Tablet PC market share is growing at breath-taking pace with millions of users added each month. There are several major brands offering different features and configurations. Although they look quite similar at a glance, they can differ drastically (even similar configurations) during actual usage. How to make sure you get the best tablet PC in your budget? Here are some important things to look for.
Long battery life - Contrary to laptops, tablets always run on their battery for long time on a daily basis. A good tablet PC must have durable, rugged and long-lasting battery to give you the best experience while browsing on the go.
Vibrant back-lit display - One of the major complaints registered by tablet users is dull display that doesn’t work as expected in poorly-lit environment. Always go for back-lit display panel so that your eyes are not strained in adverse conditions.
Android 2.3+ and above - If you really want to make most out of your tablet PC, make sure it has at least Android 2.3. Versions prior to this build lack certain features that may hinder proper functioning of specific applications or services.
Large applications marketplace - Digital devices like a tablet PC are not complete until you have a good number of relevant applications for maximum productivity. Generally, all Android based tablets have hundreds of free and paid applications for almost every category to cater the demands of the users.
Ample memory - Now this one is quite obvious! Amount of secondary memory is one of the most important attribute that prevents your digital device from being sluggish. Make sure your tablet PC is packed with enough RAM to run smooth in multi-tasking environment.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
5 Things To Consider Before Buying a Tablet PC
Monday, November 28, 2011
5 Best Games Plugins For Google Chrome Users
Internet-based games are available both on dedicated games sites as well as on popular social networking services. However, browsers like Google Chrome supports game plugins and extensions that let you directly play your favorite game within the browser. Here are the best 5 games, which are quite popular among Google Chrome users.
Angry Birds: Without any doubt, it is the most popular game among Google Chrome users. Each stage presents the challenge to destroy the castles built by green pigs to avenge the stealing of eggs. It's highly addictive and the difficulty of destroying stone and wood castles gets more challenging as you climb up to higher stages. In each stage you have limited amount of stones for destroying the hedges and castles, and you have to destroy the entire castle with that limited amount of ammunition.
Lord of Ultima: This highly addictive game is a multi-player strategy-based game that takes you into medieval civilization. As a new player, you get your own land where you build your first village and slowly transform it into a big commercialized capital. You ultimate goal is to expand your empire by taking over other cities by every available means. This includes spying, diplomacy, trading and war. You have to be extremely careful about defending your territories too, as other players also look the opportunity to take over your land.
Canvas Rider: Surprisingly this game doesn't have fancy animated graphics but is played by very large numbers of users on Google Chrome. Your goal is to ride a bicycle on different tracks made by other players. These tracks can range from very easy to highly complex and difficult. Interestingly, you can find new and unique tracks almost every day as the large community of users creates these tracks on everyday basis. With simple keyboard control you can maneuver you bicycle to complete the track successfully. 
Isoball 3: If you love to unlock puzzles and find your way to complete each stage, this game is made for you. Isoball 3 presents a new challenge with every stage where you find your way to put the ball in exit hole crossing through various blocks that comes in way. You have to find the best possible and feasible way to reach the exit hole for successfully completing each stage. You can collapse blocks and can also build energy bridges to reach your destination. It's one of my favorite games on Google Chrome.
WGT Golf Game: It's yet another very popular multi-player game for golf fans. What's so unique about this game? Well, it's the realistic graphics recreating the famous real-world golf courses from across the world to give you that exciting playing experience that makes this game extremely popular among large number of Google Chrome users. Each golf course is rendered from different angles for achieving the desired realism. You can either play alone or can compete against opponents. The complexity of each hole increases as you climb up to higher stages.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
How To Calculate Split And A/B Testing Results
Accumulating raw data and making sense out of it are two different things. Whether you own a blog, portal or a business web site, conversion optimization is an ongoing process supported by different types of methodologies. Two such methodologies are split and A/B testing. Sometimes, we generate lots of data through these testing methods but fail to interpret it correctly.
Fortunately, Split and A/B Testing Confidence Calculator can lessen your burden to a great extent by providing immensely useful statistics from the raw data provided by you.
You only need to provide the control data and at least one treatment data to this calculator and instantly you get the conversion rate (percentage), Z-score, confidence level and recommended sample size. The last column (see image above) of recommended sample size is of extreme importance. If you have enormous amount of data, the calculation may not give you accurate results due to variable factors. Recommended sample size lets you dig out the real picture in different circumstances. This significantly helps in optimizing your conversion funnel.
I'd highly recommend this tool to budding analytics and conversion optimization professionals.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
How To Host And Share Your Audio On The Cloud
If you are a podcaster or a general web surfer who loves to share favorite music and general recordings, then you must have a reliable and secure hosting mechanism that lets you host and share your audio data efficiently. Generally we use different file hosting services, but they are sometimes unreliable and you’re not sure when your content will be removed without any notice.
To avoid such situations, you can use SoundCloud service powered by reliable cloud hosting that gives your visitors and friends seamless listening experience. You can either register for a SoundCloud account or can login through your Facebook account.
Uploading and recording - SoundCloud’s in-built sound recorder and uploading facility makes the media uploading process extremely easy. It also supports time-based comment mechanism for each shared sound file. By default, all uploaded files are private and you can change their visibility with a click of a button.
Community and sharing - No media sharing can be complete in the absence of groups, communities fostering lively conversations. That’s what SoundCloud service supports with integrated personal dashboard to moderate comments and to create your own groups. You can also join existing groups and can share your media files to these groups.
Social sharing and statistics - Nowadays no web-based service is complete until it supports content sharing on popular social media sites. And that’s what SoundCloud does by providing easy media files link sharing on Twitter, Facebook and other popular social media platforms. It also provides several engaging media sharing widgets to directly embed on your web site or blog. And last but not the least is the integrated analytics dashboard for tracking listeners' activity on shared media files.
Applications - SoundCloud application gallery consists of hundreds of applications for different platforms and devices. An iPhone SoundCloud app enables you to record and upload sound data on the go. SoundCloud also offers an API for 3rd party developers to create unique and useful applications for different scenarios.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
How To Create Your Personal Dashboard Across Multiple Devices
Ever wanted to create multiple custom dashboards with useful stuff accessible from different devices? Here we are talking about dashboards consisting of different sections containing your choice of widgets, links, shortcuts, web pages, video, audio, text, custom code, documents and much more. Sounds good? So, lets see how can we make personalized dashboards for making our daily routine more productive.
MiddleSpot is a free service that lets you create multiple customized dashboards in few easy steps. With simple drag-n-drop interface even a kid can make highly customized dashboard in less than 10 minutes. You can even rotate and resize objects at your will. MiddeSpot dashboard can be made of different files types, sticky notes, custom backgrounds, text, video, audio, custom code, embed code, web page, widgets, Google Docs, Google Forms, social media tools (Twitter, Facebook), shapes and much more. Phew, that was a long list!
Once you've created your dashboard, you can either keep it private or public with a unique short url to share with people through email or instant messaging. You can also embed your dashboard in a web page. Once you've publicly shared your dashboard, your friends can access and collaborate with you in real-time on the same dashboard.
Since your every custom dashboard will be hosted on a cloud with built-in collaboration tools, you can easily access it across multiple devices having a modern web browser, i.e., desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. You can use MiddleSpot by creating a free account or you can use Google or Yahoo! account for the same.
Monday, November 21, 2011
How To Share Customized Screenshots From Web
Web content spiced up with pictures always attracts readers. Offline content is also lifeless without addition of photos. Good screen grabber software is essential for any content creator to give more life to text. There are several screenshot software (commercial & freeware) and people use each one of them for different reasons. Any useful screenshot software always supports multiple-browsers and also works seamlessly on desktop.
LightShot is light-weight screenshot software that works efficiently in Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. You can also install a desktop application to capture screenshots from your PC screen. What's so different in it?
Share on web - You can take custom screenshots from any web page and can instantly share it on Twitter, Facebook or any other social network with a click of a button.
Easy clipboard copying - After capturing the screenshot, you can easily save it in the clipboard through familiar Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V key combinations.
Instant online editing - If you want to make custom changes in the captured screenshot, this handy application can instantly open online image editor Pixlr to assist you in making desired changes in the picture.
Instant desktop saving - And last but not the least is optional desktop saving feature. You can save the captured image in different file formats and in different qualities.
Friday, November 18, 2011
5 Best Google Analytics Applications For Business Blogs
Google Analytics (GA) is used by almost every business blogger to analyze their blog’s traffic. Generally, we use the native web interface of Google Analytics with standard reports and available options. If you’re an analytics ninja, you can implement advanced techniques and methodologies to get useful insights from tons of data. But if you have limited capabilities to fully leverage Google Analytics power, third party applications based on GA API (application programming interface) are one of the options to get the required information reports.
Here are some popular Google Analytics applications that is used by large number of bloggers and webmasters to get more out of their traffic analysis process.
4Q Suite - It’s a powerful customer survey and feedback solution with easy-to-implement Google Analytics integration to get detailed reports about visitors’ experience and their satisfaction level. You can also integrate it with various conversion funnels to get useful data about prospect’s behavior during the entire conversion process. The code can be implemented by anybody and doesn’t require major technical knowledge. 
UserReport - It’s one of the best demographic data collection tool for Google Analytics. UserReport provides deep integration with GA native web interface and provide you vital data about different user-segments based on their demographic attributes. This greatly helps in improving the campaigns and landing pages to get the maximum results with precision.
PadiTrack - If you’re struggling to track and analyze your conversion funnels on your business blog, then this excellent service can be a life-saver for you. It not only creates from easy to complex conversion funnels with ease, but also lets you import all the data in Google Analytics. There’s no complex installation involved and you just require few clicks to create your first conversion tracking system.
GAget - This handy Google Analytics widget for Mac OS X platform gives you the power of Google Analytics directly on your desktop. It has a gorgeous interface with customizable auto-refresh system that fetches all the vital data from your GA profile. You can use multiple profiles and can switch between them at your will. This widget automatically checks for new versions and prompts you to update the software.
LinkTagger - The simplest approach to track downloads, clicks and bounces (cross-domain, outbound) is link tagging. Although you can implement this through manually making changes to the existing Google Analytics code, but it can prove tedious if you’re going to track large number of links. LinkTagger is a life-saver application that automates the process and is completely customizable. You can obtain the script for all 3 versions (sync, async, urchin) provided by Google.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
10 Signs You Are Addicted To Internet
Internet usage has exploded in the last decade and nowadays a large population on this planet uses World Wide Web. It's a boon if used properly, and it can be a curse if you're addicted to it. It may hinder your normal daily activities and can drastically decrease your productivity. How to diagnose that a person is completely addicted to Internet? Here's a list of general observations that can easily help in detecting the same.
1. Your computer system remains on round the clock.
2. You rarely use desktop applications on your PC.
3. Your smartphone is full of Internet-based applications.
4. You frequently change web browsers.
5. Your anger explodes when your internet connection goes down.
6. You maintain at least half-a-dozen email accounts.
7. You have more than a dozen social media accounts.
8. You prefer virtual dating and hangouts.
9. You prefer to purchase everything online.
10. You're always looking for cheaper and faster broadband connection.
These are just few major signs and dozens of more can be added to this list. Share you thoughts and add to this list in the comments below. If I found them interesting and relevant, I'll include them in this list.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
How To Learn A Musical Instrument Within a Browser
If you're a music lover and always wanted to learn a musical instrument, then you may have tried various methods to play your favorite instrument with ease. Generally, people attend music classes or hire a music teacher to polish their skills. But sometimes due to unavailability of time, we struggle to attend music classes. There's an easy solution for busy people who want to learn musical instruments from the comfort of their home.
Instinct is a unique online service that acts as a virtual music teacher to teach you the desired musical instrument. The team behind 'Instinct' has made special software to help beginners polish their skills with ease. You never have to install anything on your computer. Simply sign up and everything happens directly within your browser.
The learning method is extremely simple and effective. First, you'll see a guided lesson where you can see how an instrument is being played for a particular song. These videos demonstrate each step in an animated form so that you can grasp everything easily. You can repeat each lesson several times and can practice along with the video.
The real good part is the feedback mechanism. Its special software picks your instrument's voice through microphone and intelligently analyzes it against the original version. After that you get a detailed report of your shortcomings on which you can improvise. This web-based software is an excellent option for beginners who struggle to master their favorite musical instrument.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
How To Get More Out of Your Web Analytics Software
Almost every webmaster uses some kind of web analytics system to track the traffic coming to his web site or blog . Utilizing such software is one thing, and taking advantage of the data provided by web analytics system is another thing. And that's where a handful of people excel in getting the useful insights from the data helping them to further optimize their web sites or blogs. Here are some of the best practices for using web analytics software.
Use asynchronous code - Page speed is one of the factors in Google's algorithm to determine site quality. If available, always use the asynchronous version of JavaScript code to allow smooth loading of the web page.
Tag important links - This is quite handy for list builders and affiliate marketers. Tagging selective links (email sign up buttons, affiliate links) helps you in getting detailed information about the prospects and potential customers.
Segment - Popular web analytics systems like Google Analytics support advanced segmentation for better visualization that enables you to visualize trends and traffic behavior with greater precision.
Create alerts - Almost every modern web analytics system supports custom alerts that notifies you about an event or happening through different mediums. For example, if my daily page views inflate by about 25%, I immediately recieve an email alert about that. This way you can instantly analyze and investigate the root cause of any unusual activity.
Use custom reports - Generally, an average webmaster is happy with default widgets on the welcome dashboard. This aggregate data does give a glimpse about traffic, but is useless for web site optimization. Creating custom reports is the real way to drill down into the data set to get the hidden trends in your traffic.
Avoid multiple tracking systems - Although using more than one web analytics systems is not a sin, but it may create some problems if you're injecting 4 or 5 scripts from different vendors. First, it may slow down your site and secondly you may not get the same results from each of these systems. This can create confusion in your mind and you may get irritated with different results.
Monday, November 14, 2011
4 Tools To Write More Content For Your Blog
Writer's block and procrastination are two prevalent phenomenons that every blogger experience in his lifetime. This drastically affects the blog's performance and ruins all your hard work. A lot has been said about beating writer's block and generating regular content. Generally it is suggested to remove distractions and finding new sources to collect ideas. It works in some cases and doesn't in others. Here's a collection of tools that may assist you in coming out of shell loaded with tons of content ideas.
Wonk Tools helps you beat writer's block in an effective manner. It also helps in making your blog posts better and SEO optimized. There are 4 handy tools offered by Wonk Tools.
Writer's Block Tool - As the name suggests, this primary tool generates dozens of ideas for your next blog post. Simply provide one or more keywords and it comes up with a handy list of ideas on which you can build your content archive.
Topic & Title Generator - Do you struggle to come up with good SEO optimized titles for your blog posts? If that is the case, then this tool is made for you. Again you have to provide keywords and you'll get some really innovative and optimized titles for your content.
Vocabulary Tool - This is a very useful tool for increasing your work stock and adding more depth to your vocabulary. Write the word and you'll get it various forms, definition, explanation and real life usage in different contexts. Simply awesome!
Info Page - And last but not the least is info page, where you can get detailed information about poplar authors and their content. You can either search by name or the content title. This helps in analyzing their career growth, their writing style and tips on how to implement the same in your writings.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
3 Best Android Apps For Medical Professionals
If you're a medical professional or a medical student with an Android smartphone, you must be scanning Android Apps market for some useful applications for doctors, practitioners and students. Although there are dozens of medical applications available for Android devices, you must choose the most relevant and useful application that should help you in getting more out of your medical skills. Here's a best 3 Android applications every medical professional would love to use.
Medical News - The name says it all. This useful application pulls filtered RSS feeds from renowned MedPage Today medical website. All the fetched news is segregated category wise for easy scanning and reading. This application is must for doctors and independent medical practitioners. It not only keeps you updated with latest technologies used in medical field but also gives you useful insights about new medicines, treatments and alerts about medical outbreaks in different parts of the world. The news articles are partially fetched with a link to the original article so that the application responds quickly to navigation commands.
Medical Words - As the name implies, this extremely useful tool can be regarded as a Wikipedia of medical terms and phrases. It's a must-have app for every medical student, doctors and nurses. For each medical term, you can get the most commonly used abbreviations with detailed definition and explanation. You can also take quiz challenges to test your medical words knowledge. This application is updated frequently to add more words and terms to the database and also to update the old information. It also supports auto-complete search box that provides related suggestions in drop down menu as you type the search term.
BMI Calculator - If you regularly work in field attending patients in remote areas, this application is a must for you. It calculates the correct body mass index (BMI) for an individual. It supports BMI calculation for kids, teenagers, adult men and women. You can calculate BMI both in Metric (cm/kg) and Imperial (inches/lbs) format. BMI calculator is available in English, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Croatian and Korean languages. This handy application has a fairly large user-base with good ratings and reviews.
Monday, November 7, 2011
How To Do Private Group Chat On Twitter
It's quite easy to initiate a private messaging session that involves two Twitter accounts. Through Twitter hashtags, we can also initiate a public group chat. But what about creating a private group chat that involves more than two Twitter accounts. Neither any popular Twitter client nor any native web application provides this facility.
Fortunately, there's an easy-to-use free application called !blether that gives you the power to initiate private group chat on Twitter. Simply connect your Twitter account with !blether through OAuth authentication and get started instantly.
Starting a private group chat session is damn simple. Send a tweet starting with !b and then add all twitter handles you want to be included in the chat session. Lastly, end the tweet with a phrase or word giving the title/name of the chat session. For example.
!b @adam @michelle @derek @chris kim's birthday surprise
All the participants will receive the tweet with a unique web-based private chat session link. Clicking that link will bring them into the private chat session and each tweet within that session will be saved in participants' Twitter account. If there is large number of users, you may have to send multiple invite tweets with the same title/name of the chat session. Always make sure to prefix !b in front of every invite tweet. Once in the chat session, you can send normal tweets without any need to prefix !b.
How To Track Location of Your Social Network Friends in Real-Time
There are several popular social networks, which provide mobile interface to connect with the friends on the go. However, all of these mobile applications lack real-time geolocation tracking of your friends. Although you can leave your mark through native or 3rd party apps like foursquare, still you cannot visualize your friends' location on a map in real-time. 
Krikit is one such location-centric social networking mobile application that not only keeps you connected with your friends but also lets you keep track of their locations in real-time. It is available both for iPhone and Android smartphones.
Apart from regular geo-location tracking, you can also take instant photos, add some effects to it and can share instantly with your friends. Group chat is one of the major features of this application. If several friends are in a common area, all of them can track each other's location in real-time and can initiate group chat with ease.
If you feel insecure about leaving your location information, you can use this excellent application in anonymous mode. But in that case, you won't be able to build your friends network. Krikit is completely free to use, and is ideal for college friends and colleagues living in the same city. Through this application they can keep track of each other's location with ease.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
How To Migrate Your WordPress Blog To Google Blogger
Generally people migrate their blogger blog to WordPress, and numerous tools are available to achieve this. However, you may want to migrate your blog from wordpress.com to blogger platform for many reasons. One of the reasons may be inability to host your own advertisements on your blog. In such cases, you must know a quick and easy way to export your entire WordPress blog to Google Blogger.
Fortunately their's an easy tool to achieve that. Both WordPress and Blogger have import and export functions, but the files exported from WordPress blog are not compatible with Blogger. This presents a challenge to convert the exported file into compatible format so that Google Blogger can easily process it. So let's see how to do it.
1. Login to your WordPress blog. Go to Tools -> Export -> Download Export file. This will create a WXR file, which you can save on your desktop.
2. Now this file is not compatible to work with Google Blogger import feature. Simply head over to WordPress2Blogger conversion utility, and upload the exported WXR file. Click the 'Convert' button and you'll get a blogger compatible XML file. Save this converted XML file on your desktop. Now you can safely delete the WXR file.
3. Now head over to your blogger dashboard. Go to Settings -> Import a blog. Upload the converted XML file, fill the captcha and hit the 'Import blog' button. Since the XML file is compatible with blogger import function, all your posts and pages will be seamlessly imported to your blogger blog.
Once the import process is completed successfully, you can delete the XML file from your desktop. Although this migration utility works like charm, it also has a limitation. Your exported WXR file’s size from WordPress shouldn’t exceed 1 MB. That essentially means, that you cannot export large blogs with massive amount of content. Still it's a handy conversion facility for small to medium sized WordPress blogs.
Friday, November 4, 2011
How To Improve Your Typing Skills Through Typing Game
There are many online typing courses that consist of long boring typing lessons to help you in improving your typing skills. Generally these lessons are divided into multiple lessons from easier to difficult sessions. Although, you can significantly improve your typing speed through these lessons but it's a boring and sluggish way to learn typing.
TypeRacer is a popular online game that pumps life in your existing typing speed. It is based on multi-player gaming concept where you compete with real opponents in real-time. Although you can play it without creating any account, but in such cases your typing scores are not saved.
A typing score consists of the time you took in completing the text, accuracy (spelling mistakes), and of course the standard 'words per minute' (WPM) metric. Once you start a typing race, you and your opponents (at least four) gets a similar paragraph. Each participant is shown a racing car with his own track. As the race progresses, all the cars speeds up to their destination and the scores change dynamically in real-time. The faster your typing speed, the faster is the car speed. After the race is completed, all scores are compared and the participants are arranged according to their scores. This game is really addictive for people who love to type.
