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Homepages Web 2.0 Style
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Ah what to say about Homepage Startup. Its like someone took your favorite “homepage” of the 90s and run it through a Web 2.0 washer. It came out cleaner and smaller, and almost as useful. For me my “homepage” is my Alesti RSS reader or my Gmail so this really has little use to me. Someone will find use for homepage startup but without ads or any way of sustaining itself it looks to be smeared by other better funded sites. The site does have some nice ajaxy features about it. Like being able to move the boxes around and easily adding URLs without going through their registration process. Interesting Web 2.0 exorcise, get a peek before they run out of cash.
Windows on iPhone? Yes you can!
Seems like the iPhone was just introduced and now you can do everything you can do on your home PC on your iPhone. Thats progress! PC Now has created a web application that works with the iPhone that allows you to easily see your remote Windows or Mac on your iPhone. This way you can send your photos you take straight to your home computer without even being there. Think about it, imagine you are hundreds of miles away on vacation. You could transfer your pictures to a printing service and have pictures printed before you even get back. The possibilities are endless.
Whats great about their web application is there is virtually no setup. There was a VNC tutorial a while ago but come on who has time for instructions. This just works. Big fun to mess with your friends and show them Windows running on a iPhone.
Sell Items Online Quick and Easy
So you came up the next big thing and are in dire need to sell it online? It doesn’t matter what it is, whether its a software title, eBook, or physical product you are going to need a ecommerce solution. The biggest problem with selling online is that it can be very difficult. Hopefully we can break it down over a few articles simply enough and take out the fear in jumping in and selling whatever product you want to sell. Don’t have a product yet? Thats easy enough. There are many different online products that are sold with resellers rights. Meaning if you pay extra you can sell it as your own. Be sure to read the license agreement though. Try this site if you are looking for something to sell.
So first off you could sell things online via eBay. This is a easy solution as eBay’s tools make listing items very easy to put items up online. You can sell anything from bread that looks like Jesus to the old hot rod you have in your backyard. There is even the ability to put up houses on eBay. The great thing about eBay is that your customers are already visiting eBay so you don’t need to find ways to generate traffic, you don’t have to find a audience. Your purchases are usually paid with using PayPal which is easy to use and painless, which can be direct deposited or accessed immediately with their ATM Card. The problem is that eBay and Paypal (owned by the same company) can cost you coming and going. You pay to put your auction or buy it now item up on eBay. You then pay PayPal when you get paid. They basically get you coming and going. This can really dig into your profits if you don’t have a big margin.
There are other alternatives. One such alternative is by creating a webpage through WordPress or other blogging tool and then finding a ecommerce cart to link up to. Chances are you are already familiar with Google’s Blogger or WordPress, and its super easy to set up a site with either of them. You do have a few choices here, you can go to WordPress or Blogger.com and sign up for an account, (this is free). Or if you want more control you can get a hosting package (we recommend LiquidWeb). Usually it will cost you a few bucks but it will pay off in the end because you’ll have a web page with your own domain name. TIP: Visit www.GoDaddy.com to buy a domain name before you go to them which saves money. If you do get a hosting package you can use their CPanel to install Wordpress. Its a matter of a couple of clicks and their support can walk even the most novice - novice to get up and running.
So you have a site to call home and now you need to hook up some sort of payment mechanism. There are many options here. One of the easier is a solution called 1ShoppingCart.com, their great support and super easy (newly freshened) back end is very easy to navigate and to add your products. They also give you 30 days for free. This can be great when you are first starting out so you can get familiar with their product. Essentially though its copy and paste to bring in the code their cart creates. You either pay for a gateway or you simply use PayPal charges apply. Incidentally 1ShoppingCart.com is what I use professionally when setting up eCommerce solutions. Its very easy to customize to the look and feel of your ecart to your site. Their cart’s layout is one of the cleanest for purchasing and I wish others would adopt the one screen checkout instead of wading through pages to find the end of the checkout process. Their backend meshs up with nearly every shipping software that exists, we use Ascent. They can help you manage your opt in lists, keep in contact with your customers, and let them know when their item ships. 1ShoppingCart.com also has a cost saving digital download function built in, that allows them to host your digital download on the cart as apposed to your web server. This is great when you are on a bare bones server and cannot get hit with high bandwidth costs that can occur when you are selling digital media. The great thing about their cart is you don’t have to manage the headaches of figuring out how to deliver and account for your product. 1ShoppingCart.com makes it easy for you. Accountants will love the Quickbooks export.
There are a couple other options, like using the link code directly from PayPal or Google CheckOut but those options although less expensive don’t really assist the customer or you with a database to market and fulfill from. Next week we’ll look into the benifits of Google CheckOut so stay tuned.
Track and Optimize to a Healthier Diet
Over here at NoHeat we are deliberately trying to watch what we eat. Too many late night coding binges can add to the bottom line. Besides it’s in vogue to eat well and take care of yourself. The problem is there really isn’t a easy way to know how to eat healthier without causing your self to become some kind of food expert. What if there was a way to input the food you eat into a database that could automatically make recommendations? Thats where TheDailyPlate comes in handy.
Lets say you eat two PopTarts every morning as you blast out to work. Replacing the two PopTarts with a simple breakfast bar can save you over 400 Calories. What if you replaced that Mountain Dew with Code Red Mountain Dew you could save yourself 60 Calories. So with little impact you able to take a completely unhealthy breakfast and drop over 460 Calories. After a while you end up replacing unhealthy food with healthy food by seeing what you are eating and replacing that food with their healthier recommendations.
They even include a “gas gauge” to show you how much water you should be drinking a day.
iWatch - Apple’s Next Big Thing
We are hearing that Apple is readying a iWatch device that will be sold in the $299 range. Basically the device is based around a 2 Gig chip and a screen that allows for some touch screen coolness. This actually makes perfect sense for people who already carry around enough electronics in their pockets from uber geeks to someone who just wants to workout without dropping their precious $300 device on the ground.
We are hearing that Apple plans on partnering with Nike for custom bands for the sports crowd as well. Other bands for the iWatch are planned like a iWatch Red that gives a portion of the profits directly to the Global Fund to fund programs for women and children affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa. Of a technical note this will be the first “i” device that will not have a standard iPod connection on it. No word yet on how the device will charge but we are hearing the device will sync with iTunes through Bluetooth. Some of the functions planned for the device will be iCalendar syncing as well as a contact management system. The body of the watch will look very iPhoneish yet be slightly curved to match your wrist. The band will be easily customizable, get ready for another onslaught of aftermarket accessories.
Personally this reminds me of the old Casio nerd watches mixed with the 80s swatch watch.
The iWatch Marketing plans are already in place so it seems the product is further down the pipeline than we originally anticipated, so it is possible this product is already in production although we have no information to confirm this. The picture is not a picture of the iWatch just a Photoshop for illustration.
Gmail Broken, is your email being labeled SPAM?
Everyone here at NoHeat relies on the almighty Gmail for work, and really cannot imagine using any other client for reading email. The problem is there seems to be something broken with the Gmail spam filters over the last few weeks. Over 30% of our regular email is ending up in the spam folder (which is called a false positive) all of a sudden. This may not be a big issue for those of us who only use the web client but for those of us who download using Thunderbird or Outlook could be missing critical emails. The first thing we noticed was at first being deluged by SPAM and then all of a sudden like the spigot being turned off the SPAM stopped. With the SPAM stoppage so did our everyday emails. It seems like they must have made a very aggressive update to the spam filter, even stopping emails to people we have sent email to already. This isn’t just affecting one or two accounts we have over 20 here that are having issues. Hopefully Google can roll back their changes and let us use our email again. Moral of the story, Google is fickle don’t forget to check your spam folder every once in a while, you never know.
