10 Reasons Why You Should Play Chess

Chess is a battle of the analytical powers of two people and not necessarily of intelligence. It is a game that requires calculative and problem solving skills. So here are top ten reasons why you should consider taking up chess.

It increases you I.Q. and that is a very a good reason to start with.
It will help you take decisions faster and will help you take better decisions as well.
It enhances you logical reasoning capabilities, very helpful in real life situations like bargaining and spotting scams.
It will help you increase your concentration.
It will help you make connections with others, a great way to socialize.
Chess will make you think and analyze better, which will lend itself to more creative thinking.
By playing chess you can enhance your comprehension and retention capabilities because it increases your memory and related skills.
You will get a lot of practice at making quick decisions under pressure, very helpful for the corporate boardroom situations.
It will help you plan better and make decisions based analysis of the current situation by predicting the possible outcomes of any decision.
It is really fun once you get the hang of it! It can be incredibly addictive as well.

If you want to sharpen your brain skills, chess is the best way to do it. Not only will help you in your personal development but you can also end up having a lot of fun with friends, family and even strangers.

Finding foreclosures

Foreclosures are a very common scene in a depressed real estate market. You will find them in great many numbers if you know where to look. Even in strong real estate markets you will have foreclosures but there may be not as many in numbers as in the markets that are deflating.

If you are not a professional foreclosure investor, there is usually no point in going to the public foreclosure auctions. Banks and large lenders arrange these auctions and several professional investors are present there to snatch the deal. They are in a far better position than you to judge the value of a property and they also know how close a deal as quickly as possible. So you probably won’t be able to compete with their speed and resources.

Instead go to one of the new online sites that offer listings of homes that have just gone into default. Of course, using the websites will incur a small fee. But the alternative is going to public record offices and searching through thousands of names to find out the details of recent defaulters. Although some of those public offices have put up searchable databases online, they might not always give you the full information online. It is much easier to get proper leads by joining the paid foreclosure-listing sites. You will also be saving a lot of time by searching for pre-foreclosure properties online.

The homes are considered as pre-foreclosure homes when they have missed a number of consecutive mortgage payments. These owners still have the right to sale the property, to apply for refinance and to pay the entire defaulting amount to make their loan current again. You have a small window of opportunity for negotiating with the actual owner of the property. You might also get into contact with their respective lawyers but that doesn’t usually help.

It is best to just go down to the house and find out the house owner directly. If you can manage convince the house owner to talk with you, you are good to go ahead with your offer. If the owner is not willing to talk, you can try to offer the owner a partnership. This means that first you will pay them enough to get the loan out of default and back to current.

If you want to do this, perform the exchange for the deed to the property. Then once you have managed to sell the house you offer the original owner a 10-20% profit. If you need to repair and refurbish the house, then you might need to have a place ready where you can put up the members of the house while the house is being redone.

Of course, if the owner does not accept any offer it is best to just move on to the next prospective property.

These are just simple ways that can get your started in the business. Foreclosures are on the rise during the recession and a lot of money can be made in this market if you have the right information and timing.

Neat Business Card Scanner

Scanning business cards accurately and organizing them properly is a major need for many large and small business outfits. It helps them keep track of their contacts, payments, receipts and such things. Their need for a good business card scanner is undeniable. This is why every Neat business card scanner is made with the needs of typical businesses and executives in mind.

These efficient systems come in portable and desktop variations and have a lot to offer in terms of speed and accuracy. They are bundled with the highly efficient Neat Scanner software that utilizes a highly sophisticated deployment of OCR technology to accurately detect all the data on a card.

A very important feature of the Neat business card scanner software is its learning capability. The Neat scanner software works with you and learns from your regular usage. It will start recognizing patterns, common company codes and will also make fewer mistakes as time goes by.

The neat scanners are now Mac friendly and bring all the accuracy and usefulness to the Mac platform.
Neat business card scanners are available in a slim and small portable format for mobile scanning. You can also digitize the information on your cards and receipts with Neat Desk, which is a larger scanning system meant to sit on your desktop. The Desk can handle cards, receipts and even multipage documents. The intelligent system reads all useful information and stores it up as data on the computer, reducing your manual work and increasing your time.

Young cricket fans feel frustrated at the IPL shift

MYSORE: The Indian Premier League is a cricket tournament that sees players from all over the world participating. This year it was meant to be held in the country as usual but the dates of the tournament clashed with the general elections. This made the event’s organizers shift the venue to South Africa instead. The event will begin this weekend as scheduled but at the expense of disappointing a lot of cricket enthusiasts and supporters.

The month-long tournament is in its second season and it has already become quite popular. So the city’s youth were asked for their opinion on the situation. They responded quite vocally.
According to Rajan Nand (Student of Physical education in the University of Mysore), the IPL organizers have taken the wrong decision. They should’ve waited for the election to get over. He says that this would lead to more revenue loss for the country and that is important especially because of the recessive economy. He added that many Indian stadiums would’ve seen repairs if the IPL was held in India, which won’t happen now.

Karan Singh of UOM feels that this shift sends out a message of insecurity to the other counties. It shows that India is not sure of its internal security. He also said that the kind of crowd support and crowd volume that the players would enjoy here couldn’t be matched by South Africa, where the warm up match barely had spectators.

Ranganathan of UOM also feels that it would be a loss for the country’s economy. He says that many fans are upset at the difference in timings because it means that they will not be able to view the matches live, something that they had been looking forward to.

Ravi Verma of UOM feels that politicians are to be blamed because they are the ones who weren’t bothered about keeping the event in the country. He says that it reflects on the country’s future and feels certain that if the event had been profitable for the government, the politicians (who as per him care only for money) would’ve tried to keep it in the country.

Murlikrishnan of UOM feels that this shift has robbed the IPL of its charm because now the distance will make it feel like any other series that  is being held somewhere else. He feels saddened at the turn of events and wishes it could remain in the country.
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[old news article that i wrote]

Selecting A Card Scan Machine

Conducting business these days can be an overwhelming experience. The digitization has ensured that you meet more people, connect more often and thus create a larger network than before. But when you see that pile of business cards you have accumulated, you know that you need to sort them out before they get out of hand. Thankfully, digitization is the solution to this problem to – enter the card scan machine.

This machine will scan your business cards, Id cards, license cards, forms, passports and many more such things and turn the information on the card to data on your computer. It does this with bundled software that works with the scanner to digitize your data.

With a card scan machine you can quicken the speed of application processing at your business; store the information from printed bills and receipts to you computer; scan forms and input their data automatically and do other such things that speed up business.

You can finally spend less time on typing out data on your computer and more time on other things that matter. The card scan machine increases the efficiency and productivity of your office.

The softwares that come with these machines are made with the needs of business in mind. They will categorize your data according to bills, business cards, receipts, forms, etc. This will save you many hours a month, which would’ve gone in to the tedious inputting and organizing of your data by hand. Purchasing this type of a machine will be a very smart move for most businesses.

Use Your Business Card Scanner And Export To Excel

Use a good business card reading software to use your business card scanner and export to excel the scanned information. You must choose a software that has very accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities. This will ensure that your cards are read and turned into data on your computer with minimal processing errors. Some of the better softwares are programmed to learn as you use them and hence they will start recognizing patterns and make fewer mistakes as they go along.

You can scan cards for data with a business card scanner, export to excel afterwards with a small step. Find a OCR software that reads scanned documents and also has the capability to export the collected data into an excel format file. This is usually a CSV or a comma separated value file that contains all you scanned data in a format that MS excel can read. Now go to excel and import the file in to your work.

So you can continue using excel’s powerful features for creating accurate and useful spreadsheets but get rid of the daily drudgery of entering your data by hand from printed documents. Get a business card scanner and export to excel easily with the advanced export features of card scanning softwares.

Go to your favorite online store and search for names like CardScan, Neat, IrisCard etc. because these scanners come with softwares that offer its users the facility to export to MS Excel. You may need to search for a step-by-step guide for exporting to excel on your software but most of the major manufacturers and developers do offer this option.

Latest technology: Accessories

After all the main gadget purchases have been made, you are likely to start looking for more gadgets that go with your purchases. These smaller gadgets work as add-ons to your brand new tech-toys and give extra functionality or just a wow-factor to your primary gadgets.

There is an overflow of accessories that are available for mobile phones. Most of these are headsets and various power adapters and portable chargers. The chargers are useful when you run out of battery juice in an outdoor situation. You can actually get a solar charge for charging all your power hungry little gadgets. The headsets very in form and style, you will even get headsets attached to sunglasses that are just superb to look at.

There’s even a Bluetooth handset that looks like an obsolete, retro telephone handset! The number of accessories increases when it comes to laptops. There are myriad collections of accessories for laptops that range from the funny to the bizarre. Of course most of them are useful in some way or the other. The best are the USB devices like mini fans; laptop lights that are often converged into creatively shaped devices.

There are USB hubs that look like little men and others that look like an anemone that is sprouting USB ports, fans and lights. There are also portable speakers for laptops and they come in various different styles and shapes.

The most varied accessory is the USB stick drive or thumb drive because it appears in absolutely creative avatars that are sometimes very funny or cool to look at. There are ones with wooden casing, with casing studded with precious stones, ones that look like a pendant and even this one ingenious design that looks like torn USB cable! There is this one fantastic product that is basically a rechargeable battery that can be charged via USB; the top comes off to reveal a USB jack.

There are also portable heatsinks for laptops that tend to heat up a lot. And there are special power adapters that can fit into almost any laptop with the provided attachments. There are portable USB webcam solutions for laptops.  Laptops also have USB portable storages and drive bays, which you can use to simply plug extra hard drives in and access them via your laptop. There are also several USB keyboards that are just dedicated to doing everything that your limited laptop keyboard cannot do and this includes special functions for gaming.

The iPod and iPhone have their own share of accessories. They range from add on microphones to various docks that are attached to speakers. Sometimes the accessories will cost more than the iPod itself, but if you appreciate quality and do not care about the price tag; you might try looking at some of the high-end options in this segment. The iPhone has various accessories that let you take pictures, capture audio, etc.

As it is apparent from this article that there are endless possibilities when it comes to accessories, especially because new ones are coming out almost everyday.

What Is The Best Business Card Scanner

It is a common question across various professional fields that need to store data from printed receipts and cards – what is the best business card scanner? The answer is actually a simple one – one that is capable of producing very high quality scanned images and is also equipped with a good OCR software.

The best scanners in the market have a high dpi (some have even 600 dpi) and they will reproduce a very sharp scanned image of the business card or any other document. As for what is the best card scanner supposed to be like, it is either going to be portable (for laptop warriors) or they are going to be bigger desktop scanners with special features to scan varying sizes of cards, receipts and documents.

When you are in the market for a good business card scanner, the ideal thing to do is to go to online stores and compare the models according to your own needs. Instead of just pondering on what is the best business card scanner, go into the details of the packages and offers. See what suits you best according to size, portability, quality and of course budget.

Some of these scanners are large multipurpose machines, others come in ridiculously small sizes for portability. Business card scanners come in packages with softwares so they start archiving your data out of the box. The accuracy of these systems usually depends on the software you are using them with and most have their own software and work seamlessly with it.

Scan Business Card To QuickBooks

QuickBooks by Intuit software is a very popular accounting software that is commonly used by small and intermediate sized businesses. Its popularity has caused many of the business card scanning softwares to offer the feature that enables you to scan business card to QuickBooks.

This feature has become common in card scanning softwares, on both PC and Mac platforms. There are also popular online financial data management services that allow you to export to your data in QuickBooks format. The advantages of being able to scan business card to QuickBooks format are many.

With this feature you get to keep your book keeping completely smooth with QuickBooks and you can use your business card scanner to automatically enter vital data from receipts and bills in to QuickBooks.

This is really a very handy feature to have for those who rely heavily on printed receipts and invoices that are crucial to their accounting. Just take your pick from the various softwares available on the market or the online services and use them to import your data into your QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks premier, it is that simple.

So, to scan business card to QuickBooks, you need a good business card scanner (or other scanner) and an accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that reads the data from the scanned image. The software must support exporting or saving data to the QuickBooks native format. Hence with the right business card scanner and software combination, managing your financial documents with QuickBooks becomes a cinch.

How to choose a merchant account provider

Whether you own a business with a physical shop or an Internet based business, you will need to accept credit card payment if you want your business to be successful. And for that you will require a merchant account.

Having a merchant account has many benefits. It will give you more business because you will be able to accept payments from every type of cardholder, including ATM/Debit cardholders.

You will also be able to guarantee the safety of your customers when they are making their payment, this way you will win a lot of loyal customers who will tell everyone how safe, easy and hassle free it is to buy things from your website. That is the best thing for any website, being referred to others by satisfied customers.

So if you want your business to grow, you must invest in a merchant account. There are several providers out there who are promising a lot of things and some of them are actually scams, so be very careful about which merchant service provider you set up your account with.

A good idea is to start looking for reviews by your peers and looking for reputed companies instead of starting with the absolutely lowest charging company. If at the end of your research you find out that the best company is also the cheapest, then nothing like it. But don’t go for a company just because it us the cheapest, because you might end up losing more money than what thought you saved.

Many companies offer low cost or free setups but charge you very high transaction fees and minimum monthly rates. With these people, it is low cost to start with and then it is as high as it gets. So instead of looking at setup costs, look at how much money you will be losing regularly. Going for companies that have the lowest rates in this area is generally a good idea.

Also take into account the gateway that you will be using with your account. Some merchant accounts actually provide you with combined offers whereby you get a gateway account automatically with your new merchant account. The better the gateway, the better your operations will be and the more secure it will be. So look for reputed and proper gateways.

Then come the smaller things to consider – the extras in the package. How much automation are they offering you? How much will they charge overall, including all the small and invisible fees? Will they increase their rates in the near future? What are the perks that you get with account?

Many merchant accounts come with fully setup and functional shopping cart scripts that are tied in with your account and Gateway. Some providers also offer custom branded payment pages. All these things make your job easier and make the website more functional, professional, secure and easy to use.

So choose your provider carefully and consider all the larger and smaller details when making the decision. Remember that money is not the only issue here but it is still the main issue. So look for something legitimate that ensures long-term profit for your business.