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FirstCry.com is a well-known online portal for shopping of baby products, the portal claims to be "Asia's Largest Online Shopping Store for kids & baby products" but their practices are something one would expect from a cheap, second-class eCommerce website. The internet is filled with complaints and horror-stories of doing business with them and after discovering the "cheap coupon tactic" used by them I am pretty much sure their policies and intentions are not honest, do keep reading below their trick is exciting.

While every other eCommerce portals in India is offering discounts, free-shipping, cash-on-delivery and free return pickup to lure maximum customers aiming to create a long-term relationship, FirstCry has taken a completely different approach where they do false advertising marketing coupon-codes offering discounts but adds or increases shipping-charges magically as soon as one applies them (discount-codes) as shown below. I am not sure what to call this malpractice, but this "coupon fraud" wastes users time where they are surprised by shipping-charges at the last moment of checkout as soon as they use the discount-code which was used to lure them into shopping. As shown in the example below the shipping charges for same cart magically increases as soon as a discount coupon-code is applied.

In the second example below, the consumer is first lured into buying more (minimum value) to get FREE shipping but is slapped shipping-charges when a coupon-code is used.

Similar to Opera Turbo technology, Google Chrome features an "data compression proxy" for Android and Apple iOS mobile-devices which when enabled opens a connection between the user phone and optimization servers running in Google's datacenters relaying all non-encrypted HTTP requests over this connection. The SSL secured proxy connection performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with gzip compression for all resources, DNS lookups from proxy and images converted to WebP with resulting sizes upto 80% smaller provides huge bandwidth savings and resulting in faster web-browsing experience.

This feature is not available for Google Chrome Desktop users, however a free Chrome extension now allows users to get the same savings on their desktop computers. The extension sends all HTTP (but not HTTPS) traffic through Chrome Data Compression Proxy server, which utilizes SPDY protocol to speed up web browsing. Users can check bandwidth savings by visiting chrome://net-internals/#bandwidth and can disable compression-proxy by clicking the green bolt icon from the toolbar.

Facebook "Likes" WhatsApp in a big way, so big, that they bought it for a whooping deal valuing $19 billion. The deal involves paying WhatsApp team a total of $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock and $3 billion in restricted stock vested over several years. It is to be noted that this deal is worth more than what Facebook raised in its own IPO, this is not all - the acquisition is not only the company's largest but also bigger than any that Google, Microsoft or Apple have ever done.

WhatsApp strictly stuck to the "No Ads" and "100% Private" no data sharing policy for long maintaining the 450 million monthly active userbase, with this acquisition the big question is "What about privacy and intrusive advertising which facebook is often associated with?". Well both facebook and WhatsApp has written about this as shared below.

SugarSync stopped offering Free usage-tier some time ago, and has now started purging old free accounts. SugarSync is ditching free-users including users like me who promoted SugarSync in there early days and earned free referral bonus (140+GB in my case). This is not all, these guys are so unprofessional that when contacted about the issue few months ago I was told that since I have referral bonus my account will be ok and will not be purged in February, which was not the case. Thankfully I received an automated account-purge notice by email and contacting them again I was told that the earlier support staff was mistaken and all free accounts will get purged.

With account cancellation getting near-by I was left with the task of moving my data to alternative free cloud-storage services, since I am on a slow internet connection downloading and re-uploading was not an option. Thankfully, there are free-to-try services allowing cloud-to-cloud data transfers which comes handy in situations like this where users are left in the lurch.