Kiran’s Blog

Website Monitoring Services need no introduction. There are several website monitoring services out there that provide uptime alerts and track your site’s response time.

However, if you own a business-critical website, you might need a bit more than simple uptime checks. Your website could be up, but your order forms could be broken. Your users won’t be able to place orders. And you can’t practically check these pages round the clock.

So, here’s an attempt to list a few low cost (<$10/month) website monitoring services, that provide transaction monitoring. It is not an ordered list, but PingDom seems most promising provider of the lot.

Here are a few more options.
Some of them provide very basic uptime checks with out any transaction monitoring.
Some them provide transaction monitoring, but are a bit pricey.

Perhaps the ultimate signs of twitter’s success & popularity!

Domain name investment is a mature industry now with every word in the English dictionary long since reserved by some entrepreneur/squatter. Now Twitter has created a new supply of valuable “names”: Twitter IDs. They take the form of twitter.com/stiennon for instance. Have you signed up for your free Twitter ID? Do you own your surname? Company name? Brand identity?
Read on..

100 World’s Greatest Twitter Tips & Twitter Secrets The Ultimate “Twitter How To” Guide

The world just got a little bit smaller, small enough to fit in your iPhone.
Google has released an iPhone version of Google Earth.
Just swipe of your finger on your iphone screen, and you can fly all around the world.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

This is a truly awesome iPhone app!

The Taj Mahal

Mount Everest

OutTwit conveniently lets you post & read tweets from Outlook, without having to open another desktop application or a browser window.

OutTwit’s latest version (0.5.2.34) comes with an extremely handy Preview feature that lets you read and post tweets from the Outlook toolbar itself.
Twittering had never been so easier!

Screenshot

Preview supports the following actions:

• Mouse over – displays the entire tweet.
• Click – opens the tweet in its own window.
• Shift+Click – if the tweet has a URL in it, open the link in a browser.
• Ctrl+Click – compose a direct (d) reply to the sender.
• Ctrl+Shift+Click – compose an @reply to the sender.

More details here

If you are a windows user & have been trying to sync the calendar on your iPhone with your Google Calendar, try these steps:

• Download Google Calendar Sync, offered by Google. It allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency.
• Sync your iPhone calendar events with your Outlook calendar.

That’s it!

Google Calendar Sync offers three types of Sync Options between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

• 2-way sync:
  All events in your primary Google Calendar and your default Microsoft Outlook calendar are synced together.
• 1-way: Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook calendar
• 1-way: Microsoft Outlook calendar to Google Calendar

Limitations
Google Calendar Sync will only sync events from your primary Google Calendar and your default Microsoft Outlook calendar at this time.

Other solutions

OggSync
OggSync is feature rich, for more advanced Google Cal users.
It supports Multiple Google Calendars and Multiple Outlook Calendars
Import Google Colors, Google Calendars mapped to Outlook Categories etc

However, OggSync is not free. I have not tried it yet (38MB installer? Huh!)

Tata & Nen are conducting India’s first ever People’s choice awards for startups.
Check out the current top rankings here

Quite a few interesting ideas out there, but surprisingly there aren’t that many innovative concepts in the “IT/ Internet/ Software” industry!

This tiny utility from ntwind lets you close all open windows on the desktop with one click.
Quite handy when your taskbar is cluttered with too many open application windows.
Just create a shortcut to CloseAll and place it in StartMenu, QuickLaunch or any other area that’s easily accessible. And a single click is all it takes!
Neat!

San Francisco voted #1 U.S. City to visit by Conde Nast Traveler Readers, for the 16th year in a row.

Local favorite San Francisco (85.2) takes the united states category for a whopping sixteenth
year in a row, a feat never before accomplished by any destination or property. one rea-
son: its worldwide high restaurant score of 93.1

Check out the complete list here.
A couple of Indian resorts Kerala and Rajasthan made their way to the list too.

A very detailed review of the first Android Handset with nice screenshots.

Engadget’s take:
The G1 isn’t going to blow anyone’s mind right out of the gate. Looking only at the hardware, there’s nothing here that’s particularly impressive, yet nothing that’s particularly bad (though the GPS needs some work).

The story here is Android and what it promises… though doesn’t necessarily deliver on at first. Like any paradigm shift, it’s going to take time. There is tremendous potential for this OS on mobile devices — it truly realizes the open ideals laid out by Google when they announced this project. The only problem seems to be the stuff they either left on the back burner, cutting room floor, or hoped would come from that exciting, untapped world of open source developers. While there’s plenty to praise in this phone, there’s a lot more that’s missing — and some of those missing elements are what we consider to be core components of a device in the G1’s class.