Testfreaks.com.au was launched last week in Australia following hot on the trail of Testfreaks‘ success in the U.S. and Europe. The website is a consumer review site that aims to bring informative technical and opinionative reviews about the latest gadgets. It’s in beta mode, which means you get to help them out by providing feedback on what improvements (if any) the site could have.

Testfreaks Goal

Testfreaks Australia was developed by the hugely successful price comparison website, Pricerunner. Their goal with Testfreaks is (ref: e-consultancy.com):

to build the world’s largest review web site, both in terms of completeness (number of reviews) and audience.

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Apple OSX & Linux peeps, great news! CrossOver Chromium is available for download from CodeWeavers, free of charge.

Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. The Chromium codebase is the basis for Google’s Chrome browser.

Thanks for the heads up @mpesce

Finally got a chance to download Google’s new Internet browser, Google Chrome. So much noise on the web about it, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Upon doing so, I noticed something familiar. Is it just me or does the Google Chrome logo look like a Pokemon ball? I tried to capture what came to mind with the image below:

Download Google Chrome here.

Don’t forget to tick the box where it says “Optional: Help make Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google.”

Always on the go? Vodafone Australia announced that it is launching a USB stick mobile broadband connection. It’s something I’d want to get my hands on, just so I can bring you gadget goodness while frolicking in the beach. Vodafone has actually done well to challenge Three which released a similar product a few months ago.

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If you’ve always fantasied about your partner whispering sweet nothings about you all day long without getting annoyed, tired, or thinking you’re just downright vane, you need to check out Oddcast’s TTS Demo Website.

You can select a male or female speaker and even choose between 20 different languages! This is also ideal for those brushing up on their linguistic abilities.

If you raise the volume on your PC / laptop to max, it’s also a good prank tool. I used something similar in university where I got the avatar to shout “This is a fire drill. Please leave all your computers and head out to the front of the building!” Of course, being in a computer course, these types of jokes were standare fare…

Try it out for yoursef!

Oddcast TTS Demo

Our advertising side of things is really getting busy - only released ad spots last month and already 3 spots have been purchased! Sending out quotes and invoices as plain Word or Excel documents is not advised as these can be, accidentally or deliberately, changed. The best solution is to convert these types of documents to PDF which is secure as the content within cannot be tampered with.

Being short on time and budget, I searched the web for a free document PDF converter and I found ExpressPDF. This is a free service that converts web pages, Word documents and even Excel spreadsheets to PDF format. Try it yourself! (link below)

Thank you ExpressPDF for a fantastic FREE service!

Via ExpressPDF Website

In just a couple of hours thousands around the world will be downloading Firefox 3 helping Mozilla break the record for total number of software downloaded in 24 hours.

As we get closer to Firefox 3 Download time, I thought I’d help the cause by putting a big picture link here just for you!

P.S. This site has been designed for Firefox so help us and yourself out by upgrading to this internet browser.

The list of social media apps that I use on a daily basis is growing and it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with all that’s going on in this world. My current list includes Plurk, Twitter, Facebook and starting to spend some time on Digg.

Enter Flock.  Flock is a free web browser that is made especially for social media animals like me. It allows you to keep track of all your social media apps easily and allows you to share information much more easily. Being built on the Firefox browser, means that it’s a fast, secure and solid Internet web browser.

Here’s an video introduction to Flock:

I’ll be trying this out this week and will post up my feedback…hopefully it’s got some Plurk integration

Let me know if it tickles your fancy or more importantly improves your social media workflow.

Without the advantage of being pre-installed in the world’s most used operating system, Firefox is slowly catching up to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the Internet browser of choice. It is now the second most used browser with an 18.41% share of the browser market. This achievement is non-trivial.

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It makes totally perfect sense - allow your customers free access to the internet so that they will hang around longer, potentially order / consume more goods and services and increase the likelihood that they will do it all again tomorrow. Seems good in theory however it’s sad that many cafe owners (especially in Australia) are ignorant of the possibilities of converting the tech needs of their demographic into more revenue as many are often too focussed on the operational aspects of their businesses.

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