Consumer Reviews

Geni.com does a good job of allowing you to very easily create a family tree. It’s nice because you start adding members of your family and if you add their email addresses, they will be notified. Once they are notified, they can log in and make changes to the family tree and add more details. Of course, the number 1 concern here is privacy. The good news is that Geni has lots of privacy settings.

As far as I know, the company has raised more than $10 million dollars in VC money. I know that they make some money off of selling premium accounts but I’m not sure if that business model will be enough to make them nicely profitable… maybe I’m missing something…

All in all, great website. Try it out!

Aydin.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl7cqFQatP4]

The other day I took a trip to the Rogers store to check out the BlackBerry Bold. I was hoping that they would have a demo handset ready for me to check out… unfortunately, they did not!

Apple has demo iphones in mostly every store that it is sold. I asked the customer representative at the Rogers store why there wasn’t a demo handset and his response was: “with BlackBerry, people know what to expect.” That was the most lame excuse that I’ve ever heard. I have a BlackBerry and I don’t know what to expect with the Bold. I checked out the online videos but until I play with the phone (just like I would with a laptop at Best Buy — and phones are becoming more laptop-like these days), it would be difficult for me to make a purchase. I know that BlackBerry phones typically haven’t had demo handsets in the past at Rogers stores, but I hoped that when RIM saw the Apple strategy, things would change.

Telus Logo

I’ve been considering switching to Rogers to be able to get the new iPhone. I called Telus to see what it would cost if I canceled my plan. I’m only 1 year into my 3 year contract and so it’ll cost me $500. In other words, getting the new iPhone would cost me $200 (cost of iPhone) + $500 (cancellation fee from Telus) = $700. I’ll be honest, I did consider it for a split second…

Also, it seems that Telus will not be getting the Blackberry Bold. But, the representative who I spoke to did tell me that the HTC Diamond and the Blackberry Thunder will be coming to Telus (but then again, who knows…).

Aydin.

SuitUpp.com just launched a blog that will focus on advising men on fashion and life in general. Should be quite interesting. You can check out the blog for yourself here: http://blog.suitupp.com.

As you know, SuitUpp.com is a very new company that sells only 1 suit a week and is built off of the Shopify.com platform. This week’s suit is a Tallia Blazer and you can get $50 off by entering the code “50offnow” (without the quotes) on the checkout page… This limited-edition Blazer is available only this week so make sure to check it out here.

Kwout.com is an amazing tool for blogging. Everytime I want to create a screenshot and use it to paste into my blog, I head over to kwout.com. Its really simple to use… This is one of those must use services!

Here is a screenshot (courtesy of Kwout.com):

Aydin.

Remember the Milk is one heck of a ToDoList application. It will plug into your Blackberry, your Gmail Account, and your Google Calendar Account. I absolutely love it! The integration is amazing! I highly recommend everyone start using this website to manage their lives…

Here is a screenshot of the Gmail integration:

Here is a smaller image:

Aydin.

A bunch of people have been asking me why my facebook status always says “Aydin is twittering:…”
Well, the reason is quite simple. I use a great tool called Twitter. I also installed the Twitter Facebook Application. With the facebook application, everytime I update my twitter status, my facebook status gets updated to and is prefixed with “Aydin is Twittering…”

Twitter is simply amazing… Rather than explain to you myself what it is exactly, I’ll embed this video that will tell you exactly what twitter is in plain english:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o]

Here is the info from the TorrentSpy Team: (pay attention to the bolded text)

Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.

It was a wild ride,

The TorrentSpy Team

“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” - Justice William O. Douglas