YakFree is a great service, so I can conclude after I used them to make a call to my host in the USA and the call lasted 16 minutes – for free! I found that rather impressing, for a free service that gives excellent quality and its a touch-tone enabled phone, meaning you can go through the IVR systems very well.

It comes with a partner programme that allows you to place a call button on your site and this makes it even handy for business owners to have. Try it today, its worth each moment.

Facebook Homepage

Facebook addicts and those of us who can’t get through a day without getting to Facebook are a little disappointed by the new look of the home page, confusing with what they are calling “Live Feeds” and “Live News Updates”. Being one of the frustrated fanatics, I have discovered a simple way to take back Facebook to the good old home page it was.

Please take the following steps and continue enjoying the familiar facebook interface you are used to.

1. Login to your Facebook account.
2. If it does not take you to the default home page, click on home.
3. You should see the stream that is now your homepage with Live Feeds and Live News.
4. On the left bar, you will see the usual menu with News Feeds, Photos, Links…etc
5. Under it you will see “More..”
6. Click on the more.
7. When the full menu is loaded, you will see “Status Updates as one of the items.
8. Click on it and drag it to the top.
9. Refresh your page and there you are! Enjoy the familiar Facebook that you are used to.

You can leave a comment here if you like it or if you have other tricks to get around facebook.

The system developed by Bernsoft currently allows users to book flights from East Africa Safari Air, ALS and Air Kenya. You can book buses between Kenya’s main towns from Akamba and Crown Bus Services. You can also book Rift Valley Railways trains.

This comes as a series of products are being launched all over East Africa with the better connectivity opening the markets for online business. Safaricom’s M-Pesa, though weak when it comes to online transaction, has become really popular and the most favorable way to pay in Kenya.

While online business starts getting its roots in Kenya and East Africa, there is a need for banking institutions to come up with products that will promote online business or negotiate with international payment gateways to provide local businesses with a solution for payment.

All in all, this is a great step and Kenya is a step ahead, thanks to Safaricom and Bernsoft.

The new operating system is said to be lighter and faster than Windows Vista which has faced lots of criticism for being slow and using up too much system resources. Microsoft has worked on a user interface that is familiar to Mac and Unix users to be able to tap into the users of its close competitors.

Windows 7 boots up more quickly and is designed to work on low cost portable machines known as netbooks.

Most analysts say that the launch is low key compared to previous product launches.

The pre-orders were costing as low as £49.99 while any Vista purchased after June of this year qualifies for a free upgrade. A Home Premium edition of the software will cost £79.99 until 1 January 2010, at which point it will go up to £99.99.

During the Beta or Trial period, Windows 7 has performed well and gained a lot of praise but being new one needs to be aware that like all software, new comes with more bugs.

Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explained “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” says Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

While ranking algorithms have changed with time, Google has slowly been discouraging people from paying too much attention on PR saying that its only a minor tool and just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. For a long time, PR has just been a comfort bed for SEO noobs.

Meanwhile, Google encourages use of its analytic tools conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

On launching the app you are prompted to select a photo from your phone or take a new one. A simple toolbar-style drop-down menu interface lets you choose from a list of tools and effects including crop, rotate, and flip, exposure, saturation and tint adjustments, and easy to apply filters including black and white, sketch, soft focus, pop, border, vignette blur, warm vintage, rainbow, soft black and white and white glow.

Below is a panel that allows you to Cancel, Close, Save, Upload, Undo and Red0 applied effects or edits.  Saving makes a copy of the edited image on your storage on the phone and upload allows you to login to your photoshop.com account  or create a new one. To me, this is a new level in image storage and editing. As always, Adobe makes another hit, lets hope they follow suite with Blackberry Apps and other phones.

Anyone using the app please leave a comment here about the experience.

Facebook

Here are a few tips I have learned from experience and research throughout the time I have been on Facebook as just a social platform or as a place for traffic generation. There are a few ways you can advertise for free on using Facebook, here is a few ways:

1. Status Updates on Your Profile:
Whenever you update your status message on Facebook, your friends (in this case its the people you have added as friends on Facebook) can see it when they log in on the homepage stream. This may not have an impact as so big because you can only reach the number of friends you have and most likely only half of them will get to see your update because say for instance, I have 700 friends, if I log in, I can only see about 40 updates on my homepage. With 700 friends, there is a good chance that more than 40 of them will have an update each hour meaning unless am on Facebook the whole time, I will miss most of the updates. Again, consistent advertising on Facebook Status makes people loose interest because that is not what the Status update is meant for.

2. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups have been over used as a means of advertising by a lot of people although in my view, its not very effective. Groups allow administrators to send messages to uses directly into their inbox, users can reply to everyone and threads can continue endlessly. There are also discussions that are allowed on the groups page and there is a wall that user can post into.  Group advertising may not be very effective as only members interested in the groups can go to the groups homepage. A lot of people join groups that they never return to just because they were invited by a friend or the group had a catchy title.

3. Facebook Notes
Facebook allows you to write articles and post them on your profile, allowing you to tag friends which means your friends and their friends can view, comment and share the notes. This to me is a great way of spreading word on new things and it makes the network larger. Creatively written notes can really work to help you market your product or website.

4. Facebook Events
When you create a Facebook event, you can invite your friends and their friends can invite their friends. This means your event gets multi-level advertising from the list of your friends. This works but it takes a huge interest in the list of people to start spreading word about your event.

5. Facebook Pages
Ask me, I will tell you that this is the most effective tool on Facebook. When you create a page for your business or product, it allows members to become fans/supporters. Facebook pages allow unlimited number of fans and this means unlike friendships which are limited to 5000, you can keep close contact with your fans. The page now has a profile of its own with picture galleries, status updates, wall and almost all the features of the normal profile page. This means that if you have 30,000 fans and you update your status, the message is shown on your fan’s homepage. This gets a huge reaction and it translates to proper traffic. The fact that it allows you to stream updates into the fan’s inbox is an added advantage, you can send messages to all your fans as updates. It also allows members to post on your wall and you can discuss things just on the wall which is the most common way of communication on facebook.

6. Facebook Paid Ads
Facebook pay-per-click ads work more like Google Adwords although they are more specific on demographics. You can choose to target people aged 30-35 from Nairobi, specific to gender and interests. This makes it a huge value for money. Basically if you have money to spend on advertising, my advice is you spend it on Facebook.

In conclusion, Facebook can be a great source of traffic for your website or business, if you were to take advantage of all of the above factors, you will achieve great results. My advice before you pay for a Facebook ad, create a fan page first and advertise the page instead of advertising your external website directly. Below are a few reasons why I think this is more effective than direct advertising:

1. Facebook Pages are more like permanent advertisements because you keep your fans from the moment they join.
2. Its cheaper to advertise.
3. When you create a new fan, you create a connection that will allow you to be able to continuously communicate with your fans while if you advertise your website directly, one may click and if at the moment they are not interested, they will never remember the website to go back to it.
4. When a member becomes a fan of your page, all their friends can see it as part of the wall streams and that means that they can also get into it out of curiosity or interest.

If you would like to publish this article anywhere, please feel free to contact us for permission and endorsement.

Screenshot of Majibu.com

Relatively new, Majibu.com is a Question and Answer website that in my view is the perfect answer to Yahoo Answers in Africa. As the internet industry and Africa’s connectivity grows, the need for locally generated content is big. While we have lots of our services dependent on traditional western and European websites, I think its time we challenged us to create our own. While the concepts we use may be borrowed, we need to localize our websites and software. This is precisely why I find Majibu.com a necessary website in Africa.

Majibu.com is clearly a copy of the functionality of Yahoo Answers. Majibu is Swahili for Answers. Anyone can register, ask and answer questions. It has a point system that ranks users just as Yahoo Answers. The questions are categorized broadly with main issues affecting societies in Africa and the questions and answers are not moderated (you can report abuse).

While the domain is only 2 months old, it has an Alexa Ranking of 898,693 with main traffic coming from Kenya and South Africa. It ranks well compared to website that have been online for years and it shows that with time, it can be a centre for great content. As of now, there are no ads running on the site which I guess is due to the fact that its still new but I suppose that should be the main source of income on the site.

The site is well built and from my guess, it runs on the Zend Framework and is Web 2.0 compliant. The registration process is simple and straight forward although users need to confirm email addresses.

This is an independent review if you feel you have any comments on the site, you can leave them here or directly contact the administrators. If you have a website that you would like us to review, please feel free to contact us.

FrontlineSMS Screenshot

SMS has become among the most popular ways of communication due to the fact that mobile usage has increased over the last few years and mobile operators are present in even the most remote areas of the world. Cost is also another factor that has made SMS usage increase, its cheap, precise and personal.  It becomes even better when you can communicate to thousands of people with a single message from your computer and allow them to reply to you. I have been looking for a solution that can allow me to turn my computer into an intelligent communication centre for my messaging…I found it!

FrontlineSMS, developed by Kiwanja.net is a great tool. For me, it has provided all I needed with my messaging. It is built for NGOs and community services but I will focus on what it can do. It has enabled me to set a messaging service, setup automated keyword based responses and its given me all the advantages I could have with a premium rate number except the short code.

Basically, FrontlineSMS is award-winning free, open source software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with groups of people through mobile phones. What you communicate is up to you, making FrontlineSMS useful in many different ways.

Frontline SMS supports a great number of phones and GSM modems, automatically detecting whatever phones you have connected to your computer and letting you configure what you want to use.

According to the official website, here is what is different in Frontline SMS:

• It does not require an Internet connection.
• It works with your existing plan on all GSM phones, modems and networks.
• Attach a phone and SIM card, and pay your local operator per SMS as usual.
• It is laptop-based so it can be used on the road or during power outages.
• It stores all phone numbers and records all incoming and outgoing messages.
• All data lives on a local computer, not on servers controlled by someone else.
• It is scalable. Messages can be sent to individuals or large groups.
• It enables two-way communication, useful for fieldwork or during surveys.
• It is easy to install and requires little or no training to use.
• Developers can freely take the source code and add their own features.
• It can be used anywhere in the world simply by switching the SIM card.

You could request a download which is free at Frontline SMS

• Moved the navigation menu to the top
• The top menu publishes categories
• Inactive categories published too
• Colors and CSS style a little modified
• Used image logo instead of text

The modified magazine theme free download

Feel free to download a copy of the original theme from the Arras theme website or a copy of my modified version here below.
Download File: Since97 Magazine Theme (364)

Please note that this modification is free for distribution and all credits go to the creators of the Arras Magazine Theme.