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Popularity: 3% [?]

Wifi has penetrated lot of cities in US and other countries but it is still not everywhere and there are times when you have to be content with not being connected to the Internet. It happens on roads, some hotels, public places, cafeterias etc.

If you are a road warrior and have the need to be always connected then you should try mobile broadband cards or your cell phones. These cards fit into your laptop’s PCMCIA slots or USB slots and connect to the wireless carriers network to provide you with Internet connectivity. Cell phones can be hooked onto laptops and used to connect to the Internet.

Some options which you have in US are:

1. Sprint’s Mobile Broadband Card: providing download speeds upto 600 kbps
2. Cingular’s LaptopConnect—Wireless Laptop Solutions: features laptop connect cards and some laptops with the card built into them.
3. Verizon’s BroadbandAccess PC Card or BroadbandAccess Built-in or BroadbandAccess Connect: get a card and plug it into your laptop or buy a laptop with access built in or connect your phone to your laptop to get to the net.

If you are traveling to India, there is a similar option available:

1. Reliance NetConnect: PCMCIA card or USB option to connect to the large Reliance CDMA network.
2. Mobile Broadband Cards: you can use with carriers like Airtel and Hutch. According to discussion threads EDGE cards have better speeds than Reliance Card.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I was reading today’s issue of the Financial Times and came across this interesting article by Kavita Sriram where she outlines few technical indicators which can be applied to analyze stock market movements. I decided to dig in and find more about those measures and in this post I share what I learnt.

In this post I talk about the indicator: moving average.

Moving average

One of the easiest and most popular indicators to use and serves as the foundation stone for various other indicators. Using this measure charts are built which indicate if a stock price is on its way up or down. One can choose to buy if the stock price rises above its moving average and one can sell if it falls below its moving average.

1. Simple Moving Average (SMA): It is calculated by taking the average of price over a given number of periods. For example: a 5-day simple moving average is calculated by adding the closing prices for the last 5 days and dividing the total by 5.

   10+ 11 + 11 + 13 + 10 = 55

   SMA = 55 / 5 = 11

   

   (image source: stockcharts.com)

2. Exponential Moving Average (EMA): It is a weighted measure which gives more weight to recent stock prices. The weighting applied to the most recent price depends on the specified period of the moving average. The shorter the EMA’s period, the more weight that will be applied to the most recent price. For details on how to calculate this please refer here.

(image source: stockcharts.com)

Here is a video from YouTube which does some analysis on stocks and might provide useful tips on how to analyze stock prices:

Exponential moving averages may be prone to quicker breaks and some people use it to for shorter time periods to capture changes quicker. SMA is used by some people to analyze long term trends.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Recently I came across this post on Dosh Dosh about Technorati favorites exchange experiment and since I am a regular user of Technorati, I was intrigued by it and decided to participate in it.

Before going into the details of the contest let me give you some background information.

What is Technorati?

On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. Technorati rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and monitors these live communities and the conversations they foster.

What is Technorati rank and why is it important?

A Technorati Ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular weblog relative to other weblogs. The more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the Technorati ranking. The Technorati Ranking for a blog is displayed in URL Search results, Blog search results, and is displayed in the account profile for all claimed blogs.

Technorati rank is very popular in the blogosphere and thus it becomes a prestige thing. But besides that lot of advertising tools use this rank as a parameter while evaluating your blog for cost/per link of advertisement.

What is Technorati Favorites?

It is way of organizing your favorite blogs from the blogosphere. It is sort of like a bookmark but provides powerful features like:

• ability to see/monitor posts from your favorite blogs
• ability to subscribe to rss feed which gives you posts only from your favorite blogs
• ability to tag your favorite blogs

The Technorati Top 100 most favorited is a list of blogs according to the number of people who have favorited them on Technorati.

What do I achieve out of this game?

Objective of part I of the experiment is to land into the Technorati Top 100 most favorited blogs. This brings glory, name, recognition and more traffic to your blog.

Objective of part II of the game is to increase the Technorati ranking.

The rules of the game are simple and there are two ways in which you can participate (you can choose both):

1. Exchange favorites on Technorati 

you can do that by clicking here or the image below:

and then leave a comment to this post with the following pieces of information:

• your Technorati username
• your blog name

I will verify and add your blog to the list of my favorites blog on Technorati. My Technorati username is vikassah.

You might as well provide a link to directly add your site to my Technorati favorites by providing a URL link this: http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://www.technacular.com replacing technacular.com with your blog. You can get various types of Technorati favorites button from this page.

2. Exchange links on posts on this Technorati favorites experiment

Bloggers who are interested in participating in this game can post a similar post on their blog and provide a link to this post there.

I will monitor the trackback and add a link to your article on this post. Please email me with your post to expedite the process.

Read more »

Popularity: 6% [?]

I have three Joost invites to share. I will randomly select three people from the ones who comment to this post and give them the invites.

For those wondering as to what is Joost:

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the Internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping. You get great Internet features too, such as search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program - so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. And with no schedules to worry about, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you like - as often as you want. Joost is completely free, and works with most modern PCs and Intel Mac-based computers with a broadband connection.

Joost is still in beta phase. Check this video on what is Joost?

Just comment on this post and enjoy Joost.

 Update:

The winners are: (stay tuned for your invites)

• dwolko
• Madhur Kapoor
• chris

Popularity: 6% [?]