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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,...

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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...

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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...

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Qualys is set to launch on Monday a free service for Web site operators that will scan their sites for malware. From next Monday on, Qualys will be ready to start a free service that will check web sites for malicious software. The new services will be useful for web site administrators. The task of Guard Malware Detection is to observe the pages of customer sites and looks for invisible iframes, malicious javascript code, and other indications of a stealth threat to visitors and provides automated alerts and reports to Web site owners. According to Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys, the company has tested Internet Explorer 6 and Adobe's Acrobat, Reader, and Flash Player to understand exactly what happens under normal conditions so it can quickly find deviations that occur when malicious software is present. Kandek added that some other applications are to be analyzed soon because think consider them to be a typical target for attackers. Thanks to Dasient...

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A teenager form Wisconsin was sentenced to 15 years in jail for using Facebook to blackmail classmates into sex, according to an Associated Press report. Anthony Stancl, 19, plead no contest in December to two felonies, including repeated sexual assault of a child, according to the report. Stancle had been accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring 2007 and fall 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves. The criminal reportedly threatened to post the photos or videos on the Internet if they didn't engage in some sort of sexual activity with him. At least seven of them have said they were forced to sex acts, which Stancl documented with a cell phone camera. About 300 photos of underage males, some of which were as young as 15, were found on Stancl's computer, police in the teen's hometown of New Berlin, Wisc., told the AP....

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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...

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At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Skype and Verizon Wireless announced together the launch of Skype Mobile, a free application that will run on select Verizon smartphones. The application was co-developed by the Skype and Verizon teams and according to the two companies representatives it will be launched late in March on nine different devices, including: • BlackBerry Curve • BlackBerry 8830 World Edition • BlackBerry Storm 1 • BlackBerry Storm 2 • Motorola Droid • HTC Eris • Motorola Devour The application will be a free download. It will run in the background on all of those phones. Also Skype representative mentioned that the company has worked very closely with Verizon to maximize battery life and call quality. All of the Skype calls will go through the data plan and will not count as cellular minutes. Skype and Verizon also hinted that there would be some address book integration that will show the Skype...

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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.  

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If 2008 was the year of the Netbook, then 2009 as a whole can be described as the year of the e-reader. Just 12 months ago, Amazon's Kindle was the only real player in field e-reading devices but now, at the end of 2009, consumers could read e-books on similar products such as the Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, and Interead Cool-er, as well as the lesser-known Aluratek Libre. Lots of companies that haven’t taken action in developing and releasing an e-reader up to now announced their intentions to invade that product category, which is still dominated by Amazon. Among those are: Plastic Logic with its Que; Spring Design with its Alex; Entourage, maker of the Edge; and Zen maker Creative and their project with experimental name MediaBook. E-readers showed a strong presence but so did smartphones. E-readers and smartphones seemed uninfluenced by the recession. Market research experts from IDC announced that during the third quarter, vendors shipped a record 43.3...

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