Before you can apply to tasks you do have to pass a few small grammar tests, although these should be simple enough if you passed your GCSE English exam. Once you pass these you go onto ‘Probationary’ status. This means you can only apply for one assignment at a time. When you complete your first task you become ‘Active’. At this point you can apply for several assignments at once and fill your calendar with lots of mystery shopping.

Examples of tasks would be; buying a pint in a pub or bar, bowling, eye tests, meals at restaurants or fast food and ID checking at bookmakers. The amount you earn on each task varies depending on what it is. However, for a task such as ID checking at a bookmakers I’ve earned between £6 and £18 as well as having the bet placed reimbursed (also, if you win the bet you keep the winnings!) – not bad money for 10 minutes work. Further to this, if you’re near a task that needs to be completed soon, they may call you up and increase the payment for it to include travel expenses, making it that bit sweeter.

So if this sounds like something you’d like to do, check it out at MarketForce.

The key to this working is to make use of all of the offers available on the web at the same, so follow my guide exactly. You will need to start off with £25 in the bank for this to work. (I’ll let you know how much money you’ve got in brackets after each point)

1. First you need to sign up to Quidco. Without doing this you could lose money. (£25)

2. Once signed up, go to the Betfair page on Quidco and click the ‘Visit Site & Get cashback’ link.  (+£10 for signing up through Quidco = £35)

3. This should take you to the Betfair website, click the ‘Join today’ button on the bottom left of the page. Use the code NAKGMYUNH in the ‘Refer and Earn’ box. (£35)

4. Once signed up, deposit £25 into the account. (-£25 = £10)

5. With this £25 you can bet on anything, but do it all in a single bet. (Full T&Cs)

6. Once the event you bet on is over – if you win great, you will have increased you’re money. If you loose, Betfair will credit your account with £25 within 2 days, so you don’t loose. However, win or loose, withdraw your money so you’re not tempted to bet it and loose it. (Assuming you loose +£25 =£35)

So at this point you’ve made at least £10 and possibly even more if you won on the bet.

7. Next we move onto Paddy Power on Quidco. Do the same as in step 2 and sign up through Quidco and then deposit £10 into your account. (+£25 for signing up through Quidco -£10 for the deposit = £50)

8.  Next bet all of the £10 on a single sports bet. Once done you will receive a free £20 bet. (Full T&Cs) You can bet this on whatever you want.

9. Now make sure to withdraw all funds from these bets once you’ve done (If you won that is!)

So overall at this point, you should have £35 in your Quidco account and if you lost all of your 3 bets, then £15 in your bank account from your original £25. However, if you make some effort on your bets it’s highly likely that you could win at least one of them making it likely that you have made actually quite a bit more than £25.

Getting your free bets and for the money to track in Quidco does take time, so don’t get worried if it doesn’t appear straight away, just wait! If you have any questions before, during or after about the process, leave a comment and I will try and help!

One option under the ‘Export Event’ function on Facebook is ‘Subscribe to all upcoming events on your calendar:’, if you add this link to your google calendar under the ‘Other Calendars’ section it will clutter up your calendar with loads of events, even if you’re not planning on attending. I lived with this for a while, but soon got annoyed at the number of events in my calendar and even more annoyed at the inability to edit events.
To get around this problem without having to manually enter each event there are two options. Firstly, you can use this ‘Save to calendar’ option. This downloads a .ics file to your computer (which is basically the event), from there you have to add it to your google calendar by going ‘Other Calendars’ drop down and choosing ‘Import calendar’ and selecting the appropriate downloaded .ics file. This is an okay solution, however still takes more time than it should do – downloading and reuploading etc…

The best solution I have found is to use the ‘Send to email’ option. This sends the event straight to your inbox. Within the email it gives you the option to download the .ics file, what events you have already on the day of the invite and most importantly the option to add the event to your calendar. This has benefits over the other options as you don’t have to download any files as well as giving the ability to edit events unlike the subscription option.

I have only tried this on gmail and expect it will only work on gmail, so it is unlikely to work for people on Hotmail or other webmail services. What I would really like to see is the ability to add an event to my calendar directly from Facebook. I hope this post has helped a few of you.

Firstly I signed up BullBearings. This is fantasy stock exchange where you are given £100,000 to trade in whatever stocks or shares you want. If your just starting out, like I was, then it is very daunting. There are many different links providing information on stuff I’d never heard of. It does have university ranking tables, however it isn’t university focused, so I felt slightly out of my depth and overwhelmed by the features available to a beginner. Despite this, there are plenty of tutorials and guides on the site to help you out.

After messing about with BullBearings for a few days, someone posted on our University Finance Society facebook page a  link to Traderversity. It’s basically a University based (hence the name) trading platform. Again, it is fantasy, so you don’t risk losing your own money, however you can win money. There are continually competitions with £1000′s worth of prize money to be won. Currently the site is new, so the features are limited (…it gives me a chance to start understanding how it all works before more complicated features become available), so it’s really easy to understand. The site itself is built with Javascript, so all the values update continuously without having to refresh the page (something that BullBearinsg has to do), this gives it a more professional feel. The only hard bit is picking where to invest and where not to invest. I can’t say I’m doing particularly well with where to invest at the moment – I’ll learn, hopefully.

Overall, if you don’t want to risk losing your money on the real Stock or Forex markets and you’re at University then you should definitely check out check out TraderVersity, then perhaps move onto BullBearings at a later date when your ready. Both should (I’m assuming) help you understand what you need to know if you want to get into the Banking and Finance industry.

Happy Christmas all!

[TraderVersity Twitter & Facebook, BullBearings Twitter & Facebook]

We gave money to enable production of the Opena Case for iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S. What’s that? Well, this is a hard iPhone case with a built in bottle opener (Only Australians could think of that…) and built in cool factor. It can obviously be used for the following purposes; opening bottles, impressing girls (or guys) or just starting a conversation. Here’s a little picture of it

We are currently selling it through our website: Opena UK. We are selling them for £25 delivered (or €30 for Europe, again delivered). If you want to impress your friends or just show off your iPhone, it’s definitely worth a purchase! They come in both black and white, so check out our site.

…well, Quidco have many mobile phone network providers in there list of companies. Phone companies know if they can get you with them initially, you’ll likely stay with them for many years, often paying upwards of £20 per month. This means they’ll spend a lot to get you on their network in the first place. So Quidco have many outstanding offers from companies such as Three, Vodafone and T-Mobile.

So this is how I made £81.82 (Okay, not quite £82). I was initially with o2 on a Pay and Go sim topping up £15/month. This was actually quite good as I got unlimited texts, unlimited internet and then £15′s worth of calling credit. However, in September I’m off to University, so I decided I’ll need some minutes (for calling home etc) so decided a contract would be the way forward. Most network providers have some good deals, but Quidco’s cash back offers made all of the deals much more attractive. Quickly I wrote off Vodafone as my brother recently had a bad experience with them. Then I stumbled across Three’s SIM 600 12 month contract. For £15/month I would get 600 minutes, 3000 texts and 1GB of internet. This deal was already far better than what I was getting with my current o2 arrangement.

Now, for the good part. Because I bought my contract through a Quidco link, I earned myself a cool £81.82 just for signing up. Admittedly I am in a 12 month contract, but earning nearly £82 for something I was going to do anyway isn’t half bad! There is only one problem, the money isn’t paid to you straight away; you’ll get it between 90 and 180 days after you start your contract (With Three at least). However, I’m sure that when it finally does make it into my account, after being a seasoned Uni student for a few months, I’ll gratefully appreciate it.

So if you’d like to make a bit of money whilst moving to a better phone contract, check out Quidco and their amazing offers!

First of all I was incredibly happy with the Ferrari 2, 3 off the start line, but this was clearly overshadowed by one thing – rain, rain and a bit more rain. Just 25 laps in, the rain came in biblical volumes, causing Charlie Whiting to red flag the race. At this point we had the chance to listen to Martin Brundle and David Coulthard babble on, amazingly they managed to for the full 2 hours and 4 minutes until the Grand Prix started again. It looked like it was going to be carnage and the remaining 45 laps were just that. There were too many front wing changes to count as well as impressive over-taking all the way back down the field.

Although the bulk of the race was edge of the seat racing, the final 10 laps were just racing gold. Combined in the top four places there were 9 World Championships, making the driving nothing less than spectacular. Jenson Button had come from 21st, after numerous pit stops and penalties, to be 3rd behind Michael Schumacher. Michael, who was driving the best he had all season, lacked raw pace so was quickly dispatched by Jenson followed by Mark Webber. This put Jenson just 5 or so seconds behind Sebastian Vettel with 5 laps to go. Jenson, with 2 laps to go was right on Vettel, pressuring him as much as possible. It’s clear at this point that Vettel realised he hadn’t push hard enough, so with just half a lap to go and Vettel panicking, he takes a corner too wide and spins off, giving Jenson the win.

Clearly the driver of the day has to be Mr Button. Jenson continually had the pace and skill, joint with an amazing team, required to win the race in tough conditions where many drivers found it hard to stay on the race track. However it also has to be remembered that Michael Schumacher, at the grand old age of 42, came 4th, the best he’s done since his return to the sport. It really was a Grand Prix to remember, with some excellent highlights. Definitely worth a watch on iPlayer (maybe not the 2 hour wait a quarter way through though).

Also, just in case you didn’t see, here’s the a marshal epicly failing. (Sorry about the poor quality)

He should have put some wet or intermediate trainers on really.

[Image source]

Firstly, I think I should mention how much I prefer the commentary with David Coulthard as opposed to Jonathan Legard alongside Martin Brundle. However, I do think that Ted Kravitz should have a go in the commentary box next season, as I feel his technical know-how, joined with this exuberant enthusiasm for the sport, could add another level to the commentary, which sadly, DC and Brundle cannot reach.

Next, it has to be about tyres and pit stops. This year Pirelli are the sole supplier of tyres for all of the Formula 1 teams and they certainly have had a huge impact. So far we’ve seen the soft and the hard tyre compounds in play (the soft is quicker, but with high degradation it requires more pit stops and the hard is a bit slower but requires fewer stops). Combined with the rule that all drivers must use each compound at least once, I think team strategies this year will play more part than they ever have done. Team managers are required to get their drivers to the end as quick as possible, but this year, they have to cover other drivers. This basically means when your closest competitor pits, you follow soon after. Teams do this so that both drivers are on a similar level of tyre wear so there’s less risk of being ‘jumped’ at a pit stop. So overall, I think the new tyres definitely make the sport more exciting; the strategists have to strategise more, the mechanics get more action and there’s more risk involved in staying out on older tyres.

Next, I feel DRS (Drag Reduction System) is a hot topic in Formula 1 at the moment. The whole idea of it is to increase overtaking – done by allowing drivers close to a car in front to reduce their drag by opening up their rear wing. They are only allowed to do so at a certain point in each race, specifically chosen so both cars have to brake close to together, with the aim of having more braking and overtaking contests. So far this feature has had mixed outcomes. The last Grand Prix, in Spain, although having the longest DRS zone of all GP’s, made little to no effect. But, in Turkey a few weeks ago, DRS helped give the track the record for the most overtaking moves in made in a single GP (79!) since 1983. Despite this, I think that overtaking became too easy with the DRS at Turkey. So, overall, I  get the feeling that at each Grand Prix this season, DRS will have dramatically different effects while the optimum position for allowing the DRS to kick in is worked out at each track.

Finally, I should say who I think will win and who I’d like to win this year’s championship. It’d be too easy to say Vettel will win it just like that – even though it’s looking very promising for him. But, I think Redbull’s advantage over other teams such as Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren is starting it fall away. Despite this, I predict that Vettel will win the Championship, but not with a run-away title that some are assuming will happen. Who would I like to win? Well, weird as it sounds, Alsono. Personally, I think he has the drive quality of a World Champion which I don’t think Vettel has and purely on that merit deserves a third World Championship.

Follow me on Twitter @JoshWHarris

It’s pretty simple really. Firstly, they always have offers on free music or ways to earn credit: refer friends and get £1 or flow a song and get 20% if anyone buys it from your recommendation. Secondly, you can listen to full tracks for free out of a choice of over 5 million with no adverts (Spoitfy does) or subscriptions, so you don’t even need to buy music!

Another perk of mFlow is that you can listen to it on the move. It will work on your iPhones and iPod Touches as it doesn’t use Flash – giving you a library of over 5 million songs on the move.

You can also embed songs on your website like this…

…and if you want to do this, follow this tutorial.

And while I was researching for this post I found that if I flowed a song I could get the song free and do this up to 10 times! They just keep on giving! So why not go ahead and sign up here.

…I’m not going to make a cheesy final comment. Hope you enjoyed it