Facebook working on an ‘Answers’ portal?

Today I found a link on Facebook inviting users to apply for beta testing program of their new product, which looks like below:

Wondering what Facebook is upto I clicked on that link & apparently it looks like Facebook is working on a ‘Answers’ portal similar to Yahoo Answers. To get the beta tester access to this application, Facebook requires user to pick three questions & write answers for them. This is clearly about Questions & Answers, let’s see whether Facebook can really stand against well established competitor like Yahoo! Answers.

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24HoursLoot is an online store which lists a T-Shirt at discounted price everyday & discount applies only for 24 hours. 24HoursLoot is creative enough to come up with some nice design everyday. T-Shirts with catchy captions, music band logos, geeky slogans are the few of the listed designs so far. Though normally T-Shirt designs are standard, sometimes they allow user to customize it. Like, T-shirt with twitter design allows user to add his/her username, a T-shirt with QR code printed on it for the text you provide…etc. Sometimes they also list products other than T-shirts.

New design will be open to public every mid-night 12 & will be be available for next 24 hours. Website provides options to subscribe to new loots via Email & SMS to make sure you won’t miss any loot. Head over to 24hoursloot.com & start looting!

Vote via SMS is the most commonly used voting system these days. From reality shows to surveys & contests everywhere it’s been used. But, I personally don’t vote at all using this system since it uses 5 or 6 digit short code which my service provider will charge around 5 to 6 Re per SMS. Because of this pricing, participation in voting becomes very less.

I remember reading an SMS forward which says “Missed call system is invented by Indians”!! We use this “Missed Call” technique so much in our daily life. My mom & sis never call me from their phone, they always give me a missed call & I call back! Just because they don’t want to burn their currency talking to me. Taking forward this widely used “Missed Call” technique, ZipDial has come up with a “Missed Call to Vote” system!

For Ex:

Q: Should Meg Whitman become Governor of California?

If YES, give a missed call to +91 40 44 55 69 30
If No, give a missed call to +91 40 44 55 69 31

All you are doing here is giving a missed call, so you will not be charged anything to vote! And this system is so simple, you don’t have to remember “Send XX to YYYYY” and bleh bleh to vote! It is just different numbers to dial for different options.

I spoke to people behind ZipDial at AppJam & they said they have plans to open ZipDial for public where anyone can create a poll. They have just started, I wish everyone including TV channels start using this system. Visit ZipDial & start voting for polls & win some gifts.

Every website uses services like Stat Counter, Google Analytics to tracks visitors & get detailed analytics about their visitors. But, these tracking systems are mainly concentrated at visits made from computers. Though it tracks visits from mobile devices, details are very less. With growing smart phone popularity, you can’t just ignore this space. I personally underestimated traffic which comes from mobile devices to Tech Bangalore, which I found 20% of overall traffic after enabling mobile analytics!

PercentMobile:

PercentMobile is a free mobile analytics service which gives granular details about visitors browsing your website from mobile devices. Details which PercentMobile gives you is just awesome, like, how many devices were wifi enabled, how many were touch screen, how many were smart phones, how many had QWERTY keyboard…etc. PecentMobile also lists all the devices which are used to browse your website.

I enabled PercentMobile for Tech Bangalore few days ago & above screenshot shows how much detail you can get from PercentMobile. Screenshot is partial, there’s more to look in analytics, like Network provider, region, most visited URLs, referrer…etc.

So, head over to PercentMobile & enable mobile analytics to your website!

Magic, is something which amazes us so much right from our childhood. I always wondered how a burning piece of paper turns into a pigeon? how three threads change their lengths as I see it? how did the magician know I will pick ‘A’ spade!? Well, it’s really a magical world. But, it’s not that easy to find information about magic & magicians on the web.

My friend & a magician himself Philip Tiju took the initiative of creating a website which has every information about magic & magicians. After months of hard work he came up with worldofmagicians.com. The site has everything about magic & magicians. History of magic, a huge directory of magicians with basic information about them, videos, photos, information about magic institutions, magic dealers, links to e-groups what else you can think of?

One thing I liked about the portal is, most the place it’s open for public to add information, for ex: If you know a magician who is not listed in directory, you can go ahead and add. In this way public can contribute information they know to the site.

Go to WorldOfMagicians.com

Having a website of your own is becoming as common as having an email ID. Many people still think creating website requires lot of effort, money & coding knowledge.  Roxer is a website which provides easy drag & drop web site building interface using which anyone with minimal knowledge about web can build really good looking pages. Roxer is a free service which also provides hosting for pages created by you & a free sub domain. For your website, you can have free sub-domain like yourname.roxer.com. I know there are lot other websites providing same service. But I still considered writing about it because of it?s elegant & easy interface. The best part of Roxer is it allows users to edit it?s own homepage to have try before signing up! You just need to click on ?Lock? symbol to edit a page & lock it back once done. Though all the features mentioned above are free, you need to pay for few premium features like having your own domain for your pages. You can have a look at comparison between free & premium services here.

Link: Roxer.com

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

Visit Syntha Site

Want to build your own website? Don’t know what are all required for it? Don’t know anything technical about it? Syntha Site is just for you!

Syntha Site is a free service which provides you tools to design your website without any coding knowledge. It has lot of ready templates which you can select & modify for your purpose. It has very easy to use web builder with drag & drop feature which doesn’t require any coding knowledge. After you are done with building your site, Syntha Site also offers you a free subdomain & space to host it. Means that you will get yoursite.synthasite.com for free! If you want unique identity & ready to spend a bit money, you can have your own domain. You can register domain at any domain registrar like www.godaddy.com by paying around Rs.400 for a domain like yourname.com, yourcompany.com…etc. later you can easily configure it to work with Syntha Site as you web site files will be at Syntha Site. If you have your own web space, you can download your website & host it on your own hosting.

Visit www.synthasite.com to creat your own website.

Good News for Tech Bangalore readers, TB enters into Alltop list of Indian websites at http://india.alltop.com. This is a single page with recent five post title’s from top Indian Sites & Blogs. Content form around 40 – 50 popular websites & blogs are aggregated in a single page. Upon mouse over on a title, it show snippests from that post. So, user will be able to have a look before he clicks & goes to that particular website.

Alltop has top websites all around the world from different categories & sub-categories. It’s a ?dashboard,? ?table of contents,? or even a ?digital magazine rack? of the Internet. It has a minimalistic interface with no ads & graphics providing great user experience. Overall it’s a good site to hang on & find top stories in favorite category.