If you are looking for a way to make some extra money on the side, consider these ways you can make money advertising:

1.  Sign up to have your car wrapped with advertising.  If you drive a lot, live in an urban area and don’t mind having your car covered in an advertisement, you could make a few hundred dollars a month.  Bankrate explains, “Drivers are paid an average of $700 to $900 per month, with campaigns usually running a few months long.  Drivers use their own cars which are fitted with the wrap.”

2.  Advertise on your face.  This is probably the wackiest way to make money advertising, but two college graduates who were deep in student loan debt started selling advertisements on their faces.  They generally published the advertisement on their cheek or forehead.  They didn’t earn much at first, but now they are earning several hundred dollars per advertisement.

3.  Create your own advertisements.  Expo TV will pay people to create videos of themselves reviewing a product.  For every video that you create, you earn points to be redeemed for gift cards, cash, or prizes.  This would be a great job if you are a blogger who already routinely tries new products for review and giveaways.  The only downside is that the companies will own the intellectual property on your video, which they can use in their advertising campaigns.

4.  Review products on your blog.  If you already have a blog and are doing reviews, you can sign up for a site like Review Me.  Your blog will be added to a list of available blogs, and advertisers can choose you to review their product.  You will likely get to keep the product and will make some cash for posting the review.  (Some people make this even more profitable by selling the product on Craigslist or eBay after they are done with it.)

5.  Sign up as an affiliate.  Again, this one is ideal for bloggers.  If you use a product that you would highly recommend, sign up for that product’s affiliate program and write about it naturally within your blog.  If you already have followers who read your blog regularly, they are likely to value your opinion.  If you let them know honestly what works for you, they may be willing to try the product, too, and you will get a commission for their purchase.  Some bloggers such as Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income Blog make tens of thousands of dollars a month with affiliate sales.

The days of a marketing or advertising firms creating all of the advertisements we see are long gone.  Now, you can get a piece of the pie, so to speak, by advertising on your car or even your body.  If you have a blog or are an active consumer, you can also make some money doing product reviews.

What are you waiting for?  Start reviewing and advertising now for some easy income.

Banking

Many banks offer their own dedicated smartphone applications and some are clearly better than others. If you just want to check your balance or transfer money, that’s great, but some of them can show you just how you are spending your money – allowing you to rethink your monthly expenses and make changes where necessary.

Comparing

MoneySupermarket provides a comprehensive app that allows you to check up on all sorts. Their business insurance pages, for example, also provide information on the different types of cover available so you can make sure you aren’t on the wrong policy (read more about this here). However, the app also has links to other pages that will save you cash on the high street.

Locating

The rise in GPS-focused apps continues and one of the great ways these can be useful is in giving you the best deals available in your local area. Everybody loves a voucher, but if you have to travel to the other side of town to use it you could end up spending even more. Options like O2 Priority Moments will give you restaurants and other offers wherever you are – in seconds.

Auctioning

A lot of people use eBay to shift their junk and make a few extra quid on the side, but the site is just as useful for saving money as it is for making it. That said, being able to keep a close eye on your bids can be tricky, but with this app you can not only compare prices on the go, but receive alerts so you don’t lose track of what you’re bidding on and lose out at the last minute.

Budgeting

There’s no end of options available for you if you want to do your budgeting with your smartphone. If you’re an Apple iPhone user for example, there are great applications like Expenditure, MoneyBook and Mint to check out and you can use this alongside some of the above to make sure you aren’t overspending on your monthly outgoings.

There are clever ways to integrate apps into your life in all areas, from entertainment and leisure to organising your diary – but when it comes to finance; there are some facilities that are a no brainer!

The miCoach SPEED_CELL is designed to help improve individual performance for athletes in a broad range of sports, including soccer, football, basketball, tennis, and running. It lets each user track their unique stats such as average speed, maximum speed, number of sprints, distance at high intensity levels, steps, and strides during play. Up to seven hours of data can be stored onboard the SPEED_CELL to be wirelessly transferred later to a smartphone, tablet, or PC.

The device fits in a specially designed cavity in the outsole of compatible Adidas footwear. The company intends to introduce a full range of compatible sneakers for basketball, football, and tennis starting later this year through 2012. The device itself will cost $ 69.99 and will launch with a series of apps, starting with miCoach Soccer and miCoach Running, on December 1.

[via Engadget]

The big takeaway is how consistent Android feels in this 4.0 release. Google has obviously worked hard to not only introduce new features but bring the older functionality up to speed so that everything fits together seamlessly, addressing a common criticism by iOS users that Android can feel piecemeal. The Roboto font looks great on the Galaxy Nexus’ high-res display, and the animations shown in page transitions and when you tap on-screen icons like the new virtual buttons for home, back and menu are eye-catching enough to be interesting but not so involved as to slow the overall experience down.

Honeycomb’s recent apps switcher has been brought along, now boosted with a side-flick gesture that removes software from the list (but doesn’t necessarily stop it running in the background; that’s still left for the OS to manage); that side-swiping also navigates between similar screens in apps, such as moving through messages in your email inbox, while the flick-to-dismiss gesture can also be used to pare down Notifications in the pull-down. iOS 5 had borrowed some of Android’s previous system in its new Notifications Center, but Ice Cream Sandwich skips ahead with support for contact photos in the pull-down as well as control over individual notification dismissal. There’s also a new multimedia control pane that shows there if you have music playing in the background, minimizing the amount of jumping around you have to do, and you can usefully peek at the latest notifications from the lock screen.

The homescreen is more flexible now, with similar widgets to Honeycomb but resizable in Ice Cream Sandwich. Rather than just a selection of different sizes, you can now pull widgets to expand them, useful for showing more of your inbox or calendar. iOS’ folder creation system – dragging and dropping icons on top of each other to quickly create a new folder – now appears in Android 4.0, and you can reorganize icons within that folder as well as pin it to the favorites tray at the bottom. Both apps and speed-dials can be put in folders.

The iPhone 4S has Siri, while Android sticks with its existing voice control system – now supercharged for real-time dictation. Rather than speaking, waiting and then watching a block of text appear, you can now see your words appear in real-time, including dictating smiley faces. It was hard going fighting the background noise at the demo center here to get an accurate impression of how well it all works, so that will have to wait until the full review. Still, it gave us a chance to try the new text control tools for the onscreen keyboard – like tapping a word for the in-line spellcheck – a system which works well. Cut/copy/paste has been boosted with the ability to drag highlighted text around the page.

Android Beam is the other big, eye-catching feature, Google using NFC to transfer webpage links, Android Market listings, YouTube links, people cards and more. NFC’s promise has always been about simplicity, and Ice Cream Sandwich delivers: hold two Galaxy Nexus phones back to back and, if the app you’re in supports Beam then a dialog automatically pops up to send the information. Tap the display and it shoots across – it’s easy to do even if you’re not looking at the screen. Sensibly Google has bundled the Android Beam APIs with the 4.0 SDK, available now, so third-party apps will be able to join in, something which could well have more of an impact on NFC adoption than mobile payments.

Android’s browser has been reworked, now supporting up to 16 simultaneous tabs navigated between using the same UI as for the app switcher. A side-swipe shuts down an unwanted tab. Bookmarks are pulled across from Chrome on your desktop, but more useful is the new “Request Desktop Site” option in the menu which attempts to pull in the full webpage rather than the default mobile version many sites serve up. It’s a big improvement on trying to dig around a site’s page for an often well hidden option for the full site, and worked well on the test pages we tried it with. There are also new incognito mode options and the ability to see the most visited pages, as well as an offline page save so that you can come back to a site – images and all – even without a connection.

Google’s Face Unlock system for the homescreen obviously depends on your registering your face with the 1.3-megapixel front camera, but in the demos we’ve been shown it works well. If it can’t recognize you – we’ll have to wait until review samples arrive to see quite how often that happens – the regular gesture/pin unlock options are available too.

As for the main camera, that gets a new app which loads almost instantaneously and is capable of shooting off frame after frame faster than we could hold the Galaxy Nexus steady. Instant upload to Google+ is obviously supported – the social networking app comes preloaded in Ice Cream Sandwich – and features you’d previously have looked to a third-party app for, like Hipstamatic effects, red-eye reduction and cropping/rotating, can all be done within the native Camera/Gallery apps. The latter has had a makeover too, with more emphasis on preview thumbnails and less on unnecessary animation; it’s a little like Windows Phone in places, but that’s no bad thing.

Video, meanwhile, supports 1080p HD from the Galaxy Nexus’ 5-megapixel optics, and adds continuous autofocus during recording along with the ability to zoom. Timelapse recording is also supported natively, another app you won’t need to download. Most useful is likely to be the ability to capture photos while simultaneously recording video, which works well.

Core Android apps like Gmail and Calendar have been refreshed in Android 4.0, with offline search for your email a particularly neat addition. By default it’s set to maintain an offline index of the past 30 days, but you can alter that depending on how many or few you’d like access to. We were able to turn off all connectivity and still search through old messages with no problems. The Gmail UI is new, too, with the higher-resolution Galaxy Nexus display being used to show more of a preview of each message in the inbox, and then the side-swipe gesture coming into play to flick between emails once you’re reading. That, and the new options bar with instant access to labels, make triaging a busy inbox straightforward, though we’d still like to see a universal inbox option added. Voice messages, meanwhile, now show up in the recent calls list, as long as you’re using Google Voice, and you can speed up or slow down playback.

While Android phones have not necessarily always offered the best battery life, Google has always delivered the best tools for monitoring power usage. That focus has carried over to data usage in Ice Cream Sandwich, with the ability to track and limit what’s using mobile data and when. As with power there’s a simple graph showing your consumption, though with a predicted data use trajectory for the rest of the month rather than an estimate of what runtime you have left. Pull down a capping line and you can set a warning alert for if you exceed, say, 1.5GB each month; optionally you can have the phone lock down mobile data altogether after that point, great if you’re roaming internationally and only have a limited amount of data before facing extortionate per-MB fees.

Stats-hounds will love the granularity on offer, with the ability to zoom in on a specific part of your historic use and see which apps have been using what data. There’s differentiation between foreground and background data use, too, which is great to see what’s been quietly chomping away at your bundle, and you can block background data use on a per app basis.

The best aspect of Android 4.0 is how it all sits together. Google’s smartphone OS has always been more flexible than rivals, but it’s also felt more ramshackle: sacrificing some consistency along the way. Ice Cream Sandwich doesn’t fix that completely, though it’s a big improvement on what we’ve seen before. Integration of multiple third-party services, like Facebook, Twitter and the like, is handled with zero fuss and in a way that appears seamless. Google is still polishing the release build, and so there was some performance jerkiness at times, but when it moved fast it simply flew on the Galaxy Nexus’ 1.2GHz dual-core.

Google couldn’t say when other devices might get Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades, so it seems the only way – for the moment, anyway – will be grabbing a Samsung Galaxy Nexus when it hits shelves in November. From what we’ve seen today, of both Samsung’s hardware and Google’s software, that’s something we’re very much looking forward to.

via Slashgear

Okay, so we’ve already seen Ice Cream Sandwich running on the Nexus S, but that was decidedly… unofficial. We’ve just heard straight from Google’s Gabe Cohen that the Nexus S will definitely be getting ICS. In fact, both he and Matias Duarte think most Gingerbread devices will see an upgrade, saying: “Currently in the process for releasing Ice Cream Sandwich for Nexus S. Theoretically should work for any 2.3 device.” It’s hardly a surprise and there’s no specific word on timing just yet, but hopefully it won’t take long to move that vanilla Android device up to something with a breaded exterior.

via Engadget