When Henry Cole invented the Christmas card back in 1843 could he have imagined the multi million dollar industry the greeting cards business would become? Back then, when the Penny Post had only just been invented (before that you had to pay, per sheet of paper, to receive a letter, not send it), your only alternative was to write a letter and draw or decoupage a picture for your loved ones yourself.

In those days middle class children had a lot of time on their hands so creative crafts were commonplace; making dozens of greetings would have been quite natural to them. What Cole and his partner John Horsley did was to bring the burgeoning idea of mass production and automation to the festive season. They printed up two thousand cards with illustrations that we, today, wouldn’t find particularly Christmassy; they printed flowers, fairies and frolicking animals in an effort to remind people that spring would be arriving soon rather than remind people about the dreadful cold that was about. Remember, in those days it was thought that cold air itself was the cause of disease, hence the expression “to catch your death of cold.”

It took just over thirty years for the circumstances to be right for Louis Prang to be able to exploit the US market, in 1875 he started printing greetings cards but their popularity was to be his undoing. As has been the undoing of so many businesses his commitment to quality meant that quantity in the form of cheap inferior imitations flooded the market and he was forced out of business.

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Most of us don’t know what to look for when we’re buying power tools, There are plenty of gimmicky products which look lie they’re going to be really useful but then you get them home and you find that they’re not even worth the price you paid, not withstanding the massive discounts that have already been taken off.

Go with a brand you know. Household names are known throughout the land for a reason. If a company’s been trading for decades and it’s almost synonymous with the kind of tool you’re looking for then you can rest assured that it should be up to the job.

Buy with function in mind rather than form. You might find that there’s a decorative item on the market, I’ve seen floral print hammers and pink power drills in the past but do these novelties really beat the standard, rough and ready utility tools? Unlikely.

“Buy Cheap And You Pay Twice.” Buying ‘value’ usually means that the product is inferior. That doesn’t mean that discounts on RRPs aren’t good but flimsy tools which come out of the gate at a ‘competitive’ price will dull, blunt or break so quickly that you’ll wish you bought the brand name product in the first place.

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VoIP or we can call as Voice over Internet Protocol is the communicating technology that is being used to make and receive calls from all over the world. It is not limited by any place or time. The main thing of VoIP is that it is internet telephony and works only with the connection of internet. Internet connection is the only requirement to get connected with VoIP telephony. So, VoIP can be used on computers, laptops or on mobile phones. This technology is gaining success day by day. Most of the businesses shift to VoIP internet telephony by knowing the various benefits from it. Let us discuss some of its benefits in the following:

1.)    Economically suitable

One of the great features of VoIP is that it suits to everyone’s economic condition and this feature is specially considered by business organizations that have mostly overseas clients. Using VoIP internet telephony, one can save 80-90% on the regular phone bills. In this technology, long and far away calls are either free of cost or of very cheap. So, VoIP is very cost effective in nature.

2.)    Easily Portable

VoIP phones are easily portable to any place of the world. All you need is to have an internet connection and a computer system or laptop. It has nothing like wires and other heavy hardware. You can easily shift VoIP system from one place to another.

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Adobe recently announced that they will stop developing Flash mobile browser and this led to many Flash vs HTML5 debates. Steve Jobs, being a visionary predicted this a while ago. There is no question that HTML5 is the future and any web based application should aim for the future and migrate to HTML5. But it is still not a widespread technology and there are still millions of Flash applications so it is important to make your decision based on facts and not on the hype.

If you are web based applications there are few things you can do to determine the best course of action. The most important thing to remember here is that your customers don’t care about your product or the technology used in that product. What they care about is how your tool or application can solve their problem. The only exception to this is if you are selling to a geek community who are always looking for the latest technologies.

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My best friend who I never see (she lives in LA, I live in the UK) sent me a metallic purple mug in the mail one day, it glittered like a Christmas bauble and was near double size, holding nearly a pint of coffee. Of course it’s ruined now. I live in a shared house with a bunch of people to whom the dishwasher is known as “The Magic Washing Up Cupboard” so I guess they didn’t understand the legend printed on the bottom of the mug ‘do not place in dishwasher’ and went ahead and did exactly that.

My once glittering mug is now bland and grizzled with a few specks of metallic paint still clinging to it in heroic defiance. I don’t know who did it and they’re never going to own up. It’s just one of those things you have to put up with living in shared housing; cheap accommodation, no lack of company and all your nice stuff knackered.

When I was younger I had a particularly creative bent and one of the things I used to like to make was modelling clay lighter covers. The clay was a product called Fimo, you make your creation and then fire it in the oven so it goes hard. The covers I made came in the form of monsters, I’d make them for friends as they were cheap and every one was individual. I guess they were a good idea too because I heard about some-one who had tried to copy the idea, unfortunately it hadn’t occurred to them that they would need to take the monster off of the lighter before they fired it. They’d only been making one at the time so the explosion wasn’t so big, just a very loud bang and a terrible smell of burning plastic.

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Anyone who had been to a shopping center or turned on a television in the last week has noticed the seasonal ads cropping-up. “Holiday shopping” begins earlier and earlier. Some consumers begin shopping as soon as stores start decorating with candy canes, other hold off until it gets deeper into the season. Either way, businesses use their most ruthless sales techniques in the winter and even if you aren’t shopping everyone starts building a little fantasy wish list in their heads.

The toys and gadgets that adults will be hoping for are pretty different than what kids want to find under the tree, but they are no less cool and often have even more bells and whistles. Whether they are more everyday appliances like stoves and microwaves or seasonal needs like fans and space heaters there are plenty of new appliances that will have adults jumping up and down too.

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