I thought it may be a good idea to wrap up a few things. Here is a collection of recent blog posts I like about startups.

If you are thinking about starting a company, you should take a look at these posts. I hope it’s gonna be useful for you…

• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy?
  
• Guess What? Now’s A Great Time To Launch A Startup (this is a summary of the post above)
  
• 5 Ways to Fund Your Web Startup
• Plan B for Funding: Do It Yourself
• Startup School 08
• 5 Ways Recessions Help Startups
• 3 Ways to Market a Start-Up Business
• Should you work for a startup? Here’s 9 reasons why I do.
• work.com – How-To Guides for Your Business
• How To Demo Your Startup
• How To Demo Your Startup (Part Two)
• Startup Hacks: 7 Questions VCs Will Ask You, What They Really Mean, and How You Can Answer Them
• Too Small To Fail
• 10 Micro Trends to Bet on For Your Audacious Startup
• Smart Startup Advice: Don’t Panic – Profit
• Mobile Startups & VC’s: Opportunities in Times of Crisis
• Mobil Startup Case Studies

It was shocking and shameful at first…

“YouTube banned in Turkey after video insults”
Turkey Says “No More YouTube”

Then it became sad…

Why We’re Blocked in Turkey: Adnan Oktar
Youtube banned once again in Turkey

Now it is pathetic…

Blogger.com (Blogspot) banned in Turkey
Blogger.com banned in Turkey

I’m afraid it is going to be intolerable…

Internet banned in Turkey

I have recently blogged about working out-of-office on my other blog. In that post I made a list of what do I need to do to work out-of-office comfortably.

Here is my list:
* A laptop with a screen 11″ or smaller
* A compact and light-weight laptop bag
* A PCMCIA or USB modem for GPRS/HSDPA data connection
* A comfortable cafe

Among these, I reviewed my ultra-portable laptop choices and  made my decision -for now- :)

I mentioned 3 brands in my previous post: Asus, Acer and Sony. I still believe that 11″ Sony’s are the best, however they are still far away from being affordable. So they are out of my scope for now :( On the other side, Asus had a plenty of models of Eee PCs and each new model is better than the previous ones. I think Asus does not make the same mistakes, listens to the customers and tries to make a better laptop, oops, netbook for them.

Here is the new star: Asus EEE PC 1000H

It has a 10″ display, Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth and a webcam. And on top of all of these, it has a 6-cell 6600mAh battery which lasts more than 7 hours! Well, practically I believe it is more accurate to say 4-5 hours. What I really like is that all of these cost only $500, which is far more affordable than Sony! :)

I really love the idea of ultra-portable laptops. I don’t need so much processing power or large screen. I don’t need any DVD or Blueray players. What I do need is to have a light-weight, small and long-lasting laptop, which is called a netbook.

With that kind of laptop, ermm… netbook, I just wanna check my emails, spend some time with Google Reader or some of my social networks like Friendfeed or Facebook, write a couple of blog posts maybe and rarely watch one or two tv series (How I Met Your Mother is my favourite nowadays!). I don’t want to carry a huge and heavy laptop bag, with a 15,4″ laptop and its big and hot power supply.

I think Asus EEE PC 1000H is one of the best as an ultra-portable laptop, or a netbook. It can be carried around easily which also points that this is really an ultra-portable laptop, right!? But I’d like to ask: “Is it mobile, yet?”. What do you think?

Since this is not a review I do not get into details of this piece of art but you can find some review sites below:

http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product1000h.html
http://www.pclabs.com.tr/2008/09/22/asus-eee-pc-1000h-ve-1000hd-incelemesi (Turkish)
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/asus-eee-pc-100h.aspx
http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/09/19/Asus-Eee-PC-1000H—Windows-XP-Edition/p1
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/218841/asus-eee-pc-1000h.html

In this very first post of my new blog I’d like to share two very useful filtering tips of GMail. I have been using them for a year (I guess) and finally I am bloging about it :)

One of them is the period or dot (.) in your username. Let’s say my email address is “myname@gmail.com”. Thanks to GMail, all of the dotted versions of my username are also reserved for me, since adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. So, all of the emails that are sent to any of the email addresses below are basically received by myname@gmail.com

.myname@gmail.com
my.name@gmail.com
myname.@gmail.com
m.y.n.a.m.e@gmail.com
etc

What a helpful trick! So there won’t be any confusion of sending emails with or without the dot, just send it and it will be OK. Moreover, as I said before this can be used as a filtering tool. Just create a filter for any email-dot combination you would like to use, and use it for different websites or friends etc.

Another filtering tip is about the plus sign (+). You can add plus sign and a keyword at the end of your username, and again all of the emails will be delivered to you.

For example you can sign up for a website with myname+website@gmail.com and then you can filter all of the emails come to that address. This might be useful for suspicious websites that you think twice before giving your email address. Cool, huh? :)

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!