Flash games are increasing in popularity and the quality of graphics has tremendously increased from the early days. Some of them are even more popular than PC, Xbox or Playstation games. These games have the advantage of being free and extremely playable at the same time. They are suitable for almost all ages. Here are some cool games you can try out.

Stick Figure Badminton
Here you play badminton with stickfigures. The levels get harder as you keep beating your opponents.

Double Wires
This is a simple but very addictive game. All you have to do is swing your way as far as possible.

Stabika 3
The game tests your hand eye coordination. Can get frustrating at times but once you are hooked, you won’t be able to stop playing.

The Helicopter Game
A classic game. Extremely addictive. No doubt, you will play the game twice and even more. Just be careful not to strain your eyes playing the game.

Stree Sesh
Flash game with very good graphics. Arguably the most popular flash based skateboarding out there today.

Pic Pie Puzzler
This is a jigsaw game with a nice twist. Play it to find out how it’s different from the other jigsaw games.







Bubble Spinner

This is one of those games that can be played again and again. It is a bubble shooter puzzle game and you can get millions of combinations while trying to get the bubbles off the board. Good for some great fun and also food for your grey cells!

Open source software has long been a staple for geeks, but its coming into the mainstream and providing a valuable alternative for people who no longer want to pay for certain functionality. Here we explore the top five open source alternatives to popular Windows programs, showing you how you can live without them.

1. Microsoft Office – The alternative to this has been Open Office for years, but with support that has been less than stellar, Open Office hasn’t gained much ground. However, after it was purchased by Sun Microsystems in 2006, Open Office began seeing regular updates and has since become a valid alternative to people who want a great office suite without forking over tons of money.

2. Photoshop – The Gimp can do just about everything Photoshop can and better, and it does it all for free. While the interface of The Gimp is just a bit different from that of Photoshop, learning to use it doesn’t take ages and once you discover the brushes and editing tools, you have a powerful image editor on your hands.

3. Windows Media Player – Windows Media Player is free, sure, but its very limited in what it can do. This is where Miro comes in, as it’s a full fledged media player with tons of functionality and the ability to download torrents as well.

4. Outlook Express - Thunderbird is a robust email client which is made by the same people who brought us Firefox. In fact, it offers many features Outlook Express doesn’t, and those that it does, it often does tons better. Thunderbird is one of the first programs you should use on your computer if you’re an avid email user.

5. WinZip – For people who archive files regularly, PeaZip is a great alternative to both WinZip and WinRAR, as it supports all of those formats and more, including 7Zip.

Out of the thousands of web applications which have been released this year, picking the top three has been a hard task. Judging these applications on what they offer the community as a whole is a must, which is why we’ve picked these three as our top three web applications of 2009.

1. Dropbox – Dropbox has gotten a lot of attention over this past year, and rightly so. Up until now, most people who have offered backup space on the web haven’t coupled it with synchronization. With the average American household having around three computers in it, keeping files and things up to date between sessions has never become more important. That’s why Dropbox is our number one app of the year, as allowing users to keep up to 2GBs of files synchronized between two computers is as useful as sliced bread.
2. Google Voice – What used to be Grand Station has turned into Google Voice, and those that have experienced it have been raving about it. With selective calling and call screening, Google Voice is a great application which gives you your own free number. When people call your free number, you can choose which phone of yours rings, eliminating the need to stay hinged to one particular phone when waiting for a call. Google Voice is the future in call technology.
3. Wufoo – Until now, there’s not been a great way to keep track of forms which you have on your website. This is where Wufoo has stepped up to the plate, offering beautiful forms which can fill a multitude of functions, while allowing you to track just how often your form is used and when. Best of all, Wufoo offers free accounts for those who only need up to three forms, with decently priced plans for those who need more.

In order to be successful on Twitter, you’ll need to gain a legitimate following. Without followers, it’s less likely that your tweets will reach a wide audience, which could severely impact how effective a Twitter campaign in your business is. The most common way of getting followers is using tools like Tweet Karma to determine who is following you and who is not. If you do a trend search on Twitter for your niche, you’ll find people who are discussing your niche. These are the people you want to follow.

If you have been making quality tweets on your account for some time, people will see this and follow you, once you’ve followed them. Following everyone you can find in your niche is effective, especially if you get return follows. You should wait for two to three days to see if any of the people you’ve followed have followed you back. If they haven’t, use Tweet Karma to dump them and restart the entire process. You have to do this because of the follower limit Twitter places on you. There is a certain ratio which prevents you from following millions of people if they are not following you back, which is why Tweet Karma is handy in balancing out this ratio.

Aside from this, you should make sure all of you tweets have been quality tweets. If you’re targeting a certain niche, only tweet about that niche. As an example, if your niche is Texas Hold ‘Em poker, and you want to reach out to people who are interested in poker, tweeting about the nice Gucci purse you just bought your wife probably isn’t going to net you any people who are interested in Texas Hold ‘Em. In addition, you should make sure you’re not spamming with your tweets, as if you’re tweeting too frequently, people will unfollow you.

If you’re looking for ways to use the social network scene to market your business, there’s no better place to look than Facebook. Many large companies like Honda and General Motors have already jumped on the social network bandwagon, and with Facebook being a $240 million dollar platform, there’s no reason you shouldn’t, either.

In fact, Facebook has included many embedded tools for updating your business which are a great way to spread the word and gain a following. The first thing you should do when establishing your presence on Facebook is setting up your businesses’ page. Facebook allows anyone to set up a page dedicated to anything, and allows its members to become fans of this. This is essentially like hosting your own forum, as your fans can leave you feedback for your business on your page.

In addition to setting up a page, you’ll need to advertise it to get it well known. Facebook also includes a way to do this, which is through social ads which you can use to promote your page. These social ads are fed to all of your friends through your network, so if you have a large friend following, your page will reach thousands. However, if you have a rather small friend following on Facebook, you might want to turn to Twitter to generate word of mouth about your business. With the ability to retweet, you can attract business to your page, especially if people are satisfied with the products you’re offering.

These are all great features of Facebook, but perhaps the best feature of Facebook is the analytics tool which is included to help you monitor your traffic in and out of your page. It’ll show you how popular your businesses page as become, as well as where you’re getting the most traffic so you can better target your page for more visitors.

Netbooks have become very popular over the past few years, with many people using them in complement with their desktop computers instead of purchasing full-fledged laptops. Because they’re so much smaller and have generally lower requirements than many of the laptops on the market today, there are apps which are specially marketed toward netbook users to make their life easier, especially if your netbook of choice contains a small solid state drive. Here are three apps you can use online and save space on your netbook.

1. Meebo – If you find yourself IMing more often than not, Meebo is the perfect web app for you. It can run in the background in a tab, or you can choose to download the very small meebo notifier to alert you when you have new IMs. Either way, it’s great for keeping in touch.
2. Google Docs – If you work with documents often, this is an absolute must. With storage of up to 5,000 documents of any type and the ability to support both Microsoft Office and Open Office formats, you’ll never need to worry about not being able to open a document again. Best of all if you work with someone else frequently on your documents, you can share them with them for even more usability.
3. Pandora – For the music lover on the go, Pandora radio is the perfect solution. It can run from your browser or through a tiny program you can download if you’re a premium member, and with 42 different sound selection checks, you can be sure Pandora will always find music you want to listen to. However, if you do run across something you don’t want to hear, you can choose to skip it. Pandora does have advertisements, but they’re not intrusive and they’re few and far inbetween the music.

Some of the most popular software used in the workplace and school today is very expensive, and not everyone can afford it. That’s why there are so many open source alternatives available which are made freely available to people who want to use them. The best part of this is that often the open source alternatives work just as well with the original they’re made to emulate. This is our top five list of programs which replace proprietary programs on Windows computers.

1. Open Office – Open Office is an all in one suite which offers the ability to edit Word, Excel, Power Point, and even Access documents. In addition, it allows you to save files in these formats, so people who don’t have their own copy of Open Office can open your documents in the original Microsoft Office.
2. Miro – Miro is an open source video and music player which also offers the ability to play and schedule podcasts, as well as download bit torrent files. Miro can replace several different programs on your computer with this functionality.
3. Pidgin – For those who need an program which combines all of their IM programs into one, Pidgin is the best open source alternative programs to date, as it supports all the major protocols with several different addons you can install for additional features.
4. Cabos – For downloading from peer to peer networks, nothing beats Cabos. Cabos is a Limewire alternative which runs on all three major operating systems. It’s very light weight, since its based on java.
5. Blender – For 3D editing and animation, there’s nothing better than Blender. While Maya is a great program, Blender offers the same features and the same controls, all for free. Some of the best animations and character designs have been made in Blender.