Mefeedia introduces news video search

The web video search company, Mefeedia, has just debuted its new news video search feature. The company, which recently launched its video search feature, explained in a blog post Wednesday that it now has more than 500 news video sources, searchable by keyword. News sources currently being tracked by Mefeedia include the following:

Network News: ABC News, MSNBC, CBS News, FOX News, CNN
News Sites: New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, CNET, WashingtonPost
News Shows: 20/20, 60 Minutes, Nightline, Today Show
News Magazines: BusinessWeek, NewsWeek
News Podcasts: TalkCrunch, Read/Write Talk, Wall Street Journal Podcasts
News Blogs and Vlogs: WebbAlert, TMZ, Political Lunch, The Ointment, Beet.tv

In an e-mail, Mefeedia's Frank Sinton said the company expects to hit 5 million unique visitors this month. This is great growth this company which just launched its video search engine back in March of this year.

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G.ho.st and Glide show Web OS innovation at D6

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show. They didn't do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas.

G.ho.st
There are two companies here to take on that charge. The first, G.ho.st, demo'd Wednesday. It's a "virtual computer," as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, it's designed to be everything you need from a computer, except it's not on your computer. You get a file system (with 5GB of storage for free), a media player, and links to some apps. For example, if you want to edit a word processing file, you can launch it into Thinkfree or Zoho.

The fact that G.ho.st doesn't come with a bunch of its own apps is the key to this product, and what makes more like an actual OS than many other Web-based OS experiments I've seen. The design goal of G.ho.st is that it acts as the clearinghouse for all your Web app accounts, letting you shuffle data between them. For example, if you have a document in Zoho Writer and want to edit it in Google Docs, G.ho.st will make the transition automatic . If you want to drag a file from your Flickr account into your G.ho.st file store, and later to an email, G.ho.st will do that, too.

The interface for all of this runs within a browser, and that's the only place it will work at first. There's no offline version, and one of the venture funders for the company said the team doesn't believe that online/offline synchronizing will work with typically forgetful users (although a company spokesperson later told me they're considering talking to Sharpcast to offer sync capability). G.ho.st is being built to be the one true glue that holds all your online apps together.

Also, G.ho.st is cool since it's a Palestinian/Israeli collaboration.

The company plans to make money through affiliate deals for the services it links to.

Answering the obvious question -- how do you change user behavior to get them to move their computing to the cloud? -- the founders respond that users have already moved their e-mail behavior online. So it could happen to productivity as well.

Like many other Web-based operating systems, it's a compelling demo but a confusing marketing pitch. The "you don't need your own computer" line doesn't work all that well when everyone has their own laptop already. G.ho.st is a very long bet. It is not a product for today (and it's still in early alpha testing anyway), but it is one of the most interesting Webtops I've seen, and more OS-like than most.

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Asus launches first laptops with Splashtop

Five new laptop models from Asus will incorporate DeviceVM's Splashtop, the company announced Thursday at the Computex show in Taipei. The Asus M70T, M50V, M51T, F8Va, and F8Vr will be the first laptops on the market to include the company's "rapid-start platform."

We've seen the technology, which Asus has licensed from DeviceVM and rebranded as Express Gate, before. It was first introduced last fall on a single Asus motherboard, and recently expanded to the full P5Q series of motherboards.

Splashtop differs from the intant-on media players already found on many laptops, because it's actually an embedded Linux OS with both Firefox and Skype. The advantages are threefold: The quick on/off feature means you don't have to wait to load Windows when you want to hit the Web--a boon for travelers who just want to hop online for a few minutes while waiting to board a flight. It also means you can turn off your laptop while in transit, instead of wasting battery life on hibernate mode. And the Linux base means the Splashtop browser isn't vulnerable to viruses that target the Windows OS.

The laptops announced today are expected to become available at the end of June or early July. More laptops featuring the Splashtop technology are expected in the coming months, though a detailed release schedule is still unknown.

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Google Docs ventures closer to Word territory with print view

One of my pet peeves with Google Docs has just been remedied. The company quietly released a new view that users can see when editing documents. It's called "fixed width page view," which is a somewhat verbose way of saying print preview.

The view gets rid of the often annoying occurence of writing and editing documents in Google Docs that would stretch the writing canvas across the maximum width of your browser window. On wide-screen displays, this often meant viewing entire paragraphs on just a line or two of the display--something that wouldn't be noticed until it was printed out or sent to another medium where the width was sized down to something reasonable.

The new look shares a lot in common with Microsoft Word's print layout view. However, one critical thing that's missing is a way to zoom in and out--a feature that's been in Word for years that I've long been pining for in both docs and spreadsheets. Ideally I'd like to see Google introduce something similar to what was added in Word 2007, with the little zoom slider that makes it incredibly simple to change the vantage point on the fly.

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A new and simple live-blog platform: Scribblelive

There's a new live-blog platform in town: Scribblelive. Like CoverItLive (review), which we've used at Webware to cover events in real time (latest: Google press day), it's free and lets you very quickly set yourself up with a blog that shows your updated posts to readers almost the moment you write them.

It's clearly a very early-stage product, but I wanted to cover it because of the philosophical differences from CoverItlive. CoverItLive is a writer's platform with a capable control panel. It lets you create a live blog element you can embed in any other site or blog. Scribblelive is quite the reverse: It lets you contribute to your blog from outside the system, but you can only (so far) view the live blog itself on Scribblelive.com.

I expect that Scribblelive will eventually get an embeddable player, because that's the thing that will make the platform attractive to bloggers who want to keep readers on their sites. At the moment, it feels like a more live version of Tumblr.

I still prefer the more developed CoverItLive, with its embeddable player, nice blogging console, and fancy features like a polling engine and media library. But there's a lot to be said for the simple and open design of Scribblelive. Adding a colleague as a co-blogger is as simple as sending them a secret link. And you can post to your live blog via an e-mail address. (You're supposed to be able to send images in via e-mail, but that didn't work for me.) Soon to come, according to TechCrunch, is posting via Twitter.

Scribblelive also lets you edit previous posts just by typing over them. CoverItLive lets you edit, but only after a live blog is done and closed out.

Scribblelive has one important feature CoverItLive lacks: it runs advertisements, as interstitial live blog items. The ads are clearly labeled and not disruptive. This ad engine might help the venture make a few bucks in the early days.

If you want to quickly set up live blog, it doesn't get much easier than Scribblelive. If you already have an established blog and want to set up a post that's live, though, use CoverItLive.

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Microsoft Surface Developer Seeks New Canvas

What if you threw out your mouse and laid down a touch-sensitive flat-panel monitor on your desktop?

That's essentially what Andy Wilson, one of the designers of Microsoft Surface, has done with his latest project, called LaserTouch.

The idea is to train a camera down on a sheet of infrared laser light and then keep track of what it sees on the surface. Track the lasers on a flat-screen computer monitor, and you've created something that feels remarkably like a touchscreen monitor.

To the uninitiated, Wilson's LaserTouch software seems to work a lot like Surface, Microsoft's tabletop computer that can read reflections on its screen. It responds to gestures, so instead of clicking on a mouse, the user drags and drops with a fingertip. Squeezing two fingers together shrinks the screen, and a quick dragging movement can flip the screen to the next window.

Surface is being rolled out in AT&T stores, where it's being used to power customer information kiosks.

Because LaserTouch can work with screens that have a much higher resolution than Surface, Wilson said it could be used by office workers, if it's ever brought to market.

Using experimental presentation software developed by Microsoft's Office Labs, called Plex, Wilson was able to navigate through PowerPoint-like presentation slides on a 30-inch flat-panel display.

The Microsoft researcher demonstrated LaserTouch at a Microsoft Research event held for media and researchers at the software vendor's Mountain View, California campus. This was actually LaserTouch's second public outing. Wilson said that his software was also used to power the interactive whiteboard technology called Touch Wall that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated last week at the company's CEO Summit last week in Redmond, Washington.

What has Wilson excited, though, is the fact that LaserTouch could work on virtually any flat display, including a projection screen. The two lasers and a camera used in his demo cost just a few hundred dollars, he said. "By far the most expensive piece is the display."

Wilson's earlier research has shown how technology like LaserTouch can mesh with the real world in interesting ways. Wilson showed a demo video of two people playing chess against each other in two different locations. Each one put a white piece of paper and white or black chess pieces on the board and the LaserTouch software did the rest, superimposing a chess board and the opponent's pieces onto a projection screen. The only drawback: when you take a piece, your opponent, not you, has to remove it from the board.

Like Surface, the LaserTouch research work is showing how the virtual and real worlds are meshing in very interesting ways, said Rick Rashid, the senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "It's fun, but I really think it's the future."

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MSI's Atom-based Laptop to Debut in US This June at $549

Micro-Star International (MSI) plans to launch Wind, an ultra-low cost laptop that runs on Intel's Atom microprocessor, this June in the U.S., the company confirmed Friday.

The U.S. edition of Wind will come in two different versions, one for US$549 running Microsoft's Windows XP. A few things set Wind apart from competitors, including the 1.6GHz Atom microprocessor, larger screen size and a six-cell battery that gives it around six hours of power. Wind also carries an 80G-byte hard disk drive (HDD) instead of a flash memory-based Solid State Drive (SSD).

The latest version of the popular Eee PC by Asustek, a rival to Wind, comes with an 8.9-inch screen and up to 20G-byte of storage space.

The other version of Wind will use Novell's SUSE Linux OS and cost $399. The Linux device shares the same screen size, HDD and microprocessor as the XP device. But it carries a three-cell battery that allows only around 2.5 hours of power and does not offer wireless data transfer using Bluetooth, which the XP device does. The Linux version also comes with less DRAM (dynamic RAM), 512M-bytes versus 1G-byte for the XP laptop.

Both Wind laptops come in a variety of colors, including black, white and pink, can access the Internet via Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, sport 1.3-megapixel Webcams and three USB (universal serial bus) ports.

There will also be several hardware configurations users can choose from that can make the laptop more or less expensive. For example, Wind can carry up to a 320G-byte HDD, which would cost more.

MSI will market smaller version of Wind with an 8.9-inch screen elsewhere in the world, but not in the U.S., at least not initially.

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IBM Shows the Way to Greener Supply Chain

IBM has introduced a carbon-emissions modelling tool aimed at helping businesses analyze the environmental impact of supply-chain decisions and to devise alternative business practices.

The Carbon Tradeoff Modeler is designed to help businesses take an integrated look at how changes designed to reduce carbon emissions will affect other parts of the business, such as inventory levels and on-time delivery.

Often emissions reduction and costs can be reduced at the same time, IBM said. The tool analyses factors from both the manufacturing and the distribution points of view.

Environmental policy has become a top priority for businesses at the moment, according to IBM, and the company pointed out that responsible policies can give companies an edge with consumers as well as helping to cut costs.

An active environmental policy can also make an impact on other organizations in the supply chain, said Sanjeev Nagrath, leader of supply chain management for IBM Global Business Services.

"By incorporating research-based tools to model the cost and carbon impact of key steps in the supply chain, organizations now can take action to reduce CO2 emissions and influence suppliers' behavior toward reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions," he stated.

Examples of the analyses the tool can carry out include the impact changing package sizes or packaging materials, the impact of lot sizes, and the influence of order consolidation and inventory replenishment policies.

In each case the tool looks at emissions impact as well as the effect on factors such as transportation requirements, costs and on-time delivery.

The modeller can help pinpoint courses of action that strike a balance between the need to reduce emissions and other business requirements, for instance analyzing shipment frequency, inventory replenishment policy and routing policy, IBM said.

Evaluating the environmental impact of business decisions is not always straightforward. For instance, data center product vendors often give very different metrics on environmental effects, according to a study released last week.

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How to convert the PS3 into a PC

Popular Mechanics has published a guide showing how to convert a Sony PlayStation 3 to a full-fledged PC. It has been long established that the console's Cell processor is akin to those used by supercomputers, though this is probably a first in terms of a major exploit.

Digital Soft Technologies

Best of all, the magazine says the Linux operating system makeover is perfectly legitimate and relatively risk-free. The procedure involves a hard drive upgrade and relevant software installation. The latter, such as Ubuntu, can also be downloaded free online.

The hacked console retains all its original functionalities and can be easily toggled between console and Linux mode via user selectable dual-boot function. However, you will have to back up all game data into an external storage before installation.

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New self-repair technique enables aircraft to heal as we do

A technique pioneered at Bristol University in England and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will allow for aircraft built with fiber-reinforced polymer (or FRP), which most commercial planes use, to automatically repair minor wear and tear during flight. It'll also make that damage far more visible for ground crews. It doesn't do away with the need for maintenance, but rather it helps keep planes in the air and make repairs more thorough.

The technique involves injecting the hollow glass fibers in FRP structures with colored resin and hardener. When a break in the fibers occur, the resin bleeds out to fill the gap (pictured above), restoring 80-90% of the structure's original strength — just as cells in your blood work to heal cuts.

The damage being addressed is often too small to see with the naked eye, but small nicks can mean big problems for aircraft traveling hundreds of miles an hour. The colored resin will allow ground crews to be able to easily spot these flaws before they become serious threats.

Fiber-reinforced polymers are used in a variety of other applications where the self-repairing technique could be applied, including wind turbines, cars and even spacecraft

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ESPN's 'Ultimate Remote' is the swiss army knife of remote controls

ESPN is releasing a new remote control for sports-loving couch potatoes, and it's so confident about its creation that it's dubbed it the "Ultimate Remote" and has decided to charge a serious $300 for it. What makes a remote ultimate and worth $300? A whole bunch of doodads, that's what. Not only does it, you know, control your home theater equipment like any good remote control should, but it can also load up ESPN internet content such as live scores, allowing you to follow stats on games you're watching or on games you aren't watching because you're watching another game. It can load up program guides so you don't need to do it on the TV itself, and it can even send text messages for some silly reason. But hey, for $300 I'd expect the thing to have some crazy functions

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Napster launches world's largest DRM-free music store

Remember Napster, the totally illegal file-sharing program turned legal music subscription site? Yeah, neither did we (or at least we chose not to), until today, when it it launched a music store with 6 million DRM-free tracks for sale at competitive prices (i.e. MP3s at $1 per song). Previously, Napster had been selling songs in the outrageously misnamed PlaysForSure format.

Apple's iTunes music store only sells 2 million songs that will work on players other than an iPod, and it sells them at a 30-cent premium over protected files. Amazon, which is known for selling DRM-free music, has only 5 million songs for sale in MP3 format. We're not sure exactly what, if any, great artists are represented in those million extra songs that Napster has over Amazon, but we do believe that more choice and less DRM can only be a good thing. Thank you, Napster. Based on this move, we might actually start visiting your website again.

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Google Earth app shows effects of climate change

The Met Office Hadely Center, British Antarctic Survey, and the U.K. government on Monday introduced a Google Earth application that visualizes the anticipated temperatures changes from climate change over the next 100 years.

The animation uses a color scheme to show the differences in temperatures layed over a Google Earth image.

People can also click on icons on the image to get more on how the data was compiled, stories from people affected by climate change, and information on the projected regional impact of climate change.

The initiative was launched by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Google Zeitgeist conference on Monday.

A projection from the same perspective 50 years from now, showing the highest temperature change (red) in the Arctic.

(Credit: Google Earth)

vnunet quoted British Environment Secretary Hilary Benn saying that the collaboration was done to help people understand climate change better.

"This project shows the reality of climate change using estimates of the change in the average temperature where they live, and the impact it will have on people's lives all over the world, including here in Britain," she said, according to the vnunet report.

"By helping people to understand what climate change means for them and for the world we can mobilize the commitment we need to avoid the worst effects by taking action now."

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Russian search site plans IPO

Yandex, a Russian search engine, plans to raise $1.5 billion to $2 billion in an initial public offering this fall.

The funding is based on an overall valuation of about $5 billion, according to an unnamed source. Reuters also cited Russian media reports that Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Renaissance Capital are managing the IPO on Nasdaq.

Yandex has about 8 million unique users per day, the company said. Its co-founders are Chief Executive Arkady Volozh and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Segalovich. The company's technology began as a linguistics project at the Russian Academy of Sciences project to build a search system for the Soviet government.

The Yandex.ru Web site was launched in 1997, and the company now has become a portal site with photo sharing, social networking, an online payment system, free Web site hosting, and other features.

Google lags Yandex in Russian search. However, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview that the company thinks it's improved its search technology to better deal with the Russian language.

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Exclusive cell phone deals called into question

On Tuesday, the Rural Cellular Association, a group of more than 80 small and rural wireless providers, filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission to investigate and adopt rules that would prohibit exclusivity arrangements between wireless carriers and cell phone manufacturers. In its petition the group said that these arrangements were unfair and stifled customer choice. The group also believes these deals decrease competition and violate the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

The most prominent example of such a deal is the Apple iPhone. AT&T has the exclusive right to sell the iPhone, which was introduced first in the U.S. market in June. Neither Apple nor AT&T has publicly said how long the exclusivity arrangement will last, but it's been reported to be at least five years. Verizon Wireless also has an exclusive deal to sell the LG Voyager, another popular smartphone.

The RCA says that some people living in rural areas can't subscribe to service from a big carrier like AT&T or Verizon and are therefore locked out of getting these cool phones.

"It is important that all Americans have equal access to the latest technology, including wireless devices, regardless of where they live or which carrier provides the service," David Nace, counsel to RCA, said in a statement.

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Zuora launches Web 2.0 billing service

The number of Web 2.0 start-ups I see with undeveloped business models is frightening. "We'll figure it out later" might work if you're talking about a product line expansion strategy, but revenue? I maintain that if you're truly innovating in technology and have a product in beta, you might want to apply the same discipline to your revenue model and start beta testing it as well. Once you have a million users, it's a bit late to start thinking about your business plan.

So Zuora, with its new Z-Billing offering, is at once exactly the right product for the times, and a big risk in terms of customer acquisition, since many companies that should use it won't start thinking about it until it's too late.

Z-Billing is a service that handles subscription billing for Web 2.0 companies. Many Web companies, once they do turn on their for-pay services, set up a "good-better-best" system, where, in addition to a limited free option, they offer customers different tiers of services, with overage charges should they use the service more than they are contracted to.

In other words, they treat you just like your mobile phone company.

The Z-Billing platform exists so these companies don't have to write the billing procedures themselves. The platform can handle the complexities of penalty billing, "rollover" credits for unused monthly services, and pro-rating customers' fees when they change plans mid-cycle. The service can also tie into the authorization or provisioning systems a company might have to manage who has access to what.

Zuora starts off by charging its customers 2 percent of bills collected, with the fee going down as collections go up. Presumably the billing is handled by the Z-Billing product itself. Its first customer is Core Metrics, an analytics and digital marketing company.

The whole idea of running a billing service for Web 2.0 companies is very smart. Small companies building Web apps shouldn't be saddled with creating billing software from scratch any more than they should write their own accounting software or e-mail apps. And the Zuora business model has analogs in the telecom world, in particular in Portal Software, a telecom billing company that was founded in 1985 and acquired by Oracle in 2006. The downside to the model, as I said, is not so much a lack of customers but a lack of knowledge among potential customers that they should be working on integrating a Z-Billing-like solution sooner rather than later.

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Google Earth gets Google News

his brings some new meaning to the idea of local news: Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that shows Google News related to the area shown on the screen.

The search company announced the addition on its Lat Long blog about geographic matters.

Google Earth now can show Google News.

(Credit: Google)

"By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide," said Google product manager Brandon Badger.

I've been a fan of geotagging photos, but clearly the trend is much broader than that.

The Internet has made global news a reality, but there are several efforts under way to meet the demand for local news, too. Google News can be customized to show headlines from a given city, state, or ZIP code, and MetaCarta overlays links to local news on a Google map.

Google Earth is software that shows the planet, letting people zoom up close and show different layers of geographically relevant information. The company's online equivalent, Google Maps, is gradually growing more similar, gaining Google Earth's satellite views and its ability to show local photos, for example.

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Facebook's new profile design is all about tabs

Facebook has just published new photos and descriptions of its impending profile redesign to their Facebook Profile Previews page. The new profile design will, as we have known for a while, be centered on tabs. Profiles will be broken off into five separate tabs, including Feed, Info, Wall, Photos, and Applications. Facebook's latest round of screenshots seems to indicate that users will also have the ability to add additional tabs, with the inclusion of a plus sign to the right of the Applications tab.

Breaking down information into tabs will make the new Facebook profiles seem far less cluttered, a growing concern with users, especially with the addition of applications, and improve load times. A major change included in this release will be the publisher box.

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Google Translate speaks 10 new languages

Google Translate just got more useful for a Prague citizen visiting India.

The online translation function now can understand 10 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. That brings the total to 23 languages, Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

In addition, Google added a language-detection feature that can guess the source language a user is trying to translate. It's more effective with longer amounts of text, Google said.

Detect Language means you only have to click the language you want to translate text into.

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Pack your solar panels in the briefcase

Let's say you're a road warrior who's always running out of batteries but doesn't have the biceps to keep your gadgets juiced and ready at all times. Here's a way to take care of those needs with a power supply that looks just like a briefcase so no one will be the wiser.

Inside the "Solar Briefcase" are two solar panels that produce 13 watts of power, OhGizmo says. That's enough to recharge a mobile phone in an hour or so, when the sun's at its peak. If you're a true gadget freak, you may want to consider a 20-phone charger or the 600-watt "PowerCube" if you've got a flatbed truck.

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Yahoo offers geographic data to Web sites

Yahoo is letting outside Web sites use information from its own catalog of geographic information, thus allowing programmers to employ the Yahoo data and services into their own applications.

The company now provides an interface to the data, said Dan Catt, an engineer and geotagging buff at Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site. The catalog gives locations a numeric identifier--where on Earth IDs, or WOEIDs, to various locations.

"Yahoo have opened up their geo database," Catt said in a blog entry. One specific example: the Sydney Opera House has the WOEID of 28717584.

The service is part of what Yahoo calls the Yahoo Internet Location Platform, a service currently in beta testing that's designed to help developers build geographic features into the Internet.

Expect more news on this at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, which begins in earnest on Tuesday in Burlingame, Calif. Yahoo will preview the location platform at the conference, according to the Yahoo Developer Network Web site. Catt is giving one of those speeches on Wednesday.

The service fits neatly into the Yahoo Open Services plan, aka YOS, under which the company is trying to make its Web site a foundation for other applications, either built directly on Yahoo properties or employing services over the network on outside sites.

The Yahoo Internet Location Platform provides programmers "with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner," the site said. "The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web."

According to documentation, there are about 6 million WOEIDs, including postal codes, cities, time zones, and suburbs. So far, though, natural features and bodies of water aren't included yet.

According to former Yahoo employee Simon Willison, Yahoo got the geographic data through its 2005 acquisition of WhereOnEarth.

The WOEID interface permits operations such as translating a place name from one language to another, looking up the WOEID for a landmark, and supplying a list of likely IDs that match a specific place.

It also can let programmers find the "parents" of a specific WOEID. For example, Hearst Castle's parent is the town of San Simeon, whose parent is San Luis Obispo County, whose parent is California, whose parent is the United States.

It also permits finding neighbors--for example, towns near other towns or countries near other countries. It doesn't assign WOEIDs down to the level of addresses, though.

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Nokia Maps 2.0 gets Web component

Planning trips on your Nokia smartphone is about to get a lot easier. Today at Where 2.0, theNokia Maps 2.0. As part of the Ovi brand of Internet services, which includes the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage gaming platform, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop or laptop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you're already out on the road, you can record routes and points of interest on your handset and then upload them to the Ovi service when you return home to share with family and friends. The interface on Web side is similar to what you'd see on your phone for ease of use and a more seamless experience. Finnish cell phone manufacturer announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to to complement its mobile mapping software,

We got a brief demo of Maps on Ovi, and it looks very cool. Despite being booted off the hotel's Wi-Fi and some technical glitches with search (the service isn't even in beta yet), we can already see the benefits of such a service. The obvious benefit is not having to sit there and peck out addresses on your phone's alphanumeric dialpad, and it's especially helpful when you're planning a multi-destination trip. The synchronization from the Web to the phone was smooth. Plus, we like the sharing aspect of Maps on Ovi, and this is a point that Nokia emphasized during our briefing. Michael Halbherr, vice president of context-based services at Nokia, said now it's not so much about route calculation (since that part of the technology is pretty solid) as it is about what we can do with the data. The next step is about discovering, collecting, and sharing those experiences. And this is certainly something I can get onboard with. Having covered portable navigation systems for the past two years, I find that most models offer the same core functions (text- and voice-guided directions, points of interest database, etc.) and do them reasonably well, so now the challenge is to find services that will further improve the driver's or walker's experience (and I don't mean adding multimedia features, people!)

Nokia hopes to have Maps on Ovi ready for public consumption later this summer, and though it will initially only work with S60 series smartphones, such as the Nokia N and E series models, the company said it hopes to develop it as an independent software for all types of form factors. Hear hear!

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Microsoft launches space tours on the Web

Microsoft is ready to boldly take Web surfers where no man has gone before.

The software giant on Monday launched its WorldWide Telescope, a free Web-based program that allows Web surfers to explore galaxies, star systems, and distant planets. The program, which was developed by Microsoft's research arm, marries together images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and others.

"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. "I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe."

The program is similar to Google Sky, a mode of Google Earth that offers views of the universe, including high-resolution photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope and background information on discoveries and constellations.

Microsoft said WorldWide Telescope will be made available for free as a tribute to Jim Gray, a Microsoft researcher who disappeared off the California coast while sailing last year.

"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said in a statement. "Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe."

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Identify mystery apps installed on your PC

I regularly use Piriform's free CCleaner utility to clear out the clutter on my systems' hard drives. (Note that CCleaner is donationware, so if you find yourself using it regularly, drop a few ducats in the virtual coffer.)

The last time I ran CCleaner on my XP test machine, it freed up almost 2GB of hard-drive space by removing temporary Internet files, sweeping out the Recycle Bin, and deleting various Windows updates and other system and application files I no longer needed. Then I clicked the program's Tools option to view the applications installed on the PC.

Along with the programs I expected to find on the list were two names I didn't recognize: "Otto" and "PS2". CCleaner wasn't any help identifying the programs, nor was XP's own Add or Remove Programs applet. After searching the Web for both "otto.exe" and "ps2.exe", I figured out that the former was a game that accompanies Windows Media Center Edition, and the latter was a keyboard utility from the PC's vendor, HP.

That was all I needed to know to decide that Otto could go, but PS2 should hang around lest I someday plug in an "enhanced" keyboard and might actually want to use the specialty control buttons on the top row. These are the buttons that let you open apps or your favorite Web pages, control the PC's volume, and perform other system operations, such as putting the system into sleep mode.

It would be nice if Windows provided some clues about the programs it lists in XP's Add or Remove Programs and Vista's Programs and Features. For example, Programs and Features on my Vista system lists the Viewpoint Media Player, but it offers no hint as to where the program came from, apart from the date it was installed. From what I was able to gather after a Web search, the utility is related to the display of 3D effects in AIM.

Since I use Trillian and Google Talk for my IM sessions, I don't need the Viewpoint player. A bigger question is how the program got on my PC in the first place. It didn't come preinstalled on the machine, and no other programs were loaded on the same date as it was. Still, the next most recent software installation was AIM itself, which had an installation date one month later than the Viewpoint player.

However the program managed to slip onto my PC, removing it freed up more than 7MB of hard-disk space. At least the Viewpoint player wasn't in my auto-start list. I'll take a paring knife to that roster in a future post.

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RIM makes a Bold BlackBerry debut

You may know it as the RIM BlackBerry 9000, but on Sunday, Research In Motion officially took the wraps off the highly anticipated smartphone, complete with a new name. The "Bold" is in reference to the smartphone's gorgeous display, but it's also bold in that it represents a number of new moves for the company. Oh, BlackBerry Bold, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways.

The bold and the beautiful
As we just mentioned, the device gets its name from its screen. The BlackBerry Bold features a half-VGA (480x320 pixel resolution) and a 65,000-color display. During some initial product testing, research group participants repeatedly called the screen "bold" and "brilliant." The Brilliant moniker didn't really jibe with the company, thus the BlackBerry Bold was born.

So just how bold is it? Well, RIM stopped by our office late last week to show us the device, and let me just tell you, I was absolutely blown away. I can pretty much say I've never seen a better-looking display on a smartphone. Colors pop off the screen, and it's really amazing how sharp and crisp everything looks on the display.

We watched a couple of videos, and for the first time, we didn't notice any of the pixelation or blurriness that you typically get with phones. In addition, the menu interface has been revamped with a much more modern look and icons. Also, as you can see from the images, the BlackBerry Bold boasts a new design. It's more elegant than models past, with curvier edges and a silver trim that complements the black casing.

If you turn it over, you'll also notice that the back has a leatherette texture. No more slick plastic. RIM will sell replaceable backplates in different colors, including blue, gray, and red, if you want to individualize your phone a bit. The BlackBerry Bold measures 4.5 inches tall by 2.6 inches wide by half an inch deep, and it weighs 4.7 ounces.

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How to find any email with Gmail search

The sight of someone scrolling through hundreds of email messages trying to find a specific one is like fingers on a chalkboard for me. With a few tricks, you can use Gmail to find the exact message you're looking for, without all the scrolling.

If you don't get a ton of mail, just typing in the words you're looking for usually does the trick. I can just type lisa in the search box and get all of the messages from my friend Lisa, southwest to bring up my ticket confirmations, or "bank statement" to help get my finances in order.

But the real power of Gmail search lies in search operators -- words that help modify your queries. Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the email Lisa sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:lisa SFO. Likewise:

• A link from my co-worker Michael: from:michael http
• A photo from my mom: from:mom has:attachment
• That last chat I had with one of the Gmail product managers: keith is:chat
• All messages from ebay that aren't outbid notices: ebay -outbid (the hyphen tells Gmail to return all of the messages that don't contain the word that follows it)
• The messages in my inbox sent directly to me that I haven't read yet: to:me is:unread in:inbox

You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well. And you can get pretty fancy. Recently, I was trying to remember the date of my friend's April birthday. I always send her a birthday email, so I searched to:maya (birthday OR bday) after:2007/4/1 before:2007/5/1. It's the 19th.



If remembering operators isn't really your thing, that's ok. There's a "Show search options" link to the right of the search bar at the top of your inbox.



Clicking that provides you with text fields you can fill in to get the precision of advanced search. Start there, but after a while you'll probably find that using operators is a lot faster.

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Google offers YouTube video software for Macs

Google has released basic software called Vidnik

that lets Mac OS X users record video with a Webcam or built-in camera, trim its length, add tags and a title, then upload it to YouTube.

The software also can be used to upload other videos to the company's video-sharing site, and other editing software can be used on the videos taken by Vidnik, said David Phillip Oster of Google's Mac team in a blog posting.

The software is among a host of Mac applications the company has produced. (Another interesting one is Visigami, which lets people search for images on Flickr, Picasa, and Google Images and use the results as an animated screen saver.)

Google has an increasing stable of software that runs on people's computers--Google Desktop is one good example--and is working on mobile-phone applications, too, through its Android project. But don't be confused by all this attention to what's known as client software: the company's higher priority is to make the Internet the application foundation of choice.

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Hide formatting marks in Word

To hide formatting in Word 2003, click Format > Reveal Formatting (or press Shift-F1) and uncheck "Show all formatting marks."

Uncheck "Show all formatting marks" in Microsoft Word's Reveal Formatting pane to hide the unwanted symbols in your documents.

In Word 2007, change this option by clicking the Office button in the top-left corner, choosing Word Options, selecting Display in the left pane, and unchecking "Show all formatting marks."

Deactivate formatting marks in Word 2007 via the Display window in the Word Options dialog box.
Thanks Blip

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Facebook to open the gates with 'Facebook Connect'

Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability.

The formal announcement was made through a post on Facebook's developer blog by senior platform manager Dave Morin, who has been one of the company's most visible evangelists in the developer community over the past year. Facebook Connect will launch within the next few weeks.

Through Facebook Connect, members will be able to use their Facebook identities across the Web--profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook profile content, for example, could appear on other social sites, and Facebook event listings could theoretically connect with external event and invitation services.

Facebook will handle the authentication process, and while privacy controls have not been made clear, the company has stressed that user security will be a priority. And there's reason to believe Facebook will be particularly careful: The company already partners with outside services to share data in its Beacon advertising program, and the PR missteps surrounding Beacon's launch are something that Facebook likely does not want to repeat.

It's a big move for the site. Until this point, Facebook has had a reputation for keeping its cards close to its chest--even banning the account of popular blogger Robert Scoble when he used a script to export his Facebook contact list to Plaxo. But Facebook has a representative in the Data Portability Workgroup, and executives have said that Facebook has wanted to bring its information outside the site eventually.

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Take out telemarketers with Caller Complaints

A simple Google search for a mystery number you've received usually lets you know who's on call you're getting could be something important like an overdue library book, or a pushy desk jockey trying to sell you a heavily discounted hafnium-forged non-stick pan set. the other end before you have to pick it up. The problem is that cell phones don't have the same quality of caller ID landlines get (numbers not names); so that

In most cases the telemarketers don't leave messages and will simply call you back, resulting in an endless cycle of you not knowing who's calling and having to call back to find out--something you're unlikely to do. To avoid this, there's Caller Complaints, a crowd-sourced index of the phone numbers of law breaking companies that have called folks on the do-not-call list. Users come together to list these numbers, what was being pitched--and the frequency of the calls. If you find someone else has already listed the number and shared their negative experience, you can pile on and leave your experience, which votes it up.

The most popular (or in this case unpopular) companies rise to the top and are tracked on leaderboards. Users can also browse by area code and what type of call it was, from political phone spam to prank calls and debt collectors. The idea is that there will be enough resources to help you get to the bottom of who's calling to either leave a complaint with your carrier or simply blacklist the number from calling again.

So far the site has amassed nearly 200,000 number searches from curious call recipients. If you're adding a number to the database you also have the option to do a little quick research on ReversePhoneDetective, which will tell you where the call originated from and give you the option to pay for a full report.

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Toshiba to use Cell processor in future notebook

Toshiba is expected to release a notebook PC this year that uses a variant of the Cell processor, the same chip used in Sony's PlayStation.

Toshiba Qosmio G40

The Toshiba Qosmio G40 notebook will sport a SpursEngine SE1000 chip, a Cell stream processor also used in the Sony PlayStation 3.

Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It is derived from IBM's Power Architecture, which was once used in Apple notebooks and desktops. Today, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.

Samples of the SE1000 chip began shipping from Toshiba on April 8. Toshiba has said it expects sales of 6 million units within the first three years.

The SpursEngine can do high-definition video encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams, among other capabilities. The four processing elements inside the chip have a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 to 20 watts.

Toshiba also plans to release a TV with the Cell processor.

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QuickSilverScreen.com down; accused of copyright violations

QuickSilverScreen

Early this morning, Malaysian time, video-link aggregator QuickSilverScreen.com's site posted the following message:
This morning we were falsely accused of hosting copyrighted content by the Malaysian government, in result our host (located in Malaysia) asked us to shutdown the QSS main site server.
We still have full control over all our servers and are working with our host & the malaysian government to find a solution for this stupid mistake.
We expect to be up and running within a few hours/days

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