Innovative Mobile Advertising
mGinger
Perhaps the oldest and most unrealistic customer fantasy ever is to be paid to watch ads. Never mind that ads sponsor content – consumers feel sorely set up on by advertising and demand compensation. There was of course no dotcom millionaire who made his bucks by clicking banner ads, in spite of schemes that offered to pay people to surf.
But the basic concept has endured and is set to hit a new medium. Mobile marketing firms are making offers that sound almost too good to be true – choose from free SMS, get paid to be subjected to advertising, or maybe even both.
mGinger
Started in April’07 when Veerendra Shivhare, COO, hit upon the idea of targeted advertising, annoyed by the deluge of spam messages every day. His alternative: register with mGinger, submit a mobile number, choose the categories that you wish to receive ads about, specify the number of ads and the time they ought to be sent and you are on your way.
The best part of mGinger.com is they have grown through viral marketing and through Word of Mouth and not spent anything so far on PR or advertising. In the time honored tradition of pyramid schemes, mGinger.com encourages you to tell friends about them and earn from the publicity. A user continues to make money if the ‘friend chain’ plumps for mGinger.
Currently there are approx. 1,600,000 registered users. Not surprisingly, 31% of the total users registered are students trying to earn extra pocket money. Others who’ve opted in are engineers, consultants, managers, self-employed people and more. The largest number falls in the 22 – 25 year age-group which constitutes 38% of the pie.
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IE Warning Plugin
Today I have come across a very interesting WordPress plugin called ‘IE Warning‘.
Introduction
It’s a well known fact that IE 6 does not render all the kinds of web pages correctly. Also, one cannot ignore the fact that IE stands tall in the web browser market share. It’s the leader in the web browser market.
IE 7 has lot of improvements over it’s predecessor IE 6. But IE 6 is still widely used all over than the IE 7. Most of the corporate networks in the world still use IE 6 and not IE 7. Attribute this to the Windows operating system, which has a wider reach in the OS segment. Among the Windows OS’s, XP is the OS which runs on most of the desktops. The browser which comes along with these OS’s is IE 6. This is where the problem lies.
So, how do you reach out to your readers who still use IE 6?
Is there a solution for it?
I believe the only solution is User Education. This could be achieved through the IE Warning plugin.
Features
Once the plugin is activated, the plugin shows the blog visitors a splash message on the screen indicating a message that IE does not render web pages correctly and they may want to download Opera and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Of course, for the users who like IE 7, they may include a message to upgrade their browsers to IE 7.
You may customize the message and you can also set the least version of IE for which the message should not occur. That means, if the reader’s IE version is lesser than the specified version, the message is displayed. Otherwise, not.
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Stock Market Lessons
Once upon a time, in a place overrun with monkeys, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, they became harder to catch, so the villagers stopped their effort.
The man then announced that he would now pay $20 for each one. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. But soon the supply diminished even further and they were ever harder to catch, so people started going back to their farms and forgot about monkey catching.
The man increased his price to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so sparse that it was an effort to even see a monkey, much less catch one. The man now announced that he would buy monkeys for $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.
While the man was away the assistant told the villagers, “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has bought, I will sell them to you at $35 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.” The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys. They neither see the man nor his assistant again, and once again there were monkeys everywhere.
Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works. What’s a Bull Run and what’s a Bear Run! 
Technorati Tags: Stock Market, Bull Run, Bear Run, Stock Market Lessons
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All in One Instant Messaging Client
Pidgin
What is Pidgin?
Pidgin is an instant messaging client program for Windows, Linux, BSD and other UNIX’s. It’s a messaging client through which you can connect to any of the messengers available in the market. You can also log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously.
Features
Pidgin can work with the IM clients like AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Novell Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, IBM Lotus Sametime, Jabber/XMPP, Yahoo, Zephyr.
The best part of Pidgin is the fact that it also supports IM Clients like IBM Sametime, which are meant for Corporates. It means that you can now connect to your Sametime server from Pidgin.
There is also a text-based version of Pidgin called as Finch. It supports the same IM networks, but, the only difference being it’s a console based. It means, you can only use it with Linux, BSD and other UNIX’s.
All this for FREE! Download it here
For more information and FAQ’s, visit 
Technorati Tags: IM, Instant Messaging, Pidgin
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Free AntiVirus software – avast
avast! 4 Home Edition is a full-featured antivirus package designed exclusively for non-commercial & home use only. It’s absolutely FREE !!! There are no Terms & Conditions. This software is rated ***** (5 Star) by most of the forums.
avast! 4 Home Edition
Features:
- Avast Home Edition is a complete ICSA & Checkmark certified antivirus, Checkmark certified anti-spyware & anti-rootkit package.
- On demand scanner with skinnable simple interface, just select what do you want to scan in which way and press the Play button;
- On access scanner, special providers to protect the most of available e-mail clients;
- Instant messaging–ICQ, Miranda;
- Network traffic–intrusion detection, lightweight firewall;
- P2P protection for Kazaa, BitTorrent;
- Web shield–monitors and filters all HTTP traffic;
- NNTP scanner–scans all Usenet Newsgroup traffic and all operations with files on PC;
- Boot time scanner–scans disks in the same way and in the same time as Windows CHKDSK does
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