tech·no·philes

One of my fav. blogging website introduced me to the whole new world of Videopedia . Confused? Amazed? Don't worry, I have already experienced these in just 5 mins...... The website that confused me (and then amazed me) is 5min . It is a place to post/search short practical solutions. The whole idea is very simple: "We can explain any solution in just 5 minutes" . This website allows users to share their knowledge by sharing visual guides. The areas are Arts, Business, Sports & Health etc. Here is what 5min says about itself: - For starters, the Smart Player. To compliment the Videopedia vision and bridge the gap between textual and visual information, we developed a special player that allows viewers to watch the video in slow motion or frame by frame, zoom in and out, and more. - It gives the video creator the option to make a storyboard that helps others better understand the demonstration. - Each creator has a personal promotional Studio – a space to showcase t...

Amazed with Sci-FI movies (I am talking about i-Robot, MI series & Minority Report)? Here is a big STEP in the way we communicate! NFC (Near Field Communication) from FINN Mobile gaint Nokia . NFC is a short-range wireless technology mainly aimed to be used in mobile devices. With NFC we would be able to use our mobile phone as e-money (bye-bye to credit cards), e-tickets & smart wallets.... Wanna know more about NFC? Here you go: http://www.nokia.com/A4305081 http://www.nfc-forum.org/home

VeriSign, Inc . the domain name registry that controls the .com domain (as well as .net and others), has notified all the registrars of the domain name fee change. VeriSign has announced a fee change for .com & .net domain names w.e.f Oct 15,07. For .com domain names new price would be $ 6.42 from $6.0. Domain registrars would be paying $3.85 for .net domain names. As per the last report, VeriSign has 65 million .com domain names registered worldwide. With this fee increase , VeriSign would have better balance sheets for 2007-08. For details: http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/registrars/msg04682.html

Google Labs is back with a bang. A new product called Goog-411 into Google Labs today - a free telephone based information service that could replace toll 411 calls. Google Voice Local Search makes local-business search accessible over the phone in the easiest manner. We can do the following with this baby: search for a local business by name or category. get connected to the business, free of charge. get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone. Goog-411 or Google Voice Local Search can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 . The product is completely automated and there is no way to talk to a human for additional or clarifying information. You tell it your city and state, and then ask for a specific business or business category. To know more Catch the Buzz @ http://labs.google.com/goog411/about.html

Zenzui (an independent Mobile Web company also), developed by Microsoft’s Redmond Research lab is a new mobile browser. This application aims to make surfing the web on your mobile device easier through widgets. It lets you surf over a 6×6 grid of website widgets by panning and zooming around the grid. To learn more check out this promotional video:

I just found a real USB Desk Lamp that is made in a more traditional fashion. I am so impressed with the concept that I have added this as my wishlist item. Called the USB LED Desk Lamp this gadget has a flexible neck, four LED bulbs and an on/off switch on the lamp so you don’t have to unplug to turn the light off. The lamp is about nine inches tall and works with and USB port. The biggest surprize that its cheap at $8.0. Read More: http://www.everythingusb.com/usb_led_desk_lamp_12187.html

News Corporation & NBC Universal would launch the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled with the most sought-after content from television and film. This video-rich site will debut this summer with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips, representing premium content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios. AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! will be the new site’s initial distribution partners. Their users, who represent 96 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet, will have unlimited access to the site’s vast library of content. This media alliance will offer consumers free long- and short-form video and create a compelling platform for advertisers, targeting the rapidly growing audience of online video consumers. Charter advertisers include Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco, Esurance, Intel and General Motors . Google Team, here is the challenge for you! This may kill  YouTube ! Read More: http://home.businessw...

Search Giant! Google has decided that it's going to start purging data in its search logs. Currently, Google indefinitely retains detailed server logs on its search engine users, including user's IP addresses – which can identify a user's computer, the query, any result that is clicked on, their browser and operating system, among other details. Even if a user never signs up for a Google account, those searches are all tied together through a cookie placed on the user's computer, which currently expires in 2038 . Read More: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/google_to_anony.html http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/more_on_google_.html

CrossEngine!! I would call this search engine as a mash-up of all search engines. CrossEngine allows us to search across a wide variety of search engines. Here is what I found intresting with this Engine: Clean & Intuitive Dashboard More than 300 search resources No internal ads from CrossEngine Team As per CrossEngine help pages, it was launched as MrSapo.com in Sep. 2004. This search mash-up is owned and operated by Intelways LLC, (Woodstock, GA) . One more intresting feature I found is website customization. We can coupled our website with CrossEngine . How? Try: http://crossengine.com/?window=http://www.msn.com And, you would be able to see the resulting page as your browser's default homepage. Enjoy!!

Powered by IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software, UFOCrawler ( http://www.ufocrawler.com/ ) is one of the new search bee! This has been launched Anomalies Network. The Anomalies Network is the world's largest online UFO and paranormal community. The Anomalies Network itself uses the CentOS Linux distribution, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and PHP in addition to IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition . IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a no-cost, entry level enterprise search product with Web search services powered by Yahoo! that enables departments and businesses of all sizes to quickly and easily find, access and capitalize on information stored within organizations and across the Web. IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition can be downloaded at http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.com . As of now, UFOCrawler still need to cover a long journey in order to beat other bigges in the Search Space.

Feed43 (pronounced as “Feed For Free”) is an online service, which converts any webpage to a RSS feed.. To create and setup feeds using this service you should have any of these browsers: Mozilla-based browser (e.g. Mozilla, Netscape 7+;  Firefox 1.4+) Internet Explorer 5.01 + Opera 8 +   Konqueror 3.4.1 The procedure of setting up a feed has been mentioned in a very user friendly way at the following URL:    http://feed43.com/how-it-works.html So what you are waiting for? Go & explore this Free RSS converter!!!

I scratched my head four times when I heard about TurboGears . Later, I regret for that scratching.... TurboGears is based on the agile, mature, cross-platform, well-documented, easy and fun Python programming language. We can create a database-driven, ready-to-extend application in minutes . The objective behind TG is to simplify and speed up the development of modern web applications written in the Python programming language. Python makes it super simple to get started with TurboGears , whether you're running Windows, Linux, Mac OS X or even a cell phone. I really liked this language at the first look. Kevin Dangoor developed TG for people like me who are in love with modern web applications written in old Programming Languages. After Ruby On Rails ! This is my new love in programming!!!!! Learn More : http://docs.turbogears.org/1.0 http://www.o3magazine.com/pastissues/issue5/

My latest love " Wordsource ". This would be my online dictionary and thesaurus from today. A very clean & ads free website that provides us the feature of checking words via URL directly. Confused? Type word.sc/confused it would give you the meaning of confused. Besides this, this also helps us to do advanced search via Prefix, Suffix, ZIP Code, City & Domains. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Web 2.0 would change our web habbits......

" Shelfari " a product from Tastemakers,Inc is an online bookshelves. It helps us to build virtual bookshelves and discover popular books in friends and critics. I found my first experience with Shelfari quite amazing. This website also allows me to Influence people by rating & discussing books online Participate in online book groups to further explore literature Interact with and learn from authors It also allows us to buy books online via Amazon.com . Adding to the above, I have also heard that Amazon has invested heavily in Shelfari . Learn More: http://www.shelfari.com/ http://www.techcrunch.com

Awe---some !!! My first reaction when I checked Zilo for the first time. This website helps us to choose our own products (from ZiloShop) and earn commissions on each sale ! This venture has recently been launched in US by Centralcast (Owned by Jeremie Berrebi & David Levy). Zilo has already created a success story in France with its country specific website. I'm sure we would have a great time with this new kid on the block....... Realated URL: http://www.zlio.com/ http://www.zlio.com/?page=about http://thefrenchtouch.zlio.com/

Yahoo!'s Mixd (the group texting and photo sharing via mobile phone) is going down on 25th Feb. So far Yahoo! Mixd is only available for US phone carriers. But, I would prefer to see such services/projects (with Yahoo! Mobile) for other countries also.

Yahoo has decided to make a solid comeback in 2k7. After Yahoo Our City , we have a new RSS feed remixing tool Yahoo Pipes . Yahoo Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. It's a beta service from Yahoo Team and the name seems to be inspired from Unix pipes. Good Luck My Old Champ "Yahooooooo"

Opera Software has nominated Yahoo! as the exclusive provider of mobile search on their browsers for mobile phones. Currently, Opera has Opera Mini and Opera Mobile , across more than 100 countries worldwide. Opera will launch the new Yahoo! oneSearch somewhere in March 2007 (Q1 of 2007). Yahoo! oneSearch is a completely new mobile search service designed to give consumers instant answers & Search results. These results are grouped by subject making it easy to read through and drill down to get more details. Opera and Yahoo! will also jointly market the availability of Yahoo! Search on Opera Mobile to help drive consumer awareness and usage. It seems that Yahoo! is ready for serious action in Year 07. Good Luck Yahoo!!!!!!

My 40 mins journey with Sphere helped me to understand the importance of Blog Search Engines in today’s blogging world. No wonder! This web 2.0 technology impressed me. I'm sure; you would also fall in love with Sphere after reading this blog! What is Sphere? In simple words, it is a blog search engines in the form of Bookmark. It would help you to find blogs related to the respective topic. As per Sphere's creators (Martin Remy, Steve Nieker,Toni Schneider, Tony Conrad): "The Sphere It! Bookmarklet is a free bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you're reading on the Web. It may change your life" This San Francisco based blog bookmarklet can be accessed by hitting the following URL: http://www.sphere.com/ How to use it? Internet Explorer Geeks: You may add it to IE favorites by right clicking on the button . Please ignore the JavaScript warning message (Trust us!). Once you are done with this, visit any of your preferred new. Clic...