Still no any good consumer research site
You still get deceived by marketing tricks
Recently I tried to find a cheap and reliable pre-paid cell phone provider. I visited several consumer research sites found using Microsoft live search, and alas no one site was any good. First at all many sites give you just limited list of providers (mostly GSM or just big names). If you try to get any comparisons, then you get immediately screwed. Let’s consider http://www.prepaidreviews.com/compare/. This site give you relatively complete set of providers. So now you can compare. However you can compare only 3 at once. So you need to know some name you familiar with quite well to start your research. Otherwise you will just stuck in too many combinations. Okay, let’s consider that you have a previous experience and just want to improve your current provider, like it was in my case and I tried to compare some other with VirginMobile. If I look on results bringing me, then I get quite confused, because the result provide you lowest minute price without surcharges. For example lowest cost of minute for Verizon is listed as $0.02, however if you try to figure out a real lowest cost of a minute, then you will get $1.01. Wow! Verizon marketing deceived you by 50 times! Do you think $0.10 a minute cost for VirginMobile is fair? Nope, It can cost you $20 and even more. So any consumer research site has to give you real owning cost in consideration of your usage pattern. And then, than less you use a phone, than more complicated mechanism of calculation true cost of a particular plan and provider for you. When you a heavy cell phone user with more than 1000 monthly minutes, then you can choose a provider quite easily without any research site, however if you usage is less and you would like to save money, then right selection of a plan and provider becomes more important. Your saving can be about $200 and more in a year. Conclusion: current marketing research sites are not proactive, they do not count actual usage cases and give a consumer hard time to get right decision. It looks like a right time to start working on an own research site.
Uploading photos from MediaChest to Picasa
It is here now
Thanks Google for an open interface to Picasa web albums. Now you can upload your photos directly to Picasa web album without installing Picasa. Since MediaChest is multi platform and web started, you can do it anywhere. Open MediaChest iNetPublishing options tab and choose HTTP, select Google authentication and enjoy HTTP publishing directly in drop box of your Google Picasa album.
Mystery of Vista Weather Gadget
No weather reports for multilingual people
Sidebar idea is really bright and certainly extendable library of gadgets makes Vista UI quite distinctive. Weather gadget appears in many systems now, including Linux, so I decided to try it on Vista. Alas, the control was not alive with a message - service isn’t available. Quick Live search gives immediately the problem resolution as the first link – change your format, location and system locale to US English. Sure it started working after, but why? I can agree that my location makes sense, although I do not understand why if I am on business trip I can’t see weather at my home. But system locale? I have many documents in some European language so setting system locale to something different than US English is very convenient. Many Asian people will agree with me as well. But why not Microsoft? No weather reports for multilingual people.