Archive September 2009
Voice Chat to Hit Facebook Soon
Facebook users now have yet another reason to rejoice while using the social networking site as voice chat has come to Facebook! The new utility that will enable users to have conversations with people in their friend list was developed by Vivox rather than Facebook itself. Vivox has been the leaders in providing voice chat for a number of virtual worlds and already has a user base of about 15 million worldwide.
Users just need to download the plugin and install it in their PC’s to start voice chatting in Facebook. The utility will also enable non-Facebook users to join conversations as it has facility to call phone numbers too. A number of internet analysts were of the opinion that the new utility will help people stay in touch with their friends and loved ones on Facebook and give a better insight into who they have befriended. Many were also of the opinion that such a utility in a huge social networking site like Facebook would sound the death knell for softwares like Skype as Facebook allows them effortlessly organize their friends.
Microsoft Zune’s New Avatar
Microsoft recently unveiled the new avatar of its Zune music player – a competitor to the iPod range of music devices from Apple. The new Zune player will feature a touch-screen and users will be able to download and play high-definition videos on the player. The player comes with an organic LED display that is highly energy efficient and can be docked with a television on which the high-definition videos can be streamed.
Microsoft has priced the 16 gig Zune player at $220 and the 32 gig one at $290 and has announced the discontinuation of the earlier version of the player. The player has a couple of new features including a radio receiver for analog and digital radio and a web browser with wi fi connectivity. The Zune HD will be available only in the US market and it has been priced competitively owing to the price reductions by Apple on its iTouch series.
Affordable Broadband Coming to Africa!
A new high speed cable that has been laid connecting East Africa to the world is all set to go live. Africa always had a handicap when it came to internet services as most of the service providers offered customers very slow internet connection and charged exorbitant usage charges. With the launch of the new cable, more countries in East Africa, especially Kenya is all set to experience the power of real broadband internet.
A senior official from Kenya said that the highest recorded broadband speed provided by Kenya’s largest internet service provider was one megabit per second and it came with a monthly tariff $120- in a country where the per capita income of the people was at $250. Most of East Africa internet customers were provided with satellite internet connection which was expensive and even one GB of usage would cost them around $33. Due to these expensive internet connectivity, most of the Africans keep a tab on their usage and aren’t able to enjoy music or videos online. With the launch of this new high speed cable, Africans are hoping to have their share of infotainment and entertainment from the wide world of Internet!
Team Bellkor Hits the Jackpot
The long awaited $1m contest by the online movie rental company Netflix has come to an end. Bellkor, a team of seven strong people have won the challenge and they claim the $1m prize money. The actual challenge is that to make the Netflix website to predict the customers’ movie preferences and give recommendations based on their preference. The challenge was announced around three years back and around 51000 contestants around the globe have tried their hand over the challenge and have only resulted in failure.
The actual challenge is to increase the accuracy of the recommendations of the movies based on the preferences by at least 10%. This criterion was solved only by Bellkor team. The team included former rivals in this field. They have met for the first time in the award ceremony held in New York on Monday. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said that there was a very good and healthy fight till the end. Actually the teams that were not successful in crossing the 10% barrier joined together in achieving the milestone. The most interesting part of the competition was that Bellkor was in tight competition with another team Ensemble. Both had an improvement of 10.06% but Bellkor was awarded since it came up 10 minutes earlier than Ensemble.
Beware the Data Snatchers; Revealing Video Shows How Easy it is for Hackers To Get Hold of Your Data
The Internet is huge, not large, but huge and there are lots of dark things hidden in it. As the Internet becomes more and more essential to our everyday lives so do the risks of identity theft. There is a new breed of thief on the prowl, the Data Snatcher. Data Snatchers hide in even the most trusted websites, to steal your personal information: credit card details, private files & your identity.
Gaj-IT.com has a posted a very scary and yet informative video about data snatching. The video shows how a group (I think from Russia) hack into someones computer and steal their credit card information.
Click below to see the video and to see how you can stop this happening to you!
WARNING: The video has some scenes which children will find disturbing, parental guidance is advised.
Yahoo’s New Web Portal
Yahoo’s new boss Carol Bartz is very much interested in regaining Yahoo’s position on the internet. And as the first step towards this, Yahoo has re launched its new web portal. He feels that this step might increase the revenues from it and also the visitors’ traffic. This new portal will also open up to rivals and also the users can integrate other non Yahoo related services such as Facebook and even Hotmail. The main reason behind this inclusion into the portal is that it might increase the traffic in the portal.
When Rich Riley, Yahoo’s senior vice-president for Europe spoke he said that even though increasing the links in the portal to non-Yahoo sites is taking the traffic away from Yahoo, this technique might invite more and more users into using Yahoo services. Along with the new portal, the Yahoo search engine has also improved with more user interfaces including the new navigation bar in the left which comes along with the search results which can be used by the users to narrow down their search results. They have also bought in $100m along with the new portal and these huge advertisements will be very much concentrated in important nations where they expect could bring in more traffic into Yahoo.
Source: BBC
Now Gmail Push Comes to iPhones!
The wait for the Gmail’s push for mobile phones has come to an end and on Tuesday, Google had expanded its sync services over the air with Google mail capabilities which was restricted to only iPhone and Windows mobile so far. Initially Google sync came in order to synchronize the calendar and contact details and now it has expanded with Gmail messages too. These Google sync messages can be received on your mobile and the user is alerted of the incoming messages as per the mobile’s setting as to whether vibration or a tone. One disadvantage that anyone would say about this is that it will not give visual notification boxes in your iPhone.
This service can be obtained with the help of third party applications such as GPush for iPhone. It is just a kind where it just pushes the emails from the server to mobile which differs from the one which pulls in a list of mails for the request from the mail client. If we compare these methods, the push one is the best since it has more real-time updates and also lowers battery consumption. The step by step process in order to enable this in your mobile is available at m.google.com/sync .
Source: CNET
Read News on Google’s Fast Flip!
Internet giants Google have released a new service, that now lets users flip through the pages of leading newspapers and magazines. The new service named Fast Flip is Google’s new attempt at helping users to read news articles fast.Google has so far partnered with more than 30 leading news agencies including BBC. At a time when news agencies are trying to make money from the online content they provide, this new service comes as a boon.
Fast Flip will offer screenshots of popular news bits and the displayed news will also depend on a number of factors like how popular the news article was or if it was suggested by a friend or someone. If the user find the news interesting, he can very well click on it and read the entire story in the publisher’s site. Google has also decided to monetize this new service by displaying publisher’s contextual ads. Google has also announced that the new service is expected to cater to the people in the US in the initial phases.
Source: BBC
Google Books to Modify Plans for Europe
As part of the Internet giant Google plans of creating a huge online library of books, publishers are being offered concessions to European publishers who are concerned about the move. The project which is aimed at putting out-of the print copies of books into a digital format is successful so far and many such books are already in the digital form. However, Google would only do this if it was granted consent by the publishers if the book was in print elsewhere.
Publishers in the Europe are concerned as this can put an end to their monopoly in the publishing world. Talks are underway by the European union about the issue as copyright laws are stringent in the European continent. According to the new deal, Google will now have to negotiate with authors and book publishers before they can actually put up the books in their online library.
Source: BBC
“Windows 7″ the Next Best OS?
There has been lots of brouhaha over the release of the trial version of Microsoft’s new operating system “Windows 7″. Chip maker Intel and Microsoft have now said that the new OS will save a great deal of power and also will have faster booting times. After all the negative criticism for their earlier operating system Windows Vista, Microsoft hopes that the new OS will perform as promised by them. Microsoft said that it has been working with Intel in a partnership to develop a better and faster OS and now they are pretty happy with the outcome.
The partnership named Wintel involved hundred of engineers and started off the very next day Windows Vista was released. After the Windows Vista was highly criticized, the team worked to bring the next OS with the stylish aspects of Windows Vista and the efficiency of Windows XP. In a recent press conference in San Francisco, engineers at Microsoft showcased the new operating system’s efficiency based on a number of parameters. All the test results showed a significantly improvement from than the earlier operating systems the most noted being energy efficiency which showed a gain of about 20%!
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