In my last post we saw Samsung unveil the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. While I was not very impressed by the first Galaxy Tab (I’ll tell you why in a very short while), the 750 in its all new avatar has simply blown me away! We are gonna go through a few of the features that really stand out.

I have to admit, I am never really amazed by how much Gigabytes of storage a handheld has or how fast it’s processor is. It doesn’t really bother me that the 750 only has a 3MP rear camera. The reason being that it is safe to assume that these numbers are bound to grow over the months. In a few months time we’ll probably have 3Ghz dual core processors in cellphones. Its a given. Plus, do you really want an 8MP camera on your tab??

Here are 3 features that have amazed me the most in increasing order of their awesomeness (No1 being the best):

3. Splendid Design

The first Galaxy Tab was ugly to say the least. It was bulky and so very Nokia-ish (I hate Nokia phones BTW). It was 7 inches diagonally and 12mm thick! It was neither a smartphone (obviously there’s nothing smart about a 7inch phone) nor a regular tablet. Samsung thought they had come up with a brilliant device, but they had not. Well, now they have!
Take a look at the image below:

Doesn’t it look just amazing!! I know it looks very similar to the iPad but it is still much better than their last Tab.

The Galaxy Tab 750 also has dual speakers neatly tucked into the sides. Always good to have dual channel surround sound on a handheld.

Given it’s looks the Tab is definitely gonna turn some heads around. Why this is a feature I really liked is because even though a little late, Samsung finally have the slimmest and the lightest tablet in the market. Also having the best screen and biggest battery out there is a plus!

2. Better Accessories

Tablets try to hit that sweet spot between cellphones and laptops (desktops are almost a thing of the past now). You know Samsung have done just that when you look at all the accessories they have built for the Tab.

Apart from the leather pouch and book cover, they have also built a bluetooth keyboard, a dock with a keyboard of it’s own, a regular dock and an HTML adapter kit (they have to be purchased separately). Now you’ll never have to bother about buying expensive accessories from other companies and worrying about compatibility and connectivity issues.

Why do I consider this as an admirable feature? Because it shows that Samsung gets the bigger picture and that it cares about their user’s needs and is doing everything it can to fulfill them.

1. The new TouchWiz User Interface

Android 3.1 Honeycomb brought about true multitasking. It is a little hard to believe previous Android devices didn’t really multi-task, but check out screenshots below and you’ll understand.

Presently there are 6 mini-apps that can work on top of (alongwith would probably be more appropriate here) other applications. You could be working on your spreadsheets while having your calculator on top! Multi-tasking can really boost your productivity. I’m telling you, very soon you’ll be tempted to chuck away your laptop for this tablet!

Widgets on the homescreens are customizable! It comes as a great relief to me. Earlier phones had widgets that would take up the entire screen. It doesn’t really make sense having just one widget on one homescreen. Wouldn’t I simply use a full fledged app instead? I had raised this question to the tech lead at last year’s blogger meet for the Samsung Wave and Galaxy S and they didn’t have an answer then.

Some widgets will just shrink/expand in size while others behave differently in at different sizes! Cool eh?

There are a whole bunch of other nifty little improvements that make the overall experience pleasant.

The Quick Panel helps you change frequently used settings in a breeze

Customizing homescreens just got better!

The browser supports full flash. I tell you, the Tab can easily replace the laptop in the near future!

Even the Government is going paperless. It's high time we did our bit!

A bigger screen is like more real estate. Neatly spaced out email client means that you wont be missing your computer.

The revamped YouTube app looks kickass!

The Music Hub lets you listen to all your music as well as acts as a music store that lets you preview songs and buy them directly! Smart, I say!

Here is why I am so excited by the new interface. Although it has only subtle changes from the vanila Honeycomb interface, all those changes are those which a lot of techies have been demanding over the past year. But to really drive home the point, we’ll also look at the iPad2 interface.

Eermm.. There is nothing much to talk about really. It is just a bunch of shiny icons that launch apps. There is nothing much to it.

The reason why I would prefer the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 to the Apple iPad2 is because while the iPad arrogantly screams “Buy me now. I have lots of flaws. But next year there will be a better iPad that will have fewer flaws. Buy that one then”, the Galaxy Tab humbly calls out “Buy me and you’ll never regret”!!

Click to see full specifications of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750

In case you missed the live launch of the tab, you could even watch the recorded video on youtube.

Psst: This blog is on the verge of a major revamp! If you liked this post, subscribe to full feeds or join me on my Facebook page.

UPDATE: In case you missed the live event, you could even watch the recorded video on youtube.

What is VoIP?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a technology that enables voice transmissions to travel over an Internet Protocol (IP) like the Internet rather than over traditional phone lines. Speech is converted to packets of voice data which are sent over a broadband internet connection to another phone where the stream of voice data is reassembled into its original form.

Erm.. Will that reduce my office’s phone bills?
Most certainly. It has been seen that in some cases, companies have seen monthly savings of upto 80%!! It is a relative figure though. If you are a very very small company which doesn’t need to make a lot of phone calls, doesn’t need number extensions, it might not seem very profitable. But otherwise, VoIP is the thing for you. I know the recession is behind us but who doesn’t like a little cost cutting!

If it will save me money, I’m in. Tell me more!
Not only is VoIP a great way to reduce phone bills but it also improves the professional appearance of a small office. Many features are included, such as Virtual Receptionists, Dial-by-Name, Virtual Departments and Call Queuing. These features can make the customer facing presence of a small business much more streamlined, professional and efficient. VoIP is much less expensive than traditional phone service, especially in cases of heavy long distance or international calling. It is also far more versatile than analog telephony and provides many more features that were not possible with analog phone systems.

What additional features are we talking about? My current system gives me everything I want!
We are talking about features like Call Transfer: Attended Transfer & Blind Transfer, Call Conference (upto 30 people at a time!!), Call Logs, Password Protected Voicemail, Voicemail to Email, Virtual Receptionist: Custom messages according to time of the day, employee extension. You can even setup different greeting messages for different incoming numbers! Outlook Integration, Online Backup and Storage, Cell Phone integration, Softphone Support. I’m sure your current phone system does not provide you with all these features. Plus its at a much lower cost!

I’ve been using Skype for a while now. It doesn’t give me all these features.
Skype is for grannies wanting to talk to their grandchildren. For your business, you need business VoIP phones. Give www.volcaocity.com a shot.

Exactly how much will it cost me? Will setting it up cost me time, manpower and money?
Check out the great pricing options over at Vocalocity. They have an efficient team that will set everything up in a day or two. Their seamless portability will also make sure you don’t lose business even for that day.

Samsung's New Open Platform OS

Being the first of a kind has its implications. A brand new OS needs a flagship capable of facing up to the sizable competition. A chat with Samsung India’s President of Mobile Sales Atul Jain and the Developer Head at the recent Samsung Bloggers Meet, Mumbai blew away all the scepticism I had about the new Bada OS. 3 days into this phone and I must confess, I’m in love with this phone!

Build Quality

At 118 x 56 x 10.9 mm Samsung S8500 Wave is pretty compact and easy to slip into the pocket. The seamless brushed aluminium body makes the phone very solid and a joy to hold on to. The metallic exterior is slim, elegant, ergonomic, conservative and undeniably Samsung.

It has the usual volume rocker buttons on the left, camera and lock buttons on the right. A Speaker, a 3.5mm jack and a mini-usb port with a sliding cover on top. The 3.5mm doubles up as a TV out port which will allow you to view movies or games on a big screen!

The front is dominated by the 3.3 inch Super AMOLED tempered glass display, which is scratch-resistant. Under the display, are the only three hardware keys on the Samsung S8500 Wave front panel. The Call and End buttons are either side of central diamond-inspired Menu key. All controls are large enough and solid to press with excellent tactility.

Turn on the awesome display and the rest of the world just fades away. The ‘Super AMOLED’ screen is supposedly 20% brighter, 80% less sunlight reflective and yields 20% longer battery life. The screen is also supposed to be oleophobic (resistant to oil and thus fingerprints). Mind you, I put on a screen protector and the advantage was gone.

Below the aluminium battery cover is a 1500mAh Li-Ion battery which promises upto 35 hours of nonstop music playback. Below the battery we find the microSD card slot and the SIM compartment. The memory card isn’t hot-swappable since you would have to take out the battery everytime. Not Cool!

I give the phone a solid 4.5/5 on build quality. The only problem is the memory card slot but then, having having a really slim body has its quirks.

Score: 4.5 / 5

User Interface

The Wave features the TouchWhiz 3.0 UI which takes time getting used to if you are not familiar with Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. However the 3.0 incorporates a few much need functional tweaks. The 1Ghz processor ensures there is absolutely no lag in the interface.

At the top of the screen is a la Android pull down mini-menu that houses neat buttons for toggling WiFi, Bluetooth and Silent mode on your phone. It also shows notifications from your call list, messages, emails and file transfers.

As with previous phones you can add widgets to your home screens. Unlike previous phones which had an irritating floating column to the left out of which widgets had to be dragged out, TouchWhiz 3.0 tucks away those widgets neatly into a panel at the bottom of the screen which can be seen by taping on the small button on the top left of the screen. A refreshing change is the number of home screens that you can have. You can add upto 10 different home screens and lace them with different widgets! Yeah you read it right. 10 home screens!!

Jump into the menu screen and you see an iOS style home screen. Similar to the homescreen, you can add or delete menu pages when you turn the phone landscape while you’re in edit menu mode. Scrolling the menu screens is looped, so when you reach the last one you don’t have to sweep all the way back. You can very easily rearrange icons on the home screens. With 10 menu pages at your disposal, you could group relevant icons and give them their separate pages!

The UI would please people of ages and sizes. You can use the interface the way it is and it would work just fine. If you are an enthusiast, you could spice it up with considerate ease! I give the new TouchWiz 3.0 UI a 4/5

Score : 4 / 5

Phonebook

One functional difference is the phonebook, which now allows you to link your contacts to their IM (you can choose from AIM, Windows Live, Yahoo, Skype, QQ and Google Talk) and social accounts (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter). You can track each contact’s latest online activity through the phonebook application, which is called SNS functionality. The phonebook has rich functionality and practically limitless capacity.

You can flick through your contacts or use the alphabet scroll at the right side of the screen. Another cool feature to the phonebook is the side-sweep. In the main contact list, a swipe to the right on a name will dial the contact’s default number, while a swipe to the left will start the New message interface! (Check out the video below for a demo)

Open up a contact and you will see 4 tabs on top.

Info displays the contact’s personal details. History shows all your recent messages, calls and emails with that contact. The activities tab pulls up that contact’s recent updates on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc. The Media tab shows photo albums from your contact’s Facebook page.

For having all that most smartphones have these days plus a few tricks up it’s sleeve, I have the Wave’s phonebook a 4.5 on 5

Score : 4.5 / 5

Telephony and in-call functions and gestures

I had no real problems with calls on the Wave. The phone encourages smart dialing wherein as you start to dial a number it searches the number in your contacts and pulls up that contact for you. Not a very handy feature though. Does Samsung think we remember all our contact numbers??

The in-call gestures deserve a special mention. When your phone is ringing, simply place it face-down on the table to silence the ring. The call isn’t rejected but the ringing stops. If you can’t receive a phone call, you could reject it with a ‘I’m busy’ text to the caller. With a simple tap of the screen you could send an appropriate SMS to the caller!

When on a call, simply place the phone down on the table and the phone automatically turns on the speakerphone for everyone around to hear! Cool eh?? (See video below for more)

The Samsung Wave deserves a resounding 5 on 5 here!

Score : 5 / 5

Messaging

The message inbox offers two views – Tabbed and Conversation. The Samsung S8500 Wave supports sending and receiving SMS, MMS, and email messages. SMS and MMS share the same editor.
Setting up email on your Wave is hassle-free. Both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols are supported. For popular email clients like Gmail, all you have to do is enter your username and password and the phone does the rest!

Handwriting recognition works decently on the Samsung Wave. Given that it’s a capacitive screen, you need not necessarily type one character at a time (see screenshot below). However if you do not like the idea of drawing your messages, it also gives you a few onscreen options. You can use the QWERTY keyboard in both landscape and portrait modes. Given the size of the screen, QWERTY in the portrait mode is almost impossible to use. But you can use the alpha-numeric keypad style keyboard in the portrait mode.

For lack of a physical keyboard, I give this phone a 2.5 on 5. Nothing magical about this phone’s on-screen keypad.

Score : 2.5 / 5

Multimedia

Multimedia has always been Samsung’s forte. The S8500 tops it all. The Samsung S8500 Wave supports DivX/XviD files out of the box. It played DivX, XviD, MP4 and even MKV files (all in 720p resolution) with ease. It has a minimalist yet highly functional video player with all necessary settings at the tap of a finger stored away neatly into the bottom. If using the tiny bar at the bottom to skip to your favourite scene is painful you can search for a specific scene using the “Mosaic search” feature. It breaks the clip down to 16 or 36 parts and displays the first frame of each to help you find the scene you’re looking for!!

The Music Browser has seen a few improvements too. While in the landscape mode, it shows your tracks/albums as an array of CDs arranged in a circular fashion using the track’s Album Art. The list is scrollable with good inertia-like effect. Tapping on an album reveals all songs from that album.

The Samsung S8500 Wave is also equipped with an FM radio with RDS.

720p videos are a joy to watch on this phone. Given a 1GHz processor, the Mosaic Search works in a snap. The clutter-free video browser combined with a nifty music player earn the Wave GT-S8500 a 4.5 on 5.

Score : 4.5 / 5

Applications

Samsung has bundled quite a few applications with the Wave S8500. Most notable is the System Manager which has 4 tabs on it. The System Manager is a nifty tool to check your device information (model number, firmware version, MAC addresses), battery info, CPU usage and memory usage.

Daily Briefing is an app dedicated for weather, stock, news and your day’s schedule. It is a wonderful application to wake up to every morning, check out your stocks on it, get news updates and glance over that day’s schedule!

Memo, Mini Dairy, Twitter, Facebook, Voice recorder and Palringo IM are some of the colourful and pleasant apps the Wave comes bundled with.

The preloaded apps on this device are decent enough. But creating apps for this OS is upto the developer community. I’ll just reserve the score for a later date when there are more Bada apps in the Samsung Apps store.

Score : Reserved for later

Games

The game comes preloaded with Asphalt 5. This latest title of the popular series used the phone’s Accelerometer to control the car. Plus, you could connect your Samsung Wave to your TV using the TV-out port (same as the 3.5mm headphone port) to enjoy gaming on a bigger screen! Check out this video of a bunch of Bloggers playing Asphalt5 on the big screen at the Samsung Blogger Meet, Mumbai. The winner got a brand new Samsung Wave!!

Asphalt 5 being played on the Samsung Wave (actual photo)

Electronic Arts is also giving away Need For Speed Shift to the first 1 million users who download the game from Samsung Apps. You however need to download Kies to install apps on your device.

However this phone also comes bundled with many games that are actually demo versions! They run 2 min trials before a ‘Buy Now’ screen pops up. Notable games among the ones that can be currently downloaded are Real Football 2010, NFS Shift, BumpCrash, MasterMinds and SlidingLeaf. The overall gaming experience is exhilarating hence the S8500 gets a 4 on 5 here.

Score : 4 / 5

Browser

The Samsung Wave GT-S8500 comes preinstalled with the Dolphin v2.0 Mobile Browser. It is an open source webkit based browser which also supports flash. Support for webkit allows it to render nice smooth rounded corners. As a website designer, rounded corners ring a bell deep down in me. This browser also supports multi-touch zoom and pan. Pinch your fingers to zoom in and out of pages or simply double-tap. The Browser however does not reflow text when a page is zoomed. What this means is that for pages with wide columns, you have to pan around every line which is a big turn off.

Positives – flash, Webkit, pinch to zoom. Negatives – No text reflow! This simply robs the browser of all its points. I give the Dolphin a 2 out of 5

Score : 2 / 5

Final Score

I give the phone a 31 / 40 which is roughly 3.9 / 5

Street price of the phone

Price in India : Rs 18,000/-
Price in the UK : £ 366.99
Price in Europe : 380 Euros

Conclusion

The Bada OS
The BADA is the Koreans’ first strike into taking on the might of Android and the iPhone in the smartphone market. The Wave does full justice to the Bada OS. Having said that, I see the Bada OS becoming the next big thing in the mobile world. Love or hate, but Samsung is the biggest phone manufacturer in the world (in terms of number of manufacturer). Samsung insists that by the end of this year Bada would have come to many of it’s mid-range phones, a section dominated by the Corbys, Genios and the STARs. For people who still stuck with the question, ‘Why a new OS??’, my answer is that Samsung should have done it long ago! But now its finally here and it is definitely here to stay!!

The only reason you might choose not to get this phone is if you are an Android enthusiast. In the coming few months you might just find that perfect Android phone you’ve been waiting for but definitely at a price higher than that of the Wave.

A gorgeous 3.3 inch Super AMOLED which simply oozes color, Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Wi-Fi Tethering, 5 MegaPixels camera, 720p HD recording, 1020p HD playback, AutoFocus, LED Flash, tightly-integrated Social Networking, super customizable Home screens and Menu screens all packed into a beautiful pocket-friendly slim brushed aluminium chassis makes the Samsung Wave GT-S8500 wave a phone to look out for in the future!

Below is a video compilation of some of the features that I have really liked in the phone and a few niggles that I don’t really like. There is so much to this phone that cannot be described through words. Check it out:

(Pardon the poor quality of the video. Something went horribly wrong during the editing process and it also is my very first video!)

You can view a live demo at http://themes.angadsodhi.com
You can download the file from here.
Here’s a screenshot of the theme:

Click to view larger image

Creating this theme from scratch was fun. I have a few people to thank whose posts were very useful:

• New page menu function in WordPress 2.7
• Display your tweets without a plugin
• How to add a dynamic sidebar in WordPress?

Theme properties:

• Widget-ready
• Fixed width
• W3 XHTML valid
• Designed with SEO in mind (eg <h1> appears just once on every page and that is the poast title)
• wordpress 2.7 ready (I presume it shouldn’t have problems with wordpress 2.8)
• Threaded comments (requires Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin included in download package)

The most difficult part was naming the theme! With thousands of WP themes already available, it has become so difficult naming them. I’ll be grateful if you can suggest me a better name.

Please let me know how you like the theme. Even if you don’t end up downloading the theme, please do let me know what you think about it. Comments and suggestions are always welcome! I’m coming back from a long layoff so please help me spread the word. Digg it or tweet it if you like it.

Psst: I plan to make many more themes before my next semester starts. If you like this theme, please subscribe to this blog. Expect a much better premium theme in the weeks to come!

Twitter contests are fun. You just have to tweet about the contest and you are in! Contests cannot get any simpler than this. They help the contest holder gain followers and it gives you a chance to win something really cool!

About Motive Interactive:
Motive Interactive is a performance-based (CPA, CPL, CPS) advertising network that has great Advertiser and Publisher Solutions. That are rather new but very good. If you haven’t joined them yet, signup now! Motive Interactive also has many more twitter contests so do follow them at @motive where they also tweet about exciting new offers.

Motive is still giving away an iPod nano a week in the Shoemoney Las Vegas Challenge contest.

As quoted from the official post,

Three Ways to Win:
1.) Join Motive Interactive and earn within any of the Commission Levels above during the month of June. Contest tier prizes only awarded to new Motive affiliates signed up through this blog during June 2009. YOU HAVE TO SIGN UP THROUGH THIS LINK TO BE ELIGIBLE
2.) Follow @Motive and Tweet this contest on Twitter. Just “tweet” the following from your Twitter account and you are automatically entered to win a new iPod Shuffle each week.
“Follow @motive and join Top Rated CPA Affiliate Network Motive Interactive to make money and win big prizes! http://xr.com/s1g RT 2 WIN! “
3.) Blog about this contest promotion. If you have a blog, simply link back to ShoeMoney’s contest blog page and talk about this contest. Then you will be entered to win a new Xbox 360 Elite plus two games.

Thus, you can win an iPod nano everyweek just by tweeting about the contest and win an Xbox 360 by blogging about the contest the way I have done here.

If you are good with Affiliate Marketing, you stand a good chance of winning some even bigger prizes:

Network Earnings Prizes
$500,000+ Tier – Vegas VIP Prize
. 1st Class flight for two to Las Vegas
. Fairway Villa for two nights
. $5,000 in cash
$200,000 – $499,999 Tier
. 1st Class flight for one to Las Vegas
. Wynn – The Suite Life Package : Parlor Suite 2 nights
$100,000 – $199,999 Tier
. $4,000 in cash
$50,000 – $99,999 Tier
. 2 tickets to UFC 100 with accommodations and flight for 2 for 2 nights
$25,000 – $49,999 Tier
. Sony Plasma TV
$10,000 – $24,999 Tier
. Xbox 360 Elite plus Halo 3 and NEWEST UFC XBOX GAME
$3,000 – $9,999 Tier
. iPod Touch 32GB
$1,000 – $2,999 Tier
. Best Buy Gift Card

More details can be found at the official post about the contest.

Motive also gave me a nice “What’s your motive” tshirt. Loved it guys. Thank you once again, Luke. (Sorry for the late post. I was busy with exams) Here are some pics:

Simply love the color!

This is on the back of the tee.

The nano and the tshirt. Hope to win many more!

Psst: It’s my birthday tomorrow! Even this blog celebrates it’s birthday tomorrow. I turn 21, my blog 2!! Expect a bit of a surprise here tomorrow..

I was asked by 4cheapwebhosting.com to review their services. I had a look around their site. So here it goes: If you want me to review your site or services, drop me a message via the contact form.

Finding a good host is vital for any website’s success. You don’t want your website to have thousands to hits daily only to crash abruptly. Downtimes have a really bad effect on public memory. They don’t go down well with advertisers either. And since you have to choose a host before you have actually started your website, most newbies end up with hosting packages they don’t actually need or a hosting package that is way smaller than their needs.

An ideal host would have the following features:

• 100% uptime guarantee
• 24/7 customer service
• Live chat support
• A good forum that has plenty of big daddies on it
• Regular backup facility
• It should be cheap and affordable

Choosing a good host can be rather intricate. Have your work cut out simply by visiting 4cheapwebhosting.com and check out their affordable web hosting packages. This site can be exceptionally useful specially if you are planning of moving to new servers. That way you know your exact needs and can find your ideal host easily.

For newbies, they have a very unbiased list of hosts. Do a bit of research on them and choose wisely. Hosting packages have been classified into categories such as linux / windows hosting, ASP / PHP / JSP scripting, MySQL databases (you generally need them for blogs and CMSs), multi domains etc.

There are more than 400 packages to choose from. You can even have a word with them just to be sure you are getting the best. Take your pick wisely.

Relevant links:
http://www.4cheapwebhosting.com

I was fascinated when I first heard the term ‘electric sitar’. If you don’t know what a sitar is, jump over to youtube and search for ‘sitar’. Niladri Kumar has tweaked this traditional Indian string instrument. Check out both videos.

For the second video, you’ll have to head over to YouTube because embedding of that video has been disabled upon request. The music video is called Priority and can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQU5eGg8wcM. It has a Hindi intro to it, so just skip ahead if you don’t get a clue.

The Burj Dubai. Construction began in 2005 and is expected to be complete by 2008. At an estimated height of over 800 meters, it will easily be world's tallest building when finished. It will be almost 40% taller than the the current tallest building, the Yaipei 101.

This is what downtown Dubai will look like around 2008-2009. More than 140 stories of the Burj Dubai have already been completed. It is already the worlds tallest man made structure and it is still not scheduled to be completed for at least another year.

Recently it was announced that the final height of this tower will be 1200 meters. That would make it more than 30% taller than the Burj Dubai and three times as tall as the Empire State Building.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower, which will be the centerpiece of one of the palm islands, The Palm Jumeirah.

Dubai Sports City. A huge collection of sports arenas located in Dubailand.

The Dubai Marina is an entirely man made development that will contain over 200 highrise buildings when finished. It will be home to some of the tallest residential structures in the world. The completed first phase of the project is shown. Most of the other high rise buildings will be finished by 2009-2010.

Ski Dubai , which is already open, is the largest indoor skiing facility in the world. This is a rendered image of another future indoor skiing facility that is being planned.

Some of the tallest buildings in the world, such as Ocean Heights and The Princess Tower , which will be the largest residential building in the world at over a 100 stories, will line the DubaiMarina.

Amazing eh? If you liked this post please digg / stumble it.

This is part one of the 2-part series. Be sure to check out the other part too.

Dubai in 1990 prior to the craziness

The very street last year!

The Palm Islands in Dubai. New Dutch dredging technology was used to create these massive man made islands. They are the largest artificial islands in the world and can be seen from space. Three of these Palms will be made with the last one being the largest of them all.

The Dubai Waterfront. When completed it will become the largest waterfront development in the world ...

Upon completion, the resort will have 2,000 villas, 40 luxury hotels, shopping centers, movie theaters, and many other facilities. It is expected to support a population of approximately 500,000 people. It is advertised as being visible from the moon.

The Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai . The worlds tallest hotel. Considered the only '7 star' hotel and the most luxurious hotel in the world. It stands on an artificial island in the sea.

Hydropolis, the world's first underwater hotel. Entirely built in Germany and then assembled inDubai, it is scheduled to be completed by 2009 after many delays.

The second part can be found here. If you like these posts please digg/stumble them. Expecting some SU love on this one!

The entire episode has been divided into 5 parts. This has to be the longest SuperSundayVideo yet, but then the stadium deserves it! The stadium has a seating capacity of 91,000. It was built with 36 km (22.4 miles) of unwrapped steel, with a combined weight of 45,000 tonnes. Estimated cost of construction: $423 million!! Highly recommend everyone to watch all 5 videos but you could always jump directly to the last video.

I’d like to mention that there are ad spots up for grabs. If you would like to advertise on angadsodhi.com, please have a look at the ‘Advertise‘ page.

Looking forward to your comments. A couple of comments could get you into the top commentators list. Getting a quality backlink from a PR3 blog should now be easy pickings!!

Here is just some of the exciting stuff that he’s got over at his site.

If you like this post and find it useful, please digg it/stumble it.

I was asked by UZOOM to to review their site and the chat softwares they provide. I thought the softs were pretty neat and worth a mention. So here it goes…

If you are on a self-hosted blog, chances are that you have already used the ‘Live Support’ features most webhosting companies provide. I think it’s a really cool feature. Much better that having to open a ticket and wait for someone to reply to the ticket. Using a liveSupport function instead of the ticket system shows that your company actually wants to be accessible at all times. It simply shows that you care.

UZOOM is one company that provides all kinds of chat related softwares for your site/blog. First, we look at the ‘Live Chat’ feature. This service was very easy to setup and run. You just need to add the ‘LiveSupport’ button to your page that will show the ‘NOW ONLINE/OFFLINE’ status. The rest can be controlled from your account on their site itself. You can add additional operators so that your team can attend to different clients at the same time!

Just an example of how the button can look like

Then there is the Free Chat Client that allows you to add a neat looking chat window to any page (you don’t need an account with them for that). Just pick a nickname and chat away. As seen in the screenshot below, it has all the standard messaging features like text formatting and emoticons.

A screenshot of the embeddable free chat soft

But now the big question – Do you really need a chat software as a blogger? A support system could come real handy if you are a designer who’s just released a theme or a new plugin. If you are a full-time blogger, why give away your private messenger IDs when you could chat off your own blog! Sounds like a great way to give back some of that reader love. Then you can always add it to your facebook/myspace page.

+ves:

• Very easy to setup.
• Nice clean layout
• Gives you a professional touch

-ves:

• LiveChat sometimes took ages in the ‘connecting servers’ phase.
• LiveChat is a tad expensive if you don’t make much money from your product
• Anyone could pose as you while you are away on the free chat client! There should have been an authenticated login for the admin

Note: I have implemented the chat client on my blog. Give it a shot. It can be found here.

Note: This is a guest post by Debby Phillips who is a part of Affiliate Marketer’s Give Back. The initiative she has taken is truly noble. I asked her to write me a guest post on this blog and she obliged.

Affiliate marketing guru, Missy Ward, started a group called, Affiliate Marketers Give Back to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It is a group of 15 affiliate marketers that will walk 60 miles for breast cancer on September 12th-14th in Seattle, Washington.

Jen Fluker and I heard about the group and immediately joined. My grandmother is a breast cancer survivor, and I am walking in her honor.

We started a blog, www.marketleverage60milewalk.com, so that we could document our training and fundraising efforts. The rain seems to be working against our attempts to train!

Donate. Raise awareness. Do your bit!

Each walker is required to raise $2,200 each. Jen and I have asked our family and friends for donations. MarketLeverage has agreed to match every dollar that is donated. So far our group has raised $29,136.09 of our $45,000.00 goal.

If you would like to help Jennifer and me in our efforts to raise money for this important cause, please follow the links below to donate. Thank you for your support, and please be sure to go to www.marketleverage60milewalk.com to follow our progress.

Jen’s donation link

Debby’s donation link

–Debby Philips

This is week 9 of SuperSundayVideo. If you have any suggestions for next week’s edition, feel free to add it as a comment to this post. I would love to share it with all my readers.

The entire process of installing it on the blog was easy but the concept of SezWho beats me. Probably if I don’t figure it out by a week, I might throw it out! I’ll keep you guys updated whether this service really helps.

Till then, I’ll be grateful if a SezWho user can brief me up on it.

The only solution could be to manually select posts that you feel are related. Here’s a plugin that will definitely simplify the entire process. It’s called the Microkids Related Posts plugin.

This plugin neatly integrates into your Write Post page. Every time you write a post you can very easily search for a post that you know of and add it to the bunch of related posts. Check out the screenshot below to know more.

This is a screenshot from this post itself. As I type in the word 'wordpress', it searches for posts that features the word 'wordpress'. Then you can add them manually.

So when I install this plugin, do I have to do this for all my previous posts manually!! The answer is a mix of both yes and no. When I write post A and mark B as related to A, A is also marked as related to B automatically. So when I edit post A, I don’t have to edit post B. That’s half the job done!

So here’s a plugin worth giving a shot. Try it out. If you don’t like it, you could always dump it!
Note: The ‘Similar Posts’ you see below were not generated by the plugin. I’ll be using it when I have the time to do it.