How to listen to Pandora radio from anywhere outside the US.

I used to listen a lot to Pandora radio when I was in the US and I really enjoyed it, so obviously that I wanted it back home. But unfortunately, Pandora is available only in the US, because of the licensing problems which streaming in other countries could create. So, basically, if you are not in America, you can't listen to Pandora radio. But this is the official version...

There is a VPN service called Hotspot Shield which creates something like a tunnel between your computer and a gateway provided by Hotspot Shield (that's some sort of the definition of the VPN), which exists exactly in the US. The idea is that through this VPN, you should get a much safer browsing experience, because everything you do on the internet is sent, securely through that tunnel, in the US, so there is impossible for one to attack you and to try to track your data or something like that. For me it is not clear how the data is handled when it exits in the US, so I wouldn't trust Hotspot Shield when I buy something on the internet for example, but this remains at your own judgement.

By using Hotspot Shield, you should be able to access Pandora from wherever you are. I've been using it not very often for the last 1,5 years, but it always did its job.

Of course that using this also has some disadvantages, and they are mainly related to slow internet speeds (because everything has to go to the US and back) and sometimes slow DNS response. However, it is definitely worth being used for the possibility it introduces to all the internet customers, no matter where they are.

Note: I am not responsible for everything that happens to you by using this service. You use it on your own responsibility.

You can go on their website to learn more or try the product: http://www.hotspotshield.com/.

mysms SMS application seems to be very promising, brings many useful features over Whatsapp.

A few days ago I've presented you Whatsapp (here), a great messaging app available for a lot of mobile platforms which gives you the possibility to send free messages over the internet to all the users who have Whatsapp installed on their device. One of the disadvantages of Whatsapp is that you must be on your phone to send the messages, so you can't register on your phone and then send the messages from your computer or anything like that.

However, with mysms SMS application, it becomes possible to send messages from your computer to all of your friends from all the other platforms, using the mobile phone number you register with before. Moreover, mysms comes also as a standard SMS client, having the ability to handle all the SMS functionality of your phone's default SMS application. More specifically, you can send and receive standard SMS messages directly through mysms, without having to open the stock application separately (you'll have the option to send messages via mobile carrier or via mysms, in case your friends have it). I don't know whether this works or not on iOS because of Apple's restrictions, but on Android it works quite well.

One problem which I found is that I can't send messages through mysms from the browser (Chrome), maybe this functionality is currently unavailable, but it's still a great product. At 700 messages a month from my carrier contract, I think that it's still worth using it, considering that I don't even need to access my phone in order to view or send messages. And the ICS/JB design is a big plus over Whatsapp.

Visit the official website for more information http://www.mysms.com/, or search directly in App Store/ Google Play for "mysms".

Is Facebook down at this moment? Some users report so.

There are some users currently (1:50 PM GMT time) reporting that Facebook is down, via Twitter. It is not clear, however, what's happening, because there are other users reporting that Facebook works just fine for them. I have to mention that Facebook works for me quite well. Downrightnow.com, which is the website that monitors lots of services and reports if a service or another is working or not, is currently displaying Facebook as "Likely Service Disruption".

This state comes from users that reporting both on Twitter and on downrightnow that Facebook is down, while the Facebook officials didn't confirm (yet) that their service has any kind of problems.

If you want to see the progress of Facebook, just follow downrightnow.com. If you are an user of Facebook, please leave a comment telling us either if you have problems in accessing Facebook, or if works fine for you.

Seesmic web, or another type of twitter.com .

Seesmic has its own twitter.com like site. It lets you access your twitter account, but with lots of options, like on a dedicated client (such as Tweetdeck). Except that it is just a website. The idea is that it was created especially for incompatible platforms with Seesmic applications (Linux), but it is also great for general use, and it's ideal for slower computers.

The website is really customizable, and its a pleasure to use Twitter via this way (it's much better than on twitter.com). And what I like the most is that you can choose between two skins, a light one (white) and a dark one (black). The website is also available in more languages: English, Chinese (I think), Deutsch, Romanian (this is my language, but I really wasn't expecting this), Portuguese, Spanish and again something like Chinese ( I don't know those languages at all).

Link: http://seesmic.com/app/