India has a new Live Search Maps site! Features are:

Street Maps for 9 important Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur and National Road Network of India with roughly 20,000 cities/towns/major localities (as points on the map). Political Map of India with important geographical features that includes national roads connecting around 20,000 Indian cities are on the offer. Highlight is the detailed maps for 9 important Indian cities as mentioned earlier. Within these 9 cities, important places likes monuments, restaurants, hotels are also presented as icons in the maps. Maps of supported cities has been stitched with the national road visually and navigationally.

Location Search – Global (one need not type the city name), context-aware (i.e. ranking of results considers the map view), error-tolerant (corrects the typos, expands the important abbreviations) and flexible solution to find complete or partial address, roads, localities, landmarks and places of general interest.

Business Listing (Yellow Pages) Search - This allows us to find businesses listed with us. Click Business tab and specify what (e.g. “Petrol Pump” in first box) and where (e.g. “Indira Nagar” in second box) to get the business listings sorted according to distance from the location of search (i.e. Indira Nagar, Bangalore).

Routing/Driving Directions

• Intra-city visual driving directions
• Intercity integrated routing (detailed driving directions inside the cities having Street Maps and normal driving directions on the National map)
• One-click driving directions

Under this, one can route from a given source to a destination. Source and destination can be specified in multiple ways – by right clicking on the map, or by hovering over the search result icon displayed on the map or by hovering over the pushpins in the collections or by clicking directions link from menu and typing in the required addresses/locality/places/road. Source and destination can be any city/locality/place/landmark in India within 15KM of distance from any road. Clicking Reverse link at the bottom will swap the start and end point and will compute the route. Selecting Shortest Distance radio button will compute the routes for the shortest distance between the two points.

Share - User can share (by selecting “Send in e-mail” from “Share” Menu) his various search results, driving directions, collections etc. over email.

Print - User can take print out of the maps, driving directions, search results.

Collections - One can create collections of pushpins, custom drawings on the maps, routing etc. and save it against a Windows Live ID for viewing later or sharing it with others.

For full details and more images head over to Chris Pendleton’s VE blog: Announcing Live Search Maps India

With a face recognition feature set to launch at noon PDT Tuesday, Google's Picasa Web Albums will help users label their photos with the names of subjects. That and other changes to the photo-sharing site are joined by a new beta version of the accompanying Picasa 3.0 photo-editing software.

The "name tag" feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.

Picasa 3 beta
Google also plans to release a beta version of the Picasa 3 image-editing. It works on Windows, though a Google Labs version has been transmogrified to work on Linux via the Wine software layer. Horowitz wouldn't confirm whether a Mac OS X version is anything more than an idea: "Macs are important to us," he said. "We're always looking for new ways making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."

The new Picasa software brings several changes:

• A movie maker mode lets people combine photos with music to export movie versions of galleries to watch on a PC or upload to YouTube.
• A new retouch brush lets people edit out skin blemishes and other trouble spots. And the tool can automatically fix red-eye problems caused by flash photography.

• A new collage mode lets users compile many photos into one composite image. This time, users get precise control over image placement for example by moving, rotating, and resizing photos, and the software can produce a high-resolution composite for poster-size prints.
• A photo viewer for quick slideshows, an option that during installation politely asks to own the file associations for JPEG, TIFF, raw images from higher-end cameras, and some other formats. The slideshow software can view PNG files, which is handy, but the editing software still can't, which is a significant limitation for me.
• Online synchronization. If photos have been uploaded from Picasa to the Web site, they can be edited later and the changes, including tags, are synchronized to the Web site. This is very handy since you might want to get images up quickly to share with friends then edit them later. Unfortunately, changes on the Web site aren't mirrored back to the PC, so all those name tags will stay put in the cloud for now.

Google is all set to lift the curtains from its new browser Chrome.. click here for more.

(via webware)

There are plenty of great freeware downloads on the Web; here are just a few good freeware downloads sites:

Thanks to about.com for collecting these gems.

 

Users of Google Docs, the online applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, now have a wide range of templates from which to choose.

Google on Thursday announced the templates, which were created by Google and a number of companies with experience in the business. They can be browsed and opened through a template gallery that currently has 294 to choose from.

Among the options: wedding planners, business cards, cover letters, screenplays with proper formatting, invoices, loan amortization schedulers, fantasy basketball standings predictor, wedding photo albums, and party invitations.

Some templates, such as the group shared expense report, are explicitly designed to take advantage of the fact that Google Docs can be edited by multiple people, one of the natural advantages the technology has over PC-based editing.

In what may have been the worst-kept secret in Apple announcements of late, CEO Steve Jobs announced a 3G version of the iPhone on Monday, along with a slew of new third-party applications designed for the device.

The new iPhone will use third-generation wireless technology and run updated iPhone 2.0 software. It's expected to launch July 11, Jobs said in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The iPhone will also be cheaper than its predecessor, with a 16GB version priced at $299 and an 8GB version that costs $199.

Hardware features include longer battery life, a flush headphone jack, silver button controls on the side of the phone, and a plastic back case that comes in black or white (for the 16GB version only).
Featured applications included a mobile-blogging app from SixApart; a new version of Super Monkey Ball from Sega; an application from eBay that allows users to monitor their bids; an application from Modality that gives medical students up-close views of human body parts to help them study anatomy; an application that gives near real-time updates on Major League Baseball games; an Associated Press app that sends out local news based on where a user is; and a service from Loopt that lets people see where their friends are at any given time. (You can see a roundup of demos of each of these apps here.)

Bharti Airtel and Apple have confirmed that they will be bringing the highly anticipated iPhone 3G to India later this year. Full review of the new iPhone is here.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together a list of thousands of .com domain names owned by Google, based on an analysis of the root zone file. They then verified the most interesting ones with WHOIS information. Does GoogleWarnerbros.com represent a future partnership, or a failed tryout? Googlereligion.com? Why not. Googlepoo.com? Sure.

The entire list is embedded below. Some of the more interesting ones:

* 30dayfitness.com
* bayareaburritos.com
* donationcard.com
* essentialmommy.com
* greengardengifts.com
* mariolovespasta.com
* thesecretofburritos.com
* goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com
* google4kids.com
* googlebackups.com
* googleauction.com
* googlebroadband.com
* googlecasinogames.com
* googlefamily.com
* googlejokes.com
* googlelovers.com
* googlepersonals.com
* googlereligion.com
* googlefaith.com
* googlegym.com
* googledaycare.com
* bankgoogle.com
* googlepaperproducts.com
* googletimewarner.com
* ebay-google.com
* googlewarnerbros.com
* checkoutsucks.com
* dejastinks.com
* frooglesucks.com
* fuckengoogle.com
* gmailblows.com
* gmailsucks.com
* googlefools.com
* googlemotherfucker.com
* googlepoo.com
* googlesucks.com
* errorpageassist.com
* googlemonitoring.com
* googleclusters.com
* googlewebmonitoring.com

Read this doc on Scribd: 0804 google domains.

 

There are plenty of paid offerings to choose from in this category of software, but I've found several free programs on CNET.com that do the job nicely. The best Web album software provides ways to host your work on the Web so all you'll need is some creativity and your already honed photo-snapping skills.

Photozig Albums Express offers a step-by-step process so you can design your project from start to finish. Big button icons with descriptions make it easy to start your project and select the preferred output for your images including sending in e-mail, burning to a CD, or uploading to a Web site. The finished product is a basic layout of thumbnails that you can click to enlarge, but you'll have no skins to choose from with this one. The Photozig Web site requires you register with an e-mail address, but you'll be able to display your albums on the Web for free once you're signed up. For basic albums, this is the one to choose.

Web Photo Album is another simple free album creator offering several nice (if sometimes cheesy) templates. A nice interface layout makes it easy to find the pictures you want and quickly create a simple album. It offers basic editing functions like red-eye removal and picture rotation, and you can add captions to each picture. The finished product comes out as a page of thumbnails and once you click on a picture, you're given a close up with the ability to navigate to other shots across the top of the page. Though there are a staggering number of themes to choose from to match your pictures, your overall layout is unchangeable. Web Photo Album lets you sign up for the free Photo hosting service, or you can save to a folder to burn to CD or post to your own site.

JAlbum for both PC and Mac users is one of my long-time favorite free Web album programs. It doesn't direct you through the process like Photozig, but a quick look through the menus will be enough for you to get started creating great Web albums. There are several great-looking templates and skins to choose from, with more skins available at the JAlbum Web site. An integrated FTP program makes it easy to post albums to your Web site or blog. The JAlbum site also lets you post your projects to their Web hosting service for free, but as with the others, you'll need to register with a name and e-mail address.

With spring weather returning, you're going to have a lot of chances to snap some great pictures. Use one of these free Web album programs to turn your pictures into a nice project that's easy to share with anyone.

Its the time of the year when most of the IT pros think of making a 'switch'.
So, this article will explain which certifications are hot in the market now and which will fetch you a fat pay cheque.
Check out the 10 tech certifications that actually mean something.

Gmail is great for many reasons, but one of them is the built-in power search tool. It's constantly indexing your e-mails to makes them easy to parse through on a later date.

How-to guru, Dennis O'Reilly, of CNET's Worker's Edge has a few tips for people who want to speed up the way they search for old e-mails as their in-boxes continue to grow and fill up with messages. His tips involve using good old-fashioned operators, the little shortcuts you can put in front of a query to flavor your results.

You can read his post here, or check out the full listing of operators here.

Online photo-editing applications keep getting better as the competition heats up between startups like Picnik and FotoFlexer. Today, a very large competitor, Adobe, is entering the market by releasing a Web-based version of Photoshop for editing pictures called Photoshop Express. It is in public beta and anyone can sign up.

Photoshop Express is by no means just Photoshop ported onto the web. It would even be a stretch to say it’s a stripped down version of the desktop software, since it’s intended for mainstream consumers, not professionals.

It has got plenty of filters intended for tuning and effects - you won’t find any tools for drawing lines, adding text, or creating shapes. What you can do is easily take out red eye, touch up undesirable areas, change saturation, pop color, and crop (among other things).

Photoshop Express also differs from its desktop cousin by serving as an online storage and photo sharing service. You can upload up to 2GB of photos to the web app (or pull them in directly from Facebook, Photobucket, or Picassa). They are arranged in a collection that can be made available to others or kept private. Embedding and slideshow functionality is also available.

For me, 2GB storage is the reason to try this service. I still like Flickr but its limited storage holds me back from using it. But i'm sure, someday Flickr would do away with the storage limits.

Since all computers come with basic software that rotates, resizes and crops photos, there needs to be a compelling reason to use an online service. Uploading a photo to such a service, editing it and then downloading it back to your hard drive too high of a cost. To compensate for this, most services allow you to transfer the edited photos directly to Flickr, Webshots or other online photo services, saving users the trouble of making round trips uploading and downloading.

Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones:

Fauxto
Fauxto is a Flash-based Photoshop look-alike. It is the only layer-based online tool that I know of, and is by far the best of the bunch. But if all you are looking for is photo editing, and you aren’t familiar with Photoshop, Fauxto will frustrate you with its complexity. And if you are already familiar with Photoshop, chances are you have a copy already. Fauxto is lovely to look at and it is a really nice example of Flash in action, but I’m not sure who their target market is.

Picnik
Picnik is the new kid on the block, and they’re the best so far. It is also Flash based, it is the fastest of the bunch and the user interface is the most intuitive. Once you are done editing, you can transfer your photos directly to Flickr. Picnik has replaced Ajax-based PXN8 as our favorite online photo editing tool.

Picture2Life
Picture2life is an Ajax based photo editor. It’s focused on grabbing and editing images that are already online. The tool selection is average, and the user interface is poor. There are some bugs on the site. Photos can be transferred to Flickr, 23 and Imageshack after editing.

Preloadr
Preloadr is a Flickr-specific tool that uses the Flickr API, even for account sign-in. The service includes basic cropping, sharpening, color correction and other tools to enhance images. The fact that Preloadr is designed specifically to work with Flickr may not be an advantage - some of the other services are just as good or better and also offer Flickr integration.

PXN8
PXN8 is the best of the Ajax based editors (and the best overall until Picnik launched) and has a great user interface with the main features highlighted on large icons. The basic “enhance” feature does a very good job of fixing the obvious problems with pictures. Edited photos can be transferred to Flickr or Webshots’ AllYouCanUpload service.

Snipshot
Snipshot, previously called Pixoh, is another very-good Ajax-based editing tool that stands out because of its above average design and the fact that they have an API into their service. I prefer the features and UI of PXN8, but just barely.

When I first clicked on this article, I expected to see yet another diatribe telling you to use numbers, mixed-case letters, and special characters when you created a password. Boy was I wrong.
Get past some of the geeky language and you'll find a truly eye-opening story about the security of passwords in Windows.

Surprisingly, Mark Burnett's piece dates back to 2002, but the lessons are still relevant today. Give it a spin. Maybe consider changing your passwords today.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told public radio's Marketplace that around one percent of all Google searches go through the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn't get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt's Tom Chavez. So why does Google keep such a costly button around?
 

Take into account the number of people who'd switch to, say, Yahoo, being so disappointed that Google removed the "Feeling Lucky" button. Everything has an effect on making money -- even making money. For a more clear example, let's say Google would start showing a banner ad on their homepage from now on. Google would make loads of extra money, but many people might also use Google less, or start blacklisting the ads on Google via their ad blocker, and so on.

So, it makes sense to keep people feeling lucky.

You can listen to any PDF FILES instead of reading with Adobe Reader 6 or 7 and the short cuts are :

 

Open any PDF File and test.... unbelievable.

It will read for you the entire content !
Just try it guys.......It really works.......and its fun!

I don't want this space to be just another Microsoft-Apple news reporting website but just can't resist the temptation of writing about the new offerings from the Microsoft. Microsoft is marching slowly on its growth path and dishing out lot of new products and services.



Zune 2 :

Finally its a great day for a Zune owner. Old Zune 30GB owners (like me) will get a Firmware upgrade which will include new User Interface and lots of other goodies and the new owners will get a whole new range of Zunes to choose from. New Zune has a touch sensetive pad and is looking thinner and cooler than Zune 30GB.
Read Zune 80GB review here.

Zune Software and Market Place also got a fresh look and new features.
Read more about it here.

Launch of Windows Live services :
Microsoft launched various other windows live services during past couple of months. I found each of them very useful and productive. I'm hooked up to Windows Live Events which is a great concept and cool thing to do. I've created an event site for my Marriage here. Check it out.


Microsoft Live Workspace is Microsoft's answer to google's online office suit. This one is still in private beta and promises lots of cool features. I use online google's docs & spreadsheet very extensively and wouldn't mind migrating to Microsoft's Live Workspace because I don't want to maintain multiple accounts.
Talking about multiple accounts, Microsoft has come up with a great service which lets you link your multiple live accounts with one account. So, just sign in once and you are all set.
Live Calendar is also open to public beta now. Its Ajax based and carries a Live-look. I didn't get much time to review it but I'm sure it'll be useful.

Biggest advantage I see here is the power of integration. You can integrate Live Messaeger into your Space, show off your Soapbox videos, embed Live maps into Events, show off your documents using SkyDrive, share your Favorites & lot more.
Miscrosoft is planning to venture into Photo Sharing space too. Windows Live application suit is also in good shape now. I think, after couple of years, you'll just need one Windows Live ID and you'll be sorted.

Keep watching this space for more details.

Its been less than two weeks since Apple announced its ambitious range of iPods. That day, I felt like its the death of all other music player makers and they should immediately stop producing any unit.
But tables have turned now.

iPhone buyer became furious because Apple Chief Steve Jobs slashed the phone's price to $400 from $600, making early adopters look like suckers.Jobs issued an apology and a $100 gift certificate to contain the damage. Wall Street smelled weakness in the price cut and pushed Apple shares down 10% to $130 within two days.

It looks like an anti-Apple backlash has begun. NBC Universal, chafing at Apple's insistence that every TV show is worth $1.99 to download, is bolting the iTunes store after December, going with Amazon instead. Vivendi's Universal Music Group also reportedly won't renew its contract with Apple. 

AT&T, the wireless carrier for iPhone, was entirely shut out of selling its content services on Apple's phone.

AppleTV has been a flop. The iPhone started strong but must be fading--why else cut the price?

There seems to be a number of people who think the new 6G iPod classic sounds noticeably worse than the 5.5G iPod that it replaced. Apple discussion forum has comments like, "The new iPod classic "sounds precise, crisp, but lacks 3D image and has an electronic haze to the sound... [which] becomes fatiguing after a while"

There are increasing reports out there about problems with the screens on the new iPod touch. Apparently many folks are complaining that the screen is very dark and lacking in details. Above you can see a comparison on Apple Touch comparing the iPhone to the iPod touch (right). Over at the Apple Discussion boards a third-party LCD engineer weighs in with a possible answer: bad quality control in manufacturing led to an error with the anti-reflective coating.
Apple has accepted it as a defect. Read more about it here.

So, here I am.. Listening radio on my Zune and flashing it proudly. I no longer regret my decision of buying it and do not wish for iPod Touch now. Will wait for iRiver's new WiFi-touch screen player instead :-)
 

USB 3.0 improves upon its successors by adding fiber-optic cable alongside the copper wiring, greatly increasing the speeds. The upgrade should allow for high-def devices, such as HD DVD or Blu-ray players, to use the standard to send data. As of now, today's USB cables aren't fast enough for such heavy transfers, sending data at 480 megabits per second. USB 3.0, on the other hand, will increase that tenfold to a whopping 4.8 gigabits per second. The fancy new cables should start hitting shelves and being used in devices around 2009 or 2010. 

Via Crave