Firefox 3.1 Beta is out
New features include even better Web standards improvements, location awareness, a new tab-switching preview that some folks are raving about.
Read more about it and/or download it now.
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Microsoft’s Ballmer says new ‘cloud’ Windows OS coming
Why do I get the impression that this is just going to be Windows with some ‘cloud computing’ window dressing (pardon the pun)? Steve Ballmer says they’ll show it off at their developer conference this month.
Yup, it sounds like an attempt to cash in on the buzzword du jour. I’m not slighting ‘the cloud’. After all, we all already do so much completely online (ex: e-mail, address books, social networking, to do lists). I’m just wondering what an OS brings to the table, when all you really need is a good Web browser. Who cares about OSes any more?!
Amazon Video on Demand
Amazon has updated their Amazon Unbox program. It’s now called Amazon Video on Demand and offers for a fee on-demand streaming of 40,000 TV shows and movies over the Net. You don’t need to purchase a subscription, but can view what you’d like ad-free, whenever you’d like for a small fee. Also, if you have a Sony Bravia TV with Internet Link, you can also use Amazon VoD.
The Amzn VoD service works on Macs and Windows boxes in your usual Web browser suspects. No HD yet, but it’s in the cards. The coolest part of this service – start watching on one machine and pick it up later on a different machine!
Rentals typically last 24 hours, and cost around $4 for a movie, $2 for a tv show. Purchases are somewhere between $10 and $15 each.
Picasa 3 is out with lots of new features
Picasa was already a pretty damn good application for managing photos and even videos. Version 3 of Picasa has even more cool features. Here’s a taste:
- Retouch your pics with a little airbrushing without needing to know Photoshop
- movie editing and creating using your photos, movies and music
- Upload your pics to Picasa Web (sync too)
- Add text to your photos.
There’s more… but just download it and find out first hand, or read to your heart’s content over at Google.
Google enters Web browser market with Chrome
Google sure knows how to light up the news sites and blogosphere – release a brand new Web browser! Called Chrome, it’s Google’s foray into a once-crowded market that is now dominated by just 2 players (at least on Windows) – Microsoft and Mozilla.
Everyone else has reported on and given their opinion, so why not another?! I did download and test out Chrome. I would have been disappointed if I was not impressed by at least one feature of a brand new Google product and the big G did not let me down.
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Fotoviewr – turn your Flickr photos into a slideshow
Fotoviewr is a new (free) Web-based service to turn your Flickr (or SmugMug) photos into a cooler interactive slideshow for your friends and family. You could easily get a slideshow set up in less than a minute with Fotoviewr – just plug in a Flickr/SmugMug username, then select the photoset you want to display and third, the type of slideshow you want. Fotoviewr has 6 different types of slideshows from a carousel to a wall of photos to a pile of photos on the floor.
While I love Flickr for its clean website, I find it a bit slow. Fotoviewr speeds things up by preloading the photos and making it significantly faster to browse. Fotoviewr has also built an application for you Facebook junkies.
iSpring Free converts PowerPoint presentations into Flash
For the geek that has to do presentations, iSpring Free is a neat little tool that converts your PowerPoint presentations into Adobe Flash slideshows. So no more sticking this slides up on the Web, and needing your visitors to download then open up on their computer (and they need to have Powerpoint Viewer at a minimum too).
iSpring runs on Windows supports PowerPoint 2000/XP/2003/2007.
Delta to offer WiFi on all US domestic flights
Delta will join the airline club that will offer wireless access on its flights. So far, it’ll be on all US domestic flights, and you can expect to see it starting later this year, with the rest of the fleet getting the WiFi treatment by next summer. Fees will be $9.95 on flights of three hours or less; $12.95 on longer flights.
Continental also announced the same thing earlier this year, although surprisingly American isn’t going to try competing and will only offer WiFi on very few planes.
Ok, you can bet I’ll be trying to get flights on Delta and Continental from now on.
Cuil wants to be a Google-killer
Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a brand new search engine that claims to have indexed over 121 billion Web pages, and also claims that that’s 3 times as much as any other search engine including Google. Interestingly, just a few days ago, Google laid claim to crawling (although not necessarily indexing) 1 trillion Web pages.
So will Cuil succeed in beating Google at their own game? Well, for starters their executive/technical staff are a bunch of Google expats, so it’s quite possible, but on the other hand, Google has quite an impressive foothold now in the search arena, including mindshare with the public. After all, “google” is now a commonly-used verb. I can’t recall other search engines ever having that claim to fame, even within the geek community. Read on for a mini review.
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The magnitude of the Web that Google indexes
Google recently hit a milestone in the quantity of web pages that they process – 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000)! And that # is growing daily by the billions. One trillion isn’t the total # that they index b/c there’s a lot of duplicate content, but still… try to turn that number over in your head. And even more impressive is that they update the linkages several times per day.