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Mandriva Linux to support Skype

December 19, 2005

Skype and Mandriva (publisher of Mandriva Linux operating system) today announced that Skype will come included with the Mandriva Linux distro. According to Candace Locklear over at SparkPR, "Mandriva's Linux 2006 is the first and only Linux operating system to offer out-of-the-box use of Skype's popular application." I guess it's nice to have Skype embedded with the Linux distro, but most Linux users can just as easily go download and install Skype themselves. Besides, there might be a newer version. Nevertheless, one of the reasons Internet Explorer succeeded was that it was pre-installed with every shipping copy of Windows.

Google releases GoogleTalk API

December 17, 2005


Google has released their API for GoogleTalk. Wow! Just think of the mashups. Now you can mashup Google search with Google Maps and GoogleTalk. So for instance, one guy mashed up the Best Buy XBox 360 inventory with Google Maps which then displays pins on a map displaying the available Best Buy stores. You can then click the icon to see how many Xbox 360s are for sale.

Yahoo offers Movable type

December 12, 2005

Yahoo is now offering the popular Movable Type blogging software. This follows this weekend's news of Yahoo's acquisition of Del.icio.us, a popular online bookmarking tool used by bloggers, as well as their recent acquisition of Flickr, which offers a way to annotate and share photos, another popular site amongst bloggers. Yahoo! said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service. So now that many of the major blogging tools have been acquired, who's next?

Google Calendar launches

December 5, 2005

Rumor has it that Google Calendar will launch tomorrow. Kudos to Russell Shaw for noticing the Google domain simply by playing a word guessing game. Jeremy has some insightful thoughts and a feature "wish list" for Google Calendar. Personally, I'm not too crazy about online calendars.

Google integrates Web Search with Google Groups

December 2, 2005

I was searching Google on "Perl for ISAPI rather than perl.exe" and noticed at the bottom of the search results was some strange icons (question mark and exclamation mark in a white ballon) and a different set of search results offset from the regular web search results. I hovered my mouse of the results and realized they were links to Google Groups (newsgroups) related to my keyword search. Ok, that's interesting. Does that mean Google is now integrating all Web searches with Google Groups?

This seemed a bit odd since the average user doesn't use newsgroups, but I suppose since it's at the bottom it's not obtrusive.

Google Gtalkr for Google Talk

December 1, 2005


Gtalkr is a Flash-based website-enabling access to Google Talk and was launched yesterday as a beta. It allows you to access your Google Talk (Gtalk) instant messaging account without the software client installed, from any computer that has Flash installed. Comparisons will no doubt be made with Meebo, however Gtalkr is only for Google Talk and uses Flash instead of Ajax. The screenshot above is the upper-left hand portion after I logged onto Gtalkr. Check out this site which has screenshots and some further analysis, as well as this site.

Google Talk has a blog

December 1, 2005

Sensis and eStara launch click to call

November 30, 2005

Sensis, known as "Australia's Google" launched a pay-per-call pilot on its search engine, sensis.com.au, powered by eStara's click to call technology. Users of sensis.com.au can initiate a phone conversation with advertisers with a simple click of the mouse. The partnership was announced at this week's Kelsey Group Interactive Local Media 2005 (ILM:05) conference. This follows the recent news last week on Google entering the click-to-call fray, though in this case I think it's true "VoIP" calling where as Google was a PSTN call between the advertiser and the customer.

Google's new home page?

November 30, 2005

Anyone notice that if you are logged onto your Google Adsense account, Google Groups account, or Google Gmail account that the Google home page now includes a "Personalized Home" option, "My Account" option, and "Sign Out" option? And if you aren't logged in yet, the Google Home page gives you an option to sign on via a link in the upper-right hand corner. Here's a screenshot of the upper-right hand corner of my browser showing the new options available on Google.


When you go into My Account, I was hoping for some sort of "unified portal" depicting various statistics and information across all of my Google accounts (i.e. unread email, daily Adsense revenue, etc.), but alas, it's simply hyperlinks to the various Google offerings.

I wonder how long has Google's home page has had this feature.




CallinSearch software lets you click-to-call from Google, MSN, Yahoo

November 23, 2005

One of the CallinSearch employees posted a comment on my Google click-to-call post pointing to their technology which is currently in beta. By the way, the Google "click to call" news certainly flew under the radar. I don't see Click-to-Call listed on Google Labs even, where Google often trials new features.

In any event, CallinSearch has interesting browser-specific plug-ins that work with most browsers to enable click-to-call access within search engine search results. According to CallinSearch, "Why a separate Podcast directory, phone directory or even yellow pages?

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