Google China to push music tracks

Google is offering free downloads of licensed music tracks in China.

Rival search engines in China point users to unlicensed music, which reportedly makes up 99% of all tracks distributed in China.

The firm has just 16.6% share of the search market versus 76.9% for Baidu.com, according to the Chinese Internet Network Information Centre.

Google said it had no plans to expand its music service beyond China.

More than 350,000 songs, from Sony, Warner, EMI and Universal, will be available to Chinese users of Google, which has partnered with music website Top100.cn. Google will share advertising revenue with the major music labels.

Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said the fact it did not offer music downloads was the missing piece of its strategy in the country.

"We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads," Lee said. "We were missing one piece ... we didn't have music."

Research showed 84% of people in China used search engines to find music, said Mr Lee.

"This is the first serious attempt to start (monetising) the online market in China. I can't overestimate how important this is," said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia Pacific and Asia chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

The IFPI report that China's total legitimate music market is worth $76m, less than 1% of global recorded music sales.

International users will not be able to listen to or download songs from the Google China music service.

Social sites dent privacy efforts

Greater use of social network sites is making it harder to maintain true anonymity, suggests research.


By analysing links between users of social sites, researchers were able to identify many people in supposedly anonymous data sets.

The anonymised data is produced by social sites who sell it to marketing firms to generate cash.

The results suggest web firms should do more to protect users' privacy, said the researchers.

Circle of friends

Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Dr Vitaly Shmatikov, from the University of Texas at Austin, developed the algorithm which turned the anonymous data back into names and addresses.

The data sets are usually stripped of personally identifiable information, such as names, before it is sold to marketing companies or researchers keen to plumb it for useful information.

Before now, it was thought sufficient to remove this data to make sure that the true identities of subjects could not be reconstructed.

The algorithm developed by the pair looks at relationships between all the members of a social network - not just the immediate friends that members of these sites connect to.

Social graphs from Twitter, Flickr and Live Journal were used in the research.

The pair found that one third of those who are on both Flickr and Twitter can be identified from the completely anonymous Twitter graph. This is despite the fact that the overlap of members between the two services is thought to be about 15%.

The researchers suggest that as social network sites become more heavily used, then people will find it increasingly difficult to maintain a veil of anonymity.

The results also had implications for the social sites themselves, wrote the researchers.

"Social-network operators should stop relying on anonymisation as the 'get out of jail' card, insofar as user privacy is concerned," they said.

"They should inform users when their information is disclosed to third parties, even if this information has been anonymised, and give them the opportunity to opt out," they added.

Writing about their work, the two researchers said many different organisations might be interested in reconstructing the true identities.

They suggest that the information might be useful to governments interested in large scale monitoring or unscrupulous marketing firms keen to reach certain individuals. Even phishing gangs might be interested, they speculate, to make their messages look more convincing.

The pair will present a paper about their work to the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy taking place in California from 17-20 May.

WEBSPACE

COLOURlovers

Colours have a big influence on people. You might not realise it, but colours can affect your appetite, mood and energy levels. Advertisers, marketers and designers spend a lot of time and money devising new palettes to appeal.

COLOURlovers is an online resource where you can find inspiration and talk openly about your love of colours with like-minded people.

Whether you are designing your website, considering re-decorating your home, or are a professional in need of a little inspiration - there are literally hundreds of colour palettes and patterns for you to view and download.

The trends tab at the top of the site is interesting, as it picks up on current trends in magazine and website design, which could help you keep up to date and have your design work looking 100% in style.

And if you are the creative type you can even add your own colours and palettes to the database.

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Will It Blend?
I have no idea what inspired the makers of Will It Blend? But one thing I do know for sure is that you should definitely not try this at home.

The basis of this website is will stuff blend? By that, we mean what will happen if you put something in a blender and hit the on button. We are not talking oranges and whipped cream here - we know they blend - but how about a Rubik's cube, a sports ball or even an iPhone?

Crazy but true, these guys have blended them all and I watched the videos with nail-biting suspense. I particularly like the glow sticks blend for a bit of in-the-dark drama.

There is actually a Try This at Home section too for safe blends, like making chicken soup and grinding your own coffee beans. It is a bizarre collection of videos that I find strangely appealing. Amazing what you can find on the internet.

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Irrepressible.info

At irrepressible.info you can find out about amnesty international's campaign to ensure that the world wide web remains a bastion of free speech and expression.

The website states that the internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. It claims governments, with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world, are cracking down online freedom.

You can read all about their claims and see how to take action yourself on this clean and simple website.

It is up to you to make up your mind about what you read, and if you choose to sign up and pledge your support, you will be joining more than 80,000 others.

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Reading Test

Have you heard about the theory that the brain can make sense of a passage of text with the letters all jumbled up? This works as long as the first and last letters are in place.

On this website you can read the classic bit of text that describes the theory. You have probably seen it as a viral, as I think this one did the rounds a year or so ago.

Well, now some clever spark has created an engine where you can test out the theory on any site you like. Just plug the URL in the box provided and see how it works.

Google pulls some street images

Google has removed dozens of photos from its new UK Street View service.

The street-mapping facility launched amid a fanfare of publicity but now the firm has been forced to pull some of the images after complaints.

It is thought the pictures removed contained revealing images of homes, a man entering a London sex shop, people being arrested and a man being sick.

A spokesperson for Google told the BBC that anyone could have their images removed if they asked.

"We've got millions of images, so the percentage removed was very small," Google's Laura Scott told the BBC.

"We want this to be a useful tool and it's people's right to have their image removed.

"The fact there are now gaps [in Street View] shows how responsive we are," she added.

Street View first launched in the United States in May 2007 and is already available in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain and Italy.

The Netherlands version of the service also launched on Thursday, bringing the total number of countries covered to nine.

The imagery available comprises video taken along 22,369 miles of UK streets by customised camera cars.

Street scenes in 25 UK cities from Aberdeen to Southampton can be viewed using the service.

Offending photos have been replaced by a black image with the message "This image is no longer available". However, many of the images can still be viewed by moving up or down a notch on the street.

Dr Ian Brown, a privacy expert at the Oxford Internet Institute, said he was not surprised that there were some offending images.

"This is exactly what you would expect from a service that relies on individuals to help Google not make mistakes," he said.

"They [Google] should have thought more carefully about how they designed the service to avoid exactly this sort of thing."

Dr Brown said Google could have taken images twice, on different days, so offending images could have been easily replaced and protected privacy better.

Google says it has gone to great lengths to ensure privacy, suggesting that the service only shows imagery already visible from public thoroughfares.

It also uses face recognition technology to blur out faces and registration plates that appear in the images.

The Information Commissioner's Office ruled in 2008 that the blurring was sufficient to ensure that privacy was maintained.

Apple unveils new iPhone features

Apple has unveiled what it calls a "major update" to the operating system that drives the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Some of the 100 new features included in the update replicate those already offered by other smart phones.

The new functions include cut, copy and paste, long demanded by iPhone users, picture messaging and an in-phone search feature, but not Flash video.

"The upgrade is a big big deal and will help persuade consumers to stay with Apple," said Gartner analyst Van Baker.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7949940.stm

Apple's Scott Forstall demonstrates the iPhone's cut and paste feature

"While things like copy and paste and multi-media messaging (MMS) are things they have needed to do for a while, other features will in essence stop consumers buying other smartphones and raise the amount of money people spend on the iPhone, " he said.

Analyst Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray agreed that the upgrade was a major step forward.

"We believe Apple addressed key issues that were leading some consumers to competing devices for multimedia messaging and enterprise email."

Some of the other main features Apple highlighted for consumers include a voice memo and stereo Bluetooth.

A new search tool called Spotlight to allow users to search files and applications on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

"Profound and amazing"

Alongside the consumer upgrades Apple also unveiled its SDK (software developer kit) aimed at helping engineers write applications for the devices.

Apple admitted that the success of its App Store, where users can download from a choice of 25,000 paid-for and free applications, had exceeded their expectations.

More than 800 million downloads have been made so far, and the company said that with the help of developers they "had created something profound and amazing."

"Our goal was to make developers successful," said Scott Forstall, head of Apple's iPhone software development.

Developers will now be able to use the iPhone's mapping capability in their own applications, as well as take advantage of "push" technology to alert users of messaging or alert software.

Users can also now take advantage of enhanced peer-to-peer capabilities for games and other programmes that communicate wirelessly.

The new software will also allow developers to sell subscription-based software products, opening up the prospect of users being asked to pay for different levels of a game, to purchase additional content or to buy virtual items.

Previously, all purchases on the iPhone or iPod Touch were ring-fenced within either the App Store or Apple's mobile version of iTunes.

Industry analysts said the new move would be an important revenue-generator for Apple and developers.

"This in-app payment capability is big news and provides a way for people to pay for content again," said Mike McGuire of Gartner.

"It will be interesting to see how the print media reacts offering subscription services for magazines, newspapers and e-books.

"Game developers will cash in and I am very excited to see how music services leverage this new function," he said.

Hardware

The operating system upgrade, the third for the iPhone, will be available from the summer and free to all iPhone users.

Users who want to download the 3.0 software onto their iPod touch will have to pay a fee of $9.95 (£6.80).

Industry watchers are speculating that a new iPhone will also be released around the same time as the software upgrade.

"It wouldn't surprise me to see some new hardware come the summer," said Van Baker, of Gartner. He noted that Apple is facing increasing competition from other smartphones.

Gartner recently put Apple's share of the worldwide market at 10.7%, compared to Nokia at over 40% and Research in Motion, which makes the Blackberry, at under 20%.

"Apple can't continue to go with a point product and expect to get the kind of revenue it needs without some new offering. A good time to do that would be when they release 3.0," said Mr Baker.

At a separate question and answer session with journalists after the upgrade was unveiled, Apple's Phil Shiller said there was "nothing to announce on that today".

Blocking Orkut Albums Individually

Easy Lock Or Unlock Orkut albums individually by making yours yours Photos and Pictures available for both strangers as well as yours Friends in a single profile,By enabling this Features you can easily Prevent yours Private Pictures and Photos from Strangers and also from Fake Profile Creators by blocking albums Individually .This Features can be activated in User profiles in two ways .

First Method - This is a bit Lenthy Process then Second Process as It is done after moving to Orkut Privacy Setting

* Move to Orkut Setting >> Privacy Tab >> After reaching Privacy Tab Select Choose Individually from Drop down Menu in album Bar.

* Album List is Created when you choose individually option just below the album Bar as shown in Image below .



* Now Select which album you wana show to yours friends and which to whole Network of yours Friends.

Second Method -This Method is Easy then Previous method and can be done directly from yours Photos Album :) .

* To use This method Visit Photo Album >> Click On Edit Buttom :P Just below Album and From There Select whether you want to show that album to yours Friends Or Whole Network,And you are Done :) .

Note - This Features can Only Used to Lock Albums Individually But Not Pictures Individually ,So to lock Only Private Photos you have to seperate private Photos and Public Photos In Different Albums.

Changing Orkut Themes In Orkut Profiles Orkut Official Themes

Are you Bored Using Same Theme In Orkut themes,Then dont worry Orkut is also worried about that and for this they have Launched 12 Most Amazing Themes that will again create yours Interest towards Orkut , These Theme are launched Globally and you can installed these themes directly from yours Orkut Dashboard, :P

We have already discussed in ours Previous post about “5 +Non-Officially Orkut Themes ” that can be Installed manually by orkuters in Orkut. These Themes are launched Officiall By Orkut and can be used in all Browser i.e Internet Explore, Firefox etc.



If You are Interested in changing themes In Yours Orkut Profiles Then Orkut follow the below Guidelines !! :-D

* First of All Login To yours Orkut Profiles After that >> Click On Edit Profiles >> Click On Themes Tab as seen In below Image
* Select Themes Of yours Choice ,At present orkut have launched 12 Themes Only,but more to come soon.




Note :- If you think that these Features is still not activated In yours Profiles, Then you have to delete cookies in internet Explore ,To delete Cookies Go to Tools >> Internet Explore >> Delete Cookies after that Login orkut and Refresh the page you can now get change theme option in yours orkut profile.These Feature is Activated in all New Orkut Profiles.If you are facing any prblem in changing these themes then fell free to comment me yours problem.

How To Find Email ID of Any Orkut User

Do you want any Orkut user’s email ID for any reason? Orkut respects it’s user’s privacy and take the maximum care to protect their email ID from any unauthorized usages. But you can still find and get any Orkut user’s email ID. This trick is applied to those Orkut profiles who preferred not to show their email ID to anyone from the settings page. There is not one but two ways to track anyone’s email ID that he usages to login to orkut. Lets discuss them.



1. Send a Friend request to the person.
2. After sending the friend request, navigate to Manage Friends.
3. Search the person there in your Friends list.
4. Now you can find email ID of that person along with the pending friends request.
5. You are done.

The above trick is so simple. Yet there is an another way to track any Orkut user’s email ID. Follow the below steps.

1. Go to any orkut user’s profile page.
2. Click on More option, it’s there just below Add as a friend option.
3. From the more options select the Ignore User option and ignore him.
4. Now open Gtalk and click on Settings.
5. Now click on Blocked users.
6. This will show you all your blocked contacts. And from this contacts you will get the email ID of that orkut user.

Now you can get any Orkut user’s email ID eventhough he is not in your friends list. This Orkut trick will show you anyone’s email ID that was invisible to your previously. But don’t forget to remove him from your blocked contact list after getting his email address.

Web browsers battle at festival

Microsoft is ignoring web standards and should use its position to promote competition among browsers, the chief technology officer at Opera has said.

The complaint comes as Mozilla, the makers of another rival web browser, declared the "browser wars" over at the South by Southwest festival in Texas.

Hakon Wium Lie, from Opera, said: "Microsoft has to make sure there is user choice when it comes to browsers."

Internet Explorer's newest version will be standards compliant, Microsoft says.

Mr Lie said Microsoft's platform dominance gave them an "obligation to promote competition".

His company has already complained to the EU that Microsoft is using its dominance to promote Internet Explorer over Opera and other browsers. And Google has lent its support to the complaint.

Mr Lie said he was concerned that Microsoft would use its Windows Software Update System to distribute the forthcoming new version of Internet Explorer to users.

"That system should be used for other browsers too, to ensure users have genuine choice.

"We would be happy to channel Opera into that software update system," he added.

Firefox down

Mozilla's chief technology officer, Brendan Eich, told BBC News they would support any move to incorporate Firefox into the Windows Update System.

But Chris Wilson, platform architect of the Internet Explorer platform team, said adding other browsers to the automatic updates could confuse users.

He told BBC News: "It could be jarring [for users].

"The move form one browser to another is a bigger leap because they have different UI [user interfaces], different tenets and different missions," he said.

He pointed out that all the other browsers had their own automatic update systems.

He added: "Microsoft doesn't own the ecosystem - we don't own the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] channel.

"Other people can install things on there. I have had systems with other browsers pre-installed before."

Hobson's choice

Mr Lie said: "There is a choice for people who are conscious about it - they can download and install them.

"But there is still one dominant browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and most people don't care or don't know how to get other browsers.

"There is still room for more competition. Why does Internet Explorer have so many users when in the past it has been such a terrible browser.

"There are so many better options there," he added.

Mr Lie said Microsoft had backtracked on a commitment to be standards compliant with Internet Explorer 8, because the browser would not use default support standards when used on intranets.

Mr Wilson said the company had done this to ensure web developers could continue to use Internet Explorer 7 on their pages while they updated them to Internet Explorer 8.

Mr Eich said the imminent release of Internet Explorer 8 would see an end to the "browser wars" with users split between the last three versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

Mr Wilson agreed the "wars" were shifting into an era of co-operation.

"It's certainly fair to say there is a lot better co-operation and focus on interoperability across all the browsers."

Microsoft has faced criticism for "going it alone" in areas such as security and when it acted to fix the problem of so-called click-jacking, which is a cross-scripting method of shifting users from one URL to others without their knowledge.

While the problem affects all browsers, Microsoft implemented a solution on its own.

Mr Wilson said: "You need to respond very quickly otherwise you are leaving users to hang out to dry. We looked at where we were in the [development] cycle and couldn't wait for another cycle to address click-jacking."

He told BBC News: "In security issues you have to get solutions deployed quickly. We are perfectly happy for other browsers to take that solution and build on it."

Holes in the machine

Malicious software may just be a property of the network, says regular contributor Bill Thompson


The Conficker worm will be active again on 1 April, according to an analysis of its most recent variant, Conficker.C, by the net security firm CA.

This malicious piece of software, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, spreads among computers running most variants of the Windows operating system and turns them into nodes on a multi-million member "botnet" of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely by the worm's as yet unidentified authors.

Since it first appeared in October 2008 it has apparently infected more than 15 million computers around the internet, though even that number is no more than an educated guess because the worm works very hard to disguise its presence on a PC.

The worm turns

Conficker spreads through a security vulnerability in the Windows Server Service that allows a carefully written program to persuade the attacked computer to run malicious code instead of the Microsoft-written software.

Once installed it turns off Windows Automatic Update and stops you using the Windows Security Centre. It disables a range of internal services that could be used by anti-malware programs, blocks access to a number of anti-virus websites and even resets and deletes system restore points so you can't go back to an uninfected installation of your operating system.


And at some point it connects to a remote site to download additional malware and register itself as part of the botnet. The analysis of the latest version indicates that this will next happen on April 1st, and the day maybe a bad one because the way it does this has changed in the latest version of the worm, making it significantly harder to stop.

Previous Conficker infections were controlled to some extent because security researchers were able to determine which servers the worm was going to try to contact and block access to them before it did so. But the C variant has a much larger pool of potential domains to choose from, as it selects 500 target servers from a pool of 50,000 while previous versions chose 32 from 250.

As a result the ad hoc group of security researchers who have been working to limit the botnet's use, the Conficker Cabal, will have a much harder time ensuring that infected systems do not make the connection to the remote service that may allow them to be used to send spam e-mail, log user keystrokes or launch denial of service attacks on other computers.

We will have to wait until April to see how effective efforts at controlling Conficker are, but the analysis that has been done to date shows that it is a particularly well-designed program, one that will be hard to beat.

The overall sophistication of the current generation of malicious software is rather impressive, and I occasionally find myself admiring the skill of its developers in the same way that I can appreciate the technical skill and imagination that goes into fighter planes, tanks and modern armaments.

I may not approve of the use to which the ingenuity is being put, but I can't deny that Conficker's developers are ingenious in the way they have developed and distributed their code.



Whatever happens with this particular worm, we have to hope that the security features in Windows 7 will reduce the impact of all types of malicious software in the Microsoft ecosystem, although there will probably be enough unpatched systems around for some years to sustain Conficker and other worms, especially if the growth of netbooks means that Windows XP is still being used.

But while it's easy to blame Microsoft for making its systems vulnerable we should also acknowledge that our own demands have contributed a great deal to the current situation and may make a complete solution unachievable.

We have demanded complex, sophisticated computers that are easy to use, simple to interact with and able to connect to the internet as full peers. We want what Jonathan Zittrain calls "generative" systems that can run new software to take advantage of new services and connect us to new people. And we do not want to spend hours configuring firewalls, locking down features or scanning for potential malware.

History lesson


Perhaps we should not be surprised that attempts to make these systems secure have failed.

I see a parallel between our attempts to have security and reliability in the complex computer systems we are building today and the attempts by philosophers at the turn of the 20th to reduce all of mathematics to formal logic.

The work of Frege, Russell and Whitehead was undermined by the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel when he published his Incompleteness Theorem in 1931. He showed that in any sufficiently complex mathematical system there will be statements that cannot be proved either true or false, and that this is not because of errors or mistakes but is a fundamental property of the system.

His work made it clear that attempts to explain all of mathematics in terms of formal logic were doomed to failure, and there are clear similarities between our attempts to free our computers and the network from malware and the world described by Gödel.

There will always be flaws and security holes in the rich, complex computing environment, and as a result there will always be space for malicious software to propagate.

That doesn't mean our attempts to limit its spread and control the potential damage are futile, but it does mean they will be never-ending.

Disable Autoplay of Audio CDs and USB Drives

I find it very annoying when I go home from work and plug my laptop into my external hard drive… The autoplay window always pops up and asks me what I want to do with the files, which may be fine the first time, but definitely isn't after a year of that.

To get to the configuration screen for this setting, go to Start Menu \ Run and type in:

gpedit.msc

You will see the Group Policy window. You should select Administrative Templates \ System in the tree view:

















You will see an item in the right side pane called "Turn off Autoplay"



Double click the item, and set the radio button to Enabled, and change the "Turn off Autoplay on" to All Drives.



Now you should be safe from the autoplay monster.
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WEBSPACE
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Graphita.com

It seems like every day there is a cool new site for photo manipulation and sharing.

This week is no different, as I kick off my recommendations with this frivolous yet very funky offering from Graphita.com.

This site lets you do fun and silly alterations to your digital pictures.

Do not expect any artistically enhancing features like red-eye reduction or colour filters. This place is all about fake noses, silly glasses, outlandish hats and amusing captions.

You will need to register to save any pictures, so you might as well do that straight away.

Upload a picture from your computer and then select it from the bottom panel before clicking continue.

I found that uploaded pictures do not work in the edit screen unless you are registered - but as this site is still being developed, some strange behaviour is to be expected.

If you come across a problem - let them know.

Alternatively, if you are lacking inspiration or the material to work with, why not have a play with one of the preloaded pictures, also available in the bottom panel?

Once you have selected your picture it will open up in the edit window. Use the tabs across the top of the options panel to add your objects and any caption text, then just click save.

Clicking My Pictures at the top of the home page will open your personal gallery, and you can then use the buttons at the bottom for various ways to share your work.

Again, some of the options are there but not yet clickable until the site's developers get a little further down the road.

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www.jooce.com

A few weeks ago we talked about online applications. Well jooce.com is one of them.

According to jooce, 500 million people access the internet from cybercafes each day. And if you happen to be one of those people, or you just want a consistent experience when browsing the web from multiple locations, consider this place.

The idea of this site is to bring the functionality of your personal computer at home to any computer you might happen to sit down at - even if you do not actually have a machine at home.

You will be able to access files, e-mail, instant messaging, storage and lots of other applications.

The first step is to register and reserve your own private space on their servers.

Next up, enter your instant messenger account details and click the green arrow to confirm.

Be warned, when you want to talk to a contact, jooce will send them a message inviting them to sign-up every time you text them through their ordinary instant messenger client.

Next, click the forward arrow to run through all the options and set up your desktop how you want. There is a useful tips run-through when you first start up, teaching you everything you can do with jooce.

As well as being able to use this virtual desktop in exactly the same way as a normal desktop - storing files, making folders and chatting to your friends - there is also a public desktop (known as a joocetop) accessible through the green desktop icon at the bottom.

Here you can allow friends to access and share files you have placed on it.

It works in exactly the same way as the regular desktop, but through your jooce instant messenger client, contacts can open up your joocetop, and vice versa - making sharing files and information a breeze.

As well as being a really useful tool, I love the way the interface looks and works. Though if you are stuck using an older machine on a low bandwidth connection, you might find all the animations make it slow to load.

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www.economist.com

A quick look at a very useful site next. if I want to catch up on the world of business and current affairs - as you do - there is only one place I point my browser to Economist.com

This is a site from the popular publication the Economist, and includes all of its articles past and present, plus a whole lot more. It is a really useful resource if you want to check up on some news you may have missed in months gone by.

There is insight and opinion on international news, politics, cultural trends, science and technology. In fact for anyone running a business, large or small, this is pretty much essential reading if you want to stay on top of world affairs.

All sections are accessible through the navigation panel on the left. Of particular note are the useful city guides and country briefing sections, plus an enlightening collection of audio and video behind the link of the same name.

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www.king.com

From high brow to very low brow now. A little time waster after all this serious surfing. Get yourself along to King.com.

King is a social gaming website with more than 80 games to play and over 196 million games played per month.

Rather interestingly, more than 70% of King's players are women, and the stable of games is vast and very appealing. I especially like the word games.

Just browse through the sections and have a go.

You will need to register if you want to progress through the later levels.

Registration will also allow you to take part in the multiplayer games and sign-up for tournaments (many of which are free to enter), but you can dive into any of the single player games to try them out with no setup at all.

Competing in a tournament will earn you prize jewels, which you can use to unlock additional features on the site.

The only downside is that the annoying music and sound effects might drive you crazy quite quickly.

Add an External Drive to Windows Home Server

Windows Home Server is an upcoming version of Windows Server targeted at home users. It's extremely easy to add space to your Windows Home Server by just following a couple of simple steps.

Here I will show you the steps for adding an external hard drive. First, double-click on the Windows Home Server Console icon.






With the Server Console open click on the Server Storage Icon.









Connect your external Hard Drive to your Home Server and go through the Add Disk Wizard selecting all defaults.















Keep in mind that any data currently on the drive you are adding will be deleted because WHS formats the entire drive to NTFS for total storage space.

Google introduces phone services

Google has strengthened its mobile services with the debut of a service called Voice that could be a challenge to Skype and other phone firms.

It lets customers make cheap international calls and gives them a speech-to-text feature for voicemail.

The services are available thanks to Google's acquisition of phone firm GrandCentral which gives users a lifelong universal phone number.

"This could be big. Google is seen as disruptive," said analyst Jon Arnold.

"They are a wild card in telecoms and wireless but this is Google and they are very smart at what they do.

"The core of Google's business is search and for a long time the industry was concerned about the GrandCentral acquisition. What was the fit? What was the motivation? It will be interesting to see where they ultimately go with this," said Mr Arnold, principal of analyst firm J Arnold & Associates.

Table stakes

Google Voice is the first major update to GrandCentral, which Google bought for an undisclosed sum, thought to be $50m (£36m) in 2007.

The service gives subscribers one number that lets them route all their phones through - home, office and mobile.

Users also get a single voicemail account regardless of which phone messages are left on.

Google Voice is the latest attempt by the company to reach out beyond online search and advertising.

Domestic calls will be free but international calls will require users to set up a Google Checkout account. Calls to landlines in the UK will cost 2 cents per minute.

EBay's Skype offers free domestic and international calls made over the internet from one computer to another, but there is a charge to landlines and mobile phones.

Skype president Josh Silverman told analysts and investors that "chat and voice will become table stakes". He also revealed that the company is adding 350,000 new users a day and is on track to do more than 100 billion calling minutes in 2009 alone.

Google does not view the service as a threat to Skype or other telecom companies any more than its Google Talk offering, which lets users chat over the internet for free.

"This is about allowing your existing phone to work better," said Craig Walker, now group product manager for real time communications at Google and co-founder of GrandCentral.

"It's not that we are replacing your phone, we are giving [it] the ability to work better," he said.

He declined to say how many users had signed up. Google Voice is currently only available to former GrandCentral users.

"Chore"

Google Voice also allows all voice messages to be turned into text which will then be sent either through an e-mail or an sms.

"Voicemail can be a pretty negative experience for a lot of people," said Mr Walker.

"Now it's about putting the user in control. We will transcribe voicemails and convert it into text and put it in your inbox so that it's searchable and you will always have a record of that voicemail.

"Voicemail need no longer be the chore it has been in the past," he declared.

Mr Walker demonstrated its search capabilities by displaying the 1,000 or so voicemails he had accumulated while testing the system over the past few months.

By typing "pool man" in a search box, he located an old voicemail from December 2008. Returned results were in both text and audio form.

"I would never have been able to find that number. The phone company deletes everything for you after a couple of weeks and the scrap of paper I wrote the number on is long gone. This feature makes your voicemail a pretty powerful tool," said Mr Walker.

Opportunity

Google boss Eric Schmidt said he viewed mobile as the next big opportunity.

At the recent Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco, Mr Schmidt said he believed mobile search revenues would over take those on a PC within a few years

"The fact of the matter is that mobile devices are going to be the majority of the way that people get information," he said.

A report in February by the Kelsey Group suggested that "about 20% of U.S. cell phone subscribers are on the mobile web right now and only about 5.2 million are doing searches".

Mr Arnold said that if Google perfected its speech-to-text feature to other languages, all bets were off.

"This could be very powerful given the globalisation of markets. Language is another barrier and when you break that down, the world of communications opens up and globally this has exciting opportunities," he said.

Battery that 'charges in seconds'

A new manufacturing method for lithium-ion batteries could lead to smaller, lighter batteries that can be charged in just seconds.

Batteries that discharge just as quickly would be useful for electric and hybrid cars, where a quick jolt of charge is needed for acceleration.

The approach only requires simple changes to the production process of a well-known material.

The new research is reported in the scientific journal Nature.

Because of the electronic punch that they pack, gram for gram, lithium-ion batteries are the most common rechargeable batteries found in consumer electronics, such as laptops.

However, they take a long time to charge; researchers have assumed until now that there was a speed limit on the lithium ions and electrons that pass through the batteries to form an electrochemical circuit.

Tiny holes

Gerbrand Ceder, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and his colleagues used a computer simulation to model the movements of ions and electrons in a variant of the standard lithium material known as lithium iron phosphate.

The simulation indicated that ions were moving at great speed.

"If transport of the lithium ions was so fast, something else had to be the problem," Professor Ceder said.

That problem turned out to be the way ions passed through the material.

They pass through minuscule tunnels, whose entrances are present at the surface of the material.

However, the team discovered that to get into these channels, the ions had to be positioned directly in front of the tunnel entrances - if they were not, they could not get through.

The solution, Ceder discovered, was to engineer the material such that it has a so-called "beltway" that guides the ions towards the tunnel entrances.

Traffic management

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

Most commercial batteries use a material made up of lithium and cobalt, but lithium iron phosphate does not suffer from overheating - something that has affected laptop and mp3 player batteries in a number of incidents.



Even though it is cheap, lithium iron phosphate has until now received little attention because lithium cobalt batteries can store slightly more charge for a given weight.

However, the researchers found that their new material does not lose its capacity to charge over time in the way that standard lithium ion batteries do.

That means that the excess material put into standard batteries to compensate for this loss over time is not necessary, leading to smaller, lighter batteries with phenomenal charging rates.

What is more, because there are relatively few changes to the standard manufacturing process, Professor Ceder believes the new battery material could make it to market within two to three years.

Convert PDF Files to Word Documents and Other Formats (WEBSPACE as well)

Most of us know easy ways to turn a Word or other text document into a PDF, but what if we need to convert a PDF to Word? Today we will take a look at some methods to turn a PDF document into a Word or other text document.

Online Solutions

The first couple of solutions are web-based, so you don't even need to install any software to convert your files… keep in mind that with these web sites you are uploading your data to a third party, so consider the privacy implications if you are converting sensitive documents.

Zamzar

Arguably the most popular online file conversion site is Zamzar. This free service allows you to convert files up to 100MB for free. Just browse to the PDF, select the format to convert to, then enter your email address. When the document is ready Zamzar will send you an email with a link to the document to download. Zamzar will also convert a PDF to HTML, ODT, PCX, PNG, PS, RTF, and TXT.



Use Zamzar Free Online File Conversion

PDF Online

Another great online service is PDF Online. This service is powered by BCL Technologies Easy Converter software which you can download a 30 day trial of if you or your company wants to convert a large number of documents. Currently you can sign up for a BCL Premium Online account which allows you to convert 20 documents per day with a 10MB (per document) size limit.



After conversion you simply Right-Click on the link to “save link as” an RTF Word document on your PC.



Software Solutions

The next set of solutions are software-based, applications that can be installed on your local computer and used offline. These would be a better choice for converting sensitive documents.

BCL Easy Converter Desktop 1.0

Since PDF Online impressed me the most with their online conversion service I decided to take their desktop software for a spin. BCL Easy Converter Desktop 1.0 is a very simple yet powerful utility to convert PDF documents to Word. It works basically the same as the online service but on your desktop. It converts PDF documents to RTF only, but for twenty bucks it might be more useful than wasting time online. You can download a trial of Easy Converter Desktop or the purchase price is only $19.95.



Download A Free Trial of BCL Easy Converter Desktop 1.0

DocSmartz

Sometimes you might want to convert the PDF document to other file formats such as Excel, HTML, or Postscript. DocSmartz Pro is a great affordable desktop application to get the file format you want. Choose the PDF you want to convert and DocSmartz Pro walks you though different settings with an easy to follow wizard.



Download DocSmartz Pro

Free PDF to Word Doc Converter

Finally we get to the good part, the (sort of) FREE version. Free PDF to Word Converter 1.1 is also basic and simple to use like BCL’s Easy Converter but actually has a few extra options such as choosing a font and selecting page numbers. Conversions were quick and easy even with large documents with a lot of images.



There is a catch however. After the first few conversions you are asked to download a registration code from the site every time you want to convert a document. To never have to enter in a registration code you will have to pay $15.



Download Free PDF to Word Converter 1.1
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WEBSPACE
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PLAXO (www.plaxo.com)

With so many ways to communicate it is difficult to keep on top of all your contacts, especially with people moving house and changing e-mail address and telephone numbers so frequently. Losing touch will be a thing of the past if you sign up to Plaxo.

This is basically a contacts management service which connects you with your friends and family and helps you all keep up to date with each others' changes.

Choose between the free version or the paid for premium, which you can have a free 30-day trial if you want to consider it. But the cut down and totally free version will be more than enough for most people.

After activating your account you need to point it to your contacts book. Unlike some other sites of this kind they will not store your password or send any e-mails to your contacts without your permission, which is a big plus for me. Make your selection from the supported options and then wait while the website processes the data.

Contacts who already have a Plaxo account are offered for processing first, followed by the option to link up to all your other contacts. There is so much more to this site, have a good explore of the features. I do want to draw your attention to the option to link up your account with other sites that you subscribe to - such as YouTube, Del.icio.us, your blog, or any number of photo sharing and social networking destinations.

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WAFFLEBOX (www.wafflebox.co.uk)

Social networking sites are all about staying in touch.

You can text people, leave messages pinned to their board, or send them pictures of what you are up to at the moment. But would it not be nice if you could just call them up for a quick waffle?

Wafflebox site is an awesome idea. It basically allocates users with a voicebox telephone number that people can call to leave short audio messages. Now you can sign up from anywhere in the world.

The number is a UK 0845 number, so people will have to put +44 in front of it to call from other countries. This will be charged at an international call rate and some networks will charge it as a premium number. Check out the site's FAQ for more details on the charging.

UK users are charged an 0845 rate, which makes it pretty inexpensive for people to leave messages - and totally free for you to receive them.

You can even embed Wafflebox in your social networking site - such as Friendster or Facebook. It is really easy to do and adds a neat little widget to your profile that should keep your friends and contacts amused for hours.

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COPERNIC (www.copernic.com)

At Copernic.com there is a very handy search tool which should speed up your browsing.

You can download the basic version of the totally free search tool which will not leave you wading through pages and pages of results.

This application differs from a standard search tool by simultaneously querying all the major search engines and over 90 information sources on the web. This means it can bring back far more thorough results than many of its peers.

The basic free version includes filtering options, as well as dead link removal, grouping and numerical value scoring to really help drill down to the information you want.

The interface is a bit daunting at first, but well worth persevering with if you want to get serious about your searching.

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SEEK (http://simile.mit.edu/seek)

Another useful tool to help you manage your emails is Seek. It is made by the boffins at MIT and distributed freely as open source software for users of Mozilla Thunderbird.

It is not a pretty site to look at, but the premise of the download is that it adds faceted browsing to your Thunderbird mail boxes.

By this they mean it adds the kind of categorisation and grouping to searching through messages that you experience when browsing through online shops.

This is a must have if you are a Thunderbird user and find it difficult to keep on top of your inbox.

Facebook tweaks site to rival Twitter

Forget "What are you doing right now?", Facebook's come up with a new question - "What's on your mind?"

The site's having another revamp and it seems it's all about taking on Twitter.

Starting from next week there will be a new homepage that lets users receive continuous updates from their friends instead of every 10 or 15 minutes.

Facebook's also adding filters so people can choose which of their friends to keep up with and which to silence.

Celebrity updates

Users will be able to limit news from those annoying people who aren't so annoying that you don't necessarily want to take the ultimate step and "de-friend" them.

Celebrities will also be able to keep you posted on what they're up to, rather than having effectively static pages. US President Barack Obama and U2 are already signed up to the change.

It seems Facebook's feeling the pinch from Twitter - as people find expressing themselves in 140 characters or less more fun.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says: "The need for people to easily discover the most recent and relevant content has grown."

In a conference call with reporters, Facebook executives didn't spend much time talking about the financial side of the changes.

However, they did admit the site was moving in a direction that would make it easier for companies to reach users and interact with them.