Room Wallpapers Created from Your Favorite Pictures

Want to decorate your room walls with some personal pictures ? Better Wallpapers is a UK based company that will convert any of your scanned or digital photographs into a full size personalized wallpaper that will stick to the walls of your room like any other wallpaper.

Create Large Wall Posters from Your Images

You can upload an image online and they'll email you a proof - you approve it and the final wallpaper arrives in the next 10 days. The image will be enlarged to fit the size of your wall and they promise a 7 year non-fade guarantee.

The service isn't cheap however. A 1m x 1m wallpaper will cost around £100.00 and the delivery cost will shoot if you are outside the UK. And before you order a custom room wallpaper, make sure the picture resolution is high enough else it'll appear pixelated.

betterwallpaper.co.uk [Thanks Andrew]

Related: Turn Your DNA Samples or Fingerprints into Wall Hangings

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Download Sparky: The Official Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

The Alexa toolbar for Firefox is now available as Alexa Sparky - though they call it a toolbar, it's more like a status bar.

Alexa Sparky adds visual traffic graphs to the status bar of the browser which shows the site's popularity over time (based on Alexa traffic) and the Alexa rank number. [see screenshot below]

A Related Links option is added to the Firefox menu bars that shows the 10 websites related to the web page that's currently open in your Firefox browser.

Right click the traffic graph in the status bar to quickly access the Alexa Detail pages, Cached Pages, Search Pages and more.

Download Alexa Toolbar for Firefox at www.alexa.com. Not sure if this is compatible with the latest release of Firefox 2.0.0.5. Thanks Eklavya.

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Photograph: When Lightning Strikes People Listening to an iPod

This is a picture of Jason Bunch who suffered burns after lightning struck while he was jogging and wearing iPod. Link

Experts says that it's not just iPods that people have to be concerned about - anything similar that requires headphones or even cellphones being held to the ear could result in similar injuries.

To estimate the number of miles you are from a thunderstorm, count the number of seconds between a flash of lightning and the next clap of thunder. Divide this number by five.

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Yahoo! to Rival Adsense with Tyroo Ads, Jajah Now in India

Interesting picks from India Inc.

Yahoo! Enters Pay-Per-Click Advertising Market in India with Tyroo

Yahoo! India today picked up a 35% stake in Tyroo, a non-contextual Cost-Per-Click advertising program that is primarily focused on Indian website publishers.

This could mean some good news for thousands of bloggers and site owners in India who were looking for alternatives to Google Adsense - Yahoo! will possibly leverage it’s existing sales and marketing resources to bring more publishers and advertisers into the Tyroo program - that means more ad inventory and more ad revenue.

Jajah Enters India to Offer Cheap International Phone Calls

The popular Jajah “click to call” service has finally set foot in India. Jajah allows you to make or receive cheap long distance and international phone calls using the conventional landline or mobile phones sans the computer or internet.

Type in your phone number on the JAJAH website and the phone number of the person you wish to reach – JAJAH will connect the two numbers seamlessly. Invitation Link.

Microsoft OneNote vs EverNote

Which is your favorite software for taking notes and web clippings. Read this detailed comparison on EverNote and OneNote - Try to organize your life with any of these wonderful software and you’ll play a big role in saving trees.

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Loads of People Are Feeling Web 2.0 Fatigue

Every morning, our RSS newsreader would tell us about a dozen startups that were launched the previous night.

We (bloggers or the early tech adapters) will most often join the mad race to try that "groundbreaking and earth-shattering" product within hours of launch, compare it with existing products and blog that information ASAP with catchy headlines so that our "blog post" gains some visibility in the blogging world.

But can this phenomenon continue for long ? Won't people (our site visitors) get bored of trying new products or migrating from one to another just because the latter has some new features or a better interface?

Some popular veteran bloggers are feeling tired of this massive "Web 2.0 construction boom" - some thoughts:

Steve Rubel is overwhelmed by number of new Web 2.0 companies that spawn each day:

Techcrunch, Scobleizer and Mashable leave me all breathless. It's like watching the cranes of Dubai rise.

Circa 1998, perhaps when many of you were 10, The Globe.com, GeoCities and Tripod were all the rage. They faded from our horizon over time. The same thing will happen to many of today's hot sites...

These days, I am far more interested in what people do with technology rather than on what the latest new "shiny object" is.

Dave Slusher dropped some top blog from his daily radar because "he got so tired of hearing about another slightly different way of doing what we were already doing and why that tiny difference was worth dropping everything and moving over." [hint: Twitter, Pawnce, Jaiku, FaceBook] 

People ask me why I’m not on FaceBook since that’s the cool, hot thing. That’s precisely why I am not. I’m not interested in coolness or hotness. I am interested in friends, true friends that matter to me and that miss me when they don’t see me for a long time. I’m uninterested in virtual friends..

Life is short and true friends that will go to the mat for you are scarce. The energy spent in chasing some sort of glorious future from service to service is friction in my life, not any sort of addition.

Jeremy Zawodny has already got off the "Web 2.0 hype treadmill" and feels better after doing so:

I made an conscious decision to drop virtually all "news" sources from my subscription list that felt like breathless hype machines that provided little new insight.

My mental state improved quite a bit after that. I see to many people I know getting caught up in the breathless hype and forgetting to think about whether the latest shiny new thing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Breaking News - too much sensation but little content

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Record Replay all your Computer Activity Like a Movie

Ever wondered how did you spend all the day on your PC? Wilfing? SnapLogger can help you here.

SnapLogger is like a digital camera for your desktop in continuous-shooting or burst mode - the software will continuously click pictures of your entire desktop screen or a particular application at regular intervals and save them to your hard drive.

It can then play your entire computer activity as a movie to help you understand how you spent time on the computer. Think of SnapLogger as a video version of Thumbstrips which is only available for Firefox.

Like keyloggers, software like SnapLogger can be used to serve both good and an evil purpose so let's focus on the good side. For instance, you can automatically create a GIF animated movie of Google Earth by setting up a time interval of 1 second.

SnapLogger can come in very handy when you are sharing your screen for tech support or a group meeting. Every action of the third-party is captured on the desktop and you know exactly what they did to fix your computer.

They also have filters to help you disable capturing when particle software programs are active (or vice-versa). Available at GiveawayOfTheDay.com.

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Microsoft Office 2007 Subscription Inspired by Prepaid Phone Cards

$10 per month: Microsoft has come up with a unique model to sell their Office 2007 software in the developing world where most users cannot afford to pay the full cost of the software suite in one-go.

Like the pre-paid cell phone cards, customers can pay for the time they use Microsoft Office 2007 without actually buying the full software. Microsoft will charge around $10 per month of Office 2007 usage.

A full version of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 costs $149 - equivalent to more than a year of subscription based usage. But this big question is - will people subscribe?

According to Reuters, Microsoft will use the prepaid Office 2007 model to target students, home users and small businesses in South Africa and Romania this month, and may be available in other markets at a later date.

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Download Firefox 2.0.0.5 - Latest Version with Security Fixes

Mozilla Foundation today released a minor update for Firefox web browser that fixes the following security vulnerabilities and memory leaks in Firefox 2.0.0.4 and previous versions.

You can either download the Firefox 2.0.0.5 standalone installers from Mozilla website or download from the official Google website.

Also learn some new Firefox tricks on Digital Inspiration.

List of issues fixed in Firefox 2.0.5 from release notes:

MFSA 2007-25 XPCNativeWrapper pollution
MFSA 2007-24 Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents
MFSA 2007-23 Remote code execution by launching Firefox from Internet Explorer
MFSA 2007-22 File type confusion due to %00 in name
MFSA 2007-21 Privilege escallation using an event handler attached to an element not in the document
MFSA 2007-20 Frame spoofing while window is loading
MFSA 2007-19 XSS using addEventListener and setTimeout
MFSA 2007-18 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption

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Google Adds SiteMaps in robots.txt of All Blogger Blogs

Google is continuously improving the Blogger platform - their latest feature discussed below may help get your blog content on search engines more quickly.

For non-geeks: Sitemap files enable you to let search engines know about the new or updated content on your blog that should be indexed by their crawlers. Earlier you could point Google to your Blog's SiteMap file through the Google Webmasters control panel but that's no longer required.

Now whenever your publish a new blog post on Blogger or update some previous post, that information will automatically become available to Google and other search engines - you don't have to do anything at your end. How cool is that.

For geeks: Google has now added the Sitemap: directive to the robots.txt of all blogspot blogs which actually points to the default xml feed of that blog containing the 25 most recently updated blog posts. Here's an example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://abc.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

This is an excellent development because the Sitemap: sytax is supported by all major search engines including Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live - their search crawlers can therefore auto-discover your new or updated blog content based on the sitemap file.

Related: Verify Google Sitemaps for Blogspot blogs

If you are getting Invalid XML namespace errors and warnings with Blogspot sitemaps file, read solution here

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TechSmith Jing - Free Screen Capture cum Screencasting Software

TechSmith, developers of SnagIt and Camtasia Studio, today released a new screencasting plus screen capture software that works both on Mac and Windows. And this is probably the first product from the TechSmith headquarters that's completely free.

Jing is designed for instant computer screen movies and image captures - a small yellow bubble floats on edges of your desktop - hover your mouse over the bubble and click the capture button.

You can select any rectangular areas of the screen, decide whether you want a static screenshot or a movie, and hit the record button - the graphic is saved as a PNG image while the movie will be saved as a SWF Flash file. During the record process, everything else is dimmed which I think is a very good design.

Related: The Best Screencasting Tools

You can either leave the recording on your hard-drive or upload them to Screencast.com via Jing itself. [Screencast.com is like the YouTube of Screencast videos]

The most useful feature of Jing is history (quite similar to Plasq Skitch) - every movie or screenshot captured via Jing is always accessible through the history window as a thumbnail. Deleting a capture deletes it from your History as well as Screencast.com if it has been shared.

While the Jing installer is a mere 4 MB, you have to installed the .NET 3 framework to use this sofware (and that weighs around 28 MB.)

If you don't own Camtasia, you can consider Jing for creating short screencast videos in Flash which can then be embedded in blogs or shared online through Blip.tv (yes, Blip accepts Flash files).

While there are no hints if Jing will always remain a free utility, it does signal that the Mac Screencasting community may soon be blessed with a Mac version of Camtasia and SnagIt.

Related: Screencasting Software Guide, Screen Capture Software

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Combine PDF Files, Convert Web Page URLs to PDFs on the fly

LOOP is a unique extension for Firefox that converts the web browser into a proper PDF writer that can do some amazing things sometime not possible in other free PDF conversion software.

First and foremost, as you are browsing the web, click the Add URL button and that webpage will be converted to PDF almost immediately - the entire process requires a single click. You can continue browsing and keep adding more URLs to the PDF queue - all the PDF conversions will happen in the background with interrupting your work.

If you have any local documents (like Word, Powerpoint, Excel or Images), LOOP for Firefox will convert those as well to PDF files - click the "add file" button.

And finally, there's a "Combine All" button which will merge all the PDFs that you added to the queue and will create one PDF file out of them. You can also reorder the pages in the Combined PDF with the "move up" or "move down" buttons.

Pretty innovative and useful extension. Requires you to create a quick account on Drawloop website. The pro version offers password protected PDFs.

LOOP for Firefox | User Manual

Related: Save Web Pages as PDF with HP SmartPrint

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Guru Speak: The Science of Search Engine Marketing (Pay-Per-Click)

You are used to seeing Google ads on most websites (including this one) but ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes ?

How do these "Search Engine Marketing" companies shortlist search keywords and phrases for? How do they decide if they are being charged the right cost-per-click amount? Why is Adwords more popular among advertisers than Yahoo Panorama or MSN adCenter? Are Google acquisitions good for the advertising industry?

You will get answers to these questions and more in this very-very useful video interview of Jeff Figueiredo, an SEM guru by Robert Scoble on Scobleshow. This video will get all your basics right about PPC, SEM and how advertisers get the keyword data from Google Analytics and ISPs.

[Do not confuse SEM with SEO - the former is about getting targeted online advertising on search engines while the latter is related to improving your site's natural ranking in organic search results.]

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How Good Are You at Recognizing Fake Websites and Spam Emails ?

Can you tell a fake (phishing) web site from a real one ? Or can you recognize spam emails that request you to verify your eBay or Paypal account credentials.

McAfee has created a very simple quiz with screenshots of websites and emails for you to spot the fake ones from the real site. Do take this 10 question quiz and the results may actually surprise you even when you are a pro-geek - it looks deceptively easy but that's not the reality.

I scored perfect for ebay, amazon and paypal (popular phishing targets) but had trouble identifying the financial websites of Chase, CapitalOne and Bank of America.

Overall Rating: Tightrope Walker - "You avoided some deceptive Web sites that would have put your personal information at risk. But you chose others that pose serious security threats that could lead to identity theft or financial losses". Share your phishing score in the comments.

(1) How to Detect Phishing Websites, (b) Google Phishing Warning Extension

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Photography Tips: Take Better Pictures with a Mobile Phone Camera

You cell phone camera may lack all the great point-and-shoot features that are in your standalone digital camera, but you can still can shoot good photographs with the camera-phone that are more-or-less perfect for sharing over email and the web.

Stuart Headlam shares some simple tricks to help improve your mobile phone photography without asking you to get a Nokia N95.

The best photography tip ever:

They key to a great photo is actually to take as many shots as possible. Taking several shots may help build the confidence of people who are traditionally camera shy. If you explain beforehand that you'll take a few photos and let them pick their favorite, the chances are you'll end up with a picture that you're both happy with.

If you plan to take a print of pictures captured with the cameraphone, Stuart suggests that you need to have taken your pictures with at least a 2, maybe 3 megapixel camera if you want decent quality prints.

While Mobile phone cameras are good for casual photography, if you want to capture those rare once-in-a-lifetime moments like a graduation day, first birthday of your daughter or your grandparents anniversary, always use a standard digital camera. Cameraphones kill Memories.

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The Role of Angel Investors and VCs Explained in Simple English

Ever wanted help while explaining the role of Angel investors and Venture Capitalists to mom ? Read this:

Angel Investors usually invest smaller sums of money ($100,00 to $500,000) and are more interested in working hands-on with innovators. Angel investors are open to high degree of risks, and their decision process is usually quick, with the diligence far less intrusive than that of larger VCs.

Angel investors' value-add, other than money, is their operating experience and hands-on work with founding teams. They also help introductions to larger investors at later stages. [Angel investors are sometimes known as Business Angels]

Early Stage VC Firms focus on taking a significant stake in a company early on, and they resemble angel investors in that they are interested in guiding the company from an early stage. The difference lies in their comprehensive diligence process and timing.

These firms usually invest between $500,000 and $2 million initially, and they have the capacity to invest more at later stages. They also provide invaluable guidance from their own experience and that of their other investments.

Growth-stage VC Firms usually invest larger sums of money primarily in companies that have validated their innovations in the market and are looking for capital to scale.

These firms invest anywhere from $1 million to more than $10 million, depending on the fledgling company's needs. Growth stage VCs add value in networking their portfolio companies together, to their joint benefit.

VCs vs Bank Financing - VCs get much higher return on investments when things go well, but they should an enormous financial risk that often exceeds that of the entrepreneurs seeking the investment.

Reprinted from How Innovators Connect by Rohit Agarwal and Patricia Brown.

Previous excerpt: Time to market, Be a trend spotter

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New York Times & Wall Street Journal Websites Are User-Unfriendly

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Online are probably among the most visited websites on the planet but are they user-friendly ? Some instances:

The New York Times: When you are reading an article on NYTimes and happen to double click a single word or a sentence, NYTimes website will automatically open the dictionary definition of that word(s) from Answers.com in a pop-up window - definitely not a good user experience (see screenshot). 

It's kind of irritating because people often double click words/sentences on a web page to either drag them to the browser search box or copy-paste text as web clippings in their internet scrapbooks - they are not interested in the meaning of the word. 

There should at least be an easy option to turn off the dictionary feature of NYTimes.

The Wall Street Journal Online: When you select some text on a Wall Street Journal web page and right click, WSJ will automatically show links to related articles in a neat pop-up window - not so unfriendly but you have to become a member of WSJ.com and login in order to turn off that feature.

And this auto-search feature may be a problem for those who are browsing through a slow dial-up connection [see screenshot of WSJ.com below with search in progress]

 

The Wall Street Journal Online: A lot of websites link to external pages with the target="_blank" attribute that will open hyperlinks in new browser windows or tabs. Perfect but the WSJ web pages go a step further when linking to external website content.

Here's a code snippet from a WSJ web page which links to Desktop Tower Defense website:

<a href="JAVASCRIPT:OpenWin('http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/',..);void('')">Desktop Tower Defense</a>

Such kind of linking will possibly deny any Google Juice from the trusted WSJ to the linked website because the link is hidden in Javascript which cannot be parsed by search engine bots.

And from the perspective of "human" readers, external websites will always open in a new browser window - you cannot right click the website link and open it in a new tab. Hence even in the age of tabbed browsers, you may end up having multiple browser windows on your desktop originating from a single WSJ web page.

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Open .docx Files Without Word 2007 - Convert .docx to .doc Online

Your client just emailed a Microsoft Word 2007 document ending with a .docx extension but you have no clue about how to open and print  that file.

Not a problem, you can either convert the file from docx to .doc format or use one of the online services to view the content of that file without requiring Microsoft Office Word 2007.

See Guide: How to Convert Files to a Different Format

The DOCX format is the default file extension in Word 2007. It essentially a bunch of zipped XML documents - you can even rename the extension from .docx to .zip and extract the contents using Winzip like any other zip file.

To convert .docx documents to .doc format, all you have to do is download the free Microsoft Office compatibility Pack here and you'll then be able to open, print edit, and save .docx files in Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003 [much like an advanced Word 2007 File Viewer].

If you are on Mac, you can get the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac here - this converts .docx to rtf (rich text format) files which can be viewed in Office for Mac and other Mac word processors.

Alternatively, you can convert .docx to .doc or extract text from .docx files online using Zamzar's email conversion. Unlike the Microsoft compatibility pack, these docx to doc conversion services do not require copy of Microsoft Office.

It is also possible to open and edit a .docx file in OpenOffice or StarOffice using the free Open XML Translator from SourceForge which converts .docx Word documents to .odf and vice versa.

Related: Microsoft Office 2007 FAQ, Office 2007 Fonts Free

The Word 2007 docx format is currently not supported by GMail Word viewer or Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

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Microsoft University in Bangalore, India For Computer Courses

Microsoft is setting up a university in Bangalore, the Silicon valley of India, to impart computer education.

Though Microsoft does fund education and research projects in many universities across the world, this Bangalore based university will be wholly owned by the software giant and it's first-ever independent educational venture in the world.

TOI says that the Microsoft university may train around 1,000 students and it may well be India's first run by a multinational company.

Microsoft has software development centers both in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Recently, they opened shop in Vancouver, Canada after failing to get more workers in their US office on H1-B visa. Maybe the Microsoft University campus in India may be another step in the same direction - train students as per requirements and then absorb the best of the lot.

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Embed YouTube Flash Videos in Facebook with HTML

Facebook users - you can now embed any HTML code in your Facebook profile using the amazing HTML Box app.

That means you can add web images to your profile, embed MP3 files,  CSS formatted text (with hyperlinks, forms, tables) and even external Flash videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites.

While FaceBook doesn't permit the <embed> or <script> tags directly, the HTML box app provides alternate tags to embed these SWF or FLV videos in your profile.

For any Flash video file (.flv)
<fb:flv src="Flash_Video_URL" height="###" width="###"/>

For Audio MP3 files:
<fb:mp3 src="URL HERE" height="###" width="###" artist="artist" title="title" album="picture"/>

Facebook recently added the fb:google-analytics for Facebook app developers to track usage via Google Analytics. If you add an external web image to HTML Box, it will be cached on Facebook servers before serving it on your profile page.


Update: Facebook is no longer support HTML apps. You can however create a standard HTML file and upload it to Google Sites and embed it into Facebook. See how to create custom Facebook Pages.

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Print to PDF Button for Your Blog and Website

PDF Online, a free service that lets you convert any document or image to PDF files, today released a PDF printing widget that will immediately appeal to most bloggers and site owners. 

As mentioned before, visitors to your website can now save your blog articles and web pages as PDF files at the click of a button - the HTML web page will be converted in real time by the PDF Online conversion engine.

Implementation is easy - you just have to insert a small Javascript snippet in your Blog template or web pages. If you are using IE or Firefox, you will be asked to save or open the PDF file. If you are using Safari browser, the PDF will show up inside the browser window.

What makes this service more attractive than the HP PDF Printing Widget is that it will keep a track of all the PDF conversion activities in your site real-time - it can serve as a good metric to measure the importance of your site contents.

My only concern with the Web2PDF widget is that the hyperlinks on the web page are lost in PDF translation. web2.pdfonline.com

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