TechXav has reached its one year milestone, and we have garnered more than half a million visitors till date. In an effort to expand the TechXav Network, our young and dedicated team has been cracking our brains for new ideas lately. Few days ago, we launched a new site called Teenchnology.com. It's a free blogging platform that encourages teens between the age of 13 to 18 to write articles encircling around social media, internet, gadgets, etc. Our main objective is to provide the root to help teens begin their tech entrepreneurship journey while they overcome adolescence to become adults, and to also show adults that teens have the capability to blog as well as them.

Having a passion in social media and technology, Xavier started KidTechGuru.blogspot.com in June 2008 without any capital or experience. As the number of users began to grow at an exponential rate, he decided to make the switch to a self-hosted blog in February 2009. Today TechXav is one of the world's most popular technology blogs ever contributed by a group of zealous teenagers. Based in Singapore and the United States, TechXav now has about ten writers and the number is growing. We wouldn't be able to achieve our amazing feat without the support of our avid readers, followers on Twitter, and of course our sponsors -- SmartBloggerz, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, TweetsBot, etc. We write the articles all by ourselves, including the coding the web design, setting up our web host, developing Xav.tc (TechXav's URL shortener), and even marketing our brand. As our pockets are rather shallow, we have to think twice before making a decision, especially when it comes to premium web hosting, subscriptions and services. Meanwhile, we also have to maintain a good scalability to provide an excellent user experience for our readers. Here are some of the methods we have embraced to make TechXav load faster, and we are still trying our best to improve it further.

Recently, the URL shortener market is getting much hotter than before, with Google launching Goo.gl and Youtu.be, Facebook unveiling Fb.me, and Bit.ly releasing Bit.ly Pro Service. These services are built for the same purpose - CUSTOM URL Shortening. Our new and unique URL shortener Xav.tc is up and running, and readers can publish the shortened URLs in their tweets or via email. Many people may ask why TechXav decided to use a custom and self-hosted URL shortener instead of using Bit.ly (the default URL shortener on Twitter)?

A week ago, Google released the source code of Chromium OS (the official open source project of Google Chrome OS), and a developer has compiled the source code to VMware disk image, so that I'm able to try it out it on my Mac. I personally feel that this version of Chromium OS is "just okay" and "not that exciting". Well, the main reason is that I've experienced several problems while using this operating system and I'm not impressed by it. In this post, I would like to share with you guys my thoughts and opinions of why I don't think Google Chrome OS will beat Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, and dominate the competitive and lucrative OS market.

A few weeks ago, Tapulous released Tap Tap Revenge 3, which is the latest version with dozens of new features and better social experience. I installed TTR3 this week and incidentally, I found a huge bug inside this app. I started the game and accidentally hit the Power button during the game, and the music paused immediately as normal. However, when I hit the button again and unlocked the device, the music continued while the popup window "Game Paused" was still on the screen. The most interesting part is, I didn't tap the "Resume" button until the track finished (i.e. all the tappers had gone), and I found that after I resumed the game, all the missed tappers were considered "perfectly hit" and calculated into the streak! I repeated this experiment again and again and I found that it's quite easy to get a Full Combo after a few attempts. This bug "works" for all songs, no matter themed, purchased or whatever.

It has been a week since we first launched our social Q&A platform (AskForAnswer) to the public. Hundreds of people from all over the world have tried out our website. We would like take this opportunity to thank you guys for supporting we teens in developing AskForAnswer. Many users may this mentality - "Why should I bother creating an account on AskForAnswer and ask a question which may takes up to few hours to be answered? I should have used other websites such as Yahoo! Answers, which involves a much larger community instead." Well, you're not wrong. Yes, although Yahoo! Answers has millions of active users, but it has failed to keep up today's social world. It only provides an avenue for people to ask and answer questions. That's all. Nothing more than all.