Author: Stan Shinn

The search giant's market share among home, work and university Internet users climbed from 42.7 percent to 43.1 percent from March to April of this year--up from 36.5 percent in April 2005, ComScore said Monday.

In second place, Yahoo saw its market share hold steady at 28 percent between March and April, a decrease of 2.7 percent from last year. Less than 6 percentage points separated Google's and Yahoo's respective market shares in April 2005.

Read more at: Google retains lead in U.S. search market

Are you an IT employee wanting to improve your career track by getting certified?

Preplogic helps IT professionals and students worldwide learn new skills and enhance their careers with fast and affordable certification training.

The Preplogic service offers a wide variety of training and test preparation options. They offer free audio training samples, web based video training, and free demos of theiir practice exams -- unlike many competitors you can try before you buy and know what you're getting in advance.

Certification training and exam preparations are available for a wide range of topics including Microsoft certification training, CompTIA, Cisco, Oracle, and many others.

Read more about this service at http://www.preplogic.com

And now for something completely different.

www.headforthetop.com is a new concept -- a web site has been launched which puts a whole new angle on advertisement web sites. The ads actually compete for the prime spot on the page, right in front of the viewers eyes by playing Rock, Paper and Scissors.

Text or Image based adverts can be placed on the site, and each is placed in a box. Each advert also has a service or product description, and a link. Free boxes which just contain text can also be added which compete with the advertisements. Each box is assigned (user choice) either rock, paper or scissors. The advertisements are then launched from the bottom of the screen, and head for the top, hence the sites name. When their progress is blocked by another box, they play rock paper or scissors. The winner gets to proceed. And the looser gets relaunched if its an advertisement, or is deleted if its a free box. Its a novel idea designed to attract interest to the pixel advertising style of website. The fact that the casual user is able to play against the adverts is the clincher, because this focuses the interest on the advertisements which on most sites would be ignored. Realising the uniqueness of the idea, the designer has had the idea patented. At the moment there is a one off fee, based on size, which buys you an Advertisement lasting a year or more.

Read more at www.headforthetop.com

Amateur astronomer who wants to learn more by socializing with other astronomers and finding the best used and new equipment? Astromart is a great resource, providing digital camera reviews, astronomy news, classified ads and telescope reviews. You can place astronomy ads, read the latest news articles and check out the current reviews of newest telescopes and equipment.

Their discussion forums are quite active -- they had 1,200 new forum posts in the last week. Other features include product reviews, links, RSS news feeds, a calendar of events, auctions for used calendar equipment, and member profiles for registered users.

Learn more at http://www.Astromart.com.

Google finally added Presentations feature to their Google Docs web-based office suite. You can c Create a whole new slideshow in Presentations or upload an existing PowerPoint file (my recommendation) to get started. Collaboration for remote meeting is especially nice given they have chat built right into the sidebar.

Looking for low cost inkjet cartridges? Inkers.biz provides inkjet cartridges, toner, and toner cartridges for your printer, copier, or fax machine. Inkers offers high quality, generic ink and toner cartridges for a cost effective alternative to costly name brand toner and inkjet cartridges. Their toner and ink cartridges are 100% guaranteed against defect for one full year; they even have a thirty day no questions asked return policy.

Inkers delivers free ground shipping; their web site says they usually ship your toner and ink cartridges the same day as ordered.
Learn more at http://www.inkers.biz.

Having a good source of working capital is imperative for any small business or start-up companay. While you can use credit cards and loans from your family, one other capital source for Business Loans is an unsecured business line of credit.

www.EZUnsecured.com is one example of a source for a line of credit. Their loans and lines of credit requires No Collateral. Their lenders focus on your credit history and business financials to make their decisions. Their web site says that if you have a high credit score (i.e. above 700 FICO) they will rarely will require any income or asset documentation.

Learn more at http://www.ezunsecured.com.

Web systems are deployed not in the nine to eighteen month cycles of the Mainframe era, nor in the three to nine month cycles of the Client/Server era, but now take place in a mere 30 to 90 days!

Many of the characteristics of both the Waterfall method and the Iterative methods are not possible in sub-90 day projects. The days when gathering requirements took three months are now replaced with an economy that demands web solutions be delivered—from start to finish—in only three months!

The new web economy has provided web developers with tools allowing them to react more quickly and accurately to new requirements and a changing business environment. Gone are the days when you have to schedule to install software on an end user’s PC and take a week or two to get feedback. Web developers quickly whip together a web page, review it with an end user, and start to work on its back-end code all within the span of a few hours, thanks to web browsers and Internet collaboration.

Just as web developers have quickly adapted to the new economy, web project leaders have found new project management techniques are needed to facilitate delivering web projects on time and on budget in short 30 to 90 day life cycles.

IDrive-E is an online backup service provider offering encrypted online backups for free (up to 2GB). They also have an unlimited storage option for $4.95/month. It is easy to use, fast and secure.

While there are other alternatives in consumer online backup space, IDrive-E offers impressive performance and features.

Recent enhancements include near real time backup of frequently changing data.

With the 2GB of backup space you get in the free basic package, you can store photos, media files or other important documents. This service is well suited for individuals and families.

Features include:

• Automated, remote backups of your files/folders
• Versioning
• Incremental backup
• Continuous backup
• Mapped drive backup

Learn more at http://www.idrive.com