Smaaz’s Blog

Google Toolbar 3 Beta out for Firefox

Google announced the release of a new version of their Google Toolbar for Firefox. The third version contains all the features from the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, such as storing your bookmarks on a Google server or sending SMS. But it also has an exclusive feature only for Firefox users - ”Docs & Spreadsheets” allows you to open a lot of different document types in your Firefox Browser, instead of downloading and then viewing them with a separate application.

Add comment December 13th, 2006

Google released source code for Google Web Toolkit

Google announced the release of the source code for their Web Toolkit, under an open source license. The Toolkit allows you to build AJAX applications, like they are used in GMail or Google Maps. The source code can be found here!

Add comment December 12th, 2006

New Book Search from Live.com

The Live.com team has released a beta version of their new book search at http://books.live.com/. This release makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from their library scanning initiative, including books from the University of California, the University of Toronto, and the British Library. They also announced a new partnerships with the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine.

1 comment December 6th, 2006

Baidu.com expands to Japan

The operator of the chinese search engine Baidu.com anncounced an expansion to the japanese market. According to the Wall Street Journal, Baidu started working on the japanese version of their search engine, about six month ago, and also opened an office in Tokio already.
Baidu.com, is the most used search engine in china and contains more then a billion websites and documents in their index. According to Alexa.com, it is also the fourth most visited website world-wide.

Add comment December 4th, 2006

MySpace goes China

According to the Wall Street Journal, News Corp. plans to start a chinese version of its social-networking site MySpace, pretty soon. But the network, that already has more than 130 million users and regional versions for the UK, Germany, Australia, France and Japan, will face some big problems with China’s Internet censorship. Other US companies as Yahoo! or eBay already had a hard time with the goverment regulations. But Murdoch hasn’t been shy about his ambitions. ”We have to make MySpace a very Chinese site,” he said.

Add comment December 1st, 2006

Google Answers will be shut down

Google has announced, that their Answers service will be discontinued later this week. Answers has been online since early 2002, and contains answers on more than 260,000 questions. According to Google, all the Qs ans As, that have been posted within the last 4 years, will remain online.
Seems, you now have to visit Yahoo!’s Answers service, if you still have unanswered Questions.

Add comment November 29th, 2006

YouTube has announced cooperation with Verizon

YouTube/Google and Verizon Wireless have agreed on a cooperation, which will bring videos of YouTube.com on Verizon mobile phones. Starting from early december, the service will be availabe on Verizon’s VCAST-Portal, for a fee of $15 for a month or $3 per day. Verizon will do a preselection, to make sure that only videos will be available, that fit the small displays and also have the highest quality.
YouTube also announced, that this co-operation will be exclusive only for a limited timespan.

Add comment November 28th, 2006

Cut out the Bank - Loan 2.0

Just came accross the finance co-op network of the UK company Zopa.
Zopa is an internet business that introduces borrowers to private lenders and cuts out the bank. Since the credit sum can be distributed on several credit givers, the risk is reduced. So the system of Zopa is different to the loan system of the big banks:

“At banks, people who have spare money put it into an account. The banks then use it for lots of different things. Some of it they lend to people who need to borrow. Some of it they gamble on the price of tin or the yen depreciating. Some of it they use to make their branches nice and pretty to attract more customers. And they make a lot of money doing all this, but only ever give their customers a comparatively small amount of interest.

Things work differently at Zopa. People who have spare money lend it directly to people like them who want to borrow. There are no banks in the middle, no huge overheads and no unethical investments.”

Their service is already used by more then 100,000 members and will be introduced in the US soon.

1 comment November 26th, 2006