Google Wallet and competitors like Visa Digital Wallet want you to make the jump from your trusty if bulky leather wallet to a virtual version of the same.

This is what Google’s saying about its new product (edited for verbosity):

• Put your credit card info into your phone and make purchases by tapping and paying, using near field communication (NFC). During this process, coupons and loyalty points are uploaded to your virtual wallet from participating vendors.
• Your credit card credentials are encrypted and stored on a computer chip called the Secure Element, which is separate from the mobile phone memory. For additional security, you set up a PIN, which is entered before each purchase.
• Someday, boarding passes, IDs and even keys could be stored on the Wallet.

I like the idea of a virtual wallet, but would I use it? Currently, Google Wallet only works with Citi® Mastercard® and the Google Prepaid card, and is compatible only with the Nexus S 4G. It will be expanding to include more cards and phones, but it’s hard to say when that’ll happen.

Maybe it launched a bit early … but maybe it has to start somewhere.

It’s a nice use of MoLo (Mobile Local), which is using your mobile device to find and pay for local services and products.

When you combine smartphones, geo-targeting technology, and NFC, you just get giddy with the possibilities. You can float through your day with nothing more than your phone. That I like.

The downside is, not all smartphones are NFC-enabled and Google’s projection is that only half of smartphones in the U.S. will be NFC-enabled by 2014. Those aren’t great numbers.

Google Wallet is being field-tested in New York and San Francisco as of late May/early June 2011. The national release is set for sometime this summer.

Google is also announcing Google Offers, which sounds like an e-version of coupons. I like coupons but I don’t like carrying them around and spreading wads of them out in front of the cashier. If I can have all of my coupons on my phone and use them just by tapping, I’ll be happy.

Google Wallet sounds like another way technology is making life simpler. But it’s not yet universal. When it is, if it ever is, I’ll use it.

Brought to you by Stone Soup Technology, LLC – a leading Atlanta website design, Atlanta iPhone development, and Atlanta custom software solution provider.

The Ultrabook has a 2nd Generation Intel Core processor. It’s whisper thin, less than 20mm (0.8 inch) to pinch between our fingers, and word is it’ll sell for under $1,000 come this winter’s shopping season.

It has tablet features, such as a quick start-up, days of battery life on standby, and a touchscreen.

Within months of its retail debut, another version with the Ivy Bridge processor will hit the market, and in 2013, a third version powered by the Haswell processor will be on the shelves.

Intel aims to match or beat the power efficiency of iPad.

But is the Ultrabook an iPad extreme? Will iPad users be tossing their tablets and drooling for the newbie?

Well…

I didn’t buy my iPad instead of a workhorse laptop. I bought my iPad in addition to my laptop.

The iPad is fun and lightweight, with a quick response time as I jump from website to website. It’s my e-reader and movie screen and sometimes I even do a little work on it. And, it’s the magical land of apps (ignore the goofy grin on my face, I can’t help it).

As a side note, it runs on mobile-phone chips instead of Intel’s processor, although that’s not figuring into my vote.

Intel wants us to view their Ultrabook as an iPad with the ferocious functionality of a laptop.

We don’t know enough about the Ultrabook to predict its future with certainty. If it has all of the features of the iPad and apps out the wazoo, and if the screen snaps off and on the keyboard for those times you just want the tablet, it’ll be hard to resist.  Full disclosure – we know it doesn’t snap off and on, but wouldn’t that tip the scales?

If it does all that, it just might beat the iPad. However, from what we know at this time, it’s not the contender to knock iPad out of the ring.

• You are away from the office but you need to find an attachment or a piece of information from an email.
• Your remote connection to your office computer is not working and you need to reply back to a client.
• Your Exchange server is down and your business depends on email for basic operation.
• Your hard drive crashed and you didn’t backup your Outlook file.

We’ve all been there. You’ve made that long trip to the office in the middle of the night. You’ve wasted time looking at the clock when you could have been replying to time-sensitive emails. You’ve lost all of your emails since the last time you made a backup (which, unfortunately, is often never).

I have a free and pain-free solution. Gmail can be used as a handy free email backup. It’s very easy to do. Create your Gmail account (try to stick with something professional if you’ll be using it as a backup for work emails). If you’re managing your own email accounts, setup a forwarder that will send a copy of all emails you receive to Gmail. If you don’t have this access or knowledge, contact your IT gal or guy and ask if they can do it for you. Once you get it going, you can then have access to your email anywhere you go. You can check email on your web-enabled phone. You can check it from home. You can reply to messages when you’re not at your desk.

And…most importantly: You’ve got a free backup of your email in the event that disaster does strike!

CSS galleries are not just an excellent source of inspiration for a web developer looking for ideas or well executed websites but also a great source of traffic and backlinks to your site. Getting featured on one of these sites is not just about recognition, it also might help you rank better in search engines over time.

Nowadays there are hundreds of galleries providing quality picks. The vast majority focus on valid XHTML and CSS designs, omitting Flash-websites. With so many sites to chose from, new types of web services emerged, allowing you to automatically submit to an entire list of web galleries for a fee, services like Meecss or TheCSSGalleryList. But what happens when you don’t want to pay that fee (around $20)? There’s just one solution – searching for a CSS galleries list and submitting to each one at a time.

With the launch of version 3 of our website, my task over the last couple of days here at Stone Soup was to compile a list of CSS galleries and submit to as many as possible. Getting featured on web galleries takes up to 2 weeks. After 5 days Stone Soup already got featured on many of these sites (Screenalicious, CSSBased, 101BestWebsites to name just a few) and we experienced the traffic spikes they cause (they’re nowhere near a Digg effect however there’s a significant increase in traffic stats)

The next step is to share with you the galleries I gathered along with page ranks and submit links for your easy submission. But aren’t there lists like these somewhere else on the web? Yes there are. Most of them list over 100 web galleries. If you’ll do a quick Google search for “css galleries list” the top three results are TheCSSGalleryList, CSSGalleryList and WebGalleryList. All are quality lists however they aren’t perfect. For example TheCSSGalleryList.com divides the list in 2 sections (“Featured” and “Other” galleries) and doesn’t list as many sites as WebGalleryList.com. WebGalleryList.com gathered 241 entries however there are no submit links and many of the sites listed there are no longer live.

• it’s fresh (and I’ll try to keep it fresh with your help) – all these links have been verified yesterday
• contains only English galleries. (when it comes to page rank you need all the traffic you can get – however you must agree that it’s really hard to find the submit options on this one)
• currently lists over 200 galleries (more entries than other lists)
• galleries are listed along with google page rank, alexa rank and submit links – you can order the list by clicking on the table headings.
• you can download this list in xls and xml format and maintain it yourself or feature it on your website.

The CSS Galleries List

This list is available for download in xls and xml format:

Many thanks to Brian McAllister for his wonderful Unobtrusive Table Sort Script used to display this data.

Feel free to suggest additions to this list or notify me about dead links using the form below.

Good luck with your submission!