After the recent upgrade to Google Maps for mobile, Google is quietly continuing to add more features and enhancements to many of its online products.

Users of Google Reader now have their very own personal recommendation engine. Visit your discovery page to find a list of “interesting” recommendations from Google… based on other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data.

Google Reader also now supports drag-and drop subscription management. With this, you can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list. This is something desktop aggregators, and even other online feed readers like Bloglines and NewsGator, have had for a while. Better late than never.

Other Google properties have also seen some enhancements. Group chat in Gmail/Gtalk allows you to chat with multiple people in one single window. Along with group chat comes a new set of emoticons for your chatting pleasure.

Google is also flirting with some interesting digg-like experiments. The objective here is to empower you to influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

While Google explains this experiment in detail here, I couldn’t find any link to try this. Hmmm. Looks like only a select few have been invited to play with it.

Have you tried any of these new features from Google? What’s your experience?

There’s never been a greater need for those devices we carry around to be location-aware. Location information not only helps us determine where we are, but location-aware mobile services also use this information to make mobile mapping and search faster and more convenient.

But the most common source of location information to date, which is GPS technology, is only supported on some of the bleeding edge mobile devices. In fact, fewer than 15 percent of the mobile phones to be sold in 2007 are expected to support GPS.

Now Google to the rescue! The latest update to Google Maps for mobile comes with a new technology they’re calling My Location, which enables users who don’t have GPS-enabled mobile phones to get location information.

But even for those gadgeteers with GPS-enabled devices, the My Location technology actually complements the GPS technology they already have, as it delivers a location estimate faster than GPS, provides coverage inside buildings (where GPS signals can be unreliable), and doesn’t drain phone batteries as quickly as GPS.

How Does It Work?

The video embeded below shows the simple magic Google uses to determine your location. In a nutshell, the My Location technology takes information broadcast from cellphone operators’ towers (Cell IDs) and sifts it through Google’s triangulation algorithms to approximate a user’s current location on the map.

But is it accurate? That’s the question. Now I don’t live in the US or any other country where Google has any siginificant geo-data, and I can only speculate from the technology angle.

Triangulation uses the Signal TOA (time of arrival), to estimate distances. In environments such as the inner city, with lots of structures, the signal bounces off here and there, which causes multipath effect, and this degrades accuracy - significantly.

In open areas free from reflected signal paths, TOA systems can be as accurate as GPS, depending on how the system is architected.

But, if your phone doesn’t have GPS, this service is surely better than nothing. Go download Google Maps for mobile with My Location, here »» www.google.com/mobile/gmm/index.html.

USB has now become the preferred connectivity option for all new gadgets. Printers, cameras, disk drives, … heck, even cell phones that have traditionally used proprietary connectors are now gradually switching over to USB.

While some of these devices can take power directly from the USB port to charge the device, the large majority do not. But what if you could just take out the battery and charge them from the USB port on your computer?

Well, that’s exactly what USB Cell, a new kid on the market does. These cells function like any other cells, until they get drained. Then, instead of throwing them away or plugging them into the wall via your charger …. you simply plug them into the USB port on your computer, and viola … they get charged.

Great idea.

[Found via: Web Worker Daily]

Kindly help me remove the “Upload Photos” button from my “My Photos” page. I can’t think of when I’ll ever use it. But if I need to use it, I’ll dig for it, wherever it may be hiding.

So kindly help me hide it now, so I can use all my computer’s screen to view my albums.

Thank you.

==
George Kwabenah Appiah

For the past two years, I’ve been an Internet addict. I’ve spent a huge amount of time online following the latest trends and innovations in new media and social networking, and the businesses and individuals that are steering them. I’ve seen many young people start from scratch with nothing more than their ideas, and built great businesses that serve millions and hundreds of thousands of users today.

And I’ve also observed with keen interest, how individual writers are jumping in to to make their own small fortunes by tracking the ecosystem of these new businesses. Unlike big media houses, these indy publishers have great communities around their content, fun and interesting conversations often take place.

Here are my top 5 of these websites that actively track online business startups.

1. TechCrunch: Michael Arrington does a good job of bringing the scoop from online business startups, often several weeks before they’re open to the public. The sites archives is a great resource for studying the progression of the new breed of online businesses, some of which are currently doing very well, some barely surviving, and others already in TechCrunch’s deadpool.
2. Mashable: I call Mashable the bible of social networking. Mashable tracks all the latest from the biggest social networking communities, and the new breed of businesses that are springing up to provide top-up services withing these communities.
3. VentureBeat: Written by Matt Marshall, VentureBeat (formerly SiliconBeat) has been my go-to source for news and information about private companies and the venture capital that fuels them.
4. GigaOM: Om Malik writes about the web, mobile and broadband technologies. It’s my favorite source for all-round geek stuff, as it’s Om is not entirely focused on startups like the other three above.
5. PodTech: PodTech does in audio and video what the above four do in text. It’s always been a great blessing for me, sitting behind my computer in Accra, and watching interviews and demonstrations from some of the greatest technology and business leaders in Silicon Valley. Recently, PodTech.Net has evolved from a purely content producer to a full-fledged online video network, hosting content across all subject areas, from the most serious stuff to the most funny.

When it comes to computer software, I have a default bias towards tiny little applications that are built to do one thing and to do it extremely well. I abhor bulky, bloated, and expensive applications that try to do everything under the sun (and end up doing nothing well anyway).

But the downside is that, with so many applications installed on my computer, it was taking me about 30 seconds or more of my life just to locate any application I wanted to launch via the old and rusty Windows Start menu.

There had to be a better way to launch applications in Windows! So I started the hunt … and discovered a great little app, aptly named Launchy.

Launchy is a free and open source windows utility written by Josh Karlin and designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, the so-called quick launch toolbar, and even your file manager!

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and any directory you throw at it, and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

This can save you a ton of time, if you find yourself switching between several applications like I do.

Getting Launchy to Launch Your Applications

For you geeks out there, simply head over to the Launchy homepage and grab the application from SourceForge. Nothing special to worry about.

But for the rest of us …

For the rest of us who need a step-by-actionable-step guide to get things done, here’s how to get Launchy running on your Windows computer and forget about your Start menu for good.

We have to do three things: download the application, install it, and finally learn a few basic stuff to get us started with this super time saver.

Downloading Launchy: First head over to the Launchy homepage, take a peek around, and hit the download link. If you’re super busy, go straight to the download page hosted at SourceForge. The entire application is just about 800k … and should download in no time at all.

Installing Launchy: Installing Lunchy couldn’t be easier. Simply double-click on the downloaded file and the installation wizard pops up. Follow the on-screen instructions, and you’ll be just fine.

Running Applications with Launchy: Now that we have our helper installed, it’s about time we asked it to launch some applications for us. After installation, Launchy registers itself to automatically start whenever you startup your computer. But once started, it hides in the background.

To bring it forward … hold the alt key and tap the space key (i.e. ALT + Space). This is how the default skin looks like:

Now, type in a few keys of the program you want to run and hit enter once it has been found. Let’s say I wanted to start Firefox:

If you type a few keys and don’t get the program you’d like to run, simply wait for about 20 seconds. Launchy then displays a drop-down menu of the list of programs it finds matching the keys you have typed:

After launching your application, you can make Launchy disappear again by simply hitting Escape or Alt + Space.

Customize Launchy to your Heart’s Desire

Yeah, that’s right. You can customize Launchy to your heart’s desire. See the readme.pdf file that comes with the application for details. Here are a few suggestions for you (I won’t go into the details):

• Change your skin, so Launchy looks the way you want it to look
• Add additional folders and applications that you’d like Launchy to index and launch
• Change the hot key from the default Alt + Space to whatever you desire
• Change the number of suggestions from the default 10, or disable it all together
• Make Launchy stick permanently on your desktop, instead of hiding itself.

Yup, that’s pretty it. Needless to say Launchy has really been a time saver for me, and I really love it. Give it a try and share your thoughts.

As someone looking to strike my niche in technology and eventually becoming a venture capitalist, DEMO is one event I never ‘miss.’ Yeah, I’ve never been physically at the event before, but I hope to — someday — either to present my startup, or to look for cool startups to invest in.

DEMO is organized twice a year, and each event showcases over 60 of the hottest startups with the most outstanding technology. The first of this year’s DEMO has already come and gone … and one startup that really caught my attention was Zink, a company that promises to make your life easier by eliminating ink from your printing jobs.

Yes, that’s right … print, but without ink — no cartridges, ribbons or toners!

The company’s name, ZINK, stands for “Zero Ink” and the key to ZINK’s zero-ink printing process is a special “ZINK paper” … a composite material with dye crystals embedded inside and a protective polymer overcoat layer outside.

Before printing, the embedded dye crystals are colorless, so ZINK paper looks like regular white photo paper. During printing, the ZINK printer uses heat to activate and colorize these dye crystals to create the image.

But ZINK is doing something more interesting, besides the promise of zero-ink printing. Current printers are bulky mainly due to the delicate housing for the cartridges, ribbons or toners, and the mechanical components needed to move them to and fro to inject ink onto the paper. But with the ink out of the way, all these components are not needed anymore, and interesting things can begin to happen.

And ZINK is taking full advantage of this. A mobile printer that will connect wirelessly or via USB cable to any camera phone or digital camera is on it’s way to the market later this year. But why end there? ZINK is also coming up with an integrated digital camera/printer — a full featured digital camera with a built-in full color printer!

Both devices will support full-color 2″ x 3″ digital photos, the size of regular business cards. Currently, a 2-by-3-inch picture comes out dry in 30 seconds, a just little slower than the ink jet printer.

So yeah, no ink, toner or ribbon to print. But, so far, the Zink printer can’t print on regular paper. And this special Zink paper doesn’t come cheap. According to Mercury News (free subscription may be required), at the moment, a 4-by-6-inch print costs Zink about 80 cents to print, roughly three to 10 times as expensive as inkjet prints.

So the question on my mind now is if and when ZINK can bring down the cost of their ZINK Paper so that we’re not simply transferring the cost of ink to paper.

ZINK is not really your typical two-friends-in-a-garage style startup. The company was formed in October 2005 as a spin-off from Polaroid, company that is no stranger in the image processing industry. The company already has 65 employees, and is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.

This is one product I’m keenly waiting to buy. What about you?

I’m not a programmer. Far from it. But I hang around with so many programmer friends (mostly online) that sometimes people (including myself) mistake me for one.

And I’m often amazed when I hear folks talk about the amount code out there already in the open source community for practically any project one can think of. But the problem, they’d usually add, is finding what’s already out there for your specific project.

That’s where code search engines come in. These are a new generation of search engines that allow you to search for source code from various projects and in various programming languages. Here’s a short overview of 4 of the more popular ones.

Google Code Search: As can be seen from the logo, this is still a Google Labs project, not quite ready for prime time. Google extends it’s simple and intuitive search interface to Code Search as well. On the “Advanced Code Search” page, you can opt to limit search results to a particular programming language or a particular license.

Google aside, there are a few startups who are also working to make code readily avaible to programmers. One of such startups is Krugle, which is built on Lucene, the open source search software. Krugle provides both code and project search, as well as links to related technical papers.

Koders is another startup in the code search arena. Koders has a simple search interface not too different from Google. They also have a nifty Firefox search plugin for all supported languages and for individual languages.

All The Code is another code search engine that was launched recently. Presently, All The Code only returns results for the Java language, so unless you’re a java juggernaut, this one will not be useful to you. Expect more languages to be added soon!

NO matter what search engine you use, I think an important issue you should not overlook is the type of license under which the code is released, if you’re going to re-use specific code in your projects (why re-invent the wheel?). While, I believe, all code returned in query results are free to use, some of the licenses might require that you also give away or make open whatever you do with that piece of code.

Sure, copyright laws are dead in Ghana … but you never know when someone will knock at your door to buy or invest in your project, product, or company (that’s what I’m here for ). If this were to happen, whether or not you have absolute right to the code behind your software will surely play a role in the valuation.

Have you used any of these code search engines before? Do you know of any other? Please share in the comments below.

Gizmo Call is a new web-based telephony service from the team behind the Gizmo Project voice and IM software, as well as the SIPphone VoIP platform.

The new service offers up to 10 minutes of free worldwide calls to registered users daily. Unregistered users get half of this, while users with Gizmo Call Out accounts get more.

Users can also put a “Call Me” button or link on their web pages or e-mail signature file for others to call them for free.

To make a call, you visit http://www.gizmocall.com and type in the telephone number you want to call. Currently you can call mobile phones, landlines, Jabber/Gmail users, and Gizmo Project users. If you’re a first time user, you’ll need to install the Gizmo Call flash plugin before you can use the service.

Installing the plugin is a breeze: simply download it (about 1MB in size) and run the executable file. A pop-up appears a few seconds later to confirm installation is complete. After installation, simply reload the Gizmo Call page and make your call. But this is where the fun ended for me.

For some reason, the application worked only once for me, and won’t work again. The flash plugin won’t initialize. I re-installed the plugin several times, but no luck. Heck, I even switched to o’l Internet Explorer just to see if it’s a browser issue … but no luck either.

If this works out, that’ll be the closest I’ve ever come to making free calls to standard telephones (mobiles and landlines) in Ghana. Sure 10 minutes a day is not that much … but hey … it’s free. So give it a try, and let’s see if it works for you.