The friendly guys over at Wing Products agreed to send me one of their latest and greatest inventions, cordgo. Ultra light-weight, super portable and highly customisable, the cordgo aims to remove the daily hassle of tangled cords, cluttered wires and annoying straggly leads which are scattered everywhere I look.

So how does this work?

The device is very simple, truth be told. Even for a complete dunce like me, I managed to work it out in a matter of seconds and can now use the cordgo in style! Simply push firmly with your thumb on the back panel clipper, and slide down. The face panel willl then slip off to reveal the gadget’s insides. Grab a wire, and loop in around the spindle inside the casing of the cordgo. Then simply pop the face back into the unit, and off you go! You can set the cord length for different positions, or even for storage, without having to mess around and get yourself tangled up.

Sounds simple enough?

It is… I managed to do all of the above with just one hand, whilst jogging round my local park. It really is that simple. To lengthen or shorten the cord, simply rotate your thumb in a circular motion around the front face-plate of your cordgo. I’ve been using the device for three-days now, daily, commuting in and out of Manchester, and I’ve now found myself unable to leave the house without this spiffy little gadget. What do I use it for most? I’d have to say that as an audiophile, it’s been my headphones mostly. Unfortunately though, the cordgo only fits cords up to 3mm in diameter. Whilst this is usually more than enough for most devices, I’ve found the odd gadget or two which hasn’t fitted, which has been rather annoying, at times.

Surprises?

It’s really incredible, how light the cordgo actually is! Something as light as this would usually break rather easily though, or so I thought, so I put the cordgo to the test.

The Drop Test

- 1 meter high. A bit of bouncing, but the cordgo has remained sealed and unscratched.
- 2 meters high. Some more bouncing, though no effect again.
- 3 meters high. Some spinning, alot of bouncing, and a bit of rolling around, but the cordgo remains unscathed & sealed.
- 4 meters high. No effect, though my poor MP3 player is looking a little sorry for itself!
- 5 meters high. The cordgo wins… Not even a scratch!

The Throw Test

- 1 meter away. Busted! A full force whack on a metal door did the trick, and the cordgo came loose. The two faces separated, but no scratches could found on the exterior.

All-in-all, for something like this, it’s pretty impressive! Let’s face it, who really is going to drop their gadget from five meters high anyway?

Final Conclusions

Whether you’re an urban communter, or out in the countryside doing the odd spot of gardening, the cordgo is a must-have if you’re mess conscious and wish to eliminate wires and clutter immediately. Cordgo is ideal for anyone who is on the move, and makes the whole definition that really is ‘portable’ come to life. Don’t me let down my annoying cables, let cordgo sort it out! In my opinion, it’s hard to go wrong with something this simple, and Wing Products seem to have fulfilled all the ‘right’ categories so far.

My favourite feature? The re-usable cordgo face plate decal stickers. Whether you want a lion, a bird, a panda or a dragon, many different stickers are included with each purchase.

Pricing
$9.95 each, but for a limited time only, there’s a ‘Buy-one Get-one Free!’ offer going. That and the decals… You’ll never know till you try cordgo, how much of a life-saver it really is! Head on over and pick one up now.

Featured Sites: Cheap Gadgets | Robotmag Gaming and Gadgets

I feel rather sad, at present. The past two or three weeks, (Ever since I moved to Wordpress!) I’ve found myself constantly checking out & referencing my Technorati statistics for Techzi.net… The teasing button in the dashboard doesn’t help the matter, and I’ve now bookmarked my Technorati statistics page for quick reference.

Chris evidently symathises with me.

Here are Techzi’s current statistics as of today, Friday 9th March:

- 257 links coming in from…
- 157 blogs who know they’re spiffy.
- All this in exactly a month!

That reminds me, it is exactly a month since we re-launched over at Techzi.net! I think that calls for some kind of celebration, don’t you?

Featured Links: Electronic Components | Aircraft Parts | Italian Property | Funny Pictures

No more status-quo.

Education. Kids. The future. Change is a scary thing, but the fact is, it happens. In order to keep up with modern life, things need to change & fast. The government, councils and schools themselves have all rejected sensible propositions put forward by students, and if we don’t act soon, the future of education as we know it could plummet into a state of dis-repair. FrustratedStudents outlines this, and gives their own top reasons of WHY education needs to change, HOW we can change it, and MAKING a difference that will impact the generations to come.

1. Focus on tests and grades. Learning happens differently to everyone and the system must be more flexible and stop focusing a whole child’s life on “making the grade”.

2. Bureaucracy. It’s what stops thousands of dollars from actually educating a child, what keeps bad teachers securly in their jobs, and precisely why stopgap solutions such as more funding or bigger schools haven’t worked. Reduce the bureaucratic footprint, and you’ll accomplish much more with even current resources.

3. Living in 2007. Technology has completely changed the lives of people on this world. Unfortunately, schools are the last venue for adoption of these fantastic tools. Students shouldn’t have to fight the system, with only the pencil at school and only the computer at home.

Here’s a great example from what’s going on at my school. The board of govenors/head-teacher has decided that it will be great to push forward with a new method of classroom organization, known as ‘Vertical Tutorial Groups’. So what is VTG? Rather than having a class of 30 pupils, all of the same age (give or take a few months), 5 pupils from each year will be put into a single form, hence creating a ‘Vertical Group’.

Year 7 - 5 pupils
Year 8 - 5 pupils
Year 9 - 5 pupils
Year 10 - 5 pupils
Year 11 - 5 pupils

I’ve already written a double-sided A4 essay during our ‘PSHE’ lessons on my feelings about VTG, and have highlighted 101 reasons exactly WHY the scheme won’t work. The teachers have given several asemblies, in each, claiming that VTG is for the good of the school, and that together we can move forward. Oh yeah? Bullying will increase, as will peer-pressure from older students on younger ones. Foul language and aggressive behaviour and bad influences will be passed on from an earlier age. An increase of form-tutors/teachers will also be needed, as in every class, there will be 25 pupils, as opposed to 30. Change happens… But shouldn’t democracy have a say?

What would I like to see in Education 2.0? Democracy to the pupils. And not some half-hearted attempt to make us feel like we’re having a say, as is the case in our school. Whatever I say, it won’t matter. The descision has already been made, though the school point-blank denies it. The arguments against giving pupils a collective voice? We’re not responsible. Uh-huh? You wanna say that to my face?

Anyhow, if only children/teenagers/kids were treated with the respect they deserve, given appropriate responsibilites, given a voice, then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the educational pickle that we are in at the moment? Who knows.

The fact is, CHANGE HAPPENS. Education needs to change, and fast…

I’m tagging Chris Pirillo, Darren Rowse, John Chow, Ilker Yoldas and Nate Whitehill to carry on the conversation. Who says only kids have to get involved? If some adults voice their opinions on the matter too, then maybe we will get somewhere.

In a blatant attempt to copy John Chow, Techzi is throwing it’s very own re-launch competition! There’s already a great piece of gear which you can get your hands on, with at least one confirmed other on it’s way! So how can you win one of these spiffy prizes?

Simple! Just join our MyBlogLog communtiy! Where can you do this? Right here of course! The Techzi MyBlogLog Community already has over 60 members, and we’re throwing this competition in the hope of increasing that number further. If you’re interested in expensive gadgets, a thriving community & the latest technology news, you know this is the one for you. Winners will be announced on April 1st. “What if I’m already a member?” Great! You’ll be automatically entered into the prize drawing! Winners will be selected randomly, and the judge’s descision is final. In the event that a winner becomes unavailable, a new winner will be randomly selected.

If you have any questions or queries, or simply want to do some flaming, e-mail us at Competition@Techzi.net, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible! I won’t be writing many, if any updates today though as it’s my Birthday, so make me proud and enter. This is just the beginning!

Featured Sites: Cheap Gadget Shops

As some of you may know, I ordered my computer from MESH Computers several weeks back… They promised to deliver in time for my birthday, which just so happens to be today. The date they quoted, was infact Monday 12th February.

I have no problem with a company having issues or problems with it’s services, but when they lie to the customer repeatedly, put you on hold for several minutes on Premium rate numbers and refuse to tell you the status of your order, I have a problem. If they just owned up to the fact and admitted the problem, I’d be happy. But they’re still not quite telling us the truth I feel. First it was ‘Your PC will arrive today’. Next day it was ‘Your PC will arrive today’. Next day it was ‘Your PC may not arrive today. We’ve had a Vista Problem’. When we inquired what the problem was, they told us that the ‘Vista disk partition is yet to leave the labs’. You know what? That’s absolute rubbish… I’ve seen people on forums who’ve had MESH deliver Windows Vista, so why won’t you give me mine?

Why have you left us in the dark? Like I said, if you have an issue, admit it, and tell me where I stand. I hardly believe it’s Vista as I’ve had confrimation from others who’ve ordered from MESH.

Update: It turns out that infact it’s something to do with MESH and Vista Ultimate in quality control… Slightly more believable! Why couldn’t they have just told me that in the first place though? With a company this big, they need a better method of notifying customers of delays.

Over this week, I’ve done several different interviews with people for both Profy and Techzi… Today, I managed to catch up with Gary Jones from BlueFur, the site I reviewed not so long ago in exchange for a domain. Here’s what he had to say about his company, services, and how everything works at BlueFur.

Gary, it’s great to have you here with us today on Techzi.net - Now I’m led to believe that you’re the owner of BlueFur. Is this correct?
I am part owner of the company, but my main day to day responsibilities is to look after Sales & Marketing. I am more of the front man who you see in the public and on the internet.

Great… Sorry about getting that wrong. How does your hosting at BlueFur match up and compare to that of you competitors? Would bonuses do you offer? Why should people go with you?
Most people would agree that choosing hosting is a very hard choice as there are many providers with very few distinguishing factors other then
space/bandwidth and price. We do have several distinctive features that makes us different.

One of the distinctive features is that throughout the year we provide free online courses. These courses range from MySQL, PHP and basic cPanel usage to marketing. The courses are all done live over the phone with a screen that they can watch the presenter demonstrate the course material.

Another distinguishing factor is we offer 2 automated backup tools. These tools allow you to back up your site files and mySQL with a set it and
forget it software. This software we created so that customers can feel secure in knowing that they have there own copy of there site.

Although there are many hosts in Canada we are one of the few that take Canadian Currency with servers and staff in Canada. We are one of the only providers that has 2 locations in Canada one in Montreal and one in Vancouver. This allows us to provide a unique failover solution where if
your site were to be down on one server it would come up in a separate server in a different geographical location. This means that if the
datacenter is having issues your site and email would still function to work in a separate location.

Wow… If the courses alone aren’t a good enough reason, I don’t know what is! How does the hosting work, and what plans do you offer? Do you offer customized plans to cater for all types of people?
We have close to 130+ plans and options to choose from. We have something that fits every budget and requirement. We do provide custom plans based on the requirements of an individual.

130? Brilliant stuff! Does the company have any future activities planned? Any aims or goals for the near future?
Our immediate goal is to finish our change from MonsterHosting.ca to BlueFur.com as smoothly as possible.

Ah yes, I did read up on that. So why did you decide to run the domain-for-a-review scheme in the first place? I myself was granted ZiMedia.net with it, as you know…
Part of the move of names is that we are going to loose Mind Share for the old name. I wanted to create some new Mind Share for the new name and a bit of buzz in the blog sphere with the new name. I was also looking for some honest opinions on the name from people outside of the hosting industry. The feedback thus far has been great.

Nice to hear. Can you tell us more about the team involved? Where are you based, and how many people work on the various parts of BlueFur?
Our staff all work through Tele-Office style where they work from home. We currently have 12 full time staff and several part time staff. I am
located in Surrey, BC but the staff are located across North America.

What unique approaches does your company take, to achieve the goals that they do?
We sound board a lot of our ideas off real world business people before pushing to far into it. We listen to our customers and build plans around
there suggestions to solve problems long term. We also try to have fun in everything we do.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Everybody, that was Gary Jones from BlueFur.com! I hope you learned something new there! That said, I’m sure that the BlueFur hosting is great, but I’m with InfinFX, and with them we survived the Digg Effect hitch-free! Not bad going I say. They’re even using my Plesk control panel in their screenshots.

Here are the statistics after the Digg Effect struck us, after the ProBlogger article I wrote was promoted to the frontpage. Random, useless statistics live on! That said, there were some real shockers in stall, in both the browser & OS sectors.

Operating Systems

73.89% - Windows (Alot less than expected!)
19.19% - Mac (Incredible, in my opinion!)
4.93% - Linux (Still more than I’d expected!)
1.99% - Other (Wonder what, in this case?)

Operating System Versions

I only have the statistics here from Windows and Mac… Here are the CORRECTED Windows percentages. (My apologies for the original mistake! I had to copy these figures out by hand you know! )

77.55% - Windows XP (Expected at least this much.)
11.10% - Windows Vista (Really? Early adopters like myself I see, or beta users. )
11.35% - Other

And here are the Mac stats…

82.43% - Mac OS X Intel (Nice to see!)
17. 57% - Mac OS X PowerPC (Alot of people obviously still holding off updating!)

Browser Stats

70.30% - Firefox (300,000,000 downloads as of today!)
13.75% - Safari (More Safari users than Internet Explorer? WOW!)
12.38% - Internet Explorer (A decline in the market leader?)
1.98% - Opera (Very small amount of people using Opera.)
1.5% - Camino (Even less number using Camino.)
0.5% - Netscape Navigator (Pretty much nobody using Netscape.

Screen Sizes - Why? Dunno…

29% - 1280 x 1084 (An industry standard it seems now!)
23.5% - 1024 x 768
14% - Unknown (What happened here?)
7% - 1280 x 800 (My laptop’s screensize.)
6.5% - 1600 x 1200
5% - 1440 x 900
3.5% - 1680 x 1050
2.5% - 1280 x 960
2% - 1400 x 1050
1.5% - 1152 x 864
1.5% - 1920 x 1200 (The expected size of my new monitor… Still in the mail.)
1% - 1152 x 870
1% - 2560 x 1024 (Wow… Time for me to get an upgrade!)
0.5% - 2680 x 1050 (Sweet resolution man!)
0.5% - 1280 x 854
0.5% - 1280 x 768 (
0.5% - 800 x 600 (Nooo! The horror!)

I can’t be bothered posting the screen aspect ratio… Very boring, and about 80 different types. Another day maybe.

Timezones

The information is still incomplete, and flooding in by the second.

Language & Region

Again, we’ve not got the full data ready here yet.

Referring sources

Guess? Digg, via ProBlogger of course!

More information coming soon… Sorry it’s incomplete! Just thought that what we had was pretty surprising!

My favourite comment out of all the ones on Digg? “Nicely done on the article David. You certainly have a thick skin and a quick wit for all the garbage being thrown in these comments. I think your next article should be ‘a 12 year old shows Digg readers how to be mature’.” Why? They’re right… I never knew what kind of a place Digg was. Ah well, who cares. Their words, rants, flames, and general smitings have failed to deter me. The blog must go on!

I caught up with Ray van den Bel, a professional LinkedIn networker and found out more about him, his job, and what a ‘Pro Networker’ is supposed to do! Ray was the person who originally introduced me to networking all the months ago, and what better time than now, as he sits on top of the LinkedIn answers board to ask him a few questions?

So Ray, it’s great to have you here with us today on Techzi.net - Can you explain to everyone who you are, and what a ‘Professional Networker’ does?
I always have been fascinated by the interaction of people, I always wanted to become a diplomat in the foreign office. Being at the centre of cultures and interesting people. An online networker like me is just like a networker in real life. We try to find matching people, expertise and build huge networks use best-practices in order to do that. Web 2.0 though gives us new way to interact in a quality way to each other using IM, Skype, video online, blogs, communities etc.

I know like myself you’re a Web 2.0 fan, will you explain how that effects networking?
The internet always has been a very 2 dimensional place to be; you just showed information on a webpage for others to read and to use. Web 2.0 now enables us to make the transition to a more interactive, action driven environment on which we can show our profile, our communication style, our personallity. We are trying hard on web 2.0 and web 3.0 especially (Second Life) to make a close fit to normal life interaction and that it is why its so interesting and why you can be successful doing it, also from a business point of view

Great! How do you treat networking? Is it a job? A hobby? An extra online income-stream? How many clients do you have?
The trick is to understand yourself, your own communication style and to understand the communication style of the other person or organisation, so that you can target that effectively. It was a hobby that is turning more and more into my business. People have started to notice me and my method. They like what they see and they notice that it can make a huge difference to their online strategy… At the moment I have roughly 5 clients, all very different, ranging form personal coaching (jobhunting using networks and targeted networking) to Online strategy consulting.

Ray, I believe that Nike were recently interested in hiring you to be their strategy & new business development director. Can you tell me if you’re often approached by such big companies about Web 2.0, and what the job involves?
A lot of companies realize that they cannot reach their client effectively anymore with the usual methods (phone, email, brochures etc) . They are also starting to realize that they only can if they create a targeted community to reach out to people with same interests. Web 2.0 and web 3.0 enables that if you do it the right way. That is why they approach me.

Web 3.0? I can see you’re thinking about the future already… Anyhow, I’ve got to go, but it’s been great to catch up with you!

That was Ray van den Bel everybody! Web 2.0/Social Networking Expert.

No idea why a Digg button is showing for my article I did on ProBlogger.net - I didn’t put it there. Perhaps a pingback to this article in the comments? Anyhow…

Hmm… My computer which was scheduled to arrive today never did. I was holding on, and my mum even stayed home, from work to make sure everything came fine. Ah well. Tomorrow is a new day, and if the PC is one day late, I’ll live. The fact that the coming gave a definite date though, then when we rang to check with customer service at 3PM today, it was again confirmed, is rather disappointing. I expected better.

Long as it lasted, we’re going to create our own new little theme. Again. We’ve found there to be far to many issues, bugs, problems & general badness in this current burger of code that you see before you. It may take a couple of weeks, but you can’t say that we didn’t warn you of potential turbulence!

I’m sorry about this… Not only to you guys, but to Nate, our programmer, who’s put so much effort in already. Keep it up man!