The future of Advertising: Consumer Rewarded for Watching Ads

Want to make an urgent phone call but don't have the money to buy airtime ? Or there's no ATM nearby to buy prepaid talktime ? No problem, just pay attention to your cellphone for few seconds and you will be rewarded with free airtime.

Well, this is no joke, Virgin Mobile has launched a program, called SugarMama, that lets people earn one minute of talking time by watching 30-second commercials on a computer or receiving text messages on their phones, then answering questions to prove they were, in fact, paying attention.

Correct answers earn the customer free minutes of talk time. In the case of the video clips and the text messages, the subscribers would only receive a free minute if they sent in a response indicating that they had paid attention.

This advertising model is very different from the Philips' technology that forces you to watch TV commercials by freezing up the channel during a commercial. Here, it's the user who decides to watch the commercial on his mobile.

Virgin Mobile has already found three advertisers: Pepsi, Microsoft Xbox and a youth antismoking campaign called Truth.

Virgin Mobile SugarMama | Virgin Press release

Source: Earn Cellphone Minutes by Watching Ads

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include Gmail Mail Merge (send personalized emails with Gmail ), Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and File Upload Forms ( receive files in Google Drive). Also see Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

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