Amazon India Is Giving Away Free Ebooks

 
Amazon launched in India a week ago.  

Amazon India is now selling Books, Kindle eReader including all new Kindle Paperwhite priced at Rs 10,999(only WiFi) & Rs 13, 999 (WiFi + 3G), and Movies.

As part their inaugural promotion they are giving away one free Ebook every day for fifteen days. The deal is called "Free Kindle eBook Fortnight".

Amazon India: Free Kindle eBook 

Details of the deal:

Free Kindle eBook Fortnight
For the next two weeks Amazon.com will be giving away popular bestselling titles for free, one eBook each day -- for that day only. The free eBook of the day goes live at midnight (IST) and ends at 11:59 pm the same day. From biographies to business and travels to Tendulkar, they’ve all been covered; so be sure to bookmark this page or follow us on Twitter and Facebook to ensure you don’t miss any of the featured titles. Customers who have their country of residence set as India in their Amazon profile are eligible to avail this offer. This can be modified in the "Country Settings" section on Manage Your Kindle. Additional Terms and Conditions apply.

So, why wait? Go grab a free eBook. Today's(14th June) free book is Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia. I just got my copy!

The offer ends on 26th June. Go get a free eBook every day.

Happy reading!

Facebook Gifts

Facebook is introducing a new feature, Gifts!

This new feature allows you to send real gifts to your Facebook friends. When I logged in to Facebook this morning, I saw this:

Facebook Gift link on profile

A new entry called Gifts between  App Center and Games Feed. As you can see in the next screenshot, Facebook has made it really easy to send gifts to friends.

How to send gifts to Facebook Friends

You can send gifts in a few simple steps. Browse for the right gift to send to your friend, Add your message and send!

Facebook Wine Gift

They have a decent collection of gift items, from chocolates to cards to variety of wines.

What are the countries supported by Facebook Gifts?
According to their help page:

Counties supported by Facebook Gifts

"Please note, the ability to send or receive a gift is currently limited to people located within the United States. If you are located within the US, you will only see the option to give a gift to friends also located in the US."

So, if you are living outside of US, you have to wait for Facebook to launch this feature in your country.

Some interesting things to know about Facebook Gifts:

• You don't need to know your friend's address to be able to send gifts!
• Your friend won't see the price of the gift!
• They can choose a different size, color or style(if it's available)
• They can even swap it for another similarly priced gift before it ships!
• Your friends gets to decide the shipping address.

Sounds interesting right?  Go to https://www.facebook.com/about/gifts to watch introductory video.Or head to their help page for more information.

Happy Gifting!

What Are Testimonials

A testimonial is a statement made by a person in praise of a particular product or service. Wikipedia says:

"In promotion and of advertising, a testimonial or show consists of a person's written or spoken statement extolling the virtue of some product. The term "testimonial" most commonly applies to the sales-pitches attributed to ordinary citizens, whereas the word "endorsement" usually applies to pitches by celebrities. Testimonials can be part of communal marketing."

You can go to Wikipedia page for Testimonials to read more.

This is the first post in a series of blog posts I plan to write about the importance of testimonials for your business and personal life.

Testimonials play an important role in social connections. The first thing you do after meeting an interesting person is to find her on Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter. Reason to do that is very simple. You are always looking for some references while making new connections. Common friends, common connections, common social groups. Something to find a connection some how. You ask common friends about the new person. In summary, you are trying to get a handle on her Reputation.

Testimonials are important for both individuals and businesses. In this post, I will talk about testimonials for businesses.

Testimonials can be used as a powerful marketing tool. It's through testimonials that you tell the world what your past and current customers think about your business.

Due to the increased use of Internet, customers have access to many more tools and services than ever before. Internet users use Google and other search engines to find products and services. That makes online presence a must for even offline businesses. Whether your business is offline or online in nature, you have to have a strong online presence. 

Search engine visibility and a good page rank are crucial for getting prospects(prospective customers) to your website. However, having more people visit your business website is not your end goal. The end goal is to make them trust your business and do business with you. It could be purchasing a downloadable software package or signing up for a web service. This is where Testimonials come into picture.

In future blog posts, I will be writing more on testimonials.

Uhuru Lifetime Free Hosting Competition

Uhuru Software has announced a competition for websites. Winning 5 websites will get a Lifetime Free Premium Hosting from Uhuru. Winners will be decided by community voting.

According to Uhuru:

Further information regarding the contest, and where to vote, will be announced on the Uhuru e-mail community discussion list. 

RULES OF THE CONTEST:

- The nominated web sites with the most votes from the community will win lifetime free premium hosting on the Uhuru service.
- The owners of winning web sites will be invited to be guests on the Uhuru podcast show.
- Nominated web sites must be hosted on the Uhuru service.
- There is no restriction on the type of web site eligible for the contest. Just some examples are:

• A mobile Android app that just uses the Uhuru service as a back-end database.
• A customer resource management web site for managing sales engagements for your own products.
• An application for managing students and grades at a college.
• A blog about cuddly dogs.

- Nominations for web sites engaged in illegal or immoral activities will be rejected and cannot participate in the contest. Read the Uhuru service terms of use for details about which activities violate our hosting policies.
- The voting tool will require that voting participants register to vote. Only one vote per registered account is allowed.
- You are allowed to nominate any web site running on the Uhuru service whether it is your own or someone else's.
- You can nominate as many of your own web sites as you choose.
- Nominations which leave incomplete information on the registration form will be rejected.
- Lifetime hosting is defined as the period of time that Uhuru continues to offer a hosting service for web applications. As long as Uhuru is operating a hosting service a site with lifetime hosting will continue to get free service.
- Premium hosting is defined as 1GB RAM, 512MB shared file storage and 512MB shared database storage.
- If a web site which exceeds the free resources offered in the lifetime premium hosting offer should win the web the contest the free hosting prize will be extended to whichever site the owner of the winning web site chooses. In other words, there is no obligation for the winning site itself to be the site which recieves the lifetime free hosting. The free hosting prize can be transfered to whichever web site the winner chooses.
- The URL submitted for the nominated web site does not have to be in the uhurucloud.com format. It can be a private domain that has been redirected to uhurucloud.com.
- Uhuru reserves the right to extend the voting period.
- A web site must receive at least 10 unique votes to win the contest.

Important dates to remember.

Voting starts: Monday, February 20th, 2013.
Last date to submit nominations: March 23rd.
Competition ends at 12:00pm Pacific Time on March 29th, 2013.

Good luck.

Google Health Is Dead!

 If you have ever signed up for Google Health, you probably know that Google is shutting down it's Google Health service. So, you are left with a very few days to back up any data you may have in your Google Health account. I recently got an email from The Google Health Team and followed the instruction to download all my data and deleted my account. In this blog post I'll walk you through this process.

Here's the email I got.

This is an important Google Health service announcement. You are receiving this email because you have an active Google Health account.

As we announced in June, 2011, the Google Health service will be discontinued as of January 1, 2013. After that date, any remaining data in your Google Health account will be permanently deleted, and you will no longer be able to access or download any data from Google Health.

If you want to keep using the data you have stored in Google Health, you will need to take action before December 31st, 2012 to download it or transfer it to another online health service. We've made this easy for you. All you have to do is:
 - go to the Google Health site at https://health.google.com
 - log in with your Google account
 - follow the on-screen instructions to download your information and close your Google Health account.
For more information, see our help center article at http://www.google.com/support/health/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347989

Note that, if you log in to Google Health, and are not given an option to download your data, it means that you do not have any data stored in Google Health and you do not need to do anything more.

If you have not retrieved your Google Health data by January 1, 2013, it will be removed from Google's systems and permanently and irrevocably deleted. Google will be unable to recover any Google Health data for any user after this date.

For more details on the discontinuation of Google Health, see our blog post at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-google.html, and see answers to frequently-asked questions at http://www.google.com/intl/en/health/faq.html.

Note: you will continue to receive periodic service announcements as long as you have an active Google Health account. If you do not wish to receive further announcements, simply go to https://health.google.com and follow the process to download your data (if desired) and delete your Health account.

Thank you for your support and use of Google Health.

The Google Health Team

1. Go to https://health.google.com and login with you Google account.
   
2. Now you'll see a 'Download as ZIP' button.
   
3. Click on the 'Yes, download' button. Open the downloaded file and verify the contents before continuing.
   
4.  Now that you have safely backed up your health data, it's time to close the account. Click on "Close my Google Health account" button
   
5. Select the check box and click on "Remove Google Health" button.
   
6. That's all! Make sure you keep the downloaded health records in a safe place!

Cheers!

Facebook Year In Review

Facebook just introduced a new feature that showcases 20 important stories from your timeline. This personalized custom story is called Year In Review.

When I logged in to my Facebook account this morning, I saw this new box:

Facebook Year In Review

The box has a link that says "See Your 2012 Year in Review" Look back at your 20 biggest moments from the past year.

Clicking on the link took me to a customized page, that looked like this:

Facebook 2012 Year In Review

The page shows 20 selected stories from your timeline. A big popup shows a familiar Share button that lets you share your Year In Review on your timeline. I noticed the URL of this page. It's
http://www.facebook.com/yearinreview/<my-user-name>

I did some experiment and figured out that

• You can see your friends Year In Review by using their facebook id in above URL
• If you are logged in, http://www.facebook.com/yearinreview/ will take you to your Year In Review(there's no need to append your facebook id.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the pop up has one more link See Facebook Trends from 2012. That will take you to page listing Facebook Trends for 2012. Check it out. It reveals some special and interesting stories about how people use Facebook in extraordinary ways.

I liked this feature. Click here to see YOUR 2012 Year In Review. Kudos to Facebook for this.

Updates To Facebook Data Use Policy & SRR

Facebook today announced some proposed updates to their Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR).

A new document on their Facebook Site Governance Page announces the proposed change and also gives us links to the new documents.

Excerpt from the document:

Today we are proposing some updates to two documents which govern our site: our Data Use Policy, which explains how we collect and use data when people use Facebook, and our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which explains the terms governing the use of our services. These updates provide more detailed information about our practices, reflect changes to our products, and improve how we conduct our site governance process.

          ..................
          .................

• Ask the Chief Privacy Officer. We’ll be launching a new feature on our Facebook and Privacy Page to let you submit questions about privacy to our Chief Privacy Officer of Policy, Erin Egan.

• Facebook Live Events. Erin Egan will host webcasts on a regular basis to address your comments and questions about privacy, safety and security.

As you can see from the document they are adding a new feature to address questions about the changes. The document highlights the following changes:

• New tools for managing your Facebook Messages – replacing the “Who can send you Facebook messages” setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.
• Changes to how we refer to certain products, like instant personalization.
• Reminders about what’s visible to other people on Facebook. For instance, when you hide things from your timeline, those posts are visible elsewhere, like in news feed, on other people’s timelines, or in search results.
• Tips on managing your timeline. For example, you can use tools on your timeline or activity log to delete your own posts, or you can ask someone else to delete a post in which you’re tagged.

However to know what all has changed wrt Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), we have to read the new documents.

Use the following links to see the proposed changes. You can leave your comments on those pages. 

• Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities 
• Proposed SRR Redline(PDF)
• Proposed Data Use Policy
• Proposed Data Use Policy Redline(PDF)

Click here to comment. Remember that these documents are open for comment till 9:00 AM PST on November 28, 2012. Make sure you read and understand new documents.

Happy and safe Facebooking!