Last Nov, we noted that Google was using search data to explore flu trends in the US. With the outbreak of the swine flu (sorry, H1N1 influenza), Google has decided to release new search data to health officials and the public.

This search data shows flu trends for Mexico. Note the word ‘trends’. We should re-emphasize what Google is saying and note that this is useful for modeling what’s happening and studying the situation, but not necessarily an accurate predictor of what’s to happen.

After months of negotiations, Disney (ABC) has agreed to take a stake in Hulu, NBC’s online video website and thus also air their shows on hulu.com. Fans of Lost Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and so on can now see full episodes online legally for free with an ad or two thrown in for revenue.

While Greg Sandoval at CNET seems to think this will hurt YouTube, I don’t think that’s about to happen just yet. Sure, this is an important deal as YouTube tries to reform its model to include more industry-approved content, but YouTube is a household name with over 10 times the traffic currently.

Bluetooth headsets have never really been the epitome of style. Presenting The Ripple – coming from the designer Ilya Fridman, this headset is a small, circular disk with ‘ripples’ emitting from the center which is also a small button used to control the device.

Without knowing what it actually was, most people would just assume it’s a very modern and very large earring, but part of the circle flips outwards to reveal the microphone and when a conversation is over, you can press the center button to keep the headset active for listening to music.

More images.

via Popgadget.

Apple is working on a new device that will fall somewhere between a notebook computer and an iPhone/iPod sized device in size. Its aim – a mobile non-phone computer sans keyboard with a bigger screen than an iPod for video-watching; a media pad. Proposed name? i… Pad!

UMPCs and tablet PCs have not taken off the way that manufacturers have hoped, as laptops and smartphones continue to dominate the mobile computing market. Will Apple have better success? Given their recent successes with MacBooks, iPods and iPhones, they certainly have a good track record.

I still think that UMPCs can gain more traction if more of those vendors were willing to make the switch to Linux, as they could be made to run leaner, and thus cheaper.

Have I mentioned how much I like Gmail? Here’s a new Gmail Labs feature called “Suggest more recipients“. It works by looking at your past sent history to see who you e-mail often and in what kinds of groups. If it thinks you may want to add additional recipients, it then sticks it under your To: box (see the circled red area in the screenshot).

Oh Microsoft, for all of your improvements and even advancements over the years, you still manage to make me laugh and scratch my head in amazement. If you really wanted to compete with the iPhone, why didn’t you start a long time, oh say when you first knew they were coming out with the device?

You have a strange habit of coming late to the game and being annoyed that your competing product doesn’t vault immediately to the #1 position.  Your touchscreen ‘MSPhone’ could potentially outsell the iPhone (especially if Apple sticks to just AT&T for a cellular network), but it’s not about to happen any time soon. Good luck – we’ll be watching what happens.

Amazon.com now owns Lexcycle, maker of iPhone e-book app Stanza. Stanza, which is free, allows users to read more than 100,000 books and newspapers that mostly formatted in open standard format ePub.

Hopefully, Amazon does not change its free status, but instead builds on it and potentially integrates it into Kindle.

Meebo is teaming up with other community sites to offer their chat bar at the bottom of their pages. This is a smart move for Meebo as they move to capitalize on the success of community applications like chat and to compete with Facebook. Their chat bar even looks very much like Facebook’s. It will be interesting to see whether they will be able to wrest away a lot of the market away from FB.

via Techcrunch.

Thankfully, the American Film Institute (AFI) has embraced YouTube and posted a funny video of Carrie Fisher (Star Wars’ Princess Leia) roasting George Lucas. Even non-star Wars fans will enjoy this video.

via Philly DTV

Jut in time for summer (June release promised), Sharp has announced arguably the world’s first waterproof and solar-powered cell phone. The claim is that 10 minutes of sunbathing will get you 1 minute of talk time and 2 hours of standby time. We’ll see…

via Switched