So Codecademy comes as a fresh breath of air. In the longer run they would have to see to it that their
courses are relevant and valid.

I am taking the course currently and even though i know what they are teaching its fun. You get points and badges when you complete lessons and on passing checkpoints. The ‘feel good’ factor will surely prompt you to persist and complete the course.

Oh the Joy of Levelling up. Jump right in!

Google Labs hosts early stage product prototypes created by Google’s engineers and allows end users to play around with it. At a time when other companies are increasingly focussing on innovation, this seems to be odd. Does this mean Google is discouraging its employees. Nah. Its just that Google feels it has learned more than enough after getting a lot of people to try out its early products and now they are trying to prioritize their efforts and combine some of those innovations into a better product.

Google’s 20% time policy wont be killed obviously. Some of the better known products we use today like Google Maps, Google News, Google Reader have all started out at Google Labs. They aren’t slowing down innovation. Check out the wiki page for the list of all their products and picture becomes clearer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Among the two personally i preferred Start G+ because of the ease and flow in which it allows you to move your photos. It also offers more features like importing your Facebook and Twitter feed thus giving you no excuse to move away from Google+. Oh and it even gives you a free invite if you dont have one already.

After installing the extension

Login and Authorize to import your feeds!

Feeds appear on the Left Navigation bar

Next is Move2Picasa, i actually found this before the other one but it was too slow for me as it takes time to load the thumbnails of every photo you have before being able to upload. You can try this out if you have less number of photos.

Hope this post is helpful to all you Google+ fanatics. Sound off in the comments below! If in case i have missed out something please let me know! You can find me on Google+ here.

A few months ago Angry Birds moved from the iOs into the other Operating Systems and we blogged about how you can get it working on your PC. Then along came the RIO version and now finally its been released for PC’s as well. And yes we have a crack for it which unlocks the full version.

Download the torrent(link below) or the demo from Rovio’s Website. Install it and you are set. There’s a patch designed by Ignite/THETA which needs to be pointed at the .exe file. After that select ‘Activate Full Version’, enter the serial provided and the unlock is successful.

Minimum System Requirements:

OS Windows XP SP2
RAM 512MB
CPU 1 GHz
Graphic OpenGL 1.3 compatible
Internet Connection required for activation

Torrent:
Demonoid RealTorrentz Demonoid(alternative patch)

Troubleshooting:

I had a problem downloading the patch as my antivirus detected a virus and had quarantined it. If you face this problem when you run the patch i.e., your patch fails to run, then you need to download it again.

Update: The Demo version has been updated and the patch only works with version 1.1.0 as of now. The torrent ones are all version 1.1.0.

Today’s Google Doodle(June 9, 2011) was in honour of the late veteran guitarist Les Paul and boy! is it as addictive as the ‘Pacman’ doodle was. Based on HTML5 it works fine even on IE7 . I do hope they retain it like they did with the ‘Pacman‘(One of the few games you can play in a Websensed office). Most websites also reported that they could actually record those guitar strummings but it seems to be only applicable to people in the US.  Also some more enthusiastic people have ended up posting their work on Youtube as well.

Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009)—known as Les Paul—was an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which “made the sound of rock and roll possible” – Wikipedia

Playing with the doodle was a lot of fun and i am sure that it would lead to a loss in productivity as my office itself is filled with people experimenting with music when there were no supervisors around. This is perhaps the most innovative doodle yet, what else does the future hold for us?

Update: Top 5 Google Doodle Guitar Tributes Top 7 Les Paul Google Doodles via Mashable.
Update 2: The good people at Google decided to keep the doodle up at the main Google.com site.

“Due to popular demand, we’re leaving the Les Paul doodle up in the U.S. for an extra day. Thanks for jamming with us!” – Google’s Twitter

Also we can record our strums as well now. I am sure i could not yesterday. So here’s a guitar strum courtesy a friend, Samuel Koshie; Do-Re-Mi from the Sound of Music.

PS: This has been my first podcast and we hope that you forgive some of the glaring mistakes. Ashish has been nice enough to accept my apology for that. Thank you,Ashish. We wish you all the best.!

Fetch.io is the hottest cloud storage service in town. Users can download torrents onto their high speed servers. Once done, you can transfer it to your system or directly stream it if it’s a video file. Not just torrents, you can also use this service for downloading files from RapidShare, Megaupload, MediaFire, Hotfile, and Fileserve. Video files that are downloaded are automatically transcoded into mp4 and Flash video formats before they become available for streaming, downloading and sharing. Downloading on Fetch.io is very easy as it has a very simplistic UI. Just paste the torrent or download url and wait for Fetch.io to download it.

Some of you may argue that using this service you’ll have to download twice, once to their server and the second time to your system. To counter argue that, first we need to realize that while downloading torrents, one of the factors taht affect your download speed is the availablity of seeds. That means when there are fewer people seeding the torrent, you are not utilizing your entire available bandwidth. On the other hand, you’ll be downloading your file through http using Fetch.io. Dont worry about the time it takes for your file to appear on their servers, usually couple of seconds.

Secondly you dont have to wait anymore for those precious 60 seconds before you can start downloading. I always hated that part on Rapidshare and the fact that they make you wait longer if you’ve exceeded a limit.

Currently free beta accounts offer users 20 Gigabytes of storage and 40 Gigabytes of bandwidth. These beta accounts won’t last long, so hurry and sign up quickly. Moreover the bandwidth for the free accounts will be reduced once a paid option is introduced. As of now, you may encounter a few issues downloading torrents as there is a heavy load on their servers. Also a maximum of 3 files can be downloaded simultaneously.

Quite a few people online are questioning the legality of the service. We at the Geek’D are definitely not bothered about that part.  Just fetch you stuff while it lasts !

Geekd:Tell us about mysmartprice.com..Why would I use it and what is different in it that sets it apart from the rest?

Sitakanta:With MySmartPrice, we intend to provide our users the ‘Easiest Way to Get The Best Price’. Our focus on the ease of use and is something that we believe sets us apart from others. You should use MySmartPrice if you want an answer to any of the following questions:
• What to Buy? If you want to find an Android Mobile that have touch screen and QWERTY and is
3G below 15,000 then you should use our Mobile Finder tool. We are really proud of the speed
that we have managed to get in this tool.
• Where to Buy? Let us say you decide to buy Motorola Backflip. Next question is from which
store you should buy it. If you go to our page for Motorola Backflip, you will realize that the
mobile is available for > 17.5k on Flipkart and for 14.5k on Letsbuy!!! Last but not the least; we have started obtaining exclusive coupons from number of online stores. W e have coupons from Letsbuy, Futurebazaar on the site right now. In another 15 days time we expect to have coupons of BuyThePrice and Homeshop18 live as well. So you will get additional savings by simply using MySmartPrice.

G:Mobiles, books and cameras! Apart from perhaps porn, these are perhaps the most purchased items online by Indians and you seem to have tapped into these markets. What other sectors are you
planning to cover? What are your long term goals?

S:We have made a conscious decision to think for three months at a time. Right now we are focused on getting some small improvements to the existing products. Again if you go to any individual mobile
page, you will see a button that allows you to ask your friends opinion about the mobile. We shall like to enable users to download the output of the mobile finder page as pdf etc. By end of June, we plan to add accessories (Memory, Bluetooth etc) to the site.

G:What is your business model?

S:Our business model is based on affiliate income and premium advertising.

G:Leaving a well paying job, secure job to pursue your dreams seems to be one of the toughest decisions to take in life. What particularly inspired you to take such a drastic decision?

S:Me and my cofounder know each other for more than 13 years now. We always wanted to do
something on our own that can enable us to craft our own destiny. We realised that the problem was
more in our mind than in reality. Sheer desire of doing something where we can be our own boss
inspired us to take the plunge.

G:How did your family react when you took the start-up plunge?

S:It was tough convincing them as they had to make the real sacrifices. But they stood by us and agreed to give us a few years to make it or break it.

G:Are you concentrating full time on MySmartPrice or do you have any side projects?

S:We are fulltime into MySmartPrice.com. There are no side projects. Initially we tried to do some side projects but found them to be too distracting.

G:How important do you think is an SEO strategy for businesses like yours? Especially that one would expect most of your hits to come from organic search results? What are you doing about it?

S:SEO is one of our key marketing strategies. For a business like ours SEO is really important. We are implementing some clean SEO strategies that will help us gain traction in long term. SEO will enable us to gain first time user. But a good site which adds value to the system will help us gain direct traffic over long run and that is the ultimate target.

G:Do you have any employees? Are you planning to start employing in the near future?

S:Right now we don’t have any employees. Yes we are planning to employ a couple of ‘Out of their Mind’ guys in near future.

G:Finally what is your suggestion to people who want to start up but don’t have enough courage to do so?

S:One thing that helped us make the decision was to think of the risks in a structured manner. Anyone planning to start up should try to answer the following questions
• What is the worst that can happen?
• Can I go back to a job if the venture fails?
• Am I ready to go through the grind

Having said that, it makes sense to give yourself a clear timeline to decide if things are going the way you had planned. That timeline for us is 3 years as we believe that 3 years is a good enough time to decide if we are going somewhere or not.Finally I will suggest that the readers should read about our experiences of the first four months after starting up. In that post we have honestly put down the sacrifices/choices that we had to make and trust me when I say that you will be amazed by what you can do.

Curious to know what it was all about, i decided to apply for a beta invite. Time passed. A little more than a month later i was happy to see an invite in my Inbox.

Star.me is a Social Network game which is at the very core of matters about appreciating people you know. Every person likes to be appreciated. This game allows users to send stars to their friends. Simple no?

The Users are offered a plethora of stars to choose from to send their friends, with newer ones to unlock and some limited promotional stars like ‘Star of the Day’ or ‘Star of the Week’. You can add your friends by syncing with your Facebook, Twitter or your Email account. Star notifications can also be sent via these networks. The game mechanics is driven by simple tasks which unlock more features, simple things like updating a profile picture will help you unlock newer stars. For Easter week, they brought out a new ‘Egg Maker’ feature which allows you to send custom made painted eggs to your friends. Innovative. Also the new ‘Storage Stars’ help you to clear the stars from your homepage if it gets a bit too crowded.

Some of my favourite stars are

Bro's before Hoe's

Chuck Norris Got your back!

A Star thats a Game in itself?!

Getting people addicted to this in India is not that easy. People here are only now opening up to Twitter and from personal experience hardly any of my friends have sent a star since the time they registered. Some were clueless about how to claim your profile as they missed the right hand navigation panel of the page you land on when you are invited. So the downfall of this is that without friends on this network, you cant really have fun. Especially since it is designed to show how your relationships are and not who you know or follow.

Ze Frank’s game is built using HTML5 and is backed by Microsoft. Still in beta invite only phase. Let me know if you want an invite by dropping your email.

Feel free to send me a Star at Star.me/kenneth

Update: Minutes after i posted this i was contacted by Sara from the Star.me team. Kinda sweet on her part.

Flock, a web browser not used by many, have finally announced that they are shutting down after weeks of speculation. Started way back in August 2005, it never really caught up with the other browsers. Flock specialised in providing social networking built into its user interface and as such was concentrating on only a niche audience.

Flock will no longer be supported which means that you can still continue to use it but there will be no software updates or upgrades. Flock can no longer be downloaded from the official website. Flock was originally made on the Firefox platform before shifting to Chromium in 2010. Incidentally Flock has recommended its users to shift to either Firefox or Chrome and even has download links on their page.

The team which developed Flock was taken by Zynga in January and this was one of the major reasons for the death of Flock. The only other social browser left is RockMelt which is far more superior compared to Flock. Current Flock users should give this one a try.