One more social networking site has landed in the net world. The software giant IBM has developed this network, and christened as “My developerworks”. As the name suggests it is the place for developers and IT professionals congregate to connect, share, and collaborate.

It offers a platform for working people to troubleshoot a technical problem, network with peers, share knowledge, or just soak up wisdom from the technical community. The variety of community offerings from the network will help you to meet your specific goals.

My developerWorks offers groups, blogs and profiles to help you determine who has experience or expertise in a particular field. Apart from usual features like forum, blog, activities, IBM has come with Spaces.

Spaces are IBM-owned micro-sites focused on a software project, development activity, user group community, technical expert, or any other technical subject. Spaces are dashboards, or aggregators of resources. While only IBM employees can own a space, anyone can request to join a space and may be granted administrator or editor privileges.

An IBM rep said via email to Read Write Web, “IBM’s goal with My developerWorks is to connect the global community of software developers and make it easier for them to create new technologies based on open standards such as Java, Linux and XML. With $4 trillion in global economic stimulus investments on the way for projects such as healthcare modernization, smart grids, and public infrastructure improvements – all of it technology-driven – IBM wants to give developers a seat at the table and help them build skills in hot technology areas including analytics, clean tech, and cloud computing.”

The latest beta version of Firefox 3.5 is available in 70 different languages. The main highlights of the new release are improved privacy controls, support for native JASON and web worker threads, support for new web technologies like HTML 5, and Geolocation features. Also the Firefox team has fine-tuned its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine which now runs a bit faster.

Geolocation lets websites know where you are in order to bring you more relevant information or to save you time while searching. It’s about making the Web smarter, more intuitive and easier to use. It also offers a Private Browsing mode which will allow you to browse the web without leaving any traces of your activity behind on your computer.

Be aware, that a lot of plugins and extensions like Greasemonkey will not work in beta 4 yet.

Lexcyle have created revolution in the e-boook industry by developing a free e-book reader called as Stanza. Stanza is designed for i-phone and i-pod touch, to download from a vast selection of over 100,000 books and periodicals in a number of formats, and read them right on your phone.

On April 27, 2009, Amazon which dominates e-book industry with its Kindle has acquired Lexcycle. It seems that this action is done to improve Kindle application. Stanza supports e-books in any format from Adobe PDF to XML standard format and EPUB. Amazon would implement this supporting capability to extend choice in the format in which e-book readers can access e-books and e-reading content.

“We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition,” wrote Lexcycle’s principal developer and founder Marc Prud’hommeaux in a blog post on the site. “Customers will still be able to browse, buy and read e-books from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.”

“It’s very early days for e-books, and we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead of us. Lexcycle is a smart, innovative company, and we look forward to working with them to innovate on behalf of readers,” said Amazon spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal to The New York Times.

“We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of readers for over a decade and is a pioneer in e-books,” Prud’hommeaux wrote. “Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for e-books and we could not think of a better company to join during this exciting time.”

Every company is looking for new opportunities which will give them an opportunity to improve their work. These marketing tools are targeted to increase the number of their potential customer who will definitely give an opportunity to give you high profit. That is why selling goods online has become one of the most fast growing sectors of business.

If you start selling goods online you will have to create your own website. And of course the first thing that you will need is Dallas web design because the main specialists are concentrated in this city. They will offer you such additional services as xcart or ajax programming which will can give you a possibility to add new features on your website and make it more attractive for customer go visit it to buy goods. These features must be combined because programming part is very important as it makes possible to carry out different marketing research and adapt the marketing strategies of you company. Another advantage of such feature is that they help to improve usability an better access for potential customers to goods which they are going to buy. So you see why it is important to work out the best web design for your company.

Android is a free Linux-based operating system from Google, which is originally designed for cell phones. Now experts are predicting that the open-source operating system can be used on other devices, such as the emerging low-cost laptops known as Netbooks.

Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies have proved this by developing the first Netbook running Android, named as Alpha 680, for the cost of $250. The Alpha 680 is expected to hit the market in the next three months. It uses a 533MHz ARM 11 CPU and sports a 7-inch LCD screen, keyboard, touchpad, and built-in Wi-Fi, according to a Computerworld report. It is powered by 2-cell battery which will last only two to four hours much lower than the expected 12 hours.

Other software giants like Hewlett – Packard, Asustek Computer and Dell have also started using Android. Dell is using the software for its upcoming smartphone.

It is always very interesting to know something new about usual things. What do we all know about technology and its history? Let’s see who was the first to use this term and how everything developed.

The term technology was first introduced around 18 century by Iohann Beckman, who used this word as the name of the scientific discipline. Today, with the development of the Internet, appearance of digital signage solutions, cell phones, etc., the word technology is used in its broad sense. It is all the knowledge that is used for creating and producing goods. The process of the development of technology is very interesting and arouses many heated arguments among scientists.

Some of them believe that things like, for instance video splitter, appeared because of the evolution. People did something from century to century, which helped them to understand processes happening around them better. And if one stage was missed, everything would be different. Others are sure that everything happened spontaneously, thanks to great scientists. Let them argue. But people know, that our lives are impossible without technology, without the Internet, video walls, cell phones and so on. Now we all know more about technology.

Last week, Facebook called its users to cast their vote on its new privacy policy according to which Facebook has ownership over any content, such as images or video, uploaded to the site — even if the original owners deleted their profiles.

When thousands of group members have started protesting against the new policy, Facebook retracted the changed terms, drafted a new set and invited its 200 million members to weigh in. Facebook specified that it requires the participation of 30 % of its community in voting, which is around 60 million Facebookers. Actually less than 1 percent participated in the survey.

Mr. Ted Ullyot, the company’s general counsel acknowledged the low turnout in a blog post on the site, writing, “In the meantime, we’re going to consider lowering the 30 percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.”

Close to 75 percent of the participants requested for the new terms of services. Mr. Ullyot specified in the post as “We’re pleased that users supported the proposed documents and validated our efforts to respond to their concerns.” And “You can expect to see the new documents on the site in the coming weeks.”

Yahoo officially declared closure of GeoCities as “You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now–we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

Now it doesn’t allows new users to open an account. GeoCities was so popular in 90’s, and its personal home page service will go an era of self-expression on the Web that’s largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.

Yahoo’s statement clearly infers that it may move a site to another service, as it did when shutting down Yahoo Photos, but in the current climate, it’s probably best not to expect such a graceful transition option.

Earth Day is celebrated on April 22, to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, in 19 70, to raise awareness of overpopulation which was the serious problem faced at that time. From that environment moment, April 22 is observed as Earth Day to raise concern about environmental crisis.

The Earth Day Network, non-profit social network, says about Earth Day as “the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a half billion people every year.” On this day, environmental activists and groups try to invoke changes in human behavior that affects earth.

As a citizen of the world, we should love and preserve it by taking following actions; conserving energy, recycling waste products, increasing the growth of plant and tree, preserving water, reducing toxins in the air; keeping the environment clean; reducing air, water and land pollution; and loving and giving respect to all living beings who inhabit the earth.

NASA is celebrating this Earth day by publishing high-definition images of the planet taken from the International Space Station. The images depict where all of Earth’s “energy” is located, part of a global network of laser ranging satellites and super-charged GPS receivers, the consequences of global warming and many more. It is shocking to see nearly the entire continent of Antarctica has a hole in the ozone layer.

School students have participated in rally to create awareness of global warming among people.

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
- Theodore Levitt

The creative mind of Google people has led to innovation of two more features, Similar Images and Google News Timeline. These two features will enable net surfers to get precise result for their query.

Similar Images

Google’s image search is an effective tool to search images on net. It has added the “Similar Images”, an attractive feature, in the image search page to enable users to find out exact images using the existing image results without refining the search query. When you are searching for images, say for example, watches, images of watches of almost all brands will be displayed. If you want the images of any specific brand, you will reframe the query instead of that you can just click on the ‘similar images’ link given below the corresponding watch brand. Even if you are unaware of the brand name, you can see watches of similar design.

Google News Timeline

This feature will present results from Google News and other data sources including scanned newspapers, magazines, blog posts and sports scores, media like music, movies, books etc, and many more in a well organized manner. Users can set the time line as day, week, month, year or even decades to view news accordingly. Not only news, users can search for news photos, news videos, news quotes, TV shows, artworks etc in specific.