Tech News & Reviews

I had a thought several weeks ago that I shared with some friends and family. With flash memory prices dropping, and storage sizes expanding, I wondered how long it would take for PC manufacturers (especially laptop makers) to utilize this to their advantage.

Apparently they already have. However, because the cost of the equivalent of a top-end hard drive in flash memory is so expensive, one company has decided to bridge the gap for now. Seagate has come out with a laptop hard drive that will boot up off of a flash memory partition … saving A TON of batter power in the process. Extending battery life is the holy grail in terms of notebook computers - just ask anyone who’s got one.

If you want to read more about this new development, check out the Tech News article here.

If you are an Internet entrepreneur and have the need of a shopping cart on your website, how are you going to accomplish the task? I’m going to tell you how: outsource it! Many entrepreneurs get tied up doing all the little things in their business, and it flounders because they can’t give the necessary attention to the big things (like website promotion, social networking, etc.). Well, today you can outsource your shopping cart needs to Ashop.com. This is truly shopping cart software made easy. With the ease of Ashop.com’s shopping cart software, you’ll be up and running in no time. This will help free up your personal time and allow you to focus on other business activities. Right now they’re running a 10 day free trial right now, so what’s stopping you? Take advantage of this offer, and see just what the Ashop ecommerce software has for your business.

When you’re looking for a good deal, sometimes it’s hard to do the comparison shopping. Many websites have come and gone over the years that have put forth the effort to help consumers find the best deal on any given product. I would like to introduce you to one that looks to be promising.

Shopping.com seems to have it together, at least in the tech area. I found some great comparisons between the various stores offering the Canon PIXMA MP830 4-in-1 printer. This little jewel is pretty awesome, and comes with a pretty hefty price tag. But why pay more than you need to?

The website has over 30 reviews for this printer alone. With over 100 categories of products to search through, they are bound to be able to help you with your next product evaluation. Take a few minutes and check out the site.

(Brought to you by your friends at www.shopping.com)

Well, Halo 3 is out, and it’s breaking all the sales records.  Microsoft should be very pleased, although there have been reports of issues on their Xbox Live service, with so many new users flooding the online gaming servers.

If you have an opinion about Halo 3, let me hear it!  What do you think about this new addition to the Halo collection?

If you are anything like me, you’re always looking for ways to save money. This is especially true with online purchase, since you have to pay shipping fees. There are a lot of different place to find coupons online, but there’s a new site that looks very promising. The new site is CouponKathy.com, and the picture on the home page says it all: “Let me help you save money”.

There are quite a few categories that should appeal to the “techies” out there. Available right now she has coupon codes for Franklin Covey, GoDaddy, and Sharper Image. They even have Oriental Trading Coupon Codes. If you are involved in promotional widgets or goodie bags for kids, hand-outs, etc. - then you must check out Oriental Trading!

The process is pretty simple. Find the category you are interested in, click on the category to view the coupons. For example, I like Sharper Image. She currently has four coupon codes available as well as a banner ad. Three of the ads are for 50% off specific purchases, and the other ad is for various amounts from $10 to $100 off, depending on the amount of your purchase. These are excellent! Simply click on the ad to use the coupon and order. So next time you are shopping online and looking for that coupon code, stop by Coupon Kathy and check it out!

It seems that Starbucks want’s to get on board with the latest iTunes push.  They are getting ready to give out 50 million free iTunes songs between October 2nd and November 7th, 2007.  Only 37 titles are part of the promotion, but across the chain they will be giving away over 1.5 million tunes a day.  Customers will get a ’song of the day’ promo card with their purchases.  In addition, they will also get 2 free songs with the purchase of a Starbucks gift card.  With java, wifi, and now free iTunes, you can hang out at Starbucks all day!

Getting a small business loan is often intimidating to business owners. Because of restrictions from the regular channels like banks and other financial institutions, the small business owner often doesn’t give it a second thought. Well, EZUnsecured.com is out to change that.

I know that before I shut down my local PC repair business, opening up a brick and mortar shop would have been nice, but it wasn’t practical because I didn’t have the funds. With a program like EZUnsecured.com has, it would have been a lot easier to apply. They only work on unsecured financing, but they do require a business to be in business for a minimum of two years.

If you’ve been looking for a way to keep your business going or to buy that equipment you’ve needed, consider checking out EZUnsecured.com. They just might be able to hook you up!

bOftentimes, businesses are the last ones in the marketplace to adopt new technology. The reason for this is simple: business owners don’t want to take chances with glitches in new technology when their business is on the line. First impressions can mean everything to a customer, and as a business owner you don’t want to mess that up. However, there is an emerging technology that has several years of experience under it’s belt, that is moving into the business segment, and seeing remarkable success in meeting business owner’s needs. What am I talking about? Well VoIP, of course!

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It basically uses a high speed Internet connectin to route your phone calls instead of the traditional telephone company routers and lines. So what does this mean to you as a business owner? It means that you can usually save big bucks over traditional phone services, including some services you just can’t get from a traditional phone service provider. That’s where Packet8 comes in.

When you are looking for a small business phone system using VoIP, you need to check them out. Looking over their services, they have quite a few options to choose from. Whether you are just looking for that virtual office setup or wanting to use VoIP for an entire call center setup (and yes, that’s an option), they have the product for you. If I were setting up my small business on a VoIP plan, I would use the Unlimited Extention program. This is Packet8’s flagship extention service for virtual office and has quite a few bells and whistles, including a unique direct inbound dial (DID) telephone number, auto-attendant routing and switchboard viewing.

So when you decide it’s time for your small business to make the plunge into VoIP (and why not now?), be sure and check out Packet8.net.

Take a time out from worrying about tech support for a minute and head on over to Quiz Rocket and take the nerd quiz to find out if you qualify as a nerd. Yep, you heard me right! Quiz Rocket has 18 trivia quizzes and funny personality tests, with new quizzes added every week. These free trivia and personality quizzes are professionally written and fun to take. Users take the quiz, then see some offers from advertisers based on their quiz responses, and then they receive their score and badge. Quiz completion badges can be posted on any blog or MySpace page.

I’m heading over there momentarily, and I will let you know when I get back if I qualified or not (one would hope, since this is my tech blog … LOL)

Are you looking to buy that perfect gift? Do you like electronics, but just aren’t sure what you can find in your price range? And what do you get for that person that just has everything? Well, at Abt Electronics, they have just about everything imaginable. From a replacement humidifier wick to car accessories to computers, they’ve probably got what you’re looking for.

The company was started in Chicago in 1936, and launched their online presence in 1998. Today Abt Electronics is one of the largest single store operations in the country. They offer free shipping on items under 50 lbs, as well as select items, and delivery within 75 miles of the Glenview store!