Skype embraces Facebook – atleast they plan to

 New York Times reports that Facebook and Skype are in talks to integrate their services. Although none of their spokesman agreed to comment on this but a person who was briefed on this arrangement told NYT on the promise of anonymity that the partnership will be announced in next few weeks. 

What exactly this integration would bring for users:
This integration would take place through Facebook Connect and under the partnership, people who use their Facebook credentials to log in to Skype will be able to see their Facebook friends on Skype. They will also be able to see their news feed and to sent text messages and call their friends’ landlines using Skype. In other words Skype users who have presence all over the world would be able to use Skype software to interact with their Facebook social.

Skype’s user base is mainly from business community, Marketing and Sales personnels, Software Engineers and Consultants etc. All of them should get ready to get their hands dirty with ‘Social Activities’ right from within their communication software like Skype.

Read Full Story at: New York Times

Dual-Screen Laptops?! Yes, They’re Real (and Coming Soon)

The computer nerd in my really, really wants one of these.

Having your browser, iTunes, IM, TweetDeck, Word, Skype, Photoshop, video editing tools, folders, and more open at the same time…well, it just takes up a lot of screen real estate. On a 15.4″ laptop, you can only fit so much before your screen is piled with program after program.

gScreen, an Alaska-based notebook designer and manufacturer, aims to solve that problem, no matter where you are, with what can only be described as the PC version of a two-headed hydra: the dual-screen laptop.

Don’t believe us? Here are a few pictures that Gizmodo got its hands on

Each monitor slides, so that you can move the gScreen around compactly. Now that is awesome.

Here are the specs for this beast, listed on the gScreen website:
- 2 LED backlit display screens

- Windows VISTA/ WIN XP PRO (optional)

- Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26-GHz

- 4 GB of RAM (2GB DDR2 SO-DIMM x 2)

- 320GB 7200-rpm HD

- NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GT with 512MB dedicated memory (or)

- NVIDIA® Quadro FX 1700M Graphics with 512MB dedicated memory

- 9-cell battery

- IEEE 1394 1 Graphics Card Output (15-pin, D-Sub) X 1, HDMI X 1 Mic-in X 1, Line-in x 1, Headphone X 1 PCI Express Card X 1 AC Power Adaptor Output: 19V DC, 90W Input: 100~240V AC, 50/60Hz universal Battery Pack Li-ion 9 cells

This laptop is clearly meant for professional designers, programmers, filmmakers, and others that regularly need two monitors to get work done. Two-screen set-ups just allow you to get more done (thus why I use a two-screen set-up). There are disadvantages though, like the power drain two screens will cause and the sheer weight, estimated at 12+ pounds. And, of course, the price may be a deal-breaker: around $3000.

Still, this thing could do wonders for the productivity of digital professionals everywhere. And you may not have to wait long to get your hands on one; the company hopes to have the gScreen on the market by Christmas.

What do you think? Would you buy one of these two-headed beasts? Let us know in the comments.

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A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years. I’ve broken the image (which is quite massive on its own) into a few chunks below, and you can download the whole thing here.

Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).

In terms of Facebook users as a percentage of a nation’s population, small countries like Iceland and Norway lead the way, each of which has over 40% of their populations on the site. Of the larger nations, Canada is on top, with around 34.37% of its 33.6 million citizens using Facebook

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iPhone Unit Conversion App Makes $20,000 a Week

Have you tried out Convert, one of the better iPhone unit conversion apps out there? If you have, you’re not alone. In the first two weeks the app has been in the App Store, it was downloaded around 40,000 times.

Since the price of the application is $0.99, it turns out the app has pulled at least $39,600 so far, or just under 3,000 dollars per day, and it’s still growing. It reached the #2 top paid app spot in the US App Store, jumping from about a 1,000 downloads on 13th of August to over 6,000 daily downloads on August 25th.

Of course, not all of the money goes to the developer, tap tap tap. Because of the 70/30 revenue split with Apple, the developer actually earned around 27,720 dollars in the first two weeks. Still, very impressive for a one dollar app.

John Casasanta, the developer behind Convert, is no stranger to making money in the App Store; he has posted some impressive numbers before for a GPS-based app called Where To? which directs you to the nearest points of interest. Convert, however, is a very general, all-purpose application that, unlike Where To?, might stay in the top 10 for quite a while. If it manages to keep growing, or at least retain its current download rate, Convert might be one of the biggest moneymakers in App Store history.

When it comes to the App Store as a whole, it’s become a serious business. Today’s numbers from AdMob’s report (PDF) suggest the App Store market size is $200 million per month, or $2.4 billion per year, and those numbers are nothing to be laughed at

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11 Million Facebook Users Flock to Virtual Farming Daily

The rise of social gaming is happening more quietly than one might think given the statistics. Today we’re hearing about another potential milestone: Facebook application FarmVille claims to be the fastest growing social game in history, reaching an impressive 11 million daily users in a little over two months.

To put that in perspective, World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer game that dominates MMO marketshare with at last report 11.5 million active subscribers. Its publisher Blizzard hasn’t revealed any new population statistics since the end of last year, but assures the press that its figures are still growing. It took WoW four years to reach that many subscribers after its launch in late 2004.

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Facebook 3.0 For iPhone Now Available On The App Store

Nearly two weeks after submitting the app to Apple, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store, according to the app’s developer Joe Hewitt. You can download it now here. The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version.

The new application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically.

Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created.

One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them).

It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely. I couldn’t agree with him more.

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Lazyfeed Goes Live For Everyone

We’ve been seeing a lot of projects and startups trying to speed up RSS feeds. Today, a service is launching that addresses some of the issues with a different user-interface. Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta at our Real-Time Crunchup, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.

Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs and news feeds, all you have to do on Lazyfeed is type in a topic and Lazyfeed will show you the most recent posts and articles with that tag from the one million blogs that it now indexes. (This number is up from 100,000 blogs at launch). Headlines and excerpts containing that tag appear in the main window, and if you want to follow that topic, you can save the tag in a column on the left. As you save more tags, your interests appear as a list, which reorder themselves according to the latest posts.

So instead of a list of blogs, you have a list of interests, and Lazyfeed goes out and discovers content for you around those interests. For any given tag you put unto the search bar at the top, it also supplies you with related tags just underneath that you can click on to explore further. If you don’t like a particular blog, you can remove it from your results. Another new feature since the private beta launch is that you can now share any post on Twitter, Facebook, or email.

I like not having to worry about programming my feed reader (that’s the lazy part), but I also see that Lazyfeed is missing some key blogs right now (cough, TechCrunch). Founder Ethan Gahng says that is just because the site is going through a database re-organization which wasn’t completed in time for launch, and that should fix it itself soon. The other big question how fast the index picks up new posts. He doesn’t use Pubsubhubub, like Google Reader now does, but instead uses some internal technology to speed up crawling and indexing. But if Pubsubhubbub is faster, he should use that instead. In the realtime Web, speed is everything.

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Google Maps Will Now Show You Traffic Conditions On The Back Roads

Any one who commutes in major cities knows the value of back roads when it comes to avoiding traffic on the highways during peak rush hour times. Google Maps just added a nifty feature that will show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads (non-highway roads) in selected cities. Google Maps will also show traffic patterns on main highways as well, helping you see what the least-trafficked route is for your commute.

When you zoom-in on the city you’re interested in and click the “Traffic” button in the upper-right corner of the map, you’ll see the traffic conditions of both arterial roads and highways. The colors correspond to the speed of traffic green is little to no traffic, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic.

Google says that this feature can also be accessed on Google Maps for Mobile, which is particularly useful when trying to figure out the best route on the go. Google also shed a little bit of light as to how they crowdsource traffic info via Google Maps on mobile phones. When you enable Google Maps with My Location, the phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When Google combines your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, they can get an idea of traffic live conditions. They continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google assures users that they only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when the user has opted to enable location services on his or her phone.

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Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires Arab Internet Portal Maktoob

Yahoo has just officially acquired Maktoob, a very popular Arabic web portal that offers services including search, payments, social network, and auctions. Rumors of an aquisition have been building for months, and in the last hour they reached a head as news of an impending press conference broke. The price hasn’t been announced, but our sources say $85 million.

The MaktoobBusiness Twitter acccount notes that the deal will be unite “Yahoo’s 20 million users from the Arab world with Maktoob’s 16 million”, with Vice President Ahmed Nassef stating that it will bring “a sea change in the industry.”

Maktoob launched in the late 90’s as the first free Arabic Email service provider. Since then it has grown to encompass a variety of services, including payments, gaming, search, and auctions. According to comScore, Maktoob has seen very impressive growth over the last year, growing from 6 million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21.8 million a year later. Likewise, its page views have grown from 406 million to 1.1 billion over the same time frame.

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Nokia ‘Booklet 3G’ Netbook Details Coming In Early September

Know what’s popular nowadays? Netbooks! Nokia is officially jumping on the netbook bullet train with the “Booklet 3G” — an Intel/Microsoft-based netbook that promises 12-hour battery life, a weight of 2.75 pounds, and apparently built-in GPS. The “3G” portion of the name indicates a wireless data connection as well.

Actual specs and details will be announced by Nokia on September 2nd, but it’s believed that the Booklet 3G will run Windows 7. The 12-hour battery life is interesting, too, as that’s a full four hours longer than most netbooks currently on the market. It’ll be interesting to see which Atom CPU is used in the machine to obtain that kind of longevity. It may be a slower but less power-hungry Z-series CPU since the 10-inch Booklet will have a higher-resolution screen (likely 1280×800 or 1366×768).

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