No longer are the days when the companies determine if their products are good or bad.  We will prefer to hear what the customers are doing with these products.  That’s where GDGT comes into play.

Most of the websites are in the form of blogs where they write reviews about how the products are doing.  This can be really selfish and it is usually from one person’s point of view.

GDGT is a website for the gadget lovers to share and to find out how their gadgets are doing online.  It has a lot of sharing options for you to tell your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and more!

When I first try to add my new product, I was being told that they have been totally inundated with thousands of gadgets, so they will need to take a little bit to work through them all..

With GDGT, you can easily embed what gadgets you are currently holding onto your blogs or other forms of websites.

So, what is GDGT?

As we are all waiting for Google Voice to be released to all of us here, here’s an invitation to Google Voice when they are ready.  Simply go to their website, and key in your name and email. They will not use it for marketing purpose except for their invitation to you.

What is Google Voice?

It allows you to have a single Google number where your family and friends can call you on. And when they call you Google number, you can allow it to call any of your actual phone number such as your mobile phone number, or your home number, or anything else.  And if you want to keep it to voice mail, it is possible too.  Here’s a video demonstration:

Here’s the review of Google Voice:

There has been social media news around if Mark Zuckerberg should sell Facebook or not with an offer of $200million  of preferred stock at $10 billion valuation.  Though TechCrunch has announced that he will not sell Facebook at $8 billion valuation (seems like a discrepency here, or it’s another offer?), I believe they are still thinking about it as they are forecasting to make $550million this financial year.

If Facebook should continue to be better, here’s my recommendations:

About Facebook website

Facebook is a unique platform where it provides almost everybody in  different parts of the world a place to gather together.  Because it allows communications amongst the users, it virtually takes over some of the traditional ways of email communications.

Continue to innovate!

What Facebook really needs to do is to continue  innovating on their own platform for internal applications as well as third party applications.  There are always new competitors trying to create another “Facebook” website.  We will always be bombarded with the new competitors.  I can still remember how I was “poached” by my friend in Friendster to join Facebook.  I refused to join for a while, until I see many more people joining Facebook.  Seriously, I was left with no choice but to join Facebook.   I can still remember leaving my friendster-style testimonial on the Facebook wall while my friend teased me that I don’t have to do that anymore!

Today, I have not logged into my Friendster for several months.  I have no idea what Friendster has become.

What can Facebook do to continue retaining visitors in the next 5 years and so?

Looking from the history, it looks really common for one website to be taken over by the other.  And surprisingly, Internet should be only about 10 years old.  On the Internet, time flies really fast… One application can be famous for a few months or years, and immediately get out of the game!

From what I can see,

• ICQ has been taken over by MSN
• Friendster/MySpace is slowly taken over by Facebook
• Hotmail/Yahoo email users are slowly moving over to Gmail

And the upcoming webware are as follows:

• Google Chrome browser (taking over Internet Explorer and Firefox?)
• Google Doc (taking over Microsoft Office?)
• Google Reader
• WordPress (taking over BlogSpot?)

Something which can keep the website alive are probably as follows:

• No strong competition
• New things to keep users happy

The Number One thing I don’t like about Facebook

There are a few advertorial links in every webpage that Facebook tried to “trick” me to click.  They actually placed it beside the Facebook application I was using! And I thought it was the same application!  I can still remember one of the links actually charge me money without my permission!  Why?  Because the clause to pay money is really small!

I would say that Facebook has done a really good job of ad placement because I really thought they are associated.  But the part where they charge me money, is only to do with that scheming advertiser.

Should Mark sell?

Ok, here’s my thought.  If Mark should sell Facebook, it should be during the good times.  That’s when we can make the most out of our business.  Buy low, sell high… Isn’t that obvious?  But again, I would want to continue expanding my passion if I were Mark…

We all know how strict Facebook is when their 3rd party applications wish to access our information.  And when you install a Facebook application, you will definitely know this is in Facebook domain because Facebook is trying all means to protect their users.

Twitter, on the other hand, has so many third party applications which are built on top of it.  And because it has been doing really well as a very simple webware, it doesn’t have to worry so much about its third party applications as they are built on various platforms.

Now, Facebook is following the footsteps of Twitter in this area.  First, I saw the similarity of updating your “status” or what Twitter called it as “What are you doing now”.  Then, it turns into a feed reading place to update their friends from blogs, news and other RSS feeds.  I believe seriously that all these innovations come from Twitter.

I come to know this news from TechCrunch mentioning about Facebook is expected to announce third party access to their application externally.

I think this is a good news for every one of us because we will be able to socialize online in many different ways.  With Facebook so portable on different platform in the near future, it will mean website will be the place for headquarters only.  And users can simply use independent applications to access their information.

I don’t believe this will pose any threat to Twitter because twitter is unique in its following/follower way of connecting with people.  And we will still continue to use Twitter as it is for our social networking needs.

About Facebook

Website: facebook.com
Blog: blog.facebook.com
Category: Network/Hosting
Employees: 700
Founded: 2/04
Description: Social network
Click here for more info.

This is a review of Producteev by Charles Lau.

In today’s Internet, we have blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, wikis, and all other sorts of webware that we can lay our hands on.  The Internet is also finding ways to make you platform independent with all the software that you are using such as office productivity software (with Google Docs), email software (with Gmail) and image editing (with Picnik).

How about managing your projects and tasks with your job?  You have been a really busy executives and managers, and you would really hope how you can make your work more efficient.

Well in fact, one of the most time-consuming tasks in your project(s) is the task of managing the priority of all the actual tasks.  You would hope to know what you need to do today, and what your staff are doing in exactly the way you wanted.  You don’t have to micro-manage them, in order to manage what they are doing today, tomorrow and the day after.  All you need to do, is to manage the actual task overview of each employee.

Introduction to Producteev

Today, I am going to talk about Producteev.  It is an intuitive and fully drag & drop-able solution to collaborate with your colleagues over shared projects and tasks.

How did I manage to find this site?  I chance upon this site through Chris Brogan on twitter.  And I thought this is quite a good addition to our world wide web!

Here’s a summary of what Producteev is:

• In a nutshell, you can create tasks for yourself or to assign to members of your team, and you can then leave comments on these tasks as your project evolves with time.
• You will be accessing to a lot of useful task-management features such as file management, reminders, a calendar and numerous third-party applications such as mobile apps, desktop and IM bots.
• You will also be able to manage both the tasks as well as to-do lists, and communicate efficiently with your team.

In fact, as you can see, it is still in beta version currently.  Even though the software is already in place, they must be still trying their very best to test the software first before they make it official.

Overview of Producteev

You will see boxes of to-do tasks on your dashboard when you log into the system.  And on every box, you will share your tasks with your colleagues, or to make it private.  You are free to create a new box whenever necessary.  (See below)

There is also a live feed section for you to find out what your colleagues have done in the tasks.  This live feed also allows you to message your colleagues, upload a file to the message, and even to message privately. (See below)

You can also upload files onto the server.  Your colleagues can also comment on it. (See below)

Any other features on top of that?

Simply said, this is what Producteev is all about.  And they surround their features to be compatible with different mobile devices.  On top of that, you can also sync Producteev with the various services such as twitter to update your tasks!

Interview with Producteev CEO

I have been able to interview the founder and CEO of Producteev.  His name is Ilan Abehassera.

When I approach Producteev, I wonder if they are going to accept my interview questions with my current startup of this blog.  Never did I knew that Ilan is a really approachable person who not only answered all my questions immediately, he even added me in his LinkedIn account.  Wow! Thanks Ilan.

Here’re the questions I have interviewed on 2 April 2009:

1) When did you start to have this idea of starting this website?
Ans: I had the idea 2 years ago, and starting working on a prototype 1 year ago. I finally decided to start a company around it on July 8, 2008

2) How long have you been working on this site?
Ans: Since June 1st 2008, so 10 months

3) What’s your vision of this site?
Ans:  ”Producteev is building the first productivity platform developed on top of the tools we all rely on every day (email, IM, mobile, desktop, outlook, gmail, google docs,…)”

Group Task Management is still a largely unsolved problem : emails or IM are used as our main tool to assign tasks to colleagues, but we can all agree those are not efficient to manage and track tasks and projects. 

=> With Producteev.com, we help you centralize tasks, projects, internal communication and files by using whatever communication service you rely on.

4) What is the server technology behind?  Why is the server able to support all of our information in terms of space and bandwidth?
Ans: We are based on the LAMP stack, with 2 servers (1 web server + 1 mysql server) 

5) How many of you are working on maintaining this website?
Ans: 3 full time 

6) Will there be any always-ongoing research to further improve the system?
Ans: Of course, we have a huge roadmap ahead of us, and just recruited a mathematician that will build a better algorithm to prioritize tasks (but sshhhh, this is a secret!)

Conclusion

First of all,  I would like to thank Ilan for the interview in this blog post.  His other two colleagues include Aric Lasry (Co-Founder and Lead Developer) and Simon Dawlat (Director Product Marketing).  They have a lot of experiences before they work on this project with Ilan.  You may find out more about them in their “about us” page.

Looks like Producteev is progressing as I have just checked Ilan’s twitter that they are employing their first employee!  Congratulations!

Producteev certainly has potential as this very simple task management can be quite complicated when it involves two or more people.  I can tell you that because I have been working in an office and most of our time is to keep our tasks insync!  We’ll see how this project is going to evolve into!

HostMonster, is another web hosting company, which is run by Matt Heaton. Just over my previous post, I reviewed bluehost.  I just thought it should be right to get my review done with Matt Heaton’s hosting business since I am quite familiar with his business as his customer.

I have clients hosted in HostMonster

While I am working as an Internet reviewer in August 2007, I helped some clients of mine to start their hosting plans with HostMonster.  What’s the reason for hosting with HostMonster, instead of bluehost (since I was a bluehost customer myself)?  Simply because it is much cheaper.  We’ll see why later in this post.

Introduction to HostMonster

HostMonster is a hosting company, which provides shared hosting plans to customers.  And they only provide a one-size-fits-all plan.  That is to provide unlimited usage in everything except for the number of databases.

Basically, bluehost and HostMonster are the same.  For more technical review, please refer to my bluehost review.

No reason not to choose HostMonster

I cannot find a reason why you should choose bluehost.  Both are from the same company with the following differences:

1. Bluehost is much more expensive.  You have to pay $24 more than HostMonster.
2. Bluehost has a limit of 2500 POP3 accounts that you can create, while HostMonster has unlimited creation of POP3 accounts.  This is necessary for you to have your very own email addresses.  I can understand that you don’t need 2500 email addresses… But would you want to have a limitation if you have a choice of unlimited email addresses?
3. With the two outstanding differences above, you still get the same kind of support from them.  What are you waiting for?

Anyway, I have just left bluehost, and made my switch to another hosting company called “Media Temple” after being a bluehost customer for about 1.5 years.  To find out why, please go to see my bluehost review.

HostMonster Price Plan

Because the plans are so similar to bluehost, I just copy and paste the price plans from my bluehost review and change the prices accordingly below.

HostMonster comes with 5 price plans for different customers’ needs.

If you wish to try their plan for just 3 months or 6 months, you can sign up with the following plan:

• US$30 setup fee
• US$9.95 per month for 3 or 6 months
• US$10 for a new domain registration with bluehost (with an optional domain privacy for free)

If you are pretty serious with your online business, and wish to test your plan for 1 year, this is the plan for you:

• No setup fee
• US$6.95 per month for 1 year
• Free registration of a new domain name of your choice with bluehost (with an optional domain privacy for free)

If you are here to stay to own your online business, this is the 2 years or 3 years plan for you:

• No setup fee
• US$5.95 per month for 1 year
• Free registration of a new domain name of your choice with bluehost (with an optional domain privacy for free)

So you can see over here, the prices are basically cheaper than bluehost.  For 3 to 6 months, the prices are the same for both HostMonster and bluehost.  And for 1 year plan, you will pay $12 less when you choose HostMonster.  And if you choose 2 years’ plan, it will be $24 less when you choose HostMonster.

Payment is made easy by credit card or PayPal.

Conclusion

Shared hosting is a very affordable plan for those of us who are starting to embark on their online venture.  However, if you have connections which can bring in torrents of traffic for that one-time-offer, you may face problem serving the website to all of them and even cause your website to be down.  Pro and con here indeed.

Get Your Web Hosting Plan With HostMonster at only $5.95 Per Month

Bluehost is a web hosting company which is run by Matt Heaton.  It is basically providing affordable and reliable web hosting plans for small companies and individuals.  And today, it claims to be hosting over 775,000 domains.

I’ve been an ex-customer of bluehost

I had been a bluehost customer before, and I was quite pleasant being their customer for almost 2 years.  But I moved on to another hosting company about 5 months before my contract expired, and I will tell you why later in this post.

Introduction to bluehost

Bluehost basically provides one shared hosting plan (It means many clients sharing the same server.) only.  With this plan, you have unlimited hosting space (hard disk space in other words), have unlimited file transfer (unlimited bandwidth in other words), have unlimited domain names in the same plan, and up to 2,500 email accounts.

Bluehost President is very hands-on

Bluehost is using linux operating system for its servers.  It is a very reliable operating system, and Matt is a performance freak who will find out any server problem arises and solve the problem even at the very programming code in the kernel.

What does your web designer need to know about your purchase of hosting plan?

As for server scripts, it supports

• PHP 5,
• Perl 5,
• Python,
• Ruby / Ruby on Rails.

As for databases, they have

• MySQL 
• and PostgreSQL.

Please note that this is a very important point to take note when you are engaging a web design company to help you to create your website.

You will be using CPanel to manipulate your stuff

CPanel is widely used by many shared hosting companies.  It is very easy to use, and it has many friendly features for non-technical people to perform technical configuration easily.  CPanel seems to be everywhere, and I almost can’t find any other shared hosting companies using other software.

With CPanel, you will be able to install many types of website scripts very easily with a few clicks.  Blogs like WordPress and b2evolution, Forums like PHPBB, Mailing Lists, Image Galleries, Poll and Survey software, Content Management System like Joomla, shopping cart like OS Commerce, and so on.

What other features does bluehost provide?

It provides multimedia features such as video streaming, audio streaming, flash support, REAL audio and video support, shockwave, and midi.  You can also add your own MIME types too.

What about the support side?

Technically, it provides battery backup (in case of power failure), website backups (in case of file missing or corruption), and 24/7 network monitoring for server stability.

It provides live chat for visitors and customers who wish to talk to bluehost directly.  It also allows you to open a help ticket, and they will give you a better explanation and support in their replies, and they have their knowledgebase for you to look through the frequently asked questions.

And if you wish to speak to the customer support directly, they do have phone numbers for you to call as well.

How much does it cost?

Bluehost comes with 5 price plans for different customers’ needs.

If you wish to try their plan for just 3 months or 6 months, you can sign up with the following plan:

• US$30 setup fee
• US$9.95 per month for 3 or 6 months
• US$10 for a new domain registration with bluehost (with an optional domain privacy for free)

If you are pretty serious with your online business, and wish to test your plan for 1 year, this is the plan for you:

• No setup fee
• US$7.95 per month for 1 year
• Free registration of a new domain name of your choice with bluehost (with an optional domain privacy for free)

If you are here to stay to own your online business, this is the 2 years or 3 years plan for you:

• No setup fee
• US$6.95 per month for 1 year
• Free registration of a new domain name of your choice with bluehost (with an optional domain privacy for free)

It is pretty straightforward here.  The more you buy, the more you save.  My suggestion is to buy 2 years if you have the intention to start your online business.  That’s because a typical online business will only work from at least 2 years onwards.  You can treat these 2 years as your learning curve with low traffic coming in with only a total payment of US$166.80.  Shared hosting will always have its constraint because you are basically sharing the same server with many other bluehost customers.  Hence, once you have established higher traffic and you are experiencing poor server performance to serve your website, you know that it is time for you to upgrade to a more dedicated server!

Payment is made easy by credit card or PayPal.  If you are paying by PayPal, it can also utilize the credit card details you have provided when your PayPal fund has no enough to pay.

Conclusion

Like I said earlier, shared hosting has its own constraint.  Bluehost has a very strong founder at the back supporting the operations.  I can still remember the time when I decided to move out of bluehost.  That was because my websites have been suspended due to causing performance issue with the bluehost server.  At first, I was really angry about it because bluehost is stopping me from serving my customers.  But of course, looking at the big picture, the server may cause other hosting customers to be angry as well.  They will rather have me to be angry, than to cause many more to be angry.  I think it is a reasonable move and it is the right move to take.  But because I am also busy with my other projects, I have no time to find the root of the problem which the bluehost support has indicated to me.  It seems to be easier for me to copy the whole thing out, and paste it onto a new hosting server and get it up and running.  And I did so, and I am now with another hosting company called “Media Temple”.  And the reason for causing the performance issue is because I have used a single user to access the database from all my websites.  Anyway, the day before they suspended me, I was only upgrading my WordPress to version 2.7.  :)

Find out more about bluehost’s affordable and reliable web hosting plan today!