Gmail on Your Mobile Phone

Gmail has gone public! You can sign yourself up - no need to wait for an invitation. However, the twist is that you sign up with your mobile phone. The site has a checkbox that says: " Save my number for use with future Google Mobile services, such as secure password recovery and SMS alerts." Curious as to what those furture services are, I clicked the "learn more" link. Apparently, one of the future services is "secure verification should you ever forget the password to your Gmail account." No more forgotten password emails? They will send it to your phone instead? Hmmm. Another future offering is "to receive alerts on your phone when you receive new messages from specific senders or about topics that interest you." Now, that could be handy. Go get your Gmail now! Who doesn’t need 2.5 GBs of storage (and counting!) for free?

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Via CNet: A Dallas federal court has ordered file-swapping site LokiTorrent.com to shut down and provide Hollywood lawyers with access to its full server logs, including data that could expose hundreds of thousands of people to copyright lawsuits. The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it had won a quick court victory against LokiTorrent.

Yikes! LokiTorrent? I’ve errr…heard of that. Again, Hollywood is fighting their customers. Who but movie-lovers bother trading movies online? Why haven’t the big studios gone the way of iTunes? Embrace the BitTorrent technology and establish a business model for legal online buying/downloading of Hollywood movies? The desire is there, obviously. iTunes is a success story and one they should try to emulate. The future is today. The technology is there. Use it!

Via CNET: The Federal Communications Commission plans to begin enforcing its requirement that Net phone services that connect to the public telephone network–known as "interconnected" services–receive acknowledgment from 100 percent of their customers about 911 limitations. That means customers who haven’t responded affirmatively by Aug. 29 must be cut off, the FCC said in a document released at the end of July…75,000 to 100,000 residential subscribers who could lose their service…some subscribers have not responded to the notices because they already received some sort of 911 service through their Internet phones and think they’re immune. At issue is access to the enhanced 911, or E911, system, which allows emergency operators to link a caller’s physical location with the phone number used to dial for help.

I knew there was a reason I hadn’t jumped on the net phone bandwagon yet! (Kidding…) But this is a good example of where technology too far ahead of infrastructure. Net phones are an amazing thing, but for those 75,000 to 100,000 customers who probably don’t even realize that they don’t have enhanced 911 service, they are not so good after all…are they?

I finally got an iPod. Can you believe how behind the times I was? It’s an iPod mini in pink. I LOVE it. Already, I wonder how I lived without it. I want to wear it everywhere. I walked into work Friday, still listening. I listened to it while driving (is that wrong?) Now that I have this wonderful invention, I’m coming around to not hating iTunes as much anymore. I never really hated them exactly, but I wasn’t fond of their copyright protection at all. However, with iTunes’ list of podcasts, I’m learning to love them again. Free podcasts! I didn’t know how much I would love this. I already have a list of favorites, but I’m curious to hear others’ recommendations…

Yet another beta offering from Google: Google Desktop. The software, called Desktop 2, offers a lot of features, like a scratchpad for taking notes and a search utility to search through your Outlook email. Basically, the software has 3 parts: a toolbar that runs in Outlook; Sidebar, which shows up as a vertical panel; and "Quick Find," which lets you find files on their hard drives and launch applications. In addition to the scratchpad, the Sidebar offers weather data, news, RSS and Atom feeds from the Web, links to open browser windows and an e-mail preview. The Deskbar can either dock in your system tray or it can float and be dragged around your desktop. It sounds like it would be a pretty useful tool. Is anyone out there using it? What do you think?

Google has just introduced their own instant messenger program, Google Talk. Not only does it offer IM capabilities, it also allows you to talk to contacts via VOIP. Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded for you into Google Talk (oh, great…who are these people?!) for you to pick from. As it stands right now, it doesn’t offer anything above and beyond what is out there already, but in their FAQ, an upcoming feature caught my eye: "[We are planning on] enabling our users to talk with users from other service providers." A universal messenger from Google? Now that would be cool! Nothing wrong with Trillian, of course, but I wouldn’t mind having some choices in universal IM apps. I hope that is something they add soon!One final note - Google Talk works as a Gmail notifier, too! Cool!

Yahoo!’s Video Search just came out of beta and is now ready for primetime. If you are looking for a video clip online, this is a good search engine to use. They have partnered up with some major content publishers to fortify their offerings, including MTV, Buena Vista (including the latest clips and trailers for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), CBS News, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Discovery Channel, Scripps Networks (HGTV and The Food Network), and VH1. However, this doesn’t mean that you can type in any ol’ TV show and find full episodes to view online. Video Search is still all about the clips, which is fine, if you are looking for a popular clip like Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire or your favorite SNL skit.

However, watching TV online could be the future, which makes me curious what Google is up to. Rumor has it they are secretly recording and indexing TV programming to make shows searchable online, much the way it brings library books to the Web. In addition, Google has a video upload program, which you can log in to with your Google account (if you have a Gmail address, you have a Google account). Great for indie directors looking for exposure, but what about the rest of us? According to the terms of service, it sounds like you must have all the necessary rights and permissions to the content before uploading it. Hmm, does that mean I can’t upload various clips I’ve collected? Probably not. To test this theory, I’m uploading a favorite SNL skit to see if it will get added to their pathetic search results for that particular skit. Will keep you posted.

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I was channel surfing today and came across a new channel I had never heard of: Current TV. Initially, I thought this might be another tech channel, and I guess I was close. The guy was talking about how you can send content in to the channel…but we’re not talking public access here. For more information, he said visit the website. So I did. The first thing I noticed was the real-time TV listings on the left: "On Now", "In 3 mins", "In 6 mins," etc. The second thing I noticed was that I could edit the title of the website. Cool. Still, I wasn’t sure what Current TV was. So I followed the "About" link and got this explanation:

Current is a new, independent cable and satellite TV network, available in 20 million homes around the United States — and growing.We follow the global pulse via Google Current, a real-time view of what the world’s searching for, presented every half-hour around the clock. We slice the rest of the schedule into short pods — each just a few minutes long — that range far and wide, from international dispatches to profiles of cool people to intelligence on new trends. This is not a traditional TV network; watching Current, you’ll see more, on more topics, from more points of view. And much of it comes straight from you. We call it viewer-created content, or VC2, and it’s created in the Current Studio, an online extension of our real studios in San Francisco and LA. Anybody can join in to produce VC2 (and get paid for it) or watch and vote for what goes on TV.

How cool is that? Viewer-created TV! And not public-access stuff. You can actually upload your submissions from the Current TV website and hope for the greenlight. Top that off with a real-time view of what the world is Googling every half hour? I think I’ve found my new favorite channel!

…but they won’t say for what. Obviously, they are about to buy something BIG. Maybe acquire another company? Some speculate that the potential acquisition is in China (where Yahoo has an advantage). Specifically, it’s speculated that Google may be trying to buy Baidu.com, in which they already hold a 2.6 percent stake. Even before Thursday’s filing, rumors had circulated that Google was interested in buying or increasing its stake in the Beijing company. Yes, Google is taking over the WORLD! The question is, if this acquisition comes to pass, will Google go the way of MSN in bowing to the pressure of the Chinese censors? Microsoft just recently agreed to abide by these Chinese censors by banning the words "freedom" and "democracy" on its Chinese internet portal, MSN China. Will Google do the same? Or will they stand up for truth, justice, and the American Way?

Some beta testers of the new version of Windows, Windows Vista, noticed suspicious network traffic to their machines. After investigation, it turned out the traffic was from a new feature in Vista: a Peer-to-Peer networking app, that was turned on by default in the beta version. (Not very secure, is it?) The new P2P application uses Microsoft’s peer name resolution protocol (PNRP) and connects to other beta machines as soon as an Internet connection is available. There was some concern about privacy, as the peer-to-peer service tags the PC with an identifier that is associated with the machine. The P2P feature enables connections between Windows computers without the need for a central server. Multiplayer gaming is one application that could use this technology. Microsoft stated that the P2P app would not be turned on by default in the final version of Windows as it is in the beta version.

Source: CNET