The internet is all about being savvy, the internet is all about getting the most for your money and generally getting the best deal available!

There’s a breed of sites that allow you to do this, they are ‘Cashback sites’ – these allow you to earn money on purchases, if you access the online shops via the cashback link.

Reports have it that families are missing out on £123 a year and British online shoppers are missing out on £3.2 billion a year! Why are customers missing out on so much money? Because they are not using cashback sites!

It seems a lot of people are either unaware or unsure how to use cashback sites! There’s some really well know names you can earn cashback on including, Dixons, Tesco, Next and Onestophoneshop.

So what’s it all about, cashback sites are in effect a gateway to a large variety of online retailers, with an added bonus of getting cash for making your purchase through the ‘cashback site’. The main cashback sites are, Topcashback, cashbackkings and quidco.  There is no catch apart from shoppers need to register!

The range of sites you can earn cashback on is phenomenal, you can shop for electricals, groceries and even insurance. Each purchase can generate between 4% and up to 10% savings, this saving will get paid directly to your bank or you will be sent a cheque.  To put the savings into actual pounds, if you were to spend about £300 online, you could earn between £12 and £30.

Cashback site really are the future, get money for shopping online! We’re on the cashback sites too!

We all know China is the first place ‘most’ new technology comes from, well with that in mind the following phone concepts will not surprise you!

These weird and wonderful ideas are concepts that China may release into the market in 2010 – we are not sure at this point if they will reach the UK.

Wacky phone number 1
BenQ Siemens
This bendy blinder is a snake-like phone, which by the looks of it you can wrap around your arm. From the picture you can see multimedia features on the outside of the design, if you twist the design around you’ll see the display and the keypad  but unfortunately not much more is given away.

Wacky phone number 2
Motorola’s PVOT
This sci-fi design is aimed at developing countries and was created by Andre Minoli. Reports say you will get a minute of talk time for every 25 turns of the crank, which gives a new meaning to the saying ‘crank it up’. All the cranking charges up the AA battery inside the slim-line phone, powering a 125×125 dot matrix LCD controlled by a sci-fi looking keypad.

Wacky phone number 3
Alloy
The Alloy has two display screens, one for  viewing the menu and one for navigation around it – a stylus is included.  No other features have been given away, but from the picture you can see contacts, calendars, notes, messages, calculator and an alarm.

I wonder if these concepts will hit the UK market?

Manufacturers are coming up with amazing weird and wonderful mobile phone concepts!

One of those concepts is a ‘paper mobile phone’, yes that’s right a mobile phone made from paper! With everyone trying to improve their ‘carbon footprint’ recycling and echo friendly, mobile phone concepts are being thought of that help this. The phones internal electronics are made from recyclable elements while the external casing is made from paper.
The main idea is for travelers to rent the phones in China, return it and then for it to be recycled with a brand-new paper exterior.

Designers are: Chia-Liang Hsu, Yi-Ting Chen, Jun-Lin Fu, Chih-Chieh Lee, Chun Chia Hsu, Allen Huang!

Whatever next…

Mobile phones are mass produced day after day, with more people classing them as a necessity not an accessory. With so many mobile phones produced companies are  coming up with new ways to recycle phones – whether it be for money or the environment.
It is estimated that 15 million phones are replaced in the UK every year. That’s 1712 mobile phones every minute!

Lets look at some interesting facts:

• Manufacturing a mobile phone uses as much energy as 39.79 gallons of petrol
• That’s 597 million litres of petrol which would be enough to fuel a car to travel 74,625,000 miles (at 8 miles per litre). That’s enough to go to Mars and halfway back to earth
• The 1.019 billion phones produced in 2006 create approximately 60 million metric tons of CO2 emissions
• Replacing your mobile every 2 years rather than one would save 30 kg of CO2 emissions (about 3.3 gallons of petrol). Not huge, but when you multiply that by the 15 million handsets replaced every year in the UK, that’s 4.5m kg’s of CO2 (or about 49.5m gallons of petrol)
• If we recycled just 1/15th of the phones replaced every year – that’s one million phones in the UK – it would be the equivalent savings of taking 1,000 cars off the road
• Producing 18 million phones consumes enough energy to power 34,200 homes with electricity for a year. That’s like giving residents of Swansea free electricity for a year
• There are an estimated 90 million handsets languishing in desk drawers and toy boxes across the country. If each one is worth £5, that’s £450 million!
• According to The Use Less Stuff Report, each mobile phone produced consumes materials and energy equivalent to 2.839 litres of petrol. If all 15 million handsets replaced each year were reused, that represents a savings of 42,585,000 litres of petrol
• According to Ericsson, one new GSM subscription (2006) contributes about 24kg of CO2 per year on average, which is comparable to driving an average gasoline–powered car for a little more than one hour on a motorway

There’s some interesting environmental facts for you, do you know any?

Back in June 2009 I brought the famous iPhone and decided to leave it with my boyfriend for half a day,  within this half a day he managed to download a huge amount of apps! Most of them were games, one in particular was the Flick Fishing game.  This game was developed by Freeverse, they announced a few months ago that they had sold the millionth copy of their fishing game! This made Flick Fishing the first paid application to reach the one million download milestone!

This story caught my attention, as I have played this highly amusing game many times! It’s so undeliverable addictive! I’m a 24 year old female, who prefers shopping to fishing and i would never go  fishing, BUT I loved this game! It is really entertaining and makes you very competitive!

The game allows you to take a virtual fishing trip with a simple flick of the wrist! You can pick from a range of bait and work your way around different areas, fish in rivers, lakes or even in the deep sea.

“We couldn’t be happier that so many people decided to put on their virtual fishing cap and give Flick Fishing a try,” said Ian Lynch Smith, president and co-founder of Freeverse. “We’re very proud that over one million players have discovered that Flick Fishing is a great way to enjoy summer fun on your iPhone without the pesky flies and mosquitoes.”

Have a look for the game at the online Apple Store, it’s great fun!