Who Knows What About You? 25 Free Tools to Find Out

By Jessica Merritt

Lots of personal information about you is available online, and it’s often up to you to find it. Whether it’s public records or your home telephone number, there are lots of tools that you have at your disposal to find this information. Here, we’ll take a look at 25 tools that can help you track down the information that’s available about you online.

Monitoring Tools

Set up these tools to get alerts whenever your information comes up.

1. Google Alerts: With this tool, you can find out what people are saying about you online. Set up an alert for your name, common misspellings, and more to monitor your Google buzz.
2. TweetBeep: Twitter is fast becoming one of the most popular ways to communicate online, so monitor your name on Twitter with TweetBeep by setting up an alert.
3. AlertThingy: AlertThingy will update you on your information in social networks all over the web, so you can stay up to date all in one handy spot.
4. Yacktrack: Use Yacktrack, and you can find comments on your content from Blogger, FriendFeed, Digg, and more. This is a great way to find out when people are responding to your comments, videos, photos, and more.
5. MonitorThis: With this simple tool, you’ll be able to monitor search feeds from a variety of websites online.
6. Technorati: Find out what’s being said about you on the blogosphere from Technorati, and even read reactions to your blog.
7. uberVU: Get updates on reactions all over the Internet to your stories, profiles, and much more using the uberVU tool.
8. Boardtracker: Get alerts about forum threads that have your name in them from this tool, so you’ll always be able to find out when someone is talking about you.
9. Backtype: Find, follow, and share comments about yourself all around the Web using this tool. You can even make sure that when you write a comment with a link to your website, it will be attributed to you.
10. Trackur: Trackur offers a really sophisticated way to track your online reputation over blogs, news sites, and lots more.

Business & Finance

Check out what’s being said about your business and finances with these tools.

11. Yelp: Yelp’s local websites are full of reviews and discussions that can help you find out what’s being said about your business online.
12. AnnualCreditReport.com: Check out what the credit reporting agencies are sharing about your financial situation from this website.
13. Yahoo! Local: Check out reviews and ratings for your business using Yahoo!’s local business pages.
14. Sellerwise: Sellerwise will help you find out intelligence about your auctions, including how people are finding your listings and how many times they visit.
15. Citysearch: Find out what’s being said about your business, and find the resources that your customers can find out with through Citysearch’s website.

Search

With these search engines, you can dig to find out who has the dirt on you.

16. Social Mention: Use this social media search engine to find your name and brand on blogs, comments, bookmarks, videos, and much more.
17. The Internet Address Book: See where you can be found on the Internet from this website, and register so that you can control the information that’s shared.
18. Wink: Use Wink’s comprehensive people search to find yourself online, and claim your online identity.
19. ZabaSearch: ZabaSearch is well known for being eerily accurate about the information it can dig up on you-so be sure to check this one out.
20. Spydentity: Spydentity searches webpages, blogs, profiles, photos, and lots more to find your personal information online.
21. PeekYou: PeekYou makes it easy to find yourself by your real, name, online username, and more.
22. Pipl: Pipl’s comprehensive people search will show you information about your name, email, username, and phone number.

Public Records

Make use of these tools to research your own public records.

23. iSearch: iSearch can help you find your public records data, professional information, social networking, and lots more.
24. Intelius: Intelius is a smart tool that can help you find your personal information, including home value, income, and public records.
25. Mamma: This mother of all search engines offers a way to find your public records, unlisted phone numbers, and background check information.

Jessica Merritt
Thanks for sending me the good posts.
Benedict 

 

Source : http://www.arm.com/news/24404.html

WHAT: The ARM® Connected Community™ will showcase the architecture and technology that will deliver mobile computing to the masses in 2009 and beyond.   Mobile World Congress 2009 will witness the growing importance of the ARM Ecosystem: ARM’s innovation in high performance, low-power technology, all supported by the industry’s largest network of Partners – the ARM Connected Community.

Leading silicon, systems, design support, software and training providers are collaborating to provide complete solutions for mobile computing, based on the ARM architecture.

Product demonstrations, including the latest ARM Powered® netbooks, and Partner activities, will demonstrate this expanding ecosystem of mobile computing technology at ARM stand 1C01 in Hall 1:

Ubuntu Alpha release on the ARM Cortex™-A8 processor
The Alpha release of Ubuntu 9.04 for ARM will be shown running on ARM Cortex-A8 processor-based systems. Ubuntu 9.04 is scheduled for full release in April 2009, heralding Ubuntu as a top choice for consumers using netbook products.

Pegatron Netbook and Nettop on the ARM Cortex-A8 processor: Demonstration of two ultra slim, high performance, low power and low-cost ARM technology-based devices with full Internet connectivity and extended battery life. Both Pegatron devices will be available in 2009.

Thinkfree Mobile on ARM Powered Netbooks
Thinkfree Mobile runs on the ARMv6 architecture or higher application processors, providing an attractive, intuitive interface and high-speed performance based on Java technology. The ARM architecture provides the low power, high performance and extended battery life to enhance Thinkfree Mobile user experience.

Xandros
Debian Linux-based Xandros solution enables mobile OEM vendors and communications carriers to bring the full power of desktop computing to mobile devices with integrated applications, fast boot, long battery life, and always-on 3G networking.  Product will be demonstrated at Mobile World Congress on solutions using ARM processors based on the ARMv7 architecture. 

Movial IXS Internet Experience Suite
The total solution for fast and cost-effective development of Linux-based mobile devices, with unified user experience, interactions and branding.  Enables the easy creation of superior, customizable mobile application user interfaces with common Web-based technologies.   See the product demonstration on devices using the ARM Cortex-A8 processor. 

Wistron
Demonstration of two new products; a sleek 5” advanced Internet experience device and a new device called a P/Book with an 11.1” screen.  Both are powered with ARM processors based on the ARMv7 architecture and will be available in 2009.

WHEN: Monday-Thursday, February 16-19, 2009

WHERE: 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress, Fira Montjuic, Barcelona

http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/

ThinkFree: Not Free, But Close

Posted by Serdar Yegulalp, Feb 12, 2009 01:05 PM



We appreciate your deep perceptions and comments : Benedict at  ThinkFree

The most commonly-cited alternative to anything that's expensive and closed (Windows, Office) is something that's free and open (Linux, OpenOffice). But a third alternative has made headway: something proprietary, but either free or so cheap you won't care.

Consider ThinkFree Office, an MS Office competitor that's not in the vein of OpenOffice. It's a for-pay product and it's not open source, but it's to be offered at $50 or less for the whole suite -- and, most crucially, also to be offered as an add-on with netbooks at what I imagine is a price substantially lower than anything Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) would offer.

I gave ThinkFree a whirl on a provided Atom-powered Dell (Dell) Inspiron 910 Mini, and from the outside it is indeed remarkably close to the classic Office 97-through-2003 look that most of us are familiar with. I didn't have trouble opening existing Office documents, either (including files save in Office 2007's OOXML format). There's a whole slew of likeable features, such as the automatic document sync that lets you access your work anywhere you have an Internet connection, or the save as .PDF function.

When I spoke with the folks at ThinkFree, they cited the interface as one of the program's big potential attractions -- it so closely resembles Word (and the rest of office) that most people will never know the difference. The major competition in this regard is of course OpenOffice, although in my opinion the differences are minor. See for yourself:

If you want some hands-on time, you can snag a thirty-day tryout of the netbook edition.

I'm curious to see if this will, indeed, make a significant dent in either Office (including Microsoft's on-line version of same) or OpenOffice on netbooks. I suspect it'll be something of the same situation that's arisen with WordPerfect, which now comes as a preload on some desktop machines but doesn't appear much of anywhere else. But there are ideas here worth looking at, especially the ones that take advantage of the fact that a netbook needs a network connection to be truly useful.

CES 2009 treated ThinkFree very well with a tremendous amount of interest ranging from media to consumers.
With so many technologies and gadgets being revealed at the show,
ThinkFree played well into the mix. So what did ThinkFree learn from CES 2009 ?
[reported by Carlos, We thank you]

 
Taeyoung, Product manager at ThinkFree and Kevin Tofel, Editor in Chief with GigaOM network site jkOnTheRun

 
Taeyoung, Product manager at ThinkFree and Carvin , assistant manager at ThinkFree

Edward, Overseas Sales manager at ThinkFree Inc. and Kevin Tofel, Editor in Chief with GigaOM network site jkOnTheRun


 
Celebrities visited ThinkFree booth in CES 2009

ARM Showcases Innovation in Mobile Technology at 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress

From Unix Admistratosphere

source : http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/raid-is-not-a-backup/

This post describes the authors experience, almost losing his data on a RAID disk set. He also gives good details on why RAID is not a backup and how he rectified the situation. Remember: RAID is not a backup!

When working with corporate systems, a complete, reliable, and tested backup system is important. RAID does not protect you against many (or even most) disasters that could happen.

RAID is designed to protect against one thing: disk failure. It does not protect against user error, operator error, site destruction, and many more possibilities.

So how do I back things up? I must admit, I’ve improved my backup strategies of late. I currently have several tools that I use and would recommend to you:

• SpiderOak. This is an online backup service which offers the first 2Gb backup free. They also maintain multiple version backup, so if you want a file from two versions back, it’ll still be there. This service is worth paying for, I’d say.
• For my Mac, I’ve used PsyncX periodically (albeit not automated). It has come in handy more than once as my laptop died several times - I’ve one of those iBooks that was notorious for video hardware that failed annually (and Apple would fix for free, but never admitted fault). If you’ve a Mac, get an external drive and use PsyncX to save your home directory off. Also recommended: put your applications in your home directory, not the system directory: restoring your home directory will then be enough to get your applications back.
• For UNIX, the similar alternative to PsyncX is rsync: again, get an external drive and save your home directory off to it regularly.
• Also, come at it from the other direction: save your configuration by putting it into a cfengine or puppet setup and saving that as well. If the machine fails, running cfengine or puppet on startup will restore the system to its original state.
• One other item - that may seem a bit unusual - is using Thinkfree Office. Thinkfree Office gives you a way to save documents locally and have them mirrored in the Internet cloud - and you can also manipulate your documents on the web as well. Of course, this is only entirely true for documents that Thinkfree Office can edit.
  
  
  ThinkFree Office live is the unique solution which provide the Online and On-Premise !
  
  

ThinkFree Office Suite on Qualcomm Snapdragon Netbook

by Kevin Tofel, Editor in Chief with GigaOM network site jkOnTheRun
Source : http://jkontherun.com/2009/01/08/thinkfree-office-suite-on-qualcomm-snapdragon-netbook/

 

This morning I met with Edward Coloma from ThinkFree, developers of the ThinkFree Office suite. Back in October, the company introduced a demo of the productivity suite specifically for netbooks and today the company showed me the software running on Qualcomm-based hardware. They’re looking to have their product available for Android during the first half of 2009, but of course it all depends on hardware vendors since there aren’t any Android netbooks on the market… yet.

The test hardware I saw ThinkFree software running on was the same Qualcomm concept notebook we saw last month. The specs were meager by today’s netbook standards: the CPU was clocked under 600 MHz and had limited memory: 256MB. Yet the productivity demonstration ran reasonably well and is already optimized for touch controls. The concept hardware had a touchscreen and it was easy to tap and navigate through the simple menus. Overall, the software was pretty impressive considering it was ported over to support an ARM environment; it surely doesn’t hurt that it’s heavily based in Java.

ThinkFree is working with various OEMs to get the suite bundled on netbooks, but is considering a netbook version for sale. Too early for pricing, but their full version or Windows, Mac or Linux notebooks runs around $50 right now. My gut says the right price point for a netbook optimized version is around $30 to $35. The key selling point is the software’s ability to work both on- and off-line. We simply don’t have connectivity available all the time on our netbooks. Why sacrifice productivity when disconnected if you don’t have to?

I’ll be looking deeper at ThinkFree’s solution as they provided me with an Asus Eee PC 1000H review unit for 30 days, complete with their netbook software. Meanwhile, check out the gallery.










We thank you Kevin Tofel

Review ThinkFree.com
by Zipgeorge.com (http://zipgeorge.com/2009/01/08/review-thinkfreecom/)

Remotely hosted web applications have been around for some time, but as the software gets refined and broadband access improves, web apps like ThinkFree.com may give your desktop office suite a run for the money.

One web offering that stands out is ThinkFree Online, and the price is the best yet – free! The service allows you to create, collaborate on and store your documents and files with a generous 30 GB of storage space.

The company is a subsidiary of Haansoft Corporation, a Korean computer software company based in Seoul. ThinkFree was founded in 1999 as a java-based office developing company. The ThinkFree Office, a desktop alternative to Microsoft Office was first released in 2000. It has had a couple of updates since then and the current 3.0 version is designed to be almost indistinguishable from Microsoft Office.

ThinkFree Office 3.0 is one of the few alternative programs to fully support Microsoft’s latest format from Office 2007 so that you can open files without risk of corrupting the layout or content. Business users will like the fact that there is no need to spend money or time training employees as the interface operates just like Microsoft Office. ThinkFree products use the same file formats across operating systems so they can be opened whether the user is on Windows, Linux or Mac machines. Best of all, ThinkFree Office 3.0 costs only $49.95 for an individual license while the cheapest form of Microsoft Office (the Home and Student Edition) costs three times as much.

In 2005, ThinkFree released its first online service and has continued to improve and add to the service ever since. You can now store up to 30 gb of documents on ThinkFree’s servers so you or your collaborators can access your documents any time and from any where. If you already have the desktop version of the software, the online application is ideal for being able to access the documents that you worked on from your home computer.

ThinkFree isn’t quite up to taking over Microsoft’s market share, though. Microsoft Office does have some advanced features that aren’t available with ThinkFree products. For the average user, though, it will be the perfect office suite as it has the three mainly used programs – word processor, spreadsheet application and presentation application. The online ThinkFree also offers a handy beta tool called Note which is a blog editor and should prove popular.

Being java based, ThinkFree does tend to be a bit slower in response than other programs of this nature. It also only will only open one document at a time so it’s more difficult to work back and forth when needed. There is one feature that I didn’t expect in this type of software and that is the ability to export as PDF. There is also a very handy file conversion tool within the online office suite which also can be very useful.

All in all, ThinkFree Office online is one of the best applications of its kind. The interface is easy to grasp and navigate so there isn’t a sharp learning curve for new users. Since it works in most operating environments, you are not limited to collaborating only with users of the same operating system. Used in conjunction with the low-cost desktop version, anyone can work away from home and not worry about backups because of the large storage capacity.


Thanks for your deep reviewing and perception about the value of ThinkFree.com  
from Benedict (ThinkFree Marketing Manager)