Merging AOL and Yahoo: A Disaster or a Chance to Recover?

Tim Armstrong-AOL Chief executive-have reportedly reached Yahoo sharing his interest in the merging of the companies. Reports say that Armstrong’s merger plans had also been placed before Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo Inc., who rejected the offer. Reconsidering the option after Bartz departure, Armstrong has reportedly talked to the private equity firms and Investment bankers from Allen & Co. working with Yahoo.
The deal would bring the former Internet and technology leaders together raising hopes for rebuilding standards that they lost years back. Both companies have struggled in the past few years and fallen far from the top positions that they once held.
Tim Armstrong desires to be a CEO of the combined company after Yahoo and AOL merging. But will the collaboration be fruitful? Looking at the financial backgrounds of both the internet-oriented service providers, Chris Versace, an analyst with Think 20/20, said that it is most likely to yield a synergistic math equation of 1+1=1.5.
AOL’s market value is about $1.6 billion, while Yahoo’s is about $18.2 billion. Both companies-AOL and Yahoo-tried to compete with the global Internet market leaders such as Google and Facebook and have failed to keep up with the Internet trends.
Few minutes later when the news hit Bloomberg, CNBC tweeted ON twitter that according to the sources at Yahoo, Yahoo is not interested in the deal. This could be a negotiating trick from Yahoo; or probably, at this point of time, Yahoo doesn’t want to show its involvement in the public. The fact is, both AOL and Yahoo are struggling to reduce losses and retain their market value, if not boom it. This could be a chance to file a brand bankruptcy and start over.
Is the merging enough for both companies to recover? Some analysts said that the merger could not provide a long-term solution to the problems. After all, it’s the companies’ decision. We will follow the story!

Google+ gets 20m users in within a month

Search giant Google's new social networking site has drawn 20 million users around the world, figures have revealed.

Earlier it was announced that Google+ had signed up its 10 millionth member, during the company's quarter 2 results call.

Now, new figures from online measurement company Comscore, revealed that approximately 870,000 people in the UK have signed up to the invitation-only service so far, and the service has added around 10 million new users in a week.

The number of users rose to 19.93 million during June 29 and July 19, the Telegraph reports.

Despite some criticisms, Google's social network has been well received since its launch a few weeks ago.

Google+, however, remains some way behind its social networking rivals.

Twitter has more than 300 million users and Facebook announced two weeks ago that it has 750 million users.

Twitter adds its own photo-sharing feature

Twitter said that it is adding a photo-sharing option for its users, a move that could deal a blow to existing services such as Twitpic and yfrog.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo also announced at the All Things Digital technology conference here that the San Francisco-based service was upgrading... its search function.

Twitter will begin allowing users to upload pictures and attach them to "tweets" directly from Twitter.com, Costolo said.

"It's part of the native data of the tweet," he said, adding that the decision to launch a photo-sharing service stemmed from a "need to remove the friction of adding photos to Twitter."

Twitter said that its official mobile applications will also provide a photo-sharing feature and the service will be available in the next several weeks.

As for search, Twitter said it will begin showing related photos and videos in search results. Twitter's launch of a photo-sharing option poses a potentially serious threat to various third-party services people currently use to post pictures on Twitter.

It is the latest move by the company to provide in-house services and features for using Twitter. Last week, Twitter announced it had bought TweetDeck, a popular application for using the service.

TweetDeck, which was founded in 2008, is a favourite of heavy users of Twitter, allowing them to view tweets in various different ways and to organise their messages into columns -- features not offered on Twitter's own website.See more

The Paper Phone is here.......

For those obsessed with the size-zero, here's a phone as thin as paper. Called PaperPhone, the smartphone is presently in prototype stage.

It uses latest printing technologies to print copper circuits and wiring on to a 9.5-centimetre surface. A layer of E Ink, used in Amazon Inc's Kindlee Reader, is applied to act as a display. As for OS, it is powered by Google Android.

To be unveiled at the forthcoming Association of Computing Machinery's CHI conference in Canada, the PaperPhone, has been developed by a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Queen's University, and E Ink Corporation.

The 'flexible' phone can store books, play music and make phone calls. According to the researchers, bend gestures are fed into a gesture-recognition engine and can associate certain movements with certain instructions.

As creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen's University Human Media Lab told the The Vancouver Sun, "So you can bend the top in order to page forward or make a bookmark, you can navigate left and right on your home screen in order to open an icon, and you can make a call by squeezing the paper so that it curves, and then if you want to stop the call you pop it back into shape."

"This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," he said. This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen, Vertegaal reportedly added.

As for the pricing, while the prototype costs as high as $6,000 to $7,000, the device is likely to be priced less than $100.

Delicious is now in hands of YouTube founders

Yahoo sold Delicious toYouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who promised to continue and grow the popular social bookmarking site.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Hurley and Chen, who sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, said they planned to integrate Delicious with their new San Mateo, California-based Internet company AVOS.

"We're excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level," AVOS chief executive Hurley said in a statement.

"We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web," Hurley said.

The YouTube co-founders said they would seek to use Delicious to "develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload."

"We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type," Chen said.

Yahoo said it will continue to operate Delicious until July, when users will transitioned over to AVOS. Yahoo said the sale of Delicious was part of a product strategy that "involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation."

"We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop," Yahoo said.

Delicious, which has millions of users around the world, was launched in 2003 and bought by Yahoo! in 2005.

Some Skype features that many have no idea

It's hard not to like Skype. Free PC-to-PC voice and video calls, multi-user conferencing, and easy chat and file transfer utilities make Skype a must-have utility for many, especially since no voice-over-internet capability is built in to today's operating systems and Skype's serious competitors are few and largely unheralded.

But are you getting the most out of the Skype service?

Read on for some tips on maximising what you can do with Skype while taming some of its annoyances.

Get rid of ads 
Ads are now an unfortunate part of the Skype interface -- at least by default. To get rid of them, open the Tools menu, and click Options.

From the resulting Options panel, click Notifications in the left-hand pane, and then click Alerts & Messages from the suboptions that appear.

In the right-hand pane, under the section labeled "Show messages about," deselect the "Promotions" check box. You can also deselect every other check box on this screen if you want to remove all possible annoyances.

Call normal phones 
Many people still think that you need to be sitting at your computer to use Skype -- and that the person you're talking to must be as well. While that was the original aim of Skype, the service has grown up.

With a Skype Out number, you can use the service to call any phone. And with a Skype-enabledUSB telephone, you don't even have to be sitting at your computer to make Skype calls.

While Skype Out and the phone will cost you money, the Skype service is significantly less expensive than traditional phone or cell service, so you'll likely save big over the long haul.

Go wireless 
It's no fun to be using Skype while tethered to your PC with a wired headset microphone.

You can free yourself in a few ways. Use the mic in a webcam -- which of course can allow you to conduct video calls as well. Use a desktop standup microphone. Or buy a wireless Bluetooth headset or ear piece.

The latter are widely available online for prices starting at about 25 dollars.

To use a Bluetooth headset, your computer will need a Bluetooth adapter/receiver as well. Many notebooks already have it. If your notebook or PC doesn't, pick up a USB Bluetooth adapter online.

They're available for as little as 12 dollars. Once you have the equipment, Skype should recognise it and allow you to start talking without wires.

Record your calls 
Skype can't record telephone calls, but Pamela for Skype can (http://bit.ly/kw1fe). Pamela can record voice and video calls, keep an archive of calls, and help you turn your recorded calls into files suitable for a blog or podcast.

The free version limits call recording to 15 minutes. Before using Pamela, just make sure your conversation partner knows that the call is being recorded.

By default, Pamela sends out a voice message informing everyone when recording begins.

Forward you calls 
If you're relying heavily on Skype, you won't want to miss calls. You can use the service's call forwarding feature to make sure you don't. From Skype's Tools menu, click Options, click the Calls button in the Options, and finally click Call Forwarding in the submenu.

Select the "Forward my calls to" check box, and type your mobile or other number in the box below. This is a fee-based service, but it's covered under Skype's Pay Monthly subscription service.

Speak their language 
Thanks in part to applications like Skype, the world has grown smaller, but language barriers still exist. Get rid of them, to some extent, by installing the free Chat Translator and Speaker for Skype (http://bit.ly/cCPY7y).

This tool, designed to be used with Skype's chat window, translates in real-time and can even "speak" your Skype chat messages in 10 languages.

Downgrade Skype 
New versions of Skype add features, and sometimes they take features away. In Skype 5, for example, you can no longer transfer a file to a chat participant simply by dragging the file to the chat pane and dropping it.

Instead, you have to go through a more laborious file selection process.

If you'd like to go back to an earlier version of Skype, check out OldApps.com (http://www.oldapps.com/skype.php), which provides almost every version of Skype from the current version to version 0.9.

Use Skype on your mobile phone 
Skype's international call pricing is compelling, but your mobile phone carrier's is not. So just use Skype from your mobile phone. Skype now has apps for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone users.

Combine the app with a Skype Out number and the international plan of your choice, and you have a low-cost mobile option for calling just about anywhere for a lot less money. 

What’s new in iPad 2!!

Contradicting to popular rumor of absence due to health concerns, Steve jobs unveiled the iPad 2 in his very own style. Everything seemed perfect except for his health. He has lost some pounds and looked a bit weak. We all apple fans hope that he gets well soon from whatever he is going through.

Now let me come to the post. What’s new in iPad 2

As expected and predicted by many experts, iPad 2 has become lot more faster, smarter, slimmer and here is something most interesting, you get all this at the same price as that of ipad1. Now let’s compare the specs of both the machines.

Firstly, there are few things that have not changed at all in both the machines. The display is exactly the same as before, Apple has stuck to its old resolution. The next thing that has stayed put is the storage capability option where 16, 32, and 64GB continue to being your options. Other things, which remain the same as the former version of the gadget, are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Accelerometer.

Here is something exciting for the lovers of the color white; you’ll be able to get your iPad 2 in White from the day one of the shipment. Thinking out of the gate, this hints that the next iPhone may have the same option! Processor has been improved from a 1GHz Apple A4 to a 1GHz dual-core Apple A5. That’s slick! Where before the iPad 1 used to be either 680g or 730g depending on if you wanted 3G or not, the heaviest new iPad is only 613g, and that’s the AT&T model. Next lightest is 607g with Verizon, and 601g with just Wi-Fi. One very classy feature which Apple had not accommodated in ipad 1 but had it in iphone and ipod is the gyroscope, which also is featured in the specs of ipad 2.

The thickness of the entire unit has been reduced 33% from 13.4mm down to 8.8mm, which is slimmer than iphone 4 and you get not one, but two new cameras. Not much is known about the capabilities of these cameras quite yet, but the front camera being a VGA webcam and the back being capable of recording video at 720p is definitely a step up from having no cameras at all. Cellular radio has been added.

Its for sure that the features that have been added to iOS 4.3 will make the user’s experience a completely breathtaking one. Adding to this, Apple has introduced a new cover system that works with magnets and automatically turns off and on the device when its screen is blocked.

At last if you like to describe ipad 2 in a single sentence it would be “Super machine for same money”.