The rise of the App store

This will sound odd, and might date me the way radiocarbon dates old trees. The first mobile phone I bought was just to make phone calls. At Rs 16 a minute, to boot. Oh well, this was 1996, a different era. Hey, it was an earlier century, in the last millennium.

This – now this is the iPhone age. That thing in your pocket, it ain’t a phone. It’s the Communicator from Star Trek. It’s a universal infotainment terminal. It does stuff we couldn’t have dreamt of in the nineties, from letting you read books and watch movies on it, to storing (and editing) all your life’s documents, telling you your exact location on the planet and tomorrow’s weather… Read on» » » »

Good value social networking - Micromax ezpad Q5

It’s quite a relief to see a QWERTY handset that seems to have its own ‘personality’ and doesn’t look like a BlackBerry. This Q5 or ‘ezpad’ as it’s been dubbed, was apparently designed to be real bliss for the avid social networker and here’s how it fared.

Form
The handset’s prime focus is the keypad and not the screen, so there’s that slightly awkward Micromax LCD panel. Although the Q5 is less skewed than its predecessor, the Q3, it’s still the handset’s biggest drawback.

Thankfully, the large QWERTY keypad is fantastic. The buttons are easy to use and well-spaced and take a couple of attempts to get used to. Navigation is a breeze thanks to the track ball. Read on» » » »

A temporary email address

You have just come across a new website at xyz.com that offers an interesting ebook for free. The offer is simple — you give them your email address and they’ll send you the download links for the ebook directly to your Inbox.

Now while the website policy clearly states that they “won’t sell your email address to third-parties”, you aren’t feeling very comfortable sharing your private email address with a website that you’ve never heard about before.

What do you do then? Read on» » » »

Born-again Explorer takes on Chrome

Software giant Microsoft, fast losing its market share to new entrants like Google’s Chrome, on Thursday launched the latest version of its Web browser, the Internet Explorer - IE8, with features that allow quicker navigation, content search, and a cool display that gives an easily updated view of favourite pages. Read on» » » »

A laptop for children

This laptop is solar powered, has no hard drive, is moisture, dirt and dust resistant, droppable and its keyboards are waterproof. In short, it is a laptop made for children and costs only $210 or a little under Rs 10,000.

Designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, the XO laptop aims at taking computer education to the masses, especially poor children in developing countries like India. Read on» » » »

OpenOffice.org 3.0 released by Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems released version 3.0 of its free and open source (FOSS) office suite Openoffice.org on Monday. It has been reported that the new version comes with a number of performance enhancements and new features. Openoffice.org 3.0 now claims to work out of the box in Mac OS X as a native Aqua application. Read on» » » »

Now use Google Phone Search to get info on the go

Google has recently launched Google Phone Search , a service that will help you search Google on the go. All you have to do is to pick up your phone and dial 1-800-41-999-999 to get access to local business information, movie times and real time flight statuses and so on. All this comes without any charge.

Simply dial 1-800-41-999-999 (toll free) from any phone. The service is currently made available in Hyderabad, India in English, Hindi and Telugu languages. Read on» » » »

Mozilla Sets a New World Record

Mozilla’s new browser Firefox 3.0 has been downloaded over 8 million times within 24 hours of its launch. The Mozilla Foundation had encouraged users worldwide to download their latest browser on the Download Day in an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records. The target of five million downloads was reached earlier on June 18, and with few minutes to go, the eight million mark was reached as well. Read on» » » »

Firefox on a Mission to Set a Guinness World Record

Mozilla Firefox 3 is on the way to set a Guinness World Record to become the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

You too can participate. Firefox 3 will soon be launched. All you have to do is to download Firefox 3 within 24 hours. Currently as I write this post, there are 728,067 supporters already who will download FF3 within 24 hours of its launch Read on» » » »

Which is Better - Shorter URLs or Long and Descriptive Ones?

Having shorter URLs to your blog posts has its advantages -

• Shorter URLs can be used by the print media like newspapers/magazines to link to the online content
• Readers can quickly share shorter links via email/IM to their friends without worrying about sending incorrect URL due to formatting errors during copy-paste

At the same time, short URLs do not describe the content of the page and hence are not as search engine friendly as longer ones. SEO experts suggest using descriptive URLs. These are useful for search engines but for the readers they may not be easy to use. Long and huge URLs may scare some of your readers.

So how can we provide a page which has the advantage of being SEO friendly at the same time providing ease of use to the readers? Read on» » » »