Category: Reviews

SMS GupShup identified as India’s Twitter

Post author By Swati
Post date May 6, 2009
3 Comments on SMS GupShup identified as India’s Twitter

SMS GupShup is creating a buzz all over and is apparently being called India’s Twitter! Webaroo’s SMS GupShup is India’s mobile group SMS service that allows users to create mobile communities and broadcast messages to them. SMS GupShup accounts for some 400 million monthly text messages, which is around 5 to 6% of the total Indian market.

Three months back they added advertising to their text messages and today are making $150,000 per month in revenue. Wow!

A user is limited to 100 characters, and each SMS is paid for by Advertising. The ad appears as text of 40 characters after the main message.

How does SMS GupShup work?

Create your group
Invite your friends to join it
Forward an SMS to your group
Any SMS you send to the group will be automatically forwarded to all those subscribed to it
You have the option to maintain your privacy by keeping your group and its messages “private”.
The SMS sent to non-private groups reflect on their website
Users can create polls, quizzes and also solicit ratings from the group members.

SMS GupShup now has 20 million users and is growing rapidly with thousands of groups like:

Finance
Entertainment
Lifestyle
Health
Sports
Technology, and so on!

How could you use this service?

Only via SMS!

CEO Beerud Sheth says that the service can only be accessed via SMS, which works just fine for India’s 400 million mobile phone users. Users sign up and use the service all via text messages. They never need to visit the website at all.

This service is a low cost way to keep in touch, that too, without an internet connection.

I’d say, “Great Going”!

Link: SMSGupShup

(Source: TechCrunch)

Tags Misc, Mobile Services, News, SMS Tips and Tools

Reviews

Create interactive charts online with Chartle.net

Post author By Swati
Post date May 6, 2009
2 Comments on Create interactive charts online with Chartle.net

It’s often a hassle to create a chart online, that’s why Chartle.net came into existence.

The site’s statistics indicate that over 1 billion charts, maps, plots and diagrams are found in print publications each year, however, only 40 million online. This huge difference in numbers sure reflects the complexity to create and publish charts online.

Chartle.net allows you to:

Create interactive charts online
Minimize complexities
Keep the process as simple as possible

The images or the charts that you create online are solely yours and you can you them in any way you wish to – for your business reports, presentations, websites, blogs and even print documents.

A variety of charts to choose from:

You could create a variety of charts like:

Bar and column charts

Pie charts

Line and area charts

Scatter plots, Venn diagrams and Radar charts

Static maps

Interactive maps

Dynamic timeline charts and Motion charts

Org charts and other fun charts like Google-o-meter and gauge

Upcoming features on Chartle:

New Ajax/Flash user interface
Easier embedding
Business friendly
Social network compatibility and more . . .

Do I have to Register?

No need. You could use Chartle’s services even without registering. Create a chart online and embed it wherever and however you want. Simple!

Get started. Create your own chart.

Link: Chartle.net

Tags Free Services, Google Maps, Interesting Links, Internet, Online Tools

Reviews

hi5 adds Chat to Attract Users

Post author By Swati
Post date May 5, 2009
5 Comments on hi5 adds Chat to Attract Users

In a desperate attempt to attract new users, social networking site- hi5 is now adding an instant messaging service. Currently, hi5 has almost 60 million users – which is not a bad sized audience, but way less if you compare it with other social networks such as – MySpace and Facebook, with 125.7 million and 294.7 million unique visitors respectively.

A couple of months back, hi5 had added entertainment features to engage more people through casual gaming (like sports, arcade, etc). Last month it announced its partnership with PlaySpan, powering micropayments for virtual goods and premium content sold on the social network. And very recently it partnered with Paymo to power mobile payments for virtual goods.

Chat features

hi5’s chat service is quite similar to the Facebook chat. It:

Is an instant one-on-one messaging service
Allows you to check who are online or offline
Runs directly within the browser of hi5
Has the provision to changing your online status
Allows you to write updates
Allows you to post profile comments
Allows you to share photos while chatting
Allows you to express better with hi5 “star” emoticons

Although, quite slow to change, but this seems like a good move after all. The new IM feature will not be able to bring hi5 up to Facebook’s level for sure, but might just help engage more audience. Better late than never.

Link: hi5

(Source: TechCrunc h)

Tags Chat, Facebook, Internet, Service, Social Media, Social Networking

Reviews

Now “Kidlandia” helps you create fantasy maps for kids

Post author By Vivek Jain
Post date May 4, 2009

He had been living in a fantasy world of maps and monsters since he was a very little boy. He is Brian Backus – the founder of Kidlandia, an illustrator and entrepreneur. Brian also produced educational multimedia titles for Disney and Voyager.

The concept of Kidlandia came out in 2004 where Brian wanted to give kids a boost of confidence, control, and self-worth. Kidlandia is a web destination where parents and children can create personalized cartoon maps telling a child’s very own fantasy story.

Kidlandia helps in

Creating personalized maps of imaginary kingdoms for children
Friendly monsters as companions
Creating cities, islands, and other features of the kingdoms named after family and friends so that they feel more connected.
Engaging kids and motivating them to understand maps, and accelerate reading skills.

The Cost

You could create a map for free.
Once you have created it online, it can be ordered in prints.
Range: $39.95 for a small sized scroll to almost $180 for a framed, larger sized, high quality map.
Maps can be printed on scrolls, which are easier to carry around, or on canvas that is framed and can be hung.

Shortcomings

No integration with the web to create a virtual world for kids.
Not very interactive
Webkinz and Disney’s Club Penguin create virtual worlds for children to immerse themselves in a fantasy land, and have become increasingly popular.

Link: Kidlandia

(Source: Kidlandia | TechCrunch)

Tags Interesting Links

Reviews

A List of Top Photo Galleries – Online & Free!

Post author By
Post date May 4, 2009
6 Comments on A List of Top Photo Galleries – Online & Free!

Ever wanted to make a fully functional, photo rich, easy customizable Photo Gallery portal for your family photos online or just to make a commercial website to make some healthy cash be simply throwing some photos? Then check out these awesome photo systems for your basic and pro needs. All of these are open-source and can be downloaded from their respective sites easily, all for free.

ZenPhoto

A really powerful CMS specially designed for specialized gallery websites. It has almost all the features you want to need to make a gallery out of your photos for closed family group online or to make a rich collection of photos online to make cash. You will be served with some awesome functions to suit your taste. Easily customizable, easy integration with blog, are some of its glittering features. It also let you upload other type of media like videos, flash videos along with the photos and images. Along with these you can also leave notes on your photos, protecting photos with auto-watermarking are some other features.

Gallery

Also known as Gallery 2. This is mother of all gallery CMS with some lush functionality and options, both for a user and admin. It can be defined as all in one solution for photo site. It can be operated with several image processing tool kits. This is available in some more than 30 languages. It has some hundreds of features to make it best in town. This a gallery which can be used, installed and managed from a beginner to a pro user. Its free but has awesome support by the team.

Coppermine Gallery

This is the widely used system for photo galleries because of it’s easy usage and easy to configure process. Photos can be uploaded with web based uploader, FTP or even from Windows based publishing solution. Users can add comments, send pictures as e-cards, even they can make their own galleries. It works on PHP, MySQL along with Image shack for thumbnails. It is also available in most popular script installer Fantastico.

4Images

This CMS contains some most common features of all photo gallery systems. It is choice of many because of its nice themes and easy user registration. RSS feeds, enhanced search engine, advanced options for users, and extensive functions for users and image handling make it to stand among other competitors.

TinyWebGallery

Its elegant, its simple photo gallery solution. You won’t need a database to run a gallery with this. So if you are a beginner and want to make a gallery with no hassle and no complicated tweaking then this will let you make a gallery very easily. All you have to copy the photos by FTP to the server and it will make thumbnails of all photos. It has some drag and drop features, iPhone emotions with AJAX support.

Pixelpost

A very nice system to make photo galleries with a blog style. It let you create a website with some awesome looks, with image specific but customizable image related information. Many plugins are available for added functions for photos like Geo-tagging, Flickr integration, Spam filters, Comment Moderation, support for Cool Iris etc. This is the best best photo gallery solution to make pure photo blogs as nothing beats it.

PiwiGo

A cool photo-gallery system built by active users. Easily post and publish photos in real time. It has nice themes with powerful extensions. It let you add more functionality with an ease to your each photo. It also has a remote client pLogger to upload photos to your gallery. Users can also be added to upload photos of their own, or to edit information of existing photos easily. Users can be categorized in different modes to mange roles like a visitor, Generic, a Member, Administrator or a Webmaster.

LinPHA

It let you create a website with some ordinary looks but with multilingual support. It can easily be installed by HTML installer instead of tweaking it manually. This is another system for simple and novice users. It is developed in PHP, MySQL and PostgeSQL. It comes with basic photo gallery options along with some novice features include User management, Zip Uploads and Download feature make it to compete with other simple systems.

These Photo Gallery systems are all open source and can be easily downloaded for free from their sites.

P.S.: Do you know any more of them? Do share with us, and we will be glad to add it this list with your courtesy. You can also share your experience with us… simply drop us a comment below.

[Editor’s Note: This article is submitted by 3rdbrain who writes on ActivR on topics related to technolgy, CMS and gadgets. This is his first blog post on Devils Workshop.

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Tags Free Services, Interesting Links, Internet, Software, Twitter

Reviews

AppRemover: Get rid of the stubborn security software!

Post author By Swati
Post date May 3, 2009

Have you been struggling to remove that security software from your machine and it just won’t budge? When you are looking to replace one security program with another, it becomes imperative to un-install the earlier security program before installing the new one, in order to avoid conflicts between two similar applications.

This can be a tricky deal! Completely getting rid of an application off your machine often is a challenge.

This is where AppRemover comes in handy. AppRemover is a FREE application (for personal, non-commercial, use) that completely removes applications and extraneous files left behind on a machine. Now you could thoroughly uninstall security applications such as Anti Virus and Anti Spyware from your computer.

When to use AppRemover?

Use AppRemover when:

You are replacing one security application with another
Two similar security applications standstill your computer
The built-in uninstall process of the program fails
You have forgotten the application password

It’s easy to use!

Download the file
Double click on the AppRemover icon
AppRemover will uninstall any detected antivirus and antispyware applications on your computer

Operating Systems it supports:

Windows 2000
Windows 2003
Windows XP (32 / 64 bit)
Windows Vista (32 / 64 bit)
Windows 2008
Windows 7 beta

Click here to download AppRemover.

If you have more questions in mind, click here

(Source: AppRemover)

(Image Credits: AppRemover)

Tags Free Software, Internet, Software, Tips & Hacks, Windows

Reviews

Categorize your Friends on Facebook

Post author By Swati
Post date May 3, 2009
2 Comments on Categorize your Friends on Facebook

Facebook has recently updated their Friends page, giving the users more options to organize and manage their contacts. Now, you could organize hundreds of friends into different categories making categorization and management easier for yourself. You can now divide your friends into “logical groups” like friends, relatives, college buddies, acquaintances, etc.

New Enhancements

You can…

Organize people into various lists. This will not show up anywhere on your profile page, but is only for own convenience.
Create Friend Groups and send bulk or private messages easily.
Have up to 100 friend lists and up to 1,500 friends per friend list.
Have the same friend on multiple lists as well.

The new friends page also makes navigation simple within the friends page.

Here is the list of the the views you get now:

Friend Recommendations
Search
Browse by Network
Browse in Alphabetical Order
Phonebook
Recent Friends
Friend List Filters

Shortcomings

Some people might disagree and not call this an improvement at all. A few of my friends have been telling me that they were quite happy with the way things were earlier. In the earlier version also, they were able to arrange and manage their Friends lists quite effectively. Now every thing appears to be mixed up and all their earlier settings are out of order. Who has the time to sit again and reorganize everything again?

Moreover, this feature lacks privacy controls, which is a big drawback. Also, I have hundreds of friends in my network… what a painful task to go through the entire list and arrange them into the various categories. Honestly, I don’t see my self doing that. I’d rather leave them as they are.

Share your comments and let us know what you think of Facebook’s new friends list.

Tags Facebook, Internet, New Feature, Social Media

Reviews

HostGator: One Months Review

Post author By Gaurish Sharma
Post date May 2, 2009
4 Comments on HostGator: One Months Review

gator There are three kinds of hosting companies – small, big & huge. Small companies host hundreds of domains. Big companies host thousands of domains and huge companies host over lakhs of domains. HostGator fails in third type, it hosts more than18lakh domains! I had heard a lot about Hostgator so decided to try it.

Aspects I would cover…

Company Bio
Pre-sales Questions
Sign-Up & Migration Experience
Review of Service & Support
Pricing
Conclusion & Rating

Company Bio

HostGator is a provider of shared, dedicated and reseller web hosting services focused on the consumer and small business markets.It was established in 2003 by Brent Oxley, since then its growing leaps and bounds. The company uses ThePlanet Datacenter for hosting its servers, which is one of the reputed DC in US.

Pre-sales Questions

Before going to sign-up for any hosting service, I always ask questions. The main objective of pre-sales question is to ensure that the particular service suits me and to check the response time. I opened a sales ticket which contained 10 questions asking various things. i received answer to all my questions in about 15-20mins. Then i sent a few more question this time acting dumb, so to test their patience and how much do they care about their customers. I received answers to all my doubts in grammatically correct English. even after they, the customer rep asked if i had any more doubts i could use live chat option to get instant help. Happy with responses of sales staff , So i decided to sign-up.

Sign-Up & Migration Experience

Sign-Up process is just like any other host. Entered few details and paid via paypal. instantly got E-mail from Hostgator giving Account details. To my surprise the Server IP, Username & passwords field very empty!. This time for help, I went to live chat. explained my problem and got missing details within 5 minutes. One more problem I faced was whatever content i upload on site didn’t show up on domain which was ordered along with hosting. I went to live-chat for help, it turn out my domain wasn’t even registered! operator said it would take 12-24hrs as domains are registered manually after fraud check. this wasn’t told to be before and i wasn’t happy. Then, i sent a ticket for data migration from old server and went to sleep.

Review of Service & Support

This is where HostGator scores most, its customer service is just awesome. After my domain was registered and site was live, I opened lots of support tickets at different time slots over a period of 30 days. the average response time was about 20minutes which is the best I have experienced so far. the service which I was on was Intel Xeon 2.2ghz with 4GB ram, the average load on server was less than 1% at all times. for testing, i moved a existing forum so i could test how they handle heavy traffic sites. just after two hours i got a mail from HG saying my site is taking lot of resources and i should move it to dedicated. to my surprise they didn’t suspend the site completely. Good, as most shared host would simply suspend your site or maybe your whole account. One more thing is that, if you aren’t happy with support response you can email owner of company, Brent. He would make sure you get all the V.I.P treatment. I even tested their money back guarantee by asking for refund, they quickly refunded my money within two days.

Pricing

Their Baby plan which has Unlimited Diskspace and Bandwidth costsunder $10 per month. Further Discounts can availed if you pay in advance. however the discount coupon can only be applied on first order and without discount the prices seem to be little on a higher side, I guess this awesome support costs

Hatchling Plan

* $8.95 (monthly)
* $83.40 (12 months @ $6.95)
* $142.80 (24 months @ $5.95)
* $178.20 (36 months @ $4.95)

Baby Plan

* $9.95 (monthly)
* $214.80 (24 months @ $8.95)
* $282.20 (36 months @ $7.95)

The best thing about their pricing is, the have coupons which enable you to get hosting at $0.01(1 cent) for first month,so that you can try them risk free.

Conclusion & Ratings

HostGator is one of the best company to host your site. however hostgator is more suited to small business and people with multiple websites, as it tuns out to be cheap. however if you have a single website i won’t advice you to go far HG as its little costly.

Pros: fast Support,24/7 Live chat

Cons: Big company so you won’t get customized solution you could get at small companies

Ratings

* Pre-sales Questions: 5/5
* Sign-Up & Migration Experience: 3/5
* Review of Service & support: 5/5
* Pricing: 4/5
* Overall: 4.5/5

Tip: Try Hostgator’s baby plan risk free for 1cent for first month with coupon “BloggerToWP”

Link: HostGator-Sign Up

[Editor Note: This post is by guest blogger Gaurish Sharma. He blogs at Gaurish Sharma Live about technology.

If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Tags HostGator, Internet, Service, Web Hosting

How does SMS GupShup work?

How could you use this service?

Chartle.net allows you to:

A variety of charts to choose from:

Upcoming features on Chartle:

Do I have to Register?

Chat features

Kidlandia helps in

The Cost

Shortcomings

What is BookArmy?

If you wish to register…

If you don’t wish to register…

When to use AppRemover?

It’s easy to use!

Operating Systems it supports:

Features

New Enhancements

Shortcomings

Aspects I would cover…

Company Bio

Pre-sales Questions

Sign-Up & Migration Experience

Review of Service & Support

Pricing

Hatchling Plan

Baby Plan

Conclusion & Ratings

Ratings