Strategists recognized the concept of branding as being powerful and influential. While traditional branding was associated with companies and products, the inception of LinkedIn took the concept of branding further to a personal and professional level.

An interview with the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, disclosed his insights pertinent to “how the start-up of you” is correlated with personal branding. Hoffman underpins the importance of a brand and justifies his thought with a number of reasons.

He states one should think about relating with people. They need to realize they “live in a networked world where people Google” them as they are surrounded by “relationships that exist over decades”. People have started to think of an individual as someone “they come to with an opportunity” or “someone they come to for a quest on expertise”. He further affirms that people consider whether a person is someone “they want to work with” or not.

Why a brand matters?

Hoffman stresses that there is substance behind a brand and not just the image. People consider one’s capabilities, how one has succeeded, how one’s relationships are with people and whether one has worked with them in good ways.

All these causes attribute to the fact that the “brand-of-you” is one part of “the-start-up-of-you”. For more inspiration, here is the short clip:

Those of you who still do not have a LinkedIn profile, you might soon be signing up there.

​Hot summer has come and gone. It is colder outside, and people are wearing thick jackets and jeans. The desire to attend a gym or to walk home rather than ride in a car are missing, but the desire to keep yourself in a good shape is not going away, nor is the aspiration to meet next spring fit and tone. Luckily, if you have an iPhone, a boring diet and fitness routine can be made more versatile and engaging. This is especially true since the App Store is packed with dozens of diet and fitness applications.

​First of all, your everyday diet needs be examined, and those items that are excessive need to be excluded from it. For calculating your necessary caloric intake each day and figuring out how many more pizza slices you eat can during supper, use Meal Snap. The application is very simple to use. Simply take a photo of your meal using the app, and in a few moments, the number of calories ready to enter into your stomach will be calculated on the iPhone’s screen.

Magic? Almost. Such a simple input method does not provide 100% accuracy even if the name of the course is added to the photo. On the other hand, Meal Snap will come really handy for those who just started monitoring their diet. At this stage, a more complicated app will only confuse you and eliminate any desire to eat right.
​
Nothing burns excess weight better than a good run. However, evening jogs may soon become boring, and the exercise will begin to feel like an unnecessary burden. Have you had enough of struggling with your will power? Then let’s make the jogs more interesting. The one to help us with this task is the RunKeeper app. As its name suggests, this useful application is meant to save jogging results. Practically speaking, that means that you run around a couple of blocks while listening to rhythmic music, and a bit later, you can view your route covered, number of calories burnt, and weight change at a personal page on runkeeper.com. Here You can also share your result with friends.

​​The application allows for the creation of personalized playlists so that you can choose the right jogging music. It also offers a “Training Workout” function which will notify you of the need to slow down or speed up during a jog. If you are like me and need some external motivation to get decent results, then Run Keeper will be really handy. And by the way, there are also profiles dedicated to those who love cycling or sports walking.
​
Jogging is good, but how about a warm-up and a workout at home or at a gym? For this purpose, there is a one more extremely interesting application called CrunchFu. It will help you exercise right without spending money on a personal trainer and without the added burden of needing to write something down while you work out.

​​To use the app, you will choose the right workout for you out of 200 available exercises and start doing your crunches, push-ups and abs workout. As you work out, CrunchFu will make sure that everything is done correctly and without indulgences. All that you need to remember is to take the Smartphone into your hand or strap it to your body. This will allow you to use iPhone’s capabilities to determine your positioning and efforts applied. The application also provides an amusing Battle mode that allows you to get into a competition with other users through Internet. Is that not the perfect motivation to work out your abs faster than anyone else? ​
​So, some time has passed since you have been trying to eat right and jog regularly in the evenings? Great, now it’s just time to use a more advanced application to track your weight and nutrition. Lose It! is an application that uses a web service, www.loseit.com, which is popular among those who are trying to lose some weight. The app allows to always have a personal healthy nutrition plan at your fingertips.

Lose It’s vast product database, combined with the option to add some of your own products, ensures that your apple pie will not be equated with your beef steak calorie-wise. Through writing down your calories consumed, this app proves a bit harder to use than Meal Snap.

​Do you have to lose 10 points in just a few weeks? Now is a great time to tell friends about this goal, get them to set their own fitness plans, and compare your results with their results. A spirit of competition is always conducive to great results even in such difficult matters.

​It is always harder to get rid of weight than to gain it, but diversifying the workload using modern Smartphone capabilities will make the process far more pleasant and the results far more noticeable. Seeing a graph with proof of muscle mass growth and pounds melting away is always more enjoyable than just keeping track of progress in your mind.

==== About the Author =====

Alexander Peters is a 26 year-old entrepreneur. He is the founder of softwarewithstyle.com, a blog focused on iPhone, iPad and Mac how-to and questions. You can follow him on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/u/0/109170888919788865142) or mail alexanderpeterssws (at) gmail.com

.

I see all kinds of tests and stupid quizzes that people take in places like Facebook and MySpace, or send via email. This is not one of those tests. Although there may be debate about whether personality tests are valid, the Jung (or Myers-Briggs) Type Indicator tests are most often used by professionals to evaluate people they plan to hire or give career advice to.

These tests consist of a series of questions that are designed to reveal the basic aspects of your personality. The original questionnaire from Myers-Briggs was based on theories from Carl Jung, and first published in 1962.

Here you can see an example of the questions:

Take the test:

You can take this Jung Typology Test at the Humanmetrices website. Naturally, in order to get good results, you have to be honest with yourself. When the test is over, you’ll see the resulting four letters which represent which of the 16 personality types best match your answers. There are also links providing detailed descriptions about each type.

I’ve taken this test twice over the last two years. Both times I ended up with the same result. I’m told that my personality is INTJ. According to some sources, this means that I’m a rare type, which only appears in about 1 to 4 percent of the population.

What kind of person are you?

Be sure to post your results in the comments below.

Techie Buzz Verdict:

The Humanmetrics site offers a great free service with few ads. It’s somewhat fun and also very informative. You might learn quite a bit more about what really motivates you and makes you act like you do.

Many a times people make mistake and unlike everyone we are imperfect too and made a mistake of not testing new changes we rolled out last weekend properly. The change we made was including the Lightbox plugin for WordPress which would make browsing images much more easier for our readers.

However to our surprise over the weekend we lost quite a lot of traffic and earnings, which left me wondering what was wrong or what went wrong, checked out stats and everything just to make sure that we were getting good SE traffic as well as good social networking traffic.

However thanks to this tweet from Nirmal I was able to find that there was a issue with Internet Explorer browsers. I went ahead and opened the site in Internet Explorer, and lo behold started getting a Site aborted error which caused IE users to see a Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage error.

Though I fixed the error immediately I could have still avoided it altogether, if I would have tested out the changes in all the browsers, which I will now do everytime I make some changes to the website :-).

Just wanted to give a heads up to all our readers, who have their own websites to always test any changes they make to their website, specifically in IE which does not follow standards and may make or break your traffic.

We also take this opportunity to apologize to all our readers visiting this website using Internet Explorer who might have come across the error over the last weekend.

Hey All first of all sorry for keeping away for so long without any updates, but at times work gets so hectic that I get little time to update the blog. But now that the work has subsided I will be starting to post regularly again with more interesting stuff for you.

Just stick by and get more interesting information through Techie Buzz where you can know your technology online.

Cheers

Keith

Hi All,

This is a request from me to all my friends and readers to donate towards a blogger who is in need.

One of my co-authors and blogging friend Silki’s Brother aged 25 years has been diagnosed as a case of CRF (Chronic Renal Failure) and requires a Kidney Transplant operation to be done. The cost of the operation in India is around 5-8 lakh Rupees which amounts to something between $13000-20000 and is a huge sum which cannot be easily collected by my Silki.

With this post I want to urge my readers and blogger friends to donate generously towards the expenses for the operation. Your donation can help someone in distress.

Rest assured this is not a hoax and the money you donate will be used for a genuine cause. I also urge my fellow bloggers to urge their readers to donate to the cause. All the money you donate will be directly received by Silki.

You can also contribute by sporting the chipin widget on your blog. Any help would be considered helpful.

If you want to sport the widget on your blog please use this code or else you can email me at dsouza [dot] keith [at] gmail [dot] com if you want a customized widget.

<embed src="http://widget.chipin.com/widget/id/f5eaf47259700f56" flashVars="event_desc=Help%20A%20Blogger%20to%20Raise%20Funds%20for%20brother%27s%20Kidney%20Transplant&color_scheme=blue" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" wmode="transparent" width="250" height="250"></embed>

Looking forward to your generosity towards saving a young man.

Thanks

Keith

It has been almost a year since I have been in US and it’s time to go back to India now for a short visit. I am looking for guest writers who can fill on the position while I may not be able to look after the blog.

I have some special engagements while I travel to India which does not include my own marriage but that of my brother and would want all the readers to still get their technology head on while I am away.

It would be highly appreciative if you would be able to write guest posts for this blog. I would be able to schedule guest posts till the 31st of this month after that I will be flying out.

Every post you write would have a brief description of your blog and a link to subscribe to the RSS feeds to your blog.

If you would want to guest post contact me or email me at keith [dot] techie [at] gmail [dot] com, looking forward to your support while I am away.

Though I can’t give much back to you, all guest posters will receive a rotating 125 * 125 banner for a month from Techie Buzz.

As a bit of a habit I usually keep checking for page rank updates for this site, while I was checking for Page Rank today I saw that the Page Rank has been increased from 4 to 5 for this blog on certain data centers. This is definitely a good news as the original ranking for this blog was 5 way back last year and due to my negligence of this blog it became 4 and then 3.

Late last year when the Page Rank update was rolled out the ranking for this blog had increased from 3 to 4 and now its finally 5.

Did you page rank go up too?

Do let me know through your valuable comments.

Well I am big cricket fan and have always like to watch good cricket, but the 2nd test match between India and Australia was a competition between Australia the umpires vs India.

The mistakes made by the umpires clearly suggest that there is a need for using technology at this level of cricket. The ICC has to take notice and act faster than ever to curtail such mistakes that could cost a team the match and more importantly the series.

It is highly disgusting that even when the third umpire had the best use of technology he gave Andrew Symonds not out even when he was clearly out. I leave it to your imagination where the match would have gone if the umpires had given the right decisions.

Here are the videos of the controversial decisions, listen to what the commentators have to say about it.

India vs Australia 2nd Test first innings umpiring debacles.

India vs Australia 2nd Test second innings umpiring debacles.

Thank you umpires for giving such wonderful decisions, now thanks to you India lost the match which they should have comfortably won and will have to fight out the remaining series so that they do not lose the match.

I had recently won a contest on JohnChow.com and one the prizes was a redesign for the blog to be done by Adii. Well I am happy to launch the new design today. This is pretty much what I wanted and me and Adii went over it a couple of weeks.

Converting the design to a WordPress theme was not easy but I somehow managed to pull it through making it look just like the design Adii did. I got a new tabbed content navigation this time and have ditched the earlier one I was using. This one is neat and uses JQuery.

I have tried to fit in everything into the new design and hopefully you should not see any troubles. I would definitely want to hear your opinions about the new design. I would want to tweak if further and your opinions would be the best way to do it.

Do please let me know through your comments what you think about the new design and also any changes you would like to see in it.