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  • Wes Novack 3:37 pm on July 30, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    My hummingbird window feeder 

    I love hummingbirds! Their insanely fast wings have amazed me since the first time I set my eyes on one of the speedy little birds flitting around in the air. Thankfully, here in Arizona, there are plenty of hummingbirds in my area to satisfy my craving to view their aeronautic acrobatics.

    To help me see even more of their amazing antics, I installed a hummingbird feeder on my office window. Below you can view one video of my home office window hummingbird feeder, with a bird visiting for a drink.

    Note: For a better videw of the video, click the four arrows box icon to watch in full screen or watch it here on the full screen mode page.

     

  • Wes Novack 11:14 am on June 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Credit card price matching is back! 

    Starting August 2nd 2010, the Chase Freedom credit card will begin providing “price protection” or price matching, up to $250 per purchase. Get a refund for the difference in price – up to $250 – during the first 60 days after your eligible purchase.

    Stipulations:
    $1,000 per year maximum.
    You must save your receipts.
    You must file a claim with Chase.
    Price match claim must be to a printed store advertisement price.
    Internet prices not valid.
    Other restrictions apply.

    But even with these restrictions, it’s nice to see Chase offering this feature to Freedom card holders. My Chase Freedom card is my favorite credit card and I get hundreds of dollars in cash back from it every year. The new price matching feature is just icing on the cake.

     

  • Wes Novack 11:27 am on June 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Bite Nite charity event at Scottsdale Resort 

    Tera and I attended Bite Nite at the Scottsdale Resort and Conference center last Saturday night.

    Bite Nite is a charity event and fundraiser for the Arizona chapter of the ALS Association, who is working to find a cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

    The Locals Only Phoenix show with Jenn Maggiore and Heather Long was recorded live at the event. Tera and I make an appearance on the show around the 00:20:40 mark. Check out the video below to see us on the show! Note: the video takes a minute or so to load after clicking play.

    If you have trouble playing the embedded video above, try playing it directly on the Ustream website instead.

    Thank you to Locals Only Phoenix and AZ ALS for hooking us up with tickets!

    I’d say the event was a smashing success. We had a fabulous time and they raised a lot of money to help fund research for curing ALS and for services for ALS patients in need.

    The event was made possible by many generous sponsors, but 5 valley restaurants were crucial, all who donated time, money and other resources to this great cause. Huge kudos to 5th and Wine, Oregano’s, Cien Agaves, Va Bene and Ling & Louie’s for their outstanding contributions.

     

  • Wes Novack 2:45 pm on May 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Intel six-core i7-980x processor acquired! 

    A couple of weekends ago, the good folks at @IntelGameOn sent me a tweet to let me know that they were holding a special event and giveaway at Fry’s Electronics in Phoenix.

    I stopped in, chatted with some of the Intel staff and got a scanner card to enter their giveaway contest. The majority of the people there were winning t-shirts, hats, pens and other little Intel swag (including my friend Warren Owen, who won a t-shirt). When they scanned my card to see what I won, I was completely shocked when they told me that I had won the best possible prize, an Intel i7-975x four-core processor!

    Retailing at $999.99, it couldn’t get much better than that, right? Wrong! About a week later, they sent me another message to let me know that my prize had been upgraded to an Intel i-7-980x SIX core processor. Wow.

    Today, this beast of a processor was delivered to me via Fedex.

    Thank you again to Intel and IntelGameOn, you guys rock!

     

  • Wes Novack 2:00 pm on May 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Married in St Thomas! 

    We did it!

    Tera and I were married on Saturday, May 8th on clip point at Sapphire Beach resort on St Thomas island.

    Everything was perfect! Tera was absolutely gorgeous (as usual). The weather was phenomenal. Our minister was totally awesome. Our photographer and videographer were excellent. The setup, the scenery, the ceremony, the celebrating… we loved it all.

    Wes-Tera-St-Thomas-wedding

    More photos of our wedding day and vacation are available in our St Thomas photo set on Flickr. We also hired a professional photographer and videographer (with 1080p HD recording of course), so we’ll have some really good photos and videos in the future.

    Rain, rain, go away

    The night before our wedding day, it was a torrential down pour. It was raining HARD. We were very worried that our wedding would be rained out. Thankfully, as the sun rose early in the morning, the clouds behaved and we had ourselves a fantastic, sunny day.

    No reservo?

    2 nights before our wedding, Tera’s parents were at a bar having some drinks when they heard another group of people talking about a wedding. This other group said that they were going to a wedding on Saturday morning, at 9AM, on clip point. The exact same time that we were planning to do our wedding!

    Unfortunately for them, they had not reserved the point and we did. We notified our wedding coordinator who double checked on our reservation, confirming that it was valid. Our minister was then instructed to get to the point early to ward off any other parties.

    When we got out to the point at 9AM, our minister was there notifying the other party that they would have to move their wedding to 10AM. It was freakin sweet! They had like 30 people at their wedding, we only had 2 guests. Some of the guests for the other wedding looked pissed and we found that to be slightly amusing.

    We made the reservation, so it worked out for us. We couldn’t have asked for a better result.

    We’re now enjoying the married life!

    Thank you to everyone who has or will send us congratulations!

     

  • Wes Novack 5:14 pm on May 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Interview with LeapFish PR & Social Media Manager 

    Today, I won earned an Apple iPad in the LeapFish $100,00 Cash Dash contest. One portion of the contest awards contestants with prizes for creating content related to LeapFish. This content can be blog posts, tweets, videos and other things. There are also many other ways to earn points.

    You can also enter into the cash prize drawings simply by registering, without any additional work needed.

    For one of my video submissions for the Cash Dash contest, I thought it would be a good idea to interview the LeapFish PR & Social Media Manager, Lena Shaw.

    Check out the Skype Video call interview in the embedded video below. We discuss the LeapFish service, social media strategy, how the contest came about and a few other topics.

    In the video, Lena talks about how the $100,000 Cash Dash came about, as LeapFish was looking for a way to give back to the community while also promoting their brand and increasing awareness of their service.

    Lena also mentioned that the gaming aspect of the contest was at least partially inspired by Foursquare and Gowalla, the popular geo-location (GPS) social networking games that made big appearances at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year.

    Some of the strengths of the LeapFish service itself include connectivity to Facebook and Twitter, allowing you a quick glance at your streams and internet news all from one page, search results from all 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and multiple types of search results (video, images, news, real time, etc).

    I’m still working hard on the contest and aiming to win a MacBook pro next! If you want to see more of my Cash Dash entries, check out my other LeapFish videos.

     

  • Wes Novack 12:55 pm on May 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Using LeapFish for SEO 

    Yes, I’m doing the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash. Yes, you get points (raffle tickets) for doing blog posts and making videos about LeapFish. Yes, they are giving away prizes (iPads, MacBook Pro’s, Samsung TV’s & cash awards) to contestants.

    I’ve explored high and low all over the LeapFish website and one of the more interesting things I’ve discovered is the ability to add your own links to your LeapFish Social Profile page, using whatever anchor text you want. This can provide some excellent link juice for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Watch the screencast video below to find out more.

    As you can see from the video, LeapFish allows users to register and create a free “LeapFish Social Profile”. On the “Edit Social Profile” page, near the bottom, there is a section that allows you to add hyperlinks.

    I’ve checked the Google Page Rank for http://www.leapfish.com and it comes up with a Page Rank of 6. This is good. Getting links from a PR 6 website can be very valuable and can certainly help you gain higher rankings in Search Engine Result Pages for a certain keyword or keyword set that you are targeting.

    The source code on the leapfish social profile page also shows that it’s a legitimate hyperlink. There is no “nofollow” attribute added to the hyperlinks, which means that the search engines should give them value.

    It also appears that you can added an unlimited number of links, which is pretty cool. So check it out and gain some SEO benefits from LeapFish.

    See my post from yesterday for a more thorough overview and explanation of the LeapFish Cash Dash contest.

     

  • Wes Novack 2:58 pm on May 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    $100,000 in cash & prizes up for grabs via LeapFish 

    LeapFish.com is giving away $100,000 in cash and prizes in its Cash Dash contest. It is free and easy to enter. Simply register here to get added to the cash prize raffle drawings. Check out my screencast video below to learn more.

    All you have to do to get entered into the cash prize drawings is register for free, but while you are at it, you might as well set your homepage to LeapFish.com and snag the extra points (raffle tickets) for trying the service out as your home base on the web. The more people that set their homepage to LeapFish.com, the more cash prizes they will give away.

    I’ve been using the site as my homepage and my default search engine (on all browsers) for a few days now and it is a pretty comfortable experience. You’ll still get search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo, so it’s not like you’ll be getting listings from some unknown search entity. It is the same results you are used to, just presented in a different method, with multimedia search results thrown into your searches to make them more useful.

    Due to the Cash Dash contest, I have been exploring just about every facet of LeapFish’s website and services, so if you have any questions feel free to hit me up. Good luck, I hope you enter & win some prizes!

     

  • Wes Novack 1:04 pm on April 26, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Podcasting from a bicycle 

    Did you know that April is Valley Bike Month in the Phoenix area? Yep, sure is. And with the awesome weather we’re having, it’s an opportune time to use a bicycle for transportation, exercise, leisure, fun or whatever suits you.

    This past Sunday, Tera and I took advantage of the most excellent weather and rode our bicycles to US Egg in North Phoenix for breakfast. In mid bicycle ride, I tested out CinchCast‘s telephone podcast call in service.

    Check out my bicycle-cast by clicking the play button below:

    So far, I’m digging the CinchCast service. After signing up for a free account and specifying your mobile phone number, you can call the dedicated CinchCast phone number and record a podcast from anywhere, at anytime. You can also record from any computer that supports Flash. They also have an iPhone app and an Android app is in the works.

    I’m really looking forward to the Android app and I’ve also suggested that they support the ability to email an audio file in to publish to Cinch. This would avoid poor audio quality/reception issues that are common when using a mobile phone.

    Props to marshallk for inspiring my bicycle-cast.

     

  • Wes Novack 1:29 pm on April 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Promoted tweets Twitter advertising 

    Twitter announced and launched its new advertising platform this week.

    We knew this was coming, but we didn’t know quite what it would be, until now. Many people have long wondered how the company would monetize the service and now we’re starting to see a glimpse of their future plans to generate revenue.

    The advertising is dubbed “Promoted Tweets” and is currently live on Twitter.com in the Search section. In the image below, I searched for the word “coffee” and a promoted tweet from Starbucks appeared at the top of my search results.

    Promoted tweet snapshot below

    Promoted-Tweets-Twitter-advertising

    Notice the highlighted area underneath the promoted tweet that reads “Promoted by Starbucks Coffee”.

    Interestingly enough, it appears that promoted tweets are NOT yet live on search.twitter.com, only on the primary site.

    So what does this mean for end-users right now? At this point, relatively little. The current promoted tweets advertising system in the search results section is very unobtrusive and I bet that the majority of Twitter users don’t use the search function on the website that much.

    Promoted Tweets, the future of Twitter advertising

    But what about the future? Twitter has announced that promoted tweets will eventually be inserted into the users’ Twitter streams.

    From an end-user perspective, this sounds like it will suck, but there are many factors involved that will determine how much of a “suck” it will be.

    Let’s take a look at some of the factors and hypothetical situations that could arise in response to promoted tweets.

    Frequency. If I get one promoted tweet inserted into my Twitter stream per day, no biggie, right? But if I’m getting an advertisement every 5 minutes, I’m going to be very, very annoyed with Twitter.

    Opt out? Will Twitter allow users to opt-out of advertising? Possibly via paying a subscription fee (think Pandora). This might be a good compromise to allow users to continue using the service without being bothered by ads.

    Third party clients removing ads. It seems like it would be relatively easy for a Twitter client to identify and then remove any promoted tweets from a user’s stream. But will Twitter define this as an API Terms of Service violation? That’s the big question…

    What are your thoughts on promoted tweets and Twitter advertising?

     

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