YouTube big redesign which beta version was available for user testing in late January was officially released yesterday. The cleaner look of the video portal is a part of a greater plan to simplify the site. The initial idea was generated of user feedback and testing and aims to keep people as long as possible in the site. In a morning conference at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., YouTube UI designer Julian Frumar explained that the site was simply not working like it should with the addition of extra features over the years. He added that there were too many elements on the screen that were slowing down page views and that were flooding people with too much information. In other words, YouTube was getting complicated and inefficient. The other aspect of the problem was that YouTube had two distinct groups of users. The first group includes those users who wanted a simple, easy to navigate video-centric portal white the second group wanted numerous links,...

Read more

Apple’s iPad promises to become the “magical and revolutionary product” of 2010. The long-expected touch-screen tablet device is becoming a sensation before it’s released for sale. It occurred that the preorders of the device are “hundreds of thousands”. According to The Wall Street Journal material if this keeps up, Apple could end up selling more iPads in the first three months than original iPhones sold the first three months after its debut those sources. It's still not clear if that means actual sales only, or if that includes reservations for in-store pickups of the device. Apple.com is taking reservations for customers who want to pick up a device in a store on the first day of sale, April 3, but it doesn't require a credit card to be put down. It means that if they don't pick up the device by 3 p.m. that day the iPad reservation is canceled. In other words, a reservation should not yet be counted as a sale, but again it's not entirely...

Read more

On Friday, a Microsoft spokesperson announced that, as expected, the company is planning to finalize the work over Office 2010 next month. Besides, Microsoft will start developing a program allowing those who will buy Office 2010 in the next few months to get a free upgrade to the new version. In a blog publication, it’s explained that the company will have a business launch for the Office 2010 products on May 12. It’s added too that software is expected to be broadly available in June. As far as the technology program guarantee is concerned, Microsoft announced that it will apply to those who buy Office 2007 between now and September 30 and will allow an upgrade to the comparable Office 2010 product. Though such programs are typical, this one had even less of an element of surprise. It occurred to be so, after a Microsoft employee briefly posted details of the program last month. Microsoft CFO Peter Klein confirmed the program earlier this week, telling...

Read more

No doubt, anyone of us has experienced the following situation – we see someone on the subway or on the street but we can't quite remember who they are. But now, Recognizr – a new technology from the Swedish firm The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) could soon be able to help us figure out who they are so that we can greet them by name. According to an article published Tuesday in Popular Science, Recognizr is a new application that can figure out who someone is – it only need a photo of the person and a quick tour in social networking information about that person. ( See how here ) Riffing on the growing field of augmented reality, the magazine called the technology "augmented identity” (Augmented reality is a term in computer researches that explains a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery). PopSci describes the innovative technology as a alliance...

Read more

On Tuesday Skype announced that it is embedding its service on numerous HDTVs and added that now it is supporting high-definition video calls in the 720p HD format on PCs. With these moves, the free online communication service is aiming to make video conferencing something that can be easily conducted from the living room and meanwhile these video calls can have high-definition connections mainstream. Skype said its latest Windows version can deliver HD calls as long as people have an HD Webcam and a chip running at least 1.8GHz. The HD webcams are expected to be presented at CES for early 2010 arrival. More interesting is Skype's distribution move to embed its service on Internet-connected HDTVs from Panasonic and LG Electronics.  

Read more

Installing it is the most difficult part Windows 7 is probably Microsoft's best tested software up to now. It’s due to the wide spread public beta and release candidate testing period. However, the new operating system appears to cause troubles from the very beginning. According to information gathered by consumer helpdesk company iYogi, the most spread problem new Windows 7 users experience is dealing with the install. The next most prevalent problem is missing applets or components (such as the change from Windows Mail to the Windows Live version), followed by a missing Aero theme. Of course, the widely spread install problems for Windows 7 is easily explained by the fact that the software is new and that all new customers who haven’t bought a machine pre-loaded with the operating system have to deal with the install process. Add in the lack of an upgrade option for Windows XP users, and then all the variations of an in-place upgrade from Windows Vista, and...

Read more

Google Earth and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Wednesday that Google is developing a tool that will map out the alarming predictions of how California can be affected by climate change. The project is a result of the collaboration between with the California Natural Resources Agency, Gov. Schwarzenegger, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an organization funded by the California Energy Commission and Google.org. In a statement, SEI says that ecologists now have a serious problem in explaining the important information for climate change consequences in an understandable manner. It’s crucial these climate transformations to be clearly explained to politicians that take the significant decisions now. Ecologist need to visualize their scientific results on interactive geographic maps to succeed in explaining their ecologic fears. The CalAdapt Google Earth tool will allow individuals to view how their specific region would be changed....

Read more

No doubt, YouTube is still the leader among all online video site, but a great surprise comes out of Nielsen's VideoCensus report – according to the research, nowadays in the world, Facebook occupies the third place for most popular sites for online video watching. According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus analyses for the videos that were viewed in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. Hulu is far behind with over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams. In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. During the same time YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers. Hulu was placed fifth with only 13.4 million viewers. According to Nielsen, the amount of time web visitors spent watching videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent for a year....

Read more