Posts tagged News
Google Phone Tomorrow?
May 9th
We try to leave the rumors to other people, but there is definitely something new coming from Google tomorrow.
English blog Tech.co.uk have been invited to a special event in which Google will be revealing a “product for mobiles”.
Whether this will be the launch of the long rumored Google Phone is unknown. It could just be another one of their endlessly ‘in beta’ services, but we have our fingers crossed. Whatever it turns out to be, you’ll hear about it here tomorrow.
Is Google about to unveil the Google phone? [Tech.co.uk]
New Hotmail Unveiled – Google Still Offers More Than Either Yahoo or Microsoft – Gmail Offers Free POP3 Accounts – Comparison
May 9th
(Best Syndication) Although more people use Microsoft Hotmail than Google gMail, their new Windows Live Hotmail still lacks some functionality. Many industry watchers say it is about time that Microsoft upgrad their free email service, especially with stiff competition from Google and Yahoo!.
Hotmail now offers 2 GB of storage for free, coming closer to Google’s 2.6 GB. This is a significant upgrade for Microsoft because they had been offering only 1 GB of storage. Although Yahoo limits their free service to 1 GB of disk space, they are expected to offer unlimited space this month. Their email service is free as well, but may not work perfectly with all browsers including Firefox.
The competition is fierce between the three rivals. Yahoo still charges $20 per year for POP3 service which allows users to access their email clients including Outlook and Eudora. Google offers that service for free, and Microsoft is expected to offer POP3 service later on for Outlook only.
Free POP3 Service and mail forwarding is the biggest advantage for Google, and one reason they have become so popular. With the Yahoo and Hotmail free service you have to use your browser to access your email. With Google, you can use your browser or your email client to access all of your email accounts at once, free of charge. Offering these POP3 servers is a huge expense for Google, but it is a big advantage for their users.
All three services use spam blockers and virus protection. Google gives users a total of nine months of dormancy before an account is deactivated. This means that if you don’t use your account for nine months it will be declared dormant and then finally deactivated. Yahoo and Microsoft give their users less time before their accounts are deactivated.
Google has also integrated their Google Talk and instant messaging service into gMail. Google Talk enables users to make free voice calls through the computer.
Sometimes it is better to go second, and in this, it was an advantage for Google to learn from Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s mistakes. They developed gMail with POP access and other capabilities from the ground up. Yahoo and Microsoft had to work with their older technologies to provide users with upgrades.
Google has also unveiled a new and improved iGoogle personalized home page for their users. The free iGoogle is similar to Yahoo’s personalized homepage, but with new and improved gadgets. With your new personalized homepage you can preview your email letters with one of the free gadgets. The iGoogle has various fun themes that change throughout the day depending on what time it is. There is nothing to download and it operates like any homepage, except it is customizable. No wonder Microsoft is feverishly working on upgrades to their existing services.
TVUPlayer – P2P Tv!
Oct 29th
Using a new peer to peer technology you can potentially get any channel broadcast on the internet for free. The new controversial TVUPlayer could be the TV studio ’s biggest enemy since Napster! Channels already being broadcast on the net without permission include CBS, ESPN, NBA TV, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Comedy Central, Disney and more
Download TVUPlayer >> http://dl.tvunetworks.com/TVUPlayer.zip
FireFox – 2 The official release!
Oct 29th
Enjoy a Better Web Experience
There’s a lot to do on the Web, and Firefox 2 is full of helpful features to make your time online more productive.
Improved Tabbed Browsing
We love tabs as much as you do, so Firefox 2 will open new web pages in tabs by default. Each of those tabs has its own close button, but don’t worry – if you accidentally close a tab, just go to the History menu to bring it back from the list of “Recently Closed Tabs.” You’ll never be crunched for space anymore, either. When you have too many tabs open to comfortably fit in a single window, scroll arrows will appear on either side, and a button on the right side will always show you an easy-to-read list of all your open tabs.
Spell Checking
Sometimes you’re in a rush, and can’t remember if it’s “i” before “e” or the other way around. Firefox 2 has built-in spell checking to keep you from making any mistakes in your blog posts and Web-based email, so you can worry about more important things.
Search Suggestions
Some of the search engines in Firefox 2 can read your mind, and actually suggest search terms for what you’re looking for. Just start typing into the Search bar, and a drop down list of suggestions will appear. (Works for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com.)
Session Restore
Losing your place while you’re doing things on the Web is a pain. Now, with Session Restore, if Firefox has to restart or closes when it comes back you’ll pick up exactly where you left off. The windows and tabs you were using, the text you typed into forms, and the in-progress downloads you had running will all be restored. You can even set Firefox 2 to always restore your previous session instead of loading a home page, so you’ll never lose your place again.
Web Feeds (RSS)
What do news headlines, indie rock podcasts, and pictures of kittens have in common? They’re all things that you can subscribe to with Web feeds. Firefox 2 gives you full control over Web feeds, showing you a preview and letting you choose how you want to subscribe. You can use a Firefox Live Bookmark, or a feed reader that you’ve installed on your computer, or through a Web service such as My Yahoo!, Bloglines or Google Reader.
Live Titles
Keep an eye on that auction or the status of a delivery using the new Live Titles feature in Firefox 2. Compact enough to fit as a bookmark label, Live Titles are regularly updated summaries of the most important information on a Web page. As the information on the page gets updated, so does your Live Title. Try one out in Firefox 2 by bookmarking www.woot.com.
Integrated Search
Firefox helps you find whatever it is that you’re looking for. The Search bar comes pre-loaded with search engines for Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Answers.com, and Creative Commons. Wherever you are on the Web, you can enter a search term in the Search bar and receive immediate answers from the search engine you’ve chosen. You can select a new search engine from the Search bar menu at any time, and add search engines from hundreds of your favorite Web sites.
Live Bookmarks
Firefox Live Bookmarks let you view Web feeds such as news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or menu. With one glance, quickly review the latest headlines from your favorite sites and click to go directly to the articles that interest you.
Pop-up Blocker
Firefox keeps you in control of the Web pages you’re viewing, blocking annoying pop-ups. Firefox’s pop-up blocker notifies you when pop-ups are blocked via the information bar or icon on the lower right of the screen.
Streamlined Interface
The user interface in Firefox 2 has been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.
Accessibility
Firefox delivers a better browsing experience for everyone – including those who are visually impaired. Firefox includes support for DHTML accessibility. Web developers can create pages that reduce the amount of tabbing required to navigate a document to minimize keystrokes for those with mobility disabilities. Firefox also includes support for Microsoft Active Accessibility, Microsoft’s accessibility API standard for Windows. This support allows Firefox to work with screen readers such as GW Micro’s Window-Eyes and Freedom Scientific’s JAWS. Firefox 2 (Windows version) meets US federal government requirements that software be easily accessible to users with physical impairments.
Stay Secure on the Web
The Web is a great place, but sometimes you’ll encounter bad people. Firefox keeps you safe from spyware, hackers, scammers and spammers, using the power of a vigilant and passionate community to protect you 24/7.
Phishing Protection
Phishing Protection takes Firefox’s security to a new level, helping to safeguard your financial information and protect you from identity theft. When you encounter a Web site that is a suspected forgery (known as a “phishing” site) Firefox will warn you and offer to take you to a search page so you can find the real Web site you were looking for.
Open Source, More Secure
At the heart of Firefox is an open source development process driven by thousands of passionate, experienced developers and security experts spread all over the world. Our openness and active community of experts helps to ensure our products are more secure and updated quickly, while also enabling us to take advantage of the best third party security scanning and evaluation tools to further bolster overall security.
Automated Update
Firefox’s update system always checks to see if you’re running the latest version, and notifies you when a security update is available. These security updates are small (usually 200KB – 700KB), giving you only what you need and making the security update quick to download and install. The automated update system provides updates for Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 40 different languages.
Protection from Spyware
Firefox will not allow a Web site to download, install, or run programs on your computer without your explicit agreement. Period. You will be notified whenever downloading or installing software, and Firefox will always tell you what’s happening so that you can stay in control of your computer.
Clear Private Data
Firefox offers the ability to clear all your private Web browsing data with just one click with the “Clear Private Data” tool. You can be confident that when you clear your private data in Firefox it’s gone – whether you are using your own computer or one at the library.
Personalize Your Browser
Choose from thousands of useful Add-ons that enhance Firefox. It’s easy to personalize Firefox 2 to make it your own.
An Add-on for Everyone
You can choose from over 1,000 add-ons at the Firefox Add-ons Web site. A Firefox add-on can help you comparison shop, share bookmarks with your friends, see the weather in a corner of your browser, write to your weblog, get news, listen to music – all from inside the browser you already love. You can even change the appearance of your browser – from buttons to colors and fonts – so that it matches your own personal style.
Add-ons Manager for Extensions and Themes
The new Add-ons Manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, making it even easier for you to customize Firefox 2. Install, uninstall, enable and disable your add-ons in a single place.
Search Engine Manager
You can now quickly add, remove and re-order your search engines in the Search bar. Firefox 2 will also detect when a Web site has a search engine that can be installed, and will install it for you with a single click in the drop-down menu.
Google Co-op
Oct 24th
Google just launched a customized search service called Google Co-op (screen shots below). Co-op allows a user to create and launch a search engine with just a few specific websites included. Searches will return results from only that website.
Users have a number of options to customize the search engine: choosing which pages they want to include in their index, how the content should be prioritized, whether others can contribute to the index, and what the search results page will look like.
This isn’t new – Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.
For bloggers, using Google Co-op may be a better choice than the built in search feature. A search engine can be created that searches just a single site, and Google search is generally better than search features included with blog software, and with the addition of Adsense this will generate a separate income stream as well.
Check it here : http://google.com/coop/cse/
Orkut goes public and Lot more !
Oct 20th
Few days back Orkut started displaying Google Ads in Orkut comminities. My guess about Orkut will open to the rest of the world and will implement new features was right.
Orkut has finally implemented the much awaited improvements to Orkut.
You no longer require an invitation from an existing member to join Orkut. Orkut is finally opened to public.
You can simply create a new account from here.
Also there are many new features added to Orkut. Like Quick Reply, Delete multiple scraps. The best new feature is the facility to Add Moderators . I have been waiting for this feature from a long time. It will be easy for community owners to manage their Communities with the help of other users.
Orkut also has significantly rolled out a new feature today which allows to get friends request from people who speak just your language. No more Spanish or French SPAMS.
Why does Yahoo! need an ad campaign?
Sep 19th
Could it be that Yahoo! needs an ad campaign because it finds it difficult to compete successfully online?Yahoo ! announced this morning it is launching a marketing campaign. The integrated campaign will include television, radio, movies and online advertisements as well as free Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (?!). It is labeled as a multi-million dollar campaign. The ads will debut Thursday, September 21 and the coffee giveaway is for Yahoo.com visitors on September 22. The ads seems to emphasize their signature tagline and aim to revitalize Yahoo!’s brand, highlighting Yahoo’s new home page, the new beta mail and the success of Yahoo! Answers.
The ads are humorous and playful. Theme: how life is without Yahoo’s services and how it can be with Yahoo at your side. Cute. Well, I liked them. You can watch them here. The one below is what i liked most !! 
However, while marketing campaigns definitely have an important place in any company’s strategy, this latest by Yahoo! looks a little like a desperate move. Can’t compete with rivals on the same level (whether it’s technology or being deemed passé)? Then turn to commercials.
With Google taking over the online search market and other Internet portals eating away at Yahoo!’s market share, Yahoo! is trying to build awareness with the commercials. The problem is that I’m not sure ads shown on TV are the way to go. Internet users get to sites more by viral marketing than commercials — unless perhaps a specific service is provided, such as anti-virus, let’s say. And a site becomes a favorite because it offers something unique, not because its yodel is heard night and day on the radio.
If we consider Google or MySpace, how much TV and radio advertising have they done? (Not to say they’re not spending heavily on marketing, especially Google, but not like that).
Govt blames ISPs..ISPs says they are helpless…
Jul 19th
According to hindustan times , Govt only wanted to block only 4 blogs from blogspot.com .And they issued order to ISPs to block these 4 blogs in any manner..But our ISPs don’t have the technology to block individual name servers — say a particular blog hosted on Blogspot. So they had no choice but to block the root servers of major blogging networks — blogspot, geocities and typepad.This block is a mindless exercise and shows that our bureaucrats don’t understand technology at all.
Read more here
Tips for Unblocking Blog Bans
Jul 19th
After the bans on blogspot, typepad ,geocities etc. , many people came up with innovative ideas to unblock the baned domains.One most usefull idea is to use a different proxy. And if u want to browse any blogspot blogs, use Pkblogs which was created actually during the ban on blogspot in pakistan.We can use it only for blogspot domains.Some other techniques to overcome the ban are :
Approach 1
Google, Yahoo, WorldLingo and Altavista Babelfish provide free online language translation tools that let you convert webpages from one language to another.
The trick is to instruct the translation tool to translate a given webpage URL from English to English (or any other language pair like Arabic to Arabic)
By doing so, you get to see the exact blocked webpage on your computer served from the translation service server bypassing the government internet filter – all the page formatting, javascripts, hyperlinks, comments, Google ads and other layout elements are preserved.
babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=en_en&url=XYZ.COM
Click the above URL to see this trick in action. If the page you are viewing is in a different language, replace the en_en pair with the corresponding pair like de_de for German or it_it for Italian. XYZ.com must be replaced with your URL that’s blocked.
This translation trick works only with Altavista Babelfish and not with Google or Yahoo babelfish even though the underlying Systran technology is the same.
Approach 2
The following approach may be used when you visit the website several times in a day like a Blog or a News site. What we do here is add the webpage to our watchlist and doing so, we automatically receive an update when the contents of the page changes (like some new content is added or exiting content is updated) –
Watch this Page for Changes – Enter the webpage URL and your email address – you will be notified daily of the changes.
I recommend this approach for reading sites like Indian Uncut, Lifehacker or Boing Boing where all the recently published stories are available on the homepage.
Approach 3
Use the following approach when you need an exact replica of the online story in print for your PhD thesis or for pasting in the scrapbook.
Adobe Create PDF Online – Create a free account at Adobe website and provide the URL address that you wish to convert. This service will create a nice PDF of the webpage and send that you as an attachment in an email.
Approach 4
You can setup a proxy on ur firefox. Google for annonymous proxies and select one.Go to tools>options>connection settings and select manual proxy. Enter the values and accept. If a particular proxy fails, use another one. Repeat until u get a stable and reasonably fast proxy and then stick to it. Here is a list of free proxies from samair
Approach 4
SwitchProxy lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations
quickly and easily. You can also use it as an anonymizer to protect your
computer from prying eyes. NOTE: In Firefox you can use the toolbar
element to save space get it from Here
But all these methods are not enough.We need Indian Govt to unblock these domains which i hope they will do within a week after they sort out what they want. Until then use these methods..
India Govt Banned Blogspot
Jul 18th
First of all , sorry for a big Delay in blogging. Its my post after a one month gap. Actually i was busy with some other stuffs..Went to Delhi for week and i was completly offline for 7~8 days. Anyway i am still busy but i thought its the time for me ,like all other indian bloggers , to protest against a rude, unreasonable and unfair attempt by Indian Govt .
Yesterday when i was going through my ususual routine of checking RSS feeds of various blogs.And all blogspot accounts returned error.When i checked some blogger accounts it returned a timed out error.(Some people says they get a banned error!!) . I thought blogspot server may be down.Even after a few hours there is no change. Even at night things where same..I googled and found out some news in rediff.com. Indian ISPs are blocking blogger accounts! WTF!! I agree that there are some anti-Indian blogs in blogspot.But what about others? Almost all my friends blog in blogspot as it is simple and free.Backed up by google , it gives reasonable service with less downtime. Thats the reaseon why everyone opted for blogspot for satrting their blog. I used to blog on Blogspot and later switched to my own domain. I know people who run business through blogspot blogs.Some use it as a news service. And now..!! I think indian govt is taking some harsh steps after the mumbai tragedy. Its ok to ban anti-Indian sites.But it has to be precise. You cant block entire domain just because of having 1 or 2 violent sites. Even mumbai help(a blog created after the trajedy for providing help and service to people affected by the bomb blast) was blocked! So the next step will be blocking google.com as one can reach a “anti-indian” site by searching in google.I think its the time to react . We , the bloggers need to protest.No one else is going to give pressure as i dont think the polititians even know about blogging.First i thought about mass mailing.But now..i think it would be better to tell them directly about it through telephone(I thought abt this after reading this blog ) . Phone numbers are available here and here .
Till then you can use this simple trick to bypass the ban
PS : If you are from govt and you think this site looks offensive .. GO Ban it!!
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