No favours for scam victims - New Zealand Police

The 36 overstayers who have been caught up in an alleged passport scam will not receive any protection from police.

Detective Senior Sergeant Dave Pizzini says police located the 36 people, who then lodged complaints against Gerrard Otimi.

But he says they will not have any protection from the police when it comes to their immigration status.

"It's between them and the Immigration Service. We don't have anything to do with their immigration status," Mr Pizzini said.

A spokesman for Immigration New Zealand said those who had lodged complaints would be treated the same as others who came forward.

"[Immigration New Zealand] considers their current circumstances, as against the case for them staying in New Zealand.

"This is an individualised assessment. If there is no reason for them to remain, and they are in New Zealand unlawfully, the expectation is always that they will depart New Zealand."

Otimi is facing 39 fraud-related charges and is accused of charging people hundreds of dollars for passport stamps.

He made a brief appearance in the Manukau District Court yesterday and was charged with 36 new counts relating to the alleged alteration of Samoan passports in June.

Otimi - who represented himself - initially refused to stand in the dock.

He asked Judge Anna Johns if she ordered him to stand in the dock. She said she did.

The small courtroom was packed by Otimi supporters, some of whom had protested at the recent Taito Phillip Field case.

Police have indicated that they will disclose evidence to Otimi within three weeks. The defendant will next appear on August 26.

In June, police executed three search warrants in relation to the case and found $40,000 in cash and 5000 blank "hapu certificates".

Otimi claims to be representing a hapu but Tom Roa from Ngati Maniapoto has told the Herald he has never heard of Otimi's hapu - Okahukurapukekauwhatawhataarangi.

Mr Roa was also asked if Otimi was an activist.

"Certainly I would never describe Jerry as an activist, he's an entrepreneur - he thinks beyond the square.

"The key thing really, I think, is the matter of mana," Mr Roa said.

Sales of virtual goods boom in US (Gadget, news, report, review)

Americans look set to spend $1bn (£600m) on virtual goods in 2009, claims a report.

The cash will be spent on add-ons for online games, digital gifts and other items that exist only as data.

Total spend on such items is expected to be up by 100% over 2008 and to double again by the end of 2010, said the analysts behind the report.

In related news, Facebook is updating its gift store so it offers a wider variety of virtual presents.

Social games

Written by games analysts Justin Smith and Charles Hudson, the report says that virtual goods are proving ever more popular with gamers and users of social network sites such as Facebook.

Many players of massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, spend real money on virtual currency to ensure their in-game avatars have the best gear.

Some games in Asia also use the so-called micro-payments model to fund their games in lieu of a monthly subscription fee.

Now, people playing social games such as virtual agriculture simulation Farmville on Facebook are using real cash to purchase game dollars for additions to their farm. Firms such as Zynga, Playdom and Playfish are all growing fast on the back of the rise in social gaming.

The purchase of virtual goods on smartphones, such as Apple's iPhone, are also starting to take off, said the report.

The figures in the report deal only with sales in the US. Introducing the report, the authors said: "While virtual goods have been driving revenues in Asia and Europe for years, 2009 will be remembered as the year virtual goods-based businesses began to scale in the United States."

Facebook has announced an overhaul of its virtual gift shop to expand the range of digital presents members can buy and send to friends, family and colleagues.

As well as virtual birthday cakes and pints of beer, Facebook users can now also send music tracks to each other.

The music service will initially only be available in the US. One Facebook credit (10 US cents/6p) buys one streamed song. Ten credits buys a downloadable MP3.

Ways to Optimize your Blog or Website (Power Tools and Tips for blogger, blogging, David, Lim)

Everyone in the Internet Business devotes their money, time and effort to get more traffic to their site. There are lot of methods and ways to do it.
One of them is to Optimize your website. So that your website is found online. Optimize means you have to transform your website to a much smaller form so that it consumes less bandwidth without compromising the look and feel of the website.

Here are some of the basic tips for website Optimization.

Know your target visitors who will search for your site online
You need to do some research and figure out what search phrases the surfers use so they can find your site. Then decide on the keywords that you are going to use. Get some idea of those keyword that will be use and searched for.

Define a Particular Niche
Your keyword should be direct enough so that the web surfers will find your site right away and not get lost.

Keyword Density
Always consider your keyword density. Keyword phrase should appear at least three to five times in the article while keywords should appear 8-10 times or more.
One way is to repeat the main keyword every 200 words.

MyYahoo.com
Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine.

Ping-0-matic
Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories: http://www.pingomatic.com

Title Tags
Take a look at your title tags. Title tag is used to define a particular web page. Make sure it describes the exact content of your website.
Make sure title tags contain certain strategic keywords. Title tags is very important since search engine look for title text when they index pages.

These are some of the tips to help you optimize your blog or website. By Following them you will see your sites improvement in the search engine rankings. You really don’t have to be an SEO expert or spend a lot of money to optimize. Simply follow them and you will start getting more traffic!

Lock Your Spot before 15 May, 2010 and change your life 360 degree from 16 May 2010. It will change the way you feel, act and live! Tell your friends now or someone else will!

Lock your spot before May 16, 2010 and change your future forever! What - Who - Give -Watch

ARM announces the first mobile multicore processor - Cortex-A5 (tech, news, report, latest, 2009, mobile, phone, repair)

ARM have just launched the ARM Cortex-A5 MPCore processor - their first multicore processor intended for usage in mobile devices. According to the company this is the smallest and most power-efficient multicore processor that is capable of delivering the performance needed for smartphones and the cheap manufacturing desired for low-cost devices.

The ARM Cortex-A5 gamma features a wide range of CPUs - from the power-efficient uniprocessor (that we imagine will cost pennies to produce) to up to 4-core processor (that should be used on high-end multimedia powerhouses).

The new range of processors should deliver much better performance than its ARM11 predecessors, while still fitting within the size of the ARM9 units. At the same time the multi-core ARM Cortex-A5 should be nearly twice as power efficient, which should probably have quite an effect on mobile devices battery life. ARM11 is a pretty popular hardware platform for many Symbian smartphones. Even the the first two generations of Apple iPhone used ARM11 cores.

ARM state that the new Cortex-A5 is fully application compatible with the older Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processors (currently used in popular devices such as the Sony Ericsson Satio, Nokia N900, Samsung Omnia HD, iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre), which means it should get along perfectly with0 all software platforms such as Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc. We are yet to see however if all those platforms will be able to utilize the multi-core architecture to its fullest.

The Cortex-A5 processor is now available for general licensing, and shipments will start in Q4 of 2009. That means that we might be seeing the first prototypes utilizing it at the next GSM Congress in February.