Friday, March 27, 2009

Become a Fan of Facebook Pages With a Text Message | GroupHelp.NET - Easy everything!

Become a Fan of Facebook Pages With a Text Message | GroupHelp.NET - Easy everything!

TECH ZONE: Mobile Marketing and Mobile Advertising At The Click of a Mouse

TECH ZONE: Mobile Marketing and Mobile Advertising At The Click of a Mouse

Friday, March 13, 2009

Don’t Buy FAPTurbo Forex Trading System: Giant Rip Off! Total Scam!

This is a warning. Be aware of a Forex Trading system called FAPTurbo that is being hyped all over the Internet, which is supposed to double your money every month. It doesn’t! I could never even get it to work. After tweaking and tweaking, I got a couple of trades out of it, never made a profit, and then it just quit working altogether. I religiously followed the instructions and set all the parameters perfectly as recommended in the manual.

In the sales hype, they tout the excellent customer support. Well, let me tell you, it’s non-existent. They do not respond, leave you high and dry, and keep your money.

There is supposed to be a 60 day guarantee no questions asked money back refund. Well fergetabout it. No one answers the phone. The voice mailbox on the answering machine is always full. No one ever returns calls. No one ever responds to email.

I have been trying to get a refund for weeks without any success. In desperation, I spent the money to send a registered refund demand letter to the New York City address listed in the Website. The post office returned my letter as undeliverable. Someone wrote on the envelope “The person and company have never been at this location.”

All I can conclude is that the entire operation is a flim flam Internet scam. Do not invest in this software. It did not work for me, and I doubt if it will work for you. There is no customer support. They do not honor their guarantees, and they do not exist at the address listed on the Website. Do not get involved as an affiliate either, for you will only be perpetuating the scam and will probably never see any compensation for your efforts.

Spread the word: FAPTurbo is a scam and a rip off. Steve, Mike, and Ulrich the supposed geniuses behind this fraud should all be in prison. Maybe the law will catch up with them, and you can help.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

How to forward text messages to your email inbox

clip_image002When I was asked to review TxtForward, I had to stop and think about why I would want my text messages forwarded to my email inbox. Isn’t text messaging handy enough without cluttering up an already overburdened email inbox?

TxtForward is an application that will automatically forward your text messages to any email address you specify. You can determine if you want inbound, outbound or both forwarded.

Scratching my head, I began to ponder the possible benefits of forwarded text messages to an email address. The more I thought about it, the more benefits I conceived. Let me share with you the results and invite your comments if you see other uses.

First and foremost, I think the major benefit would be as a backup record to important texting exchanges as in the case of a legal transaction for business arrangements or travel plans. There is a log of text messages created in the Windows folder, but it can only be read in the client that created it. Having an email backup is more useful and makes more sense.

I’m playing around with the idea of creating a novel or a play based almost entirely on text message exchanges. I think it would be a hoot. Can you imagine a play that would have two people texting back and forth never saying an audible word to one another? The scenes would change from home to office to car to restaurant and so forth throughout the day, but texting would be the only interaction. The audience would be treated to two huge screens each representing the actors’ cell phones.

The problem my collaborator and I discovered was that some of the messages had been inadvertently erased. Some of the dates were screwed up and out of sequence when the machine was reset unwittingly and the date not adjusted. An email backup would have saved the day.

Besides backup, this utility could have a whole range of stealth applications. For instance, what about cheating spouses? The program could be surreptitiously installed in the unsuspecting suspected spouse’s phone and programmed to route an email to your lawyer, private eye, or perhaps to the other guilty party’s email. It’s also a way to make sure your kids are where they are supposed to be and with whom they’re supposed to be. When I was young, I used to go to the library a lot, or at least that’s what I told my parents. I wonder if kids still do that. Parents would probably just tell them to look it up online.

I must say that when I’m sitting in front of my computer working, it’s nice to have my text messages streamed in with my email so that I don’t have to deal with my phone. I use a program called True Connect from raspberry software.com the places a tool bar on your Outlook ribbon that allows you to create and answer SMS messages. This brings up a wish list item for TxtForward, and that is to be able to reply to messages from an email client.

Another nice feature of TxtForward concerns those of us who have a whole stable of phones. As a writer/reviewer, I am always juggling several phones at any given moment. Some people have a private phone and a work phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if all your SMS messages could be directed to one depository, your email. Of course, with TxtForward this is no problem.

Another plus is that if you change phone numbers or get a new phone or SIM card, with TxtForward, your SMS records remain intact.

Now let’s look at security issues. Unfortunately, email clients that I’m familiar with do not allow the encryption of folders, files, and messages, so if your communications are sensitive, you are at risk. About the best you can do is password protect your whole email program, but this is a bother and isn’t really all that secure. Another suggestion is to create an obscure email account that you can password protect and use that for your messages with security issues.

clip_image004I have another approach. First you will need to get a copy of Resco Explorer, which is an amazing program in itself basically for Windows Mobile devices. It’s actually a whole suite of useful utilities. But of interest here is the fact that it places an item on your desktop right click menu button for encryption of files and folders. With this application installed on your desktop, you can then create a page in Word and simply drag your text message email over to the Word page taking care to keep them in order. You can annotate them and organize them. After you have saved the page you can encrypt it and password protect it. How’s that for a creative solution?

By the way, you have the choice of forward messages from the developer’s server or directly from you phone. Note that some services such as Gmail will not show messages sent to yourself. In this case, you would want to use Electric Pocket’s server or send them to another email account. Electric Pocket swears that you can have complete confidence and that they do not log, monitor or record messages on their server.

In conclusion, it seems that the usefulness of this application is only limited by your imagination. It should have a premium edition capable of sending to multiple email addresses. It would be nice if Electric Pocket addressed the issue of security too. TxtForward would be even more useful if you could respond to messages directly from the email program.

Take it for a trail run or make it yours for a mere $7.95. It’s available from www.electricpocket.com.

If you can think of any more helpful uses of this application, please share.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

National Public Radio (NPR) goes mobile

clip_image002 I’ve had a love/hate relationship with NPR over the years. There’s lots to like about NPR, for it has some great content and unique programming along with being one of the few sources of classical music. I like Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, and Car Talk with those zany brothers. I appreciate Fresh Air, All Things Considered, and the news.

On the other hand, NPR has some serious negative features in my opinion. On the weekends, it has that awful Celtic music, which is repetitive, boring, and banal. Who would choose to listen to that stuff? And yet it goes on and on, year after year. There must be some heavy-duty, deluded sponsor who keeps it going. Certainly there could be far better, more creative programming to fill that slot. For a supposedly commercial-free platform, I grow weary hearing about their sponsors incessantly, and solicitations for more sponsors.

An improvement I would suggest is broadcasting scrolling text for the music being played and the composer/artist. I certainly appreciate this feature when listening to satellite radio and many other AM/FM stations. News can be broadcast this way as well while multi-tasking with other programming. I suppose it could also be used for mentioning sponsors. Perhaps this will change when stations begin HD broadcasting. But then how many people will have radios capable of receiving HD signals?

Another problem with NPR is that it seems every time I turn it on there is a fundraiser going on and on and on. While it bugs me, I usually fork over a donation every year because I want to support what I do like. However, it is usually a major inconvenience to make a contribution. I would be much more inclined to do so and more regularly if it were possible to do on my mobile phone or with PayPal instead of having to write a check, find a stamp/envelope, go to post office—fergetaboutit. Dropping everything to call on the phone and digging out a credit card isn’t much better. Get with it NPR—go mobile.

clip_image004 Actually, NPR has gone mobile with a truncated version of its full Website. You can access it at www.mobile.npr.org. You’d think they would have used www.npr.mobi instead. There is a decent array of offerings there including “Local” News, Most Popular Stories, Story of the Day, Music, Politics, Business, Health and Science, Movies, Books, Interviews, Commentary, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me! Quiz. Opening each of these headings brings up mostly text stories, but if the word “call” is next to a story, you can get a recording.

There are some 35 “local” stations representing only the larger markets. If you want to listen to one of these stations, you can place a “call” to connect. This could cost serious money if don’t have the right data plan. Hasn’t NPR ever heard of Wi-Fi? You can search for a station in your area by zip code or city name, but chances are it will not be online if it’s in a smaller market. There is also an opportunity to donate to your “local” station. But, again, it’s only the large market stations. The joke is that they give you a phone number to call. NPR just doesn’t get it, and is losing out on the power of mobile phones as a tool for charitable contributions.

I think they need to retool their entire money-raising machine. It’s outmoded and annoying. I recently sent our regional NPR fundraising representative a proposal for an innovative approach to fundraising that would have generated a sustainable residual income. She didn’t even have the courtesy to respond. It’s a good thing she doesn’t work for me; she would be looking for another job without a recommendation.

What amuses me is that the mobile version does not even mention RSS feeds, Podcasts, links for iPhone/Blackberry, text only site, API archives, Newsletters, MobiRadio, or Mspot. What about Windows Mobile?

NPR seems to be totally unencumbered with any knowledge of the interactive possibilities of mobile technology. There isn’t even an opinion section on the mobile version, nor are there any blogs. NPR needs to hire someone knowledgeable in Web 2.0. NPR is missing so many opportunities. It should have a presence on all the social networks. It should be Twittering away with timely Tweets. It should be texting and allowing its sponsors to have contests, sales, promotions, conducting surveys, texting coupons, sending out optimized mobile sites, and MMS messages as well. What an incredible waste not to be building an opt-in subscriber base for fundraising and communication purposes. Shame on NPR. Does NPR stand for Neo-Paleolithic Radio?

I suppose congratulations should be extended to NPR for offering a mobile version, but it is so lacking in mobile technology features that it is pathetic. One does wonder about in what century the mobile site was built. While it is certainly a start in the right direction, there is much room for improvement, which I hope will be forthcoming before the next ice age. Meanwhile I shall restrict my NPR experience to listening via satellite radio over Wi-Fi.

SMS scams cleaning out consumers' bank accounts - Mobile Marketer - Messaging

SMS scams cleaning out consumers' bank accounts - Mobile Marketer - Messaging