Google is planning to unveil an all new social product Today at 10AM that will integrate with at least two existing Google products.  Some details emerged earlier today on the Wall Street Journal (“a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates”).  From the rumors that we have heard, this product will go far beyond a Gmail integration.  Sounds very exciting.

Will this be a Facebook rival?  We will have to wait and see for the complete announcement!

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According to the latest press release by Microsoft, you will be able to watch TV on Windows 7 PCs.  The details are not very clear on weather any special hardware like a tuner will be required, but when you upgrade to Mediaroom 2.0, Media Center will have access to all the content like HD and on-demand, which is very nice idea.  

For a complete list of details read the press release below.

Source: Microsoft

LAS VEGAS — Jan. 6, 2010 — With the announcement of Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0 today at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Microsoft Corp. has shown the world the future of TV entertainment.

Subscription TV services, powered by Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0, will take viewers where they haven’t been before by extending TV experiences across multiple screens, including the PC, TV and mobile phone. The Mediaroom software supports whole-home digital video recording, on-demand capabilities, access to both operator-hosted content and Internet TV, and interactive applications. Mediaroom 2.0 combines client software with cloud-based services to provide viewers with access to a world of great content on the big flat screen in their living room, the PC in their office, and even the smartphone in their pocket.

The past few years have seen major innovations in the ways television content is distributed and consumed. Perhaps the biggest change is the widespread availability of mainstream television programming online. A growing number of consumers now use a PC as a secondary screen for watching TV, and in some cases a PC may be their only TV screen. In the process consumers are coming to expect more diverse access to their ever-growing collections of content. The Microsoft vision for the future of TV is taking advantage of this trend.

“Our strategy with Mediaroom is to combine the power of client software and cloud-based services to greatly enhance the way consumers experience digital entertainment,” says Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president for the TV, Video and Music Business at Microsoft. “We want to make it easier for consumers to find and discover great content, to watch, listen and engage in new ways, and to do so anywhere and on any screen. Mediaroom 2.0 is a key milestone in our strategy, providing the software platform to power operators’ service clouds to reach more screens, and more people, with more content than ever before.”

While the original version of Mediaroom enabled services to be viewed on TV set-top boxes and on Xbox 360 game consoles, Mediaroom 2.0 alleviates the need for operators to deploy redundant systems, allowing them to expand the reach of their television service to include Windows 7-based PCs via Windows Media Center, Web browsers on both Macs and Windows-based PCs and, in the future, compatible smartphones. Mediaroom 2.0 also gives TV service operators the ability to reach beyond their managed IPTV networks, extending their television services to their unmanaged broadband networks. As a result, operators have the ability to offer content from a vast number of television and Internet sources, and deliver it to more viewers in more places than ever before.

All of this gives people more freedom in where and how they access their entertainment, while also providing a familiar, consistent experience. For example, subscribers could start watching a show on one screen and finish watching it on another. They could also build a video queue on a smartphone and watch the content later on a TV or PC. While traveling they could watch a recorded TV program on a smartphone and later watch an on-demand feature film in HD on a laptop all via Mediaroom 2.0 enabled TV services.

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It seems to be a little faster than Firefox.  You can apply different themes from the galery or leave it completely stock 9just like I preffer it). 

Ont big thing to get used to with Chrome is the absence of the toolbar.  no buttons, links, etc.   Similar idea as Safari, and IE8 is that when you click on a new tab, it shows you a gallery of recent sites you’ve visited.  This can be desabled if you do not like that. 

If you own a MAC and like to try things out, give Google Chrome a whirl.

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If you are a gamer then you are clearly familiar with virtual currency and points that you can buy in many games that you can then trade for virtual currency to buy what ever it is that you may need to get that edge in the game.  But the time goes by and you no longer want to play this game anymore, or you won every level and have every piece of machinery that you ever wanted.  Where do you go from here?  Well most likely you just stop playing this game and move on to the next one.  So what about all that virtual currency that you have so patiently collected over the months or worse, years?  It would just sit there in your account until you decide to play the game again, or not.  Well, there may be a solution for this problem. 

A new startup company called Bodega, is working on a solution that will help users swap virtual goods and currencies across different games, and even across different social networks.

Bodega supposed to allow users sell their virtual goods at auction in return for Bodega’s own currency.  You can sell your virtual goods in an e-bay like fashion, where you can put it up as a ‘buy it now’ style purchase or an auction, with an ability to ser a reserve price.  Users looking to purchase these virtual goods or currency can obtain Bodega Money by buying them with their credit cards, or by selling their own virtual goods in the marketplace.

This sounds like a great idea and is very promising accept for one thing.  Unfortunately almost no game manufacturers have this ability developed for their games, weather it is PC, iPhone or web.  Currently Bodega is available on Facebook with plans to launch on MySpace, Bebo, and the iPhone in the near future.  iPhone market is full of these type of games and would be great if Bodega can get their foot in the door on many of these games.  Lets hope they can do it. 

Source:  Techcrunch

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According to last Experian Hitwise report, Google accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. searches, Yahoo Search gets 16 percent and Bing get 9 percent of searches, while the rest of search engines only account for fewer than 4 percent.

Even though 9 percent may seem small, Bing is still one of the fastest growing search engines among other things.  Certain things are much simpler to find on Bing then it is on Google or Yahoo, like images, videos, shopping, and even travel.

Bing is much more graphical than any other search engine, which makes it much more appealing to many people.  Finding an image that you want on Bing is much easier with greater variety than Google Images.  Video searches are similarly streamlined and pulled from a variety of sources including YouTube, Metacafe and MySpace. Pont your mouse over the thumbnail and you will see a preview with no need to click on it. 

Bing cash incentives have been a huge hit on the web.  Shopping for an item, you can go to Bing and search for what you need and you may find one of the top results with Bing Cash back and the percentage that you will get from Bing once you purchase your item.  Bing is the 4^th most popular shopping comparison site on the Web. 

Finding travel deals is another great thing that Bing has.  Not only do you find great deals on tickets, but Bing offers price prediction.  It predicts whether the price of a ticket will go up or down over the next week.  

In addition to all the mentioned above, Bing is the first search engine that captures social networking updates in its results from Twitter, Facebook soon to come, as well as many other blogs.  If you one of not many people that still have not visited Bing, do yourself a favor and check it out.

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OpenX said that publishers using its recently launched OpenX Market and Ad Server products will be able to use MS’s Content Ads, and that in return Microsoft will refer potential customers to OpenX.  Financial details of the advertising tech partnership, have not disclosed.

OpenX is based on open-source ad-serving, and works with more than 150,000 independent sites that together serve more than 300 billion ad impressions per month.  Some may remember that the company formerly known as Openads. 

Source:  Techcrunch

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According to TechCrunch and couple of other sources, Google is partnering up with iLike and LaLa to launch their new Music Service.  Since this service will be integrated in to Google Search, it is possible that the service will be called Google Music or Google Audio.  It is still not very clear if this service will be streaming or if the music will actually be able to be downloaded.  Apparently, from what the roomers are saying, this service will be different from Google’s other free services and apps.  

Update:  Apparently users will have an ability to download songs at a specified price.

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Visual Studio is one of the most powerful development environments that has been used for a variety of projects like web application development, mobile and windows application development. 

With the introduction of these new tools, Microsoft is making it much easier for developers to build on the Azure cloud.  Visual Studio 2010 will allow developers build ASP.NET web applications that are hosted in Azure’s cloud services operating system.  These tools will simulate cloud environment that runs on the developer’s machine, so developers can test and debug their applications locally.  This sounds very interesting and promising.  Lets hope they will not have many backup problems with the cloud.

Source: Techcrunch

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrXPcaRlBqo

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YouTube just hit the one billion videos a day mark.  Can you emagine the amount of bandwidth they consume every day?  It has got to be staggering!

To mark the milestone, there is a celebratory logo on the YouTube website today. Chad Hurley, YouTube’s chief executive and co-founder wrote on the video sharing site’s blog: “Three years ago today… we’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world’s information (in our case video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere.

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