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Palo A.

3
Level 3 Contributor

Contributor Level

Total Points
3,128

18 Reviews by Palo

  • LogMeIn

6/16/08

Not the cheapest, but a robust enterprise solution for remote computer access and VPN service - While Logmein is not the cheapest remote access service out there, it's great for a growing small/medium sized business. They offer scalable services and have great support. I'd recommend them to anyone.

  • Mailinator

11/16/08

Malinator makes creating new fake email addresses easy - How many times have you signed up for some seedy looking website and wished you didn't have to give them your email address? For me, this happens all the time. I have a throw-way hotmail account, but it's stuffed full of spam and it's a lot of trouble to create new email accounts (they require your name, another email address, etc.).

Mailinator lets you create as many fake email addresses as you like without giving them any info. It's very easy, and you can check them just like normal email addresses, but you don't have to worry about giving them out to bad websites since they are not traceable to you. It's a neat service.

  • Interspire

6/14/08

Interspire shopping cart is decent and SEO friendly. Anyone know of anything better? - Most shopping cart software is pretty crummy and not SEO friendly (don't auto generate tags, titles, and descriptions for pages, etc). Interspire is not perfect, but it's certainly better than most and I've been reasonably happy with it. However, if anyone knows of anything better, I'd love to hear about it.

  • Rakuten Advertising

6/2/08

Affiliate network has RSS feeds for each merchant - I love that Link Share offers RSS feeds for updates from individual merchants. Most of the other affiliate networks (and their merchants) are stuck in the stone age (CSVs?). I want RSS for everything!

  • Amazon Associates

5/30/08

Amazon.com's affiliate program is only OK for publishers - Everyone loves to buy stuff at Amazon.com. But for publishers, Amazon's affiliate program doesn't offer much to get excited about. On the upside, Amazon offers a number of attractive widgets for your users to click on, search for Amazon products, etc and their website is easy to use. But Amazon's 4% referral rate doesn't get me too excited (although its 10% on the Kindle which makes me think they're having a hard time selling them) and they don't offer many (any?) coupons or deals. Link Share has been a lot more profitable for me.

  • 7-zip

5/27/08

Great free unzipping and zipping software - I'm not sure why anyone would buy WInZip; 7-Zip is light, easy to use, and free. I love it.

  • iTouchless

5/18/08

Ever want an auto-flush toilet or automatic sink? Now you can get one - I haven't tried it yet, but i really want the "touchless fly swatter" http://www.itouchless.com/share/cgi-bin/site.cgi?site_id=itouchless&page_id=pbsdlx

  • Glocap

5/16/08

Decent site for finance jobs - pre-MBA to executive level - Glocap does a decent job of posting positions in investing banking, private equity, and hedge funds, as well as some business development positions. Although if you're serious about getting a top tier position, a more specialized recruiting firm is probably a better bet (like the Oxbridge Group).

  • CostHelper

4/30/08

Good site for researching the cost of services - I had to replace the toilet in my master bedroom and had no idea what a good price was. Costhelper.com gave me an overview of the process and cost so I felt more comfortable getting quotes from plumbers. http://www.costhelper.com/cost/home-garden/replace-toilet.html

It's really a great resource for all sorts of services.

  • Morguefile

4/22/08

Public domain (free) pictures for your website - MorgueFile doesn't have a huge selection of professional quality pictures, but the pictures it does have are free for use for any purpose. The site isn't trying to sell anything, so there are no annoying "download hi-res yada yada" by each pic.

For a list of free photo sites, you can check out the wikipedia page on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

  • StoreFront

6/16/08

StoreFront shopping cart not optimized for SEO and poor for developing new features - In my opinion, any good shopping cart solution needs to be SEO optimized and be easily customizable and expandable to accommodate a growing online business. StoreFront's shopping cart misses on all these fronts. While StoreFront comes with some features that might seem valuable (built in affiliate program, email promotion tool), I found them to be gimmicky and not particularly useful. Moreover, StoreFront is not particularly cheap. I would strongly consider using another service like Interspire which is more flexible and better designed for SEO.

  • Ahsay Systems Corporation Limited

6/15/08

Ahsay backup software is good, but customer service is bad (for service providers) - Ahsay offers decent backup software - it's fairly customizable and is moderately priced (a little on the high side, but worth it for me since I'm a service provider and need the flexibility). My biggest gripe is the customer service. They took DAYS to get back to me, and the only real way to get through to them is over email.

  • Google AdSense

6/2/08

Adsense competitive ad filter is terrible - The Adsense competitive ad filter is honestly a piece of crap product that Google should be ashamed of.

It works like this: when adsense shows ads which are either competitive or irrelevant to your site (which happens all the time) you can put them into the Adsense competitive ad filter so Google will stop displaying them. Sounds good in principle, but in practice it is terrible.

Firstly, the only way to input the URLs of the ads it to download a clumsy program called AdSense Preview Tool which only works for IE. That tool outputs the URLs of the ads.

Secondly you have to cut and paste those ads into the Competitive Ad Filter. Fine, but for some reason the Competitive Ad Filter only takes 64 character URLs - but almost ALL of the stupid URLs are over 64 characters! So you have to manually delete all the extra characters.

Thirdly, you have to wait at least a couple hours to see if it works. And it only works about 75% of the time! And now I have so many blocked competitors, I never know whether I'm adding a site that has already be blocked or not and I have to go back and delete the duplicates.

Basically, Google either doesn't want you to use the Competitive Ad Filter or did a terrible job of designing it.

  • WinZip For Windows, Mac And Mobile

5/27/08

Why would anyone pay for WinZip? - Maybe there are some sophisticated features I'm not aware of, but is there a good reason why anyone would pay for WinZip when there are free programs like 7-zip? (which seem better if anything)

  • FedEx

5/8/08

Printing business cards at Kinko's for a small business - Kinko's business card summary:

--Kinko's is good if you have your own artwork and layout

--Don't get the 90lb business card paper -- it's too thin. Consider getting your own paper.

--There's no minimum order, so if you have a small order, Kinko's could be cheap. But if you are ordering 1000+ cards, a real printing place is probably cheaper.

After getting crappy cards from Vista Print, I decided to try Kinko's. As usual, Kinko's is best if you can do everything yourself. I brought in my business card artwork in a Photoshop file, and they told me that it costs $16 to lay everything out, $15 to cut the cards (they print 10 to a page), and another $1.50 per page to printing including color, one-side, no bleed on "business card" paper (bright white, 90 lb). I decided to layout the cards myself (which was easy using guides in Photoshop) and have them printed on "business card" paper. The results were not bad -- the printing and cutting was fine. But the business card paper was too thin and flimsy. They said that was the thickest paper they had and standard for business cards, but if you use Kinko's I would recommend getting your own paper. The prices are OK, but the good part is that there is no minimum purchase. So 100 cards would cost $15 ($1.50 x 10 sheets) plus cutting or layout costs. Net net: not bad for small orders, bring your own paper.

  • Vistaprint

5/5/08

Poor quality business cards - I just received some really poor quality business cards from Vista Print. I purchased the "premium" card stock and used their Photoshop template to upload graphics. The paper was cheap and flimsy, the cards were mis-cut (the borders were uneven), and the colors were washed out and pixelated. This was particularly surprising, as I had previously used their newsletter service which was pretty good.

  • eFax

10/21/08

EFax is a waste of money and a crummy product - For basic eFax service it costs $17 per month, which gives you a fax number and the ability to send and receive faxes. I orginally signed up because I read some decent reviews of eFax. But those reviewers I don't think had actually used the service for any period of time.

(1) the cost is not competitive - if you google "internet fax" you will see a number of much cheaper alternatives.

(2) the fax product is poor. There is a cumbersome client (software) they require you to download to read and send faxes. I think you should be able to do all that on a website without downloading anything.

(3) they auto-bill your credit card without notifying you each month.

(4) they make it very difficult to cancel. There is no link on the website, you have to contact customer service via email or an online chat window. I canceled via the online chat, and the customer service rep would not let me cancel! They just kept trying to retain me. Big waste of time. I wouldn't recommend eFax to anyone.

  • SonicWALL

6/15/08

SonicWall has terrible tech support and makes you pay for things that should be free - I have been really unhappy with SonicWall. Their customer service is lousy and they make you pay for every little thing (support, vpn, etc). If you can, I would strongly consider going with Cisco products - their tech support is much better, and you'll likely end up saving money in the long run.

Palo Has Earned 88 Votes

Palo A.'s review of SonicWALL earned a Well Said vote

Palo A.'s review of StoreFront earned 2 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of WinZip For Windows, Mac And Mobile earned 4 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Glocap earned 3 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Rakuten Advertising earned 4 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of CostHelper earned 4 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Vistaprint earned 4 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Interspire earned 4 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of iTouchless earned 2 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of eFax earned a Fraud Buster vote

Palo A.'s review of LogMeIn earned 8 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Amazon Associates earned 5 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Morguefile earned 4 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of 7-zip earned 6 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of FedEx earned 3 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of eFax earned 6 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Ahsay Systems Corporation Limited earned 7 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of SonicWALL earned 5 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Mailinator earned 5 Very Helpful votes

Palo A.'s review of Google AdSense earned 9 Very Helpful votes

Palo hasn’t received any thanks yous.

Palo Has 1 Fan

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Pete J.
38 Reviews
295 Votes

Palo is Following 1 User

Thumbnail of user petej
Pete J.
38 Reviews
295 Votes

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