Google Play is Google’s Android Market where you can buy and download mobile apps from. Android apps are on the rise and today there are so many different kinds of apps catering for various needs such as entertainment, lifestyle, business, gaming and so on. The popularity of the Android Market, now coined as ‘Google Play’ has been growing tremendously over the past year. With over 25 billion downloads, Google Play is the place to go for the newest, coolest and amazing collection of apps.
Speaking of gaming, the website is flooded with thousands of games and some can be so addictive you’ll just want to spend all of your time trying to get to the next level. One such game is FlaTank – A retro 2D Tank Maze War Game, which is available for free download. With over 72 5-star ratings, and above 20000 downloads, this game is undoubtedly very entertaining – especially for those who fancy war games.
The concept of the game is simple. All you have to do is work your way out of the maze while killing all the foes you meet with ammunition. There are lots of levels to get through and so it can keep you busy for a while. Do have a look at the website at this link, and tell me how it was! 🙂
– Millie
SIM-only deals are the new and rapidly increasing trends in the mobile industry. You no longer have to sign up for a 12 or 24 month contract to get an affordable handset, which is actually more expensive in the long run. The new alternative is to buy the handset outright and then sign up for the popularly short-term SIM-only deals which are less costly by a great percentage. SIM-only deals can cost as little as £10, or less, and the great thing is that it doesn’t come with a lengthy contract. A lot of people are going for this option to avoid signing up for another two years after their normal phone contract ends.
Based on a report compiled by Carphone Warehouse, the number of people signing up for SIM-only contracts went up by 26 % in the first six months of this year, compared to the rate of signups they had last year. This obviously means that people no longer want to be tied up with the normal lengthy contracts, and hence SIM-only contracts are proving to be much better.
An advantage of using the SIM-only deal option is that you do not have to be locked to one service provider. SIM-only deals can be used on unlocked phones and hence there are no restrictions to which mobile service provider you choose to go with. This gives you the flexibility to switch to cheaper tariffs when required – another cost-saving method!
So with so many providers and available deals for SIM-only contracts, how do you find the best one suited for your needs? There is one website that showcases many deals and allows you to compare SIM-only contracts from various providers to make it easier for you to choose the option that is perfect for you. Hope you find it helpful! 🙂
– Millie
The Internet: It is a huge network of networks which has become a big part of our everyday lives. The Internet is the sole source for any kind of information, whether it’s for businesses, students, or for anyone else. The internet is the only platform which is accessed by billions of users, worldwide. What the Internet can be used for: for creating awareness about your products or services, for online trading (e-commerce), for sharing information, for communication, for advertising and marketing, and so on.
Why You Need a Website: Websites give your company a global presence and they are the most cost-effective tools used for advertising and marketing. Websites are very low cost and the possibilities are endless. One the greatest thing about having websites is that they are dynamic in nature, meaning that they can be changed as required, in line with your evolving organizational needs. It is very easy to update website content.
Designing a Website: Most people have the perception that it is very difficult to design websites, however this is not true. With the availability of excellent content management systems like WordPress or Joomla, creating a website has become so easy, even for beginners who can hardly write any HTML code. This said, it’s not enough to just have a website, it is important to have a professional-looking website that can be taken seriously by its visitors. WordPress is a perfect platform for creating professional websites and now with resources like ultimatewptraining.com, it’s very easy to learn how to make simple but good websites on WordPress.
Ultimatewptraining.com is an amazing website that provides tutorials on how to create WordPress sites, with videos that show users how to install WordPress, how to use the Dashboard, how to post articles, how to optimize the website for search engines, how to create pages, how to work with different WordPress themes, how to install and use widgets and plugins, and so on. Do have a look at ultimatewptraining.com and let me know what you think! 🙂
Success with Micro Jobbing Sites
Posted on: May 19, 2012
The rapidly increasing rate of micro jobbing sites has been a blessing for online freelancers who can now work from home and make money doing things they love. The micro jobbing sites allow freelancers to post jobs or ‘gigs’ for as little as $5, giving them the option to charge as much as $100 for tasks they can carry out from home.
Freelancers signing up for micro jobbing websites like famousgigs.com are offering a vast varieties of services like creating banners, advertising products and websites, social media marketing with Twitter and Facebook, transcribing audio and video files, creating mobile applications, writing articles, and so on. FamousGigs allows freelancers to set their prices and sell their services to anyone interested. It is a new website which is following the Fiverr revolution and it’s growing fast, moving towards being yet another success story.
The good thing is you can get jobs which are normally time consuming to do, such as creating several hundreds of backlinks for your website or carrying out search engine optimization, for as less as $5! Of all the gigs listed on this website, the most popular ones are providing social media marketing through the top social media websites: getting more followers on Twitter; getting more Facebook likes; getting more views on your YouTube video, etc. and with tasks that promise to increase the traffic to your website, its popularity is growing fast.
The most interesting gig I’ve seen so far on famousgigs.com is a freelancer willing to sell to the buyers an opportunity to expand their dropbox accounts to up to 18GB….now this is really worth the $5, isn’t it? Head on to famousgigs.com and see what else is being offered at dirt cheap prices! 🙂
– Millie
It is not very frequently that we go out to purchase a laptop and hence when buying one we have to ensure that we get the correct kind, with the required specifications, and at the most reasonable prices. However, with so many websites and stores struggling to sell their stocks of laptops, it can be quite a confusing process to choose the best laptop, one that is most suitable for your requirements. It can be difficult to decide where to buy the laptop from, which ones are the best for different purposes such as the best laptop for gaming, internet surfing, one to take to college or university, and so on.
But do not despair as there is now new tools available that will help you choose the best laptop. With the features available on suggesters.org, you can now search for laptops based on their specifications. The website tool also allows you to sort the results, view the specifications, compare different laptops and rate them according to your likings. With this tool you’ll be able to conveniently choose the best laptop for your needs. Hence keep tuned to this website and you’ll find it extremely useful to buy your next laptop. Compare laptop prices and get to know which one is the most reasonable one, offers the most amazing features, and read about the different brands available. Suggesters.org lists many types of laptops from HP to Dell, Toshiba, Acer, Samsung, Apple, and many more.
Suggesters.org has further plans of extending their services to digital cameras, cell phones, hardware, e-books, tablet PCs and lots of other electronic and digital items, so keep tuned!
You have to agree that enterprises nowadays are so technology-oriented that most of their operations are dependent on systems. System failures can not only cause loss of valuable time and efforts but when the systems fail at the wrong time, it can cost companies both money and customers. This is the reason there is an increasing trend in the number of organizations who are focused only at providing IT support services. There is a significantly huge market for this kind of work and there are many players as well – and they know that they all play vital roles. Considering this then, what factors would make it easier for companies to decide which is the best IT support service provider?
IT service companies provide a range of support models, from backup and data recovery plans to helpdesk support. Some go deeper into offering support for specific applications used in an organization. Others provide server solutions. But that does not mean you have to hire different IT support service organizations to carry out these different tasks! That would just be ridiculous! Actually there are many providers who serve in many ways, for instance TSG (Technology Service Group) goes to the next level whereby they claim to not only provide IT support, but they bring themselves forward in ensuring that your organization will not experience any functional problems if they’re in the lead.
Like I mentioned that IT support should be provided in various fields as opposed to just one or two services they provide, TSG literally diversifies in four major domains: Microsoft SharePoint, Support in Sage Software, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, CRM Software, amongst others. Without a doubt these IT infrastructures are different and have totally different functionalities; however TSG is able to tap into these and provide credible enterprise solutions at a global level.
There might be other companies out there too, if you’ve had any experience in using IT Support Services then please comments and tell us about your experiences. Which company has worked well for you? Which one were you disappointed with?
Do have a fruitful week!
– Millie
Responsive Design for Websites
Posted on: February 10, 2012
The most important thing you can do is adapt.
Our industry is changing. I say our, because it is an inherently collaborative environment. Code is written and tweaked, hacks and adjustments are created to solve Problems in the code, and those hacks are forked and rewritten.
Arguably, one of the mpg influential new techniques of our current web era is responsive design. This was, just as other coding techniques, born of collaboration – born of a collaborator in our environment: Mr. Ethan Marcotte.
Now, this won’t be another “what is responsive design” post or a why is this good/bad/spawnofsatan – I could point you to any number of posts about it. No – this is about adapting. Taking a long and intricate project and rebuilding it 50 percent of the way through to take advantage of a great new technique.
The RevSystems website used to be a representation of our company – a solid design, built and applied to wordpress. Since its launch, we have taken monumental strides in redefining our brand, advancing our way to the edge of modern technology and opened our arms to the phenomenal new techniques that are coming into existence in conjunction with HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Naturally, with these upgrades, our website needed to be recreated to represent those changes. The site you are currently reading this text on, is our new website. We completely redesigned it – we didn’t rework it – we started from scratch, designed comps in fireworks and the browser and pushed our knowledge of current design and progressive enhancement to a new level.
Starting and Restarting
When we started the redesign, back in February, we had only begun to dive into responsive web design. I had taken an expectational amount of my free time to investigate this new technique that had the web buzzing, and decided that it would be a fantastic challenge to apply this technique on our agency website. So we took all of our fireworks & browser mockups and scrapped them. Reread that sentence. We took months of our designs and in-browser comps and trashed them all. We knew that our markup would be bloated if we tried to make it responsive as it currently was. So, we bit the bullet knowing (Lie. We had no idea. ) that it was going to be worth it in a long run.
We had chosen a framework (expect a post on that process in the near future) and redesigned the comps based on it. We then restarted the browser comps on top of the same framework. This was certainly frustrating, as any designer can tell you, but we marched on and started building us a website.
Advanced Web Design With New Techniques
We were already pushing ourselves to our limits with this site. We had never completed a website using the responsive design methodology so, naturally, tackling a complicated one such as this and making everything efficient in our process was borderline impossible. But we soldiered on and made it work. What ensued was an exceptional display of destruction. We took all of our scripts and code and began butchering them – making sticky footers work on a responsive framework, having sliders respond to their containers and adapt touch events for iOS devices, using an almost excessive set of typekit fonts for live text with live masking (we wow’ed ourselves with that one – go ahead, try to highlight the header on this page.) and much much more.
What we ended up with was our original design with a huge set of live text effects and cross-browser functioning scripts, all of which respond from 1600 pixel wide resolutions down to iphone views. We even began serving high resolution assets to the iphone 4’s retina display.
Essentially, this project has shown us that things we generally take the safe route on can be flipped on their heads. Text blocks are no longer images – typekit, css3 (or even simple css margins) lets us create anything we want as long as we put in the time and effort. Markup can be kept simple and adapted for any screen – instead of having 2 sets of everything being serviced to either desktop or mobile.
What’s our goal? Make people think. Stop being comfortable with design and start challenging yourself more. The web is evolving even faster than it has in the past decade – the only way to stay on top is to push your limits and start using these exciting new technologies today.
Have you ever experienced a crashed hard disk then discovered you lost all your important files? Mine crashed today and the feeling is awful! If only you backed up the second before you lost all the data! Well I just stumbled onto a website that can be used to store, share and access files online. This guarantees that you don’t lose your files when your hard disk gives up next time because once your files are stored on cloud servers, they are accessible from anywhere, and at anytime.
FilesAnywhere is the leader in cloud storage features and some of the services they provide are offsite backup storage, access to web folders, direct and online file editing, platform to share photos and stream audios and video content, and much more. This is the perfect solution for me, at least for the moment, must say goodbye to the files I lost and keep safe storage of the ones I’ll create in future! 🙂
There is one thing that would concern anyone about this type of online storage: security. I found out that FilesAnywhere does provide SSL encryption and not only that, they have secured FTP services as well. Their desktop applications are available for both PC and MAC users.
Cloud storage has been around for years, and there are many companies that provide these services. There is no better way of concluding which is the best provider without experiencing using them. I signed up for an account today, let’s see how it goes! Hope you all have a great weekend ahead!
– Millie
Payroll can be such a nightmare for some! Others say it’s complicated and time-consuming. My friend says it’s just boring! Surprisingly this is the kind of job that no one looks forward to doing. But think about it, we’re in a technological era, and so we don’t really have to process these manually! Why not use software to accomplish such mundane activities? There are tons of payroll solutions out there, just do a quick Google search and you’ll see dozens.
When you’ve found a handful of solutions, how do you decide which one to go for? This could be a tough choice. Some of the factors you’ll need to consider are:
Security: Is your payroll system protected from unauthorized access?
Flexibility: Will your chosen system be flexible enough to grow or scale according to your company size?
Control: How much control do you have over the payroll system, what changes can you make, what are the limitations of the system?
Tax Management: To what extent does the payroll system handle tax-related calculations? Does it leave any headaches for you?
The online solutions I reckon are the best because you can access them from anywhere, as opposed to an in-house payroll system which only runs on your company’s servers. One of the best search results I found on Google is Intuit and this is because I’ve used QuickBooks so I’m familiar with the platform and software. Their payroll solutions integrate within your QuickBooks application, making it convenient for you to use it.
Hope this post helps you decide better how to deal with the bother of payroll! 🙂
– Millie
The use of smart phones has rapidly increased over the past few years. Every other person nowadays carries with him a Blackberry, an iPhone or any other model of smart phone. They’ve become so popular amongst all age groups as they make life easier by adding to it efficient ways of carrying out various tasks. The rise in the use of smartphones has had a significant impact on the number of mobile applications that are released each day, worldwide. The are tons of mobile applications which users download, ranging from tools to games, social network applications, image and video sharing applications and having applications that help personalize your smart phone in different ways.
Many applications allow users to create their own mobile content such as customized graphics for mobile phone wallpapers and customized ringtones based on the music saved on the phone. There are various free ringtone makers available on the app stores for iPhone and Android phones. I also tried a ringtone maker last week, an app called Mobile17. I was successfully able to convert some mp3 files into ringtone formats.
The technology era is moving towards the “Web 3.0” buzz word and compared to the Web 2.0 where it’s all about user generated content, Web 3.0 brings in a splash of personalization so that users can get, create and use personalized data for their needs. Mobile web and applications that allow users to personalize their experiences are on the rise and I think the future in this field even holds fascinating technologies that users will surely appreciate. What mobile or web applications have you used that gave you a good user experience? Do share with us your views by posting a comment below!
– Millie
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