The Clever Apprentice

As a man who came from a poor province where illiteracy was the norm, Naveen Jain knows the value of education and the possibilities a good education brings. The founder of Infospace and Intelius, and now one of wealthiest man in the world, literally toiled his way to success. Starting from the province of Uttar Pradesh, the current CEO of Intellius received his B.S. degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee). He holds a post-graduate degree in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from the XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business and Human Resources. After completing his education, Naveen Jain joined Microsoft where he became one of the company’s top executives. Now, Naveen Jain is manning the helm of Intelius, a leading company in the information commerce industry. With education a huge part of Naveen Jain’s core values, it is not surprising that Intelius provides huge support for organizations focusing on education and the development of effective educational programs. Together with his wife Anu Jain, Naveen Jain created a scholarship designed to provide financial aid to freshmen students who are currently registered as Computer Science or Computer Engineering majors at the University of Washington. The grant is given to students who have satisfied the academic and financial standards of the Office of Student Financial Aid. Both Anu and Naveen Jain believe that their scholarship can open doors for people who have the potential of making a difference through education, particularly in the areas of computer science and computer engineering. Naveen Jain is also dedicated to other philanthropic endeavors, specifically those that address issues such as hunger, homelessness, and healthcare. Naveen Jain stated that by supporting these areas, everyone can make a significant impact on the lives of others.

A SIM card for the phone is like having a small computer in your
computer. The SIM card stores a lot of data such as your
messages, whether text or pictures, your phone number,
reminders, files, value added services etc. What determine the
phone number are actually the card and not the phone. In fact
the mobile phone company keeps track of all your calls whether
incoming or outgoing through your SIM card. They can identify
the precise city and country that you have taken the phone to.
In this way, the company charges you for the calls.

The SIM card is actually called a Subscriber Identity Module and
is the size of a thumb impression. This tiny chip is a small
microprocessor, but it packs in a lot of data and information.
It’s inserted into the back of the cell phone that one is using
and only then can the cell phone be activated. As soon as the
cell phone is activated, it’s connected to the network of the
cellular phone company. Thus one can start making and receiving
calls.

Therefore when you switch over to another mobile company, you
need to purchase another SIM card to make and receive calls.
SIMS can have a memory of 16kb to 64kb as of today. Of course
with convergence happening, SIM may have larger memories to take
care of many operations.

There are two types of connections for SIM cards. One is a
prepaid connection where you for a fixed calling value, let’s
say $10, can get for example 100 minutes of talk time. The
second option is that of post paid. After every billing cycle,
the cellular company will charge you upon the usage.

There is a massive demand for cellular products in the market
place. Almost ever consumer has some form of mobile device out
there. However, you need to due your diligence when it comes
down to looking for cell phones. When you shop and compare cell
phones here are a few tips that you just want to take into
consideration. What type of carrier or phone are you looking
for? Are you seeking an option with no plan such as a prepaid
phone or are you looking for a monthly fee? This is will allow
you to see what sort of budget you can work with.

Then once you have determined the sort of phone you want you
need to determine the coverage that is going to work for you
best. Are you looking for rollover minutes, or even free
unlimited evenings or weekends? How about long distance? Are you
making any calls to places other than locally? Some consumers
are feature oriented. That is why you can obtain options like
color display, speaker phone, blue-tooth enabled, photo caller
ID, video recorder, text messaging and more. Basically the
options are entirely up to you.

Some companies promote cash
back offers or other special offers. Where they make most of
their money is the calling plan that you choose. Be sure to
investigate if there are any hidden charges and what the length
of the contract they want you to sign. If you are not
comfortable with it, then perhaps a better option is the pay as
you go prepaid cell phone deals. They often come with no credit
checks or hassles. You just buy minutes when you need more time.
Both types of systems have advantages, it really depends on what
your current needs are.

Do you remember the days? Firing up your 200Mhz turbo PowerPC, dialling up using your 56k modem, waiting an age for your hotmail page to show up, waiting some more to check your e-mails only to have your connection die just as you hit the send button! How times change.

It’s funny, once you’ve used broadband you quickly forget how painful the dial up connection was. I used to run my business on dial up and looking back I managed rather well. But these days there’s no way I could do without my broadband connection.

There’s no doubt about it, broadband is well and truly here to stay. It is of course a logical progression - streaming audio and video demand much higher bandwidth and broadband connections are the only way to achieve anything which is at all usable.

A recent survey revealed that 53% of Americans who use the Internet now use a broadband connection. What they failed to point out is that obviously this means 47% still use a dial up connection. This actually equates to around 60 million people. These kind of statistics are mirrored in other developed countries. When you consider a large chunk of the developing world still uses dial up then you realize that’s an awful lot of people still using a slow Internet connection.

So is it possible to speed up your dial up connection?

Well actually yes it is. There are quite a few services online these days allowing you to “accelerate” your dial up connection. These Internet accelerators claim to be able to boost the speed of your dial up connection by as much as six or seven times.

Before you scream with delight at this prospect I feel I should point out right now that these accelerator services are not high speed broadband Internet services. They use a different kind of technology based on the same idea as things like zip files and mp3 files. These files use a compression algorithm to dramatically reduce the file size.

Internet accelerators work in the same way and most providers have also implemented a caching technology whereby they store local copies of popular web sites. These local copies are pre compressed and can be sent to the user very quickly. The user has a piece of software sitting on their PC which decompresses the data as it comes in. This is how the dramatic speed increases are achieved.

Many people report excellent success with these systems. Some people are even comparing the accelerators with broadband services

So while this is a really good thing for basic web pages, the technology falls down as soon as you start working with large video or audio files etc. Since an mp3 file is already compressed there’s not much more compression that can be done and so the Internet accelerator has little effect. Plus many services have a file size limit meaning they will not even attempt to compress anything as big as a regular pop music mp3 file.

But if you’re just loading up normal web pages without too much flash animation and all the other bells and whistles, then I highly recommend you get yourself an accelerated service. If your ISP doesn’t offer it there are plenty that do so vote with your feet and check out some of these excellent services.

For more information simply search Google or Yahoo! for the term “dial up accelerator” or something like “speed up my dial up connection”. You’ll find lots of providers ready to supply you with service.

Some popular services in the USA are NetZero and Earthlink. In the UK you want to be taking a look at someone like Mistral or Onspeed.com

Fabio writes for many niches and is an experienced researcher. He has written articles covering a wide range of subjects and enjoys plying his trade especially on the Internet. He is currently sponsoring Ambient Modem News and Blogs and can be reached on fabio@linkz-and.info