eCommerce
eType: Auto-Complete Words, Spell Check & Translation Tool (1000 Invites)
Many freeware typing tutor programs can help increase your typing speed and accuracy. But if you want a simple application that guesses which word you are about to type and automatically fills in the letters, then eType is what you need.
eType is a freeware currently in its beta. The downloadable app is compatible with Windows and sized at almost 5 MB. Installation is quite standard and you will have it up and running in no time.
Once the program has been installed, you can have it run in the background as an icon in your system tray. You can right click on the icon and enable / disable eType’s function.
So what exactly does eType do?
eType monitors your typing activity in any application. Whether you are using notepad, Microsoft Word, typing in your web browser, chatting, or doing any other typing activity, eType will be monitoring what you type. As soon as you type in a few letters, word suggestions will pop up in a floating window. From this floating window you can select the word you wanted to use. A word can be selected by pressing ENTER or SPACE or clicking on the word. You can choose to skip the word selection by pressing the ESC key. To revert to typing the old way, you can always disable eType from its system tray icon.
By completing a user’s words eType will help many computer users who want to type fast and save time.
eType is a freeware program and currently in beta. There are 1000 instant beta invites exclusively available for SmashingApps readers. You can get eType from http://www.etype.com/v.aspx?id=smashingapps
We do not need anything in return but would appreciate a lot if you can guys can spread the word and tweet it.
New Customization Features Added to Google News
Google News has undergone extensive testing by Google and finally the service now has a number of notable customization options. Read on to learn about them:
1. Topics you can subscribe to
In the left pane of Google News, you will find a topics list. Click on any topic to find news related to it. When the news open up, you will find a button which lets you add that topic to your personalized news page thereby subscribing to the topic.
2. News For You
News For You is a brilliant idea by Google. You can edit the news topics by filtering them out of your news feed. New topics can be added by entering keywords in the search bar provided in the News For You box. You can also specify the frequency with which you read about each topic so that news is correspondingly arranged.
3. Selecting / Deselecting News Sources
If there is a certain news source that you prefer, you can click on “Settings” at the top of the page, select “News settings” and start typing the sites you’d like to see more often in Google News. On the other hand if there is a news source you do not like, you follow the same procedure and eliminate the news source from your feed.
4. Social Network Integration
Clicking on the small arrow in the top right corner of each news cluster will drop down networks on which you can share the current news. This is a great way to let your friends know of anything interesting you read.
5. Keyboard Shortcuts
Some keyboard shortcuts have been added to enhance the user experience. The following keys apply: j or n (next story), k or p (previous story), / (search), s (star), . or f (share), Enter (open the headline article for the current story).
Google has clearly improved its News page by giving more control to the user. A full list of new features can be read here, on Google’s official page on the matter.
Estimurl: Website Estimated Worth Finder And Analysis Tool
Many professional bloggers start up their own websites. They then bring it up to a reputable level at which they begin receiving offers for the site. Determining what price would be fair for the site can be a little tricky. People value websites in various ways because there is no standard. But Estimurl is one service that provides its visitors with a fair and comprehensively calculated value of a site.
Estimurl is a free to use web service that determines the value of a website. This can be greatly helpful in determining what price to quote for the site you have worked so hard on. Finding the fair market value will also help buyers ensure they are not paying more than what is fair.
The homepage of the site is filled with many elements but the text field is on top and stands out. You enter the website’s (any website’s) URL in this text field and then click the “Check” button. The site then processes some data and you a window computing the statistics.
The site’s unique algorithm runs its own tests on the URL you enter. After processing the stats you are shown a comprehensive set of results with the site’s value located on top.
Under this portion you can view various other details about the site such as Alexa rank, and estimates of the website’s daily income and daily visitors.
The final portion of the result shows the IP address of the site’s server and its physical location on a map.
You can use Estimurl to find out the worth of your site or run random tests to find other sites’ worth. Either way, Estimurl will serve flawlessly.
DoYouBuzz Can Help You Easily Create Customizable Resume and Spread It Across Social Networks
People whose work involves computers need to have an online version of their resumes a.k.a. curricula vita. If you plan on uploading an online CV furnished in Microsoft Word, you will not stand out from the crowd. You need a resume that is brilliant and eye catching. DoYouBuzz can help with that.
DoYouBuzz is a wonderful website that helps you create an online resume within minutes. The site features free and paid accounts. While you can take full advantage of the site’s services only through the paid account, the free version will be a good place to start.
You start by creating a username and password on the site. Entering your name gives you your very own DoYouBuzz URL. As you move on you can transfer information from your LinkedIn and Viadeo accounts. At the time you enter your name, you can also enter your employment type and field.
The resume starts off as a basic black and white template which you can modify to give a visually brilliant look. This is what the resume looks like without any work done on it:
Additions to your resume can be made using the buttons on top. From there you can choose different templates and color schemes for your online CV.
You can choose to add a variety of things to your resume such as media additions to your portfolio.
The completed resume can even be linked to your social media accounts to share with your friends and family.
People who work online (especially freelancers) can immensely benefit from DoYouBuzz’s online resumes. Click here to visit the site.
Digital Product Delivery: Selling Products Online Is Not That Hard, As We Assume!
Selling digital products on the Internet can look like an overwhelming and expensive endeavor. However, with the right tools, knowledge, and experience, it is very feasible to make a remarkably viable online marketplace in a matter of a few clicks of the mouse. Significantly helping to streamline and simplify the process for online marketers while still offering a wealth of features and options is DPD.
Standing for Digital Product Delivery, it is a comprehensive e-commerce utility for people who want to sell digital products on the web.
Sell Digital Downloads at a Flat Price
With some of the other online marketplaces that facilitate the sale of digital products, the sellers are hit with transaction fees, hosting fees, and other charges that can quickly bite into the bottom line. Such is not the case with DPD. Instead, subscribers pay a low monthly fee and are offered unlimited downloads and unlimited transactions. In fact, it is possible to sell digital products through a number of different websites, all through one DPD account.
When you use a standard Google Checkout or PayPal process for selling a digital product, you may be hosting your premium content on a freely available webpage. You may use a generic link that is sent out to all buyers, opening up the possibility of link farming, piracy, and other related issues. DPD is different in the way that it works. Each buyer is provided with a unique, secure download link. This way, it is much more difficult for multiple people to download from the same purchase. In the settings area on the user dashboard, you can also set restrictions in the number of download attempts, as well as a time limit for how long the generated download link remains active.
Multiple Websites, Multiple Profiles, Multiple Products
One of the major features offered by DPD is that it can handle multiple websites and multiple products from a single DPD account and interface. This significantly streamlines the process. Each website can be afforded its own profile, defining such items as the store name, website URL, currency accepted, contact name, default language, payment processor, Google merchant ID, tracking HTML, download limits, and more. Since this e-commerce tool hosts all of your digital products too, you don’t have any worries about bandwidth and minimal concerns over downtime. Most DPD plans have no product file size limit, ensuring that you have enough room for larger content like videos and software packages.
Inspecting the User Dashboard
From this dashboard, you have quick access to your stats and analytics, as well as the ability to edit your websites and products.
Each website and each product is listed separately on your inventory page, including links to the different options and customizations available. Each product is given its own unique product ID, as well as a thumbnail image. Going into each individual product, you can also gain access to pre-designed buttons (including the full HTML code for each) that you can then embed on your websites, forums, and other places on the Internet. There are sets compatible with single-item (instant) checkouts and multiple-item (shopping cart) checkouts. After the buyer completes the purchase process, he or she can be redirected to a return URL that you define. This could be a specialized “thank you” page that you design or it could be back to your main website; it’s up to you.
Integration with WordPress Blogs
WordPress continues to be one of the most popular content management systems on the Internet, not only for blogs, but also for content websites and e-commerce stores. As such, DPD has also been designed to be compatible with the platform. In this way, you can “turn your WordPress blog into a download selling marketplace” with DPD. There is no extra code-edited needed on your part. In fact, you don’t even need to copy-and-paste like how you would with a regular website. Instead, the entire transaction can be facilitated with the WordPress plugin. Simply download and activate the plugin, connecting to your DPD account, and you’ll be ready to sell digital products on your WordPress site in no time. This includes a sidebar checkout widget, customizable buttons, and the ability to add cart buttons to your posts.
Run Your Own Affiliate Programs
Want to enlist the help of affiliates to promote your product? As it turns out, DPD comes with it’s own built-in affiliate system to automatically track affiliate’s commissions and generate payout reports. DPD generates your own affiliate “mini-site” to link from your sales site where your affiliates can log in and view their sales stats, generate links, read vendor news, and more. DPD supports multiple payout levels too, so you can set up “super affiliates” with higher payouts. A unique feature of DPD, vendors can create affiliate buy buttons that allow affiliates to sell your products, right from their website while you retain complete control.
Offering Coupons and Discounts
Allowing you to open a regular e-commerce store is already pretty powerful, especially with multi-website and multi-product support, but DPD goes even further.
It is possible to offer discount codes for each of your digital products. These coupons codes are defined by you and you can define the amount of the discount, either as a flat rate or as a percentage of the purchase price. Want to only offer the coupon to the first X number of buyers? You can do that too. The coupon can also be time-limited, giving you all sorts of opportunities for creative marketing and promotion.
Sell Digital Products with Fixed Costs
A remarkably robust and powerful e-commerce tool, DPD is also very affordable, even for the smallest of online merchants. There are a number of pricing plans available, including a 30-day free trial. All plans include PayPal support, Google Checkout support, an affiliate enabled multi-item checkout cart, ClickBank support, and the ability to give free samples. The smallest plan is just $5 a month and includes up to 10 products with a max product size of 50MB. Even at this price, you are afforded unlimited bandwidth and unlimited transactions. The most popular plan is $10 a month, allowing for up to 20 digital products, unlimited product space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited transactions. The 30 product, 60 product, and 120 product plans are $16, $22, and $30 per month, respectively. DPD even has larger plans available for volume sellers!
Let Your Customers Rate Your Emails With Nice Reply
Leaving a good impression on your customers is the key element in the success of any business. The way you communicate with your customers reflects on how high you value them. Attention to little things is of utmost important because you want your business to have loyal customers who come back for your services every time.
To give your customers what they want, you first have to know their wants. One way to go about it would be to collect feedback from your customers about a particular issue that you feel needs improvement. “Nicereply” is a perfect example of this.
Nicereply is a free to use website that helps you improve your interaction with your customers. This is achieved by improving the email messages sent to customers.
The way it all works is quite simple. You create an account on Nicereply and obtain a link which you should add to the signature of the email. A small description could be included in the signature, asking customers to click on the link and indicate their satisfaction with the email message. When they click on the link, their response is observed by Nicereply and recorded in your Nicereply account. You can view the overall statistics of a certain email message and see how successful it is in satisfying customers. The nature of the email can be anything: from an automated response to something offering tickets and coupons.
The customer service representatives in your company can have individual accounts at Nicereply. This will form a healthy competitive environment in which each employee will be motivated to excel amongst his peers when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Nicereply works as a wonderful tool in determining whether or not your emails are up to the mark. Click here to visit Nicereply.
BuyWidget: Monetize Your Website By Helping Sell Music Online
Are you running a website? One of the best ways to attract more traffic is to personalize your website. Most site owners do this by adding an “about me” section. While this is fine, sharing your musical preferences with the visiting community will help them relate to you. This in turn, will form loyal site followers.
Now imagine sharing music by adding great quality songs in a web player on your website. Visitors can listen to the songs and purchase tracks / albums in this player widget. To make things even better, you get a percentage of each track / album sale. If it were not for BuyWidget, that scenario would have sounded too good to be true.
BuyWidget is a simple tool for your website that performs all the functions mentioned above. You sign for an account on the site, create a playlist of songs, and get the widget which should be added to your site.
The playlist can contain as many songs as you want. You can add songs by searching for artist, genre, album, and song. Once a playlist has been formed you can always change it, make additions to it, and reorder the tracks easily. The code you obtain for the widget is HTML and can be placed wherever on your site, according to your preference.
Visitors can play the songs from the BuyWidget player and hear the best sounds because the songs are in MP3 format, at 296 kbps or higher. You get 7% of the sale of each track or album.
BuyWidget is an excellent concept that will satisfy a lot of site owners by adding a new source of revenue to their income. The best part about all of it is that you need not pay BuyWidget any signup or subscription fees. Click here to visit the site.
MashPedia The Real-time Encyclopedia Searches Many Online Sources In One Go
The sources in most online encyclopedias are static. Take Wikipedia for example. User submitted articles on Wikipedia have fixed sources for their articles. A change in the source therefore can present a problem for that particular article.
Suppose there was an encyclopedia with the latest sources accompanying its article on a subject. Not only will that be a great help to the encyclopedia’s user, but it would make the article more reliable as well.
Realizing the usefulness of such a search engine / encyclopedia and how beneficial it can be to internet users, Mashpedia was created.
Mashpedia is a free to use online encyclopedia that updates and gathers the results of our query in real time. The advantage of this is that we get new / different results each time we execute a search, even if our keywords are the same.
In addition to news and trending topics, the site has a simple search bar located at its homepage.
Entering our keyword in the search bar and starting our search quickly shows us gathered results from a variety of sources including social media sites and video hosting sites, in addition to standard search engine results.
In the above image, I executed a search for ‘electrons’ and came up with the Mashpedia article on it. The pane on the right details the properties of an electron whereas the pane on the left show us YouTube and social media sources for the keyword ‘electrons’; these sources are updated in real time and will be different the next time we search for ‘electrons.’
As we scroll down the page, we find other related sources from numerous other social networking sites and informative websites.
News results regarding our query are also shown.
The absolute end of the page lets us leave a comment on the article.
Mashpedia presents the results of our query by gathering them in real time from many sources. This unique concept of an online encyclopedia will surely benefit many internet users.
Click here to visit Mashpedia.
microWorkers: A Quick Way To Earn Money By Doing Easy Micro Jobs
Some of us have schedules that give us small breaks in our day. These breaks are usually spent doing pointless activities, just to pass our time. What if there was a way to earn money in the same free time, without investing any extra minutes? Converting our free and wasted time into something productive is something which surely everybody would want to do.
For all such people, microWorkers is a wonderful website.
microWorkers is a free to use website that lists small jobs. By ‘small’ I mean jobs that require a small amount of time and have only a small amount of money associated with them.
In order to start using microWorkers, visitors are required to create a free account and click on the activation link they are emailed. Only one account per user is allowed and anybody creating multiple accounts is banned.
After creating your account, head on over to the “Available Jobs” section to quickly find out the type of jobs people have posted.
You will find that most of the available jobs can be done on the internet during our free time and will take no longer than 15 minutes.
Once a job has been completed and the employer has marked it so on his/her microWorkers account, the site credits the payment to your account. The mode of payment is PayPal, Check, Moneybookers, etc. Note that processing the payment amount of the job can take up to 30 business days.
microWorkers, in conclusion, is a great way to make a somewhat substantial earning and transforming our wasted time into something useful. Click here to visit the site and start making money in your free time.
Tabzon: A Small And Easy In-Out Attendance Board For Offices
Different workplaces have different ways to mark an employee’s attendance. Sometimes a physical register is kept in which each employ signs in and out. Other workplaces use a fingerprint scanner or a code-entering gadget to mark attendance. Another way is for each employee to sign in via an email which can only be opened from the office.
All these solutions are effective in marking attendance but are not effective in finding out where the employee is presently. In other words, if an employee is absent, the boss does not have a way to find the reason of absence.
To remedy this, a better sign in-out solution is provided by Tabzon.
Tabzon is a free website that acts as an in-out board. It can work as a wonderful attendance tool for businesses. To take advantage of the site, the boss creates a Tabzon account. This requires entering the name of the company and no kind of personal details. Upon successful account creation we are provided with a URL for our company’s in-out board. We can then proceed to invite our employees to Tabzon either from within our account or by sharing the URL.
When a user enters your Tabzon in-out board, each time he is about to be away from work, he updates his Tabzon status for other employees to see.
Using Tabzon employees will be able to specify the reason they are currently unavailable. This is something that will be a great help to the bosses and administration.
If you are heading a company, give Tabzon a try by clicking here and let me know in the comments what you think about it.
