If you had to buy or sell a mobile phone a few years back, the immediate place that came to your mind was the nearest mobile store. Times have changed and things are no more the same. It’s the age of the internet and e-commerce is the new supermarket.

I can’t really remember the last time I went to a store to look out for new gadgets or to simply check the price of a new gizmo. When it’s just a click away, why take the pain of driving to a store? Ya ya I know, the internet has made us too lazy, but isn’t that the reality? Shopping experience has been so simplified that it’s actually a pleasure now to explore stuff, not a trauma that it used to be. It’s not just about buying, the same applies to selling as well. With e-Bay starting the trend, e-commerce has just exploded into a huge global market with millions of online stores opening up, making each and everything available on the web.

Online shopping is already very popular in regions like America, Europe, Australia and parts of Asia. You can call it the preferred medium of shopping at these places. And it’s not just these parts of the world, the trend is catching up in other countries as well, including the African nations, and when it comes to Africa, Kenya is one country with a lot of potential in this regard. As per a CCK report, during the period July ’13 – Sep ’13, there were a total of 19.1 million internet users in Kenya. This number has only been increasing since then. Seeing the surge in the internet population, a large number of online stores have opened up in the country, serving customers with everything ranging from cakes to electronics. Services like Olx Kenya have also been foraying into the country’s online market, providing people with a platform to buy & sell through classifieds.

With the internet user base growing, more and more Kenyans are looking to shop from their homes. This presents an opportunity not just for the sellers, but also for the buyers, who’ll benefit from the increased competition by getting better services and cheaper prices.

Starting a business may seem like an extremely daunting task, but the reality is that anyone can do it nowadays, you just have to be organized and have a clear vision. You don’t have to go into debt renting a building anymore. While there’s a certain novelty to having a physical place of business, all you really need to do is rent a domain for a just a few bucks a month.

You can find online stores on the web that sell anything and everything you could possibly imagine. While large corporations have websites that sell their goods online, small businesses are also cropping up each day. It’s actually an excellent way for a fledgling entrepreneur to get started, because you don’t need to invest a great deal of money into it.

If you have a product that you’re confident in, selling it online can become a very lucrative business venture. However, it’s important that your website looks and feels as professional as possible. A lot of people make the mistake of launching a site that is extremely plain and rudimentary. 

When people are shopping online, first impressions are everything. Typically, one makes a judgement call from merely looking at a page for a few seconds before moving on, so you want to present something that is going to make a statement and keep eyes glued to the screen.

Merchants tend to design their decor and signs in an aesthetic that encourages the customer to enter and browse a store in the physical realm, and the same idea applies to the virtual world as well. You may have the most fabulous product in the world, but no one will know if you don’t market yourself well.

A professional and sleek website will also make customers more confident in buying from your website. People want to feel secure and not like they’re about to be ripped off. If your site communicates a message of trust and comfort, you’re more likely to get people to buy your product or service.

You don’t have to know the first thing about web design in order to get started. An eCommerce web developer at SolidCactus.com can do all the work for you. If you have a specific theme in mind, all you have to do is make your vision known, and someone from SolidCactus will make your dream a reality. Everything from branding to the interface of your shopping cart can be taken care of.

Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for software to organize their internal and external support organizations. Small offices rely on the memories and “sticky notes” of a few dedicated individuals. Zoho provides a system which can meet the needs of both in a web-based service. In addition to basic task or ticket management, Zoho offers features which add to the basic support mission.

Management reports provide insight into support activities and problems encountered. Contact tracking means that everyone from sales to the CEO can make sure that addressing issue histories doesn’t become a future sales challenge, whether the client is small or a major account.

Social media fans are noticing that sometimes when they post complaints, concerns and even compliments on Facebook, Twitter, and similar media, they’re getting direct, personal attention from the company involved. It makes a big impression when it happens, and often results in a positive word-of-mouth message for the responsive company. Zoho has ways to get “out there” in social media and get involved in an organized way. Zoho’s online system provides customer service software which they update and maintain. Their client companies create an account and just get to work. Zoho’s experience with their clients also results in improvements to the system which benefit everybody who uses it. Chances are, help desk and support organization managers who are asked to implement new ideas from corporate management such as social media involvement will find that it’s already done and ready to go.

TeleSign protects the largest Internet and Cloud properties in the world from fraud. With a sturdy and easy to implement solution for identifying and significantly reducing online fraud and spam, TeleSign has become one of the most trusted leaders in intelligent authentication. It safeguards over 2.5 billion downstream accounts in 87 languages in over 200 countries. They do this by employing one of technology’s most common devices: the telephone. Using one of TeleSign’s products, validate leads that will solidify return on investment when selling those leads.

Far too much time is wasted on leads that turn out to be unreliable for a myriad of reasons. TeleSign improves lead generation, helps increase margins and save valuable resources with the products that clients around the world have come to trust to protect their online properties. When a lead enters their contact information into a form, including a phone number, TeleSign will send an automated phone call or SMS to that number. That message will include a PIN that has to be inputted before the lead can continue with the form. Once the code has been entered and the phone number validated, you have a contactable lead.

It’s easy to abuse email verification, which has become the easiest and most common means for verifying information. But it’s also not uncommon to use disposable email addresses, as well as invalid phone numbers, on lead capture forms. Validating information through TeleSign’s intelligent authentication products will improve lead quality and ROI immensely.

As you know Facebook is one of the popular social networking sites and Google is a reputed search engine. Both these companies strive to sustain in this web world. You cannot deny the fact that Google and Facebook are the two epochs of the technical era. While Facebook is current social era, Google is rapidly receding to the past. In the technical era, it is often seen that one leader doesn’t lead to the next.

But Google is a toast in this regard. It is not at all stagnant rather the core business is developing every moment. Its core products are improving and successfully entering the new market. Take a quick glimpse at the variety of arenas where both Google and Facebook are struggling for future of the technology.

Social Activity

When it comes to social activities, Facebook takes a higher strand than Google. Hours after hours are spent on Facebook in comparison to Google. People spend around 2 hours a month on Google and consider that to be enough. Google understood the importance of social networking and hence launched Google+ recently. This social system has a better design than Facebook, especially in its way of handling the variable privacy with the aid of its Circles.

What Google+ lacks is globally connected user base of the Facebook. Google might not unseat Facebook in the social field but can effectively drive the users from Facebook.

Search

As all of us know that the web is a huge store house of information and Google shows you the way how to extract the contents of the web. Google is not just concerned with collecting of the information, it also shows how it collects information for the users and the ranking of the result in the Google page. Social interconnection is the core essence of Facebook and social data is conducive in building socially-aware search.

Google is making effort to stay ahead of the social networking site, Facebook both traditionally and socially. Social signals are integrated into Google search by the feature of “Search Plus Your World”. Google though lacks the intensity of social data like Facebook, incorporate extremely private social data in its search results.

The current scenario is – Facebook is entering the realm of general search and Google is entering the realm of social search. In this regard, Google is said to acquire the upper strand.

Identity

Identify solution is present in both Google and Facebook and they are perfect for owning social index. Facebook’s identity solution is enormous – it collects data as to on which system you and your friends are signing up and everyone is getting connected. Google’s identity solution is not as same as the Facebook. Signing into Facebook makes sense as you get the chance to interact with one another. If you are planning to sign up for new services, Facebook is the ultimate solution. Google has to buck up in this regard.

Google and Facebook have their own aspect and features important to the web world. You need to make the choice according to your need.

Author’s Bio: Charles Malcolm  is a prominent desktop support expert. You can know about the social networking sites from him.

For those of you who don’t know, Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It basically resembles a bulletin board system and consists of a number of newsgroups. Users can read and post messages to these newsgroups. Usenet contains more than 2500 terabytes of data and 5000 gigabytes are added daily. The best part – you can download the files at maximum DSL speed.

What is UseNeXT?

UseNeXT is a Usenet service provider and a software/client that is used to access the Usenet. Accessing the Usenet has always been a complicated task and a special software or a newsreader is required. UseNeXT allows you easy access to the Usenet through a clean and organized interface. UseNeXT is the only service provider that offers access to 8 server farms world over. It gives you immediate high speed access and the maximum level of security through a 256 bit encryption. Since the download are direct, you can make full use of your high speed connection.

The UseNeXT software provides a slew of features. The built-in media player lets you preview files before downloading them, even if they are archived. It also automatically unpacks and repairs failed downloads. Files are sorted into various categories. You can pause the downloads and resume them later. There’s a chat feature as well, that lets you chat with other UseNeXT users.

UseNeXT is a paid service but you can always avail the 14 day free trial first, which allows you to download 300GB of data. The paid package starts at 9.95 Euro and gives you up to 600GB per month. If you want to download quality content at maximum speed, try UseNeXT. You’ll love it.

Today we have a social networking boom that has resulted in a vast number of social network sites. Almost everyone has a social media presence these days. Each of us have our own choice of social network. Though FaceBook and Twitter are the most popular ones, we connect with our friends and family over a number of different services like Gmail, Yahoo, LinkedIn etc. Managing and checking so many different profiles can turn out to be a little difficult at times. Wouldn’t it be convenient to view all the updates at one place? Well MyLife.com is the answer.

So what is MyLife.com? MyLife.com is a social network service founded in 2002. It integrates all your IM and social network profiles and lets you connect with everyone at one place. Convenient, right? You can use the People Search tool to find existing connections among the 700M profiles that the site claims to host. MyLife.com makes managing connections across all your social networks a brisk. You have the option to add all your accounts like FaceBook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Blogger and a dozen other services and view all the updates at one place and manage everything centrally from one location. You can also see who all searched for and viewed your profile. MyLife.com has been featured on various websites like BBC, Yahoo, Cnet and Fox.

Registeration at the website is absolutely free and you can also sign in with your FaceBook account. MyLife does what it promises: It lets you connect with all the people at the same site. Give it a try and know it for yourself.

Pop-ups are annoyances spread all over the web. Clicking a simple link or white space can trigger the opening of a series a pop-ups, totally useless and unrelated to what you’re surfing. Pop-ups are mostly advertisements, can be for a smiley pack, a toolbar or any other thing. Apart from the irritation these pop-ups cause, they can also infect your PC with malware. So it’s better to get rid of them than let them interfere in your work.

Pop-ups are usually Javascript based. Though browsers have in-built mechanisms to block pop-ups, they are not very effective. Now this is where extensions come to the rescue. By installing a simply browser extension or Add-on, you can disable pop-ups easily. Since each reader may be using a different browser, I’ve written this post descibing how to block pop-ups for all the popular browsers, ie. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Pop-up blocker for Google Chrome

An extension called Better Pop Up Blocker effectively disables all the pop-up windows in Google Chrome. Once installed, a blue icon will show up in the URL bar and will begin protecting you. This extension will definitely improve your Google Chrome experience.

Download it. 

Pop-up blocker for Firefox

To block pop-ups on Firefox, an Add-on named Adblock Plus Pop-up will help you. This Add-on also gives you the option to disable pop-ups for some specific websites.

Download it.

If you wish to block pop-ups on all the websites while using Firefox, install the above Add-on and open up the Add-ons menu (Click on Firefox button > Add-ons) and click on the options button in the Adblock Plus Pop-up Addon section. A window will open up where you can list the websites you wish to block (Add site rule). Selecting ‘Block all pop-ups’ under ‘Default action for sites not listed’ will disable the annoying windows everywhere.

Pop-up blocker for Safari

Better Pop Up Blocker is also available for Apple’s Safari web browser. Simply install it and see your pop-ups vanish.

Download it.

Pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has an in-built pop-up blocker that can work effectively if tweaked a little. Fire up Internet Options from the Settings menu and click on the Privacy tab and open the Pop-up Blocker settings. A dialogue box like the one above will open up. Set the Blocking level to high and click on Close. PS: Make sure the Turn on Pop-up blocker option is ticked.

I’ve myself installed and verified all the extensions and techniques and they seem to work well. If you encounter any problem loading a website, simply add that website to the exception list. For example: after installing Better Pop Up Blocker, I was having trouble opening up my FaceBook timeline, but when I clicked the blue icon in the URL bar and selected “Allow http://facebook.com”, the problem vanished. Have a happy pop-up free web surfing!

Tech Junky is holding a contest to reward our loyal readers with a very special prize.

Binverse, an all-in-one premium Usenet provider, has given us 2 free accounts to giveaway on our site.

These are special block accounts not normally offered. They come with 50 GB of high speed downloads and no expiration date.  So you have as long as you need to download the 50 GB.

So What is Usenet?

• Usenet was started in 1979 as a text based communication network. It was where the world first went to discuss topics online.  People posted topics and discussions in themed groups called newsgroups.
• It predates the World Wide Web and was the place where the Web was first announced to the public.
• Usenet today is a collection of massive amounts of stored data. You can discover and download virtually anything you want.
• Premium access to Usenet is now only offered by a handful of providers.

Features of Binverse:

• Speed – Binverse Usenet access offers uncapped speeds. This means you can download files as fast as your internet connection will allow. Usenet is stored on a farm of commercial grade servers. Binverse provides its users a direct connection to these servers. No wasting precious bandwidth with other users.

• Security – Binverse offers a 256-bit SSL encrypted connection. This is the same security offered by online banking. Binverse respects your privacy. These levels of security insure ultimate privacy when accessing Usenet.

• Search and Preview – Unlike many other Usenet providers, Binverse offers an all-in-one solution to Usenet. To download from Usenet a newsreader, search engine, and Usenet access are all required. Binverse has combined all these functions into an easy to use platform where you can quickly search and download anything. With Binverse you can also preview audio and video files before downloading them to insure their quality.

• Newsgroup Free Trial – In case you are not one of the lucky winners. Binverse offers a 3 day free trial with complete, unfiltered access to all the newsgroups. While it is just a preview of what is out there, it is still a great way to experience what Usenet has to offer.

So How Do I Win a Free Account?

It’s Easy. Like Tech Junky on FaceBook from the sidebar and simply leave a comment below telling us how badly you want a free Usenet account and you will be entered into a random drawing. We will choose the winners at a later date. Check back here for contest updates.

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Not everyone wants or needs to connect with the Internet through a home connection – be it an old fashioned straight modem, or a wireless router connected to a cable. For people who move around a lot, working online can be cheaper, quicker and easier using a mobile package.

The laptop, after all, was designed to be moved around. That’s the point of something small, which folds up into a tough case and can be carried lightly. Your home internet connection isn’t going to cut it when you’re on a train 200 miles away from your house!

There are plenty of mobile broadband options to choose from. I use AT&T internet but they’re not the only provider – all the major mobile phone companies deliver similar packages, so it’s as much about finding someone who has the right coverage in your area as it is about remaining loyal to a particular brand.

Coverage is all important for the speed of your mobile Internet device. I work in a variety of locations in my local area, which is unhelpfully surrounded by hills and is around 90 miles from the nearest population centre (idyllic, but annoying for internet speeds!). My At&T internet connection is useful (as a mobile device that is) because the AT&T coverage in the area is strong enough to pick up a good speed. There are some communications providers whose transmitters hardly reach my village at all, so buying ne of their mobile internet devices would have been a very good way to spend useless money on a piece of plastic that doesn’t do anything.

The mobile internet device works in exactly the same way as your home devices – just using mobile signals instead of the landline signal that is piped into your modem. Even wireless home internet uses a modem – the wireless router is plugged into the landline infrastructure by way of a cable modem. The mobile device plugs into your chosen mobile network using a SIM card – exactly the same kind as the one in your ‘phone, only this one is specifically registered to give you Internet access.

Like all connectivity packages, whether you use AT&T internet or the provider whose signal is best in your area, what you pay equals what you get in terms of monthly downloads and uploads. The more you pay, the more data you can deal with on a daily basis.

Choosing the mobile connector that is right for you, then, is about finding the right deal as well as the right supplier. If you’re lucky enough to live in an area with good coverage from all the mobile networks, you’ll be able to shop around to find the best deal for your budget. You should be able to specify a 4G device if you are buying a new contract right now – certainly the latest AT&T internet mobile device is set up to receive at 4G speeds where available already.

The way in which you consume the Internet ultimately dictates whether or not you actually need a mobile device. If you don’t work on the go, you don’t really need one – your phone probably does all the surfing you need when you’re out and about. Unless you have a yen to download movies wherever you end up of course!

Tagged as:
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