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5 gifts for Dad under $60

June 13, 2007 Posted by Tara in : New Products, Other Stuff, Reviews, Tips , add a comment

With Father’s Day rapidly approaching, I decided to to put together a mini gift guide for those of us who want to show our appreciation for dad without breaking the bank. Each one of these gifts is under $60 and is user friendly, as we know sometimes parents just don’t understand. The first gift is one I know for sure my own dad would like:

fishfinder.jpg1. The Humminbird SmartCast RF30 Wireless Remote Fish Finder

Retails for $59.99, designed as a wrist mount, this little gadget has a 75-foot remote operating range and 100-foot depth capability. It has a 1.25-inch high-visibility display with 48 x 32 pixels of resolution. It is obviously waterproof and has one touch menu navigation for ease of use. (more…)

AuctionAds filling up fast

June 10, 2007 Posted by Bryan in : New Products, News, Site News , 1 comment so far

If you run a website and you haven’t yet tried AuctionAds, it’s time to get off your ass. A recent post on the AuctionAds blog noted that they had met and surpassed their initial year end goals for new registrations in their first three months. For those interested in getting referral credits, the number of people who haven’t yet signed up is decreasing quickly everyday.

The AuctionAds service grabs eBay listings and posts them as ads on your site. When people click through and purchase a product, you make a percentage of the sale. Additionally, if people register for the AuctionAds service via your site, then you get a little extra percentage for referring them (at no cost to them).

As you may have noticed, we’ve been running AuctionAds on our site for about a month and a half. Since this site makes most of its money from the ad revenue it generates (will the new store change that?), I was initially concerned about them detracting from our big breadwinner - Adsense. I started them out at the bottom of the page to see what would happen.

One of the great things about AuctionAds is that the ads show product images. People like to get a sense of what they’re clicking before they commit to it. I’m not sure why Google hasn’t yet developed anything with this approach, but even at the bottom of the page, AuctionAds click-through rates were beating Adsense click-through rates considerably.

The first few weeks were slow, but now the service is really starting to take off. The AuctionAds perform so well that I am comfortable leaving them at the bottom of the page AND replacing the Adsense ads with some different, more risky, CPA links. Essentially AuctionAds have freed up an Adsense block (since you can only have three per page) and given us the ability to try out some new income generating options.

If you have a blog or other website and haven’t yet tried AuctionAds, I definitely recommend it. The service is structured such that the more people that register, the more money people make. However, if you’re interested in getting that referral bonus, it’s best to get in as early as possible before everyone else has already signed up. To register (and give us some credit) click here.

QuickSeek by Kensington, the User-Friendliest of All

May 31, 2007 Posted by Tara in : New Products, Reviews , 7 comments

Once in a while, a device comes along that is so amazing, I would feel criminally negligent not to write about it. The Kensington Quickseek FM Transmitter for your iPod is one such device. 

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How-to: Build your server for the future

May 13, 2007 Posted by Jeff in : DIY, How-to, New Products , add a comment

It amazes me how many times I walk into a new client and see the same thing - they ran out of room on their server because the system partition is too small. It reminds me of those silly “Plan Ahead” posters that were all the rage in the ’70s, where the words ran across the bottom, then had to kinda take a turn up the side a little. But it’s good advice to plan ahead, instead of buying some pre-canned thing that Dell offers. Nothing wrong with Dell, in fact, their service is great, but glitz it up a little. Here’s some things to remember from a battle-hardened IT guy that will make your life with your new server a bit more bearable. I will be touching on generalities here, so you can elaborate on my points for your own needs.

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What is the word on OpenOffice? (Part 1)

April 24, 2007 Posted by Tara in : New Products, Opinion, Other Stuff , 1 comment so far

I have been hearing rumblings around the office lately about OpenOffice, the multilingual, multiplatform, FREE office suite. One of my coworkers was a beta tester for Excel 2007, and had several complaints. He was telling me that everyone should be using OpenOffice anyway, including our company. I was suspicious of his enthusiasm and decided to do a little bit of research to find out the whole story.

For those of you who are not familiar with OpenOffice, it is an office suite (like Microsoft Office) that utilizes open source code. Open source means that source code is made public so that any programmer or layperson who can write code can copy, fix or redistribute the open source material.

The suite is comprised of Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (multimedia presentations), Draw (graphics), Base (database manipulator), and Math (formulas and equations with graphic user interface).

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Scan-ARGH!

April 3, 2007 Posted by Tara in : New Products, Reviews , 8 comments

If you have ever sat in a meeting or a lecture where the presenter was churning out notes onto a whiteboard, you have undoubtedly thought that there must be better way to get the notes on the board into your computer without scribbling furiously to get every word down. ScanR (www.scanr.com) provides, for the time being, a free service that does just that. (more…)