Gmail's New Look.

Google has changed the look of its email service Gmail. The new look as the company says on its official blog is done to make the Gmail as powerful and as beautiful as possible. The specialty about this revamped Gmail interface is that it is done to match the theme and interface of the Google's new social service Google+. They have earlier changed the look of the Google Calender in the same way.
So it seems like Google is trying to achieve the very ambitious goal of ruling the web, which means that if a person logs on the web and type www.google.com then all the services can be provided by the Google and  user does not have to leave the Gooogle umbrella. These services can range from search, docs, images, social networks etc.

The Gmails new look is of two types Preview” and Preview (Dense).

The themes look like:

You can activate these previews by
1. Selecting the Mail settings from the right hand extreme top corner next to your name.
2. Select the themes tab from the top bar and select any of the two new themes Preview and Preview (Dense) located at the bottom of the theme section.
or click here and select themes Themes tab in Gmail settings

Sources: Gmail Official Blog

A Google A day. What next??

It seems Google is totally determined to take on the social media and networking by fire this time. They are launching one after another killer apps and website from the last few days. Just now when I thought that google has done it all by launching Google plus what I found was a link below the Google search box which said  "Your name is Galloping Gertie. How many furlongs long are you?"


Google Homepage:

Agooleaday homepage:

This site will take you to the google search page with some question at the bottom and then you can use the google search box to fing the answer. But then there is a twist, the site claims that - "You are search the internet with A wormhole inspired time machine that enables you to solve today's puzzle spoiler free by searching the Internet as it existed before A Google a Day launched."

So what can we say Google finally doing it all to take on social network world??

Here is the link: http://www.agoogleaday.com/

Google Plus

Just heard noise on the web about the new google product Google+. people are saying its a facebook killer so I thought I will do a bit of research by myself. So I kept following the buzz,, twitter feeds, followed many famous tech blogs and read many articles and saw many videos. I must confess it is the best social product I have seen from google. The demos are very exciting which you can check out here. The videos for this product are here.

I must say having read all of the Google+ content, all of the info site and watched all of the movies (to post a story about it), I can now say I am a little miffed I don't have an invite :) .This is little disappointing but as its said on google official blog its a small field trial and will be rolled out to everyone when they create a final clean product. So I am waiting for it. You can opt for trial from here.

Having said all that the best blog to read about Google plus where all the info is given is the wired article Inside Google+ by @stevenjayl

Sources: Official Google Blog, Wired, twitter and buzz feed

So what do you love??

A cool google site which combines many of the services provided by google. The end result just put a query like "India" and find out yourself where  you can get videos, news, 3D maps of places, popularity charts of the topic, products services, pictures, patent info and many other interesting and fun stuff.

So go on it and explore.

http://www.wdyl.com/

State of social media in 2011

Check out this video to come up to speed with the current state of social media. The creator is Erik Qualman of Socialnomics.






via State of social media in 2011 - Holy Kaw!

Help Bring Back the Alien-Hunting SETI Telescopes

The world’s only telescopes devoted to searching for aliens went dark two months ago because of a lack of funds. Now you can help bring them back.

This morning, SETI launched a website called SETIstars to try to gather funds to resurrect the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which some astronomers call our greatest hope for finding ET.

Read Here

Source: wired.com

World's Fastest Computer!

World fastest computer is has been built in Japan and is named as K-computer..

An eight-petaflop Japanese supercomputer has grabbed the title of fastest computer on earth in the new Top 500 Supercomputing List to be officially unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg today.

 Read More here!!

Google Wave to meet its end!!

 Google's highly published product Google Wave which was called as the "Successor of e-mail' will be pulled out as decided by Google. What was positioned as web-based software that could transform Internet communications is officially dead. Yes, Google has pulled the plug on Google Wave.
Google Wave blended e-mail, instant messages, blogs, wikis and other collaboration tools in a web-based application that aimed to allow people to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.
Launched with plenty of fanfare at the Google I/O conference in May 2009, Google called the HTML5 app a successor to e-mail and instant messaging, a reinvention of these tools that took a fresh look at what people need in communication and collaboration online. Now Google is waving goodbye to these aspirations.

Catch the whole story at: Yahoo News

Android Hack found by a hacker Group.

The hack for Google Android mobile has been found by a group of hackers. Thousands of hackers will be able to break into the Google Android mobile OS. The new software will allow experts to break into Android-powered phones to steal personal information from people who own smartphones which run the OS.

Google will probably offer a patch to protect handsets which use run Android and downloads which will patch software on phones already in the market. That works if people who use Android-based smartphones find out about the problem and take the time to download the patch.

Source: 247wallst

15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter.

You can follow the whole story at: Top tech women!!

The Seven Hoursemen of the Web Apocalypse!!

Seven people across the world will hold a keycard which when put together will reboot the key part of the World Wide Web should a security breach, natural disaster or terrorist attack disable it.
It sounds like something out of a spy thriller movie or an episode of South Park, but this safeguarding measure is to enable the web to be restarted. 
Out of these seven, only five are needed to come together at a secure location in the US to put together the DNSSEC root key from the fractioned code, which would enable the resetting and restarting of the service. DNSSEC is a new Internet security system, run by ICANN which protects users from online fraud and cyber-attacks.
The experts include Paul Kane, head of CommunityDNS; Norm Ritchie of Canada, Jiankang Yao from China; Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso; Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago; Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic; and Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at Recursion Ventures in the US. They have been dubbed the “Seven Horsemen of the Web Apocalypse” or the “Fellowship of the Ring.”

This video from Community DNS explains it in detail.

Sources: games.venturebeat.com, zdnet.com, youtube

The First Ever Indian Browser "Epic"

A Bangalore-based Indian software start-up company Hidden Reflex released its first web browser “Epic” from India. Epic browser is based on open-source Mozilla Firefox platform. Epic has filled with several applications and features, which are specially focused on Indians. The target of this browser is to provide a position to India in the world so Indians can feel proud. It is the first completely India made web browser and aim is to give attention on Indian users. The company, Hidden Reflex was founded by the Alok Bhardwas, a US based engineer, in 2007.
Epic is developed by a team of Indian engineers. Epic comes with a unique feature, which is different from the other browsers that it has an inbuilt protection of antivirus. This antivirus and antispyware is powered by ESET. The browser also provides a sidebar with a number of previously installed widgets such as maps, news, skins, jobs, yahoo, gmail, twitter, facebook, orkut, games and many more. Epic developers claims for faster browsing and downloads. Epic gives maximum privacy by its feature of flash cookie deletion, private data deletion. Browsing history is also not stored.
 Epic offers about 1500 applications free of cost and are included in the browser. According to the Hidden Reflex, it supports approximately 12 Indian languages like Gujarati, Hindi, Telgu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. It also offers free word processor. With this browser, a user can access other websites to watch videos in another small window. It also offers over 1500 customized themes and wallpapers for users.

 The browser can be downloaded from here: Epic

Sources: http://www.epicbrowser.com/ , Techtree

Web 3.0 & Semantic Web.

What is web 3.0??
Web 3.0 is, among other things, about the Semantic Web and personalization.
The next generation of the Web is Web 3.0, will make tasks like your search faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. The browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you.The Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant. As you search the Web, the browser learns what you are interested in. The more you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you and the less specific you'll need to be with your questions. Eventually you might be able to ask your browser open questions like 'where should I go for lunch?' Your browser would consult its records of what you like and dislike, take into account your current location and then suggest a list of restaurants.

Conrad Wolfram has argued that Web 3.0 is where "the computer is generating new information", rather than humans.

"Web 3.0 - the Read-Write-Execute Web". Rajnish Sharma says, Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals with fater search technology & great reduction in exceution timeusing Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

Futurist John Smart, lead author of the Metaverse Roadmap echoes Sharma's perspective, defining Web 3.0 as the first-generation Metaverse (convergence of the virtual and physical world), a web development layer that includes TV-quality open video, 3D simulations, augmented reality, human-constructed semantic standards, and pervasive broadband, wireless, and sensors. Web 3.0's early geosocial (Foursquare, etc.) and augmented reality (Layar, etc.) webs are an extension of Web 2.0's participatory technologies and social networks (Facebook, etc.) into 3D space. Of all its metaverse-like developments, Smart suggests Web 3.0's most defining characteristic will be the mass diffusion of NTSC-or-better quality open video to TVs, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, a time when "the internet swallows the television." Smart considers Web 4.0 to be the Semantic Web and in particular, the rise of statistical, machine-constructed semantic tags and algorithms, driven by broad collective use of conversational interfaces, perhaps circa 2020. David Siegel's perspective in Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web, 2009, is consonant with this, proposing that the growth of human-constructed semantic standards and data will be a slow, industry-specific incremental process for years to come, perhaps unlikely to tip into broad social utility until after 2020.
 

Sources: Youtube, Youtube2,Wikipedia, w3

India's own cheap ipad.

So finally we got a 1,500 Rs laptop.... 
It looks like an iPad, only it's 1/14th the cost. The prototype cost $35 (U.S.) basic touch screen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.
 
India on Thursday unveiled a prototype tablet computer that would sell for a mere 1,500 rupees, or $35, with the price possibly dropping even further as R&D efforts continue.
Kapil Sibal, showed off the super-cheap touch-screen device in New Delhi as part of a push to provide high-quality education to students across the country. The tablet also comes with a solar-power option that could make it more feasible for rural areas.
The Linux-based computer at first glance resembles an Apple iPad and features basic functions you'd expect to see in a tablet--a Web browser, multimedia player, PDF reader, Wi-Fi, and video conferencing ability. It has 2GB of RAM (but no hard disk, instead using a memory card) and USB ports and could be available to kids from primary school up to the university level as early as next year.

Students from several branches of the Indian Institute of Technology co-designed motherboards for the computer, which is likely to drop to $20 and possibly getting as low as $10.
Sibal called the as-yet-unnamed device India's answer to MIT's famed OLPC laptop aimed at children in developing nations, which started off five years ago with a projected cost of $100, but ended up going for $200.

The tablet is part of a larger initiative aimed at improving India's educational system through technology. Nearly 8,500 colleges in the country have already gotten broadband connectivity, according to the Ministry for Human Resource Development, and some 500 Web-based and video courses are available for upload on YouTube and other online portals, with more in the works.