SnappyFingers: An FAQ search engine, find answers to your questions

Most of the times we goto Google for searching answers for our questions. There are also websites like Yahoo Answers, Answer.com etc, where you can post your question & other users can answer questions to gain points. But SnappyFingers is quite different, it indexes all FAQs in the web. This makes easy for user to find answers rather asking at Yahoo Answer & wait to get reply.

SnappyFingers is a Question and Answer search engine. It crawls and indexes FAQs spread across the Internet, and provides search results in a easy to view Question/Answer format. It can be used for finding answers & also will be useful for conducting research.The site is in beta, and has a database of 3 million questions. Snappyfingers claims that their crawlers are working hard, and planning to increase the number of questions aggressively in the coming months.

I myself tried many questions on Snappyfingers & amazed with the results I got. It could be really helpful in many cases. Though Google is powerful enough to find anything on net, sometimes it fails to give right answers. The way SnappyFinger works is quite different from Google & you get answers in almost first five results. Looking forward for more good search results when it comes out of beta.

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How fast this post got loaded? Should be noticable improvement in speed! TB has seen improvements in traffic every month. My previous host was unable to handle this traffic even after implementing caching mechanism. In any shared hosting service there will be limitations on number of simultaneous PHP threads & CPU load. When a site exceeds these limitations it ends with an error message.

Tech Bangalore is now moved Media Temple (mt) which is grid based hosting service. Many of the world top blogs including Tech Chrunch are on Media Temple (mt). So, Tech Bangalore might never go down from now on & also loads faster

Web greetings sites are bit boring these days, I have almost stopped using them. I still feel actual greeting card will have more value than these web greetings. But these days we are so lazy, we do almost everything on web including paying bills, transferring money…etc. Obviously we don’t have time to goto greeting shop to pick one & post it/courier it.

Here comes Papam.in, where you can find collection of greeting cards for almost all occasions. Select a card & customize it with your own words or keep the default one. Enter recipient’s postal address & pay the money. Done, greeting card will reach recipient in 7 days. Greeting cards are priced at as low as Rs.39 including shipping. You can also buy a package of Rs.500,Rs.1000,Rs.2000 & Rs.5000 where you can get discounts. You can either pay for as much as you purchase or buy credits through packages mentioned above & use it for sending greeting cards.

As per my knowledge Papam is the only player in this business. Start sending greetings at Papam.in

Last week there was a function in my cousin’s house. He recently bought one digital camera also, so I took the responsibilty of taking pictures. Finally we had arround 500 images shot! We sat with & removed all duplicate images & finalized 450 images for printing. As we both are working for IT companies, we didn’t had time to order pictures & follow up with conventional photo printing shops. So, we descided to look for any help in web & here is what we found!

PicSquare:

In our search we first landed on Picsquare.com. I signed up to have a check & process was quite simple. Photo upload interface was good with bulk upload, which is the most important feature a photo printing service provider website should have. Picsquare also got Flickr & Picasa Album integration, which saves time & internet transfer to upload the photos again which you already uploaded to Picasa Albums or Flickr. You can just select images you want to print from your Flickr/Picasa album. Price is one of the other factor to consider, Picsquare price for 4×6 print is Rs. 2.99

Snapfish:

Snapfish is the service provided by a known big brand HP. Snapfish is available in many country across world including India. Again signing up was not a big problem by filling out a normal web form. I looked for upload options & I was really shocked! There was only one option to upload photos & that too only 12 images at a time! There was no Flickr or Picasa Album integration too! As I already said, I had 450 images to print, it might have taken a night to upload all my images & order for printing. My expectation was high as HP is a known & big brand offering Snapfish in many countries. But it failed to win my heart! Price for a 4×6 print is Rs. 2.95

iTasveer:

itasveer is pretty much clone of Picsquare with similar features. It has bulk uploader to upload photos & also Flickr/Picasa album support. One feature I loved with itasveer is that, it allows to create photo gifts like mugs, T-Shirts, Collages…etc without signing up! The price is competetive at i tasveer which offer a 4×6 photo for Rs.2.90 which lowest among all reviewed here.

Conclusion:

Picsquare & Itasveer are really good in their service, which puts you in confusion to choose any one of them. Beside photo printing, they also offer free space to host & share your photos with others. Picsquare is one step ahead in this which offers “Personal Photo Site” for free. Both sites also allows you to create photo gifts & order them. Though Snapfish has got big brand image behind that, it’s left behind in features.

Finally we ordered 450 photos on Picsquare. As my cousin stays at Mandya, a town 100 KM away from Bangalore, we gave that address for shipping. I got a call from my cousin on exactly the fourth day after ordering saying order reached them. He was also happy to get free albums with photos. I also orderd arround 70 images with Snapfish & it took one week to reach my office located at center of Bangalore!

Yeah! it’s the easiest way to set a Guinness World Record! As we all love worlds’s most advanced, most customizable browser, we can help it to set a world record. It’s new version Firefox 3 is to be released soon. Official date for it’s release is not yet announced. So, Firefox 3 is all set to make a guinness world record as most downloaded software in 24 hours. The date to download will be announced on Spreadfirefox.com. You can also pledge & give your email ID, and a reminder will be sent to your email ID too.

Let’s join hands & set this world record

Getting a movie DVD for rent is never been easy. You might not get the movie you wanted from the CD shoppe next to your home. Some times you end up with a low quality DVD/VCD or even badly scratched discs which doesn’t plays properly. Or you even might feel guilty for supporting piracy.

Here is a solution for all those problems. With BigFlix.com you can browse through wider range of movies available for rent. You can queue movies you want. DVD/VCD will be delivered to your doorsteps within a day for no extra charge! You can keep that disc for as many days you want! When you get bored of it, you can ask them to come and collect it back!

Though everything can be done online, they also have real stores in many locations. You can even walk-in to anyone of their stores to collect or return DVDs. There are many plans to choose from, starting from Rs.250/month.

Though BIG Flix looks as a greate service, SeventyMM started same service long time back. Plans of SeventyMM are also looks better than Big Flix. So, there’s no much difference in both this websites, you can pick whichever you think is good one. Do share your comments on which one is better if you have used any one.

Airtel has launched internet portal airtellive.com for it’s user base. The portal is built in association with Google using Google Personalized Home Pages. This portal is made for Airtel Broadband users. Users can get simple yet powerful applications for free. Applications & services includes email, documents, presentations, spreadsheets…etc. Portal is co-branded by Airtel & Google. Airtel also partnered with shaadi.com, 24×7 Guru.com & Naukri.com to provide exclusive offers to it’s users on portal.

Above is the radio created for Tech Bangalore. You can listen to all posts made on Tech Bangalore. Text to speech conversion looks pretty good. You can listen to all blogs which are having RSS feeds. You can listen to any blogs in simple two steps:

1. Goto http://blogbard.com
2. In the search box enter blog URL

That’s it! it automatically detects feed of that blog & creates a flash radio out of it. Embed HTML will be provided in a text box, copy & paste it in your blog. Now your visitors will be able to listen to your Radio, oh! I mean blog.

BlogBard also has features to read your subscriptions in Google Reader & Bloglines. Just login to thes services in BlogBard & it does the rest!

Microsoft is providing 5GB of space to store your files online. As the above picture illustrates, you can save files for yourself, share files with friends & also share on world wide web. It provides three level of access control for your files.

Private: Store files which are only accessible to you. This could be used to store files which are private & should not be accessible to anyone else.

Shared: Share files only with your friends, but they need to have an MSN or Hotmail account. Other than your friends can’t access these files.

Public: Upload files to public folder to make it available to everyone. After uploading files you can share link with anyone & they can download the file. If you have a web page or blog & want to provide a download to your visitors, it also provides attractive badges to insert in your web pages. Clicking on it, user can download that file.

Users who already have MSN or Hotmail account can straightaway start using it by logging in. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for a free account. Sign up or login to Skydrive at http://skydrive.live.com/

Twitter is a service which ask you “what are you doing?”. But it’s deviated a lot from this theme & evolved as a big microblogging platform. You can just update whatever you want through web, IM or Phone. Others can follow your updates & can receive updates via all three mentioned mediums.

Twitter has millions of users & finding people from your location to interact is difficult as there is no such option provided right now. Abhinav Sarkar, a forth year student in IIT Kharagpur, created a script just for fun. But the script is really useful, it is written in python & uses Twitter API. Primarily script crawls Abhinav’s Indian friends on twitter by looking at location entry as “India”, “Bangalore”, “Mumbai”…etc into his database. Later script crawls his friend’s Indian friends & so on, the list keeps building. Finally, the result is a directory of all Indian Twitterers!

This list can be accessed at
http://abhinav.sarkar.googlepages.com/indiantwitterers.html

Great work Abhinav

Update:

Abhinav has created a twitter bot which follows, collects tweets from all Indian Twitterers & re-tweets them. So, you can follow this bot to follow all Indian twitterers tweets. Follow this bot at http://twitter.com/IndiaTwit