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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Google Launches Video Chat for iGoogle

In November 2008, Google added video chat to Gmail, allowing you to video chat with other Gmail users after downloading a small plugin. Now Google is extending its video ambitions, launching video chat for the iGoogle homepage.

What’s the advantage of having video chat on your personalized homepage? The main benefit is that you can now speak to friends who don’t use Gmail (although they still require a generic Google account). You’ll also need to download a plugin to make it work.

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Stupeflix: Powerful Movie Making From Your Browser

Quick Pitch: Stupeflix is a web service that turns digital content (images, text, audio, videos) into awesome videos.

Genius Idea: Think of Stupeflix as an advanced way to mashup your videos, photos, and music and create a video collection or home movie that you can download or share on the web. Using the Stupeflix editor you can upload your content and music, drag and drop to organize content in and out of groups, add video effects, associate tracks with groups (or the whole movie), insert text overlays, and piece together your own movie.

The browser-based movie-making service isn’t exactly a plug-and-play application, but it isn’t overly complicated either, and it does provide a pretty impressive tool for combining your video, photos, and music in any fashion you desire. It’s a unique and sophisticated approach to turning digital content into story-telling entities that you can then share across the web or save for personal use. Advanced users can even use the XML editor to add their own parameters.

The site is also hoping to attract business users by giving companies the ability to broadcast on mobile devices, brand their own content, include call to actions, add interactivity, and leverage text-to-speech technology. They also have a powerful API that can turn feeds into libraries of videos, much like this impressive group of videos they created from Wikipedia content.

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Zoho Mail: Now With Offline and Mobile Support

It’s tough being a competitor to Gmail. Google has been the first major company to offer virtually unlimited storage for e-mails, and the simplicity of the service, solid spam filtering and good integration with other Google services has made Gmail a favorite for many.

Zoho Mail has been in private beta stage so far and thus it is definitely not as widespread as Gmail, but it has always been a worthy competitor. It’s a slick, feature-rich client that tries to marry Gmail’s simplicity with the overall look and feel of a full featured desktop email client, such as Outlook. Today, they’ve reached an important milestone - Zoho Mail is coming out of private beta, and it has some new features to show off.

First,through Google Gears, Zoho Mail now supports offline mode. To access, it, you must have Google Gears installed in either IE or Firefox, and click on the “Setup Offline” link on the top. Zoho Mail will recognize your connection status and switch between online and offline mode seamlessly. It may not be a killer feature, but it’s useful, and the fact that Gmail has been dabbling with it for quite a while but the official offline mode is still not out there is in Zoho’s favor.

Another important feature is mobile support - oops, did I say mobile? I meant iPhone, since Zoho Mail currently only works with Apple’s phone, and support for other devices is “in the works.” Just login to zoho.com from your iPhone and you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail right there.

These two features, along with some others, for example support for Gmail-style labels as well as Outlook-style folders, and integrated chat, make Zoho Mail an interesting competitor in the Web mail field and a great addition to the already very solid Zoho Office suite.

Courtesy: Mashable

Zoho Mail Gets Offline Support via Google Gears - Ahead of Gmail

Innovative Web Office startup Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again, announcing offline support for the newly public Zoho Mail tonight. Ironically Zoho is using Google Gears to enable offline functionality in Zoho Mail - see the video below by the Google Developer team. Zoho also beat Google to offline support in online word processing, again using Gears, by launching that functionality in November 2007. Google followed up with offline support for Google Docs at the end of March 2008.

We wrote in July about speculation that Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Didn't happen.

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes. The video is also available on Google Code blog.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Publish Sweet Looking Blogs OnSugar (Video)

OnSugar is a new blogging platform with a twist. The service has added several functions usually found on other social networking sites so that it feels like a blend of WordPress mixed with Twitter. For example, on the homepage you can view the public timeline which updates with posts from all blogs or just those you follow. You can also follow bloggers and their blogs and send them private messages (just like Direct Messages).

One of the most useful features is the drop down menu that allows you to jump from one of your blogs to another. The other menu item (see right image) displays all of the tasks that you can perform on the blog you’re currently visiting. For example, you can create a new post, edit drafts, change themes, widgets or pages. You can also change your site settings or invite other bloggers to guest blog on your site.

Speaking of themes, you can use existing themes or copy them and change them to make them your own. You can also create your own original theme from scratch if you want.

The Start Following link appears on all blogs and acts like the subscribe to RSS feed option that we see on all blogs these days.

When you create a new post you’re presented with a great deal of choices, which is another thing that makes this blogging platform different than most standard platforms. You can create many different types of blog posts. Besides the standard text post, you can also create polls, question and answer type quizzes, quotes, links and more. As for media, you can upload audio and video files or embed them.

The home page has a cool filtering system that lets you display whatever you want to see. For example, you can choose to see all new posts from all blogs or just the sites you subscribe to.
MP4 / Subscribe for Free!

You can select what kind of posts to view too, such as only posts with audio, video, polls, quizzes, links, etc. It’s a unique way to let users manage and control their blogs and those that they follow.
The service might appeal more to women because of its initial look and feel, but there seems to be a significant amount of men on the service already. The platform is different so we’ll have to see what shakes out when more traditional bloggers give it a try. Is it a good idea to mashup social media services with the blogging platform model? I think it is. WordPress and Blogger have made strides (ever so slowly) to give their users more social media tools and functions. Time will tell how much farther they will go to make their blogging platform more social.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Zoho Mail: Now With Offline and Mobile Support

It’s tough being a competitor to Gmail. Google has been the first major company to offer virtually unlimited storage for e-mails, and the simplicity of the service, solid spam filtering and good integration with other Google services has made Gmail a favorite for many.

Zoho Mail has been in private beta stage so far and thus it is definitely not as widespread as Gmail, but it has always been a worthy competitor. It’s a slick, feature-rich client that tries to marry Gmail’s simplicity with the overall look and feel of a full featured desktop email client, such as Outlook. Today, they’ve reached an important milestone - Zoho Mail is coming out of private beta, and it has some new features to show off.

First,through Google Gears, Zoho Mail now supports offline mode. To access, it, you must have Google Gears installed in either IE or Firefox, and click on the “Setup Offline” link on the top. Zoho Mail will recognize your connection status and switch between online and offline mode seamlessly. It may not be a killer feature, but it’s useful, and the fact that Gmail has been dabbling with it for quite a while but the official offline mode is still not out there is in Zoho’s favor.

Another important feature is mobile support - oops, did I say mobile? I meant iPhone, since Zoho Mail currently only works with Apple’s phone, and support for other devices is “in the works.” Just login to zoho.com from your iPhone and you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail right there.

These two features, along with some others, for example support for Gmail-style labels as well as Outlook-style folders, and integrated chat, make Zoho Mail an interesting competitor in the Web mail field and a great addition to the already very solid Zoho Office suite.

Courtesy: Mashable

Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Beta

Back in April, Yahoo acquired IndexTools, a provider of analytics software based in Hungary. Today, that service has re-emerged as Yahoo Web Analytics, and is being offered as a limited beta to customers of Yahoo Small Business – the company’s suite of tools for helping small businesses market and sell products online. Additionally, the tool will also be made available to select Yahoo advertisers.

As you might expect, Yahoo Web Analytics includes integration with other Yahoo products. For example, you can analyze the effectiveness of Yahoo search marketing campaigns and track how well individual products within your e-commerce shop are trending. The product will naturally be compared to Google Analytics, the free offering from Google that has similar integration with AdWords.

While it may be late to the party, Yahoo Web Analytics is apparently a big upgrade for Yahoo Small Business customers. Mashable contributor Sean Aune is a user of the service, and sent along the following screenshot as an example of what the service’s rather archaic reporting looks like today:

If nothing else, if you look at the screenshot below of the new service, it would seem that Yahoo Web Analytics has just received a long overdue upgrade:

Yahoo plans to roll out the service gradually to its Small Business Customers through the end of the year and expand the offering to other users in 2009.

Courtesy: Mashable

Make VoIP Phone Calls Over Email with Momail and Jajah

JAJAH, a VoIP service provider that manages connections for social network users and mobile and non-mobile phones, has teamed up today with Momail, a free mobile mail operator, allowing users to make VoIP phone calls by simply sending an email.

All it takes for Momail users to implement this new option is to register with JAJAH under Momail’s “On Demand” feature page, located within a user’s member page. Once complete, you simply send an email to JAJAH with a phone number you intend to call. JAJAH will subsequently initiate a call to your handset, followed by a call to the intended party.

Momail alone is an interesting invention. Along with popular third-party webmail recognition and push mail for phones - which support the technology - Momail claims to compress data received by users by up to 99 percent its original size. For those operating on metered data plans or simply for phones that cannot consume large file sizes (or whose owners simply don’t have to patience for such transfers), this is handy indeed. Now with JAJAH’s VoIP feature on board, Momail is able to provide extra power with little or no extra investment on the user side.

Note:Momail is still in beta in some countries, including the United States. You’ll have to request a password in order to gain entry.

Courtesy: Mashable

Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously.

Microsoft has announced that the latest version of Windows, due in the next couple of years, will be called - drumroll please - Windows 7. It’s about time Microsoft adopted a naming system that might actually make some sense to users, but I can’t wait for hordes of customers to start asking if they somehow missed Windows 1 through 6.

Windows has had one of the most ridiculous naming schemes in the history of software. First there were logical (but ugly) version numbers, like the once commonplace “Windows 3.1″. Then with the release of the overhauled Windows 95 the company adopted a naming system based on the year of release, which it continued until Windows 98.

Windows Me (perhaps the worst operating system I’ve ever used), sacrificed the scheme for a chance to be clever (it stood for “me” and the millennium at the same time!) Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it’s catchy, and we have no idea what it means. Fine.

Finally we had Windows Vista, which seemed to stick with the naming convention of “something that sounds sort of cool but didn’t really mean anything”. It had been more than five years since the release of XP, so there was little chance of confusion.

Microsoft is now in a hurry to push out its next operating system after the generally dismal response to Vista. And so we’ve come to Windows 7, which is apparently tied to the build numbers and not the actual releases. The new naming scheme lends itself well to faster, more incremental releases similar to what we’ve seen from Apple (about once every 18 months), but it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be more bland.

You can read more at the company’s blog post here.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Chrome Coming to Android

The browser-bearing world was atwitter yesterday with the announcement of Google’s Chrome browser. Just about overnight, they’ve managed to convince hordes of people that Chrome is the way to browse on your PC. Next step? They’re taking it mobile.

According to an interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the two projects will start working together more closely now that both are approached 1.0 releases, with the Android browser adopting much of Chrome’s inner workings. He also expects the mobile browser to pick up a new name to indicate the relation to it’s bigger, full-blown browsin’ brother.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch