Skype introduces 10 way video calling for Windows

The second beta of Skype 5.0 brings a number of changes both outside and in – most importantly, you can now make group video calls with up to 10 people. It also welcomes in a fresh new look, as well as increased stability and better quality when making group video calls.

Make group video calls with up to 10 people

You can now use Skype to make group video calls* with up to 10 people – letting you bring even more of your family, friends or business together, even if you’re cities or continents apart.

Note that everyone in a group video call now needs to be running this version, so if your friends, family or colleagues are using Beta 1, they’ll have to upgrade before you can include them in group video calls.

A refreshed user interface

You’ll notice that the new-look Skype is sleeker, neater and crisper than before, and they’re proud of the work our interface designers have done to refine and mature the interface for this version. They have also added Skype Home, where you can follow your contacts’ mood messages, set your profile picture and mood message, receive account notifications and learn more about using Skype.

Better stability and quality

They have made improvements to call quality when making group video calls, as well as fixed a number of bugs affecting stability, so your calling experience should be smoother than before. This version also includes automatic call recovery, which should help automatically reconnect Skype calls that are interrupted due to network problems. They have also made a number of other housekeeping fixes since the first beta – but please bear in mind that this is still a beta version, and so there may be the odd bug remaining.

* Group video calling is currently available as a free trial. For group video calls, everyone in the group video call will need Skype 5.0 Beta 2 for Windows.

(from skype official blog)

First serious iPad competitor: Samsung Galaxy Tab

We have read and seen tons of promised for Android based tablets, all with all the features lacking in the iPad such as cameras, USB ports, you name it.

Well none of them are in the market, except for the Samsung Galaxy Tab that can be seen on sale on Germany for nearly 1000 usd.

There was also a lot of talk about wepad, also in Germany but I don’t think it is there yet. What it is sure is that this is about to boom. The Samsung android tablet runs froyo 2.2, has 16 or 32Gb and cameras. And it is much samller than the iPad.

Take a look at the comercial. It looks very good:

New iPods and Apple TV

Steve Jobs announced a lot of updates and new products in its yesterday keynote:

• iOS 4.1 now and iO4 4.2 by November (free updates) also for iPad (so multitasking by November). It will include wireless printing from iPhones, iPods touch and iPads, and AirPlay, to stream your music videos and photos over wifi.
• New iPod touch: very flat, with retina display and HD video recording (2 cameras). Like an iPhone 4 (with facetime) but without the phone and very light and slim.
• New iPod Nano, running iOS… just a squared screen, small but awesome.
• New iPod Shuffle (back to the origins).
• New Apple TV. 1/4 of the size of the current one for $99. Running sort of iOS but no app store. No internal storage. A4 chip and connected to Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and mobileMe. You can buy  rent HD movies for $4.99 and shows for $0.99. Amazon has already responded with the same prices but for buying the stuff instead of renting it.
• iTunes 10. New logo (with no CD in it) and Ping, a sort of social thing for music. I don’t know if they want to kill MySpace… You can update you iTunes to 10 if you have jailbroken iPhone. No problem.

  

  

  
  

  

  

  
  

  

  
  

Facebook adds Location: Facebook Places

Finally Facebook has partnered with Gowalla and Foursquare to create Facebook Places.

They just updated the iPhone app but it is still not working. Nothing on the web yet.

A lot of questions though: How are they going to use Places? How are they going the manage check-ins? They said they were partnering with Gowalla and Foursquare but I cannot see how. Is Facebook going to kill this two successful startups?

TIME best blogs for 2010

• Zenhabits
• PostSecret
• Climate Progress
• HiLobrow
• Hipster Runoff
• Kottke.org
• Cake Wrecks
• The Oatmeal
• S___ My Kids Ruined
• Deadline Hollywood
• Everything Everywhere
• The Sartorialist
• Information Is Beautiful
• The Daily Kitten
• Shorpy
• Apartment Therapy
• Double X
• Strobist
• Roger Ebert’s Journal
• The Awl
• GeekDad
• Engadget
• The Washington Note
• The Consumerist
• Pitchfork

Essential Blogs

• The Daily Wh.at
• TechCrunch
• Gawker
• Politico’s Ben Smith
• Boing Boing

Overrated Blogs

• FAIL Blog
• The Big Lead
• Perez Hilton
• Mashable
• Daily Kos

Read more here.

CloudCourse: An Enterprise Application in the Cloud

From google official blog:

At Google we have experts on everything from Python to penguins. However, connecting our expert teachers to eager students around the globe can be a complicated business. To that end, we are excited to release our new internal learning platform, CloudCourse under an open source license. Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):

• Sync service – to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
• Room info service – to schedule classes in your locations
• User info service – to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library. Deploying CloudCourse on App Engine is a breeze, and should take less than 5 minutes.

We developed CloudCourse to:

• provide a course scheduling system fully integrated with Google services
• demonstrate what it takes to built an application using App Engine

By releasing CloudCourse as open source we hope to help developers who want to port or build enterprise applications on App Engine. Digging into the source code, you will find many examples of how we addressed challenges like long running processes, locking, synchronizing with external systems, high performance transactional workflows, and more.
All the techniques that we used can easily be applied to other applications.

CloudCourse is available for download now. If you would like to discuss the project or if you have any questions, please join the CloudCourse mailing list. Happy hacking!

The Future of News

Following with the series of Jeff Jarvis videos, here another video that discusses about the business of news which is changing radically. The old-time economics of supporting a big newsroom, printing the news on paper and getting it to people’s doorsteps seems increasingly unsupportable given the exodus of advertising dollars to internet sites.

If you have dedicated half an hour watching this video, then you should read this very interesting article.

Click here on the left to have it here.
Read more

Silentale, the Dropbox-for-communications, opens to the public

After nearly a year in private Beta, Silentale, which is calling itself the “Dropbox for communications”, opens to the public today.

The service is a kind of personal CRM system, providing a searchable backup of your contacts, messages and attachments across various communication channels, including email and social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s designed to address the fragmentation of electronic communication, combining a unified address book and archive of messages .

Adopting a classic freemium model, Silentale comes in two flavours, a free and paid version. However, premium accounts are being waved for users who sign-up before the end of May.

The free version is limited to 5 services (accounts) and can only be used to import 6 months of messages. The premium plans, which are being introduced on 1st of June, offer up to 10 accounts and the ability to import 2 years of messages for $49/year, or for businesses that need to manage multiple channels, a $99/year price plan that supports up to 20 accounts with unlimited import. However, premium accounts are being waved for users who sign-up before the end of May.

Since launching in private beta, Silentale says it has processed more than 50 million messages and 10 million contacts. Interestingly, users have been archiving data from an average of 4 accounts, which would full within the free version, so perhaps that doesn’t bode so well for the company or suggests that Silentale is really targeting business and enterprise customers not individuals.

The Paris-based company offers an API for third-party developers, and a Firefox add-on is currently available that shows a contact’s details and the latest messages exchanged when viewing an email from them or browsing their profile on the likes of LinkedIn, Salesforce, Facebook etc.

Additionally, Silentale says it has an accompanying iPhone app in the works, which is very close to release, along with one for Android and an Outlook plug-in.

Group buying: A billion-dollar Web trend?

Can we all get a better deal by making purchases together?

That’s the idea behind a new breed of “group buying” Web sites — at least one of which may be valued at more than $1 billion.

It’s hardly a stretch to predict that group buying will become one of the biggest Web trends of 2010, and the market leader will be one of the most closely-watched sites of the year.

Groupon, which traces its origins back to 2008, has a simple premise: If enough people agree to buy something, they all get a big discount.

Today’s deal for those in New York: Save 50 percent on a $20 purchase of cupcakes from “ChikaLicious Dessert Club.” If 450 people agree to the deal, everyone saves money.

If that critical number is not reached, however, the deal is a dud. The site offers one deal per day in the cities it covers, and the number of cities in the network is growing fast.

It’s a good idea for sure, but it might also be an incredibly valuable one. Web rumors this week suggest Groupon may be in the process of raising a new round of venture capital at a $1.2 billion valuation. The money follows a $30 million round that valued Groupon at $250 million. In layman’s terms: Investors think Groupon is set to be the Web’s next breakout hit.

Groupon’s competitors are seeing big investment, too. Rival siteLivingSocial recently raised $25 million. BuyWithMe has raised $5.5 million. How many group buying sites are there now? Possibly dozens: SocialBuy, Groop Swoop and Scoop St., to name a few.

The dynamics of group buying mean that Groupon has a significant early advantage, however: The more users a site can gain, the more leverage it has to score big discounts from businesses.

It’s a hot market we should have seen coming. The top Web trendsat the start of the year included the “real-time Web” and “location.” With almost constant web connectivity provided by smartphones and free Wi-Fi at coffee shops, airports and bookstores — not to mention the immediacy of Twitter and Facebook — we’ve come to expect instant gratification online. Group buying meets that need.

Groupon is local, too, targeting deals to metropolitan areas. There’s a further trend Groupon capitalizes upon: Social networking brings us together to share opinions and experiences … why not deals too?

Is Groupon worth a billion dollars? Could the group buying market be worth multiple billions? Investors seem prepared to make that bet.

Editor’s Note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and technology forCNN.com.

(Article from CNN)

Next iPhone handset forgotten in a bar

Gizmodo has a nice story on a prototype iPhone next generation forgotten in a bar.

Looks like an Apple guy forgot the phone in a bar. The story is credible: the phone was inside a cover that made it look like a 3gs but when removed, a different phone… the new iPhone that we are expecting for this summer.

What’s new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×640 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What’s changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

Oblong Industries: minority report technology is here

Is this the future of technology? The co-founder of Oblong, John Underkoffler, is the man who came up with the gesture-based interface used in the Steven Spielberg movie. And now he’s building it in real life.Welcome to spatial operating system:

Google Could Unveil Gmail’s Social Features Today

Google could be launching later today a social status update feature in Gmail. The Wall Street Journal reports that it is a new Gmail module that could integrate status updates as well as content from YouTube, Picasa and potentially other social sources.

Google is organizing at its headquarters an event where they will “unveil some product innovations in two of [its] most popular products.”

The description fits very well with the WSJ report. Gmail is one of Google’s most popular products, and this new social status update feature would be a “product innovation” within Gmail.

Internet in 2009: wrap up

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Enjoy!

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign andWebhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats fromSymantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here andhere), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

(from pingdom)

iPad from Apple

(from engadget)

Here it is folks, the Apple iPad. The screen is gorgeous, tilting is responsive, and the thing is insanely thin and light. Still, if you’ve used the iPhone before — and you can see the two devices side-by-side here — there’s not a lot of surprises here so far. Here are some initial thoughts on the device:

It’s not light. It feels pretty weighty in your hand.

The screen is stunning, and it’s 1024 x 768. Feels just like a huge iPhone in your hands.

The speed of the CPU is something to be marveled at. It is blazingly fast from what we can tell. Webpages loaded up super fast, and scrolling was without a hiccup. Moving into and out of apps was a breeze. Everything flew.

There’s no multitasking at all. It’s a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you’re working in Pages… you can figure it out. It’s a real setback for this device.

The ebook implementation is about as close as you can get to reading without a stack of bound paper in your hand. The visual stuff really helps flesh out the experience. It may be just for show, but it counts here.

Square: iPhone payment system

A new payment system has been developed for the iPhone. Take a look to the video

Square is Jack Dorsey’s (Twitter co-founder) new startup that now has Kevin Rose (Digg founder) on board as an investor and YouTube pitch man for the prototype payment device that plugs directly into the iPhone’s headphone jack.