Commentto is an browser add-on utility(currently on Firefox and Chrome) that makes you save your excerpts and bookmarks that you want to read later or have them noted down while browsing the web and keeps them documented within your account on Commentto.com .You can also subscribe to saved excerpts and bookmarks of other Commentto users and vice-versa.

What problem does it solve ?

• Commentto mainly tries to provide a seamless, convenient way to document your excerpts and bookmarks in a manner that you can comment on them as well. Sharing of your recorded excerpts and bookmarks is also made possible through Commentto.
• As all your excerpts and bookmarks are stored on Commentto’s servers and completely independent of your browser’s local storage,  you can check and retrieve your bookmarks and excerpts from any machine, by simply logging to Commentto.com with your user account credentials.

What’s Cool!

• Site’s UI is done well. Light-weight and easy to get used to
• Browser extension available for two most relevant browsers of today, Firefox and Chrome.

What’s Not So Cool!

• When you login to Commentto, all your bookmarks and excerpts are stacked up within ‘Excerpts’  category only. All bookmarks should have a separate listing section in user account.
• There are hardly any users to subscribe to on Commentto at the moment.

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+

But as more services are proliferating into this emerging area, quantity is taking a toll on quality. Some services are quite average in their work approach but some of them are doing a better job in alluring their customers with right marketing approach, better service quality and active customer service.

Here’s a Mobile Recycling service that’s taking a different work approach and offering several unique things which one might not get otherwise. www.Cash4Phones.co.uk is one of the fastest growing services in U.K.  and offers lot of things that should make customers happy.

The basic service is very much similar to any other Mobile Phone recycling service. Users simply enter their mobile handset model and get the price that they can get if they send their handset to Cash4Phones. Once decided by the user, he’s simply required to send the phone by free post to Cash4Phones and that’s it !

Cash4Phones will get you the money transferred to your account or mailed to your address in just one day. This is one big advantage as many other Recycling companies make you wait for really long before you get your cash.

Here’s are some of the unique things you will get to have:

• Free online valuations
• Instant, secure payments
• Up to 65% on non-working mobiles
• Manage and track orders online

In the end, If I were to recycle my Mobile Phone in exchange for money, I would surely consider Cash4Phones.co.uk along with other service providers in the industry and make my final decision afterwards.

Cash4Phones has created a nice video to explain what they do….Check out this video(embedded below) about Cash4Phones.

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+

The next accountable expense that fluctuates over a wide range is Web hosting expenses. There are businesses that prefer procuring and maintaining their own servers. Timely upgrades, software licensing, dedicated manpower etc are among add-on liabilities that come with self-managed servers.

Web/Database hosting costs can go pretty high if you really want to own your servers and maintain them in your own premises. But that’s not the requirement for any startup that has just taken off. Most web startups(99.9%) are far from attracting traffic levels which are unbearable for standalone hosting service providers.

Hosting providers serve all kinds of hosting needs, whether ‘shared hosting’ for low traffic websites or ‘dedicated hosting’ for high traffic startups. As web hosting market is turning pretty competitive, some of the best web hosting companies are now amongst the cheapest web hosting providers as well. For finding cheapest hosting providers on web, stumble over some hosting reviews of various service providers (such as this one for Web hosting hub) and choose the one that suits your budget and needs. Remember that shared hosting is not ideal for high traffic websites and one should immediately upgrade to dedicated hosting plans once the website starts attracting big traffic spikes more often.

Apart from regular hosting service providers, yet another way to accommodate web hosting needs for cloud hosted web apps is services like Amazon EC2. EC2 allows scalable deployment of web apps and users are billed according to variation in traffic levels. In other words, the users will only pay for the bandwidth consumed by the traffic their web app attracts, rather than paying some fixed rental which may not be as cost-effective to the users.

There are other hosting options such as App Engine, more suited to hosting enterprise applications. Looking at current trends, Cloud computing based options are picking up fast. And as you explore more, you will realize more such options catering to different needs. That’s all for now about hosting for small & medium sized web startups.

Img source

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+

It’s the conventional way of creating one’s own website with a proper domain name (unlike free websites hosted on WordPress or Blogger), which is still the most effective way of creating an online identity for an individual. But for individual’s case, we often hear people saying that it’s too costly for everyone to maintain their Online identity, even when cheaper Shared hosting solutions are widely available on the internet.

In our opinion, it largely depends on the specific purpose of the individual. If the website is about an individual, there’s a good chance that the bandwidth and web space requirements will likely remain very low. Such a requirement can be fulfilled by cheaper hosting service providers out there on the web.

While exploring cheaper web hosting options, you can also have a look at DotEasy’s Domain & hosting solutions, where you can fulfill your .COM/.NET/.ORG domain registration(get it as cheap as $7.95) requirements and sign up for free web hosting solutions as well, which certainly looks a great deal for any starter.

At DotEasy, you also get to have some other advantages such as access to their repository of free web tools, applications and scripts, which will ultimately help you supplement your website with rich web applications, without much need of technical know-how.

In the end, we would emphasize on having a unique online identity for yourselves and we reckon that there is no shortage of cheaper web hosting solution providers like DotEasy, that will help you build your website without hurting your pockets.

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+

There’s a newly launched service called 140it(for a change,this time the twitter app isn’t “tw………”),that lets you shorten your tweets if they are exceeding the 140 character limit in twitter.They use the usual style of shortening the text,which is commonly used by us while sending an SMS or even a tweet.

For instance,we shorten ‘are’ with ‘r’ or ‘management’ with ‘mgmnt’ and now the same task can be done with this twitter based app.You just need to “drag ‘n’ drop” it in your browser toolbar and you’re done.If your tweet contains a web link then it will automatically convert it using bit.ly.It also replaces company names for their StockTwits symbols.

TweetShrink and Twonvert are the two apps that have been providing this very same service for a while now but they force you to go to their homepage.140it,on the contrary never lets you come back again to their site by tending you to add it your toolbar and get the things done there itself.

But,you have to access your twitter account for tweeting through 140it.So,for now,you can’t enjoy the comfort of using an app such as TwitterFox and simultaneously use 140it to shrink your tweet.Seeing the growing population of colliding twitter apps,it’s pretty easy to predict that we will soon have such text shortening service,right there in TwitterFox or similar app as well.

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+

Earlier,Apple appeared quite rigid for any App Store policy amendments,specially for Mobile web browsers but it seems that Apple is accepting the fact that stopping 3rd party web browsers from contributing into App Store might give developers as well as users,another reason to choose ‘Android Market’ or latest entrant ‘Palm App Catalog’ over App Store.

Astoundingly,just after Apple loosened out its policies regarding Web browser for iPhone,bunch of web browsers got approved(they all were probably waiting for this policy amendment).

It’s very clear that we will see more policy amendments in the near future from Apple as they are now feeling stiff competition from Android and Palm and can’t afford to leave any stone unturned.

On the other side,mobile versions of popular web browsers such as Firefox and Opera,inspite of all that SDK restrictions, will now find great opportunities to dominate iPhone userbase in fastest possible way.

This will surely cause serious damages to Safari’s dynasty within iPhone userbase but such a policy amendment was somewhat inevitable and seems quite justified from Apple’s point of view.

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+

Ever wanted to look at the web and its creations through other’s perspective…..Real time !

Hang On !

Here is a web app that lets you do it.It also lets you surf the website together with your friends,communicate with them as well as fellow surfers of that webpage through a unique text box that appears on the webpage the moment you start typing on the webpage provided the webpage you are surfing is thatsmymouse enabled.

What it offers…

• A way to share a common webpage between multiple netizens
• Track visitor’s mouse movements i.e., where they are clicking or browsing over
• Communicate with the people sharing the same page
• Invite people from various social networks like FaceBook,Myspace,Twitter,IM and get them to the thatsmymouse enable webpage

Why it can be THE NEXT BIG THING !

• Live interaction -As the users are on the same webpage,they are more probable to be like-minded.Resonant users on a common thatsmymouse enabled webpage would enjoy interacting with each other even more
• Bandwidth friendly – No worries for low-bandwidth net surfers.App works fine and doesn’t raise browsing hassles
• Ease of use – It is very easy to use for any web publisher to have it(fews lines of javascript) .The users also find it easy to use

Why it may prove to be a Web Struggler !

• Reverse Psychology – Thatsmymouse.com offers the users, a way to chat while surfing to add more interactivity but this can also serve as an interruption in the “Free Surfing” attitude and make users feel frustrated
• Usage Hesitancy – Privacy conscious users may find it uneasy to browse thatsmymouse enabled website as every movement of the user is being tracked by someone else
• Parasite – Majority of web apps are parasitic in nature.They lack their own identity.Hence,chances of turning out as a winner appear dearth for thatsmymouse

Prashant Sharma

Prashant Sharma is a Delhi based Entrepreneur who spent most of his college days polishing his marketing skills and went for his first business venture at 19. Having tasted failure in his entrepreneurial debut, he turned a Tech-enthusiast, specializing in web technologies later. Today, he heads AQR8 Media, a Digital Marketing and Technology firm and writes at TechPluto as well. Join him on Twitter , Facebook and Google+