Carl L.

DIY Drones is my favorite place to learn about how to assemble your own amateur drones. Drones are just remote control airplanes but these are not your father's remote control planes. Today's drones can carry wireless cameras whose video feeds can be broadcast to goggles so you can pilot your drone even when it's not within eyesight. Drone prices have also come way down where you can assemble a cheap one for a couple hundred dollars. DIY Drones has a lot of great information for beginners and experts alike and also has a great community. Have a look!

DropCam is the cheapest and easiest way I'm aware of to set up a simple video surveillance system. They're perfect for your home or for a small business. You just connect the little camera to your wi-fi and you're basically ready to go. They have a simple iPhone app too so you can check the camera from anywhere. The video is stored by their "cloud service" which is I'm guessing how they make all their money. But it's not too much so it seems worth it to me. All those big surveillance companies will probably go out of business eventually.

Back in the 80s and 90s printing a banner was ridiculously expensive. Times have changed; on Banners.com you can order a high quality 6 foot full-color banner for as little as $30. I've found Banners.com to be reliable and the quality to be good. We used them for a couple trade shows and were happy with the results. They also sell a number of other types of signs for conferences as the like which are also reasonably priced. The turn around is reasonably quick although depending on where in the country you're located the shipping time varies a bit.

I agree with the other reviewer about the pros and cons of Big Stock Photo. Mostly, I think you can find better stuff at iStock Photo and even Shutter Stock.

I use Scottrade as my personal brokerage account. It's cheap and relatively easy to use but if you need help you're better off using a traditional brokerage or wealth manager.

For a few dollars a month, Angie's List is better than Yelp for finding good quality local professionals, doctors, contractors, etc. But no reason to stay signed up. Just sign up and then cancel!

WebEx (now owned by Cisco) is the best video conference tool for business that I've used. It's better than Skype because you can share your screen and workspace more easily. It's also easy to record the video conferences. The price for a small business is not too unreasonable (I think it's less than $50/month provided you don't have more than a certain number of users--we share an account between several employees).

I admit my iPhone has made my Garmin device less critical, but still whenever I go on a trip I bring my Garmin GPS along. They are probably not the cheapest on the market, but I've found them to be quite reliable.

I've found DHL to be cheaper than UPS and USPS and FedEx when shipping from the US to Europe.

My wife bought me a turtle neck at Zara and it fell apart in 6 months. I'm sure my wife thought it was very stylish when she bought it but I don't want to have to go shopping every 6 months for a whole new wardrobe.

Bank Rate is my favorite place to keep track of mortgage rates, savings/CD rates, credit card deals, and insurance rates. I think they make money by sending leads on to other sellers of financial products, but I've found all their rate information to be reliable. It's nice to get it all in one place.

Forex Factory is the best online forum for forex traders. It has a lot of very smart professional traders and is the best place online to take your knowledge to the next level and stay on top of currency trading. And if you're looking for a broker this is a good place to go: http://www.forexfactory.com/brokers.php

Constant Contact is the best email marketing platform but it can get expensive for a small business.

I've been using Commission Junction for a while and while it's definitely one of the largest affiliate marketing exchanges and there's a lot of value here for web publishers, it's way harder to use than it should be. To really get the most value you need to build up relationships with all the individual affiliates and it just isn't as efficient as it should be. It should work more like AdSense.