What is hPage?

In their own words, “We have a great number of unique design templates (more than 300), we offer over 300 MB webspace, and, what is totally different: We offer really a lot of extras for free to build a great website. This includes own forums, newsletters, a member area, counter, guestbook, survey, contact form, pinboard, galleries, link lists, password protection, gimmicks, etc.” So I decided to take them on a test drive.

Setting Up

Setting up is pretty easy. A simple registration form is to be filled and voila! you can log in to your admin panel. This is, however, standard with most website builders out there. With the idea being to minimise the effort required with getting started with a website. The plan from now on is to select a design, create your pages, upload your files and go live.

Choosing a design is a simple matter of visiting the Design > Choose a Design menu item and selecting one of the existing 385 templates, or one of 5 customizable templates or just work on creating your own theme out of 17 framesets. I tried an existing template and moved on. The handy getting started guide was very helpful throughout the process.

Adding content is a matter of creating Text Pages from the Pages > Add a Text Page option. The service offers a rich Flash-based editor for the content editing, which is really handy and includes what you’d expect from a rich WYSIWYG editor. Once done with adding a couple of pages, you are ready with your website. hPage pushes a guestbook and a contact form by default and also, to much of our dislike, a banner ad saying for hPage. That’s unfair, the domain name already carries their brand and bring traffics to them. Moving around to the Menu systems and Files Managements is fairly easy. So is adding and managing the aforementioned Gimmicks, which work more in a click-and-deploy fashion. With a little effort on our way, we were up and running with a website in less than 10 minutes.

Final thoughts

Making websites with hPage is swift and easy, but the designs are very old-skool. They fit the web as it existed in 2002-04, the web now is much more buoyant and vivid. But, you can achieve that vibrancy with your own templates with little effort in implementing the rest of the content and functionality. Another weakness is that your website, made in hPage, is not socially aware, and there is not much scope of you doing it as well. That might pinch some of us. The only silver lining is that these problems exist with pretty much every website builder out there on the web.

The bright side is the swiftness with which you can push out your website. And you know, old-skool is not always bad. Sometimes, old-skool is what you want. What we say is, though hPage will not blind you with uber-awesome Web 2-oey gooeyness, you can still use it to create a free website, with ease and swiftly – and for personal use thats what counts.

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Its the new world these days, companies can’t be run with a market place of just one city. Every firm needs to spread out their wings and just try to grab the whole new world. Client interactions are important for everyone and high price flight tickets don’t help you much. Phone calls are just not intimate enough to really touch someone either emotionally or professionally. What solutions remains to us are video conferences, these are cheap and almost essential for any proper client interaction. But low quality video quality can just bite you back then bring any closeness with clients.

What is the Solution?

Solutions like polycom, Tandberg, and Radvision are expensive and don’t target start ups and small firms at all. Other existing products from Microsoft and Logitech don’t provide the HD quality over the internet, which is kind of essential these days. Unlike this webcam from FaceVsion Technology USA called “FaceVsion FV Express Combo” which provides full HD video calls with your Google accounts friends with the help of its unique H.264 hardware encoder and decoder chip that reduces the load from both your CPU and internet bandwidth. So, even with a nominal hardware (Intel Atom will do) and decent internet connection (800Kb/sec up/down performance) you can take a big leap forward in your business.

Features

This product by faceVsion has many other feature build in to it like Voice Quality Enhancement and Video/Audio Error Concealment and your Google Gmail contact list can be automatically synchronized to your HD video conferencing contact list. What more to this is availability of Codec and Camera APIs (SDKs) with this hardware so now you can customize the hardware to suit your company requirement perfectly. As can be seen in the FV Express Combo product image, its a tiny little piece of hardware that will bring about much productivity in your business functions.

Getting It!

FV Express Combo is available through shop.facevsion.com and other value added partners. Purchasing the FV Express Combo HD Video Conferencing solution through the faceVision on line store also provides you with exciting promotional opportunities. On-going promotion with $10 off any purchase, using the promo code of FVTBTS2 while checkout. The promotion ends 09/30/’10.

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With increasing broadband reach in India, video chats have been becoming the main form of our communication over the internet. Skype, then, becomes the tool of choice. I have been using skype for over 2 years for personal and official video calling and have faced low video quality video calls many times, sometime due to low bandwidth, sometimes poor webcams. Many times this makes a bad impression in front of my clients. This was when I started looking for better webcams in the market and stumbled across the faceVsion TouchCam N1. FV touchcam N1 is the first Internet streaming true HD webcam for Skype video calls. Interested, I explored more.

True HD Streamcasting

Unlike the commonly used Microsoft Cinema or the Logitech Pro 900, FaceVision TouchCam N1 has an in-built H.264 encoder, resulting in a smoother and true HD streamcasting over the internet. This chip takes the 720p video and using high-quality encoding technology, squeezes the video into a stream small enough to be sent over a typical Internet connection. So no matter if you are on a slow or fast internet connection, the video quality of the video chat will always be great from your end.

Scope & Exposure

Also, the N1 also features a best-in-class 78 degree super wide angle lens with fast auto-focus, so several people can comfortably get into the picture. This makes it most useful for family video chats or business group conferences.

The N1 attaches easily to most notebook computers or flat-panel displays and can also sit on a desktop. Sporting the high-speed USB 2.0 hardware ports, the webcam is very easy to plug-and-play in any normal computer system.

Final Expectations

Demonstration of the broadcasting with the FaceVision TouchCam N1 convinces me that the smart encryption-for-broadcasting being done by the H.264 encoder chip in the webam will make it the ideal webcam of chocie for better and clearer HD video in skype calls and video chats. Imagine talking to your family, loved ones, and business associates with the clarity of HD.

Pricing

FV touchcam is available through shop.facevsion.com and other value added partners, and is priced at a moderate $119.99. www.shop.facevsion.com is now running a back to school promotion with $10 off any purchase, using the promo code of FVTBTS2 while checkout. The promotion ends 09/30/’10. Check out the faceVision on line store now. For the moderate end user, another product of choice can be the FV ExpressCombo.

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Webhosting Geeks provide the service of reviewing and comparing the various web hosting service providers. They rate them on a number of factors including the quality of Tech & Customer Support, Server Software Management, Traffic Management, Uptime & Relaibility, Space Offered, Price, Quality and User Friendliness. The hosting providers are reviewed not only by their editorial team but also by a very strong and active member community. The editorial plus user reviews help determine the score for individual service providers, which is a score you and me can rely on.

In addition to the reviews of service providers, another feature of note is the categorisation of the service providers and the awards against these categories. The categories include Green hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated servers, budget hosting, hosting for blogs, forums, ecommerce, windows/unix/php hosting, amongst many others. So while Inmotion leads both vps hosting and dedicated server hosting, GreenGeeks is the best green hosting and JustHost the best blog hosting.

users review services on many factors

The company not only provides in-depth information in their various hosting reviews, they also write a hosting blog which provides a lot of useful information about how to do stuff with web hosting. What would have added to the quality of the blog, though, would have been a more frequent rate of posting. It is around once a month right now, higher would be better.

With its many ups and downs, it makes for a decent collection of various hosting reviews and aids a lot in the making of a purchase decision for web hosting. We had a look at these, this new year when we had to decide to continue with our Pronet Hosting account. It might prove useful to you too, if you are considering buying a web hosting.

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With improvements in Optical Storage Technology and the advent of Blu Ray, it has always been a hassle to create a backup copy of your Movie and Games collections (especially your Playstation 3 Blu Ray games). If you also download videos from the web, or own a huge collection of DVDs and Blu Rays, you know the pain of managing copies and keeping backups. 123 CopyDVD brings a Blu-Ray Copy Breakthrough with their 123 Media Max Software. The software boasts of some wonderful features for the Blu Ray in addition to the usual CD/DVD Features available in almost every other disc copying software. Some of the promising features are:

• Copy Blu Rays to Blu Rays or DVDs wihtout noticable decrease in quality
• Create Video DVDs and Blu Rays (Sony PSP/PS3 compatible) of your DVDs, Videos from the Web
• Copy Blu Rays, DVDs, CDs
• Convert & Burn Video/Audio Files for Sony PSP, Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Zune, XBOX 360, and many others
• Powerful Video Editor for editing and mixing your videos and audios

Video Conversion and Editing is a CPU intensive process, so a good Processor+RAM combination is recommended. I will recommend a 2GHz Processor + 2GBs of RAM for any video conversion/editing requirements, and even though this is higher than recommended by 123 Media Max, a higher configuration will only make your process swifter.

All of these features come at a price, and this software is available for $69.99 (roughly INR 3300). This is towards the higher end of the spectrum, but yet cheaper than Nero 9 (USD 79.99, INR 3800). Find out more details at the 123 CopyDVD website.

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If you have a digital camera, you have always faced the hassle of connecting your camera to your computer to take out the pictures, right? What is the usual process?

Find the USB Cable (or keep it handy), connect camera and computer, start software (or through the shell integration) and transfer the photos. Hmm.. a lengthy process.

How about we scratch away the first three steps? How about if you can simply transfer your photos from the camera to the computer? Is there a way – yup! Watch this video:

Well, the Eye-Fi is a SD card with a capacity of upto 4GB (plus built-in Wi-fi). Since its in the SD card format, it is compatible with almost every digital camera out there. Using a Eye-fi card, all you have to do is turn on your camera and it will be connected to your computer. Now, you can configure it to automatically backup all photos on the computer, or to share the pictures online on services such as Flickr, Facebook, etc or do both. And in case you have a SDHC capable camera and a wireless router, you dont even need the middle-ware – the computer.

Sounds easy and simple? Well give it a try. But remember, not all good things come cheap.

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Abbott Medical Optics Inc. (AMO), a global leader in laser vision correction, has recently launched the “You Gotta See This” Video Contest, inviting entrants to make a video showing the impact of improved vision on people’s life, for a chance to win cash and prizes.

The contest is still open for more entries, so visit the iLASIK Video Contest website and submit one.

Prizes include:

• One Grand Prize winner will win USD 5,000 — selected from all submitted videos
• Three First Prize winners will win an HDTV package(a USD 2,500 value) — one per video category
• Three Second Prize winners will win the Flip UltraHD camcorder (a USD 199.99 value) — one per video category

What you have to do

1. Record an original video on how improved sight betters lives
2. Submit the video in the following categories:
   • “My contacts are getting in the way of my good time”
   • “My favorite sport or activity would be so much cooler with better vision”
   • “You should see life after the iLASIK® Procedure”
3. Tell Friends To Vote. Votes help decide who wins.

The contest ends on December 10th so check out the contest website now! It is only open for US and Canada residents.

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If you are a windows user, you have faced the wrath of viruses quite frequently, and there is no certain way to be completely safe. You can add more security but never be compeltely safe. Vipre Antivirus can play a very important role in that security.

We all have used some antivirus program like Norton/McAffee/Avast/etc at some point of time (and are using one right now too), but unlike them Vipre is not exactly a resource hog (look at performance stats).

Compared to other popular antiviruses, Vipre has a good range of features and provides comprehensive online security:

• The Vipre MX-V Advanced Malware Protection is a very unique, and state of the art protection system.
• Is very light weight compared to others
• Comes with excellent support.
• a “home site license” to cover all your home PCs through just one purchase.

Starting at $29.95, Vipre is a decent choice for an antivirus program on windows (on other OSs, you most probably don’t need one :P). In any case, you can always try out the 15-day trial available at the Vipre Antivirus Software website.

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