Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Did you know, India has 120 million Internet users & the Indian e-commerce market is worth $7 billion ?  Travel accounts for over 80 percent of the e-commerce market. Forbes believes " the rise of e-commerce is significant because it shows the limitations of physical retailing and the rise of aspirations of small town India. Between the large unorganised retail (kiranas and unbranded supermarkets) that serves the masses and modern retail that serves the aspirational class in large cities, there lies a thin wedge of aspirational classes who live in dusty towns. The economics of physical retailing have always left them short changed. " ( Update: 25-Apr-2012, Economist ) "Nowadays more than 100m surf the web. Close to 30m scour for bargains online, and the number which grows by 1.5m every month. The industry is worth around $10 billion, though travel-ticket sales alone accounted for $8.4 billion last year....There is certainly room for growth. E-commerce accounts f...

Did you know, SQL Server 2008 Management Studio has an in-built option to generate a script that can help you restore an entire database alongwith the data? Compared to a .BAK file that can also be used to restore a database, a script lets you peek into the schema AND data (INSERT statements for rows within tables are automatically generated) before you restore it. Unfortunately, this cool feature is hidden under layers of options and isn't easily discoverable unless a really discerning user points it out . Steps to generate script: 1. Right click on a database name, choose Generate Scripts.. option under Tasks.. in the context menu 2. In the Generate and Publish Scripts wizard which appears choose the database object for which you want to generate a script 3. Under the Set Scripting Options, make sure to click on the Advanced button which reveals a bunch of more options. 4. In the new dialog box that opens up, scroll down to the last option in the General category and f...

As per the most voted answer on Web Applications StackExchange forum , thefreedictionary.com with the print layout is the fastest and their content is pretty comprehensive too. WordWeb is my favorite desktop dictionary tool & now I also have thefreedictionary.com configured as my search engine for words within Chrome. The URL looks simple - http://thefreedictionary.com/p/Word & this makes it super easy to add the site as a search provider in Chrome & Opera . This generic article how you can add thefreedictionary.com as a search engine option. I assigned the letter "d" to represent thefreedictionary.com as a shorcut for dictionary. So now, whenever I need to search for the meaning of a word I type "d" in the Chrome address bar, hit space followed by word & bingo...a detailed page pertaining to that word appears in a flash. Related: HOW TO Google specifically for discussions/answers on only online forums instead of articles Free Programmab...

When popular websites change their layout & design, it takes time for users to get accustomed to it. If you don't like frills and rather like features that get your work done faster, explore keyboard shorcuts that web apps like Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs offer. Just hit the question mark (?) key while you are logged into one of those sites and you will see a popup with a list of all supported hotkeys. While the keyboard shortcut Help popup has been in GMail & Google Reader since a couple of years now , I came to know about the Twitter hotkeys today from Scott Hanselman's blog . I found the choice of letters used by Twitter hotkeys more intuitive than what Google has (how easy is it to correlate Sneak Peak with the letter "h"?) ... so I identified for myself a list of shortcuts that are easily memorable from the much larger list: g then i : Go to Inbox g then s : Go to Starred conversations g then t : Go to Sent messages g then ...

The Wife finally cracked the mystery of how to take a screenshot of any screen on her Samsung Omnia 652 . For months since she saw the message "Screen captured. Saved as image file" while trying to unlock the smartphone, we were intrigued what key combination had led to it. We turned to Google but found no answers and this was too trivial to ask on online forums. It's finally a relief to know that the combination is Alt+*+Confirm/OK key You can access the screenshot by going to the  Images folder in  My Documents that you can find under Contents Manager.  A few other tricks we discovered (after we didn't find them in the manual): While composing a text message, press the Shift key (up arrow on the extreme left of bottom row) twice to type everything in capitals and if you need to type only numbers, press the Alt key twice. The Sym (Symbol) key lets you activate the XT9 option, the  predictive text feature that helps in typing words faster.  XT9 ...