People associated with online journalism and professional blog writing will relate to this. While experienced ones may have already found a way out, many beginners might not even be aware of the hindrances that affect their online productivity. They start putting exhaustive efforts to better their figures but hardly do they know what’s causing the real trouble. Based on my personal experiences, here are 5 major things that bring your enthusiasm, and hence productivity, down.

1) Social Media

Yes. Paradoxical, but yes. You sit in front of your computer, prepping yourself for some real work, but you keep your Twitter client and Facebook running in background. Yes, you are following some awesome people on Twitter and hope to receive the last minute update so that you can tweak your work (let’s say a blogpost) accordingly. But this affects the quality of your work bigtime. Anything that you do requires ‘focus’. And the lack of it causes mediocre quality work which leads to bad productivity. As simple as that. Close these applications and use them later to promote your stuff.

2) Analysis

“Too much analysis leads to paralysis”. I have seen people analysing (or simply checking out) their Google PR, Alexa rankings, number of incoming links to their blog, their adsense earnings, analytics, Twitter mentions, ‘Likes’ and comments on their FB fanpage almost a dozen times in a day. While it’s a great ego booster to see those graphs go up and down, it seriously affects your work. I have a rule of thumb – analyse anything and everything only in the last half an hour of your day, just before packing up.

3) Keeping an eye on competitors…all the time!

See, it’s a human nature to consider only those people as your competitors who are slightly ahead of you in the game. Always. Once you surpass them, your subconscious mind removes them from the list to add new competitors. So at any given time, you feel like you are behind someone else. Now, in a way it’s a good thing that keeps you motivated. But keeping a close eye on their progress all the time makes you feel less confident about yourself. You try to follow their exact footsteps and become less creative. Here you need to give importance to your intuition about what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. Only then, your productivity will show some rise.

4) Choosing the wrong time

No, it’s not about working at the most suitable time of the day when you feel energetic and enthusiastic. It’s about being smart. It’s about analysing the rush of internet users at different times. Often, people do not study the internet properly and then crib about not getting enough exposure. If you are publishing something online, make sure you do that in the peak hours when the traffic is huge. Your content is more likely to be picked up then. Publishing something important at 3AM or on weekends will obviously get unnoticed. Try to spread your best works on weekdays, just before noon. Avoid Saturday evenings at all costs. Keep in mind that even if you work hard for the whole day, but it doesn’t get noticed, your productivity still remains zero.

5) More than necessary sources of information

It is quite obvious that people tend to stuff in as many news and information feeds in their feed-readers trying to get the most of it. But before you can even realise, you would have made an information hodgepodge. You try to extract relevant information from it and before you make any sense out of it, you feel exhausted and frustrated. Your productivity suffers. I tend to analyse my feeds every month or so and keep those blog feeds which provide a particular information at the earliest. The rest with almost the same story, I remove them.

So these are the hindrances to productivity that I experienced and my views to tackle them. What hindrances do you face? Share your thoughts

Last year Microsoft released its flagship product Windows 7 and it’s been doing really great. And by great I mean seven Windows 7 copies are being sold every second. Amidst all the excitement, Microsoft mistakenly leaked some docs that shows the anatomy of the new version of Windows – Windows 8. Currently the information is too scarce to strongly claim anything about the new Windows but ofcourse, it’s enough to set the imagination rolling.

When?

According to the documents, Microsoft plans to deliver Windows 8 around June, 2012 with the first betas around June, 2011. Presently, Windows 8 is supposed to be going through the planning phase shortly after which, the list of features will be decided. By Dec 2010, the core development based on those features is expected to commence followed by internal code sharing among dev units to make a considerably functional beta product by June 2011.

Next comes, obviously, the bug fixing phase and tweaking the features based on the feedback from the betas. The final product is expected to be ready by June 2012.

Platforms?

Microsoft aims to develop Windows 8 for 3 different configurations, the ‘Lap PC’ which includes laptops, netbooks and tablets, the ‘Workhorse PC’ which I believe to be enterprise PCs used at workplaces and ‘Family Hub PC’ which are home desktops.

What comes alongwith?

It is confirmed that Windows 8 will feature Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Live Wave 5 will roll out simultaneously with the release of Windows 8.

Windows App Store: Similar to the ‘Software Center’ in Ubuntu or the Apple app store, Microsoft aims to launch Windows Store where users can find and download hundreds of application software certified with full compatibility with Windows 8. The app store, what I believe, will also feature web applications and also the applications for the Windows Phone 7, making it the one stop shop for everything Microsoft.

Multimedia:

Microsoft will naturally improve and enhance multimedia in Windows 8 by providing native support to 3D Video, AVC HD, various MP4 web formats, H.264 encoding, MPEG2 decoding / encoding and also HTML5 audio/video.

Hardware support: 

Windows 8 is expected to natively support latest hardware, devices and standards including USB 3.0, Bluetooth 3.0.

New Sensors and Location:

We saw a great leap in man-machine-location interaction in Windows 7 with sensors. Microsoft aims to improve it to another level. Windows 8 will use a new inbox location service, called ‘Orion’, to find geo-location with 50-100 meter accuracy. If you have a dedicated GPS hardware, the accuracy further increases to an unbelievable 3-20 meters.

Support for other sensors include facial recognition, orientation, accelerometer, attention detection, human presence and many more. The leaked document further states the scenarios where these natively supported sensors would make life easy. Imagine walking into the room and the PC automatically detects your presence, starts itself, does a facial recognition and logs you in your own user account. And when you get up and go away from your PC, it shuts itself down…all automatically!

More details about Windows 8 are sure to surface in the coming weeks. All the information above has been gathered and compiled from the information available from Mashable, MSFTKitchen, Paul Thurrott and CNET. We will keep you informed about the latest Windows 8 news.

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Let me start off by saying that there was a time when websites were made for desktops and laptops. Hours and hours of web designing followed by weeks of debugging to make it look presentable on 1024×768 resolution on Internet Explorer. Fast forward to 2010 and the whole perception becomes null and void. We have already reached a point in time when even hand held devices are getting saturated.

While your site may look awesome on a desktop, it might not even load on a mobile phone. With increasing availability of smart phones, it has now become inevitable to build a mobile version of your site. Looking at a broader picture, people will eventually leave desktops and laptops and completely turn to hand-held devices to quench their daily internet appetite. And this will happen very very soon.

Recently Opera claimed to offer their services to 100 million users out of which 50% are mobile phone users. The Internet Telecommunication Union forecasted long ago that mobile internet users will reach over 1.7 billion by 2013. With the advent of devices like iPhone, iPad and technologies like 3G, this target seems ridiculously easy. [Some more mobile internet usage data here].

I have been using Woopra for TechExplorer’s traffic analysis for about a year now. It gives me detailed information about the visitors. A part of that information includes the screen resolution of the visitors’ devices. I have noticed that the visitors using devices with smaller screen resolutions (mostly 480×320) have constantly increased in the past 6 months. This urged me to have a separate mobile version of my site – http://m.techexplorer.in.

In this scenario, you simply can’t ignore the mobile platform while designing sites. Making a mobile version of a site is just as important for a normal site owner as it is for corporate big daddies. And to simplify your task, there are many options available. There are services like Mobify, Mofuse, MobilePress, etc. and WordPress plugins like WPhone, WordPress Mobile Pack, WPTouch to make a mobile version of your site. And the best part is, most of these services are free. Why not use them?

When you use these services, they will automatically redirect your visitors to the trimmed mobile version of your site. This will make your site load faster on their mobile devices and will eventually make them happy. Great browsing experience is one of the critical factors on mobile phones. Fancy banners and other multimedia magic is of second priority here. Also, this will make a good professional impression on your visitors.

I have always believed that visitors, essentially, need just the vital information that they are actually searching for and not the eye-candy. When Godzilla visited NYC in 1998, Dr. Nick Tatopoulos said, “Give him what he wants, and he’ll come to you.” This stands true for your visitors too. Provide them with the information that they want and they will become your loyal returning visitors.

What are your views on mobilizing your site? How much important it is to you to have a separate low-bandwidth version of your site? Do share in the comments!

Microsoft recently rolled out the IE 9 Platform Preview which has created a sort of anticipation within me. Not that I am a hardcore IE fan but being a Windows user since stone age, I love it when something new comes out of Redmond. So I thought of teasing the so-called winboys and made 12 high resolution (2560 x 1600) IE 9 Teaser Wallpapers.

6 of these wallpapers have a teaser line written on them; the rest are without it.

Preview:

Download IE9 Teaser Wallpapers / 10.8 MB

PS: Do not hotlink to the zipped file. The download link will change frequently so provide a link-back from your website/blog instead.

Jan 27 was the day when iPad happened and shortly after we caught a glimpse of it’s look-alike on a French company’s website – The ExoPC Slate and this is what it looks like:

Too much of resemblance to the iPad eh! Even we think so. Now here’s the interesting part. It just doesn’t look as awesome as the iPad, it even claims to perform as good as (if not better) than it. We’ve got the specs of the ExoPC Slate and would love to have a one on one with Apple’s iPad.

* 32 GB model costs $599 ($499 + $100).

** 64 GB model costs $699 ($499 + $200).

More information about the ExoPC Slate can be found at the official website.

The ExoPC Slate surely does have some strong features to put one into a dilemma, like the Windows 7 OS, the webcam, SIM Port, 2 GB RAM, USB ports and not to forget the widescreen experience. Both iPad and the ExoPC Slate will be out roughly at the same time.

So finally it narrows down to what you feel about the ExoPC Slate. Do you think it can give a tough fight to Apple iPad?

Avast is one of the well-known names in free antivirus category since years. It has been repeatedly ranked amongst Top 3 free antivirus products and now to add to its glory, Alwil has slipped out its stylized revamped avatar, Avast 5.0.

I have been really happy with Avast and am using it since my college days. Mainly because it is free, less annoying, can be updated offline with installable virus definitions and shows no pity to the bad guys. So obviously when a new version comes out, I am urged to speak a few words about it.

New Interface:

Avast 5.0 Beta has a lot of visible changes compared to previous versions. The new interface is awesomely intuitive, everything’s handy and has a great work-flow. Unlike version 4.7, if you remember, the main interface is large, has most of the crucial options visible at all times. However, it gives a faint impression of Kaspersky’s interface but that’s not a big deal when under-the-hood functionality is way different and simple too.

Ergonomics:

As you can see in the above screenshots, the interface is ergonomically designed keeping ease of use as the top priority. Large buttons with collapsible menus make is easier to perform tasks. During the scan it also provides additional real-time information about the current activity. Even the virus definitions update and the program modules update has been differentiated well. In earlier versions, I have seen people getting confused amongst them because of lack of proper differentiation.

Additional enhancements:

When a program does a makeover, at least I look for some additional features beside optimization of the regular ones. Alwil added new and useful functionality like the Silent/Gaming Mode and the Real-time graphical representation of Shields.

• Silent/Gaming Mode, once activated, stops popping of messages and notifications. This comes as a life-saver when playing games or watching movies.

  

• The Real-time shields option, reminiscent of Kaspersky, gives real time graphical representation of the scanning activities performed by its shields.

  

• Apart from this, the speed and the efficiency of Avast 5.0 Beta indicates better heuristics and many other under-the-hood changes. Not only for the local files, but Web activity is thoroughly and efficiently monitored real-time.

  

TechExplorer verdict:

The features offered by the new Avast 5.0 are really too good to be true for the $0 price tag. One can take the liberty to compare Avast with most paid antivirus programs out there. Considering it still in the Beta and the features offered, Avast 5.0 Beta deserves a generous 4.2/5 

Download Avast 5.0 Beta

I think Microsoft has developed a ‘thing’ for music since Windows 7 launched. Some weeks back, we did a post on Microsoft’s Win741 campaign and provided free MP3s of songs featured in Microsoft videos.

Now recently Microsoft declared its sponsorship to ReverbNation’s Playlist 7 program whereby music fans like you and me can vote for and download 7 free tracks every week. For those unaware, ReverbNation is a major marketing platform for more than 500,000 music artists, labels and managers. It basically gives exposure to immerging music talent.

It so goes that music fans vote for 7 artists every week to help them make it to the ‘Playlist 7’ and get further promotion and of course, some bucks. In return, the fans get to download 7 of their music tracks every week. The first 50 tracks are already available for download. So it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

Mr. Jed Carlson, the Co-Founder of ReverbNation said,

To vote for the artists and download some really beautiful tunes click the link below:

Download from Playlist 7

If you have checked your Gmail account recently then you must have noticed a new option being displayed in the top-right corner that says, ‘New Gmail Tips’. So finally that is Google’s official two-cents on how to use Gmail efficiently.

Once you click the link, you will be redirected to the page where you can learn karate new Gmail tips. Although many of these tips are already well known, you may find some hidden gems that can really make you a Gmail Master ;) Click the link below.

Become a Gmail Ninja

If you own a cell phone then I am sure you wished to reverse check a phone number atleast once. It may be a mysterious blank call or someone you want to secretly stalk. The reason is irrelevant but you wanted to know the location of the phone number right? Well, reverse phone number search or location tracing methods are probably as old as the invention of phones but they were not for individuals like you and me…untill now!

TP2Location is a web-based application that lets you trace out the geographical location of almost any phone number across the globe. Just visit TP2Location website, enter the phone number in a textbox and click a button. The web app traces out the geographical location of the phone number along with the wireless carrier details. Cool, if you were to ask me. I mean this much information for free, right?

Entering the mobile number:

TP2Location fetches results:

When I tried some of my known phone numbers using the format +919xxxxxxxxx (+91 for India) it gave me results upto state level precision along with the wireless carrier.

The results for US phone numbers are even more precise. Considering the service still in its Beta, this is not too bad at all. I expect the results will be narrowed down further as the service evolves. For now, you can check it out by clicking the link below. Digg it or Tweet about it to share it with your friends and followers.

Visit TP2Location website

Quick-tip

Yes, I know it’s a long title but well that’s exactly what I am going to write about. First of all, Merry Christmas to all my readers and my apologies for no new posts for 4 days. It was in these holidays that I really needed to forward some of beautiful greetings that I received from my friends to my family members. I thought there should be a way to forward specific mails to a different email address in Gmail. It didn’t took me a while to figure it out. Here’s the small trick so you don’t have to goof around:

Gmail: Auto forward specific emails to a different email address

» Login to your Gmail account and click ‘Settings’ on the top-right.

» Click ‘Filters’ tab > ‘Create a new filter’ (located bottom-center).

» Now choose the criteria for which you wish to forward an incoming mail to  different email address. Here the permutations and combinations are many. Fill in your desired criteria and click ‘Next Step »’ button.

» Here, check the ‘Forward it to:’ option and click ‘Create Filter’.

There you are! Obviously this filter won’t forward older emails falling into the criteria you specified.