Good news for those who spend a lot of time teaching or helping their parents with their computer or internet issues on a day to day basis. Yes, I mean You! If you are a bit tech savvy, I’m sure you are often the Go-to-guy [ or go-to-gal ] to fix all computer/ IT issues of your parents, grandparents, neighbors, extend family, friends, friend of a friend and the list goes on…

Even though personally I don’t really mind helping out when such occasion arises, sometimes it just becomes overwhelming if you happen to be the tech guy for a lot of people. Dealing with someone’s tech issue is never easy as most of the time you are not in the same location as the person who needs your help. Thus you try to provide help over Telephone or IM and often it does more harm than good. Lately as technology has advanced, I often just use softwares like – Teamviewer, GoToAssist or any other remote desktop clients to get control over their computer remotely so that I can do the necessary fix from my end and they can just sit back and watch.

But what can beat some good quality, short, easy to understand how-to videos produced by Google that covers a lot of those simple (sometimes annoying) problems/questions that often gets thrown at you. Google’s this new initiative can be accessed at: http://www.teachparentstech.org/ which is a really cool way for you to send a “how-to” video on a topic of your choice directly from the site. Currently they have videos on a wide range of topics like: Computer basics, World Wide Web, Communication, Multimedia & Search. Check out some of their sample videos below:

- How to Make a blog

- How to Share Photos Online

- Take a Screenshot

- How to change Desktop Wallpaper

For the rest just go to: http://www.teachparentstech.org/

Also check out Google’s video introduction of this initiative:

My Two Cents:

I think its a great move by Google, but not sure why its called – Teach Parents Tech? I mean parents are not the only people who needs help with tech. But anyway since Google now is into a much wider “consumer market” with their Android, Chrome Browser, Chrome Netbooks etc. overall its a very good initiative from the company to show everyone that they truly cares and in the process they may eventually push more people to their “cloud” of products.

(Via Google Blog)

Often times we are searching on the web for various things and we get frustrated when we don’t get to our intended result fast. We switch our default search engine from Google to Yahoo and then Yahoo to Bing but the end result stays the same. Most of the search engines that exists today gives you near identical results and they are all equally good (Ok, maybe Google is a little better…), but other than the difference in Look n’ feel and speed, all the major engines follow the same underlying architecture that indexes the world wide web so that you can find everything at your fingertips.

Everyone knows how to search the web, its simple – we type in a word or a phrase and we get the result. But I’m going to share some of my personal web search tips for Google that gets me results much faster!

Write your search phrase naturally

Most of the search engines today can process natural language better than you think. So when you are searching for a direct answer, you should type in the question as it comes to your mind. E.g. What is the Capital of Netherlands? or What is the distance between earth and moon?

Search for Information from a Specific Site

Sometimes we want to get a piece of information out from a specific site quickly without visiting numerous doorway pages to do so. The operator “site:” works really well on those cases. By defining a “site:domain.com” at the end of your search phrase, you are telling Google to look for the information exactly on that particular website and nowhere else. For example, If you are looking for the 1-800 number of DHL simply search for – 1-800 site:dhl.com and it will directly show you the number in your search results page.

Exclude terms you don’t want to include

You may come across a situation where the search engine gets confused about a particular term that you are searching for and displays results for another term. For instance, if you search for “Jaguar” Google by default thinks you mean the car brand jaguar. But it may not be the case all the time. So you can exclude terms like “car” from your search results to refine your result so that you only see pages relevant to what you actually need. If you search for jaguar –car it will exclude all the jaguar car pages from your search results page and only show you information related to the real ‘jaguar’.

Find a definition of a word quickly

You can use the operator “define:” in front of a word to find its definition quickly. It often gives you a sentence as an example so that you get a general idea of where and how to use that word. Do you know the meaning of the word – Tenebrous? Well try define: tenebrous in Google now!

Check Weather, Local Time and Movie Schedule

Checking for things like weather, local time and even movie schedule is very easy with Google. If you are and would like to know the weather of the city of your destination, just type weather cityname (e.g. weather london), similarly for time type time cityname/country (e.g. time kuala lumpur) and you will not only get the time but also the day and date. For movie time/schedule use the operator movie: followed by your cityname (e.g. movie:Kuala Lumpur).

Quick Currency Conversion

This comes really handy when you want to do currency conversion on the fly. e.g. 120 USD = ? EUR or 100 USD = ? JPY.

Search for Multiple queries

You can search for multiple queries at the same time using the operator “OR”. E.g. Paper Cup OR Disposable Cup will display results of both Paper Cups & Disposable Cups. So adding synonyms of words that you are searching for with the operator “OR” increases your chances of getting more relevant results.

Perform Calculations

Don’t have your calculator with you? No problem! Google can even do calculations try searching for 2+2 -3 or even more complex calculation like 34.5% of 1933

Search by File type

Sometimes you may want to find information that comes in a specific file type (e.g. pdf, ppt, doc or mp3). With the filetype: operator you can easily do so. E.g. Marketing Trends filetype:ppt will only show you PowerPoint presentations with the title Marketing Trends.

Hopefully you will find some of these tips useful and make most out of your Google Search experience! Happy Goo-gl-ing!

Edit Images Right from your Browser

I’m totally blown away by the new Browser based online image editor – Falcon, which is brought to us by the great – aviary.com. Aviary which itself is a full online photo editing & creation tool has always been awesome, but their new creation is more simplistic and easy to use for day to day photo editing.

You can quickly grab and edit images within your browser and also run it on any OS platform as its completely web based. Falcon currently offers a simple subset of tools which was previously only available in Adobe Photoshop. These tools are very useful to bloggers and others who spend a lot of time manipulating and editing images on the fly.

The best part of this cool service is in its Firefox plugin called Talon, which let’s you grab a screen shot on the fly at any time and automatically upload them into Aviary’s browser-based editing platform.

During your capture, you are given the choice of capturing a portion of the screen, the entire viewed screen, or the entire page (below the fold). The option of capturing the entire page is extremely useful; and a feature that many advanced photo editors doesn’t have.

How much Does it Cost?

Well its Free for most usage. Once you are done editing your image, you can save the image as a PNG or JPG either on your desktop or host it on Aviary. If you become their Pro member, you will be privillaged to get some additional storage options like privacy and watermark control for $24.99 per year.

How to use this Online Image Editor

So if you still haven’t tried Falcon – Just head over to the website – http://aviary.com/launch/falcon and try this amazing service. You don’t need to register or signup in order to test it. Just click on the link and it will load the photo editor right in your browser. If you wish to grab photos and take screen shot then don’t forget to install the firefox plugin – Talon!

You can easily download WordPress 2.8 Beta 1, here, and also leave your feedback for the developers, here. This is not a final release, so don’t update your blog just yet, as it may have a lot of bugs and loop holes.

So what to expect in the new WordPress 2.8? Well they have put up a whole list here.

How to try WordPress 2.8 Beta in a safe way?

If you are really interested to try out this new beta but don’t want to screw up any of your blog up by doing an upgrade,I strongly suggest that you do a fresh installation of this version on a sub-folder of your website/blog. There you can play with it without having to worry about any problems it might cause.

If you are too cautious or don’t have a web hosting account yet, You can download this free program called – EasyPHP, which has a built in MySQL DB Server and Apache Web server that can run quietly on your Windows taskbar. It replicates an actual web hosting account with access to database and a webserver and can run any html/php web platform like wordpress smoothly on your own computer. You don’t even need an active internet connection to try this!

So have you tried out WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 already? Share your views in the comments!

Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts recently spoke on a panel about “Preventing Virtual Blight” at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. So for those of you who couldn’t attend that conference, Matt cutts has recorded a special summarized version (“director’s cut”) of his presentation and made it available for Free (~ So nice of you Matt).

Its a 20 minutes videos, where Matt explains how you can use some common ways to prevent spam and also protect your site & domain from usual spammers & hackers. If you own or maintain any Web 2.0/3.0 service or even just a blog, this video is a must watch.

And here is the actual presentation slide:

Matt cutts writes in the Google Web Analytics blog:

One of the things I’m thinking about in 2009 is how Google can be even more transparent and communicate more. That led me to a personal goal for 2009: if I give a substantial conference presentation (not just a question and answer session), I’d like to digitize the talk so that people who couldn’t attend the conference can still watch the presentation.

Well this is certainly an excellent move by him or by Google (who ever made the actual decision). I hope that this move by Matt Cutts will open eyes of other key individuals, who holds important position in big organizations and possesses a lot of experience & knowledge but are reluctant to share anything with the public.

I’m sure most of you are already using twitter as a communication medium to communicate with your friends, family, your colleagues, your online pals and it doesn’t stop there. You are also using twitter to keep track of your industry, the key people involved in the industry and companies that are important to you etc.

Nowadays every company seems to have a twitter profile with a real operator (human being) behind the scene who is communicating with customers, taking complaints, resolving existing issues and doing everything to save their online reputation. Companies are monitoring the twitter cloud for occurrences of certain keywords – company name, product name etc. and before you know it, you get a tweet from them – showing you that they exist & they care!

How thoughtful! Isn’t it? Well, that’s just the ‘social’ side of it. When a customer is talking about your company, you should be there! But is being there just enough? Let’s take a look at some of the corporate twitter accounts like dell, comcast, jetblue etc. (Courtesy of Search Engine Journal).

Below are some of the similarities I have found. If you run a business and you have a business twitter profile, than I’m sure you fall under one or more of the points below:

• You simply broadcast whatever new happens with your company. It’s like a TV advertisement– You tweet, tweet and hope that your customer sees it.
• You try to be interactive with your prospective customers. Whenever people talks about something that you
  sell or do – you jump right into the conversation and try to pitch your product/service.
• You use Twitter as one of the dedicated Customer Support channel for your business. So when your customer is having a bad experience and they have shared it via twitter, you try to comfort the customer and help to resolve the issue.
• You use twitter as a Reputation Monitoring tool. When someone talks about a bad experience with your company/product or service. You try to jump right in, showing that you care and show him a light of hope.
• You just heard of twitter and you have opened up a profile with your company name to save it from those stupid name squatters. You are yet to think of a proper strategy to run your twitter account.
• You are using twitter as you normally would, but you are just using your Business name and logo in the profile.

Now whichever point you business falls under, it’s really not my focus today. I’m not here to argue on which ‘strategy’ works and which doesn’t. In fact I’m not even going to touch on the ‘social’ factor that twitter possesses. Twitter is an excellent social tool on the web and this is just a fact so there is no point in talking about it over and over again, because it has already shown its significance in that area.

Can Twitter be a Medium of an Information Retrieval System?

Twitter is yet to be tested as a strong medium of an Information Retrieval System. SMS (Short Message Service) has been very popular & successful in delivering On-Demand information to customers. So for instance, if you want the latest headlines of the news, want to track your order, or want to know the exchange rate of a currency – What you usually do is simply send an SMS to a specific number (provided by the mobile operator) and you get the details instantaneously on your mobile inbox. The service is not necessarily offered by the mobile operator, in most cases it’s created & maintained by the 3rd party providers. They simply lease a pretty number (e.g. 1111, 2000, 3232 etc.) from the operator and share the profit with them as per their agreement.

Now SMS is becoming history, people are sending less ‘text’ messages and relaying more on twitter. So I am very surprised why no one is looking at the possibility that twitter can actually replace SMS in terms of On-Demand Information Retrieval & Marketing.

Here are some scenarios:

Amazon & Dell can start allowing users to track their orders via Twitter – It can be fairly simple. Customers will simply follow a specific twitter account for tracking purpose (i.e. @AmazonTrack, @DellTrack) and they can send a DM to the account with a keyword followed by their tracking number/order number etc. So something like:

DM @DellTrack Track 1033910

Then within seconds DellTrack will query a database containing the order number and DM back the customer with the details:

Order Status: 1033910 – Dispatched 19:09 – 02/01/09 (Details: http://dell.com/tracking/twitter/?o=1033910/)

Some third party service is already doing this for Postal Mail/Parcel Tracking for Fedex, UPS, USPS, and DHL etc. But why aren’t those companies doing these themselves?

Airlines can give away Flight information via Twitter – I found a few airlines on twitter – (e.g. SouthEast, American Airlines, Delta etc.) But most of them are just sticking to the social aspect of twitter. But from a customer point of view I think it would be really useful if a person could just send a tweet and know what time his flight is or from which gate its boarding etc.

So all you need is to follow their twitter account and send a “DM” which will automatically make the ‘bot’ to query the Database and send you a direct message with the details requested.

Service Industry can use Twitter for Customer Support – Whether you are a mobile operator, an ISP or a Web Hosting company, you can provide your customer with an extra channel of support via twitter.

For example, customer can be allowed to assign one twitter account with the service that they are subscribed to with your company. Let’s assume for now that it’s a hosting industry. And for those quick support queries (e.g. My Site is down, How Can I do XyZ), a customer can simply send a DM to the Support’s Twitter account (Without having to make that call or write an email). The system will automatically generate a ticket for that support request and let the user know the ticket number via DM.

Since this will be integrated with the host’s support system, so all those ‘tweets’ will actually be received by the support team via Email. They will simply respond to the email and its cut-down version will be automatically DMed to the user with a link to the full response.

Schools / Colleges can give away their Results via Twitter – A student can DM @StanfordResults with their ID & DOB and get the result of the current term.

Love Sports? Get the latest updates via Twitter – A sports freak can get the latest score of his favorite sport by simply sending a tweet.

Make a Doctor’s Appointment with Twitter – No need to make that call, just tweet and you automatically know whether your doctor is available on your chosen time-slot and then you can register yourself for an appointment – everything just using your twitter account.

Pay for your coffee via Twitter – It would be cool if you could send a DM “Pay @Starbucks48 $9.99” to @PaypalTwitter and automatically @Starbucks48’s TwitterPaypal account will be credited with that amount. This can also work for ordering pizza!

Random Ideas of some Twitter Based Information Retrieval Apps

World Time – You send a tweet to @worldtime – “time London” and the world time bot automatically returns a message to you with the current date/time in London.

Exchange Rate / Conversion – Similar to the one above – “193 USD =? AUD”.

Stock Updates – There are many people who needs to keep a sharp eye on the stock market. So if this app is developed users can just write @StockUpdate GOOG and get the latest Google stock price via twitter. They can sign-up for a auto-notification service where every hour or every day, the system can send a DM to you with the latest stock price of your preferred businesses.

Tweet Poll – I love polls and I have seen a lot of people who take polls via twitter. But I can’t imagine the trouble the host needs to go through by manually counting the ‘votes’. Why not have real tweet polls that can be automated? So you sign up with this service and create a poll, your poll question can be a True-false type (e.g. “yes/no”) type of a MCQ type (e.g. “1,2,3,4”). Users will be asked to simply tweet the poll id and the answer to the service provider, say – @Polldady. (e.g. @polldaddy QS93384 3).

The possibilities are endless. Anything that exists for Mobile devices (via SMS) can actually be upgraded and made for twitter. Since more users are going for mobile internet, and getting wifi access almost anywhere – sooner or later SMS will become a history and Twitter will be the next alternative for SMS.

What Needs to be done from here onwards?

Someone needs to build a platform that will be able to ‘host’ some of these things mentioned above in a simple manner. Since Evan Williams (CEO, Twitter) is yet to find a proper business model, I believe this is something that they should look into. Rather than charging people money for their service, they should build a platform that businesses can subscribe to facilitate these services. Because it will be impossible to do something in a large scale with their current API limit. They are in the best position to host these services on the cloud. They can even formally open up a team, to develop the ‘systems’ and integrate it with the company’s existing system so that a smooth operation can take place.

For small businesses (those who doesn’t require much customization), Twitter can have sort of an ‘Easy Wizard’ that can allow the businesses to make a basic application on the fly and pay for it as they go.

Have any ideas? Share them in comments!

Follow me (@saadkamal) on Twitter!

1. Techfuga

Techfuga is a relatively new website that aggregates technology news from other tech news aggregator (like – Techmeme) as well as other hand-picked technology sites, blogs etc. If you go to techfuga, you will notice that they have special tabs for each of the technology sites that they are monitoring (e.g. Digg, Techcrunch, Slashdot etc). So if you click any of the tabs, the news from that particular site would be displayed on your screen. This will definitely come handy if you want to browse through the top technology sites quickly. At the bottom, they also have a popurls like design where a user can glance through all the top technology blogs. What I found most interesting about techfuga is its actually monitoring social sites like – twitter & friendfeed and adding related feeds directly with the news.

2. Alltop: Technology

Alltop is a nice site that is inspired by Popurls. The creator Guy Kawasaki took the concept of popurls further by making dedicated pages for different topics. So for instance, if you are interested in technology just visit – Alltop Technology category, and you will find all the latest blog posts and articles from over 100 top tech sites.

3. Megit

Megit is yet another news aggregator that works like techmeme. But Megit has not limited themselves to technology news only. They have dedicated pages to cover news on – Entertainment, Politics, Business etc.

4. Techmeme

Techmeme is the most famous Technology news tracker that probably has the nicest interface. Their design is very clean and readable without any ‘ads’ around the news. The only thing they have is “Sponsored posts” which are all relevant, technology related posts from some of the big industry players.

5. Digg – Technology

I’m sure you all know about the popular social news site – digg.com. If you are interested in Technology news, there is no better place to find them than the Technology category in Digg – http://digg.com/news/technology. Digg has a very strong & active community. So within minutes of a news/story posted somewhere, Digg is usually the first one to pick that up. Digg’s Upcoming section lists all the news that are upcoming and still not popular. Usually you should keep an eye on this area for finding the ‘fresh’ tech news stories.

And thats not all! There are tons of other sites that can get you all the breaking technology news in your fingertips. Such as: Reddit Technology, StumbleUpon Technology Tag, Mixx Tech, Yahoo Buzz Sci/Tech, Propeller Sci/Tech.

Did I miss any? Share your favorite tech news sources in the comments!

This brand new Gmail Labs feature Labs lets you send Text SMS right from Gmail Inbox. It combines the best parts of IM and texting: you chat from the comfort of your computer, and your friends can peck out the replies on their little mobile keyboards.

How to Send SMS from Gmail

First Log in to your Gmail Account, click on Settings, and go to the Labs tab. Scroll down until you see “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat” and select Enable and Save Changes.

To send an SMS, You can simply type a US-phone number or into the search box in the chat window on the left, then select “Send SMS.” You can also select the contact you want to SMS first and then add their phone number.

Once you give us a name for that phone number, you’ll be able to start chatting.

More Details are here and here.

Whatever you collect from the web can be easily sorted using tags called ‘Collections’, which can be published to the web via RSS, embedded in blogs, shared to friends for collaboration, or kept private for your own reference.

TechCrunch points out, that Thumbtack also gives users ability to customize their look and feel by offering a set of ‘gadgets’. Initially the they provide an Address gadget that can identify addresses in clips and find them on a map, a Properties gadget that lets users to assign a price value to any specified item, and lastly a Layout gadget which users can use to organize their thumbtack workspace.

From Microsoft Live Labs Blog:

Thumbtack is an easy way to save links, photos, and anything else you find on the Web in a single place. Compare prices, colors, styles or locations at a glance. Grab the stuff you want from lots of different sites, put it into a Thumbtack collection, then get to it from anywhere you can get online.
Thumbtack uses machine learning and natural language techniques to understand the information you give it—it automatically extracts addresses, for instance, and the Address Gadget will then automatically plot that address on a map. Other gadgets help you compare items in your collection, or arrange them the way that’s easiest for you to see them.

Watch the following video to learn more about Thumbtack -

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6a905d98-0332-4c3f-8b25-75737cd9b675&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Introduction">Video: Thumbtack Introduction</a>

My Two Cents

As Adam Ostrow of Mashable points out, Microsoft Thumbtack may be useful for very specific tasks like doing research online, however for bookmarking purpose – I believe the traditional bookmarking & tag based social bookmarking sites works best.

What do you think? Would you use Thumbtack? Share in Comments!

How to Enable Gmail Tasks

Simply login to your Gmail account and head over to Gmail Labs (Settings > Labs ) and there you will be see something like the following -

So simply click on “Enable” and Save your settings and then you are done! Your Inbox will reload and you should be able to see the following link -

How to Use Gmail Tasks

Click on the “Tasks” link and it will load your Gmail Task inside your Inbox.

Now you can start adding your tasks easily by clicking anywhere on the white space inside the task panel. You can also add emails to your to-do list by simply selecting an email and clicking on “Add to Task” from the More Action Menu. Illustration provided below:

Google Operating System blog shared some useful shortcuts of Gmail Tasks:

• Open the tasks box by typing g then k if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled.
• Create a task from an email by pressing Shift+T if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled.
• Navigate between tasks using the arrows.
• Delete a task by deleting the text and hitting backspace.
• Organize your tasks by indenting them — just hit Tab to indent and Shift+Tab to un-indent.
• Ctrl+Up moves a task up the list and Ctrl+Down move it down.
• Hit Shift+Enter when in a task to show its details

Read Write Web has done a nice video of Gmail Task in action. So you can have a look at its feature before trying it out yourself. Eric @ Techcrunch also did a write up on Gmail Tasks earlier.

My Two Cents

Certainly this is an awesome inclusion by the Gmail Team. But I’m very disappointed that this Gmail Task can’t stay fixed in my sidebar. I need click on the task link every time I need to open it. Before Gmail Tasks was available I used to be a huge fan of Remember the Milk for Gmail. I think I’ll still continue to use them as it still has a lot more features that Gmail Tasks doesn’t provide yet. But adding emails to to-do-list is something that is new and worth trying out!