06 Oct 07 Bix - a yahoo company

This is what it says on the home page of Bix. What is Bix? In essence, it is a platform to create, participate in, and win online contests. You create a contest, enter the contestants, and make the contest go live. Then you sit back and wait as visitors choose who is better amongst the contestants as they are presented each one compared to the other.

There are contests already up there for "Best Movie", "Best Movie Duo", "Best Simpson Character", etc. There are also plenty of Karaoke and Lip Sync contest. You can upload pictures, videos, and audio for people to judge.

All very nice, but I found it to be boring after a very short while. I started judging the Best Duo contest. Now, the way they do it is that they show you two contestants at a time and let you pick one over the other. So, if there are 2 contestants in the contest, you just have to do this once; if there are 3, you need to do this thrice; and this number goes up very quickly of course as the number of contestants increase. So, for the Best Duo contest, there were many contestant entries, and after about 20 clicks to choose which one is better than the other, I made a quick exit from the site.

Overall, it may be a good way to pass your time if you have nothing to do in the world. Or of course, if you create a contest of your own, it might be fun to see the results.

03 Oct 07 Find Company Information on Masterseek

• Very Fast
• Consistent Results
• Focused Search

Cons:

• The free offering is only a little better than Google. To get detailed search information, you need to Upgrade.

Overall, it’s a nice idea and has some potential. They need to make more things free though.

31 Jul 07 Cooler Gadgets, gadgets for drinking pleasure

If you thought you had seen all about gadgets, you will be amazed to discover that there is always a new way to improve something. And if you like partying, making cool presents to your friends and improving your drinking pleasure, you have here the perfect site for this.

We are talking about CoolerGadgets, a collection of gadgets that claim to be perfect for activities such as BBQ’s, partying, dog walking, hiking, fishing, etc :-). Some of the offers you can see in their site are things like a MotorCooler - a cooler that can actually be DRIVEN :-), the Tower of Power Corkscrew - the coolest & easiest to use corkscrew on the market or the OpenerHat, a baseball hats with bottle opener built into the Brim.

Ideas are plenty, so just browse around because I am sure you will find something amusing and amazing for your next present.

27 Jul 07 Shvoong, abstracts only

I got today a mail from Shvoong, a website that I tried several months ago and that I had totally forgotten about them. Shvoong is a place where you can write abstracts, summaries, reviews, etc from published books, news or whatever so other people get to know a bit about it. It is like building a huge library of summaries that you can browse before deciding if it is worth it to read the full original source or not.

Whatever the idea is good or not ( seems it is as they have already almost 400000 articles), the email came to announce an improvement in their system. You know, I tried very enthusiastically Shvoong at the beginning because it was a source of small income, you can get some money (not much honestly :-)) writting summaries that later get exposed to the public for general voting. You get a percentage of the revenues they obtain due to advertising according to the popularity of your reviews ( also you can translate to several languages what others have written and get cash for this). But I found out soon that the effort was not being rewarded enough so I stop translating and writing articles.

I have decided to give it a try to their improved system and soon will start again posting some abstracts there. You can also post extracts of your blogs so you increase your visibility in the net, and if you happen to be a student or be around places where many people may be interested in writing, you can even print some flyers and hang them up in the walls of your schools with a code, so when people sign up with that code you get some revenues for that, check their affiliates page for info :-).

24 Jul 07 Advantage Processor, managing online payments

Everyone willing to take profit of online payments has always the same problem, what service/application to use that is reliable, secure and does not takes such a commission that I lose all the profit I can make with my business?.

I guess you all can think of several alternatives with different characteristics. One of the latest available solutions in the market is called Advantage Processor, it offers ways for merchants to accept credit card payments for both online credit card processing, offline card processing, and both high risk and low risk merchant accounts.

To start using their services you need to apply for an account on their website and shortly you will be contacted by their team to find out what are the needs you have. It may be a good solution for your online business so you do not have to worry too much about the payments!.

15 Jul 07 Shopping Path, help to buy better

Although they are still in their initial stages, this utility seems is gonna become one of the best comparison tools for helping buyers find their product on the net. We talk about ShoppingPath, a new website powered with Yahoo Shopping! that will bring to you all the needed info to compare and buy products on the net. So far they are in Beta, but you can see an example in CrispyShop and get an idea of how it is working. I like these kind of applications, it makes my life so easy when I need to buy something that I almost don’t get anything that I have not compared before using some online websites. Let’s hope they will get live soon for everyone!

12 Jul 07 Fooooo, multisearch for videos

If you thought that looking for videos in Youtube was not enough, now you will see have the opportunity to increase your search to more than 23 millions videos all over the net with this new application. It is called Fooooo ( I have to count the number of "o" to make it right every time :-)), and it is a japanese service that allows you to search videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, MySpace, GoogleVideos, Stickam and some more. Not bad, ein? :-). You have no excuse now to say that you can not find a video to illustrate your posts…