Monday, 31 December 2012
USE FACEBOOK ON MOBILE WITHOUT DATA PLAN
HOW TO USE FACEBOOK WITHOUT INTERNET CONNECTION
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| Fonetwish |
You can now use Facebook on any mobile phone without GPRS or the Internet. You can chat with Facebook friends, send messages, add friends and more.
Do you have an old mobile phone, like the Nokia 1100, that has no browser and can do little more than make phone calls? Or are you stuck in some remote place where there’s no Internet or no other form of data (EGDE/GPRS/3G) connectivity is available?
Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:
Use Facebook without the Data Plan
Facebook India has partnered with Fonetwish to bring Facebook on every mobile phone without requiring any apps or even the Internet.
You dial the *325# number, then enter your Facebook username and password and you are in. You can then send number based commands to access various features of Facebook, chat with friends who are online, add new people to your friends list, and more.
I played with the service for some time and it was a nice experience overall. If there were a Unix-like shell interface for Facebook, it would be much similar. Fonetwish says that this service is currently available for Airtel, Aircel, Idea and Tata Docomo users in India.
It may be too much work to read your Facebook news feed stories one by one but this is a good option to quickly update your Facebook status or for chatting with friends who are online. The price is reasonable too – you just have pay a subscription fee of 1.00 per day for unlimited usage.
Related: If you have an old mobile phone, you can search Google by SMS
HOW TO FIND WHICH PROGRAM ARE CONNECTING TO INTERNET
HOW TO FIND ACTIVE PROGRAM THAT ARE USING INTERNET
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| TCP Eye |
How to find out which programs on your computer are connecting to the Internet?
You only have a single website open on your screen and yet the data activity light of the modem / router is constantly blinking indicating that one or more programs are actively uploading or downloading data from the Internet .
How can you easily find out which programs on your computer are accessing the Internet and what websites are they connecting to?
Find Which Programs are Connecting to the Internet
You have quite a few options. If you are on Windows 7 or Vista, you can use the built-in Performance monitor utility to see a list of all running processes that are currently accessing the Internet.
Tech-savvy users may also use the netstat command to get similar information. Alternatively, if you are on a different version of Windows or want something less complex, try TCPEye . This is a free network monitoring utility that creates aself-updating list of all processes that are currently using your network connection.
What makes TCPEyea bit different is that it also lists the websites / servers that the programs are communicating with and the location (country) where those servers are located. Most other network monitoring tools only mention IP addresses and thus it is up to the user to determine the underlying server name.
If you notice an unwanted connection or a suspicious entry in Sunday, 30 December 2012
BEST HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES IN US
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| Health insurance in US |
HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANY IN USA
There are many health insurance companies in the U.S., a lot of them handling just a small regional area, but others insuring patients across the country. There’s also Medicaid and Medicare.There are six of these biggest health insurance companies: WellPoint, CIGNA, Aetna, Humana and United Healthcare, although the latter works on a state-by-state basis.
The five biggest health insurance companies insure approximately half of the insured population, or well over 100 million people. Here we take a look at the five biggest health insurance companies:
WellPoint
WellPoint has 34 million members in its affiliated health plansand more than 70 million insurees when its subsidiaries are included. This makes WellPoint the largest health insurance company in terms of membership.
WellPoint was created from the merger of WellPoint Health Networks Inc. and Anthem, Inc., in 2004.
WellPoint is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. It is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association serving members in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin.
WellPoint's plans do business as Anthem Blue Cross, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, or Empire Blue Cross (inthe New York service areas). WellPoint also serves customers throughout the country as UniCare.
One in nine Americans are insured through WellPoint.
WellPoint’s managed care plans include: preferred provider organizations (PPOs); health maintenance organizations, (HMOs); point-of-service (POS) plans; traditional indemnity plans and other hybrid plans, including consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs); and hospital only and limited benefit products.
The company also covers managed care services to self-funded customers, including claims processing, underwriting, stop loss insurance, actuarial services, provider network access, medical cost management, disease management, wellness programs and other administrative services.
Affiliated companies provide an array of specialty and other products and services such as life and disability insurance benefits, dental, vision, behavioral health benefit services, radiology benefit management, analytics -driven personal health care guidance, long-term care insurance and flexible spending accounts.
Angela F. Brady is the chair, president and CEO of WellPoint.
CIGNA
Headquartered in Philadelphia, Pa., CIGNA’s history stretches back more than 125 years. The company’s revenues (as of December 2011) are $21.3 billion. CIGNA has 11.4 million insurees in the U.S. and another 7.6 million outside the U.S. (in 29 different countries) and is ranked Number 129 on the Fortune 500 list.
In 2010 CIGNA processed 119 million medical claims.
CIGNA has three divisions:
• CIGNA HealthCare provides health plans and services to both companies and the individuals, offering medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmacy and vision care coverage.
• CIGNA Group Insurance is one of the top providers of group disability, life and accident coverage in the United States.
• CIGNA International provides life, accident and supplemental health insurance as well as specialized health care and related employee insurance benefits to expat employees of multinational companies based abroad.
David M. Cordani is the president, CEO and director of CIGNA.
Aetna
Aetna was founded in 1853 in Hartford, Conn., and provides healthcare, dental, pharmacy, group life, and disability insurance, and employee benefits. It has almost 18 million medical members, 13.5 million dental members, and 8.5 million pharmacy members.
The insurer provides benefits through employers in all 50 states, with products and services targeted specifically to small, mid-sized and large multi-site national employers.
Aetna also serves Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in somemarkets. Aetna’s revenue for 2010 was $34,246 million, down1.5% from the previous year.
Mark T. Bertolini is chairman, CEO and president.
Humana
Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Louisville, Ky., Humana began as a single nursing home and grew to more than 100 hospitals before getting involved in health benefits.
Humana has 10.2 million medical members and is Number 73 on Fortune magazine's list of the largest U.S. companies, ranked by annual revenue.
Humana offers a range of services and plans including:
• Humana Medicare Plans, for Medicare-eligible consumers
• Humana One, individual insurance with a range of plans
• Humana One Dental & Vision
• Humana One Life and Supplemental Insurance, which offers stand-alone life plans, to hospital indemnity, and policies targeted for specific diseases. Humana Dental, for employers
• Humana Vision Care
The healthcare provider also offers a pharmacy benefit manager, Humana Pharmacy Solutions, which is backed by a Fortune 100 company and is one of the highest-volume PBMs in the nation.
Humana Pharmacy Solutions' mission is to give members access to the medicine they need while offering guidance on clinically proven, therapeutically equivalent drugs that bring better value to the member and the employer.
Michael B. McCallister is chairman of the board and CEO.
United Healthcare
UnitedHealthcare
is an operating division of UnitedHealth Group, the largest single health carrier in the United States. The company was formed in 1977 through the reorganizationof Charter Med Inc., which was established in 1974.
The company provides products and services to some 70 million Americans and its pharmaceutical management programs provide more affordable access to drugs for 13 million people.
United Healthcare has three divisions:
• UnitedHealthcare Employer & Individual provides benefit plans and service solutions on a dedicated basis to large, multi-site and national employers and coordinates network-based health care benefits and services on behalf of small to mid-sized employers, as well as individuals, students and families.
• UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement is the largest business in the nation dedicated to meeting the growing needs of seniors.
• UnitedHealthcare Community & State facilitates and manages healthcare services for state-sponsored public and Medicaid programs and their beneficiaries.
The company’s revenues in the first quarter of this year were$25,432 million, up from $23,193 million in the first quarter of 2010.
United Healthcare is ranked Number 22 in the Fortune 500 listbased on revenues. It also received the No. 1 ranking for Innovation in the Insurance and Managed Care category on Fortune magazine’s 2011 list of the World’s Most Admired Companies.Saturday, 29 December 2012
HOW TO EARN MONEY WITH BLOG
Earn Money from Your Blog
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| Blogging |
To display advertisements on your blog, you can either partner with existing advertising programmes (like Google Adsense, Chitika, etc) or contact prospective advertisers directly (say you have a popular blog about Sports Apparels, then Nike or Reebok could be interested in showcasing their products to your visitors). We will first discuss the popular advertising programmes and then suggest a few other approaches to generate income from your blog.
BlogAds are the pioneer in blog advertising. Blog Ads generally pay well and also provide you the liberty to choose which ads are displayed on your blog. The other big advantage is that Blog Ads offer a fixed payment irrespective of the number of site visitors. But the downside is that you can gain entry into the Blog Ads network, only when your website receives a decent amount of traffic and some advertiser is willing to sponsor you. That could be a huge requirement for a new blog but established bloggers should consider Blog Ads, provided they find sponsors.
The biggest and most famous player in web advertising is Google. Their Google Adsense programme is hugely popular because it offers contextual ads, meaning Google spiders scan the content of the webpage on which Google Ads would be displayed and then show ads based on the context of the content. Contextual Ads offer very good returns, as site visitors are more interested in knowing about products that are related to the content they are reading. For example, someone reading about cars will show more interest in advertisements about car loans than in software like Microsoft Office. Google algorithms make sure that your site visitors see only relevant ads.
Getting Google Adsense ads for you blog is very simple. There are absolutely no pre-requirements like finding sponsors or site traffic levels or geographic location except one – your blog should stay away from topics like gambling, piracy or sexual content. Once you fit the bill, applying is a one step process. Google engineers review your site the next day and send you a small “ad code” that you can integrate in your blog. Ads start getting displayed almost immediately.
Google Ads can be either “Pay per Click” or “Pay per Impression”. Their reporting system is almost real-time – you can check at any time of the day what your earnings have been since the start of the day. Google even has the largest pool of advertisers, so you can virtually write on any topic and Google will find relevant ads for you. Also, Google Adsense is more suitable for Indian Publishers as Google sends a monthly payment cheque in Indian Rupees so you save paying bank commissions for international transactions. Highly recommended.
Chitika is another player though relatively new. Chitika Comparison Shopping Ads are generally more popular on product related blogs that write about gadgets, clothes, software since Chitika displays merchandise from Shopping.com. Chitika Ads, known as Chitika eMiniMalls, are presented in an interactive ad unit – one can compare prices from different merchants, read the main features of a product and even search the shopping database – everything inside one ads.
Chitika is known to offer good returns but there’s one drawback. Though anyone can apply for their programme, Chitika won’t pay you for traffic from India, Pakistan and some other countries. That means if a site visitor in India clicks a Chitika ad, the site owner won’t receive any benefit. Sites that primarily receive traffic from US, UK can consider Chitika as a good alternative.
TextLinkAds and Adbrite are other popular site-targeted non-contextual advertising programmes. They are extremely popular with gambling, adult content and file uploading sites like rapidshare or megaupload. The reason that these programmes are popular lies in the flexibility and small entry-level requirements – an advertiser can choose to run his ad on your site, for just one day or maybe seven days and immediately calculate the conversion ratio. No bidding competitors and the ad is guaranteed to run on the blogger’s website. These programmes are particularly popular among small advertisers or who do not fit the Adwords Policies. Recommended.
So we have looked at advertising, now let’s examine some different approaches to make money from blogs.
Become an Affiliate – Companies like Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction offer affiliate programmes – the way they function is that you promote a product like a book or a software on your blog, your readers visit the merchant’s website and when they actually buy it – you get a commission ranging from 5% up to 50% of the sale proceedings. Remember, the ratio of a site visit converting into a product sale, is very low.
Donations – Don’t be surprised, you can actually make good money from Donations – There are a lot of “good people” on planet earth who are willing to share their fortune (maybe just 0.00001%) provided they enjoy reading your blog and probably benefit from the blog content. For example, if you wrote about some fuel saving tip and if it actually worked, people may be interested in sending you a token of appreciation via Paypal.
There’s one more option ‘Sell your Blog as a Brand’ – If you are a popular blogger and have a huge fan following, it’s time to capitalize on it. Start selling T-shirts, coffee mugs, handbags wi purchase, Cafepress sends you a commission.
Or if you can write eBooks on your favourite subjects, Blogs can be a good selling place
Friday, 28 December 2012
FLICKER VS PICASA WEB ALBUMS
Best Place for Sharing Digital Pictures
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| Flickr Vs Picasa |
Both GOOGLE and Yahoo have updated their online photo sharing services in the last few months and so we decided to do a comparison again - FLICKR vs Picasa Albums Round II.
Photo Storage Space and Uploading Limits
When you have a free FLICKR account, you can upload 100MB of photos each calendar month but the counter is reset ever month and the overall storage space is therefore unlimited even for free FLICKR accounts. With Picasa Web Albums, you get only only 250MB of free storage space.
Cost & Benifits of a Pro Account
A FLICKR Pro Account is available for US$24.95 a year and you get unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth. A $25 yearly subscription on Picasa Web Albums will get you only 25 GB of extra storage space and if you pay $500 per year, you get 500 GB of storage space in Picasa Web Albums. Unlike FLICKR, there's no unlimited space option in Picasa Web.
Limitations of a Free Account
For free users, FLICKR will limit the number of photos that are displayed to just the 200 most recently uploaded photos though the older photos won't be deleted. Also the large size photos are automatically resized to 1024 pixels at the time of uploading. Each photo that you upload to a free FLICKR account must be less than 5MB in size.
Picasa Web Albums won't resize your high resolution pictures even if you are a free user. They limit the individual photo size to 10 MB.
Uploading Photos Online
Both Picasa Web and FLICKR offers basic tools for uploading pictures online but Picasa Web Album users have an advantage here - they can use the Picasa Image Editor to upload their photos directly using the software. No such "official" tools exist for FLICKR yet that can enhance images and also upload them.Downloading Pictures from your Photo Galleries
When it comes to downloading images from the web to your hard disk, Picasa Web Albums wins by a large margin again thanks to Picasa software. Users can select the Picasa albums / pictures that they want to download and the software will automatically download the entire set in a single click. A useful feature that you will miss in FLICKR.
Other Unique Features of FLICKR
» FLICKR allows anyone to add notes on your photos or annotate them.» FLICKR easily lets you search public photos of other users by tags, descriptions or even based on Camera models.
» With a FLICKR pro account, you can replace one photo with another keeping the tag information, picture description and comments intact. May come in handy when someone is using your photos without credit.
Picasa vs FLICKR - Who's the winner ?
GOOGLE has definitely paid lot of attention to Picasa in the last few months - they have added support for tags, introduced pro accounts for international users and significantly enhanced the Picasa desktop software.However, Picasa Web is very expensive - FLICKR offers unlimited storage space for $25 an year while GOOGLE wants you to pay a dollar per GB.
Picasa software definitely makes life extremely simple for managing your online Picasa Web Album account but other than that, we really found no convincing reason to switch from FLICKR to Picasa Web Album.
FLICKR clearly walks away as the winner of Round II as well. In FLICKR, you feel like being an integral part of some community, something which you would never experience inside Picasa Web Albums.
Sunday, 16 December 2012
HOW TO STOP IDLE PROGRAMS USING INTERNET DATA ?
HOW TO SPEED UP INTERNET STOPPING IDLE PROGRAMS ?
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| Speed up internet |
If you are worried that some hidden or unknown programs on your Windows PC are secretly making connections to websites in the background, you can use a simple DOS command to detect and prevent such suspicious activity:
1. Open the Windows Start Menu and search for Command Prompt. Right-click and choose "Run as Administrator ". Alternatively, you can cmd in your Windows Run box to quickly open the command prompt.
2. The command prompt will by default open itself in the Windows System directory. Use the cd command to switch to the root directory
c:\windows\sytem32> cd \
3. Now type "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. After say 2 minutes, press Ctrl+C.
4. Type "activity.txt" on the command line to open the log file in notepad (or your default text editor)
Which Programs are Connecting to the Internet? The file activity.txt will have a log of all processes (or Windows programs) that made a connection to the Internet in the last two minutes. It will also show which process connected to which website during this time.
And not just the web browsers (like iexplore.exe or chrome.exe), the log will also show your IM clients, download managers, email programs or any software that requires a net connection.
Scroll though the activity.txt file and look for any process names or website addresses that you are not aware of. If you track one, open Windows task manager (or Process Explorer) to find the location of the executable on your computer and stop using this.
Friday, 14 December 2012
HOW TO MAKE HAND WRITING NOTE AND SIGNATURE FOR ONLINE DOCUMENTS
HAND WRITING NOTE FOR ONLINE DOCUMENTS
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| Hand Writing Signature |
It would be nice if you could write (or draw) on a piece of paper with a pen and send that handwritten note straight to Google Docs or Evernote for digital archiving?
Would not it be nice if you could write (or draw) on a piece of paper with a pen and send that handwritten note straight to the cloud – like Google Docs or Evernote – for digital archiving?
One option is that you use scan the paper as a PDF file and upload it to Google Docs but if you need a solution that’s more simple and completely automated, consider getting yourself a Livescribe pen.
Livescribe is an impressive piece of technology – it is like a regular pen with an ink cartridge but unlike any other pen, Livescribe pens record everything that you write on a notebook including the audio that you hear (like when you are in a meeting or a lecture).
Later, you can tap on your notes to replay the recording. You can connect the pen to your computer via a USB cable to transfer all your handwritten notes and the linked voice recordings to the desktop. All your handwritten notes are searchable now or you can transcribe them to digital text using the Livescribe Desktop software.
What is a Livescribe Smartpen?
Send your Paper Notes to Google Docs, Evernote, etc.
Livescribe today announced a new software update that will let you send your handwritten notes from paper to cloud services like Facebook, Google Docs or Evernote with a few taps.
You draw a small double-line on the paper that you want to archive, write the destination name on that line (like “Google Docs”) and the next time you connect your pen to the computer, the note will find its way to the cloud automatically.
A limitation is that the transfer is not wireless and will only happen when you connect the pen to your PC or Mac. Livescribe Pens start at $99 (the basic model has 2 GB storage) but there’s another recurring cost – it only works with a special kind of paperThursday, 13 December 2012
HOW TO MEASURE SPEED OF WEBSITE
CHECK SPEED AND PERFORMANCE OF WEBSITE
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| Page Speed Google |
It is important that you speed up your website as much as possible because, all other factors remaining the same, a faster performing site may rank higher in Google search results. That’s because Google now considers page speed as one of the factors while ranking pages.
How to Measure your Site Performance
Google offers a free tool called Page Speed that you may use to improve the performance of your web pages. The tool performs several tests against your website and then suggests simple ways to make your site even faster.
YSlow from Yahoo! is another such tool that measures the performance of your pages and offers suggestions for improvement. Yahoo! says that the response time of web pages can be improved by 25% to 50% by following the recommendations made by the tool.
Run Page Speed and YSlow Online
Both Page Speed and YSlow are available as add-ons for Firebug and will therefore only work if you have Google Chrome or Firefox on your computer.
If you are however running a different browser (like IE) or would like to evaluate the performance of your sites without installing add-ons, you should give GTMetrixa try.
GTMetrix will analyze your pages using both Page Speed and YSlow rules in one go and other advantage is that it runs online without requiring any add-ons.
You can setup a free account and the service will automatically run performance tests against your site at pre-defined intervals. It also preserves the reports of previous tests and you can therefore easily measure the outcome of
Sunday, 2 December 2012
DRIVE A VIRTUAL CAR ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
CAR DRIVING GAME ON GOOGLE MAP !
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| Mini Map Google |
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to drive a car on the congested streets of USA or the scenic roads in EUROPE? Try car driving on Google Maps to get an idea! to drive a car on the congested streets of lower Manhattan in Now York or the scenic Transport road in Europe?
Meet Mini Maps , a Google Maps based Flash mashup that lets you drive a car virtually anywhere in the world using the controls on the keyboard. Simply select a location on Google Maps – you can either type the address or choose a point on the map visually – and hit the car accelerator (the up arrow key) to start moving.
Unlike the other Google Maps based car-driving games,
Mini Maps is smart enough to recognize the terrain and the roads in your driving area and adds virtual boundaries on either sides of the road as you drive. If the area you have selected for driving is too dark, the car headlights will turn on automatically or your can press the “N” key to turn-off the night mode.
There’s more. You can create your own track on Google Maps by clicking at different points on the map or you can invite your other Facebook friends to Mini Map for a quick game of
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