One of the key advantage of android is that it is an open platform – which means there are unlimited ways to customise one’s phone. The downside is that these may be too daunting for the simple user – just like the Linux experience that scared many computer users.

So let us help you by giving 10 tips how to make the best use of your android phone.

1. Get better keyboard

One of the pet peeves of android users is the default software keyboard. If you’re not happy with it, there are many alternatives that you can download and use. We recommend Swype, Better Keyboard(available in Android Market) and HTC IME modified keyboard.

2. Create your own ringtones

Like all modern mobile phones, the Android platform lets you select and create your own ringtones. Creating ringtones and notifications can be done manually or with the help of an app from the Android Market.

Manually adding a ringtone to your phone involves creating several specific directories on your SD card, based on the type of ringtone you’d like to add. The other method is far easier. Simply download the Ringdroid app free from the Android Market and use it to edit and trim your audio files before saving them as a ringtone, notification, or alarm. You can customize notifications and ringtones on a per contact basis by opening the desired contact’s information and selecting Set Ringtone.

You can change email notifications within the Gmail app (though you might want to select Silent if you receive a lot of emails).You can also set a different song to wake you for each day of the week by creating an alarm ringtone of your favorite songs, and creating an alarm for each day of the week, then selecting the desired song.

3. Import Contacts

• Export contacts from Outlook to CSV, and then import to Gmail contacts. After that,
• Sign in to your phone with your Google account, if you haven’t done that yet.
• Browse to Contacts>Settings>Display options>Select “Only contacts with phones”, and also Google>Manually select all groups. Then sync.
• While you are at it, use the Email app to setup your school/office email and install Gtasks to sync your todo lists with Google tasks. Use IMAP or Exchange settins to ensure that email read status is synced to your phone too.

4. Activate the Android Power Strop

It’s amazing what wonders you can do with a device with one single navigation button. Let me share with you 10 more cool tips and tricks for your iPhone. At the end of this, please let us know whether you found them useful or if you have any other cool tips – share with us.

1. Send Full Definition Photo in Your Message

Do you know that iPhone scaled down the resolution of your photo when you attach it in your email? – typically you do it by hitting the “Share” button on the lower left corner and then press the “Email Photo” button.

To send full resolution photos via email, open the photo in your iPhone’s camera roll, tap on it and hold until the “Copy” button appears.

Copy the photo, then compose a new email. Press and hold somewhere within the content section, let go and the contextual menu will appear. Press Paste to insert your full resolution photo. Whalla! No more skimping on quality when sharing…

2. How to take a screenshot

Sometimes you just want to take a screenshot of your cool apps collection on the home display. Here’s how you do that.

Hold the “home” button, then hit the “power/sleep” button, the screen will momentarily flash, and the iPhone’s current screen contents will be saved to the Camera Roll.

3. Make your own iPhone ringtones

I know… getting cool ring tones for iPhone is such a pain in the $%%. But fret not. Here’s a way to make your own custom ringtones using nothing but the iTunes.

Step 1. Choose the song you want in iTunes and right-click on the track and hit “Get Info.”

Select “Options” from the menu along the top, then change the “Stop Time” of the song to 15 – 30 seconds.
Now, in the “Advanced” iTunes menu, select “Create AAC version.”

You will now see a second version of the song. Be sure to go back into the original song’s “Get Info” options and delete your “Stop Time” setting, or else the song won’t play past this point in the future.

Step 2. Convert the song to ringtone format

Once you’ve got the AAC version of the song, you need to find it on your computer. (typically: My Documents, My Music, iTunes, iTunes Media, Music and then the relevant artist’s folder.)

Change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r by clicking on it and overtyping. If you can’t see the file extension type (just the name) then you need to enable that functionality first. Go to your control panel and click “Folder Options.” Then, untick the option that says “Hide extensions for known file types.” Going back into the iTunes folder and you will now be able to see the extension to change it.

Once it’s changed, you need to import the renamed file back into iTunes through the “Add to Library” option in the “File” menu.

p.s. this if for PC users. Mac users have to use their peculiar method to rename the file.

Step 3. Get the ringtone to your iPhone

Now, both Mac and PC users will see the file under the “Ringtones” category on the left of your iTunes display. To get the ringtone where it needs to be — on your phone — sync your iPhone to iTunes. If this is the first time you’ve added a ringtone in this way, make sure that the “Ringtones” tab is set to sync.

To change the ringtone on your iPhone to your chosen song, go to “Settings,” then “Sounds,” then “Ringtone” and you should now have a “Custom” list above the pre-loaded “Standard” list. Just touch the song you want and you can be free of that pre-loaded “Marimba” forever!

4. Get to the top fast

Scrolling a long document is a hassle right. Here’s a shortcut in to get to the top of the page fast.

In Safari, Mail, Contacts, and many other apps, simply tap the status bar at the top of the screen — which displays the carrier information, time, and battery level — to scroll quickly to the top.

5. Get the character count in SMS

iPhone, by default, does not show the number of characters that you’re typing – such as in composing SMS or Twitter messages. This is an annoying oversight right?

You can easily turn this facility on. Just go to the “Settings” menu, select “Messages,” then slide the “Character Count” toggle to “On.” Now when you are composing a text message — after you get to the end of the first line — you’ll see a running count of how many characters you’re sending on the right of the display, above the send button.

6. Sentence stopping shortcut

If you’re not already using this trick, you most certainly should, as it can seriously speed up your typing. It is enabled by default, but to confirm it’s active, go to “Settings,” then “General,” then “Keyboard,” then make sure the toggles next to the “Auto-Capitalization” option and the fourth option down — “.” Shortcut — are set to the “On” position.

Now when you’re typing away, a double tap of the space-bar will add a period/full-stop and automatically capitalize the very next letter you type.

7. Setup Hotmail Using Exchange ActiveSync On Your iPhone For Push Email, Calendar & Contacts

If you are still a loyal user of Hotmail, you’ll be pleased to know that you can now sync your email, calendar, and contacts to iPhone using Exchange ActiveSync. So any changes made on the iPhone will be reflected on the web interface, and vice versa.

Here are the steps:

1. Launch the Settings App. Under Settings, tap on “Mail, Contacts, Calendar”.
2. Then tap on “Add Account”.
3. Tap on “Microsoft Exchange” to configure Hotmail ActiveSync.
4. Enter your full Hotmail email address in both Email and Username fields. Leave Domain blank. Enter your password. In the Description field, enter a name, e.g Hotmail.
5. Then tap on the Next button.
6. After the details entered above are successfully verified. You will get another screen where you need to enter m.hotmail.com for the Server name. Then tap on the Next button.
   
7. If the verification is successful, you will see the screen where you can select the data (Mail, Contacts, Calendar) to sync and then tap on Save.

Now you’re all set.

8. Sleep The iPod After A Certain Period Of Time

If you frequently listen to music on your iPhone before going to sleep, this is a pretty cool tip. You can set the iPod function to sleep after a desired period of time.

To set the sleep timer, launch the Clock. Select the Timer function. Set the amount of time you’d like to listen to your music before the iPod goes to sleep.

Tap on the “When Timer Ends” menu and you’ll be brought to a page where you’re able to select a particular alarm that is played when the timer ends. Scroll up and tap on “Sleep iPod”.

Sweet dreams listening to Justin Bieber!

9. Open link in a new page

There have been a lot of tips regarding Safari. A popular tip, if you didn’t already know, is to tap and hold a link then tap on “Open in New Page” to browse the link in a separate browser page.

When you’re done reading, just close it and you’ll be brought back to the main webpage. I find this tip very useful when reading blogs with multiple entries — I avoid pressing on the Back button and the need to reload the page each time.

10. To Silent A Call

The last tip is a simple but very useful to ignore annoying callers.

To silent a call, press the Sleep button once. It will continue to ring without any indications (no ringtone, no vibration) until you answer or the caller hangs up. To reject a call, press the Sleep button twice.

Hope you will find these tips useful. Don’t forget to let us know which one that you used and how do you find it.

An old social networking service that was established in 2002, Friendster had grown to become one of the most popular networks in Asia Pacific today.  In a worldwide analysis, it was found that the top 15 countries accessing Friendster are: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, The US, Singapore, Canada, India, Australia, UK, Hong Kong, Japan, United Arab Emirates, China, Taiwan and Korea.

With all these scenario, it attracted business opportunities but the owners decided to decline buyout offers, even that from Internet heavyweights such as Google.  In 2003, it was reported that Friendster’s management received a USD$30 million buyout offer from Google but declined it.  No reasons were highlighted.

Then in the Fall of 2003, The Wall Street Journal reported that Friendster received investments from former executives of Internet companies, including Yahoo Inc., and raised a whopping USD13 million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital.  Since then, the company has worked to develop a profitable business model.

That year, Friendster’s expansion included a package for Scott Sassa, a former NBC executive, as the new chief executive. With the hire, Friendster appears to be trying to shed its online dating image and to evolve into a media company.  Ideas about new interactive programming on Friendster based on the networking taking place on the site was speculated but the new management at the time, kept mum.  Friendster was also seen defining its initial business model: advertising-backed programming rather than dating-service fees.

Within that era, analysts were not too thrilled with the online scenario as it sounds like a journey back to the good old dot-com days. Despite all the restructure and a new strategy kicking in, in those early years, analysts were skeptical about most social networking firms ever becoming profitable. Social networking is very exciting as a concept but not as a business, was the main feeling towards this sort of ventures.

In today’s day and age, it has been proven that social media is huge and it is definitely not going away.  As the global race heats up, one of it’s closest competitor, Facebook soared at more than 400 million active users worldwide.  There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.  There are more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries for Facebook. There is no question that people continue to gravitate in droves towards social networking and blog sites.

In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site when ranked by total minutes for the month. Analysts recently placed Facebook’s worth at USD$10 billion.

In Malaysia, 80% of affluent Malaysians (those with a household income above RM5,000) use social networking sites.  Report shows strong engagements in the Social Media Malaysia (nearly 3.8 hours per visitor and 22 visits per visitor).  Facebook is however the clear leader in social networking sites in Malaysia with 77% reach of Malaysian web population.

For Friendster, there are more than 115 million members worldwide making it one of the leading global online social network but not the top 5 spots. More than 60 million users visit the Friendster website per month making it one of the most visited websites on the Internet these days.

Then, it attracted the attention of a local home grown Malaysian company, MOL.  The company was founded in February 2000 and later listed on the MESDAQ Market of Bursa Malaysia Securities Berhad under the Technology Sector in December 2003.  It went through privatization by its controlling shareholders in February 2008.

In October 2009, Friendster and MOL entered a global partnership where MOL was appointed to provide an integrated payments platform, as a foundation for The Friendster Wallet and The Friendster Gift Shop, for Friendster’s users.

Friendster’s move was to have access to MOL’s 500,000 payment channels across more than 75 countries worldwide.  Apart from that, MOL is linked to 88 banks in 9 countries worldwide making MOL one of Asia’s fastest growing payment systems in developing nations with over 5,000,000 transactions per month. It’s no easy feat but it also processes more than USD200 Million worth of transactions in a year.  Most importantly, more than 2.9 billion people around the world can easily access their online, virtual and physical payment channels.  With this distribution capability and vast market potential that Friendster could tap on, it makes perfect business sense, …… for Friendster.

Following the acquisition, the operations of MOL and Friendster was combined to create Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network, pairing MOL’s offline retail channel partners and payment platform with Friendster’s large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia.

Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen Online said, “We have seen some very exciting growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space. The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing, or a how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers.” He also remarked  “Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice.”  Friendster needs to be relevant to what the market needs.

If Friendster wants to stay relevant and would like to create an evolution in advertising that would create a two-way conversation with the consumers, Friendster needs to be a part of the user experience and foster social interaction with their target audience.  The challenge is of course, had always been, how to monetize the huge database and build up ARPU.

Ganesh Kumar Bangah, president and chief executive officer of MOL at the announcement of the merger said “The merger with Friendster will continue to transform the social networking industry, combining a highly intuitive and successful social media site and online marketing channel with an integrated payment platform and content network which includes games, goods, gifts, music and video. We are creating a unique company that will be well positioned to provide content to a huge, regional user base, here in Southeast Asia,” said

He also said, “The new combined entity gives Friendster the kind of financial backing, retail distribution, and e-commerce infrastructure that will enable us to accelerate our strategy and create a locally relevant, fun experience for our users in Asia, both on and offline.”

We would like to know how far has this plan gone?  What are the achievements thus far and what are the marketing effort that has been put in place to ensure the success of this merger.

So, have you got Friendster?

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I read that customer demand continues to be strong and that new orders will be made available come February 2010. This beauty is not without flaws — but Barnes & Noble has since fixed the bugs.

Dubbed as the world’s most advanced eBook reader & also the Best New Gadget of 2009 by the TechCrunch Crunchies Award, I could only think of this: “Be mindful of the future, but not at the expense of the present. – Master Qui-Gon Jinn”. I hope this will generate better reading society at the very least. They have a competitor — the Amazon Kindle 2.

So perhaps a little bit of comparison investigation would be good. Amazon Kindle has this feature – Text to Speech where it can read newspapers, magazines, blogs and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable. Impressive. Nook on the other hand, features touch color screen.

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A droid does needs color in its life. Nook wins hands down with the content availability. There are more than a million titles available and more than 500,000 free eBooks. I am swooned over by these facts and the review from Time Magazine on the Nook helps – “One of the 10 Top Gadgets of 2009, and Best Travel Gadgets of 2009. It’s the stuff around and behind the screen that makes the nook cool. Like that color touchscreen… support for wi-fi, SD cards and PDFs.

The nook also comes with a classy book-lending feature.” – Time Magazine. What not to love about it? And oh, I want one with a Kate Spade New York designer covers, thank you!