Celebrating a successful one complete month (May 2007) of Tech Spikes, taking a que from Kumiko, we have decided to share our excitement with our readers and are holding a Raffle Draw and giving out lots of cash and other prizes as well! Its simple and anyone who is everyone can take part.

First Prize: $50 cash via PayPal + Site Wide Link (Anchor Text of your choice) + One Banner Ad for one month effective immediately after Raffle draw.

Second Prize: Site Wide Link (Anchor Text of your choice) + One Banner for two weeks after 1 month of lucky draw results.

Here is how you get tickets for the Draw

100 Tickets: A post on your website/blog with one link to the domain http://www.techspikes.com using the anchor text ‘Latest Tech News‘ and one link to this post using any anchor text. For example:

I came across a site called Tech Spikes that features the Latest Tech News! Tech Spikes offers cash prizes, site wide ads and back links to your blog. Read more here!

You are free to write a full fledged review, not exceeding 300 words though. You are also welcome to link to any number of our other posts.

80 Tickets: Add Tech Spikes to your blogroll

60 Tickets: Make Money by signing up to Text Link Ads

50 Tickets: Subscribing to our feed

Once your are done, shoot us an email at promo@techspikes.com with all the necessary details and you are in!

This is a great opportunity to gain back links and promote your site which will help you get a better PageRank and Search Engine Rankings. You can enter in as many ways and times as you like.

We shall be keeping track of how many tickets each entrant has got and the winner will be drawn at random!

Hurry! We’ve got ‘early bird’ prizes. There is a ‘100 ticket’ bonanza for each for the first 10 entries. So what are you waiting for? Write a review, add Tech Spikes to your blogroll, sign up to Text Link Ads or Subscribe to our Feed and start accumulating tickets Now!

Our decision is final. All the Best Folks!

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Hi!, If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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FiOS is a fiber to the premises (FTTP) services offered by Verizon in the United States. According to Verizon, FiOS stands for ‘Fiber-Optic Service. It is the first major service provider to offer super high speed Internet access over fiber optic lines. Along with the broadband internet, Verizon has also launched FiOS TV which is a full fledged interactive television service.

FiOS can provide internet access ranging from 5 Mbps all the way up to 50 Mbps. But these speeds will vary depending on a number of factors such as the condition of wiring at your location, computer configuration, Internet and network congestion, and the speed of website servers you access.

There are different packages and you can choose the one suited to your needs. But even the lowest end package offering 5 Mbps data rates, will should be able to support Online gaming, Video Conferencing, downloading and even watching movies in real time.

From history of technological development, we can observe that Software and Services available to the end user has always followed the Hardware that is currently available which is the platform. Now with these blazing Internet speeds, Verizon has pushed up the platform by a significant margin, thus opening up windows to the next of era of Interactive Realtime Computing irrespective of the distance. The world has definitely become a smaller place.

Verizon has expanded FiOS to a number of areas. See FiOS availability, to find out if you can get access to it.

Visit Verizon’s FIOS website. If you are interested in further details, read more @ FiOS in Wikipedia.

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People. Remember the cool interface in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise just makes some funny gestures and manages to move things around? Well, we are almost there.

Microsoft recently unveiled a new technology called Microsoft Surface. Go have a look at the site, it is truly awesome.

Microsoft Surface is a new paradigm in man-machine interaction. By way of an interactive tabletop display, Microsoft demonstrated its Surface technology. Have a look at the cool video here. It uses the multi-touch (similar to the method used in the iPhone) for input. You can use your hands, or for that matter, any object to interact with this table. The video even has a kid drawing with all her 10 fingers!

But that’s not all! It recognizes whatever you place on it! If you place a cold glass of drink, it finds out and draws interactive bubbles on the surface. If you place a wireless enabled camera on it, it immediately downloads the photos and displays them. You can use multi-touch to play around with the photos, as you would do to real photos - dragging them, rotating them, and even dragging with two fingers to zoom into them. If you place a compatible phone on the table, you can even drag and drop the photos into the phone!

But here is the best part. Lets say this table is in a restaurant. After you are done with your meal, you can place your credit cards on the table, and decide who is going to pay how much by just moving around a slider! Wow, how cool is that! The multi-touch input method seems so natural, and the way the people play with maps in the video, wow, I couldn’t help but drool.

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Google’s latest Street View feature has been in the news for the last few days and I’m sure a lot of us have seen images similar to the ones below

What we might have not seen are the vehicles and the cameras used to take these images. Have a look at them. These are the ones used by Immersive Media, one of the companies that is actually shooting majority of the photos for Google.

The camera mounted on top of the car is Immersive Media’s own; patented 11-lens camera. I believe Google has their own Vans with cameras too which are of higher resolution than that of Immersive Media’s.

Via: PR Differently

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I read this article by John Chow on reducing the number of pages in Google’s Supplemental Index and checked out the same for my blog and found that it had more than 700 pages in Google’s Supplemental Index and decided that I would do something about it. I had earlier created a robots.txt based on Everton’s and like him, I also experienced a steep increase in traffic. When a further change guaranteed some more increase in traffic, I was more than happy to try it out.

Here is the SEO for Firefox stats for my blog. This was taken yesterday and there has been absolutely no change since May 24th (That’s when I had changed the robots.txt file).

Based on John Chow’s robots.txt I modified mine. You can see it here. That is when trouble started. My traffic started going down. Drastically. I tried to reason out why it happened. My blogging pattern hadn’t changed. Apart from the robots.txt, I couldn’t find any other difference. When the drop went down by 60%, I reverted back to my old robots.txt (day before yesterday) and immediately I began to see a slight increase in the number of hits. I also checked out SEO for Firefox for John Chow which shows that his blog has crossed more than 2000 pages in Google’s Supplemental Index. Check out the screenshot below.

This experiment doesn’t seem to have helped John Chow. I’m not sure if he noticed any spike in traffic. It definitely has not helped me in any way. However, Nathan at Not So Boring Life seems to have had an increase of 20% in Search Engine traffic.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with an ex-colleague who has some experience in SEO

me: then how do i reduce the suplementary indexing?

Anil: Actually once the page rank of ur blog increases, all the pages which are in supplementary index of search engines will come in to main indexing…. no need to worry abt it…. but remove all “disallows” in the code…this will cause more pain than supplementary indexing..

I’m not sure how correct this is, but that’s exactly what I did by going back to my earlier robots.txt. Can someone help me out here? These questions have been bothering me for quite some time now.

1. What went wrong with this experiment?
2. Why did I lose more than 60% of my traffic?
3. Why has the number of pages in Google’s Supplemental Index for John Chow increased while it should have decreased?
4. How did it work for Nathan and not for me?

Any answers??

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