Marriot Hotels offer discounted awads nights.

To lure more business travelers, Marriot Hotels is offering discounted awards nights to members of its Marriot Rewards loyalty program through January 15, 2010.
Called "Points Savers Plus", the promotion will award members who stay at participating hotel brands using the Points Savers rate, a point rebate of 10% for Sandard and Silver Elite members , and 15% for Gold and Platinum Elite members.
To take advantage of the program, a registration is required by January 15, 2010 and members can do so by visiting www.MarriotRewards.com/PointSaversPlus or call 1 801 468 4000.

UPS offers convenient new online printing service.

Following Fedex's footsteps, UPS, the shipping company has introduced a new online printing service last week. With the new service, customers can from the comfort of their homes or offices, send documents such as business presentations or marketing materials to be printed via the Internet to any UPS store in the country.
To use the service, customers will have to sign up at UPS.com/printing, where they will choose an user name and a password to create an account that will serve as a personal folder. Once they have created an account, customers can then use it as a personal fling cabinet to upload or create their document from scratch and save it or send it for print at the store of their choice. The printed document can then be picked up or delivered locally which should cut on the delivery charges and time.

For more, see WSJ.com

Pandora Online music radio application for Android phones is now available.

Already available for mobile phones like the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Pandora.com , the Internet radio streaming Web site is now available for download on phones running the Android operating system by Google.
In an article in the New York Times, it turns out that most people who download the Pandora mobile application, listen to the music by plugging their phones to speakers, either at home or in their cars.
The application shows ads that pops up at the bottom of the screen that listeners can choose to click on and watch while the music still play in the background, and when they decide to watch video or make a phone call, the music will stop.

For more, see NYTimes.com

Vark is a free app that provides answers to those nagging questions.

Ever been engaged in a ragging trivia battle with a bunch of your buddies but could not agree on any of the answers provided by anyone and wished that you have some sort of a referee at hand to provide the final answers? Well, like the ads said, there is an app for that, and it is called Vark available at Vark.com.
According to the New York Times, Vark is available free for the iPhone and works this way: You will need to go register at Vark.com and list your areas of expertise and your Facebook page because it will use your social network as well your friends' networks to assemble the widest circle possible. But still quoting the New Y0rk Times, it will work without a link to Facebook by sending your question to selected volunteers, experts in the field of your question. If you have signed up using your Facebook page, when you ask a question , only a handful of people in your network or your friends network would be asked to provide an answer
which usually arrives within five minutes via instant-message, e-mail or through the iPhone itself.

For more, see NYTimes.com

Simplea files backup and sharing solutions.

If you live or work with someone and you both use a different laptop or PC accessing and creating different files but use the same external hard drive to back up your data without any synchronization, there are some simple and affordable solutions availble to help.
They come in the form of networked hard drives that can back up two machines wirelesly and allow them to share data. Among them is a new device from westerndigital.com called My Book World Edition which works with both Windows PCs and Macs and is a breeze to set up and use.
It comes in two different versions selling respectively for $230 for one terabyte or 1,000 gigabytes and $450 for two terabytes. Either one of the two, does performs the same tasks like stream music to Apple's iTunes program installed on either machine, or stream music , photos and videos to a TV with an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. Also any content backed in the My Book World Edition can be viewed from any other computer connected to the Internet.
Another way to synchronize files is to use a Web-based service and that kind of services is available from several companies like Sharpcast.com.
Sharpcast offers a service called SugarSync which can automatically synchronize the files in folders that you have selected among multiple computers. Those files are baked and accessible at an online account accessible via a password.
The start up price for the service is $5 a month or $50 a year for 30 gigabytes storage files and it goes from there depending on the amount of space needed. To allow people to try out the service, Sharpcast.com offers a free two-gigabyte thirty days trial.

For more, see WSJ.com

TuneWiki is a free fun music app that gives a peak at what is popular around.

TuneWiki’s chief charm is the ability to scroll lyrics karaoke-style as a song plays, whether the music is coming from your phone’s built-in payer or from an internet radio station. No more excuse for singing “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” during “Purple Haze.” The lyrics are added wiki-style by users, so you might spot some howlers.
Beyond that, the app lets you look at what other users are listening to around the world, or to see what the most popular songs are with Tunewiki listeners. You can see what people near you are listening to, or, on the Android version, you can see where other people in the world are listening to the same song you are at that moment. Songs can be purchased through the site, forwarded to friends, and (except on the Blackberry) you can post what you are listening to on Twitter and Facebook.
There are still bugs to work out and developers are still adding features. They promise that within weeks you will be able to set up a network to see what your friends are listening .

For more, see NYTimes.com

Plastic Jungle helps sell, donate or exchange unsused gift cards.

Nowadays gift cards have become very popular with people who use them as an easy option when the need to buy someone a gift, arises. But as popular as they are for the givers, that may not be the same for the recipients with 10% of them who do not redeem their cards or do it only partially. That makes the merchants that issue those cards the real winners in this exchange. If gift cards recipients have all kind of reasons not to use them in the past, now they have an option to take advantage of them by trading them for cash or for another card that they really want to use. A nascent trading market of second hand gift cards has sprung up in recent years, allowing owners of unwanted cards to unload them.
Plastic Jungle.com a California start up is one the companies that buys, sells or exchange unused gift cards for cash or a credit with Amazon.com. Plastic Jungle buys those cards at a discount ( about 8o percent of the original price) and resells them at a slightly higher price.
Beside Amazon.com, Plastic Jungle has partnered with Donors Choose.org, an non profit organization that match donors with schools around the country in need of supplies. In that partnership, gift cards owners can choose to do good with their cards by donating the full face value of the cards to needy schools through Donors Choose.org.
According to the New York Times, "the non profit organization will match the difference between the original balance on the gift card and what Plastic Jungle pays the donor “so that donors don’t lose a single penny when donating a gift card.”

For more, see NYTimes.com