Google Saves My Internet from Itself

Yesterday Google made public its Measurement Labs series of sites, designed to analyze your internet connection and determine whether your ISP is throttling you or not.

This news makes it even harder to hate Google; with these tools the average joe can keep an eye on his ISP and make sure its not trying to sneak anything by him, and will help to keep those sneaky ISPs honest. Google may be the most massive company in the universe, but they sure are helpful.

This comes at the perfect time for men, because I’m beginning to suspect that our ISP is throttling us.

Interview With Jay Feitlinger, Founder and CEO of ShopTab

Recently, I was able to interview Jay Feitlinger, CEO and Founder of ShopTab, a company that allows businesses to sell through their FaceBook pages.

RS: First off, WHAT is ShopTab?
JF: ShopTab is a Facebook App that allows business owners to sell more products by creating a shop tab on their Facebook fan page, showcasing products from their existing online store. Easily. Quickly. Inexpensively.

RS: When did ShopTab launch
JF: ShopTab launched in October 2009

RS: What made you decide to create ShopTab?
JF: Over the past 8 years I have been working with small to large clients with their online marketing and social media strategy. One of my biggest passions is helping small to medium size business owners understand and leverage the internet to connect with their customers. Many of my smaller ecommerce clients have been requesting my help on how they can monetize their efforts on Facebook.

My wife owns an online baby product business http://www.littlebutterflykiss.com. She, as with many of my smaller ecommerce clients, don™t have large budgets to afford website development of a custom Facebook shop tab nor large marketing budgets. I decided to help and after 3 months of development we recently launched ShopTab to complement any ecommerce tool. It has some built in social shopping features such as Share to Facebook Wall to get the word out about their Shop Tab products.

RS: What sets ShopTab apart from other similar applications?
JF: There are a few shop type applications on Facebook but ShopTab specifically:

1. Was designed and developed from the business owner perspective. We focused heavily on the needs of the business owner when developing the application and spent the extra time and money to ensure the tool did not require any technical knowledge. We require no additional programming code or html.
2. Works with every ecommerce tool.
3. Allows a shop owner to export their products from their current ecommerce tool and upload through our easy to use admin tool. A few of our recent customers told me they set up their 500+ product store within 10 minutes.
4. Ds not charge an upfront fee for the shop tab application, nor take a percentage of each sale. Our customers pay a flat small monthly fee starting at $10/mo for up to 500 products. We also offer a 7 day free trial and they can cancel whenever they want — no long term contracts
5. Ds not require they use any specific platform to handle payments, sales tax, shipping, security, etc. We send their prospective customer to their website to handle the transaction.
6. Sends customers directly to an existing shopping site, increasing traffic and enabling a shopping experience unfettered by any limitations within Facebook. For instance, upselling, cross-selling, recurring purchases and so forth can still be handles as they always have.

RS: Why Facebook?
JF: With over 350 million fans and growing everyday and the strong desire for business owners to find a way to monetize their Facebook presence “ Facebook was the right choice for our intial launch.

RS: If I were looking at setting something like this up, what would I need to do to get started?
JF: Simply visit http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=189977524185 and click on Go To Application. From there a business owner would create their account, log into the admin, and either use our product feed upload tool or add products individually.

RS: What features are you looking at adding in the near future?
JF: For this we are relying on our customers to tell us what else they need. Just last week customers asked us for a way to share a product to their wall. That feature was added yesterday. We are going to rely on what features make the most sense for our business owners but do not require an increase in monthly cost to the ShopTab business owner. There are a few features such as horizontal vs. vertical layout that we have in the works but again if another feature comes up that is more important to our ShopTab business owner customer it will take higher priority over our feature roll out schedule.

Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=189977524185

10 Questions with upillar.com CEO Trevor Milton

Recently, I was able to sit down and talk with the founder and CEO of upillar.com, Trevor Milton.

RS: First off, WHAT is upillar.com?

TM: upillar.com is a free nationwide online classified website. Items are listed both locally and nationally allowing buyers and sellers to reach the broadest possible audience absolutely free! upillar.com never takes a portion of the sale. We provide our services 100% to the public. Whether you are buying or selling; Motorized vehicles, Clothing, Electronics, Real Estate, or looking for your next job, upillar.com’s free online classifieds are the place to go.

RS: What made you decide to develop upillar.com?

TM: I was going to college trying to make college payments by buying and selling stuff. Nothing was available at the time. The only free services were very cumbersome and difficult to use. I decided the public deserved a place to go where everything was free, and actually easy to use.

RS: Why the name upillar?
TM: The letter “u” signifies “you” or “yourself” , the word “pillar” gives reference to a sign of strength. So you are what makes our free marketplace strong.

 

RS: What is your background? Did you work at an internet company previously?

TM:No internet background whatsver. I ran with this as a dream, and was able to put together the entire site from scratch during 4 1/2 years of development with a whole team of programmers.

RS: What is your vision for the future of upillar.com?

TM:We hope that upillar.com becomes THE place to buy and sell goods for free. With major releases soon coming, upillar.com will offer sections that specifically cater to Real Estate & Jobs. Although you can find those categories in our current classified section, the new release will customize an entire section of our website dedicated to those categories giving some of the biggest names in the internet a run for their money.

RS: What were some of the major obstacles you encountered while starting this site?

TM: Some of our biggest problems were; Name, Trust, Organizing our website, flow(How users click through the website),and credibility. With our newest release coming the first week of December, we hope to improve many areas of our current system.

 

RS: What is on the immediate horizon for upillar?

TM: upillar.com has just signed a major national advertising campaign that will begin the first week of December. We would be happy to tell you more about it once the official releases go out! We anticipate millions of listings in our first quarter of next year.

RS: What sets upillar apart from ebay and Craig’s list?

TM: upillar.com is often referred to as a hybrid of craigslist and ebay at first glance.

upillar.com’s services are completely free like Craigslist.org, but has some major functionality differences between the two. First; when you list an item for sale, the item is placed into a category instead of a city. This enables users to list an item once, and it immediately becomes searchable both on a local level and a national level. Second; You can place up to 20 photos for free on each listing. upillar.com also gives buyers easy access to the seller by providing a safe way to communicate with the seller without giving up personal information.

upillar.com also offers a very powerful keyword search technology that enables users to find what they are looking for in under 30 seconds. This is accomplished by “category narrowization” . Ebay has a great platform where this technology has proven to be valuable. Since upillar.com is a classified website, sellers dont have to worry about monitoring their listings to make sure minimum dollar amounts are met. Just list your item and let it be until someone emails you or calls you.

 

RS: What was the first item sold on upillar?

TM: First item sold on upillar.com was my own personal Sony camera. First public item sold was a purebred Labrador puppy.

RS: Technologically speaking, what was the biggest issue you’ve had thus far?

TM: Biggest problem so far has been our patent pending technology of displaying book values on all our motorized vehicles. Teaming up with NADA guides, upillar.com was able to create the first ever website that shows what each car,boat, motorcyle, or ATV is worth without ever leaving that listing. Need to know if what you are buying is a good deal? You’ll never have to worry about it again on www.upillar.com. We have since figured the technology out and by January first the values will be displayed in each motorized listing. (Values are currently available on upillar.com, but can be somewhat confusing to some users. The fix will come January 1, 2010 for that specific technology.

Check out the site at http://www.upillar.com

Cooking your Turkey with Laser Beams, and other Gadgets for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is coming up, so I thought I’d do a roundup of gadgets to help on Turkey day.

1. Qooq (pronounced Cok) http://www.qooq.com/ Approx $520: Qooq is a device meant for the kitchen that connects to your home network by Ethernet or WiFi to look up recipes. You can even subscribe to a monthly update that includes tips and recipes. This device also has a meal planner, so you can put your entire 4 day Thanksgiving meal spread in there and look up a new way to prepare cranberries. The Qooq can also be used to get weather updates so you will know why some of your guests are late, internet radio can bring in some holiday music, and it can also be used a s a digital picture frame.

The Qooq comes with 500 preloaded recipes and features a touch screen so you don’t have to mess with a mouse or keyboard.

2. Sharper Image Rechargable Wine Opener http://www.sharperimage.com $39.99: After that 5^th bottle of wine, the traditional method of poping the cork might be asking a little too much. Sharper Image to the rescue! The Rechargable Wine Opener removes the cork with just a push of the button.

3. Digital Measuring Cup http://www.comforthouse.com/taylor3890measuringcupscale.html (Taylor Model 3890) $30: If the rechargeable wine opener has been in use, maybe a digital measureing cup will be necessary this Thanksgiving! Taylor’s digital measuring cup will handle all your measuring needs for the big day. Dry goods or liquids, this measuring cup will do it all. The cup is one liter in size and will automatically calculate volume from weight. The digital measuring cup will measure in pounds, grams, fluid ounces, cups and millimeters

4. LED Fridge Magnet http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/new-arrivals/digital-video-memo/index.html about $50: The screen is 1.5 inches and has a built-in camera to record images or video. It can store up to 30 seconds of video and can be plugged into your USB port on your computer. Maybe capture some of the family memories in the kitchen and keep it on the fridge until at least the next holiday. Although this gadget won’t help you prepare the meal, it entertain those that seem to congregate around the food.

5. Cook your Turkey with Lasers! From a competition by Electrolux, invented by French student, Ludovic Peperstraete http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_details.asp?individual_id=200276 : Still a prototype, but maybe for next Thanksgiving. This oven uses three lasers to ZAP your food. The cooking dsn’t come from the lasers individually but from the lasers criss-crossing each other to make heat. Hopefully you won’t blow the turkey up!

6. USB Microwave-Beanzawave- $160: Lastly, maybe you have to work at your tech support job on Thanksgiving. Heinz brings us Beansawave, a USB powered microwave. You can nuke some Thanksgiving beans right there in your cubicle while fixing a network adapter in Newark. This little gadget uses mobile phone frequencies to cook the meal in less than a minute. Being advertised as the smallest microwave, the Beanzawave (horrible name) is less than 8 inches tall and is currently not available to the public, but it should be available in the very near future.

Save Your Hard Drive, Check out SpinRite

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm ($89)

Since a hard drive typically lasts for 5 years before the chances of failure start dramatically increasing, you may find yourself at some point with a drive that either fails partially or completely. First, calm down and don’t panic by throwing the drive from your 5th story apartment window only to land on someone’s cherry red Toyota Carolla. Instead, check out SpinRite.

What sets SpinRite apart from the dozens of other hard drive repair utilities is that SpinRite isn’t an installed application. Instead you boot to a SpinRite CD so the entire hard drive can be analyzed. SpinRite then works directly with the harddrive without having to work through different layers like operating systems and such. This means, no matter what kind of machine you have, Mac, Windows, or Linux, SpinRite will work the same. This also means that SpinRite can repair the drive at the lowest level for the greatest possibility of recovery¢Â¦..next to sending the drive off to the clean-room-bunny-suit people to recover your data for $500+.

SpinRite has 5 levels of recovery and data analysis.

1. Examine the Surfaces : which means it verifies and examines the physical surface of the drive for errors.

2. Recover Unreadable Data : this will look at the entire disk and then rewrite it to correct for any errors and recover data.

3. Refresh the Surfaces¢â€ this will read and write all of the data on the disk bit for bit not once, but twice.

4. Locate Surface Errors : this reads all the data on the drive and repairs any areas marked for repair.

5. Restore Good Sectors : this function will read and rewrite all the data bit for bit. The benefit of this feature will restore unusable areas of the drive that may have been inaccessible previously.

Keep in mind that recovery and repair of this level takes time, so don’t think that the drive will be repaired in 5 minutes. It will typically take hours to completely repair a disk depending on the option you choose. I highly recommend SpinRite and it’s worth every penny!

BONUS APPLICATION: Shields Up! https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

Also by Gibson Research Corporation, Shields Up! A free online application to help identify internet security vulnerabilities on your computer. Shields Up! probes your computer for any possibility open spots you may ne be aware of. Once the probing is complete, you are shown a full report on the results including steps on how to correct any areas of vulnerability.

I personally use Shields Up! on every computer I set up to ensure I haven’t missed any settings plus it is a verification that the computer is secured as much as possible. Plus it’s free.

Chi.mp vs. Storytlr vs. FriendFeed: Lifestream Battle Royale!

As we grow our online personas and login to one of many powerful tools, we spread ourselves thinnerliterally. Posting on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, delicious, Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon or even your personal blog, we spread our lives across many servers and many sites. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were one place where my friends and family could see all of those nuggets of me? Ask and you shall receive, but like the numerous sites you populate already, there are also numerous sites that do exactly what you want. Lifestreams.

This article will take three lifestreams and compare them, bring out their pros and cons, and then let you decide which one may be right for you.

1. Chi.mp. (http://www.chi.mp) A slick web site that allows you to amalgamate Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and RSS feeds. The interface is clean and setup is fairly easy. The one stand out feature is the ability to select a custom domain name, for free, to point to this new collection of your internet life. Chu.mp or Pi.mp could be your chosen domains, or the simple BillSmith.mp can make that address much easier to remember. The downfall of the site for me was the use of the site. Once I set it up, I never went back. For my use, Chi.mp had no traction for me. No big payoff.

2. Storytlr.(http://www.storytlr.com) . I am growing more and more fond of this site. Storytlr has access to your accounts on Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Vimeo, Youtube, and many others. Besides the broader reach of Storytlr, it also brings sidebar widgets similar to Wordpress, comments, and pre-made themes to skin your site. Antoher feature that I find useful is the ability to crosspost, so if you post onto Facebook, you can have it update your Twitter account and link to that post.

3. FriendFeed .(http://www.friendfeed.com) . FriendFeed taps into delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Gmail/Google Talk, Twitter, Amazon, and RSS feeds. There are 58 services in total at the time of this writing that they support, and I see just about everything I need. It also has premade themes to transform the look of the site. FriendFeed also added the ability to friend people within FriendFeed, adding another layer to the site complete with direct messaging that can cross over to Twitter. Lastly, and I think possibly one of the most valuable features is the live updates. No site refresh needed, so I can set up FriendFeed and let it spin all day and I can always catch new updates. Of the three sites, FriendFeed is by far the most likely to grow and catch on. If you don’t have a FriendFeed account, go get one now.

Will these sites revolutionize how we use the internet? Probably not, but they will make our daily lives a little easier and maybe they could spark innovations in how we communicate with friends, family and colleagues.

Four Sites that Could Teach you to do Just About Anything

 Have you ever wanted to learn how to play guitar, change your car’s oil, increase your Twitter followers, or become way more skilled in Photoshop?  Knowledge is power and there are many web sites out there offering a Boat-load of knowledge for free.  I will cover four web sites that cover a wide array of topics and have instructions for you to accomplish just about anything you want.

 

The first is eHow (http://www.eHow.com).  A great multi purpose site, eHow, covers topics like Careers, electronics and even legal and Parenting.  For instance, are you wondering what constitutes Reasonable Suspicion for a police officer to stop you?  There’s an article on that.  Are you wondering how to pierce an ear like a professional?  Or maybe how to best choose a tattoo design?  eHow has a mountain of user-submitted articles covering all these topics and more.  The downside to this site is that many of the instructions are of a very basic nature.  Over all, eHow has provided me with a few tips and tricks valuable enough that I will go back.

 

Next is Tutorialized (http://www.tutorialized.com).  Focusing on the more technical side of tutorials, Tutorialized does a really good job of providing articles on Photoshop, Gimp, and even AutCAD.  With over 12,000 tutorials on Photoshop alone, this is a great resource for any graphic designer or photographer.  They have some great articles on simple enhancements all the way to very specific tips and tricks, like How to Create Glossy Lips and Change Hair Color.  Each tutorial has stats like the number of views, votes and a simple rating system so you can quickly evaluate which tutorials seem to be better. 

 

Not commonly thought of as a tutorial site, but Mahalo (http://www.mahalo.com) has some pretty decent tutorials covering a wide range of topics.  Just check out the How To section of the site (http://www.mahalo.com/category/how-tos) to find some great articles like How to make Pumpkin Pie or How to Make Money off of Facebook.  The articles are well done and rival just about any tutorial I’ve seen on the internet.  Don’t under estimate Mahalo the next time you are looking for directions on how to do something. 

 

Lastly,  MonkeySee (http://www.monkeysee.com).  An aptly named site, these tutorials are all video-based and range in topics from automotive repair to pet care.  One of the more interesting articles is, How to Play Air Guitar and How to Read Tarot Cards.  I thought I knew how to play air guitar, but watching a video from the world champion air guitarist, I guess everyone has something to learn. 

So, the next time you find yourself wondering how to accomplish a task on your Honey Do List, don’t worry, because you can look it up on the internet.

Little-known Free Tools from Microsoft

Live Sync: https://sync.live.com/clientdownload.aspx?ibm=10

Live Sync is a wonderful tool if you need to share files with someone or if you want a hands off backup of important files.  Live Sync allows you to synchronize foldersbetween two computers (Windows XP and later and Mac OSX up to 10.5).  The computers can be on a local network or just connected to the internet.  This is a great way to share photos with relatives or files with other people.  I personally use it to synchronize a folder full of Keepers on my desktop with a folder on my backup server so if my computer ever crashed after I added the document but before the nightly backup could run, I still wouldn’t lose the files.

 

Security essentials:  http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

Microsoft has realized the necessity of antivirus software on windows PCs and has stepped up with the free Security Essentials.  Security Essentials provides protection against viruses, spyware, rootkits and Trojans.    This is a huge step in the right direction by providing this service free of charge.  Keep in mind, that like all anti-viruses, they are typically only effective in telling you AFTER you’ve been infected, so practice safe surfing habits like not downloading from questionable sites, don’t open e-mail attachments, and make sure you are running as a limited user on your computer and not running as administrator. 

 

PowerToys http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx

Microsoft has a history of releasing non-supported PowerTools and Power Toys that their developers create because there is a need.  These are not publicized formally nor are they supported by Microsoft, but there are some gems.

Color Control Panel Applet:  Being an amateur photographer, being able to control how the computer displays colors and be able to control it from the screen all the way to the printer is very important.  This powertoy does just that in one centralized area.

SyncToy: If you have multiple copies of files or need a simple way to compare files, Sync Toy was built to help copy, move and synchronize various files like photos, docuemtns, etc.

RAW Image Thumbnailer Viewer:  As a photographer, I like to shoot my DSLR to capture RAW images.  The issue with RAW images is that many softwares can’t display the RAW files natively. This is where the RAW Image Thumbnailer Viewer comes in.  it allows you to see thumbnails, previews, EXIF data and even print RAW images you may not otherwise be able to see.

Alt-Tab Replacement:  If you multitask and have many files open at once, you may use the Alt-Tab key combination to cycle through the open windows.  The Alt-Tab Replacement PowerToy beefs up this ability and included page previews and the application icon.

Tweak UI:  By far, my favorite of the PowerToys.  TweakUI has been around for years allowing people to manipulate the user interface of Windows to better suit your needs.  Tweak UI is a must have for me when I set up a new computer. 

Image Resizer:  Why open up Photoshop or some other powerful image editing tool if all you need is to resize the image to e0mail or post somewhere?  With a right-click, you can resize one or many images.

Webcam Timershot:  This PowerToy allows you to set up a time lapse photo using your webcam.  Maybe you want to capture traffic or the weather moving in.  The Timershot tool is a simple way to take snapshots at specified intervals.

Windows Home Server–Why don’t more people use this?

 Windows Home Server—what is it?

Windows Home Server http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

I have a small network at home with 8 computers attached to each other.  I had various shared external harddrives across the network, but finding things became cumbersome and unwieldy.  I wanted something like a server that I have used for many years at my place of employment, but I didn’t want a full server.  I wanted something that was easy to set up and manage and provide a central location for videos, music, and other files.  My search began and I quickly found Windows Home Server.  HP quickly began selling their MediaSmart server for far more than I wanted to spend; I purchased a copy of Windows Home Server and used one of the PCs I already owned to set it up.  The minimum specs for WHS are 1GHz Pentium III CPU, 512MB of RAM, 80GB of hard drive space, DVD-ROM drive, and a wired Ethernet adapter.  No problem.  In fact the most difficult part of the entire setup was buying the software.  WHS is not offered in retail stores.  Thankfully you should be able to find a copy on Amazon, NewEgg.com or TigerDirect for around $120.  What you will get is the server install disk which is installed on your server.  You will also get a disk with the connector software on it.  This is installed on the other PCs on your network so that they can be automatically backed up to the server.  Lastly, you will receive a recovery disk that you can boot into to recover the backed up data from the server. 

Installation of the server software and connector is pretty straightforward.  Once you install he connector software, you can then modify the user privileges in case you don’t want your teenage son to have access to the software directory where you keep all the installers for a few hundred necessary applications.    Plus you can then manage the individual PC backups and see what has been successfully backed up and what hasn’t.  You can even kick off the backup from the server console. 

Sharing audio and video from the WHS server is pretty trivial.  Once you have all the media on the server, it can be accessed by anyone with access on the network. 

One of the nice features WHS provides is the ability to add multiple hard drives, either internal or external, into a storage pool.    So now my collection of 100GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1 TB drives can be placed into a giant storage pool on the server and utilized as multiple terabytes of storage.  This was a nice addition to the features since now I can increase the storage size by just plugging in a new hard drive and selecting to add it to the storage pool from the server console.

Lastly, the server software allows me to connect to my home network from any internet connection.  I can access my data, configure my server or even stream media like music or video.  Very handy for those long nights in hotels after conferences or training sessions.  Just log in and stream some music or a movie.  Very handy.

All in all, WHS has impressed me and is now a required part of my home network infrastructure.  I imagine this might work equally well in a small business environment where the employees need access to a central bank of files and be able to automate the scheduled backups.  Microsoft has done an excellent job scaling down a full server into something fit for a home or small office environment!

Browser Compatibility? What’s that?

As web developers, keeping up with the web browsers is an ever-moving target.  We write the cleanest, most universal code we can, but unfortunately not all browsers were created equally.  Even when we’ve created what is ostensibly the best application we can, we must still run the site through some testing to ensure browser compatibility.

I always have the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari installed on my development machine, but depending on the client, you may need to ensure other browsers. 

Thankfully there are applications out there devoted to this.

My favorite is Browser Shots (http://browsershots.org/) because it is the Swiss Army Knife of browser emulation.  In one submission, you can verify you site in dozens of Linux, Windows and Mac browsers including some of the lesser-known browsers like Shiretoko and K-Meleon.  You can specify screen size, color depth, and whether or not to include Javascript, Java, or Flash.  Browser testing has never been so easy.    Browser Shots is perfect as that high-level test to ensure the code is rendering as you are expecting. 

BrowserCam (http://www.browsercam.com) is another valuable service for web development.  BroswerCam allows you to test your site similarly to Browser Shots, but BrowserCam is not free.  You can sign up for a free trial that will let you see the screen captures from the various browsers for only 24 hours and you can only do that 200 times before having to pay.  The interface isn’t as streamlined as Browser Shots, but BrowserCam allows you to choose the Operating System specifically along with the browser.  So for instance, if a customer is having issues running Firefox 1.5.0 on a Windows 2000 machine without Adobe Flash installed, you can emulate that exactly on BrowserCam.  You can also denote the screen shot format (JPG, PNG, or BMP), the screen resolution, and even if the capture will be just the browser or the entire desktop.  This service is incredibly useful while troubleshooting specific situations and issues without having to build a system on which to test.. 

Lastly, if you would rather have 307 different browsers on your system, the Browser Archive is there for you (http://browsers.evolt.org/).  The Browser archive is a collection of every browser and version you have heard of and many you haven’t.  If you are looking for an old version of Netscape Navigator or the kid-friendly browser Surf Monkey, then this site has the installer for you.  Download the installer and install the browser and get ready to take a trip back in time! 

Whichever you prefer, it’s always best to test your sites across multiple platforms and browsers prior to the launch and with the help of these sites, hopefully that process just got a bit simpler!

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