When we go to purchase a laptop, personal computer or any other electronic gadgets we usually get confused. It is often tough to decide whether to give priority to high configuration gadgets with small brand or low configuration gadget with big brand name. Finally we end up purchasing whatever store owner convinces us best. Best thing about online shopping is you are not influenced by anyone while selecting your brand. Still if you need some buying guide ConsumerMate.com is second to none in India. ConsumerMate portal has an expertise on helping customers with choosing the best Laptops, Mobile phones, LCD/Plasma TVs, Digital Cameras and Camcorders etc within their budget. You can compare mobile phones, laptops etc from various vendors. I would rate them among the most unbiased reviewers of mobile phones india. They do not influence their customer unlike what you generally see at your nearby stores but they show you wide variety of choices from which you can narrow down to select the best one.

When I am talking about electronic gadgets I should not forget to mention about Digit, the No. 1 Technology magazine. Digit magazine has already gained trust of youth by providing reliable and robust reviews of latest laptops, computer accessories and various other gadgets. I myself have subscribed monthly edition of digit magazine. I love to go through their ultimate expert comments about the latest launches. Now to add to the flavour for their readers Digit has launched its own online shopping portal called http://shopping.thinkdigit.com/. Needless to say, it offers plethora of technology gadgets to choose from, Deep discount hot deals and convenient and secure shopping online.

Both the above portals are unique of their kind and extremely reliable. I must mention about the interactive web application by Consumermate known as Guru Gyan. This feature implemented by Consumermate is extremely helpful for the visitors to find exactly what best they can purchase within their budget. They narrow down the options of available products and gadgets based on customer’s usage, budget and brand choice. Customer care of Consumermate is very active and ready to help. You can post your queries on the portal in Ask Us section to contact Consumermate experts to answer your technical and legal queries/complaints on the gadget purchases. You will get immediate response via email or SMS for your query through Ask Us section. Non the less, you will also be provided with atleast three neares dealers in you city where you can get your products. Now that is indeed very customer centric facility.

Google has openly said that it can withdraw from China if needed. This statement has come after Google found some involvment of chinese government behind the hacking of Gmail accounts of some social activists. Google was already pissed off by the cencorship imposed by chinese government on the search result in china. You might not get any search result for Tibet or Dalai Lama or Tank man. However after this statement many disputed results are available in search results in Google China. Due to various regional pressure google search results have been different for different regions. A common example is – If you search for Indian state Arunachal Pradesh on Google Map in china, it is shown as a part of Republic of China. Same search shows Arunachal pradesh as Indian territorry in Google India. And the most irritating as well as hilarious thing is that Google in United States shows Arunachal Pradesh as a disputed Territory. I was amazed by looking at these biased search results.

Recently India has condemened Google for showing Arunachal Pradesh as Chinese Territory and warned to take action against the firm.

Google withdrawing from China seems completely impossible as China is a big market for internet users and internet advertising as well. Nor China can afford to lose Google as it can reder many unemployed in China and hamper the chinese interest a well. China assured that it will take care of foreign comanies investing in their country.

IMEI stands for International Mobile Equipment Identity. It is a unique built in ID through which your cellphone can be identified and its whereabouts can be traced. It is associated with each cellphone during manufacturing process. Importance of IMEI numbers can be understood by the fact that if your cellphone gets snatched or stolen you can trace your cellphone using IMEI number. If you are unable to get back your cellphone then at least you can take help from police to blacklist that IMEI number so that it can not be used by anyone. Cellphones without IMEI number is a major threat to the security of any nation. Such cellphones can not be traced and terrorists can use it for malicious purpose. Most of the cheap Chinese cellphones in the market do not have IMEI numbers. Some of them use the duplicate IMEI numbers too.

Have you ever wondered that how your IMEI number gets traced and how the blacklisted IMEI numbers gets blocked? IMEI numbers of all the mobile terminals are stored in the database known as EIR i.e. Equipment Identity Register. EIR stores three different lists of IMEI numbers – A white list, A Black list and A Grey List. White list consists of all the IMEI numbers who are allowed to access the network. Black list consists of the list of those numbers which are blocked. These are usually stolen terminals whose service have been barred. Grey list consists of faulty or non-approved equipment. These equipments are under monitor.

Recently I India put a ban on cellphones without IMEI number. If you had purchased cheap Chinese cellphone and you want to continue with your same cellphone then all you have to do is to immediately apply for unique IMEI number. It is possible to use your cellphone. You need to approach to ICA i.e. Indian Cellular Association for unique IMEI number. They embedded a new IMEI number into your cellphone. So you can continue using your same cellphone.

Free to Air (FTA) television is often confused with Free to View, but they are completely different. In Free to Air broadcasts are sent without any encryption and can be received by any suitable receiver. But in case of Free to View broadcast is digitally encrypted. They are also restricted geographically. Though neither of them is paid service. FTA Receivers are capable of getting up to 3500 different FTA Satellite TV channels with Free to Air Files. FTA receivers are preferred by most of the people these days. Today every people in North America are setting up Free satellite TV. Once you setup FTA receiver you may confront with the problem in channels backup and sometimes your TV channels could be down. Then you look for the Free to Air latest FTA files, fixes, IHub files, Dongle files, & software to get your TV back up. However If you devote some time on internet you can find out some really good offers. N2News is the number one FTA Receiver Site on the Internet for last many years. It supports many receivers such as Ariza, Buzz, Captain, Captiveworks and many more.

You can also buy membership for one month, three months, one year or even lifetime with lots of features and services. Lifetime membership is available for just $89. So hurry up and subscribe today for unlimited downloads, instant access and 24×7 technical support. Visit their website for more N2News Services and information.

You would have heard in month of May that Microsoft is going to launch its brand new search engine called Bing. Now that the beta version of Bing.com is online, internet users are curious to know what new about it. Now why did Microsoft decide to launch a new search engine when it already has a search engine live.com? Let me first tell you that live.com is now enhanced and turned to bing.com. So when next time you try to open live.com you actually get redirected to Bing Beta. The question still crawls “why”. Obviously Microsoft has used some new algorithm in Bing to give relevant search results. Talking about the interface of Bing beta, it opens quickly though not quick as Google, but it appears with a beautiful background image which is cool. You can set your search preferences and incorporate the search engine with your browser. These features are available with every search engine on web but what else do you want with a search engine. Important thing is the result provided. Since the search engine is in beta state hence no paid ads are present on the home page.

Lots more is needed to be done because to compete Google now is like racing with the wind. Google already incorporated loads of features with its iGoogle and is hit among the users. Lets us see what innovation Microsoft brings to make Bing a unique search engine. It is too early to comment on its performance. Let’s wait and watch.

Anonymous surfing has not only become the need of today’s internet users but it has emerged as pretty good business also. Confused? Don’t be, let me explain. Proxy servers are mainly used by the college students and organization staff to bypass the network filter and surf freely the social networking websites such as Facebook, Orkut etc. Secondly and most importantly, proxy servers play a vital role in securing the organizational network by intercepting the client requests and forwarding it to the target server. You can search and find thousands of proxy servers which can cater your needs. But it would be hectic if you search proxy servers one by one and that too of different types. Now you can get the list of robust and most secure proxy servers at Proxy Library. As the name says, Proxy Library has enlisted in it the huge list of proxy servers which are updated and rated on daily basis. They also provide the section where regular visitors can rate the proxy servers they already used. They also provide the list of PHP proxies, ASP proxies and many more. Choose whichever you feel reliable. If you have your own proxy servers then you can submit you proxy server for free.

IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. But how many of you know what exactly is it? In this post I will explain to you about this new technology in very simple words. IPTV is spreading world wide and very soon it will replace cable connections used for viewing your favorite channels. Since it is expected that nearly every house will have their fast broadband connection hence this technology will enable us to view the television content through technologies used for computer networks. This technology is not possible with slow download speeds. But now with high speed broadband connections IPTV is emerging very rapidly. It will make your experience with TV very interactive and personalized. Imagine that you would be able to reply to the game shows with your TV remote. This is all possible through IPTV. You can watch movies and TV soaps and chat or share files with distant friends at a time. It is believed that IPTV could be integrated with very popular protocol VoIP i.e. Voice Over Internet Protocol.

IPTV uses a two-way broadcast signal sent through the service provider’s backbone network and servers. This allows the viewer to select content on demand, time shift i.e. you can watch any program when you want to watch. IP i.e. internet protocol refers to a method of sending information over a secure, tightly managed network. Building IPTV capability into a network allows a service provider to deliver voice and data as well. That fulfils the promise at last of a single, secure network over which all services can be delivered. Many of the world’s major telecom providers are exploring IPTV as a new revenue opportunity from their existing markets. It will change TV viewing not only for residential viewers but also create a whole new market of customized content delivery. Recent news related to application of IPTV is linked with India where BSNL, the largest service provider, has announced to launch IPTV services in 10 major cities including the metropolitan cities.

You might have heard about the Kaspersky Lab, a leading antivirus developer, detected Koobface worms earlier this year. Now it has appeared again tiptoeing around the security filters and supposedly using Google’s websites for attack. When earlier this malicious program appeared it targeted the Facebook and MySpace users. It had two variants Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.a. and Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b as detected by the Kaspersky Lab. Their method of infecting the computers was a classic one. They used to send images looking like lucrative YouTube video and when a user clicked on it, it redirected the page to some other site which asks the user to download the flash player or codec required to view the video which was actually the worm. Once it was downloaded it uses the PC as zombie computer to form botnets.

Now the similar worm is said to be back with a bang detected by the researchers at unified threat management vendor Fortinet. According to them this is the similar program to the Koobface worm and uses Google Reader and Picasa Web sites to spread. The worm works in same way as earlier i.e. attracting users to click on the fake video and pictures which downloads the Trojan programs. Earlier its spread was checked by MySpace and Facebook by blocking the attack websites. So this time they have hosted files that appear to be YouTube videos on Picasa and Google Reader. Once user gets to these pages they are asked to download the codec and other stuffs. Facebook is just used as a medium to send YouTube and Picasa links to the victims.

Since Facebook is the most popular social networking website and hence such worms can be devastating due to its reach to such huge number of computers. Facebook is currently working with Google to curb this spread and they are positive about the results so far. This attack can in fact happen to any social networking website. Hence if you are Facebook or MySpace or any such website user then please don’t click blindly to all the links you come across.

32 texture units, 640 stream processors, a 256 bit memory interface, 512 MB of memory running with operating frequency near to 1.8 GHz. Guess what is it I am talking about? Guys this is the configuration of AMD’s brand new ATI Radeon HD 4830 Graphics card. The product is a complete package to attract the gamers as it allows up to 4 cards per computer which highly enhances the gaming experiences. AMD is well known for it innovation and now the way its ATI CrossFireX and picture to picture technology used with this card has boosted the performance definitely keeps the AMD on the top of other brands. As far as the price is concerned, you will be amazed by knowing that you just have to spend $150 or less for this worth buying graphics card. It is quit affordable and economic in terms of both price and performance.

I give all the stars to ATI Radeon HD 4830 as it seems appealing to me, but time will better tell how gamers respond to the release. AMD has lots of expectations with it and so do gamers.

On 8^th October 2008 I wrote about Google email archiving service extends for up to decade. I don’t know what would be the response of the users and enterprises on this step but recent comment of GNU founder Richard Stallman on cloud computing, which is somewhat similar concept to archiving services, has really raised some questions over the reliability and security of the data. According to him Cloud computing is a trap as quoted in an article at Gaurdian.co.uk. Before telling you about what he said, let me tell you about the concept of cloud computing. Cloud here means “The network of servers” and hence the cloud computing is the supercomputing-level power to user. Cloud Computing is also known as On Demand Computing. The cloud or The Network of Servers are used to manage the distributed database in which the components of program are stored in thousands of computers. Actually Cloud Computing uses the concept of using multiple computers which can be possibly Computers or UNIX workstations, multiple storage devices, and redundant interconnections, to form what gives the user an illusion of a single highly available system. This concept is also called the Cluster Computing. It is used for load balancing the traffic and ensuring the high availability.Moreover, Parallel Processing has enabled the program to run with less time complexity by processing the program instructions dividing them among multiple processors. Hence due to both cluster computing and parallel processing vast processing power is available.

Thus now vendors like IBM, Amazon etc. allow users and enterprises to use the services and storage whenever and wherever they need. Users are charged for these services depending upon the server utilization, processing power used or bandwidth consumed. Google Apps, Maps and Gmail are all based on this the cloud computing. That is why it is likely that one day everyone will rely on the remote access of data. Numbers of organizations are already offering free Web services in the cloud. According to the Richard Stallman using such services is “worse than stupidity”. He said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

The article also mentioned that the growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google. Stallman added that that using such web applications to do your computing makes you lose control. You are getting defenseless as you are you are putting your programs and data in the hands of whoever developed that software. Now being user you have to decide whether you can risk the integrity of your data.