I happened to come across a site called Charity Navigator which is an independent, non-profit organization that evaluates various charities. Going through their 10 Charities to watch out for, I came across a charity called Asha for Education. Asha for Education was found back in 1991 and is dedicated to bringing a change in India by focusing on basic education. The belief being that education is a critical for bringing about a socio-economic change, which I think is very true.

The objectives of Asha for Education from their site:

1. To provide education to underprivileged children in India.
2. To encourage the formation of various local groups across the world to reach out to larger sections of the population.
3. To support and cooperate with persons and groups already engaged in similar activities.
4. To raise the required human and other resources to achieve the group objectives.
5. To provide opportunities to individuals living outside India who wish to participate in Asha activities in India.
6. To address, whenever possible, other issues affecting human life such as health care, environment, socio-economic aspects and women’s issues.

Asha For Education has grown significantly since 1992. They have 66 chapters worldwide, covering India, USA, Europe, Singapore and Australia. They have over 1000 active volunteers worldwide. A total of 385 projects across 24 states in India have been supported by Asha For Education. They have disbursed over $4 million till date.

A charity like this can do wonders to underprivileged children.

If you would like to make a donation to this foundation, you can make an online donation via their site. They do accept online payments.

This post is sponsored by Navtej Kohli…

• Digg Profile
• Navtej’s Blog
• Typekey Profile

Some useful posts for the day:

• CNET has an article on 10 tech disappointments...with cool names. Zune, Trumours, and Wii are on this list!!
• Interested in having thumbnails of websites showing up the site you’re developing? Use Websnapr.
• TechCrunch reports that Slideshare has added audio synchronization support.

Enjoy!

In the last couple of weeks over 100,000+ iPhones have been purchased. Imagine the number of old cell phones just lying around. Why not make some money by returning it? Isn’t that a great bargain?

CellForCash.com is a great concept which I can use to sell my old cell phone and make some good money on it in the bargain.

To sell a cell phone to CellForCash.com is a straightforward and simple process. Just visit their site, select the model that you want to sell, see the offer price. If you like it, fill out the form and the transaction will proceed from there onwards.

Note: The service is available for US customers only.

I found a wonderful post at ProBlogger on how to find domain names. If you’ve been looking for a tool to help you accomplish your search for the ultimate domain name, try one of the three mentioned in the post:

Bust A Name

Domains Bot

Name Boy

Happy hunting!!

Coupons are an important aspect of doing business in the United States of America. A variety of coupons are available ranging from groceries to high end gadgets. Ensuring that you get the best deals at all times can be difficult if you don’t know where to look for these deals.

Zimini is a company that could solve these problems for us. Consumers need to download their fairly large software (77MB in size!) and install it on their desktop running the Windows Operating System. Consumers then need to fill in their personal details into it like their food habits, movie habits, their demographic and income details, etc. This helps Zimini get the right coupons sent across to you.

You then just need to print it or use it online if its an Internet coupon to get the best deals possible.

This sounds great but my concern would be over the private and confidential information that we enter into the software. We need to have full faith and trust in Zimini to ensure that data privacy is maintained at all times.

Here is the link to Zimini website if you want to read up more about them.

Lets walk thru their software now…

When you launch the software, you will see the login screen as shown above. If you don’t have an account with them, you’ll be redirected to their website where you can create an account for free.

Once you successfully login, you will see the startup page as shown below:

The first time you login, you will need to spend about 15 minutes in creating your profile. This is critical in ensuring you get the right coupons according to your requirements.

As you can see in the image, the profile requirements are fairly detailed and its quite understandably so. Here is where we need to trust Zimini in ensuring that data privacy and confidentiality is fully maintained at all times. After you create your profile, you can then look for coupons:

As a merchant, you can benefit a great deal from Zimini. The Zimini website has complete details on How Zimini works for merchants. Not only can you create coupons directly using the software, but can ensure it has appropriate demographic and geo-targeting.

Zimini has had some good press coverage as well. Yahoo, Demo.com, CNet News, and Practical eCommerce are a few reviews amongst a bunch of others.

Some useful links for the day:

•  Do you use GIMP for your photo editing needs? If yes, read this nicely written article (Part 1) on basics of GIMP.
• TechCrunch has an article on a startup called Streamy, which is a mix of Digg, IM, and NetVibes.
• Digg has a launched an iPhone version of its site. Read more about it at TechCrunch.
• Most Web 2.0 startups these days follow the “by invitation only” model for user registration. How do you get one of these invites? InviteShare comes to your rescue.

Enjoy!

First Data Independent Sales (FDIS) is a leader in the transaction processing industry. Established almost 2 decades ago, they provide a variety of solutions for solve transaction requirements for just about any organization. FDIS has one of the highest approval rates in the industry. Most applications are approved within two business days.

First Data provides electronic payment solutions which covers all major credit card processing, PIN secured debit cards, Electronics Benefit Transfers, Gift Cards, Purchasing Cards, all web based e-commerce payments through a secure gateway, amongst other solutions.

Just to give some more insight into how you should go about choosing a payment processor?

1. Set up fee
This varies from company to company. Some require an upfront registration amount while others give it for free.

2. Global Footprint
Does the company allow payments from different countries? What is the processing charge for different countries? The charges typically vary from region to region.

3. Transaction fee
How much does the transaction fee vary from location to location? Again, the transaction fee might vary from region to region.

4. Payment transfer
How do you receive your money? Is it via a wire transfer, cheque, etc.? What charges and minimum balance requirements are there? What is the frequency at which you get your money?

5. Service & Support
This is a crucial one. What kind of service support do they provide? Do you get your queries answered within a 24hr turnaround time or is it less or more?

If you can gather the answers to the above questions, you would get a good ground for comparing products from different companies.

Keeping this in mind, if you’re looking at starting an online business (or a brick and mortar one), you might consider getting in touch with First Data Independent Sales for your transaction processing requirements. They score well on many of the above factors.

What is Social Networking?

The answer as defined by Wikipedia is:

A social network service focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software. Most social network services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.

Social networking sites are a rage these days. For end users this is a way to get in touch with friends long lost and a medium to make new friends. In the crowded social networking marketplace comes WireClub. WireClub is a social networking website which focuses on free chat rooms, clubs and forums.

After login, the first screen you see is your dashboard as shown below.

The first thing that you should do is to create your profile. You can upload your photograph, occupation, religion, hobbies, relationship status, your habits, etc as part of your profile.

As part of your profile, you can clearly specify your purpose on WireClub — friends, dating, networking, etc.

The first screen after login is the dashboard, which shows your profile, a snapshot of your blog, the clubs you are a part of, and the comments you’ve received. Also shown is a random selection of fellow members you can get in touch with.

Searching for clubs/chat rooms can be done on various criteria. The club feature allows you to search for forums where you can meet and chat with people with similar interests as yours.

One feature that I liked was “Countries”, which randomly shows a few members online from each country. This will enable you to make friends based on geographic locations faster.

An interesting feature of WireClub is an integrated blog as part of your account. You can make any sort of journal entry that you want to share with your friends here. The blog is quite basic in features but quite usable and helps you give a personal touch to your profile.

WireClub is a PR4 ranked site as per Google with Alexa ranking it at 249,904 as of today. This does mean that WireClub gets got some basic acceptance but would surely need to do a lot more to gain more a larger traffic share compared to its competitors like MySpace, FaceBook, etc. The number of active users on WireClub still seems to be less than other similar sites but it does have the basic ingredients required to succeed.

I would surely recommend that you give WireClub a trial run to see if it serves your purpose of social networking.

If you’re a Firefox addict, you’ll like these 2 add-ons for sure:

FEBE or the Firefox Environment Backup Extension is an add-on that allows you to take backups of your entire Firefox environment. This includes, themes, bookmarks, add-ons, etc. This will allow you to rollback the environment to a stable condition if something goes wrong. Also, you can ensure that if you use two or more computers, you’re using exactly the same environment on both. Neat!

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer does something similar, but focuses only on bookmarks. I’ve got this add-on installed on two computers and the moment I launch Firefox, it ensures that exactly the same bookmarks are available on both. It does this by storing the bookmarks on its server.

Both these add-ons are a must for any Firefox power user.