Business as practiced by Vbarrack.com also followed by various sites in the internet. It because they see that the accounts of War of Warcraft will be easily sold because of the high enthusiasm. But, some of the sites are only use the identity of the buyers to something less liable. But, Vbarrack is different; this site guarantees that you will be safe if you buy wow accounts or sell wow accounts here. How they guarantee it? If players want to sell wow accounts to this site they must have the secret question answer, the email access of the WOW email accounts and the seller must be the owner of the accounts.

If players want to buy new characters, it is simpler, that is by visiting the wow accounts for sale page and then chooses the characters want to be had. The safety is guaranteed here. They give also warning which tells the visitors not to believe and access all suspicious content.

Image Source: barcodenerds

Wired recently published a good article covering iPhone app review sites that request, and in some cases demand, money to review an app, or to deliver an ‘expedited’ review.

Several websites dedicated to iPhone app reviews are requesting payments from developers in exchange for writeups of their apps, Wired.com has learned. Those payments are not always clearly disclosed to readers, and the practice hasn’t received much discussion outside of gaming blogs.

This is a subject that I feel very strongly about.  Accepting or demanding money for reviews is something we have never done and something we are dead set against. So I’d like to talk about this site’s stance on this, my thoughts on the arguments that the pay to play sites use to defend their policies, and what your thoughts are on all of this.

Here’s a further slice from the Wired piece:

Soliciting money in exchange for a product review is not illegal, but the practice should raise questions about the credibility and independence of the review sites, critics say.

The two sites that were most frequently mentioned by programmers who contacted Wired.com were TheiPhoneAppReview.com and AppCraver.com. Both sites appear in the top four Google search results for the search term “iPhone app review.”

I can tell you that as the owner of a site that strives to provide good, thorough, and fair app reviews it is demoralizing to see sites with these dubious ethics scoring so high in search rankings, and being perceived as ‘major’ sites.

For those of you who have never looked at our About page, here is our stance on reviews and how we choose which apps to cover here:

We do not request or accept any sort of payment – ever – for mentioning an iPhone app, covering an app, or reviewing an app.

The above policy applies to any app that is advertised on this site as well.  Apps / apps publishers who advertise here are treated 100% the same as those who don’t.  No guaranteed mentions or reviews because of an ad placement.  All potential new advertisers are told these things right up front.

Here is how we choose to mention an app on this site:
One of us finds it interesting

Here is how we choose to review an app on this site:
One of us finds it interesting and / or useful enough to want to review it

Accessory reviews are treated similarly to app reviews. We will specify in the review whether the item was purchased by the author or provided by a company for site review.

We try our best to produce thorough and fair reviews.  Hopefully we manage this most of the time.  One thing we can guarantee though – all of the time – is that our posts and reviews are *not* paid for.  If you see an app or accessory covered here, it’s because we thought enough of it to want to cover it.

In every app review and posts where we express views about an app, we include a clear disclosure line at the bottom of the post – indicating whether the app was purchased independently by the author or whether a promo code was provided by the developer.  This never influences our reviews, as you can plainly see by the number of negative reviews for apps we have received for free and positive reviews for apps we have paid for, but we include it anyway.

We are also proud members of the OATS – Organization for App Testing Standards – group of sites.  Here is a brief description of the mission of OATS:

O.A.T.S. is a group of sites that were brought together with the goal of improving the editorial ethics and standards in the emerging world if iPhone application and game review sites.

So that’s our stance.

In the comments on the Wired article the owner of one of the two sites called out (Shaun Campbell from The iPhone App Review) and another pay for play site owner defend their practices and lash out at the ’so called ethical sites’ in various ways. Here’s some of what they had to say in the article and the comments, and my reactions:

Campbell said that his site’s policy is to offer expedited service in exchange for a fee because with the gigantic number of apps in the App Store, it would be an “impossible task to review all the apps we receive, paid or unpaid.”

Wow – then don’t try to review them all.  Also, nobody is going to manage that anyway with the sheer volume of apps there are, and there are certainly enough useless, dross apps out there that nobody will be crying our for reviews on.

Again from Shaun Campbell:

The so-called “ethical” sites ONLY review popular apps – as these apps drive traffic. Start-ups and Mom & Pop developers do NOT get a look in. We provide coverage to these guys for a very small fee …

Bullshit.  Plain and simple.  We are one of the so-called ethical sites and we love to cover smaller, indie developers and have done so from the very beginning.  I know that most or all of the OATS sites do so as well.  Giving ‘mom and pop’ developers a PAID look in hardly seems a Robin Hood sort of approach to brag about.

Mike from the Crazy Mike Apps site lashes out at those ‘who tout their ethics’ and questions the acceptance of promo codes:

How about promo codes, do they pay for $9.99 promo codes, no they get them for FREE, which is also some form of gratuity per the FCC.

A couple points here.  Firstly, my understanding is that Apple created promo codes exactly for this purpose – for them to be handed out to reviewers and beta testers.  Secondly, all of the OATS sites and many other ethical sites have solid disclosure policies – that make it very clear to readers how and when promo codes have been used.  This is something the pay to play sites do NOT do with their paid for reviews.  There is no disclosure line alongside a review to indicate it was paid for, which for many folks makes it the equivalent of an advertisement.

Another disturbing practice that some of these sites use is that when a developer pays for a review they agree to contact them prior to publishing if the review is looking less than favorable.  The defense of this I’ve seen put forward is something along the lines of ‘our readers don’t want to see negative reviews, they want to discover only the best apps‘.

I think that’s nonsense.  Being warned about poor apps is an important part of being able to discover all the best apps.  My impression is that readers do value negative reviews.  And that they value fair, unbiased reviews.  Reviews that are not bought.

I really hope I’m not being too optimistic in believing that – and I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Do you trust sites that accept and demand payment for app reviews?  Do you even care about how sites handle this issue?

]]> http://growingcode.net/do-you-trust-sites-that-demand-payment-for-app-reviews/feed/ 0 http://growingcode.net/i-love-my-iphone-keychains/ http://growingcode.net/i-love-my-iphone-keychains/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:20:38 +0000 http://growingcode.net/?p=259

OK, as I’ve admitted in the past, I’m a bit of a sucker for silly little iPhone accessories.  I’m not always sure right away that I’ll end up purchasing some of these items, but they certainly catch my eye.

These ‘I Love My iPhone’ keychains from Netgrrl fit nicely into this category for me.  In addition to the main iPhone home sceen keychain, there are a number of others with individual (built-in) iPhone apps featured.  They go for $8.99 each – which feels a little steep to me for a keychain.

]]> http://growingcode.net/i-love-my-iphone-keychains/feed/ 0 http://growingcode.net/multitasking-in-os-4-0-rumors/ http://growingcode.net/multitasking-in-os-4-0-rumors/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:20:56 +0000 http://growingcode.net/?p=8

Outside of notifications, there are other features related to multitasking that iPad users may want to see addressed. One is local background services such as Pandora radio. Apple’s forthcoming iPhone OS 4.0 is anticipated to either allow users to select specific apps to run in the background, or roll those services into the system, or to enable specific background tasks.

That’s an excerpt from an article over at Apple Insider today, mostly talking about the multitasking possibilities on the iPad – but including that lovely tidbit on what iPhone OS 4.0 may bring.

I have been feeling more and more optimistic lately that we will see some level of multitasking built into iPhone OS 4.0.  It just feels like one of those ‘Apple is not stupid’ moments.  They know what other mobile platforms are doing, they must know users are clamoring for this, and they of course know that the iPhone 3GS in particular is more than ready to handle some multitasking and rapid app switching.  I’d honestly be shocked if we don’t see something like this in OS 4.0.  Of course the devil is in the details and we’ll need to see how good the execution is – but reports like these are still very encouraging.

What do you all think?  Will Apple give us some level of multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0?

Connect One has introduced a device called Wi-Reach Classic. It is basically a portable WiFi hotspot that would work with any 3G USB modem. All you need to do is to insert the modem into the USB port and the Wi-Reach Classic will make it possible to share your connection over WiFi. You can connect up to 10 computers to the hotspot at a time. But remember that hooking up more computers will seriously affect the speed of your connection.

The Wi-Reach Classic costs $99. Connect One says that the device would get around 5 hours of runtime.

Hey, students — pay attention. Not to us, mind you, but to the syllabus provided by your professor. Kieran Mullen, a physics professor at the University of Oklahoma, has a fairly strict rule about gadgets in class: there won’t be any, ever, under any circumstances. Balk all you want (understandable given his own clipped-on cellie), but if you sign up for this guy’s class, you’ll be flipping your phone to “off” and leaving your laptop in the dormitory. And if you try to blaze your own path and slip that netbook into the back row, you might leave bitterly disappointed. As you’ll see clearly in the video past the break, Mr. Mullen sought to make a visual point that laptops weren’t allowed in class (he calls them “a distraction”), and while it seems that the whole stunt was premeditated, most students acknowledged that his point was driven home. In short, he took a defunct machine, submerged it in liquid nitrogen, and proceeded to make the following statement:

“This is just liquid nitrogen, so it alone won’t hurt the computer. But this will.”

Find out exactly what “this” was by hitting that ‘Read More’ button there on the lower left.

[Thanks, studentatOU]