Still searching iPhone 5 release date? new iPhone 4S is Here.

The long-awaited new iPhone was announced on Tuesday, 4 October 2011. However, unexpectedly it was not an iPhone 5. Those thrilled for a new eye catching iPhone legacy design changes are raising eyebrows because the shape and outlook dimensions of the new iPhone are identical to its predecessor.
One of the executives at Apple explained “You don’t want to oversell what you’re doing so you hurt your credibility”

Tim cook, in his first public appearance after becoming CEO of Apple announced the new iPhone 4S which has the A5 dual core processor from the iPad 2, upgraded 1 GB internal memory, an 8 megapixel camera and enhanced graphics with a 7x increase in graphics capability.

In addition to reinforcing the new phone with more powerful hardware and the new 64 GB option, the phone comes up with innovative new features including an intuitive AI voice activated personal assistant called Siri along with new Dictation feature.
The technology was demonstrated by asking an iPhone, “Do I need a raincoat today?” with Siri capable of drawing online sources of information including local business reviews and weather feeds; the device responded back by, “It sure looks like rain today.”
Siri also empowers a question-and-answer search engine WolframAplha. It is able to search restaurants in reaction to a query such as “Find me a great Greek restaurant in Palo Alto,” and even offers to book a table. It can render requests like “How many dollars is 75 euros?”.
Dictation is a new feature in iPhone 4s that allows composing text messages or emails using speech recognition; its already available for users of Android based devices however.

The handheld becomes a powerful and intuitive voice-activated mobile assistant to schedule appointments and performing other tasks without requiring bringing it out of the pocket, like it sets alarms or meeting reminders in response to commands like “wake me up at 7 a.m. in the morning”

Keeping in view the rising competition in smartphone business with Android based devices selling double to those of Apple, hopes are high at Apple that the more sophisticated capabilities of Siri will make it stand out.

With preorders starting Friday, the iPhone 4S will start selling on Oct. 14

Samsung Galaxy Xcover smartphone for extreme Conditions

Source: Times Of India

Samsung has announced its new rough and tough smartphone named as Galaxy Xcover. Specially targeted for thrilled sports enthusiasts and extreme conditions, the phone is made up of tempered glass and can survive up to 30 minutes underwater and has IP67 dirt and dust resistance.

The phone carries a 3.2 mega pixel camera accompanied by LED flash that doubles up as a torch. Its 3.64 inch touchscreen is made up of tempered glass.

Galaxy XCover runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and is powered by a single core 800MHz processor. Pricing is not reveiled yet but it’s expected to be a mid-range Android smartphone for tough guys.

Source: Times of India!

Google Website Optimization Service

Google has launched a new page speed service to automatically speed up web pages during loading. The page service sits between browser and web servers; it fetches content from the web server, optimizes the code of the web pages using Google expert techniques and tricks to improve performance. End users will see no impact other than faster web experience.

In future, this is going to be a big relief to the developers overstressed to optimize website performance, as well as to the small businesses running simpler sites to achieve faster delivery cycles and more budgets for development by cutting the cost for advance level web site optimization and tuning. However, for large websites running enterprise applications; it won’t be rational to claim that this service will sufficient enough to take care of speed issues.

Google has launched a test page to compare site speed across different browsing platforms and environments. Currently it offers to selected number of site owners, and expected to be free for all in future.

Read More about Website Optimization Techniques

SQL SERVER 2008 (KATMAI) & SQL SERVER 2008 R2 (KALIMANJARO) SERVICE PACKS AND CUMULATIVE UPDATES

Here are the links to the latest Service packs and cumulative updates I thought should be bundled together!

SQL 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

Cumulative update package 1 for SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2

Cumulative update package 15 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

Cumulative update package 5 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2

Automatically Share your Google + activity with Facebook and Twitter

This free app know as Start G+ is available as an extension of chrome browser lets you automatically post to facebook and twitter when you share on Google Plus. Lets you put your Facebook posts and Twitter tweets inside your Google Plus Stream. It's intuitive enough to let you read your gmail messages directly inside the Google + by adding a gmail inbox notifier to the top bar.

Attractive Browsing for Websites with Google Font Library!

Google has introduced an interface of its free and open source font library for a new attractive font browsing experience. Everyone can make use of this open source API to introduce attractive fonts into website pages. To make the interface intuitive and easy, the concept of shopping cart is introduced allowing users to add fonts into their collection and proceed further by selecting, reviewing, and finally using the font by copying and pasting the HTML snippet into your website. The interface allows easy font browsing by weight by choosing thickness filter at the left hand panel of the module.

There are three different viewing modes available-Word, Sentence and Paragraph to facilitate the users to choose the font particular to the area of their website they are interested in. The default area is Sentence mode which allows users to preview the text for a sentence. Word mode allows a larger preview font size and Paragraph mode shows the small text in sample paragraphs.The Interface allows comparison of fonts side by side to experience the look and feel of your font collection by making use of sample layouts. By Introducing the Test Drive module, users can visualize their font collection in a sample layout. In this way, you can see what your fonts look like in practice, before embedding them in the final product. To take your fonts for a test drive, click on the Test Drive tab from within the Review step.

When you have finalized your font to be used in your website, the interface shows an indication of page load time based on your font selections. The more fonts you use on you pages, it will take more time to download font data resulting in slow rendering of your website pages. It’s very important to be careful while choosing your page areas to make use of these fonts.



Google Font Previewer for Chrome further makes it easy for chrome users by letting them choose a font from the Google Font API directory, and apply that font to the entire page to see how it looks. Useful when you're designing a website and want to quickly find a font that will look good.

Google Web Fonts API and Web Fonts

Nokia out of smartphone competion? Not so Fast. With New N9, the game is on.

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phone has been struggling a decline in mobile market share, vaulted by Apple, Google and other rivals including Samsung, HTC, and LG. Nokia enjoyed a long pride being a symbol of Finland’s corporate leader, which ended last year after iPhone became the best-selling smartphone device in Finland.

Nokia’s alliance with Microsoft followed by investors’ reaction has plunged Nokia’s share price by 40 percent. With tens of thousands of people at Nokia, this transition will eliminate 7,000 jobs replacing Nokia’s internal Symbian OS with a new mobile OS from Microsoft.

After the announcement of mutual endeavor, Stephen Elop, the chief executive who left Microsoft to lead Nokia in getting back to the game acknowledged that the job cuts and transition to Microsoft was considered necessary to restore competitiveness, have been challenging. However, the phase-out of Symbian would be gradual and Nokia still plans to introduce 10 new Symbian handsets over the next year. He said further that we are shifting a whole company in order to retool and better equip Nokia to compete and take back its corporate place in mobile industry.

Nokia introduced a shiny touch-screen smartphone named N9 in Singapore on last Tuesday. The N9 outshines with a new useful improvement missing in any competing device even in iPhone or Google’s Android phones. Optimized for one-hand use, the N9 allows users to switch between applications with a thumb intuitively, without requiring to return to a main menu screen or press a button which is a requirement on both Android and iPhone devices.
The N9 is a combination of sculptured four-inch glass screen and a polycarbonate plastic body made of solid color; cyan blue, magenta and black minimizing with barely visible scratches. It runs a variant of Nokia’s MeeGo operating system, a product of Nokia’s short-lived venture with Intel, the chip maker. It’s expected to come with 16 and 64 GB models with competitive pricing of $670 and $760 to challenge market rivals.

Stephen Elop relayed that Nokia might reveal one or more of the first Microsoft handsets in time for the holiday season.
This could be a breakthrough for Nokia in smartphone market and an affirmation that Nokia continues to innovate and does beautiful work.


Source: The New York Times!

The Cloud Buzz and Security Risks. Dropbox Exposed.

Dropbox, a cloud based storage service used by millions of users was compromised allowing illegal access by using any user name and password. The service hosts sensitive documents, and other files including media content. The reason to this nightmare according to Dropbox was a code update introducing a bug affecting their site authentication mechanism. Although a fix was delivered in just five minutes after the bug was exposed, but the site remained defenseless for four hours.
Dropbox revealed in their blog entry on June, 20 confessing “this should never have happened”
Clients are obviously outraged and raising privacy concerns over their confidential stuff stored on the cloud. Proper unit testing followed by every update might have avoided this catastrophe to take place.

Despite Billions of dollars have been invested on cloud services and solutions by companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Sales Force to compel individuals and businesses to go online and do expensive conversions; such incidents lately have had a substantial negatively impact on the cloud computing campaign.

These security breaches seriously raise a necessity of having a proper governing body to define standards and rules for all those who offer cloud services. The body should keep auditing to ensure that cloud based service is in compliance to all rules and SOPs and monitor that such companies are fairly investing on best security standards to gain confidence of clients.

Read More on similar cloud security breaches including gmail hacking.

World's Most Powerful Computer

K Computer built by Fujitsu Japan has been ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Mr. K, made up of 672 cabinets of electric circuit boards is claimed to be three times faster than the former Chinese rival and is said to have an equal computing power to a combination of one million desktop computers. The tests revealed that K was able to make 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second and that is why it is named as “K” which is a short term of “Kei” in Japanese, meaning 10 quadrillion. In comparison to running a million desktop computers to produce “K” metric, this system is said to be energy-efficient, yet it consumes enough electricity required to power tens of thousands home costing near 10 million dollars annually.

Such supercomputers are aimed to be used in extreme high-tech computations including research, climate predictions and oil exploration industry etc.

Source: The New York Times - Japanese 'K' Computer Is Ranked Most Powerful

Faster Web Experience

Websites response time and browsers speed to render pages quickly has been quite a challenge. Client fidelity to stick to a site during the page load is not more than a few seconds. If a web page takes too long to open, the potential customer would steer away. Every website has a goal to keep the user for more and more interaction. Companies allocate huge budget for website performance and we continue to experience having a new version of our favorite browsers claiming more optimization and fast surfing experience.

Google designed a protocol known as SPDY back in 2009, to optimize websites for fast loading of web pages. This protocol claims to radically speed up page rendering by tweaking how browsers interact with the servers. This was tested and deployed internally by Google in support of its Chrome OS and its recent Chromebook which only comes with Chrome as browser. Google claims that Chromebooks are built and optimized for the web, as the company has a vision that most of the computing time spent is on the web. This protocol however has not commercially existed outside Google.

For the first time, Strangeloop which deals in website optimization has commercially added SPDY into the features of its product, Site Optimizer. The product sits in between a website and the clients; and tweaks the server code to render pages efficiently without requiring of changing server side code or adding more servers for better performance.

It’s worth noting that Google Chrome is the only SPDY enabled browser; other browsers currently won’t be able to make use of it. Given the potential of dramatically increasing website response time, this protocol is also expected to be introduced in other browsers as well as in mobile based web browsers for faster web experience.

Read More!

IBM Celebrates 100 Years

The High tech giant IBM founded in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) is celebrating 100 years of progress. 

IBM is a key player in transforming business models in emerging sectors including banking and insurance, Telecom, infrastructure, healthcare, travel and transport, media and entertainment, Security software solutions. IBM has recently been significantly influential in the government sectors of Brazil, Africa and India investing in immense high-tech projects aiming for long term return of investment.

It’s reported of $14 billion of investment made in different systematic acquisitions by IBM so far.





Read More!

Project Spartan; Facebook’s Secret Project for Mobile Platform

TechCrunch has revealed that Facebook is carrying out a hidden project named Project Spartan, an HTML5 browser-based cloud platform to target millions of mobile users. To be more specific, initially for iPhone running HTML5 enabled Safari, and later for android. The platform obviously will have many powerful apps.

The motivation behind this for Facebook is to get control of their apps running on iPhone by directly challenging Apple’s App Store and sidestepping their mobile app distribution mechanism.

Currently, If you want to deploy a game or an App for iPhone; you need to develop it in Xcode using C, C++ or Objective-C and push it to Apple Store. Apple provides APIs for developers. You have to purchase a developer account costing $99 per year and your app/game is required to be in compliance with Apple's guidelines. It also involves a long approval process in case of updates/fixes to existing Apps/games further requiring the end users to download that update.

Instead of this process, an alternate is to build the app/game using HTML5. Although you may have limited functionality and features of the target device in comparison to the former process, however this gives great power and control to the developer without depending on Apple and avoiding the cost involved for apple store account.

It’s said to be a team of 80 developers according to TechCrunch, working with Facebook in collaboration of Zynga and Huffington Post on this platform which is expected to launch in next few weeks.(Unsurprisingly, Facebook haven’t commented on this stuff).

iCloud Communications Sues Apple on its iCloud announcement

iCloud Communications sues Apple on overstepping its trademark.
The company formed in 2005 provides VoIP Solutions as well as cloud computing services to the customers.
In response to Apple’s formal announcement of iCloud just a week ago; the company filed suit against Apple on violating trademark. The company claims that it spends thousands of dollars annually in advertisements using its own iCloud logos.
The company’s stance is that Apple was either aware or consciously ignored the rights of iCloud marks of the iCloud Communications.
This is not a new incident. Technology giants with immense marketing budget, substantial influential power and playful tactics are over sighting the damage caused to the existing industry already providing relevant services. Just one week back, PayPal filed similar law suit against Google Wallet, claiming that Google stole trade secrets by pulling Osama Bedier, former executive at PayPal who is now Google's vice president of payments.

Apple iPad 3G phone calls and SMS App

If you are looking to be able to make phone calls and enable SMS from your jail-broken iPad 3G tablet; there’s an app available to achieve this. The app is known as Phonelt-iPad.
However, this app doesn’t seem to be approved by Apple and you should be taking a complete backup before installing it in order to be able to go back to your previous good settings in case things go unexpected.

Give New Meaning to Your Facebook Activity

Social memories are a great asset, especially when days pass by so quickly and all you have left is TIME; you wish to have a sight of your favorite events and celebrations, hangouts and activities that you could later share with your beloved ones.
This interesting Facebook app gives a tangible reflection of your social networking activity, and reveals interesting trends, aptitude, relations, and priorities of your online behavior.

The app developed by the Deutsche Post DHL costs 19 Euro.
It can be viewed online in flash and can be printed into 28 pages.

Completely Secure Erase your iPhone/Android Mobile before Resale

It is very common that we are compelled to upgrade our phones by getting attracted towards the new fascinating look and feel, new exciting features and applications claimed by the upcoming versions of mobile devices; we give away our older phones to the family members or sell em to our peers or bringing up on eBay followed by an upgrade.

Cell phones are now more like wallets and before giving them away, we need to be sure that after taking one last backup on a separate location, all the private information including contacts, text messages, images, emails and other personal information has been securely and permanently removed from the device.

Following Links provide enough guidelines to help securely erase your personal information form your iPhone or Android mobile device.
Clean Sweep iPhone.
Clean Sweep Android.

Smart Phone Apps: Google Goggles and Apple Word Lens change how the world looks like!

Smart phone applications have the capability to change how we interact with our world.
Imagine you are traveling abroad where the native language is unfamiliar and you come across a sign board at the cross roads that will decide your further ride towards several miles ahead.
You would really love to have a smart phone device with Apple's Word Lens or Google Goggles application.
Just pull out your smart phone, turn on the camera pointing at the sign board; your phone will read the sign board in language you know.
Click Play on the Demo Below!



That's not just it; There are many great things you can further do with your iPhone or Android mobile device running Google App or Goggle Goggles.
Click Play on the Demo Below!

Gmail Hacking: Google stumbles gmail accounts hacked by chinese

The Recent Cyber attack on Sony PlayStation hacking was a disaster followed by Apple mac defender malware, and now gmail hacking .
Google claims that the accounts were compromised because of stolen passwords, reason could be due to malware installed on client computers, heavy phishing or through responses to malicious e-mails from fake sources by the hackers. It's feared that this might include senior US government and military personnel accounts that were compromised. The origin of this activity according to Google, is china.

Google relayed the details on Wednesday through its official blog:
    "Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems*, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists."

Seems like Hackers around the world are getting in alliance for last few weeks to bring world's attention and pose serious security concerns to large enterprise companies.

Just like insurance companies that sell expensive disaster coverage plans (earthquakes for instance) having substantial potential turn over to the insurance company, they equally allocate huge marketing budget by projection of events and news that bring customer attention and awareness to purchase such plans. Human psychology :)
This could be an involuntary marketing campaign for the companies that sell large expensive security and protection software systems. :)

Facebook allows Bing to let your friends help you find what they "like"

Bing's collaboration with Facebook opens up all its "LIKES" data to bing to include in its search.

After all, friends suggestions and their expertise do matter :)
Bing will track recommendations from your peers on Facebook and will return granular, more relevant and specific search results to your interests.
Your search would be more like taking your friends along with and telling them about the laptop you are planning to buy; and they will guide you through what they "like".

This could be a major breakthrough in internet search. Further, it might give substantial edge to bing over its search rival Google, which might be working to exploit social search using data from orkut, but it has less user base than Facebook does.

To enable bing social search with Facebook; go to bing and follow below steps.

Offline Wikipedea an example of Anti Cloud

Offline wikipedia offered by apple itunes, brings all the content about world in the small hand-held device as well as PC.

This gives great ease and power of information to the users while travelling with little or no connectivity, or being anywhere without internet.

It further offers customization and personalization like, queing articles for later review, organizing peferred articles into folders and synchronization with latest text and images on the cloud.

The app when deployed on a shared PC accessed by multiple users at work places could also save internet traffic and avoid bandwidth issues.

Read More!

Google Wallet, a mobile payment platform. Still Carrying Credit Cards?

Google launches its Near-Field Communication(NFC) enabled Mobile Payment Platform, which allows payments sent directly from your smart phone. Your phone will be your wallet.
Google has partnered with big industry retailers and merchants including Master Card and City Bank for its Google Wallet.
This launch has created buzz in all related industries from Point Of Sales Vendors, Retailers & Merchants through Banks and Software Companies in support of this platform and get compatible with the future of customer payments.
There are also Gossips about Apple that is working too on an NFC enabled mobile payment system for its iPhone.

Read More about Google Wallet.

Google's Cloud Based Machine Learning Service

Google Labs now offers its cloud based machine learning API and Big Query, powered by a full fledged BI enabled engine with a hand some of Google's industry tested and renowned prediction algorithms.

This empowers developers and organizations alike to take jump start towards greatly improving their applications and services by making use of Google's deep data analytic capabilities.
It specially attracts those Organizations lacking the high tech infrastructure of maintaining a data warehouse followed by high licensing costs of purchasing data mining engines and business intelligence applications offered by major vendors like Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft.

In order for this to work; you have to upload your data to Google, process the data using Big Query and then applying the set of prediction APIs.

However, when it comes to prediction, machine learning, and data mining; we are talking about data in Giga/Tera Bytes.
Given the type of business, size, and sensitivity of data; uploading data over the internet to Google infrastructure for the first time followed by daily incremental uploads raises feasibility and security concerns. But as the cloud Buzz continue to grow massively, so does the adaptability.

Read More!