Archive for the ‘Product Review’ Category
31 Flavors of Me
I remember teaching myself how to use HTML for the first time in high school because I wanted to “soup” up my AsianAvenue page (you heard me right, feel free to chuckle and judge as needed). When I went off to college, I used Microsoft Frontpage to build my first website. Grad school introduced me to WordPress and tweaking CSS to change my font color, but nothing more elaborate than that.
I wish I knew how to code. I can read HTML and make token changes, but I’m no developer. And these are the extent of my coding abilities.
You might find yourself in my shoes, and I have an amazing resource to share. Need a website? No coding needed. Read the rest of this entry »
OTA Holiday Shopping
I purchased my first airline ticket, a round trip ticket to Seattle to attend college, and used my return flight for the holidays. I remember going to a travel agency where an actual agent used her database to search for the best deals she could find across various airlines. It was a big hassle—because I had to physically go to the travel agent, and repeat my trip if deals or desired fares were unavailable.
You can say goodbye to the days of relying on travel agents. In recent days, the power of searching and purchasing a plane ticket has been turned to consumers. The travel industry has taken popularity online, through OTAs (aka Online Travel Agencies) where consumers can search and coordinate their own flights and vacation packages. Kayak.com and Expedia.com are both popular OTAs in the Internet world. While Expedia has been around longer, Kayak.com is a new face that is making ground and paving a new path. The matrix at the bottom shows the pros and cons of the two websites.
There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been trying to save some cash during this economic crisis, downturn, whatever you call it. In fact, my friend and I were recently talking about how we need to take on window shopping as a new hobby. Well, here’s a cheap (free) way to cure our shopping blues since being broke is the new black.
Meet Kashless. If Craigslist and Twitter had a love child, this site would be it. It is the first online marketplace to solely offer postings of free items in the Seattle area. You can either post directly with Kashless or via third party listings from sites such as Craigslist or Freecycle. Using their microblogging design, you can search by categories, by neighborhood, or by distance. They make the process seamless from bookmarking options to e-mail notifications, but the unique aspect of Kashless is their ability to narrow down your product and save your search preferences. That’s target advertising (without really being advertising) at its best!
To Twitter or not to Twitter, Part Deux
If you have heard about #AmazonFail, #Oprah, #HudsonRiverCrash in the past few months, you probably fall into one of these categories:
- Taking the leap onto the Twitter bandwagon
- On the cusp of joining Twitter but don’t want to manage another social networking site
- Maybe considering it, but still too much effort to tell if I’ll be onboard
- Twitter still sucks
Haters, don’t say I didn’t warn you. But thanks for keep me motivated.
On-The-Go Recording
Image from Calabarock.com
Want to record a podcast? There’s an (iPhone) app for that.
Even before iPhones entered the marketplace, video recording capability was integrated into cell phones. But who would have thought users would need to take a step back into the world of audio recording? Here’s a new tool (with a brand name that seems endorsed by Obama) that you can utilize while you’re on the go.
To Twitter, or not to Twitter
This week, I started using Twitter after almost a year long hiatus with a few attempts in between. And now, I’m absolutely hooked.
During my first class in the MCDM program, my professor encouraged us to play around with Twitter. As a long time social networking site user and a web 2.0 advocate, I’d self proclaimed myself as an early adopter to new tools and gadgets.
Boy, was I wrong.
It was difficult for me to understand why I would feel the need to update my exact whereabouts practically every minute of the day, especially when I already had a tool that worked just perfectly fine. I had been tailoring my Facebook updates to express my two cents to a closed group of social networks. Besides, status updates become more fun when you have an audience reading your daily rants and thoughts and commenting back with stamps of approval or comic relief.
Then, I discovered that Twitter is quite different than a just fancy version of Facebook status updates.
Do Take It Personally
When Microsoft first entered the tech marketplace with their first version of Windows, who would have thought that one day they would segue into the gaming arena? No one would have guessed that the night before the launch of a Microsoft gaming device would create a trend of waiting overnight in front of gadget stores.
Let’s just say Microsoft has come a long way. Despite the infamous Mac vs. PC ad campaign led by Apple
Studious > Sexy
Let’s just get the cat out of the bag: Windows Media Player (WMP) is old school. It’s a grandfathered media player that needs to be phased out or revamped. And, it’s definitely not sexy.
Sexy aside, everything has a purpose–and WMP gets the job done. It doesn’t use as much bandwidth as Quicktime, because most websites that need to stream at high quality do not rely on WMP. Forbes.com doesn’t seem to mind Windows Media Player’s simplistic nature, because it gets the job done. News, compared to websites that use plenty of rich media graphics, does not need much bandwidth to stream their content. In the news industry, speed trumps quality to help break the news–but not to say quality is completely neglected.
Walk the QuickTime Line
Who doesn’t love Johnny Cash?
More importantly, who doesn’t love QuickTime?
The movie, ‘Walk the Line’ has an official website to promote their DVDs. As you enter the site, QuickTime is immediately integrated into the homepage using various clips from the movie. I enjoy this particular feature because it is visually appealing–and websites that promote media such as movies, televison shows, and concerts are best delivered with smooth, uninterrupted, and flashy streaming media rather than extremely detailed text. If I could change one feature, I would not use an unlimited loop for the background video– it’s efficient to catch the user’s initial attention, but it becomes distracting after one or two loops.
Move over MySpace, Facebook wants to chat.
Who remembers the days of ICQ, AIM, and MSN messenger? As a user, I chose these chat products because they each had unique features. As the years went by, and saturation became an issue, I decided to devote my time to only one IM: MSN Messenger.
Now, before you go ahead and start pointing the Microsoft fingers, let me tell you why I preferred MSN Messenger above the others. I had more contacts on MSN Messenger than on ICQ or AIM, and most users had a Hotmail e-mail account than an AOL e-mail account. More contacts = easier to keep in touch with people. Besides, most of my friends on AIM already had a presence on MSN Messenger.
This is where Facebook put their thinking caps on.
