Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Recently I saw that HP’s photo service, Snapfish, offers prints for just 9¢. What a deal, huh? I looked into signing up for an account and it said that my first 20 photos were free, and then after that, each 4 x 6 inch print would be 9¢. That got me wondering what other services charged, and which ones you all use. I set out to find all of the basic pricing from the major services and this is what I found:

From the looks of it, Wal-Mart and Snapfish are the cheapest route to take if would like your digital photos printed. It’s amazing how affordable photo printing has become and how convenient it is to have them printed.  There’s no more dropping off rolls of film at the store and going back later to pick them up, you just upload your photos to one of these services and wait for them to be delivered to your doorstep.

So which service do you use to print your digital photos?

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• How To Print A Document On A Remote Printer
• Flickr Fun With Flickr Toys
• New Poll: How Many Digital Photos Are Stored On Your Computer
• Trouble Transitioning Into the Digital Age?
• Create Photo Collages in Any Shape

This article was written on September 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

First of all, Woot has the Microsoft Zune 30GB Digital Media Player as their deal of the day today for $129.99 plus $5 shipping – not a bad deal. The last time they sold the Zune, they offered it for $149.99, so it’s $20 bucks cheaper. That’s not what this post is about though, it’s about the product information to describe the Zune which is hilarious.

If you haven’t read the Open iPhone Letter from Steve Jobs when he justified the price drop and then offered the $100 store credit to all iPhone customers, take a look at it here first. Now take a look at Woot’s  "Emergency Open Letter" to their customers which mocks Jobs’ Open iPhone Letter perfectly and offers a $10 Woot credit to the Zune’s "early adopters". I’m just pasting it into this post because after today, it won’t be available. Important parts are highlighted, but the whole thing is funny and definitely worth reading:

An Emergency Open Letter

To all Woot customers:

I have received more than three emails from Zune buyers who are upset about Woot dropping the price of the Zune by $20 one month after it went on sale the first time. After reading every one of these emails, or at least scanning their subject lines, I have some observations and conclusions.

First, I need to make a better effort to hide my email address.

Second, I am sure that we are making the correct decision to lower the price of the 30GB Zune from $149.99 to $129.99. This confidence is based on more than the holy doctrine of corporate infallibility. The Zune is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to “ride the lightning” and “shoot the curl” this holiday season, not to mention “kill the messenger” and “rock the vote”, further enabling us to “pay the rent” and “keep the lights on”. It benefits both Woot and every Zune user (but especially Woot) to drag as many new victims as possible into the Zune “dungeon”. We strongly believe that misery loves company this holiday season.

Third, being in technology for 1+ years, give or take a year, I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always some idiot changing lanes without signaling, and the potholes never seem to get fixed. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you’ll never buy any technology product. I mean, why should you? Truth is, you don’t really need any of this junk. We’re afraid you’ll catch on to that fact and overpaid frauds like me will have to go back into fields like telemarketing and burrito construction. Fortunately, most of you continue to languish in a consumerist stupor, wallets spread wide for us to plunder as we please. The bad news for us is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service. But we’re hoping you’ll buy from Woot instead.

Third-and-a-half, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of the Zune, and even though the technology road is, like, this total Deathrace 2000-type scene, we need to do a better job taking care of our early Zune customers, at least until we find a private security firm we can afford. For some reason, our early customers trusted us. We must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these, lest you turn off the money spigot that maintains our decadent lifestyles. These peacock-egg omelets and mink-lined Jacuzzis don’t pay for themselves, you know.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every Woot customer who purchased a Zune from us on August 22, 2007 (or in the last Woot-Off) a $10 Woot credit towards any Woot order of $40 or more, before shipping. If that’s you, just enter the coupon code BUMPYROAD while making your purchase, and boo-yah: you’re mayor of Discount City. This discount applies to any Woot site, including Woot.com, Shirt.Woot, Wine.Woot, Sellout.Woot, and Beets.Woot. It doesn’t expire, so feel free to check back everyday ’til you find something that will temporarily fill the void in your soul. You may use the coupon as many times as you bought Zunes. So, if you bought one Zune from us back in August, you can use BUMPYROAD once; if you bought two, you can use it twice; and so forth and so on and what-have-you. But you can only use the discount once on any one order. We make this decision with every confidence that most of you will never want any of the crap we sell anyway.

We want to convincingly pretend to do the right thing for our valued Zune customers. We’d apologize for disappointing some of you, but we long ago lost the capacity for sincere remorse. We will continue to do our best to trick you into having high expectations of Woot.

Larry Stalin
Woot CYA Officer

Doesn’t that sound like something The Fake Steve Jobs would write? This has got to be one of the greatest product descriptions from Woot, ever.

Source: Engadget

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Yahoo! Partners with Woot! for "Deal of the Day"
• Save Some Green, Get a Zune
• "Secret" Woot Page Reveals 30GB Zune for $100
• Firefox Extension Watches Woot for you!
• Woot does it Again … 30GB Brown Zune for $80!

This article was written on October 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Yahoo Mail is celebrating their 10th birthday this month! They’ve been around for a decade, and between now and then, our email habits sure have changed. Yahoo’s mail service originally started due to the acquisition of RocketMail. They were watching Hotmail sweep up thousands of users everyday, and knew they didn’t have the time to create their own platform. Shortly after the acquisition of RocketMail, Yahoo! Mail launched. Back when the service first launched, each user was allowed just 3 megabytes of storage. These days, email has become a primary way that many of us share photos with friends and family, and those photo attachments are much larger than what the total inbox storage limit was just a few years ago. With Yahoo celebrating their 10th birthday, we thought it was a perfect time to take a look at how our email habits have changed over time.

Yahoo has put together a survey which takes a look at our changing email habits.  Among the questions that they asked was “If you were stranded on a desert island and could have only one of the following, what would you choose? The options were chocolate, photo album, email, MP3 player, sunscreen.  Most people will likely choose email. Why? Because that’s how many of us communicate with friends and family on a regular basis. Back in 1999, Americans were sending 2.1 billion emails every day.  Today that number is up to 196 billion emails per day! It’s clear that we rely much more on email now than we ever did 10 years ago.

What we use email for is also changing.  Before, it was primarily used just to email a friend to determine where to meet or to say hi.  Now we send emails to companies for technical support, and we receive order confirmations for items purchased online. Instead of making a phone call to ask a question to someone, we send an email.  Instead of mailing off a letter to family or friends that live farther away, we email. Given the choice, many of us prefer to send an email to someone instead of making a call.

Besides the fact that email habits have changed over the last several years, the mail services themselves have had to make a lot of changes to “keep up.”  Yahoo points out that back when they first launched email, users had the choice of having their email address displayed in a public directory and most people opted in.  Now none of us would ever think to post our address in a public directory for fear of getting spammed. Spam accounts for more than 70% of all email sent these days! Along the same lines is Phishing emails.  Phishing has become more prominent and so mail services have had to take extra steps to prevent those emails from reaching the inboxes of their users.

I can only imagine what the state of email will be like in another 10 years from now! It continues to change and evolve, and 10 years from now, we may not even have email! How have your emailing habits changed over time?

Happy 10th birthday Yahoo! Mail!

Source: Yodel Anecdotal

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Yahoo! Mail Adds Ymail and Rocketmail Domains
• How To Get A MSN Email Address
• Check For Page Changes In Firefox
• Alexa Changes Ranking System
• Monitor Your Computer Usage with Slife

This article was written on November 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

IBM recently reported the results of a survey they conducted called “End of Advertising” to see how people felt about current methods of marketing and advertising. One interesting finding from the survey was this – 11% of the 2400 consumers surveyed said they would be willing to pay a nominal fee to view online video content free of ads. They also found that people value their Internet time just as much as, or if not more than their TV time, and want a quality experience. This helps explain why consumers would be willing to pay for a video service that’s currently offered for free.

Given that YouTube is king of video content on the web, would you pay a monthly fee to watch user-submitted videos ad-free? What about other sites on the web? We know that users will tolerate a certain amount of advertising and certain forms if they can get free content, but some would rather pay to have ads removed like the good old days where you paid for the services that you received. YouTube is a service, Gmail is a service, Yahoo Messenger is a service, yet they’re all free thanks to ads.

Between Read/Write Web and E-Consultancy, they crunched the numbers to see if offering a paid-subscription could potentially turn into a good business model in the future for sites like YouTube. If YouTube were to charge $2 per month for each user, and 10% of their 50 million users participated in the subscription service, YouTube would receive $137 million annually. Looking at it from the other side, if those same 10% of users generated money via the advertisements that YouTube currently uses, at most, they would make $38 million in annual revenue. The bottom line? YouTube could potentially increase their profits quite a bit if they started to offer a premium subscription plan.

So, would any of you be willing to pay an amount to some of your favorite sites and services if they’d remove the ads? What’s the most you’d be willing to pay per month?

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Helpful Tip: How to Watch Restricted YouTube Videos
• The YouTube Video Awards Winners Are…
• Watch YouTube High Quality Videos by Default
• Watch High-Resolution YouTube Videos
• Hands-On with YouTubeDesktop

This article was written on July 29, 2006 by CyberNet.

Maps continue to get more and more useful thanks to satellite imagery and dedicated developers. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have taken the time, effort, and money to build maps that are unrivaled by their competition. These companies have also opened the doors for smaller businesses to create their own software or Web sites that utilize the map database via an API. There have been amazing products produced and I have developed a list of 20 sites that use Google Maps as their building block.

Today I also stumbled upon a product called Atlas which brings a lot of amazing features to the table by using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API. It lets you search for things like movie theaters, gas stations, events and much more. Atlas will display the results for your search on the left-side of the screen in a semi-transparent window that is created. If you are searching for gas stations then it will show the location on the map and will also give you details such as the price for the different fuel grades. Movie results are also similar where it will show what movies are playing at a given theater and the time it is playing.

If you search for multiple things (as displayed in the first image above) it will select a unique color for each type of result. In my picture you will see that blue represents gas stations and yellow represents movie theaters. This makes it easy to distinguish between multiple kinds of results.

I also tried searching for some Wi-Fi spots but I couldn’t find any in my town. However, if I did a search for Chicago, IL then it had no problems at all. They also have traffic results that are provided by Yahoo, local blogs, and an event finder. All of this put together makes it a very appealing tool to use.

There is also an integrated GPS functionality for devices that run Windows Mobile 5. You can find a demonstration of the GPS by going to the Atlas homepage and selecting Services->GPS (Beta). It shows you how it can track multiple devices simultaneously so that you can easily stalk, I mean track, someone.

You will get a lot of amusement out of Atlas but I have also found what I consider to be some design flaws. You can zoom with your mouse-scroller or with some keyboard shortcuts but there is no on-screen display for zooming in and out. The same issue is present for panning around the maps because there is no button that you can simply press. They need to stick these in because these kind of buttons should be standard on any map.

Overall the service is really nice and runs smoothly. I ended up registering because they said you will receive more features. Well, that wasn’t exactly true because the new features, which were finding movies and gas stations, were already available to me before I registered. So if you are looking to kill a little time then try it out, it’s fun!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• PC Magazine Gives Streets And Trips 2006 A 3/5
• New Street Atlas USA 2007 Mapping Software
• Maps And Satellite Imagery Simultaneous Overlay
• Google Maps Gets Yahoo’s Dynamic Movement Feature
• Use Google My Maps To Create Your Own Map Mashups