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New Gmail feature: sign out your other sessions

Miscellaneous / By /

There’s a new Gmail feature that Google just rolled out that apparently has taken years of testing. It’s the ability to track and sign out other Gmail sessions that you have open in other browsers/computers.

All you need to do is head down to the bottom of your Gmail screen and click the Details link near your “last account activity”. It will show you other Gmail sessions, including their IP addresses and a button to sign out of those sessions.

I tried this today and signed myself out of my session that I left running on my home computer. I love it. It means I can be a little less afraid of using Gmail on strange computers. Not completely though!

Nokia buys the rest of Symbian; will open source it

Phones / By /

In a somewhat surprising, yet not so surprising move, Nokia bought up the rest of Symbian that it didn’t already own and will open-source the cell phone OS platform. Why? This is the strategy du jour in this age of Linux vs Microsoft, and now Android (Linux basically) vs iPhone/Win Mobile/Blackberry.

It’s a $410 million gamble for Nokia, but not a bad risk. Open-sourcing products many times results in amazing contributions and improvements to the products which in turn fuel sales of hardware, software and services surrounding that product.

Time will tell how Nokia fares. This writer thinks this will certainly help to keep Nokia firmly in the top tiers of the cell phone handset industry.

Google rolls out some experimental Gmail features

Miscellaneous / By /

Starting today, Gmail now has some experimental features that you can choose whether to enable or not. Just head over to the Settings page and then click on the Labs tab. New potential features include the ability to bookmark specific e-mails, select custom stars for starring messages, custom keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures. My favorite is the e-mail addict tool which lets you lock yourself out of your account for 15 minutes.

So far, I’m not seeing the new tab showing up, but I’m sure it will eventually.

via CNET.

Microsoft luring users to its search engine with cash back

Miscellaneous / By /
Microsoft is at least for now, aiming to become the Discover Card of search engines by bribing… luring … ummm.. encouraging users to its Live Search site with the cha-ching sound of cash.

Just one catch. You need to follow links off of Live Search to vendors associated with the program and make a purchase.

Oh yeah, you gotta get up to $5 worth of rewards before you can claim it. That tells us that you shouldn’t expect to make very much money back from this. Time will tell if they actually make any inroads into Google and Yahoo’s search engine market share.

Google’s Annual Food Bill: $72 million

Miscellaneous / By /

Silicon Alley Insider estimates that Google spends an average of over $7500 per employee per year on free food, assuming that each meal costs $30. That works out to over $72 million per year!

Is that worth it? Apart from considering how large their profit margins are and what a great perk does for employee morale, also consider this: given that a huge portion of Googlers make salaries north of $75k, a perk that costs 10% of that is easily worth it if those employees put in even 1 more hour of work per day.

How the Matrix Begins

Networking & Internet / By /

Morpheus couldn’t tell Neo how the Matrix was first built, I think we’re seeing some interesting groundwork being laid for an ever-more realistic simulations of the earth coming out that will may one day give us the option of choosing to live in a virtual world instead of the real one. Which would make broadband access a vital public utility along with water, gas, and electricity.

First, Google Earth. If you haven’t downloaded it, stop reading right now and go get it. The fact that an interactive model of the entire earth, including detailed satellite imagery, 3D representations of buildings, hyperlinks to user-generated photo albums and a freakin’ flight simulator to fly around all of it is free, as in beer, is still mind-boggling. The thing to remember is that Google isn’t sitting still on Google Earth or it’s web-based companion, Google Maps. There’s a decent chance that since I’ve been writing this post, Google has added another cool feature to its mapping tools that will be the topic of another blog post.

Google Maps Street View

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How the Matrix BeginsRead More »

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