Well, once again I am apologizing for being unbelievably tardy with my postings here. So we went to CES and it was unbelievably crazy. Some of these huge corporations have entirely too much money if you ask me. I think they may need to start donating to random people. Maybe they should start with me? No? Well, worth a try anyways. The booths were out of control, and I felt tiny everywhere I went. We were actually exhibiting there to showcase the TechSelector system. Our booth was quaint but so well put together. We definitely had a ton of fun talking with all kinds of people there. There is such an eclectic mix of visitors and companies, so it really kept us on our toes (plus after hours of standing on your heels in uncomfortable shoes, we were literally trying to stand on our toes or sit down as much as possibly) Yeeowsers, as inspector gadget would say.
So Im not sure if everyone here has been to Las Vegas. If you have, then you’ve probably heard of the fine hotel establishments, Circus Circus and Excalibur. Now, in considering these two places you have to understand that someone actually put millions and millions of dollars into producing hotel monstrosities centered around the ideas of a super cheesy circus (wow is all I have to say for this one), and a polyester version of medieval castle living and felt good about that decision. It blows my mind every time I go to Vegas. We stayed at the Excalibur this time. It was definitely a few rungs up from Circus Circus (which pretty much just gave me nightmares from just walking around the place…) Did I feel like a King in my castle? Well saying no would be an understatement on that one, but my wallet felt pretty content so thats good right?
Quite possibly the funiest part of our CES experience was our position on the hall floor. Consider the following points on this:
-We were in the Venitian sands floor.
-Apparently this is the floor where the lower budget booths reside.
-I would say a third of our hall was taken up by conglomerates of little Asian companies lumped together which we aptly labeled “the flee market” because it felt like you were walking in a open air Asian food market or something
-The three booths to our left and the booth to our right didnt show up, so we were just sort of floating out there in the middle of our aisle which was funny
-We sort of likened our position to being in the bad part of town

It was pretty fun though regardless, and like I say, we really did get to chat with a lot of people. We are looking at making the system into a sales tool for retailers which is what we really wanted to talk to people about. So Ill keep you updated on anything that happens with that. The other thing we are looking at is making some changes that would allow us to make TechSelector systems for any product, from cosmetics to toys, so Ill also keep you updated on that one.!

CHEAS
-Pete

Bonjourno,
First I’m going to take a minute and recount my non-tech Thanksgiving…
Well, Thanksgiving is over and done with and I feel approximately 8 pounds heavier. No joke, Im pretty sure thats the realistic amount of Turkey that I imbibed this Thanksgiving. I went the “I take everything to the next level and beyond” route this year and hauled a 29.8 pound Turkey home. It was the biggest one I could find at the store basically. (Mind you this beast of a bird was intended for a party of 8, and we didn’t even get through a quarter of it… HA well, LOTS of leftovers) I honestly could barely fit this thing in the oven. It had maybe an 1/8th of an inch extra room in there.
I enjoy cooking, so let me explain how I went about tackling my nemisis, the overweight Turkey. First I made a brine of 2 cups kosher salt, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 1/2 gallons of water, and a ton of different spices. Then I soaked the Turkey in that for about 20 hours while it defrosted. Then when it came time to cook her up, I stuffed the cavity with quartered onions, thyme, rosemary, salt/pepper. Then I made an herd butter rub for the skin. You mix rosemary and sage into 1 whole stick of sweet creme butter at room temperature. Then you take that and rub it all over the outside fo the turkey, and also seperate the skin and rub it all over between the skin and the meat as well. Throw it in the oven for 7 hours, basting it occasionally, at 350 degrees F. For the first 6 hours, cover it with tin foil, and remove the foil for the last hour to brown up the skin. Holy crap it was phenomenal. Ive never tasted turkey that good. The brine-soaking made an enormous difference.

So back to tech-talk. With Thanksgiving long gone and Turkeys everywhere taking a moment to sigh with relief, the Christmas season is fully upon us. How do I know this? Well I use a method called “walk-into-your-nearest-drug-store.” No one knows the seasons better than retail fronts that sell the accompanying possibly useless extras such as tiny santa keychain LED lights.
Now, with Christmas upon us, it is almost imperative that websites help people to make the decisions that they need to make. We find this is the perfect time to offer some interactive gadget buying guides to internet surfers. I mean, who doesn’t want help with figuring out which gadget is right for them, and the truth is that the vast majority of people trying to purchase things like digital cameras or printers, have no idea what they are really looking for. They simply know that they want it because they have heard from friends about how great that certain gadget is. Its a whole different story though when you get down to actually trying to make your decision out of 40 cameras…
By the way, did anybody see that Fusion pen? Looks right up my dad’s alley.

Cheers
-Pete

First off, here’s the link to the partner area on TechSelector.com where you can sign up:
Sign up and more Info
Hey guys whats up. Okay, this is tardy, I know. So Im going to finally explain the new service that we launched at Blogworld last week. Its essentially a portable version of our interactive buying guides, but here’s the thing, its not exactly like your run of the mill amazon store or api. We see the system that displays on your site as being one big very interactive advertisement that not only gives you a new PPC revenue stream, but also new space to place your own advertisments that you would normally serve. The PPC part of it is just sort of an extra bonus. What we are really after here is higher page impressions on your advertisements per user. See, a typical blog just doesn’t see a ton of page views/user, maybe 1-3 on average. But when you direct users through the buying guides, your going to see ad impressions of more like 6-10 per user. So you can take literally any advertisements you have, whether they are from an ad network, or a shopping widget, amazon ad, whatever… and place them in the ad spaces and serve them around the system.

What we are doing with this is on several levels, and thats why a lot of times people just don’t quite understand it at first. By placing one or several of these “interactive ads” on your site, you are giving your users a really cool service (that is actually going to help them!), increase your the ad revenue of your current advertisements, and also give you extra PPC revenue.
Its actually really simple to use and implement too.
First off, the system is javascript that you configure in the partner area, an then cut/paste into your site. This is a screenshot from the partner area:

Then you can click on the setup ads link and set up any ads you want to display in your ad space around the system. Once you set them up, you can then drag and drop them around the three spaces… its a really cool tool especially if you dont have a lot of programming skills. Check it out:

Okay so now that Ive done that, I can preview the interactive ad Ive created. In this case, Ive only chosen a few categories, Ive chosen to use the embedded version, and Ive chosen to put ads in all three ad areas. You also get a revenue share of any PPC revenue that is produced. That happens whenever a user clicks through one of the pricing links in the system. So check that out:

This is a ready-made solution for any blog, and yes I mean ANY blog. You don’t have to be consentrating on gadgets or on shopping for this to apply to your blog/website. There was a guy who came to our booth telling us about how he sold consumer electronics through his POLITICS blog… Totally unrelated subject matter, but everyone is interested in gadgets like these, especially because Christmas is coming up and its presents time!
Oh yeah, so another interesting point is this… We also have a referral program where you can get 10% of anything we make from new referrals for a year. You do that by just posting one of our “tagged links” and directing people through it to our registration pages. We automatically track everything.

So give it a try. Its ridiculously easy to sign up, its free, and the only thing it can do is help you on several levels on your site. If anyone has any questions, just email us at info@techselector.com

Cheers!
-Pete

Well, Blogworld was a ton of fun. I met a lot of great people, and found out about some really interesting things people are doing. I was really impressed with how well the show was put together for its first year. Aside from nice setup and asthetics of the show, it had a pretty impressive line up of speakers that I really didnt expect would be at a smaller show like this one. I really think that next year will easily be twice the size. There were a lot of company reps walking around, and one thing I definitely would have like to see more of is straight, pure bloggers walking around. Granted, I did get to talk to quite a few of them, but it would have been cool to see even more breadth of blogging backgrounds.
I think we represented the Select ta tha Tech pretty well. We had sort of an extremely multidimentional product that we were launching there, so it really took some explaining and demoing to get people to understand what we were trying to accomplish. Wait wait wait… I just realized that I havent even broken the news about our new blog revenue solution on our own TechSelector blog yet. That will have to wait for the next post though. Okay so where was I?… Ah yes. Explaining to people. It was funny because what we were explaining just totally clicked with some people, but others had a tough time grasping what we were doing there. I found the whole scene to be positive, mildly comical, and just plain fun. We were right next to the guys from Snap.com, and they were hilarious. (I ate a lot of their free mints, and let me just say that they were downright delicious…)

Well, its now somewhere around 2 am here. So its bedtime for me. My next post will likely be me explaining what we were actually at BlogWorld to unveil!

-CHeAs

Pete

Well, we are at BlogWorld, and I am getting ready to go set up our booth. If anyone is at the event, our booth is 227, so come check us out. We have a brand new revenue solution. Im going to do an in depth posting on it tonight sometime, but here is the link to information on it for now:

So, I have to apologize once again for my tardiness in postings here. I’ve been sort of unaccessable and out of the country. I believe that I will be going to a brand new show, and for all of you Bloggers out there, this one is going to be awsome I think. The first real convention for Blogs. Its called BlogWorld Convention and its going to happen at the Las Vegas Convention center on November 8th and 9th.
TechSelector and myself are going to probably get a small booth there. We have a new revenue solution for Blogs that we’ve been cooking up. Its pretty cool, I must say. We are going to be promoting that revenue solution at BlogWorld. I spoke with BlogWorld’s CEO, Rick, yesterday for about 45 minutes. He’s super cool guy, and he seems to be very into making this convention the best and most informative for bloggers that it can possibly be. He’s actually a blogger himself, and he started BlogWorld because he wanted to learn about how to make money properly with his own blogs by going to the tradeshow for it. He found that there was no such tradeshow though, so he and his partners started their own.
In any case, there are about 85 exhibitors right now (86 if you count us in ) and about 2000 attendees so far. I think its going to be a LOT of fun.
Hope to see everyone there, check it out at BlogWorld’s website

CHEE-AAS
-Pete

SO I got the Sprint broadband card for my laptop and Ive been using it nonstop. I use when I get gas, I use it when I go to the grocery store, and I’ve used it at the dentists office(they had to pry it out of my kungfu grip while I was in the checkup chair) The thing is GREAT. Its another one of those “I’ve been severely deprived up till now” kind of gadget accessories. I drive and type all the time. If you thought cellphones were distracting, try typing. I don’t know if there is a law against it, but there definitely should be.
You know those times when you get to a hotel expecting free internet service only to find that you have to pay 10 bucks a day for it?? Well say goodbye to those annoying days. Say hello to internet access all day any day.
There are several providers of the service. In my own research, Sprint had the fastest transfer rates and the most coverage. Verizon was next. I have talked to some friends that had verizon and they were all very happy with their service as well.
Broadband internet access is definitely the future of wireless internet. As transfer rates and coverage areas increase, broadband will definitely become the best option. The rates are quite high right now, mine is 60 dollars a month. However, I can see those rates decreasing as well in time.

Cheers!

-Pete

I was chatting with a friend recently, and we were talking about MP3 players and how much they’ve evolved. He insisted that all MP3 players should just incorporate the Apple “i” somewhere in them since the iPod is the first MP3 player that comes to mind when most people think of an MP3 player. “It’s kinda like Kleen-x,” he explained like a physics professor simplifying the definition of dark matter for a freshman, “Everyone knows tissues as Kleen-x now because they were the biggest brand in the business, so now when someone asks for a tissue, they always say ‘give me a Kleen-x.’” I quickly interjected with “no no, I say tissue and I also say please first.” The point here is that I couldn’t agree less with my friend on this. The high and mighty iPod is a great line of products, iPod mini, iPod micro, iPod etc. There are so many of them, and they are all great. We really need to stop for a minute though and realize that there is more to the MP3 universe than just the iPod family. There are all kinds of other great models like the Toshiba Gigabeat MEG-F60 for example. Its a great MP3 player and guess what. It doesn’t have iPod written on the side of it. There are all kinds of other MP3 players that are out now as well that are focusing on specific user types like the excersizing type who needs music to workout, or the file troll, who hoards as much music on one device as is possible.
So before you buy, check out your choices and understand that just because the iPod series is a great group of products doesn’t mean that it is the only group of MP3 players out there.

Clank! (Sound of me cheersing you with a beer stein)

-Pete

Well maybe it has a little to do with the printer. But what people don’t realize is that even a mid grade inket printer can print lovely images if you use the right paper and settings. So here is a tip - invest in good coated paper and follow the instructions on that paper for changing the settings in your printer dialog box. Coated paper is really important because it doesn’t let the ink seep into the paper and create oversaturated and blurry images. There are a few kinds out there - my favorite is actually the matte (not shiny) coated variety because you get very crisp, clean edges. The general rule of thumb for settings with coated inkjet paper is to choose the highest resolution possible (usually called “Best”) and the appropriate paper type. The main difference between the higher priced printers and lower priced ones (if the resolutions are in the same ballpark) is speed. You may have to wait a lot longer for those pretty pictures to print. But you can achieve similar quality if you pay attention to your paper.

I think it is time to upgrade in the printer category. I have one of the old HP 750 PSC. She’s a bit of a bear, but trusty and true. Sure, it takes up about a half of my desk space and I haven’t moved it for fear of a pulled back, but I have had the thing for 5 years now. Recently, I was checking around through the TechSelector for a new printer. Now, when I say printer I really mean “All in One” because I demand all those features in one machine. I was checking through some of them and saw a Tech Spec comment, I think by Desmond Dekker (I find that funny, because I can’t see the original old school reggae artist Desmond Dekker lending his two cents on technical specifications) that said something about how good we have it nowadays. He’s totally right. I mean can you remember when you had your office all decked out with one machine to print documents, one machine to “photocopy”(ha ha remember that word?!) things, another machine just for faxing, and yet another seperate scanner? I’m not trying to demoralize the idea of getting seperate machines to do certain jobs mind you, the point is that back then we didn’t have a choice. At least now when we get a seperate printer, its going to be a good printer or a specialized scanner, etc.
Anyways, back to my point. Printers are great these days. The new All in One’s are half the size, with way more functions and benefits. My bottom line here is going to be short and simple. Chuck the old, in with the new. (just be careful of that back when chucking the old, seriously they can be pretty heavy, and there’s nothing to brighten up your day like a nicely pinched nerve:) )

Thanks and Cheers,

-Pete