Today we review MyMustangSite.com (MMS) which is a niche social networking site for owners and enthusiasts of the Ford Mustang automobile. With the growth of sites such as Ning there is an explosion in social networking sites in specialized niches. MMS just hit 9600 members after just over 2 years on the web so there must be something unique about this mustang community to grow so fast in a crowded space.
What makes this site different from other Mustang communities? Well, the first observation is that Myspace community users will feel at home here. When you go to the site you have the ability to use the same codes that you use to build web pages on Myspace. Of course, you can install your radical dance tunes on your online stereo player, make new friends and promote your blog! Many of the other Mustang community sites run on bulletin board software such as vBulletin or phpBB are forum based and these packages simply don’t offer you the level of customizaton that MyMustangSite.com offers you.
We learned that MyMustangSite.com is a site for car lovers with a deep level of passion for Mustangs and disarming respect for one another. Just browsing the profiles for recent new members, I saw one new stanger (as MMS members call them selves) that is on his 6th Mustang in his 30s! How can that be? There was another member that joined recently that currently owns 3 Mustangs and is in his late 50s with the first one purchased over 30 years ago. Its clear that he knows far more about Mustangs than most of us ever will! I spent some time on the forums and didn’t see any of the flaming or foul language I am used to seeing on other boards. The tone on the forums is welcoming, friendly and helpful. New MMS members that post on the Newbz forum are greeted with a near avalanche of messages and my impression is that new members are embraced by the community. Read the rest of this entry »
We are fascinated by small, high tech devices that fit on our key chain or that have secret agent appeal. Maybe its in our DNA. but we love gadgets! Today we talk about the GPS tracking key from LandAirSea Systems. The advantages of this product versus other competitor products in the marketplace is that it is easily concealable, offers a high degree of position accuracy and provides compatibility with Google Earth.
How is something like this used? We read about the use of a GPS tracking device to solve a difficult criminal case that would have been impossible to solve otherwise without the vehicle tracking technology. The GPS device showed logs of the crime scene and investigators were able to recreate the murder scene and land a successful prosecution. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you find yourself pulling all nighters at the last moment to write essays? Are you time constrained? Do you wait until the last day to hammer out your school assignments? If this describes you, then we have the perfect service for you! The service has been designed for the busy student that has more money than time. We figured that some of the readers of CoolWizardz.com are students in undergrad or graduate programs.
This buying essays service guarantees that the assignment will be completed within 3 to 12 hours which is perfect for all of the serial procrastinators out there and I am sure there are milllions of us like that. If services like this had existed when I was a student, I am sure I would have been all over them especially around finals time when my friends and I would rather be out carousing than studying and writing essays.
There are a number of essay writing companies in the market place for these services, but this is one of the few that specializes in short notice customer writing which is why its so ideal for students who are eternally behind and leave projects until the last minute. Read the rest of this entry »
The Bang & Olufsen A8 Earphones are a great iPod accessory. The first you thing you notice is that they are stylish and trendy. They will fit right in with the Wall Streets crowd, the impossibly thin models, the Silicon Valley tech wizards, street punks, athletes, anybody really. The sound quality is outstanding, you get better clarity on the bass and treble than you would with standard ear phones. Not only this the fit is excelllent. You can be running, biking, climbing or any active sport without fear that they will fall off even in the most strenuous conditions. I take mine everywhere I go and switch it between my iPod Shuffle and Nano products.
Well, who is the buyer of this product? You appreciate style and design, You buy few things, but the things you do buy are high quality and durable. Not only that you would rather spend $160 on the earphones rather than the $8000 to go all the way and get the full Bang & Olufsen home stereo system. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the problems I have in communicating with my friends is that they all use different email applications: hotmail, yahoo, gmail, hushmail, mail.ru. There is no rhyme or reason to the applications they use and we can’t do instant messaging unless we both share the same email program. Skype is great, but you have to download software onto your machine which I try to avoid doing because this tends to clutter up and slow down my machine. I would prefer to use a free browser based web application if I can.
I encourage Coolwizardz.com users to try out www.ChatMaker.NET. The look and feel of the site is decidedly Web 2.0. The website is lightweight, downloads quickly and is simple enough to use that even my grandma or the friendly librarian that is not technically inclined could easily learn how to use the site. You type in a chat room name, press go and Presto! you have created an instant chat room that you can email to your friends or insert into a community or personal site for your instant communication needs. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a technology blog, but we still reserve the right to review low tech gadgets and gizmos. Not sure why, but I always had a weakness for gadgets that I could put together and take apart. And now as an adult it seems like nothing has changed. I seem to have a more intensive fascination when the gadgets are dangerous or have dangerous applications. Well, the super magnets at United Nuclear seem to fit the bill.
The magnet page on the United Nuclear site advises the casual reader that the super magnets are dangerous and that fingers and bones could be crushed. When they are shipped to customers they must be shipped via ground service since the magnets could interfere with an aircraft’s navigational equipment. In fact, an adult signature is required in order to take delivery of the magnets to prevent children from accidents.
How about checking if your dollar bill is real ? Modern US bills use magnetic ink and you should be able to move a genuine dollar bill around with your magnet. The magnetic ink makes it more difficult to counterfeit US currency and allows vending machines, ATMs and bill counters to function properly. Read the rest of this entry »
There are many companies out there today that offer these types of services and on the face of it many people would probably classify DTI Data as just being another one in a long line of interesting companies that really can’t accomplish great things. However, a closer look at DTI Data and in particular their hard drive recovery services shows that the company is indeed capable of great things and has been quietly doing them all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, as far as hard drive repair and recovery is concerned, DTI Data is really one of the internet’s best kept secrets.
Procedure
The procedure followed by DTI Data when they go about recovering information from your hard drive is a simple one that yields results more often than not. They start with a industry standard clean room to prevent dust and other contaminants from interfering with their mission and then they use proprietary knowledge about hard drive recovery to get information for you that very few other professionals would be able to do. The procedure itself might sound overly simplistic but the results that DTI Data has been able to get over time really do speak for themselves. In the vast majority of cases, no fees are charged until your data is completely recovered. Read the rest of this entry »
We have searched the internet looking for gadgets that will make us look and feel like 007. Its pretty unlikely that most of us reading this will match Bonds look’s or cash hoard (alhough there may be a few good exceptions and you know who you are), but at least the rest of us can buy some gadgets and this just MIGHT give us some of his coolness! Well, its cheap to dream . . . Surely the readers of this blog will remember the laser scene from “Goldfinger” when Bond is almost cut in half by a red laser. Well, we found a company that sells commercial lasers for hobbyists and gadget lovers. Some of the models we found from Wicked Lasers have the ability to burn plastics and rubber, light matches and pop balloons which are sure to make the owner feel like a secret operative on a mission. Is that cool or what? The laser beam is bright enough that it can be seen from miles away so this opens up a number of interesting applications: sending a morse code signal to a party far away, pointing out a constellation to a young astronomer or saving your life when you foolishly leave the group on your hiking expedition.
Once in a while my anecdotes about doing business on the internet are worth sharing, especially when you need guidance on picking a company to provide you with a mission critical business service. I had a baaad experience with a web hosting company. I signed up with a web host for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) account to support one of my high traffic websites. It is a Google Page Rank (PR) 5 web site with over 150,000 visitors a month and does some intensive database operations. For this I need a high end hosting account and preferably with industrial strength servers. About one week into my subscription my site was knocked off the web with no advance warning by the web hosting company! When I pressed they said that the behavior of site was taking down other sites on the dedicated server, in fact it was slowing them all down. Never mind that VPS accounts are supposed to be isolated from other accounts. In fact they refused to take on my site even on their dedicated server packages. Shoot! This was profoundly upsetting and my site was off the web for days until it was up and running again. Needless to say this is not a company that will win my business again for my web hosting needs. I will not release their name because I would prefer to let this memory die out and see no reason to stain their name.
With these thoughts in mind and the dangers of a low quality web host, I thought I would introduce a company with a reputation for reliability and stellar customer service. IM Hosted is well known for their first rate support and hosting solutions. When you compare them head to head versus other hosting providers, I found them to be very competitive and in reviewing their pricing plans conclude that they offer affordable web host pricing. They guarantee that the customers site will be carried off their servers in 80ms or less over any 5 minute period day or night. In addition, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee for customers that try them out. That’s impressive, confidence like that in the product is rare in this industry! Who offers that anymore? Read the rest of this entry »
I know too many people that have been affected by the economic malaise in home building, media, finance and other industry sectors in the United States. They say that NYC metro area alone has lost 100,000 finance related jobs. With this in mind we thought it would be a good idea to write a review of a jobs website which makes finding your dream job, or any job for that matter, significantly easier. Unlike many other job sites which require registration prior to use or fumbling through complex menus, SimplyHired.com is spartan with Google-esque efficiency. They do one thing and they do it well. They aggregate the job search results of employment and job sites across the internet direct from a search box. So the user only has to go to SimplyHired.com instead of visiting and querying many other job sites across the web. The database is comprehensive for finance jobs and software engineering jobs with over 100,000 listings each and they boast a total database of over 5.8 million jobs. I don’t know if the site could help our CoolWizardz.com users in Asia and Europe, but perhaps there could be consulting gigs for the more entrepeneurially inclined who are willing to reach out across the oceans for opportunities. If I lost my job writing for this blog, I think would be camping out on this site! As always we welcome your comments and feedback.
