Techie Buzz has been growing tremendously in the past few years and we attribute all our authors out here have played a huge part in it’s success. We have a thriving team who have been with us for a long time now and none of them have ever left us since they joined.

We are now opening up new opportunities as full time writers for Techie Buzz and would love if you would want to be a part of it. We are looking to hire 4-5 new writers to join our team of current authors. If you are interested, the details are below.

Why Join Techie Buzz?

Over the past few years we have seen around 400-500% growth and we want to continue that growth with new excellent authors who can write some excellent content and help us grow further.

Currently, Techie Buzz has 3.5 million+ monthly page views and we have plans in place to get to 5 million page views a month in the next few months. We are also a well known and reputed blog and are often linked by newspapers and some of the top tech blogs in the world.

We also have more than 15000 feed readers, 5000+ Facebook fans and a growing Twitter follower list.

What Are We Looking For?

We are looking for authors in the following categories, if you fit the bill, read the next sections to know how you can apply.

• Microsoft and related technologies
• Mac OS X and Apple related technologies
• Software and Web Service reviewers
• Hardware and Gadgets reviewers
• Mobile App Reviewers (iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry etc.)
• Camera/Photography
• Your suggestions about what you want to contribute as an editor at Techie Buzz

Why Techie Buzz?

As we already said, Techie Buzz has seen a tremendous growth over the past few years and we are confident that we will continue to thrive in the future.

Along with that, we provide good compensation to our authors and a very homely environment that is super-duper-friendly (ask any of our current authors about it).

You will also get an opportunity to improve and grow within the team and will never remain stagnant.

How Can I Apply and What Do I need To Send to You?

If you are looking to apply for a writer position at Techie Buzz, please fill out this simple form and we’ll take care of the rest. We expect to get quite a few applications so please be patient while we review all of them and get back to you.

Looking forward to having you on the Techie Buzz team.

If you’re concerned that HP and Palm won’t be announcing anything ground breaking at CES 2011, you’ll be happy to know that an event is taking place in San Francisco on February the 9th.

The motto on the event invitation reads “Think big. Think small. Think beyond.” Could this be the next-gen smartphone hardware we’ve been hearing about? Perhaps it’s about a tablet styled device or the public release of developer-only features to WebOS? The sky is the limit when it comes to WebOS, hopefully HP and Palm don’t get clobbered by the suspected lack of presence at CES and are able to get the public re-invigorated and warmed up to WebOS.

Via: PreCentral

Epic RPG makers Bioware today announced the epic sequel to the epic RPG game of yesteryear in an epic announcement page today, er… epicly (!)

Dragon Age II will be taking place across a decade, with each and every one of your choices having consequences far into the future. Though the initial setting is pretty similar to what we have played already, I am pretty sure Bioware has some new tricks up its sleeve that would definitely make this one a huge, if not gigantic, hit.

The usual marketing snippets follow:-

Embark upon an all-new adventure that takes place across an entire decade and shapes itself around every decision you make.
Determine your rise to power from a destitute refugee to the revered champion of the land.
Think like a general and fight like a Spartan with dynamic new combat mechanics that put you right in the heart of battle whether you are a mage, rogue, or warrior.
Go deeper into the world of Dragon Age with an entirely new cinematic experience that grabs hold of you from the beginning and never lets go.
Discover a whole realm rendered in stunning detail with updated graphics and a new visual style.

New visual stylesounds pretty sweet but I don’t think a Borderlands-ish effect is what I want from my RPG. Nevertheless we’ll see how that goes.

A trailer is inbound on the 17th of August. Stay tuned for it!

Of late we have been getting a lot of requests from guest bloggers who want to contribute and write permanently for Techie Buzz, however, we often have to reject those offers due to several reasons.

We don’t like to deject users, so we are starting out with a new way to have your posts published on Techie Buzz through permanent contributor accounts at Techie Buzz. Contributor accounts will be able to write posts for Techie Buzz and get them published to a wide audience of readers.

Contributors on Techie Buzz can write any number of posts for the site which is related to our niche. However the posts they write will be credited to them instead of us having to publish guest blogger posts.

In addition to getting credited for the posts you write, you will also get to work with our editorial team and improve upon your mistakes (if any), and also get help to write posts in a better way.

Contributing editors will also get to add a Bio and link to their own websites on the posts they write for Techie Buzz as pictured in the screenshot above. The best part is that you will join the Techie Buzz team and be part of the community.

Interested? Oh yea I hear you, send out an email to keith [@] techie-buzz.com with a brief profile on where you write currently and why you want to become a contributing editor for Techie Buzz.

Please add “Contributor Application” to the email you send out so that I can easily find out for what the emails are being sent for.

Note: This is not a paid gig and will not involve any revenue sharing, any posts you contribute to Techie Buzz will become the property of Techie Buzz and cannot be republished elsewhere. We also reserve the rights to not publish the articles you contribute, however, unpublished articles can be used on any other site.

Techie Buzz is growing to become one of the best blogs on the Internet, and we have an awesome set of writers who contribute towards making it a success. However, we are now into an expansion mode for our new channels and content offerings.

So why are we waiting then? Let’s get down to the details. This time around we are looking for authors around specific niches to add more value to our news and offerings. If you fit into any of the categories below, just drop everything and email keith ‘@’ techie-buzz.com and we will get in touch with you.

• Android Geeks – We are looking for guys/gals to cover one of the most happening OS in the mobile industry.
• Ubuntu / Gnome Experts – Have the Open Source gist in you? We are looking out for you.
• Gaming Nerds – Love to play? We love you too, just drop in with your console and we can play together.
• Indian Startup / Technology – Love Startups and Technology from India? We too, so get in touch and we can converse.

As always we offer a very comfortable environment to work in with lots of fun and frolic happening behind the scenes, so if you want to be part of all that, you know what you have to do.

Rules for Applying

Are you interested in writing for us? How do you get in touch with us? Just drop a email to keith [@] techie-buzz.com. Please make sure to include the following details, all are not required but it helps.

• Why do you want to write for Techie Buzz?
• What area(s) you can cover from the above list?
• Have you written elsewhere or own a blog? If so please provide samples.
• How often can you contribute?
• Anything else you might want to include is welcome.

Once I get your email, I will get in touch with you and personally discuss things and we can take it forward from there. Looking forward to having YOU on the Techie Buzz team.

WordPress.com has gown down apparently taking down millions of blogs with it. We were one of them too, however, we are not hosted on WordPress servers, but were using a plugin called WordPress Stats for analytics purpose.

However, our site was down and out for almost half an hour, the reason apparently because we used the WP Stats plugin.

So if your site is down and you have no clue why, just login to FTP and delete the WP Stats plugin and everything should work fine again. Let me know if your site has gone down after WordPress.com went down.

Update: You might see downtime on your site if some of your plugins try to access WordPress.com, this might not just be for the WordPress Stats plugin.

Update: WordPress.com looks to be back up again.

Update: Source was The Next Web

Here is another feather which will be added to our collective hats. I am proud to announce that Techie Buzz is the first blog to break into the Top 5 of the Digital Brand Index for India in a study for the Buzziest Channels in India, conducted by Edelman-Brandtology.

The research tracked over 1.5 million online technology brand mentions in DBI 2.0 for the last quarter of 2009. Techie Buzz has made it to the top 5 most popular online brands at #4.

I once again want to take this opportunity to thank everyone on the team and all our readers for helping us reach this position. We hope to continue growing and providing users with the best news we can offer.

To learn more and read about this research you can visit this post by Edelman.

Hi to all our readers, we know that you might have been facing some problems while accessing the website for past few days. However, it was not a problem with our servers, it was a planned move to move to a more powerful and stable server.

For the past one year we have been running the site on a Ubuntu Hardy server, however, we have now made the switch to Karmic Koala, for several reasons.

• Karmic Koala is the latest version of Ubuntu and is more powerful than Hardy.
• Karmic Koala has a huge support base as compared to Fedora and RHEL.

For those of you who are interested in the new setup, here are some juicy details:

• Our new server is from Slice Host and runs on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), is powered by Quad Core processors and has RAID10 storage.
• It has 4GB of dedicated RAM.
• Our cache server to host images and other assets is powered by Dreamhost.
• We run a custom setup of Nginx, MySQL 5, and PHP 5 with PHP Fast CGI.

We have seen a huge jump in the site load times and this will eventually benefit our readers. Please let us know if the site loads faster or slower for you.

As further planned maintenance, we will be redesigning the homepage and other aspects of the site to make it load blazing fast no matter what type of connection you use.

These changes will be gradually rolled out over the month, so hopefully by end of January 2010, Techie Buzz should load in 1-2 seconds for most of our users.

Oh and yes, we will still continue to bring you the best news and views as usual. Thanks once again for all your support.

Back in June 2009, Microsoft took the whole technology world by a storm with a flawless & unexpected demo of Project Natal at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, what was not known was the availability & price. Today at CES 2010, Microsoft’s Robbie Bach confirmed that Xbox Natal will be available starting, 2010 holiday season (end of 2010). While there was no demo or any announcement of games exclusively for Natal, there were quite a few interesting announcements regarding games for the Xbox 360. A new genre of games called Psychological Action Thrillers was mentioned with a demo of Alan Wake. Following games will be exclusively available first on the Xbox 360 platform:

• Mass Effect 2
• Splinter Cell Conviction
• Content packs for Modern Warfare 2

Robbie Bach showed a Halo Reach video and announced that the multiplayer beta will begin in Spring 2010 on Xbox Live. A new segment on Xbox Live called Game Room will be introduced, Game Room will feature classic arcade games that can be bought and played on the Xbox or Windows PC. Talking of Xbox Live, some interesting numbers regarding Xbox Live that were mentioned:

• 20 million active users on Xbox Live.
• 2.2 million concurrent members online during Christmas and New Year.
• Around 10 million people have used non-gaming applications like Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM & Zune.
• 100 million songs have been downloaded.
• 4000 songs were downloaded during the hour and a half long keynote.

Regarding Xbox 360, an estimated 39 million plus consoles and more than 500 million games have been sold so far. Microsoft is serious about the Xbox platform and the numbers are staggering. Microsoft will not be introducing a new console any time soon and Xbox 360 is now a mature gaming platform perfect time to buy it, I say. As Robbie Bach puts it:

When I said 2010 was going to be a big year for Xbox 360, I was lying. 2010 is going to be the biggest year of Xbox history.

2009 is over and I decided to take a look at the stats to figure out on some trends. Most of the trends are based on the Google Analytics stats I have and is based on stats from January 2009 to December 2009.

Summary of the Stats for 2009

• Approx 9 million page views were recorded for the year, most of it coming in the last quarter of 2009, we did ~million views in December 2009 and will possibly hit 2-3 million views per month by February or March 2010.
• 43% of users visiting Techie Buzz used Firefox, 34% used Internet Explorer, 12% used Google Chrome, 4% used Safari and 3.5% used Opera.
• Approx 4 million unique users visited the site using Firefox. Most of the users visiting the site had Firefox 3.0 or better browsers.
• Internet Explorer 7.0 and IE8 were the top browsers for IE.
• Windows dominated the OS segment followed by Mac, Linux, iPhone, Symbian OS and Android.
• Most of our visitors come from United States followed by India, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Other Interesting Stats

• Our servers had a uptime of 99.8% thanks to some heavy tweaking from me, we will be moving to more powerful servers in near future.
• We used by 3.5TB of bandwidth for the whole year.
• We did two re-designs for the site this year.
• We now have more than 25 authors writing for the site.
• We have ~9000 combined regular readers and more than 2000 fans.

What You Can Expect to See in 2010

• More high quality news and views from us. More breaking news, and software reviews, deals, mobile news.
• More hands-on reviews. We are in talks with device manufacturers, so expect to see some really good reviews coming through.
• More participation in Tech events and better reporting.
• A much more faster and cleaner interface for users.
• More giveaways. We are in talks with some of the leading software publishing companies, so you can expect more freebies exclusively from Techie Buzz on a regular basis.
• Nothing but the best.

2009 has been a great year, and we have succeeded in building a good team. 2010 should see the best we can give to you in form of news, views and reviews.

Thank you for all your support, and here is looking forward to a great 2010.