a great collection of clean looking wordpress themes and templates

5. krad a dark colored wordpress theme/template

6. blue-kino clean simplistic wordpress theme/template

7. thoughtmechanics a small collection of quality wordpress themes and templates

8. 5thirtyone another nice wordpress theme/template from 5thirtyone

9. ifelse famous for his collection of wordpress theme/template “A theme a day”

10. brokenkode old is gold.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, Free, Templates, best, Theme, Themes,