PayPal says that it is ready and waiting for any competion from Google GBuy launch. The Google GBuy system is supposed to come out in June.

"We respect their entry and stand ready to compete," Jeff Jordan stated. He noted that PayPal has had many competitors in the past, and has weathered those challengers well enough. There are currently about 105 million user accounts with the company, which represents a 47 percent increase from the same period last year. And PayPal's total payment volume is up 41 percent for the same timespan, to its current level of $8.8 billion.

Googles GBuy can compete in pricing as average transaction price to sellers on PayPal is 3.5 percent where as GBuy is expected to be offering no transaction free for an initial period, and eventually charge anywhere from 1.5 percent to 2 percent.

PayPals CEO remained unconcerned. "We think we are pretty good at it and have a pretty strong lead," he said, referring to online payment services.

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Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft in 2008 which came as a big surprise. Gates, will be stepping down and focus on his charity foundation which is aimed at fighting infectious disease.

"This was a hard decision for me," Gates added. "I am very lucky to have two passions that I feel are so important and so challenging. As I prepare for this change, I firmly believe the road ahead for Microsoft is as bright as ever."

Microsofts Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie the creator of IBM Lotus Notes will occupy Gates place as Chief Software Architect and continue workingg side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities in anticipation of Gates departure from a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008.

Experts say that Ozzie has good management skills to bring much needed discipline to the vast software development organization and he has a fresh perspective that might make Microsoft a more innovative company. But Ozzie faces big challenges ahead Getting Vista out the door, competing with Google and Yahoo, finding a way to re-build bloated apps with leaner, cleaner, more secure code, as well as innovating instead of following and shaking the monopoly mantel.


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American residents looking for financial news and information online are overwhelmingly prefer Yahoo Finance, while Googles Google Finance has failed so far to break into the ranks of the ten most popular finance related sites according to Hitwise.

Yahoo Finance tops Hitwises two categories for business and finance sites, while Google Finance, launched in March, hasn't yet managed to gain enough of a following to challenge the leaders.

Hitwises Business Information category, Yahoo Finance captured almost 35 percent of all visits in May, while MSN Money came in a distant second with little over 13 percent.

Time Warner's CNN Money ranked third, followed by MarketWatch and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Google Finance ranked in 42nd place.

I think since still google finance in beta, soon it will catch up with others once it gets out of beta


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Soon the home phone number could become a history as more and more people moving to mobile services and VoIP.

"VoIP technology will convert the home telephone from analogue to digital, and once digital, the home telephone number will become unfixed," Jupiter's Ian Fogg said. "It will no longer only be available just at home, but also in the office, in internet cafes, and even on mobile phones. VoIP telephony is attractive to consumers because services are digital, cheap, and flexible." - analysts at Jupiter Research

IDC also predicting that VoIP the internet telephony will be the "next generation of technology to change the telecommunications landscape". Although the market for consumer VoIP is still a fancy, IDC predicts that the number of residential VoIP costomers in the US will grow to 44m by 2010.

IDC says that "mobility, simplicity, and on-demand telephony" are top of the list of trends that will drive growth in consumer VoIP services.


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AOL remodling its Netscape website into a page with many links to latest news articles, which are submitted by users and gets expanded upon by a pro bloggers.

AOLs plan to keep and expand netscape audience was devised by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc., a collection of blogs that AOL bought last year. Mr. Calacanis proposed that Netscape could combine blogging with the growing popularity of sites that allowed people to share interesting things they found on the Internet with others.



The site is modeled on Digg or Slashdot, a rapidly growing sites focused on technology news. Digg users find items that interest them on news sites, blogs or anywhere else on the Web. They submit links to those items along with a short descriptions. And Other users then vote on these items, and those that generate the most interest are displayed on the sites main page.

Mr. Calacanis has set aside a budget to pay for the Netscape bloggers to travel to news events, often with video crews. He said he hoped that the audience participation would allow Netscape.com to be quick to respond to news events. The bloggers will work on a schedule so that someone is on duty around the clock.

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Google today launched Google U.S. Government Search that offers one place to search U.S Government related information and for keeping up to date on government news.

You can search for content located on either federal, state and local government websites or the entire Web from the same search box. The homepage also includes government specific news and content from both government agencies and press outlets.

The Search index includes U.S federal, state and local sites with domains such as .gov, .mil as well as select government sites with .com, .us, and .edu domains (eg. .usps.com, .ca.us and ndu.edu) which you can personalize by adding content feeds on government or other topics that you are interested in.


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Google Picasa Web Albums service has gone live and is similar to Flickr. Google Picasa is still in beta and requires an invitation to use its online services.

Here is a quick comparision between Google Picasa and the other online photo storage Flickr.

Uploading Feature: Both the services provide a web interface for uploading your pictures to their photo servers. But Flickr also provides other photo uploading functinality like uploading through Mobile Phones or emailing photos directly.



Free Storage Space: Flickr offers 20MB of storage space per month for free where as Picasa offers 250MB storage space for free.

Paid Storage Space: Flickr offers 2GB of storage space per month for $25 where as Picasa offers 6GB per month for the same.

Photo Taging Feature: Flickr offers a beautiful feature of photo tagging, which allows the users to tag their photos, for example in a group photo you can mark your face with your name or a link and when an user moves their cursor on the photo the text/link in the tag is displayed to them. Picasa lacks this feature.

Overall Flickr is a better community Oriented with lot more features to offer than google picasa
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Some Pictures of Google Picasa

Check here For HQ Google Picasa Screenshots
and images here.

















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Skype has officially released Skype version 2.5 today and is available for download here.

New features:

#Can stop Import Contact search at any time.

#Flag Emoticons: no graphic to click for flag but rather enter "(flag:cc)" where "cc" is the two character country code. You need to include the brackets.

#SMS API and a couple of other new API's

#Lots of bug fixes




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Microsoft anti-virus tool has removed 16 million instances of malicious software from 5.7 million unique Windows computers over the past 15 months. Malicious Software Removal Tool(MSRT), the malware removal software is a free tool provided by microsoft and it also provides updates every Tuesday. Since the initial release of the MSRT, the tool has been executed approximately 2.7 billion times by at least 270 million unique computers.

On average, the tool removes at least one instance of malware from every 311 computers it runs on.The MSRT has removed at least one backdoor Trojan which can enable an attacker to control an infected computer and steal confidential information, are a significant threat to Windows users has been removed from approximately 3.5 million unique computers.

Rootkits, which make system changes for the purpose of hiding or protecting some other, possibly malicious components, are a potential emerging threat.Of the 5.7 million unique computers that the tool has removed malware from, a rootkit was present in 14 percent of the cases. But this figure droped to 8 percent if WinNT/F4IRootkit, the rootkit distributed on select Sony music CDs, is excluded.

The malware problem appears to be migratory in nature. Most of the computers cleaned with each release of the MSRT are computers from which the tool has never removed malware Microsoft research team conclude.


Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Trends


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An e-mail virus, or worm, dubbed as Yamanner had infected Yahoo Mail users in a very small number. The email carrying this virus has a email subject as "New Graphic Site." Once opened, the message infects the computer and then spreads to other users listed in Yahoo users email address book.

This worm exploits a vulnerability in Javascript technology used to make the mail program easier to use by triggering embedded HTML scripts to run in the computer user's browser.

The e-mail containing the virus need only be opened—in contrast to most worms that are hidden in attachments and require users to take an additional step—to release the virus, according to computer security site Symantec Corp.

Yahoo Immediately advised users to update virus and firewall software on their computers and to block any e-mail sent from the address "av3@ yahoo .com."

Symantecs suggested that Yahoo Mail users might protect themselves by upgrading to its latest test version of the recently upgraded Yahoo Mail software. The worm cannot infect users with newest version of Yahoo Mail Beta.

Yahoo email worm


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If you had even thought of getting your site included in Google News here are some of the guidelines that may come in handy. As rustybrick points out you need to prepare a good case by giving google editors a good historical background of your site, you site stats, awards received, about the author and who links to your site and so on.

The Technical requirements that need to considered for your site inclusion are as follows:

# In order for the Google crawler to correctly gather articles, each page that displays an article's full text needs to have a unique URL that does not change. Google cannot include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL.

#The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

#Keep in mind that we cannot include sites for which the URL of the main page includes a date. URLs with dates in them often change on a daily or weekly basis. This prevents us from crawling the site for new content, as we are unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.

#Google's automated crawler is currently best able to crawl regular HTML links. Google is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript.



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Microsoft today announced two video conferencing webcams for online video-chatting and photo blogging on Microsofts MSN Spaces community site. With the release of these cams microsoft enters the market of video conferencing.

Microsoft LifeCam takes instant messaging to a new level of video and sound by offering great video and crystal clear audio with acoustic noise cancellation technology inbuilt. It also give you advanced features, such as automatic face tracking software and low light adjustment.



LifeCam is optimized for Windows Live Messenger, one click on Windows Live Call Button starts a video call and see who is online, also with LifeCam Dashboard you can access video effects and control your webcam from the Windows Live Messenger window. With One-Touch Blogging, a single click allows you to upload to Windows Live Spaces that lets you easily post blogs, photo albums, and personal music lists. The automatic face tracking software, which takes advantage of the camera pan, tilt, and zoom controls, follows you so you dont disappear off-screen.



The $99.95 VX-6000 is aimed at tech-savvy users looking for a feature rich webcam and The $49.95 LifeCam VX-3000 shoots video at 640x480-pixel resolution and is designed for budget conscious buyers.

Video conferencing has gained prominence in recent years because of increased broadband users. That has led to an increased demand for quality webcams.
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Windows Vista is now available as a free download on Microsoft site. This trail software version will expire on June 1, 2007 so we have have an year to play around with this new OS without buying it.

The Good news is that you can safely try Windows Vista Beta 2 by having dual-boot with Windows XP. So that your XP still be intact and also your programs settings and data files.

In order to setup WindowsXP system into dual-boot Vista mode, you require a partitioning utility like PartitionMagic to create a new Windows Vista partition on your hard disk. Once the partion is created then you can install vista on this newly created partion by booting from the Windows Vista Boot DVD.

Life-hacker has a detailed tutorial on how to setup dual-boot Vista with Windows XP. Once this is complete, you will have a choice to boot your machine with XP or Vista.
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The Pirate Bay one of the worlds most popular websites for illegal downloading of movies was recently shut down by Swedish Police for torrents linking to pirated films, music and softwares.

The entertainment industry, mainly the MPAA was overjoyed, but their excitement was only shortlived as PirateBay emerged stronger after the swedish police raid.

The Pirate Bay, which claims to have million registered users, was soon back up and running at Netherlands even though most of its Servers were confiscated by the Swedish police raid.

There were protests worldwide by fans and supporters of the PirateBay website even on the streets of Sweden. Even a hacker hacked into the website of Swedish police as part of the protest.

Now according to Alexa the hits to Pirate Bay website have doubled since its re-open. I guess that may be due the publicity it got from all this. Also piratebay owners is seeking compensation for damages caused by Swedish authorities.


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eBay soon to lauch eBay AdContext a new ebay affiliate program similar to Amazon which will deliver relevant, real-time eBay listings to help maximize your ad profits.

eBay AdContext allows websites to place links to eBay online auctions and receive commission when a click on the site converts into a sale. The eBay ads will be available in Text-only, Image-and-text and Macromedia Flash formats.



eBay Ads system is a contextual advertising program which means it will scan the content of a Web site and automatically return relevant eBay ad content. These are targeted ads like Google Adsense that will deliver ads relevant to the content of the webpage and as a result it increase reader interest and that results in higher click through.

eBay AdContext was developed using eBays keyword selection technology, which uses proprietary eBay data to match contextual eBay ads to the Web page. The contextual ads take into account the popularity of certain keywords on eBay, not just the keywords on a given Web site, making them relevant to what people are actually shopping for on eBay.

Developers can use its new API which returns eBay keywords based on the ranking and categories for a specified Web page to create applications that may be different from traditional contextual ad serving.

eBay AdContext is not available to the public now. If you are running Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on your site, you need to check with them as you cannot run other contextual ads on the same page with adsense or YPN as per their tos.


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Want to Follow your favorite teams and players during the FIFA World Cup tournament with Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. This fun program allows you to access all the latest tournament news and information with the click of a button! Live game data allow you to monitor your favorite teams progress in real-time. I also offers you to Check out your teams fixture(schedule), standing, and news as they advance through the tournament.


FireFox users can download Add-on from joga to Stay up to date with the latest scores, and also see videos of the best goals, and talk about the 2006 World Cup with fellow fans.


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