geek evaluation

Xbox was Microsoft’s first foray into the gaming console market. The integrated Xbox Live service allows players to compete online. Microsoft then worked with popular social networking site Facebook, to make it work right with the Xbox.

Facebook users will be able to hop on through the Microsoft Xbox Live service, and bring Facebook right to their television screen. It will allow you to perform all kinds of Facebook actions, like updating your status , check out your news , listen to music and browse photos.

For gamers that use Facebook, it will be added advantage, as that will give them the ability to show off their gaming prowess. Gamers can publish screenshots and other things right to their Facebook account.  You can also take your Friends list on Xbox Live and, if you’ve linked your accounts, send out friend requests for those people on Facebook

So you might be glued to the television set even more

Today social networking sites are doing really well. But in the latest news Yahoo has announced the closing of its Yahoo 360 social networking service. Yahoo 360, opened in the year 2005,and they hoped to pose a threat to the other networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, but it never happened. First they had announced the closure of the site in 2007, but then pushed it several times and now its finally closing this year in July.

Users will be transitioned to the new Yahoo Profiles service. The Yahoo Profile service , incorporates  basic social-networking functions, giving people the ability to publish information about their lives, create a list of friends, broadcast status updates and keep a blog with text entries, photos, videos and Web links. However, it still doesn’t match the features of 360, something Yahoo acknowledges.

Yahoo’s search engine has already been dominated by Google for a long time now and the failure of Yahoo 360 has been an another setback for Yahoo.

Only time will tell if the Yahoo Profile service does well.. Lets just wish them all the best..

In the latest statistics announced by StatCounter Global Stats Microsoft’s search engine Bing overtook Yahoo as the number two search engine in the United States. Microsoft’s revamped search engine Bing, which they choose to call a “Decision Engine”, is designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the web and making quick and important decisions.

To gain the number two spot Bing was able to grab the market share from Google. Google was and is the leader in the U.S search engine market on Thursday with 71.47%. Yahoo! moved into third place with 10.22% while Microsoft’s Bing was able to grab 16.28%.

Globally Bing was also able to move up to the second spot, but with a narrow margin the global results were:

Google – 87.62%
Bing -  5.62%
Yahoo – 5.13%

Currently Microsoft must be celebrating their success , with their launch of Bing.. But only time will tell if Bing is still able to hold on to their spot after a few months.

Meanwhile do check out their search engine or must i say decision engine!

Due to the recession, it is no surprise that  amongst many other companies ,Dell  the computer manufacturer declared that its profits were down compared to last year. Thankfully they were not losses like Sony and Palm.

Dell reported a a 63% drop in profit but still managed a net income of $290 million, compared to $794 million during the same quarter last year. One major reason for the decline is that the business and government sector  makes up three quarters of its business. Due to the recession and also the possibility of Windows 7 coming up, many business and government sectors are not buying computers now..

Another reason is also because of its competitor Acer. Acer is able to sell their computers for much less than Dell in consumer sales. Though for Dell the consumer market is secondary , but it is important if Dell wants to continue the way it is.

But Dell is optimistic about the year, since the release of Windows 7 might end up increase the sales of the computers as many people would like to upgrade to the new OS.

Lets hope Dell is right!:)

In my earlier blog I was mentioning about the growing popularity of social networking sites. Among all these social networking sites Twitter is gaining importance. The people who are on Twitter will agree with me that Twitter’s search engine,is not one of the best.

To solve this problem comes Topsy. Before you get any ideas, Topsy is a search engine that only searches tweets. Unlike Twitter’s search , Topsy doesnt just show you what everyone has been retweeting or just repeating about a topic.

It searches the links posted by Twitter users, and how often they were retweeted. By counting the links and how often they’re retweeted, Topsy also grades users. Those who get retweeted often have more influence over the search results than those who retweet more often,Topsy can even break down what’s happening in the search result by the hour, day, week, month or all them.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. In the world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg and many such communities people use them to share reviews, opinions , messages and have discussions about many things. Topsy indexes those things . Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms.

Topsy is not a threat to Google, but it is definitely a very useful search engine for Twitter. The founders of Topsy are Vipul Ved Prakash, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,Gary Iwatani and Justin Foutts.

Take a look at the demo Topsy

Today, Social Networking and instant messaging, are becoming more and more popular. It has started replacing the standard business call and the client handshake.

While e-mail is still the leading technology tool . The usage of text messaging, instant messaging and social networking are becoming very popular with white collar workers under 35 years of age.

According to a recent survey by Directions Research Inc, in the United States,in the 21st century,because of the leap in new technology and with shifting demographics of workforce the traditional way of business would rapidly change and more business will be conducted using emerging communications technologies and social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin.

The technologies that people preferred to use in their private lives will become the technologies people want to use at work. The survey found that nearly one in three such employees report that they use these technologies at work daily.

So what are u waiting for ?? get yourself onto one of the Social Networking sites and network away..:)

Skype the popular VOIP , just released its new beta version for Windows and this version includes Skype’s screen sharing feature. Skype’s screen sharing features are pretty basic and allow users to either share the full screen or select a part of the screen they want to share. The image of the screen is great.But in order to share a screen, a voice call has to be initiated, which might not always be what you really want to do.

Skype’s new version has also added additional support for visually impaired users who use screen reading software, as well as birthday reminders that will alert you when it’s one of your contacts’ birthdays.

Screen Sharing via Skype was already there in the Mac version a long time ago. Now with this facility even in Windows, Skype will be able to allow screen sharing between Mac and Windows users as long as they are using Skype.

May 28 had been a pretty exciting day for tech industry . There were 2 big news .

1. Google unveiled its stealth project Google Wave. Although google wave is not open to public yet but looking at the preview of it is sure to get you excited. So what is google wave ?

Google Wave is a in browser communication and collobration tool. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client.

More about google wave here .

2. Microsoft its search engine Bing . With the bing came a joke “But it is not google”

There was so much hype around the bing but on the day of the laucnh , looked the site had real issues.

But we need some real challenge to google. It is getting smarter day by day and has established a near virtual monopoly.

I am not sure what microsoft is up to. On the one hand it has launched wave and on other hand it is talking to yahoo.

The news should be out pretty soon.

It is speculated that worlframalpha could be a potential rival to google. wolfram Alpha is a revolutionary new search engine that computes answers rather than pointing to websites will be launched officially on May 17 .

Wolfram Alpha, named after Stephen Wolfram, the British-born computer scientist and inventor behind the project, takes a query and uses computational power to crunch through huge databases.

Dr Wolfram points out that his brainchild is a “computational knowledge engine”, not a traditional search engine.

All said and done , there had been many people who had tried to challenge google but havebeen unsuccessful With more than 70% search market share , it is not easy to bring the might of google which not only has tons of cash but a massive database.

It is only the time will tell whether the British can regain the “lost glory” in Search.

Microsoft has been using different tactic against Apple . The rising popularity of Macs and the domiance of Apple in iPod and Phone has threatened microsoft.

The latest ad features pre-law student Lauren and her mom, Sue, and these are the things they are looking for primarily in a laptop: speed, portability and battery life.

They end up with a Dell for $971.99.

This most recent ad comes about two weeks after Sheila bought a $2000 HP, and one day after Apple responded to the Laptop Hunters series with the Elimination spot