Most of you must be wondering why this would be useful, especially when there are free options like Flickr out there. The main reason I’m such a huge fan of Zenfolio, the online photo storing website is that it’s simple and easy to use. It’s also really easy to display your pictures in a professional album. I’ve had a lot of comments about my pictures and the way they are displayed by both friends and family.

With the advent of digital pictures it’s become hard to keep photos in an album, since we don’t print out most of our pictures and tend to store them on our computers. The problem of course is that it becomes tough to share our pictures with others, and of course if our computers crash we lose our pictures forever (trust me this does happen)!

Sure you can upload your pics to facebook, but those are low quality versions of the huge multi-megabyte archival pictures that you took. If you ever lose them, I wouldn’t want to use facebook pics as a replacement to the original. With Zenfolio you can upload your pics to the site, and keep the full copy high quality originals. Zenfolio has backups of all pics at multiple centres around the world so you are very unlikely to ever lose your pics.

Best of all you can use themes to display your photos in a traditional album format. If you would like to protect your pics, you can even set a password so that only those with the password can access some, or all your folders, and best of all instead of awkwardly uploading pics and emailing them you can now just email everyone a link and they can view your pics at their own time.

My favourite thing about putting pictures online of course is that you can show someone your pics even if you aren’t near your home computer. It’s almost like traditional paper photos, except even more accessible.

Anyway at the moment until July 31, 2010 Zenfolio is offering a $10 discount, by the use of a special “coupon”. This should apply for the life of your account. You can also sign up for a trial period, and get a full refund if you’re not satisfied.

Visit www.zenfolio.com and use 9MS-YYH-CBP as a coupon for your $10 discount off ANY zenfolio account. Use the free trial too!

In my opinion Palm’s biggest mistake was giving up on their OS and switching over to windows mobile. What were they thinking? They had a huge pool of developers, a stable and quick OS that used very little memory and a good hardware plat form. By giving all that up and switching over to windows mobile they introduced a memory hogging, buggy OS to their hardware and left a lot of Palm developers without a job. They lost their competitive edge and ended up being just another windows phone with no real advantage over their competitors RIM and eventually Apple.

The problem with windows mobile is that like the PC equivalent it doesn’t provide users with an “experience”. Simple things are so cumbersome on windows phones that once you use Apple or Blackberry you wonder how you ever lived without them. Windows phones get the job done, but in a very “rough” and roundabout manner. Perhaps that’s why Palm’s market share has been declining so much. Had they capitalized on their early marketshare and evolved their OS along with the time perhaps they would have been able to offer a better option to Apple’s Iphone and RIMs Blackberry. However with their very low marketshare I don’t see how they could ever recover, and my prediction would be that they won’t be around for very long.

I recently learned that Inphonex a Florida based VOIP company that has been around for years, recently developed a “World unlimited Plan”. This is unique from other VOIP providers that offer these type of plans because it includes unlimited calls to both Indian landlines and Mobiles! That is a very hard think to find, and probably coincides with the fact that rates to call India have slowly been dropping.

The cost of this plan is pretty good, considering that it also includes calls within Canada or the US, for which you’d be paying your landline provider anyway. If you are happy to prepay for a year, then the prices drops to 19.95 a month, if however you’d prefer to pay month-to-month, then the cost works out to be $23.95/month. Interesting they also offer a quarterly payment plan for those of you that would like to save money but don’t want to get tied into a long 12 month committment. That works out to be $21.95 a month.

Since Inphonex also allows porting in, once you are satisfied with this plan you could theoretically port your number over and use it to replace your landline since it would include all your domestic calls as well.

Plan Details

World Unlimited
Countries included in World Unlimited plan**

Albania
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bahamas *
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Belgium
Bermuda
Brazil
Brunei Darussalam *
Bulgaria
Canada *
Chile
China *
Colombia
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Estonia
Finland France
Georgia
Germany
Gibraltar
Greece
Guadeloupe
Guam *
Hong Kong *
Hungary
Iceland
Iraq
Ireland
India *
Israel
Italy
Japan
Jordan
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malaysia *
Mexico
Netherlands New Zealand
Norway
Panama
Peru
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico *
Romania
Russia
Singapore
Slovakia
Spain
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States *
U.S. Virgin Islands *
Venezuela

Big surprise Ebay managed to sell Skype off in 2009 for a whopping $1.9 Billion in cash. When they first bought Skype I was wondering what they were thinking. I really couldn’t see any synergy between Ebay and Skype. As a former Ebay seller I can tell you that the main convenience of Ebay was that you could post your item on Ebay and just communicate through email. That way you could respond on your own time, rather than waiting for a Skype call from a potential buyer.

Seriously what Ebay seller would really to correspond with customers via Skype when they could simply do everything through email? Seems like making someone wait buy the “phone” to receive a Skype call would just add to the overhead of the company and make things more expensive. Let’s face it the target market of Ebay is people looking to save as much money as possible – so this is not a good thing at all. What was Meg Whitman thinking???

One thing good about Skype is the unlimited calling plans. They are awesome. Not only do you get three incoming numbers from anywhere in the world but you also get a Skype-to-go number. This is actually pretty useful because you can use this number like a calling card gateway. What this means if you have an unlimited calling plan to say North America and you live in the UK your Skype-to-go number will be a local UK number. You can call this number from a landline or cellphone and you get a dialtone allowing you to make outgoing calls. So if you have a North America calling plan you can call any North American number for free (it’s part of your plan) and you only pay local rates.  Pretty useful feature, and I hope this doesn’t disappear when the new owners take over.

Speaking about the new owners, I read part of the group of investors is the Canadian pension plan. I really hope these guys will have a silent investor approach…the last thing Skype needs is some big government bureaucracy stuffing up any future innovative ideas it might develop.

The VOIP market is currently saturated with so many different VOIP providers. I was pleasantly surprised when I first signed up with VOIPo. There was a special with the activation charge being waved. Many VOIP providers suffer from poor voice quality, whether this is because of their service or because of the myriad ATAs, routers, modems that are out there is hard to determine. VOIPo ships out a Linksys VOIP adapter which is generally well regarded and seems to have the fewest compatibility issues. An ATA is a device that you plug a normal phone into, and then into your modem or router. The ATA coverts your voice into digital signals which can then travel over the internet. This is why VOIP is slightly cheaper then the regular phone.

The most important thing about VOIPo is that the voice quality has been excellent. I’ve been with several other VOIP providers, and most have had some issues with voice quality. With VOIPo I plugged in my ATA and haven’t had any issues since. Even during busy times like Christmas or New Years voice quality has always been excellent. With the current deal of $99 + $30 tax for 12 months and a 30 day trial period you can join VOIPo today and start saving money.

I’ve included a few codes below to help you get an extra 4 months of free service for $130.

SIGN UP

Currently VOIPo are running a $99/year promo.

They also have a 30 day trial period so you can sign up and cancel within 30 days.

If you want to sign up visit VOIPo

To get 4 months free use the following codes:

Under Promo code: GATORNEWS – Gives you 3 months free on an annual plan or 1 month on a month to month plan

Under VOIPo Referral: 6477240800 – Gives you 1 month free on any plan

CLICK TO ACTIVATE DISCOUNT

Not only do they allow you to easily customize the entire site but they have very elegant themes that you can change to at the click of a button. This must be the easiest and most professional looking photosharing website out there. One of the best parts about Smugmug is that they load really fast. I’ve had friends/family from all around the world viewing some of my amateur photos and none have had any loading problems.

If you’re a pro then Smugmug has a pro level account that may be right for you. It allows you to set prices and sell your pictures online, leaving you a bit of room for a nice profit. If you take pictures at weddings, or other events what better way then to give your clients a link and sit back and watch your pictures sell? It is also one of the few websites that allows you to upload videos as well. With videos becoming a huge part of most events, this maybe the perfect photosharing site if you have videos in addition to your pictures.

For 30% 25% off any Smugmug account, click on the following link:

1. Copy and Paste this code under Email/Coupon: SmUg30  GWNW

2. Click here to activate the code
For $5 off any Smugmug account and a never expiring coupon:

1. Copy and paste this code under Email/Coupon: MjmiE0xAHBhwQ

2. Click here to activate the code