Rockmelt- the social web browser

Rockmelt is a web browser which brings in the social media along with it.Meaning- You no more have to even open your Facebook/Twitter accounts in a seperate tab to use them. It is all present as inbuilt features in Rockmelt which makes it noticeable.

Well that is not it. There is some more you need to know about this web browser. To totally understand Rockmelt,lets know about "Chromium" and "WebKit" first.

Chromium is Google's open source web browser  project from which Chrome was built.
WebKit is a layout engine which renders web pages for the web browser.
To make it more clearer, Google Chrome and Apple's Safari is powered by WebKit. That is why we find many common features between the two browsers.  It is also said that Amazon's Kindle ebook reader uses WebKit for its browser. 
When i came across this information, the one question that popped up on my mind- Google and Apple uses the same layout engine for their browsers? INTERESTING!!
Initially WebKit was derived by Apple from Konqueror web browser and is now being extensively 
developed by the big shots like Google, Nokia,Apple, Bitstream and others.


Having briefed about the two important terms, we'l get back to Rockmelt browser which uses Chromium and WebKit.

Developed by   :  Tim Howes & Eric Vishria
Focus                 :   Google Search & Social Media
Launched          :   November 8,2010 (Beta version)
Rival                    :   "Flock" social web browser 


Notable Features:


i)   Facebook sidebar is present on the left side of the browser window which enables user to chat with his contacts.
ii)  The chat bar displays user's own status, display picture and his contact list.
iii) User can post on his friends' wall, message them or create favourites list without navigating to Facebook site.
iv)  Right side of the browser lets user to view his wall and notifications.
v)   Twitter is intergrated in Rockmelt.
vi)  Google search bar is present.


I know!!! All you need is here on one browser. A Feast to all social networking maniacs :) (Includes me)


Getting Rockmelt to your desktop:


i)   Goto Rockmelt website- www.rockmelt.com
ii)  Connect your Facebook account in the site.
iii) Receive an invitation mail.
iv) Download Rockmelt web browser to your desktop.


Work,have fun parallely!
Do write back. 
My comments section awaits your views. :)

Epic Browser-The first ever Browser designed by Indians for India

Epic Browser is the first product of Hidden Reflex founded by Bangalore based Alok Bharadwaj. Initially Hidden Reflex constituted 3 members and has consequently grown up.

When I came to know that there exists a browser for India made by Indians, I went up to the site to download it. Ammmazing work!! It has everything you need on one browser. So many applications that you can add, so many customizable themes which is India oriented and so on.

 
I'l start with the sidebar that is inbuilt with the browser.

•     Epic India is all about news of all categories
•     Epic Indic Text is where you can type in any of the Indian languages
•     Epic Skins lets you choose the themes and backgrounds and as i said it has lots to do with India
•     The browser has an inbuilt antivirus, a text editor, snippets-which lets users highlight words/  images       and save them automatically to your hard drive.                                                            
•     You can add your My computer,My documents etc to your sidebar for added convenience
•     Aaah,,this is for people who spend endless hours infront of computers like me-To do applications         and timers.Very helpful tool- especially for me coz whenever I start working on my computer I             eventually get pulled by social networking sites. Reallly addictive!
•     Needless to say, the browser has Facebook, Gmail, Orkut, Twitter,Yahoo,Maps in it. 
•     Additionally icons like travel,games, jobs are also present
•     Collections- The sites which the users open regularly can be put in a collection and can be opened 
•     Then the ususal apps like History,bookmarks downloads are also present.

Users are allowed upto 1500 applications to the browser.

 Unlike other browsers, Epic browser claims that they do not save user's search data.The look and feel of the browser is too good. From now on Epic is gonna be my default browser.

DOWNLOAD EPIC here

According to Alok Bhardwaj, CEO and Founder of Hidden Reflex, “We want to prove that India can be a hub for innovation in software and technology."  Sure it is :)

INDIANS ROCK!!

Buzz, Twitter and FaceBook- All in one page

Buzz has become popular overnight. But users dont have to sacrifice using Twitter or Facebook or keep changing the tabs to goto the respective sites.
As i was browsing the other day I ended up in "Mashable" where I read about an article which would enable us using Buzz,Twitter and Facebook without even leaving Gmail page. Tried it and its working. So thought of sharing it here.


Here is how it goes:


1. Open your Gmail account.


2. Goto Settings - >Labs -> Add any Gadget by URL (last one among the many thats listed). Enable it.


3. Goto Settings->Gadgets


4. For adding Twitter gadget copy this link and paste it
    https://twittergadget.appspot.com/gadget-gmail.xml


5. For adding Facebook gadget copy and paste this link
    http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml


Refresh the page and its done.

                      Expand the Facebook gadget and this is how it would look after
                      embedding the two gadgets.


Checking mail, Buzzing, Tweeting, Facebooking - now all in one page 

Zinga to open its office in India soon

Facebook users would surely know about Farmville and that the game was created by Zinga- the largest social game provider. Zinga has recently announced about its opening office in Bangalore.

India stands third in terms of Internet usage after China and United States. And this may be the reason for Zynga CEO Mark Pincus to decide opening office in India which currently has more than 80 million Internet users. Games developed by Zynga includes Farmville, Fishville, Yoville, Petville, Cafe World, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Vampire Wars, Pirates and so on.

Zynga aims in promoting all these games in  future and it is expected that the company would start recruiting computer engineers and game developers across the country.

The youtube magic!

YouTube having millions of videos posted enables people only to watch them and not download them for free. However many applications have been designed to download these videos for free. For eg: Type "youtube video download" in Google- many applications pops up in competition. You can either download them to your desktop and save your favorite videos or you can also download the videos online without having to download the application itself. 

Guess what?? The above said is already outdated. There is even more simpler way of downloading videos. 

Follow these steps:

1. Goto www.youtube.com and see what video you wanna download

2. Copy the address and switch to a new tab/window of your browser

3. Now in the address bar- paste the address and wait, dont click enter

4. In the address you have pasted replace y by 3 and leave the rest of the address as it is

5. That leaves us with www.3outube.com/(with the selected videos address)

The rest is taken care automatically. You will be prompted to a download page where you have to specify the preferred format and click save.

DONE !!

Yah Bin Goo

Wondering what it is?

Search engines are competing against each other at fast pace. But you dont have to confuse which search engine to use or keep switching tabs giving various search engine addresses to get your result. That is how YahBinGoo comes into the picture.

YahBinGoo(as the name implies) is the combined version of Yahoo, Bing and Google search engines i.e you can use three search engines at the same time.

Each of these engines have different strategy according to which the related websites to your query is listed. When this is the case why not have all the three major search engines on one screen when you search?!

Now the features

1. You can view the results of the respective search engine in tabs if you like

2. Press SHIFT and left click to open the link in new window

3. Press CNTRL and left click to open the link in new tab

4. Press ALT and left click to download the webpage

And there are some more tricks which you would find it useful

Start searching in an entirely new way!!

InterviewStreet

Are you a job seeker?

Are you in your final year of college awaiting placements?

Do you wish to get yourself into one of the tier one companies?

If yes, here you go..

There is an all new website you should check it out-interviewstreet.com

About the founders

InterviewStreet portal is started by two youngsters-Vivek Ravisankar and Harisankaran who finished their graduate degrees from National Institute of Technology, Trichy in 2008. They left behind their jobs at Amazon and IBM and started this portal which has a whole bunch of interesting features which I havent come across in any other portals so far.

Now about interviewstreet.com

So how does this different from the other ususal portals?

Heres the answer:

InterviewStreet enables you to attend mock interviews from highly skilled working professionals from the company you choose. Isnt tat cool??

At present they have four companies from which you can choose one- Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and CTS. They claim to add more companies in future. Once you register for a company, in around 2 days or so, you get to attend the mock interview.

There are pricing plans as well :

For Bronze, you get 1 interview and 1 multiple choice question test.

For Silver, you get to attend 2 interviews and 1 online written test with evaluation.

For Gold,you attend 3 interviews, 2 tests and feedback of each question answered.

Pay and get benefits accordingly.

Not only does this website offer mock interviews, it also gives a lot of interview tips, phone interview tips, workshops that are about to be held in colleges and a lot of important stuffs you need to check out.

And visit mcq.interviewstreet.com also. It has the mock aptitute, verbal tests etc.

My favourite part of the portal is the 'Articles' section which is too informative to ignore. So make it a point to go through it.

So guys, make the best use of this portal and get yourself into one of those tier 1 companies out there!

And good luck to interviewstreet team!

Cheers!

The new iPod from Apple

Apple which is known world wide for its user friendly gadgets has extended the features of its Nano iPod. Apple iPod came in two categories- shuffle and nano both of which had become a sensation once it entered the market. Nano which has been serving only music to millions is now coming up with video camera, Music genius, FM, VoiceOver and Fitness. Wats even more exciting is the size of the iPod is still the same. 

Video recorder:

With a few scrolls you could access the video camera and start recording the fun things happening around you. A built in mike lets u record the audio too. 

Music Genius:

Now this is not something new for those who are familiar with iTunes. When you really love a song you could turn on the genius in the nano which brings you a playlist of songs that would sound great with the one you love. If you are not satisfied with the playlist refresh it and give it a go for another combination of songs. 

And one of the best features of iTunes is Cover Flow which will be available in the upcoming Nano too. You cannot find an easier way to browse through your songs. And just give the Nano a shake to shuffle the songs. Pretty cool 

FM Radio:

FM in Nano is not just the FM you listen daily in your other gadgets. Besides playing the station you tuned in it also tells who and what you are listening to. Two mind blowing features which comes along with FM- Live pause and iTunes Tagging. If you had to go for a break while your favourite song is playing, just pause it and go ahead. The song is all yours and you can play when you want to. You can also rewind and fast forward it. And its still FM ( APPLE, YOU ROCK).

And what is all about iTunes tagging ? Say you listen to a song in FM and you seem to like it. When you goto iTunes library you forget the name of the song. Is this happening with you? Then new Nano makes it simple for you. You  can tag the songs and make a list of all the songs you like. Later when you synch it with iTunes you can download them as you wish.

Voice Over:

This is something that was already put in iPod Shuffle as an additional feature. Voice Over tells you what song you are listining to and also the artist without interrupting your music. And it talks multiple languages too. 

Fitness:

The built in accelerometer helps you to remain fit. You just turn it on before starting from your place to see how many footsteps you take to meet your goals. 

8GB iPod Nano costs $149 (around Rs.7000) and 16GB costs $179( around Rs.8500). Totally worth it and I cant stop falling in love with Apple gadgets. 

Waiting to get my pay cheque so that i get one. 

The after effects of Gmail outage

Yesterday Gmail seemed to be down for a while as a result of which millions of users were not able to access Gmail. The first thought that came to my mind was if it was only me having this problem and then I was relieved when I found tweets like  "Gmail is down", and many queries like"Is Gmail down?". 

Millions of users have posted in various social networking sites. Twitter's one of the most trending topics yesterday was Gmail outage. But it was only for a while. Google informed their users that they will be back up shortly and seemed to regret for the inconvenience caused. 

Gmail is the third most popular email service, Yahoo Mail is second and Microsoft's Hotmail continues to remain in the 1st place.As said, the problem was fixed and they informed the users through official Gmail blog. Gmail was back to normal again serving its 37 million users (according to ComScore in June). And a user after that has posted "The heavens opened, and then there was light. Gmail is back up" on Twitter.  

Bottom Line:

Just to be confident that you are not the only one to face denial of access problems check out the tweets on twitter or google it. You will get the best and convincing results of whats happening around. :) 

Beware of social networking sites

Utilizing social networking sites in right manner is most important these days. Unfortunately many users fail to be aware of the impending danger that is likely to happen by their own posts on these sites.

Letting the world know what they are upto is what most of the users post in social networking sites.Posts like "Off for the weekend", "Home Alone", "Will be back in 10 days" is like inviting burglars to ur house as reported by "The Digital Criminal report" conducted by a U.K based consulting firm. The survey has reported that 38 % of 2000 social networking users post their plans about vacations and their return dates on these sites. (If you are one among them stop that right away)

Whats much worse is many post their addresses and contact numbers in these sites as well which could be even more easier for strangers to track you down. Some even go the extent of posting about the new expensive things they happen to buy recently.

So beware of whats liable to happen because of the posts which you think sounds "cool". Could be pretty dangerous. 

Google Vs Microsoft

We all pretty much know that Google and Microsoft are the two giant companies competing with each other to invade the world. And that day would come before long.

Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen began its journey in 1979.This corporation mainly focussed on their operating system called Windows which has become popular in a short period of time because of its user friendliness. Microsoft Office enables people to create smart presentations,docs and calculations using Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel etc. Users dont have to be a genius to work on these environments. All this success let Microsoft to expand its wings from Windows 98 to Windows XP and then to Windows Vista. The latest sensation being the yet to be released Windows 7.



And now we have Google founded on 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with main focus on their Search engine. Google has been a default option for searching the web for a long time. Google accounts for around 60% of online searches-a record which no other search engine has come near to it. Though these two companies seem to have different focusses they do compete with each other. Like Microsoft Office, Google has its own Google Docs which enable users to create their docs and presentations. When it comes to Google everything is Web based. You dont have to have softwares installed in your PC to do all this work instead you just have to login to Google to get your work done.



But then Microsoft will never let its users down which is why it has its own Office Live Workspace which works similiar to Google Docs. Here you go!If its Microsoft's MSN that provides mail service to people, Google has its own Gmail. And if its Google Chrome its Internet Explorer from Microsoft's side. This competition doesnt stop with computers alone. If Microsoft introduced Windows Mobile operating system for smartphones, so does Google by introducing Google Android which is an open source OS.

Google has various other products too- Blogger, Google Maps, Google Chrome, GTalk, YouTube, Picassa, Orkut, GMail etc. All these have become a part of our lives these days. Thanks to Google!

On the other hand Microsoft's products apart from the operating systems are MSN, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Zune, the incredible XBox series of games,.NET softwares,silverlight, many hardware products and the latest sensation being Bing-Microsoft's search engine. How cool is that!

Both Google and Microsoft keeps buying the potential companies to strengthen their market but both didnt make it up buying Yahoo when it was under financial stress in 2008. And the both the companies have been investing a lot in Cloud Computing which has proved to be a boom these days.And both Google and Microsoft along with more companies have joined hands to make ue of the 'white spaces'(unused bandwidth in the frequency spectrum of television) in future!

As we saw earlier while Google focusses on online services and Microsoft on desktop applications these two companies are now trying to become successfull other way round too-Google on desktop applications and Microsoft on online services!
Sky is the limit for both Google and Microsoft.

Iam a fan of both Google and Microsoft for these are the giants who have made us go digital!

GTalk- becomes informative and entertaining

Most of us use Google products like Blogger, Picassa, iGoogle, GMail, Orkut, Youtube and GTalk extensively. Recently more cool features have been added to some of these products and GTalk tops that list.

GTalk is no longer just used for chat and file transfers. The functions are upgraded so that it can be used irrespective of whether ur chat friends are online or not. If you are a job seeker the latest new feature would serve you best. Naukri has just launched its job search feature in GTalk.


Add jobs@chat.naukri.com as your friend in GTalk and when you see this online type help and you get the necessary information to proceed further. You can enter your location, experience, search for a particular job or even search by giving your Naukri Id.

Apart from this I think there is something more which is worth sharing and has been in use for quite a long time. In you case you dont find any of your friends online and you need to kill time you could go for this- Add games@gtalkbots.com as your friend in GTalk and when it is online start about by typing anagram. You receive a jumbled word and you have to assemble it to get a sensible word. As simple as it sounds. This becomes more interesting when you register yourself in gtalkbots.com after which you get a chance to compete with several other people who are in gtalkbots. In such a case you would tend to beat the other person competing with you to get a high score.



There are many more features in www.gtalkbots.com , Check it out and enjoy exploring the new features of GTalk.

Safari 4-Downloaded by 11 million users in 3 days

Apple's web browser Safari 3 is upgraded to Safari 4 which was released few days ago. Within 3 days of its release, Safari 4 was found to be downloaded by 11 million users out of which 6 million downloads are done by Windows users.

According to Apple, Safari 4 is built on latest browser technologies like Nitro JavaScript search engine which enables this new browser to execute JavaScript nearly 8 times faster than IE8 and four times faster than Firefox 3.

Safari4 is said to have passed the Web Standards Project's Acid test. The company says that the browser supports offline technologies too. Be it Mac or Windows, Safari needs just 256mB RAM to perform well.

“Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president

Happy surfing with all new Safari 4 !!

Social networking sites becomes ineviatble these days

Heres an example of how much social networking sites are becoming a part of human life.

Pope Benedict XVI has launhed a new Facebook application named as "Pope2U".

Pope2U in Facebook lets people receive the Pope's messages through this social networking site. So you can see Pope in Facebook, receive his messages, get his blessings and wishes through postcards also.. And u can send those e-post cards to your friends..

How cool is that!

And this is a good change welcomed by all.

Not long back I came to know tat US President Barack Obama has a twitter account too.

http://twitter.com/BarackObama. You can check his updates here.

Hats off to the these netwoking sites which are making things around us simpler!

Mac Vs PC - Conflicts of ads

The steady competition between these two giants increase in the form of ads. With the release of "Get a Mac" video ad, Microsoft made Redmond company to make many advertisements in an attempt to turn the customers from buying Mac.
In the latest Laptop hunters ad featuring a mother and a daughter, where they end up buying a dell laptop ignoring a $2000 Mac. The main reason for rejecting Mac is its price(As said in the ad).