Occasionally I find myself in a situation where I pronounce a word differently to what my friend does. The solution? I look up theFreeDictionary.com or simply tfd.com. Two buttons right besides the word allow you to play recorded American and British pronunciations of words, a boon for my multi-cultural background and a need for improving pronunciations!
Note: You may not see the buttons if you have script block or flash block on firefox.
Startups.co.uk presents Startups 100 – the “The ultimate hitlist of the UK’s best new businesses”.
In their own words – “Startups 100 is the definitive countdown to the UK’s most innovative, inspiring and ground-breaking new companies. As our criteria explains we’ve been unashamedly unscientific in our methodology – this is our list of who we think the best, most exciting, promising, disruptive new businesses and entrepreneurs are shaping the start-up market right now.”
Startups 100
Watch a 5 minute documentary on Net Neutrality, explaining the past, present and the possible future of the way the Internet functions and is controlled/regulated.
Related post: Internet, as we know, may end soon?
ipipi.com provides a low cost, reliable and easy-to-use service to send international text messages directly from the mobile phone unlike other services which provide a web interface to do so. The text message takes the following format – s <number> <message>, and the message gets relayed to the desired number via the online service almost instantly. I have been using it for a while and haven’t had any ‘lost’ messages and the delivery reports can be seen online. Another good part, the bought messages do not have an expiry period.
“U.K. consumer confidence fell to the lowest level since at least 2004 (when the survey began) in May as increases in living costs added to gloom about the economy, Nationwide Building Society said.”
“‘Consumers are starting to feel the pinch’, Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s chief economist, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. ‘The housing market isn’t getting any better at the moment, and we also know there’s been a squeeze on their income. Their willingness to spend and their ability to spend at the moment isn’t very high.”’ – Bloomberg
U.K. Consumer Confidence falls to the lowest level since 2004
Paul Graham, co-founder of YCombinator, has written various thoughtful essays on topics such as ‘Why to not not start a startup’, ‘How to start a startup’, ‘A student’s guide to startup’ and ‘Good and bad procrastination’ among others. Of course, there’s no substitute to reading them, but if you want to take them around in your iPod, find them in MP3 format by clicking the link below.
Adobe joins the online ‘Office productivity tools’ race with the launch of Buzzword! Other notable ones include Google Docs and Zoho. All these new offerings at attacking well at the tail end of Microsoft Office sales, and more so, since most people only make use of the most basic functions in these tools, most of the times. And there is OpenOffice for desktop users as well.
Some companies want to become Internet’s gatekeepers and control what can be and can’t be accessed on the Internet for a given price. Below is a video which explains what this means and how the general public can prevent this from happening.
Such sentiments are echoed by Sir Tim Berners Lee (inventor of web) in his blog post on net neutrality.
Number of websites have sprung up to prevent it from happening such as SaveTheInternet.com, SaveNetNeutrality.com, OpenInternetCoalition.com and Google’s stance on the issue.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2XPiqhN_Ns]
Please share your views and ideas in the comments below. Raise your voice against this!
Related post: A documentary on net neutrality