Aakash II to launch in April at same price

A faster, upgraded version of Aakash tablet — touted to be the world’s cheapest — would be launched in April without any increase in price, Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal said.

Sibal said during Question Hour in Lok Sabha that Datawind will supply one lakh high speed tablets with a longer battery life and better screen.

“These higher specifications which include 700 MHz Cortex A8 processor, 3200mAH battery with three-hour usage time and a capacitative touchscreen have been necessitated to overcome the initial difficulties observed in the devices,” he said.

The first phase of one lakh tablets were targeted for students in higher technical education institutions so as to further ascertain technical feedback on its operation and usability, the minister said.

To demands from members for extending the distribution of tablets to school students, Sibal said the same would be made available when the proposed National Mission of Education through ICT for Schools got necessary funds.

He said once the production capacities are built up, norms for distribution with an aim to prioritise empowerment of students, especially from disadvantaged and marginalised sections of society, through this low cost access-cum computing device would get developed.

Best Ultrabook: 15 top thin and lights for 2012

Best Ultrabooks: 15 of the best

Many of this year’s hottest new laptops are about one word: Ultrabooks.

The term Ultrabook is actually pure marketing, dreamt up by Intel for a new generation of portable PCs featuring its technology.

Like Centrino but unlike Viiv, it’s starting to stick as a catch-all term for thin and light laptops, or ultraportables as they’re sometimes classified.

The best way to think of an Ultrabook is a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple, a netbook that isn’t underpowered or a laptop that’s been on a crash diet. Ultrabooks all feature a Core i3, i5 or i7 processor, plus fast SSD storage and USB 3.0 connectivity.

brightcove : 1437758361001

According to Intel, Ultrabooks also have “ultra-capabilities” – security features, battery power, instant-on and quick standby. They’ll provide a lightweight alternative to tablet devices for people who just can’t work without a full QWERTY keyboard.

Intel has announced a massive $300m (£185m) fund to help develop Ultrabook hardware and software, and it’s confident that Ultrabooks will make up 40% of the market by 2012.

The first models are shipping with current generation Sandy Bridge Core processors, which will be replaced this year by a new generation of Ivy Bridge chips.

Intel set an initial price target of $999/£999 for Ultrabooks, though many have been more expensive – expect serious in-roads on the cheaper £600-£800 market this year.

But what’s the best Ultrabook to buy? Check out the best Ultrabooks we’ve reviewed, as well as some we got hands on with at CES 2012.

1. LG Z330 and Z430 Super Ultrabooks

Rather than a tapered design, the chassis on the 13.3-inch LG Z330 Super Ultrabook is 14.7mm thick from front to back. It runs Windows 7 (for now) and has a bigger brother, the LG Z430, which comes with a 14-inch display. Why is it ‘Super’? Because LG says so.

Read our Hands on: LG Z330 and Z430 Super Ultrabook review

2. Asus Zenbook UX31

Asus has done a terrific job with the Zenbook’s design – even if you have to acknowledge that the designer took more than a sneaky glance at Apple’s ultraportable first.The 13-inch Zenbook is fantastic to look at. When closed, the wedge-shaped laptop measures 17mm at its thickest point and a mere 3mm at its thinnest.The same design thinking even stretches to the Intel Core and Windows 7 stickers. We wonder who it was that proposed they were silver and black – Intel? Asus? – but whoever did has made a difference.

Read our Asus Zenbook UX31 review

3. Samsung Series 5 Ultra

Packing an Intel Core i5 processor, the Samsung Series 5 Ultra is small but perfectly formed. Available in 14-inch or 13-inch models, the 13 incher is 17.6mm at its fattest point, narrowing to 14mm.
It comes with a 128GB/256GB SSD or a 500GB hard drive (alongside a small 16GB flash drive) and incorporates an LED SuperBright screen. The only worry? Battery life is low at around three hours in our tests. Not to be confused with the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. Which is definitely not an Ultrabook.

Read our Samsung Series 5 Ultra review

4. Samsung Series 9

While the original Series 9 was one of the world’s thinnest laptops, the new Samsung 9 Series Ultrabook is even thinner.

The design team has shaved off another 4mm, giving this 13-inch (1600 x 1200) laptop a waistline of only 12.9mm. Inside, a 1.7GHz Core i7 chip does all the hard work, ably assisted by up to 8GB of memory and SSD storage.

Read our Samsung 9 Series review

5. HP Folio 13

As the moniker suggests, the HP Folio 13 is yet another 13-inch Ultrabook. It’s not much of a looker and, at 18mm around the middle, it’s not the slimmest Ultrabook at CES.

But HP is claiming a 9-hour battery life for the Folio 13, which will be ideal for regular mobile workers who value staying power over pretty design.

Read our Hands on: HP Folio 13 review

6. Lenovo IdeaPad U300S

Lenovo hasn’t obsessed over aesthetics, and this laptop is no Apple MacBook Air clone. It seems chunky next to the wafer-thin Asus Zenbook, which features a wedge-shaped design that tapers off to a thin, blade-like point.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U300S retains its 16mm thickness across the chassis, giving it the impression of being squat. The body is aluminium, and weighs 1.4kg, the same as the Acer Aspire S3, but much heavier than the Toshiba Portege Z830 and the Toshiba Satellite Z830-10U. If you’re looking for an ultrabook that will turn heads, you will most likely look elsewhere, but can the Lenovo IdeaPad U300S impress with power?

Read our Lenovo IdeaPad U300S review

7. HP Envy 14 Spectre

The HP Envy 14 Spectre is a little bigger than your average Ultrabook and a little fatter because of it. Intel specifies a sub- 18mm chassis for 13-inch models, but 14-inchers like this can bulk up to 21mm.

With a Core i5 (or i7) processor and 128GB HDD inside, HP claims a 9 hour battery life for the Spectre. And… that’s really the only appeal.

Read our: Hands on: HP Envy 14 Spectre review

8. Dell XPS 13

The Dell XPS 13 might be a little late to the Ultrabook party, but it’s one of the prettiest portables we’ve seen.

Amazingly, Dell has squeezed an Intel Core i5 or i7 inside the trim chassis, along with 4GB of memory and a 128/256GB SSD. How thin is it? 6mm at its slimmest point.

Read our Dell XPS 13 review

9. Asus Zenbook UX21

The Asus Zenbook UX21 is the first 11-inch ultrabook to hit the shelves. Of course, comparisons will be immediately drawn with the Apple MacBook Air, which is one of the best ultra-portable laptops money can buy, and these two 11-inch portables are very closely matched. The Asus Zenbook UX21 matches the Apple MacBook Air in every respect. It’s just as well-built, made out of a single piece of aluminium, just as light and oozes the same head-turning style and class that makes people cast admiring glances while you work in public. It also has the same Intel Core i5 low voltage 1.6GHz processor, and a 128GB solid state hard drive, which keeps the system really responsive and fast.

Hands on Asus Zenbook UX21 review

10. Lenovo IdeaPad U310 and U410

The Lenovo IdeaPad U310 has a distinctly MacBook Pro vibe to it but these Ultrabooks are expected to be at the cheaper end of the scale, around £600 or so. Packing a 13-inch display, the U310 tips the scales at 1.7kg and is squeezed into an aluminium chassis that’s 18mm thick.

A Core i5 chip is expected to provide the processing grunt, with the choice of a 64GB SSD or 500GB hard disk for storage. There’s also a U410, boasting a 14-inch display.

Read our Hands on: Lenovo IdeaPad U310 and IdeaPad U410 review

11. Toshiba Satellite Z830

The Toshiba Satellite Z830-10U, priced at £999 in the UK (the US price isn’t yet available).

At its thickest point, the Satellite Z830-10U measures only 16mm across, but Toshiba has still packed in Sandy Bridge power and given us one of the best trackpads we’ve yet seen on an ultrabook. It’s not without niggles, however, and we found parts of the chassis to be inferior to stronger machines such as the Asus Zenbook.

It’s the lightest Ultrabook chassis we’ve yet seen, but also an excellent battery life, this could be the answer for frequent travellers who need a long-lasting machine full of performance for under £1,000.

Read our Toshiba Satellite Z830-10U review

12. Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga

We’re loving the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. This flexible, foldable Ultrabook also converts into a 16.9mm thick tablet with a 13.1-inch (1600×900 pixel) touchscreen.

Running Windows 8 you get the best of all worlds – a QWERTY keyboard for heavy duty working and a tablet experience for after hours net sessions on the sofa. The downside? It probably won’t be cheap.

Read our Hands on: Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga review

13 Acer Aspire S3

The 13.3-inch Acer Aspire S3-951 is an appealing prospect for regular travellers. The Intel Core i7 2637M version we tested is priced at £900 in the UK and costs $1300 in the US (where it has the more specific name of Acer Aspire S3-951-6432), which is enticing, considering the impressive specs list.

A less powerful Core i5 model can be bought for £700 in the UK, while in the US there are three cheaper Core i5 machines, two of which cost $900, while one retails at $1199.

Read our Acer Aspire S3 review

14. The Intel Nikiski concept

While not technically an Ultrabook, Intel tells us that a Ultrabook version of the oddball Nikiski is on the cards for later this year.

What makes it stand out is the glass touch pad that turns into a touchscreen layer to enable you to browse a slimline view of key information such as new emails.

15. Acer Aspire S5

Thin (15mm) and light (1.35kg), the new Acer Aspire S5 isn’t much of a design departure from the older Acer Aspire S3.

But it takes advantage of its Ultrabook DNA with a 13.3-inch display, Thunderbolt technology, SSD storage and a fast (but as yet unspecified) Intel CPU. Are we excited?

112 government websites hacked in 3 months

About 112 government websites, including those of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Planning Commission and Ministry of Finance, were hacked in the last three months, minister of state for communications and IT Sachin Pilot said in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

The website of state-owned telecom operator BSNL was attacked on December 4, by a Pakistani hacker group called ‘H4tr!ck’. This was the fourth time the BSNL website was attacked.

Other hacked websites belonged to the agencies in the government of Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Sikkim and Manipur besides the HRD Ministry, the Parliament was informed in a written statement by the minister.

The attacks on government websites indicate their vulnerability, especially those ending with gov.in as a top level domain.

On the other hand, number of internet frauds of Rs 1 lakh and upwards, declined to 125 in 2011 from 269 cases reported, three years ago, the minister said.

About 1,800 cases of internet fraud were reported in 2011, a drop from 2,234 cases reported in 2010. But the CBI’s Economic Offences Wing registered only three cases in 2011. Most of the cases relate to payment and e-commerce fraud by way of stolen credit cards.

The amount involved in the internet frauds declined from Rs 12.3 crore in 2010 to Rs 7.8 crore, last year, the minister said.

New Upcoming HP Laptop and Products For The Year 2012

HP realizes its ideas that will launch in 2012. Who and what we will see in 2012 ?

hp products in 2012

 

hp conceptual laptop 2012 with a virtual keyboard

HP New Electronic Wallet

Media Carpet in 2012

Intelligent and Innovative hp Pen in 2012

Charging Self in 2012

hp Tablet PC

Wireless Hub

Mahindra Satyam partners with Experimentus to offer TMMi assessments

Mahindra Satyam announced its initiative to offer TMMi based software quality assurance and testing services in partnership with Experimentus.

Mahindra Satyam has become the first global company to offer these services under license. Leveraging TMMi Assesment and Validation against a proven independent maturity model like TMMi ensures both repeatability and confidence of outcomes. Clients benefit from increasing maturity of software quality processes, reduced cost of software development and on time completion.

What uniquely distinguishes this offering is the fact that it’s an independent validation and benchmarking of software quality management and test processes carried out by an accredited team of assessors and practitioners from Mahindra Satyam. These assessors would be independently validated by the TMMi Foundation for their independence and capability to assess against the industry model.

“A specialized focus on testing process has been long due in the industry for defect prevention and brings predictability in business alignment of IT. TMMi based assessment bridges this gap and helps unravel hidden cost of software development,” said GS Raju, Global Head Testing, Mahindra Satyam.

With this partnership with Experimentus, Mahindra Satyam expects to increase efficiency up to 60 percent and effectiveness of software deliveries, whilst at the same time helping companies.

Why Facebook’s Data Sharing Matters

Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users’ messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook’s data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.

The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.

We, ok I, have long argued here at ReadWriteWeb that aggregate analysis of Facebook data is an idea with world-changing potential. The analogy from history that I think of is about Real estate Redlining. Back in the middle of the last century, when US Census data and housing mortgage loan data were both made available for computer analysis and cross referencing for the first time, early data scientists were able to prove a pattern of racial discrimination by banks against people of color who wanted to buy houses in certain neighborhoods. The data illuminated the problem and made it undeniable, thus leading to legislation to prohibit such discrimination.

I believe that there are probably patterns of interaction and communication of comparable historic importance that could be illuminated by effective analysis of Facebook user data. Good news and bad news could no doubt be found there, if critical thinking eyes could take a look.

‘Assuming you had permission, you could use a semantic tool to investigate what issues the users are discussing, what weight those issues have in relation to everything else they are saying and get some insights into the relationships between those issues,’ writes systemic innovation researcher Haydn Shaughnessy in a comment on Forbes privacy writer Kashmir Hill’s coverage of the Politico deal. ‘As far as I can see people use sentiment analysis because it is low overhead; the quickest, cheapest way to reflect something of the viewpoints, however fallible the technique. Properly mined though you could really understand what those demographics care about.’

Several years ago I had the privilege to sit with Mark Zuckerberg and make this argument to him, but it doesn’t feel like the company has seized the world-changing opportunity in front of it.

Facebook does regularly analyzes its own data of course. And sometimes it publishes what it finds. For example, two years ago the company cross referenced the body of its users’ names with US Census data that tied last names and ethnicity. Facebook’s conclusion was that the site used to be disproportionately made up of White people – but now it’s as ethnically diverse as the rest of America. Good news!

But why do we only hear the good news? That millions of people are talking about Republican Presidential candidates might be considered bad news, but the new deal remains a very limited instance of Facebook treating its user data like the platform that it could be.

It could be just a sign of what’s to come, though. ‘This is especially interesting in terms of the business relationships–who’s allowed to analyze Facebook data across all users?’ asks Nathan Gilliatt, principal at research firm Social Target and co-founder of AnalyticsCamp. ‘To my knowledge, they haven’t let other companies analyze user data beyond publicly shared stuff and what people can access with their own accounts’ authorization. This says to me that Facebook understands the value of that data. It will be interesting to see what else they do with it.’

I’ve been told that Facebook used to let tech giant HP informally hack at their data years ago, back when the site was small and the world’s tech privacy lawyers were as yet unaroused. That kind of arrangement would have been unheard of for the past several years, though. Two years ago, social graph hacker Pete Warden pulled down Facebook data from hundreds of millions of users, analyzing it for interesting connections before planning on releasing it to the academic research community. Facebook’s response was assertive and came from the legal department. Warden decided not to give the data to researchers after all. (Disclosure: I am writing this post from Warden’s couch.)

‘Like a lot of Facebook’s studies, this collaboration with Politico is fascinating research, it’s just a real shame they can’t make the data publicly available, largely due to privacy concerns’ bemoans Warden. ‘Without reproducability, it loses a lot of its scientific impact. With a traditional opinion poll, anyone with enough money can call up a similar number of people and test a survey’s conclusions. That’s not the case with Facebook data.’

‘Everyone is going ‘gaga’ over the potential for Facebook,’ says Kaliya Hamlin, Executive Director of a trade and advocacy group called the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium.
‘The potential exists only because they have this massive lead (monopoly) so it seems like they should be the ones to do this.

‘Yes we should be doing deeper sentiment analysis of peoples’ real opinions. But in a way that they are choosing to participate – so that the entities that aggregate such information are trusted and accountable.

‘If I had my own personal data store/service and I chose to share say my music listening habits with a ratings service like Neilson – voluntarily join a panel. I have full trust and confidence that they are not going to turn on me and do something else with my data – it will just go in a pool.

‘Next thing you know Facebook is going to be selling to the candidate the ability to access people who make positive or negative comments in private messages. Where does it end? How are they accountable and how do we have choice?’

Not everyone is as concerned about this from a privacy perspective. ‘There are many things in the online world that give me willies for Fourth-Amendment-like reasons,’ says Curt Monash of data analyst firm Monash Research. ‘This isn’t one of them, because the data collectors and users aren’t proposing to even come close to singling out individual people for surveillance.’

Monash’s primary concern is in the quality of the data. ‘There’s a limit as to how useful this can be,’ he says. ‘Online polls and similar popularity contests are rife with what amounts to ballot box stuffing. This will be just another example. It is regrettable that you can now stuff an online ballot box by spamming your friends in private conversation.’

It doesn’t just have to be about messages, though. Social connections, Likes and more all offer a lot of potential for analysis, if it’s done appropriately.

‘We need trust and accountability frameworks that work for people to allow analysis AND not allow creepiness,’ says Hamlin.

Two years ago social news site Reddit began giving its users an option to ‘donate your data to science’ by opting in to have activity data made available for download. Massive programming Question and Answer site StackOverflow has long made available periodic dumps of its users’ data for analysis. ‘You never know what’s going to come out of it,’ StackOverflow co-founder Joel Spolsky says about analysis of aggregate user data.

The unknown potential is indicitive not just of how valuable Facebook data is, but potentially of the relationship between data and knowledge generally in the emerging data-rich world.

That’s the thesis of author David Weinberger’s new book, Too Big to Know. ‘It’s not simply that there are too many brickfacts [datapoints] and not enough edifice-theories,’ he writes. ‘Rather, the creation of data galaxies has led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we’ve adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all.’

The world’s largest social network, rich with far more signal than any of us could wrap our heads around, could help illuminate emergent qualities of the human experience that are only visible on the network level.

Please don’t mess up our chance to learn those things, Mr. Zuckerberg.

IBM developing storage device of just 12 atoms

 Researchers at IBM have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.

The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will also consume significantly less power. And it may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.

“Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren’t that many of them,” said Shan X Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University. “To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important.”

Until now, the most advanced magnetic storage systems have needed about 1 million atoms to store a digital 1 or 0. The new achievement is the product of a heated international race between two elite physics laboratories to explore the properties of magnetic materials at a far smaller scale.

Last May, a group at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Hamburg in Germany reported on the ability to perform computer logic operations on an atomic level.

The group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center here, led by Andreas Heinrich, has now created the smallest possible unit of magnetic storage by painstakingly arranging two rows of six iron atoms on a surface of copper nitrite atoms. The cluster of atoms is described as anti-ferromagnetic – a rare quality in which each atom in the array has an opposed magnetic orientation. (In common ferromagnetic materials like iron, nickel and cobalt, the atoms are magnetically aligned.)

Under the laboratory’s founder, Don Eigler, IBM has explored the science of nanomaterials far smaller than the silicon chips used in today’s semiconductors. Eigler recently retired from the company but is a co-author of the Science paper.

The researchers now use a scanning tunneling microscope, which looks like a giant washing machine festooned with aluminum foil, not only to capture images of atoms but to reposition individual atoms – much the way a billiard ball might be moved by a pool cue with a sticky tip.

Although the research took place at temperatures near absolute zero, the scientists wrote that the same experiment could be done at room temperature with as few as 150 atoms.

As part of its demonstration of the anti-ferromagnetic storage effect, the researchers created a computer byte, or character, out of an individually placed array of 96 atoms. They then used the array to encode the IBM motto “Think” by repeatedly programming the memory block to store representations of its five letters.

Toshiba Unveils the World’s Thinnest 10-inch Tablet

Super thin, super light, rather sexy. It’s hard to believe that those are the words one would use to describe a new tablet from Toshiba, the company that brought us the hefty, too-thick Thrive, 10-inch Android Tablet. Yet, I challenge you to look at and, if you’re lucky, hold the new .3-inch-thick, 1.2 lb Toshiba Excite 10-inch Android tablet, introduced here at CES 2012, and come up with a different set of superlatives.

With its burnished, magnesium alloy back, gorilla-glass face and unique channel trim, Toshiba‘s latest tablet entry stands apart from the pack. It is, for now, the thinnest tablet, besting the slim iPad by .04 inches. It’s also a tad lighter. The iPad 2 weighs 1.35 pounds and the Excite is just 1.2 lbs. It honestly feels impossibly light, but, thanks to the rigid back, not flimsy.

Perhaps more surprising is the number of buttons and ports Toshiba squeezed onto this tiny frame. That’s right, ports. Like the much-thicker Thrive before it, the Excite offers a pleasing set of inputs and outputs, including micro-SD, Micro USB, Micro HDMI and, of course an audio jack.

Buttons are hidden along the edge in a channel that runs the full perimeter of the device. In fact, they’re almost too hidden; I noticed that I couldn’t always see where the power/wake button resided. The Excite also has a physical volume button—a welcome choice when compared to the market’s second most popular tablet: the Amazon Kindle Fire. It has just one button for power and no ports beyond the audio Jack.

Like the iPad 2, the Excite packs two cameras, though the Excite’s are somewhat more powerful: 2 megapixels on the front and 5 megapixels on the back. Its 10.1-inch screen supports a 1280 x 800 resolution and sports an anti-smudge coating on its surface (though Toshiba execs admit that nothing will ever keep these screens smudge-free) Inside, the Excite is running a 1.2 GHz dual-core Texas Instruments CPU and 1 GB of RAM.

As for the mobile OS, it will be a “stock” Android experience, though Toshiba has not yet decided if it’ll release the uber-light slate with Honeycomb or the new Android 4.0. It is, though, built to support Ice Cream Sandwich. While Toshiba doesn’t mess with the Android interface — and earns a Google logo on the device, in part, because of it, the Excite will feature some special Toshiba apps for media and file management.

Final pricing has not been set, though the Excite should be in the $499 to $599 for the base configuration when it ships sometime early this year.

Facebook boosts security after worm siphons 45,000 logins

Social networking giant Facebook has acted to stop the spread of a new computer worm that has stolen over 45,000 login credentials.

According to computer security experts, the Ramnit worm has been spreading since April 2010, but was only recently adapted to target Facebook details.

A “worm” is distinct from a normal computer virus in that it can reproduce itself without needing to attach itself to an existing program.

The new threat to Facebook users was highlighted recently by Seculert, an Israeli computer security firm. It said most of the users affected so far are British or French, The Telegraph reports.

“Our research lab identified a completely new ‘financial’ Ramnit variant aimed at stealing Facebook login credentials,” the firm said in a blog post.

“It was fairly straightforward to detect that over 45,000 Facebook login credentials have been stolen worldwide, mostly from users in the United Kingdom and France,” it added.

Facebook, that learned of the new attack on its users last week, said it has already taken action to defend them.

It said it had studied the 45,000 stolen login details and concluded that most of them were out of date. However all affected users will be forced to reset their passwords to improve security, the social network said.

“Last week we received from external security researchers a set of user credentials that had been harvested by a piece of malware,” a Facebook spokesman said.

“Our security experts have reviewed the data, and while the majority of the information was out-of-date, we have initiated remedial steps for all affected users to ensure the security of their accounts,” he said.

“Thus far, we have not seen the virus propagating on Facebook itself, but have begun working with our external partners to add protections to our anti-virus systems to help users secure their devices,” he added.

4 Online Secrets for Getting Amazing Flight Deals

The best time to travel each year is during January and February, as flight prices plummet after the holiday season when consumers try to cut back on spending. So for those not burnt out from holiday travel and can spare some extra change, the Internet is bursting with great flight deals.

“People are spent and traveled out, and there aren’t as many destinations that are desirable for mid-winter travel since a lot of the bigger cities in the U.S. are experiencing colder weather, such as Boston, Chicago and even Atlanta,” George Hobica, founder of AirfareWatchdog, told Mashable. “Airfares are always lowered from about now until Mid-February, when the school vacations start up – with the exception of some higher fares around Martin Luther King weekend.”

1. Look for Airline Tweets

A low fare could pop up at any minute of the day or week, so shop around, follow tweets — because the best deals, even if they’re good for travel over a long period, last only a few hours — and be prepared to go wherever it’s cheap rather than where you can’t afford, Hobica advises.

2. Sign Up for Alerts

First, sign up for AirFareWatchDog’s fare alerts and email newsletter that sends cheap flight deals based on your home airport. Most domestic deals are under or around $200 – and some right now are so low, it’s mind-boggling. A roundtrip trip to Chicago from New York, for example, could cost as little as $54 and you’ll find airfare to Florida for less than $100.

In addition, non-stop, round-trip flights from New York to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines are unusually inexpensive ($565), including taxes, and that fare has been steady for a few months. Other popular deals include a non-stop roundtrip flight to Liberia, Costa Rica under $400, taxes included, on JetBlue’s new service route.’

3. Let Web Sites Do Your Legwork

Another site worth checking out is SkyScanner, which is perfect for flexible travelers. By typing “everywhere” into the destination search and selecting when you want to travel, the site reveals the cheapest options out there – from New York, fares to the Caribbean right now are under $300 and there’s even an option to Ireland in the $400 range.

Kayak also lets you search “everywhere” through its Explore feature, which shows on a map the prices to fly to certain destinations.

4. Know When — Exactly — to Buy

While searching for deals, remember that traveling on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday are the cheapest days to fly, while Friday and Sunday are the busiest travel days and the most expensive. The most cost-efficient time to fly is also first thing in the morning and red-eyes, according to FareCompare.com, followed by lunch time and dinner-hour flights.

The best time to purchase an airline ticket, however, is Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET, as discounted flights hit the sites. Most of these specials are pulled by Thursday, FareCompare said.

The deals are good, but not the best ever. Rock-bottom airfare is actually slightly higher this time of year than it’s been in the past, according to Hobica. For example, a standard roundtrip fare from New York to Los Angeles this time of year usually costs about $198, but it’s priced at $238 now. Even so, the route is significantly less expensive than it was just a few weeks ago during the busy holiday-travel season when it inched close to $500.

International airfare is also more pricy thanks to mergers and less seat availability.

“Airlines are getting better at making use of their planes when they can to make the most money – some such as Delta were flying domestic routes usually reserved for 757 aircraft with larger 767 planes reserved for Europe,” Hobica said. “Since European traffic was soft and certain domestic routes were strong, it made sense for them to take this approach but it cuts back on seat availability for the European travel and doesn’t help the price.”

But all is not lost. You can still get great deals now and all year round by putting in a little time (and using a little strategy) to get what you want.