IT Masala

Ryan Fitzgerald , an unemployed 20-year-old who lives with his father in Southbridge , considers himself a guy who's easy to talk to.

He posted a video with his cellphone number on YouTube, urging anybody anywhere who wanted to talk for any reason to give him a call."Girls, guys, whoever you are wherever you're from talk about whatever," the spiky-haired young man told the world.

He had got more than 5,000 phone calls and text messages from around the world. Monday morning at 5 a.m., the free "weekend" minutes on his T-Mobile service were scheduled to run out.

"I love talking to people," he said. "I just love helping people."

His original video, posted Friday and titled "I'm Here For EVERYONE! Give Me A Call! 7742531962" is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-rDqt99eGc

It has been viewed about 120k times and attracted around 400 comments.

His response, "Update On The Many Phone Calls I've Received And Rumors," from Sunday, is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF-Vxc0VC9k

One of the comments on his original post says:

"With all the pain and suffering in the world, it's nice to see someone trying to reach out to other people. I'm also amazed that many people seem to think this is some sort of self-promotional stunt; it seems to me that Ryan is utterly sincere, and his video is short and to the point. We are all so connected, and yet all completely cut from each other by the huge electronic grid we all now share; I say "bravo" to Ryan for trying to reach out in an increasingly impersonal world." - cursewill

At present on the net there are hell lot of sites distributing lyrics, not legally of course. Yahoo's song lyrics, in contrast, are supposed to be the official versions. Under the licensing agreement, Yahoo will share with copyright holders the revenue from the ads that will be displayed alongside the lyrics.

The 400,000 song lyrics included in Yahoo's database span about 9,000 different artists, ranging from old standbys such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan to more recent stars like Radiohead and Beyonce. 

Gracenote Chief Executive Craig Palmer said licensing lyrics should boost worldwide music publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually, with the words to songs ultimately providing as much as $100 million in annual revenues in about 10 years as the market expands with new opportunities like online subscriptions, downloads and automotive distribution deals.

Yahoo, Gracenote launch lyrics service [Reuters]
Yahoo expands its online music section [USA Today]

Google informs you that they are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 .  

During this time, this service may be unavailable to some of the users.  Please inform your users about this planned maintenance appropriately. 

If you have any questions, you can contact the Google Apps Support team through the

[ Google Apps Help center ]

PageAddict is a Firefox extension that will help you monitor your Internet addiction. Once you install it, choose PageAddict from the Tools menu to display a summary of the time you've wasted on each web site for this day, and a graph of your web…

Its really cool, you will actually know what to do and what not too.. i mean if you are spending more time on something very less useful , you will know your stats ! It might help you make yourself better. This could be very useful to monitor children's browsing habits and what steps to take to put them on to track !

I really love you pageaddict

Become Better with pageaddict ! njoy

[ Download add-on / Alternate Link ] [ Firefox Add-ons ] [ pageaddict ] 

Today we celebrate Earth Day . It's Not Easy Buying Green.Eco-friendly electronics products are increasing in number, but consumers have to work to find them.

Dell's Plant a Tree For Me program lets you make a small donation to two environmental organizations while buying a notebook or desktop PC. Retailers like Radio Shack and Best Buy have electronics-recycling programs for disposing of unwanted cell phones, batteries, and other products. (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has compiled a list of recycling programs.) But when it comes to buying a product that's less toxic to the environment, knowing what your options are isn't easy.

Count Down Your Carbon is a site where you analyze energy consumptions like Change Your Light Bulbs, Plant Trees ,Buy Energy Star Appliances,Conserve Energy,Use Hot Water Efficiently,Buy Clean Energy,Drive Less—Drive Smart,Eat Green,Reduce Waste—Support Recycling,Offet Your Emissions. So what more you could other than knowing the energy consumptions and saving..

Download : home energy audits school energy audits

Google also celebrating Earth Day 2007 ..showing off their Earth Day logo..

Let us all contribute in whatever way we can.. " Small contributions from you and me can make this World a better place "

[ Earth Day Flag ] [ Earth Day ] [ Get Involved ] [ Earth Day @wikipedia ] [ Earthday.gov ]

Saw the post on TechCrunch about Google adding another company to its list of applications. The company acquired Marratech AB, a Swedish startup (refer to Wikipedia page) with a video conferencing applications, including an interactive whiteboard and application sharing.

It now competes with established players including Microsoft, Raindance, Adobe and WebEx, which was just acquired by Cisco for over $3 billion.

Visit [ Marratech AB ]

A hacker managed to break into a Mac and win a US$10,000 prize as part of a contest started at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

The conference organizer decided to offer the contest in part to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs. "You see a lot of people running OS X saying it's so secure and frankly Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," said Dragos Ruiu, the organizer of security conferences including CanSecWest

The contest originally was open just to conference attendees, who were invited to try to break into the machines through a wireless access point. But on Thursday evening, 3Com Corp.'s TippingPoint division put up the cash prize and put the machines online so that anyone could participate.

The winner has not yet been named but is not someone attending the conference in Vancouver.

via [ pcworld ] 

I always dream of getting into Google ! ..Maybe after my M.S i shall put all my efforts to get in ! Someday i know my dream will come true >…Because "Only those who dream can achieve the impossible"…..

Anyway here are the openings @ Google India as given in their job site !

Software Engineering
Engineering
Operations and IT
Partner Solutions Organization
QA Engineering
More Bangalore Job Opportunities
More Hyderabad Job Opportunities
More Delhi Job Opportunities
 

We believe you don’t have to work in Silicon Valley to create great software. In fact, a number of our most innovative products have been developed at our engineering centers right here in India. That’s why we’re looking for world-class engineers for our software development teams in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi.

[ Google India Jobs ] 

All the Best !

First to those who donna what is Hitwise . Hitwise is a company which collects Internet usage data directly from ISPs to measure the traffic to more than 800,000 Internet sites.

It has predicted the next six Web 2.0 companies most likely to reach the soaring success of YouTube, Wikipedia or Flickr.  The list includes Yelp, StumbleUpon, Veoh, WeeWorld, Imeem and Piczo. Hitwise announced its projections in San Francisco at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo.

Here is in short on what these six Web 2.0 companies do:

• Yelp offers an online guide that allows users to rate various goods and services.
• StumbleUpon allows users to recommend Web sites to others with common interests.
• Veoh provides software to allow users to collect, publish and watch high definition videos.
• WeeWorld allows users to create a graphic alter ego to be used for online or mobile communications.
• Imeem is an online community to allow users to promote their content, blogs, music, photos and videos.
• Piczo is a site that allows users — it targets teenagers — to create their own customizable Web sites.

Wikipedia, the wiki-based encyclopaedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 per cent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.

Besides Wikipedia, other well-known Web 2.0 destinations are social network sites like MySpace and Facebook and photo-sharing site Photobucket.

Visits by web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 per cent of US web activity, up from only two per cent two years ago, the study showed.

[ Hitwise ]

Google renamed the name of its shopping search engine from "Froogle" to the more corporately inclined Google Product Search. The name caused confusion for some because it doesn't clearly describe what the product does- said officials of Google .

The name was originally intended as a play on the word "frugal", Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience, and Jeff Bartelma, product manager for "the product formally known as Froogle", wrote in a blog post to the Google Web site.

From their blog post on Google:

We're taking the opportunity to refocus the user experience on providing the most comprehensive, relevant results in a clean, simple, easy-to-use UI. We're also excited about how Google Checkout can help searchers have a fast and secure purchase experience, so the new interface makes it easier to buy with Checkout.

Froogle was sacrificed to the re-branding gods and has emerged as Google Product Search.

[ Google Product Search ]