College students are becoming more and more reliant on computers – and it means spending boatloads of cash on software that is only needed for a short period of time. The truth, though, students can get plenty of free alternatives out there for nearly all purposes.

Using free web tools is a cost-effective and easy way to improve your academic productivity. Well-designed apps can also replace costly software products and free up computer space. These are 14 web tools that could prove useful to nearly all college students:

1. Posti.ca (http://www.posti.ca/) Students who often use sticky notes will certainly enjoy using Posti.ca. It can be used to make and place digital notes in the web that can be opened from any computers and any locations. Those notes can also be sent from iGoogle and Twitter and may be shared with everyone including those who don’t have a Posti.ca account.
2. Adobe Buzzword (http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/) It is a free online word processor that works in major web browsers. It can be used to create and edit documents, track changes on a project from anywhere and collaborate with others.
3. Creative Pro Office (http://www.creativeprooffice.com/) It is a free online office management app. Features include a project manager, office dashboard, calendar, time tracker, and expense monitoring. Creative Pro Office was developed for small tech teams and independent professionals, but it could also be useful to any student who needs to boost productivity.
4. Whiteboard (http://writeboard.com/) With this free web application, students can collaborate on projects and documents from anywhere and make changes in a snap. It allows users to write, compare, and collaborate in real time without the worry of losing their works.
5. Bubble.us (http://bubbl.us/) It allows students to turn thoughts into a color-coded mind map and it’s also perfect for visual brainstorming.
6. PromoOnline (https://online.primopdf.com/Default.aspx) It is a free and easy way to make PDF documents without having to buy and install software. With just a couple of simple steps, you can generate a PDF version out of any file.
7. BibMe (http://www.bibme.org/) An online bibliography maker for those who want to make a bibliography quickly or works cited page in APA, MLA, Turabian, or Chicago format. You can enter the necessary information or use a search feature to find articles, books, websites, or video clips.
8. ThinkFold (http://www.thinkfold.com/) Students looking for a simple way to work at group projects should find what they want in ThinkFold. This free online tool allows students to create documents, make changes and add images – all in real time.
9. Awesome Highlighter (http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/) It takes some of the mental confusion out of online research by giving students a chance to highlight the important sections of a web page and convert it into a more manageable link.
10. FlashcardExchange (http://www.mindpicnic.com/) Simply the world’s largest web-based flashcard library, students can create and use flashcards online. If they don’t have enough time to make their own flashcards, it is possible to study ready-made cards made by other people.
11. Mindpicnic (http://www.mindpicnic.com/) It is an online learning software. Users can choose many Mindpicnic courses and begin studying as soon as they create a free account.
12. NoteMesh (http://notemesh.com/?a=home) Developed by students, it is a free web service for students who need to collaborate on a collection of notes in a certain class. NoteMesh makes a simple wiki that can easily be updated by all group members.
13. CollegeRuled (http://collegeruled.com/) It can be used to make to-do lists, classroom message boards, a color-coded class schedule and much more. Those schedules can be linked to or from Facebook profiles and opened from any computers.
14. NetVibes (http://www.netvibes.com/#General) It is a handy tool that gathers all of your favorite email accounts, blogs, video providers, social networks, and more to a single place, perfect for students who use the same sites regularly.

Do you already use any of these online tools? If it’s the case, feel free to share your experience with us

Google was nicknamed BackRub

Like most booming internet companies, Google had an interesting upbringing, which was marked by a lowly beginning. It started out as a purely scientific research project by two young Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to an official documentation, Brin and Page argued on every single subject they discussed. These incessant arguments, however, may have been what actually spurred the duo to reconsider web-searching and create a novel strategy for websites ranking based on backlinks, and not determined by how many times a certain search term is shown on a given site, as was the norm.

Due to the unique approach, Page and Brin planned to name the new search engine, BackRub. Fortunately, in 1998, Brin and Page decided to drop the sexually suggestive name, and came up with a now famous global brand ‘Google’, a word originating from a typical misspelling of “googol,” a word which refers to 10100.

Google scans our e-mails

Nothing in this life is perfect – or without even the slightest controversy – and with Google, it isn’t an exception. Google scans our Gmail e-mails through a process known as content extraction. All outgoing and incoming e-mails are scanned for certain keywords which will allow more accurate advertising. The technique has brewed quite a hail of controversy.

Google Street is also accused as a breach of personal privacy. The service offers high-resolution street-view images from around the globe and has, on many occasions, caught poor individuals committing questionable acts. Similarly, Google Earth has continuously come under fire from a few governments about the security risks it poses.

Google spends $70 million annually on employee meals

Seventy million dollars each year – that works out to about $7,300 per employee. While the actual details vary depending on your location, employees at Google’s California HQ, aptly entitled as the Googleplex, may get two free meals each day from eleven different gourmet cafeterias. As if that weren’t enough, the office has a few snack bars that are cram full of healthy and tasty morsels to munch on.

But, what if their cars are in a bit of a rut? Easy; Google offers on-site oil changes and car washes. The list of perks for working with Google is never-ending, making it obvious why it’s considered the best place to work, offering: on-the-spot massage therapists, full athletic facilities, haircuts, language classes, day cares, drop-off dry cleaning,  and a clinic just to name a few.

Google loses more than $100 million each year through “I’m Feeling Lucky”

There is not much to see when you open Google’s main search page, and maybe simplicity is one of the factors to Google’s success. When using Google, you are given a couple of options: a normal Search or a supposedly handy “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. By clicking the former, you’re given that typical list of search results; but if you click the latter, however, you’re automatically redirected to the #1 web site on a specific search result, bypassing Google’s search engines results page.

Other than the fun factor, the driving idea behind this feature is to give the users instant access to the actual information they are looking for, and hopefully save them time that would usually be spent perusing endless pages of search results. Sounds handy and harmless enough, right? Not really. Because it bypasses all text advertising and it is believed that Google loses more than $100 million each year in advertising-generated revenues.

All anti-spam solutions should give you a basic feature of blocking bad e-mails. However, increasingly better spam attack techniques force us to continuously improve the anti-spam solution capabilties. Here are 4 key features that should be used to counter future spam attacks.

1. Administration of underlying OS: Relevant only for software-based solutions. Whether when using Windows or UNIX, someone will need to spend some time updating the operating system: making configuration changes, installing patches from time to time, and tracking resource performance and consumption.
2. Enterprise policy administration: When using centralized spam blockers, whether it is a software-, appliance-, or ASP-based system, will require certain amount of organization-level administration, including quarantine management and white-list management for adjusting the degree of filtering, should too few or too many messages are tagged as spam.
3. Performance upgrades monitoring: As the company and/or the e-mail capacity grows, someone has to watch resource utilizations over time so that an upgrade to network capacity and server hardware can yield better results
4. Automatic algorithm and signature updates: In order to stay completely effective, an anti-spam solution must have the most recent rules (ways to determine whether an e-mail is spam or not) and signatures (characteristics of all known spam messages). Spam filters do this by periodically downloading and installing updates from the spam filter’s website. Someone must watch this diligently to make sure that the updates work properly.

 Actors and politicians have managed to garner public attention and votes by basking in the glory of doing good by saving the world from global warming.

Global warming still remains a debated topic in the scientific community and the politicians who claim that there isn’t enough proof to support the validity of global warming due to unregulated anthropogenic activities. Then there is another section of scientists who claim to be sure about the phenomenon and the consequences of global warming. This bunch of scientist has changed the world around by numerous summits and conferences and has come up with protocols which are now being reframed to accommodate developed nations. Like it or not, as on today global warming is an official threat.

Everyone has to do their bit including people like you and me. Global warming has definitely stirred up many delayed and better said ignored scientific developments like bio diesel, harnessing solar energy, wind power and geo-thermal energy. These alternate energy solutions can slowly replace the conventional energy programs and are being endorsed by most governments across the globe as they are cleaner and eco-friendly technologies.

Promoting green means of upgrading living standards have bought about positive changes such as compressed natural gas (CNG) in cars and thereby replacing petrol; since CNG is a cleaner fuel that emits few or no green house gases (GHGs). Products such as CFL bulbs and T5 tube lights are slowly replacing traditional incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tube lights respectively. LED bulbs are also quickly catching up as they emit lower GHGs and are also energy efficient.

Every industry and sector is required to meet targets to reduce GHG emissions or simply pay for it. Opting for greener and cleaner technologies is the new age mantra. Promoting products that fall in this category can be a decent business option even during an economic slowdown.

Solar panels and wind turbines and several such products are considered as promotional items of go green revolution. This is almost like a cult phenomena taking over the world slowly. Many can find lucrative career options in the field of environment as well. Research, education, law, economics and management re few aspects of environment; anybody participating in this field would do well not only for themselves but the whole world. Just look at the big picture that you could be a part of as well.