By David Goldman @CNNMoneyTech   T-Mobile/MetroPCS: Third place at best   NEW YORK (CNNMoney) --  T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS have agreed to merge, joining together two of the nation's largest low-cost wireless carriers.  Both companies have been struggling. Though each remains profitable, their smartphone offerings are lackluster (i.e., no iPhone), they are far behind the curve on network technology, and both are shedding customers. 

B y Guest Contributor ·  Email Kimberly Palmer is the author of Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back, which was published by Ten Speed Press this week. The following post has been adapted from the book. Since job security is almost as hard to find as well-rested new parents, we have to create our own financial stability by building multiple sources of incomes. That can mean taking on freelance work, starting up our own businesses, or pursuing a potentially lucrative hobby. With the average worker now holding 10 different jobs before age 36, the only way to guarantee a little bit of continuity is to take matters into our own hands. Here are some ways to get started: Brainstorm. Ask a friend or family member to engage in some quick back-and-forth to gin up some ideas. What are your talents? Do you daydream about any potential money-making schemes? Have you stopped pursuing a hobby that you used to ...

Kevin Foster and his wife. Name: Kevin Foster Pay: $103,000 Age: 53    About five years ago, I went to go purchase a car, and the salesman said [no one would finance my loan]. Then he told me I had a 460 credit score. He said I needed to find someone to help me get my credit cleaned up. I called a [credit repair] company and enrolled.  It turned out there was another guy who lived in my same town with a very similar Social Security number, so his bad credit had gotten merged onto my credit report. [Once the credit repair company was done], my score went from a 460 to a 780.  [Three years later], I started going to national conferences that are like boot camps for credit repair and I learned how to legally and ethically launch my own company [TRW Credit Services]. 

Jason and Steven own an Italian mastiff named Rocky who is K-9 Resorts' unofficial mascot. Name: Steven and Jason Parker Pay: $150,000-plus (each) Age: 28 and 25    Steven: When we were kids we would always ask our parents for a dog for our birthdays and holidays. When I was 14 and Jason was 12, we said 'what if we start a dog-sitting business to show our parents we're responsible enough to take care of a dog?'  We [took care of 50 dogs] and went back to our parents, and they said 'it's not that we don't believe you have the responsibility, it's that we don't like dogs.'  But we loved what we were doing anyway. So we opened [a luxury dog hotel] in 2005 and it was an immediate success.  Jason: [To set ourselves apart, we have] cage-free rooms and suites, outdoor window views, and plasma TVs playing "Animal Planet....

Name: Josh Skolnick Pay: $250,000 Age: 29    When I was 10 or 11 years old I had my own little business pushing a lawn mower for people, and I continued with landscaping through middle school and high school. [By 2005, I had my own] mulch business. I had about 385 residential clients. [One day], someone called and said they had a dead elm near their pool that no one would come cut down and remove. So I went out and [hired a contractor for the day to] cut down the tree. While I was out there, all the neighbors saw what I was doing and started asking me to cut down their trees, too. 

Name: Jonathan Lockwood Pay: $127,000 Age: 46    I got into radio when I was very young, at 17. I was a deejay, and recording commercials [for local businesses] was part of my job.  As I moved from station to station, I found there wasn't a lot of money. So I started doing TV commercials. And when I was 32, I finally left my last radio station to work out of my home studio [recording TV commercials]. I do a lot of commercials for national furniture retailers. I announce the big sales. I just did an infomercial for eDiets where I introduce people who had success on eDiets. I do car dealers and laser vision correction doctors. I

Name: Lauren Elward Pay: $165,500 Age: 33    I was an English teacher, and the copy machine at school was always breaking so I would make copies at home.  I had 125 kids a day. I can't count how many times I was running out to Staples getting more ink cartridges -- and it was all coming out of my pocket.  I looked online and there are companies out there [that recycle cartridges], but it wasn't a flooded market. So [my husband and I] invested about $1,000 and found some inexpensive guy from Europe to make a website for us. 

Clearing trees. Performing magic tricks. Pet sitting. Repairing other people's credit. These people are earning $100,000 or more.  Reads minds, does magic tricks Name: Wayne Hoffman Pay: $135,000 Age: 30    It all started as a hobby, when I got a magic set for Christmas as a kid. At college, I studied psychology. And that's when I started getting interested in mentalism, which is geared toward mind-reading. Times were rough at first and I had to bust my butt to get jobs, but now I have to turn away business, and I can take off time whenever I want.

One year after Steve Jobs ' death, Apple is now the most valuable in the world. By David Goldman @CNNMoneyTech   NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Here's one of those peculiar Apple paradoxes: One year after the death of Steve Jobs -- the iconic leader Barron's once called "the world's most valuable CEO" -- Apple's value has soared. 

By Dorrine Mendoza , CNN A videographer shoots the side of Facebook's Like Button logo at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California. (CNN) -- It was a busy week for Facebook, which hit a major milestone, made fashion news and made some users uneasy about privacy again. In case you missed it, here are the highlights: 1. Reached 1 billion users In short : As of October 4, one of every seven people on the planet are actively using Facebook each month. "Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life," Zuckerberg told CNN Money.

Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory in March, months before Friday's report of a massive strike at the plant's iPhone 5 production lines. source : CNN By Julianne Pepitone @CNNMoney   NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Thousands of factory workers at Foxconn went on strike Friday to protest their working conditions on the iPhone 5's production lines, according to a report from an independent workers' rights organization.

(Source: CNN) --  Photo Comparison (Source: CNN) Some iPhone 5 users are complaining that a burst of purple is showing up in their photos -- and Apple seems to be acknowledging it's just part of how the camera works. Since Apple's new smartphone was released just over a week ago, some of the millions of users have reported that, when a strong source of light is present in their photographs, the light takes on a purple hue.

(CNN) --  Smart Phone Diaries of 3 smartphone addicts In 1 recent week, the medical student sent 40 e-mails and 399 text messages, snapped 25 photos, bought two movie tickets, downloaded four songs, watched a full-length film, checked the weather forecast 15 times, shopped at Target, surfed the Web for 129 minutes and spent 5½ hours socializing with friends on Facebook -- all from his iPhone 4S. "I am not my phone, but my phone is a reflection of me," said Smith, 26, of Louisville, Kentucky. "It does a pretty good job of taking my life and folding it up into a nice little lightweight, pocket-sized summary. It's almost like I am holding a copy of my brain in my hands."

Steve Job (Source: CNN) -- Many of Steve Jobs' most inspiring and quotable lines come from his famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford , when he told assembled graduates, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." But the late Apple co-founder, who died a year ago Friday, had many other colorful and insightful things to say.

Computer Knowledge, Software & Technology: Online Marketing

Firesheep:Trick to Hack Facebook and Twitter Password on Wifi

Do you access your Facebook or Twitter account while you are on a public network like your college’s or office’s unsecured WiFi.Then this is the time that you should think about your account security.If you think that Facebook or Twitter are secured websites then it’s the time to face the reality they are not secured.Whenever you login into your Facebook or twitter account check the address bar of your browser you will see something like  http://www.facebook.com/home.php?  Similar is the case with twitter.They use HTTP protocol instead of secured HTTPS protocol.But if you login into your gmail account you will notice that it uses HTTPS protocol.

As we all know, reaching people through online, e-commerce and social media has become an unquestionable requirement of doing business; particularly for smaller brands without the resources to do other types of advertising and promotion. However the online space is becoming increasingly more crowded as well. Gone are the wild frontier days of social media where anything would garner attention. In addition emailers and banner

In PowerPoint, the standard operations, such as saving work, are just like in any other Office application. To save, click the Save button on the Standard toolbar or choose File ⇨ Save. To save the presentation under a different name or location, or as a different type, use File ⇨ Save As. No surprises there. In most cases you'll want to save PowerPoint presentation files in the default format: Presentation (*.ppt). There are lots of alternatives available, though, and Table 1-1 below summarizes them. If you decide you want to save in PowerPoint format, you have three choices: Presentation (PowerPoint 2003) format is very versatile. It is compatible with all PowerPoint versions 97 and above (97, 2000, 2002, and 2003), and it preserves all features. PowerPoint 97-2003 and 95 format adds compatibility for PowerPoint 95 to the mix, but it also greatly increases the file size. That's because in 97 and higher, graphics are compressed, but in 95 they ar...

As with anything, it's easier to work with PowerPoint when you can clearly see what you're doing. Here are some tips for making the display show the elements you want to see. Customizing the Normal View Panes In Normal view, you can adjust the sizes of the panes relative to one another by dragging the borders between them. To get rid of one of the panes entirely, drag the border between it and the adjacent pane so that it is as small as possible. For example,  I've dragged the bar between the Slide pane and the Notes pane down all the way to the bottom, so the Notes pane is completely hidden, and I've increased the width of the Outline tab's section. The Outline/Slides pane also has an X in its top-right corner that you can click to close it. To restore any panes you've hidden, reselect Normal view from the View menu. This does not restore the sizes of any panes you resized, nor does it reopen the task pane. (Choose View ⇨ Task Pane t...

PowerPoint is a fairly typical Windows-based program in many ways. It contains the same basic elements that you expect to see: title bar, menu bar, window controls, and so on. And like all Office 2003 applications, it has a task pane that provides shortcuts for common activities. Here's a quick rundown of some basic elements, which are shown in Figure: Toolbars: The Standard and Formatting toolbars appear at the top, and the Drawing toolbar at the bottom, by default. Other toolbars come and go automatically as needed, and they can also be displayed or hidden by right-clicking any visible toolbar and choosing from the menu that appears. Task pane : This pane pops up on its own for certain activities as well as when PowerPoint starts. You can also display or hide it manually from the View menu. Slide pane : This is where the PowerPoint slide(s) that you are working on appear.

I was talking to a new acquaintance recently at a party who had just discovered PowerPoint. As a graphic artist back in the 1980s for one of the "big three" TV networks, she had spent many years creating presentation graphics and overlays for commercials and TV shows. She was so excited about PowerPoint's capabilities! "With PowerPoint, I can do in 2 minutes by myself what it would take a staff of 20 people a whole week to do," she told me. That's PowerPoint's appeal, in a nutshell. It does all these amazing graphical things that make presentation graphics really shine, and it does them so easily and quickly that it puts the power of creation in almost anyone's hands. PowerPoint is a very popular tool among people who give presentations as part of their jobs, as well as for their support staff. With PowerPoint, you can create visual aids that will help get the message across to an audience, whatever that message may be and whateve...

By being aware of the page layout in your documents, you can ensure that everything looks good. Maybe you think that the text is the most important thing, and I agree with you, but the layout of your documents is the text’s "public face" and it is the first thing the reader sees. A good layout, however, will give the reader a good first impression, which means that your pearls of wisdom stand a better chance of being read. This is equally important whether you are trying to sell an idea, a product, or yourself in a job application. In this section you will learn how to align margins and tabs (tabulators), insert page numbers, create headers and footers and other cool features. You will also learn how to create two-sided prints.   1 Margins There are three things to remember when aligning margins: Should there be room for headers and footers? Should there be room for holes in the paper? Does it look nice? Whether the document looks nice is of course a subjectiv...

Word changes automatically to a new page when there is no more space on the page you are writing on. But in some cases you may need to take control; for instance, if you are writing a book or report, where you want all the main sections to start on a new page. That can be achieved by inserting forced page breaks. Later in this book, we will do some exercises where we are going to need a document with multiple pages. The document that we have worked with so far only has a single page, so let us make it a little longer by adding some page breaks. It is also a good opportunity to revise how Styles are used and how the Table of Contents is updated. Place the cursor after the last line in the document. Choose the Insert Tab in the Ribbon.  Click on the Page Break button. 

Now that we have made some real headings using Styles, I want to show you how to make an automatic table of contents. A good rule of thumb is that a report of twelve pages or more should have a table of contents. In Word this is easily done if you have used Heading Styles. The table of contents will adapt automatically if you make any changes to the document. We will use the document that we have worked with in recent exercises. It is only a half page, so I have to admit that it seems a bit silly to make a table of contents, but in this way you do not have to write 12 pages of text before we can begin the exercise.

The "Normal" Style is excellent for general text. It is basically set up to use the font "Times New Roman" in point size 12, which is pleasant to read. But perhaps we can still improve the style a little. I like documents with “straight margins". This means that the spaces between the words are adapted so that all lines reach the right margin, excluding the lines that are closed with a line break. 1. Right-click the Style button Normal in the Ribbon. 2. Click Edit in the menu that appears.

When I say simple formatting, I mean selection of a piece of text to be rendered in another font, colour, alignment etc. When it gets more advanced, we will start working with Styles, which gives more options. 1. Select the first line using the mouse. 2. Select the Home Tab in the Ribbon. 3. Click on the Bold Button in the Ribbon. It is the button with a ”B” on it 4. Select once again the text you have just formatted 5. Click on the Center Button. 6. Again, make sure that the first line of text is selected. 7. In the font changer, click the small arrow to the right of the font name. 8. Click Arial Black on the list that appears 9. Similarly, change the font size to 16. You can do this either by selecting it from the list or by typing it directly into the field.

Let us write some text, so we have something to work with. You must type the following text into a blank document. When I write "Press ENTER on the keyboard", you obviously do not write it, but press ENTER (or RETURN key, as some call it). This is the first exercise in Word 2007. Press the ENTER key on the keyboard. When I have finished reading the book and done all the exercises, I will be able to solve virtually any task in connection with letter writing, report writing, mail merging, printing, envelopes and labels. (Press the ENTER key on the keyboard). I will also learn how to insert images and even spreadsheets and charts from Excel. (Press the ENTER key on the keyboard).

As indicated earlier, we will try using a Template. I have chosen a letter Template that makes it easy to set up a nice letter. 1. Click on the Office Button in the upper left corner of the screen. 2. Click on New. 3. In the left side, select Installed Templates. 4. Select the Template Urban Letter. 5. Double-click on the template or Click on the Create button. This opens a new mail document. Everything is set up, you just have to type your text into the different text fields. Using Templates is an excellent way to create documents. If you are working with Word in a company, the company might have created its own templates for letters, faxes, reports and notes, which are adapted to their letterhead, colour, etc. You could ask the IT department in your company if this is the case.

You do not have to confine yourself to working in one document at a time. You can have as many documents open as your computer's memory allows. In most cases, this means more than you will ever need. Let us try to start a couple of new documents, so you can get an idea of your options. Click on the Office Button in the top left corner of the screen. Click on New.

When Word starts up, the program will display a new blank document - that is, a completely blank piece of paper which you can begin to write on. That is fine most of the time, but you do not have to start from a completely blank page. Word can help you lay out your documents neatly, so it is easy, for example, to design a nice letter. This is done through a variety of built-in Templates that were installed with the program. You can download even more Templates from the Internet. If this is not enough for you, you can also create your own Templates once you are familiar with the program.

The Status Bar, in the bottom left of the screen, shows at all times which page you are on, how many pages there are in total, and how many words there are in the document. There is also a small icon that moves as you type.  Status Bar  It shows the Spelling and Grammar Check is active. It also says what language you are using (in case you are in doubt). Joking aside, when, for instance, it says "English", it means that Word understands what you have written to be English and applies the English Dictionary and Grammar Check on it.

With the View Buttons you can change the way your document is displayed. The View does not change the way your document appears when you print it. The different Views each have their advantages depending on what you are working on. 1 Print Layout Print Layout is the default View. In this View, what you see on the screen is similar to the print-out. This View is good when you type text, and it is excellent when you want to position pictures and graphics as well as when you need to adjust page setup and margins. This View is probably the one you will use most often.

The small, discrete ”Quick Access” Toolbar is located just to the right of the Office Button. Using Quick Access, you can save, undo, etc. with a single click.  "Quick Access" can be customised so you can choose the features that suit you. To do this, right-click on any button and choose Customize Quick Access Toolbar. Alternatively you can click the small arrow to the right of the Toolbar to enable you to quickly select and deselect features.

In the upper left corner of the screen, you will find the round Office Button. It corresponds basically to the old "Files" menu. When you click on the Office Button, a menu pops up. It is this menu you must enter when you want to create a new blank document, and when you need to save it. You will also find menu items for Preview and Print. It is also via the Office Button you get to Word Options, where you can configure a wide range of basic Options that determine how Word functions. If you are not very familiar with Word, you should stay far away from Options at this point.

In this section, we review the basic structure of Word 2007 . You start the program by clicking the Windows Start Button at the bottom left, then click Programs. In the Programs menu there is a folder called Microsoft Office, and this is of course where you find Word. When you start Word, you automatically start in a new blank document. On its surface Word 2007 is a very simple and attractive program, and it is undoubtedly relatively easy to use, but there are some elements you need to familiarise yourself with.

Shortcut keys If you like using Shortcut Keys instead of the mouse, you need to know that they work a bit differently in Office 2007 compared to previous versions. I recommend using Shortcut Keys as they are often easier to use than the mouse. Shortcut Keys are combinations of keyboard keystrokes that give you access to most of the functions you would otherwise select using the mouse. I highly recommend that you practice using Shortcuts for the functions

Fig. 1 If you have used Word for some time and just recently changed to the 2007 version, you are probably going to have some initial problems locating the functions you are used to. This is primarily because many functions have been redesigned in connection with implementation of the “Ribbon”. In some cases the functions have also changed name. I am going to list the most important functions, so you can get used to the new interface as quickly as possible. New, Open, Save and Save As are located in the Office button. The quick Save function can also be found in the ”Quick Access” toolbar, next to the Office button.

In many of the previous versions of Word, the changes have mostly been cosmetic. In version 2007, Word is still essentially the same program, but on the surface there have been some significant changes that in many cases have made it easier to use. Ribbons and Tabs Like the other programs in the Office package, Word has gotten a new, smarter look. The most obvious change is that the traditional Menu and Toolbars have been replaced by the new Ribbon. The Ribbon contains Ribbon Tabs and every Tab contains buttons for the various functions that used to be located in the Menu and Toolbars. The Ribbon is far more visual and task-oriented; it constantly adapts to your current activity.

This focuses on how best to solve various problems in Word. Rather than a point for point examination of all the functions in Word, it is based on typical tasks and problems you might need to solve. First you will learn how to navigate in the program and tackle basic tasks, such as writing letters and reports, and creating a nice layout. At the more advanced stages, you will learn how to mail merge (combine a Word document with a spreadsheet) and use the proofing tools.

Ms-Word is like a typewriter on steroids! In this respect Word is no different from other word processing programs. Since the computer has become a common household and workplace item the typewriter has almost disappeared. Some people might have kept their typewriter, but that is mostly for sentimental reasons. Nowadays a typewriter is only used when a carbon copy is needed. If you do not need carbon copies, and if you have a personal computer (PC), you might just as well donate the old “chopping board” to a museum.