Adobe has partnered with one of the most popular social networking Web sites, Facebook, to give developers a new set of tools to create applications.

The applications will use Adobe's Flash platform and the new ActionScript 3 Client Library for Facebook the two companies developed together. The client library is a free open source programming language that supports Facebook application programming interfaces (APIs) including Facebook Connect.

Adrian Ludwig, Adobe's group manager for platforms, told Macworld that the companies will release the library and then gather feedback from developers. The libraries will be updated, adding functionality based on that feedback, allowing developers to make better applications.

The number and types of developers using Flash is increasing all the time. Some of the developers are focused on Flash, while others are coming from more traditional segments of the market.

"We are seeing that it's becoming quite easy for traditional developers to start using Flash," said Ludwig. "That's quite a change from where it was five to eight years ago when Flash was focused on animation."

Adobe said that Flash Player 9 has 98 percent penetration, meaning that 98 percent of all Internet connected computers have the application installed. The company did a study two months after the release of Flash Player 10 and found 55 percent penetration. While not released yet, Ludwig said he expects the latest adoption rate for Flash Player 10 to top 80 percent.

Those numbers give Flash Player 10 the fastest adoption rate of any version of Flash Player, according to Adobe.

Writing Facebook applications in Flash is not new. In fact, 12 of top 20 apps on Facebook use Flash. However, the new tools should make it easier for developers in the future.

Source: http://www.macworld.com/article/139727/2009/03/adobefacebook.html?t=232

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Microsoft plans to make those announcements and others related to the Marketplace on Tuesday at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas.

Some of the features of the Marketplace match those of existing mobile application stores from Apple and Google, but Microsoft -- and any other company that launches a new mobile app store -- will have to add exciting capabilities in order to match the popularity of the iPhone's App Store.

Microsoft plans to announce that people who buy an application from the Marketplace will have 24 hours to return the application for a full refund. The setup is similar to one adopted by Google when it launched its Android store last year, but different from Apple, which doesn't allow returns of iPhone apps. If a user returns an application, Microsoft will refund its 30 percent share of the sales price and the developer will return its 70 percent share.

Marketplace users will also have more options on how to pay for applications than do users of the competitive stores, said Aaron Woodman, director of consumer product management for mobile communications at Microsoft. Windows Mobile 6.5 users will be able to pay with a credit card or put the purchase on their mobile service bill. iPhone users pay for apps through Apple's iTunes content platform, and Android phone users can only pay for applications through the fledgling Google Checkout payment service, a limitation that some developers blame for slow sales.

Microsoft will also let mobile operators create stores within the Marketplace, Woodman said. The operator stores will appear among categories such as games and productivity applications in the store.

Windows Mobile users are likely to be most interested in some of the name-brand applications that Microsoft plans to announce at the conference. Despite Microsoft's financial stake in Facebook, there is not yet an official Facebook application for Windows Mobile phones. That will change in four to six weeks, when a Facebook application will become available for current Windows Mobile users. Facebook also plans to release an application

Source : http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/033109-facebook-app-return-policy-to.html

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Nano Costing just 100,000 rupees ($1,979; £1,366), the TATA Nano is being launched in Mumbai later, before going on sale across India over the next 10 days.

Tata hopes the 10 feet (3 metre) long, five-seater car will be cheap enough to encourage millions of Indians to trade up from their motorcycles.

Car industry analysts estimate it will take five or six years for Tata to start to make a profit from the Nano.

Factory row

The four-door Nano has a 33bhp, 624cc engine at the rear.

The basic model has no airbags, air conditioning, radio, or power steering. However, more luxurious versions will be available.

A slightly bigger European version, the Nano Europa is due to follow in 2011, and is expected to cost nearer to £4,000.

Analysts said that if the car proves an immediate hit in its home market, Tata may struggle to meet demand.

This is because the main Nano factory in the western state of Gujarat, which will be able to build 250,000 cars a year, is not due to open until next year.
In the meantime, Tata will only be able to build about 50,000 Nanos at its existing plants.

The delay happened when Tata had to abandon plans to build the Nano in a new plant in the eastern state of West Bengal due to a row over land acquired from farmers.
This caused the launch of the Nano to be put back by six months.
Quarterly loss

Even if Tata can sell 250,000 models a year, it will add only 3% to the firm's revenues, says Vaishali Jajoo, auto analyst at Mumbai's Angel Broking.
"That doesn't make a significant difference to the top line," he said.
"And for the bottom line, it will take five to six years to break even."
Yet with seven million motorcycles sold last year in India, Tata is eying a huge marketplace for the Nano.

Like almost all global carmakers, Tata has seen sales fall as the global economic downturn has continued.

The firm made a 2.63bn rupees loss for three months between October and December.
In addition, Tata is struggling to refinance the remaining £2bn of its £3bn loan it took out to buy the Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford in June of last year.
For more information visit here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7957671.stm

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There are probably a bunch of things in your life that you wish you could undo, but cannot. Thankfully, technology allows you to do that, to some extent.

The next time you realize you will invite a devil's wrath after sending an email from Gmail to someone you shouldn't have, you'll have an option to undo this action. But you have to hurry up; you'll have only 5 seconds!

This feature, called "Undo Send," is yet another experimental feature that comes from Gmail Labs. After enabling the feature, Gmail shows an "undo" link whenever you send a message.

Now, when you undo the sending of a mail, Gmail saves it as a draft and you can continue editing the message or discard it.

How to Activate:

1. Go to Gmail Labs
2. Look for "Undo Send"
3. Choose Enable

Also, if keyboard shortcuts are enabled in your Gmail account, a better option than clicking on "undo" is to press "z."

It is debatable whether 5 seconds is enough for you to realize whether the message you sent was a mistake.

"Goggles" is another Gmail Labs feature that helps you to not send messages when you're sleep-befuddled (at night). It does so by making you solve math problems before your message can be sent.

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Undo_Gmail_Mistakes_in_5_Seconds/551-100287-643.html

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Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) will release the latest version of Internet Explorer at noon Eastern time on Thursday, bringing major changes in a bid to hold onto the browser's dominance and fend off an increasingly crowded field of browsers, including the still-surging Mozilla Firefox.

Internet Explorer 8 brings to the table a number of new user-friendly features, increased standards support, and much improved security. The browser has been downloaded tens of millions of times since it entered public testing mode a little more than a year ago, constituting one of Microsoft's largest beta tests ever. Improved security is one of IE8's most significant features. NSS Labs released an independent study early Thursday showing IE8 significantly besting Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera in catching and blocking malware. With its SmartScreen filtering, IE8 Release Candidate 1 caught 69% of malware, while Firefox 3.07 caught only 30%.

In telemetry from beta testers, Microsoft has found malware to be a common occurance -- one IE8 user in 40 has gotten a malware block, while 1 million users per month are prevented from browsing to phishing sites.

IE8 also contains a number of other security features, including an InPrivate Browsing mode that keeps no trail of browsing history and new features that prevents certain cross-site scripting attacks, click-jacking, and the installation of malicious ActiveX controls.

Nevertheless, a hacker successfully hijacked a machine running the IE8 release candidate and Windows 7 beta -- competitive browsers were hacked, too -- in a contest at the CanSecWest security conference on Wednesday.

The user interface in IE8 has been overhauled, adding new features such as color-coded browser tabs to group recently opened tabs together, the ability to recommend sites, a new visual search feature that allows users to see pictures of things such aseBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) results, auto-completion of searches and URLs, and a toolbar like Mozilla Firefox's for searching within a page. New tabs also show commonly visited Web sites as links, and tabs work in isolation so that if one tab crashes, the entire browser doesn't.

Throughout the testing process, Microsoft has focused most heavily on two new usability features, Web Slices and Accelerators. Accelerators let users perform actions like translation, mapping, and search from the right-click context menu, which brings up a window inside the current page to show translated text, a map, or search results.

Web Slices, which requires work on the part of site developers and therefore are still few and far between, let users create a link on their favorites bar, which brings up only a small portion of a Web site such as a condensed local weather forecast.

Microsoft claims that IE8 is faster or as fast as its main competitors, though the claim is debatable since Microsoft itself did the tests. The company released a high-speed video last week showing highly trafficked Web sites loading side-by-side in multiple browsers; IE8 came out ahead more often than not. Still, Microsoft isn't overplaying its hand here, simultaneously raising and downplaying the results. "These differences come down to milliseconds," Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, said in an interview.

The other significant -- and controversial -- new feature in IE8 is standards support. While developers and standards advocates have long complained that IE didn't support Web standards well enough, standards support comes at a cost, namely compatibility. In IE8, Microsoft includes both a legacy browsing mode and a standards browsing mode so that non-standard sites still load.

Developers can add a tag to their sites letting IE know if the site should be opened in standards mode or compatibility mode. Microsoft also maintains a blacklist of standards-mode incompatible sites.

IE8 will be available at launch in 25 languages, for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. However, IE8 won't be available for the Mac.

For more information visit here

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/browsers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215901126&cid=iwhome_art_Brows_mostpop

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Networking giant Cisco has unveiled its Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy, targeting IT managers with what chief executive John Chambers described as "not a product announcement, but a datacentre architecture announcement."

Chambers said the new platform would "unify compute hardware, network and storage access, with the power of virtualisation."

"We enter markets when we see an inflection point and this is the third of a five phase approach to our datacentre strategy," he said.

"It's going to be enterprise services-led - we've got high-touch engagements with enterprise customers and service providers."

Cisco said the datacentre architecture would incorporate a new server product, the UCS B-series blade server containing Intel's latest chip, the soon-to-launch Nehalem processor. No technical specifications were announced at the launch, but Cisco's designate executive vice president Rob Lloyd said more details would be released in April.

Currently Cisco has rolled out test systems to 10 beta sites and plans to seed trial rollouts to selected businesses as well. One customer who was named was IT service provider Savvis, although Chambers said there were also financial, automotive and service provider clients trialing the system.

Cisco said UCS would be an open system allowing, Microsoft, VMware and other virtualisation packages to run on top of the hardware, and several of Cisco's partners were involved in the global announcement.

VMware chief executive Paul Maritz said its customers were, "reaching for new levels of flexibility and efficiency."

"There's no more debate as to whether virtualisation is a good strategy, but it's incumbent on us to remove the roadblock from the current level of servers that have been virtualised by businesses. We're trying to move our software from enterprise-grade to cloud-grade – basically attempting to achieve 'cloud'-like levels of service," he said.

Microsoft's president for server and tools business, Bob Muglia, said that while all customers were looking to save money through virtualisation, there is also a chance "to save people costs in datacentre management."

EMC chief executive Joe Tucci described UCS as "game changing in terms of speed, cost, scale and eliminating complexity."

One of the current conundrums for datacentre managers is how to increase the percentage of servers being virtualised, while making the resulting virtual infrastructure easier to manage. BMC chief executive Bob Beauchamp said what was needed, "was a single pane of glass to manage all firms' virtual infrastructure. "

However, Blade Network Technologies president and chief executive, Vikram Mehta, warned customers that: "For Cisco, it's all about getting a bigger share of wallet from IT customers. There's not a lot of markets you can step into, and servers are a $60bn market. It's Cisco's relentless quest for growth that is overtaking what's best for customers."

For more information visit here

http://www.vnunet.com/computing/news/2238601/cisco-targets-datacentre-spend

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Google has begun testing a service that will make transcripts of voice-mail messages and make them searchable.

For now, Google will only offer voice-mail transcription to existing customers of GrandCentral Communications, a telecommunications service provider that it bought in July 2007, it said in a posting on the Official Google Blog.

GrandCentral offers customers a single number through which they can forward calls to their work, home or mobile phone, filter calls before answering them, record conversations and access an archive of recordings and voice mail via the Web. Just like Google's promise that with its Gmail e-mail service, you'll never need to delete another message, GrandCentral promises to archive voicemail "for life."

Google isn't saying yet whether it will make and store transcripts of recorded conversations in addition to voice-mail messages.

GrandCentral stopped accepting new customers after Google bought it and even now, rebranded as Google Voice, the service is still closed to new business. Since its acquisition, GrandCentral has invited prospective customers to leave their e-mail address to reserve a number, and Google said it will begin responding to those requests "in a matter of weeks."

Google claims its service is the only fully automated voice-mail transcription service on the market. The transcriptions may include mistakes, and Google will make accuracy improvements over time, it said.

In contrast, other automated transcription services already on the market rely on a small amount of human intervention to improve transcription accuracy and teach the software new words on the fly.

Last week Skype began transcribing its customers' voice mail messages into SMS (Short Message Service) text messages using technology from U.K. company Spinvox. If the Spinvox software is unsure about a word, it plays that part of the recording to a person who confirms or corrects the transcription.

Spinvox began launching services in the U.K. in 2005 and now powers the voice-mail transcription services offered by North American carriers including Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Rogers and Telus. Telus will send transcripts to its subscribers via SMS or e-mail.

Another software company, Nuance Communications, announced a competing offering last April. It hasn't named any customers yet, but operators in France and Spain are deploying its voice mail-to-text service, a company spokesman said last month.

Skype makes its transcription service pay for itself by charging for the SMS messages, but Google hasn't said how it will make money from its transcriptions, which like other GrandCentral services are free.

One obvious revenue source for Google would be targeting advertising: when a friend leaves a message suggesting you meet for dinner, the transcript might be displayed alongside an advertisement for a local restaurant. Google might also use the transcripts to improve the profiles of its users' interests that it is building in order to deliver interest-based or behavioural advertising, a move it announced on Wednesday.

For more information visit here

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161121/after_gmail_google_wants_to_search_your_voice_mail_too.html

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Apple have unveiled their new iPod Shuffle.

A new feature means that the MP3 player can talk to the user in 14 languages, telling them the artist and title of the song they are listening to.

The revamped iPod Shuffle, which measures around 46mm by 8mm, is the smallest ever made, and weighs only 10.7 grams.

Controls are mounted on the headphone lead for the first time, rather than on the body of the player.

The third generation iPod Shuffle, which comes in only silver or black, can store 4GB of music or 1,000 songs.

It talks to you because there's no screen. It could be the beginning of an Apple virtual DJ.

The player, the entry level in Apple's range, was originally launched in January 2005.

For more information visit here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_7939000/7939405.stm Read More

Apparently, Internet Explorer is on its way out. JCXP.net is saying that Internet Explorer 8 will be the last traditional version of Microsoft's web browser, and that Microsoft's next web browser will be based on a promising Microsoft Research project dubbed "Gazelle".

Reading through the Microsoft Research paper on Gazelle, it becomes clear that it is an intricate beast. It relies on a "browser kernel", 5000 lines of C# code, that exposes the underlying system to webpages using a set of system calls. Web content does not interact with the actual operating system at all; all communication goes through the sandboxed browser kernel. The browser kernel takes care of all resource protection and sharing.

In addition, Gazelle takes the multi-process approach used by Google's Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 a few steps further by not only running each tab or webpage in a separate process, but by also giving separate parts of each website their own process. The authors of Gazelle believe the model introduced by Chrome isn't sufficient. "This granularity [in Chrome and IE8] is insufficient since a user may browse multiple mutually distrusting sites in a single tab, and a web page may contain an iframe with content from an untrusted site (e.g., ads)," they explain. They go even further by considering content coming from "ad.iloveponies.com" to be separate from "user.iloveponies.com". Plug-ins are also run in separate, sand-boxed processes, so that if they go bad, they only affect that particular sandboxed plug-in process.

Currently, Gazelle is built with some additional IE bits on top, and is not production ready. Still, it renders most websites correctly, but there is an additional performance overhead thanks to the IE bits. The authors also state that they have made no concessions to backwards compatibility in favour of security.

JCXP now claims that Gazelle will be the basis for Microsoft's next web browser, which won't sport the IE name, but there's no source. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen; when news of Singularity came out, the entire web automatically assumed that this Microsoft Research project would be the next Windows. Still, the ideas behind Gazelle are sound, and don't sound too far-fetched to be implemented.

For more information visit here

http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/story/21120/Microsoft_s_Next_Browser_To_Be_Based_on_Gazelle_

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TAIPEI -(Dow Jones)- Apple Inc. (AAPL) is planning to launch a netbook computer with a touch screen monitor as early as the second half of this year, two people close to the situation told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday.

The mini laptop computers will likely have monitor screens that are between 9.7-inches and 10-inches, one person, who declined to be named, said.

Another person said other specifications and functions are still under evaluation.

Apple is working with Taiwan's Wintek Corp. (2384.TW), a contract manufacturer of small and medium displays, to make the touch-screen displays and Quanta Computer Inc. (2382.TW), the world's largest notebook maker by revenue, to assemble the new netbooks, the second person said.

Netbooks are primarily designed for Internet browsing and mobile computing. They cost less than conventional laptop computers, and are lighter and smaller.

A slew of PC makers including Dell Inc. (DELL), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and Acer Inc. (2353.TW) have in recent months entered this market segment. The companies are hoping to tap new computer users in emerging markets.

Apple's entry may come in what is expected to be a very tough year for computer sales. Desktop-computer shipments in particular are expected to fall by nearly one-third globally in 2009 as consumers increasingly shift to laptop computers, according to projections released by research firm Gartner Inc. earlier in March.

While netbook computers have become a major sales driver for computer companies, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs last year dismissed netbooks, even going so far as to suggest Apple's third-generation iPhone - a smartphone device that offer multifunctions - could serve as a netbook. Jobs told analysts in October Apple isn't "tremendously worried" the slump will drive customers to less-expensive PCs and added, "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk."

Jill Tan, a spokeswoman for Apple in Asia, declined to comment Tuesday. Wintek spokeswoman Susie Lee and Quanta Computer investor relations officer Carol Hsu declined to comment.

Apple, like many other big personal-computer and consumer-electronics brands, doesn't actually make most of its products. It hires manufacturing specialists - mainly companies from Taiwan that have extensive operations in China - to assemble its gadgets based on Apple's designs.

The arrangement frees Apple and its fellow vendors from running complicated, labor-intensive production lines, while the ability of Taiwanese companies to slash manufacturing costs helps cut product prices over time.

Quanta assembles Apple's MacBook and iMac computers.

Shares of Wintek and Quanta rose on the news. Wintek shares rose 6.9% to NT$ 11.70, while Quanta shares gained 4.4% to NT$37.60. The broader market closed up 0.9%.

But Yuanta Securities analyst Vincent Chen said the share price gains may be limited as orders from Apple may not be large.

"Apple is unlikely to make very cheap products. The netbook would most likely be very niche, meaning volume is going to be small."

For more information visit here

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200903100213DOWJONESDJONLINE000077_FORTUNE5.htm Read More

TAIPEI -(Dow Jones)- Apple Inc. (AAPL) is planning to launch a netbook computer with a touch screen monitor as early as the second half of this year, two people close to the situation told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday.

The mini laptop computers will likely have monitor screens that are between 9.7-inches and 10-inches, one person, who declined to be named, said.

Another person said other specifications and functions are still under evaluation.

Apple is working with Taiwan's Wintek Corp. (2384.TW), a contract manufacturer of small and medium displays, to make the touch-screen displays and Quanta Computer Inc. (2382.TW), the world's largest notebook maker by revenue, to assemble the new netbooks, the second person said.

Netbooks are primarily designed for Internet browsing and mobile computing. They cost less than conventional laptop computers, and are lighter and smaller.

A slew of PC makers including Dell Inc. (DELL), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and Acer Inc. (2353.TW) have in recent months entered this market segment. The companies are hoping to tap new computer users in emerging markets.

Apple's entry may come in what is expected to be a very tough year for computer sales. Desktop-computer shipments in particular are expected to fall by nearly one-third globally in 2009 as consumers increasingly shift to laptop computers, according to projections released by research firm Gartner Inc. earlier in March.

While netbook computers have become a major sales driver for computer companies, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs last year dismissed netbooks, even going so far as to suggest Apple's third-generation iPhone - a smartphone device that offer multifunctions - could serve as a netbook. Jobs told analysts in October Apple isn't "tremendously worried" the slump will drive customers to less-expensive PCs and added, "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk."

Jill Tan, a spokeswoman for Apple in Asia, declined to comment Tuesday. Wintek spokeswoman Susie Lee and Quanta Computer investor relations officer Carol Hsu declined to comment.

Apple, like many other big personal-computer and consumer-electronics brands, doesn't actually make most of its products. It hires manufacturing specialists - mainly companies from Taiwan that have extensive operations in China - to assemble its gadgets based on Apple's designs.

The arrangement frees Apple and its fellow vendors from running complicated, labor-intensive production lines, while the ability of Taiwanese companies to slash manufacturing costs helps cut product prices over time.

Quanta assembles Apple's MacBook and iMac computers.

Shares of Wintek and Quanta rose on the news. Wintek shares rose 6.9% to NT$ 11.70, while Quanta shares gained 4.4% to NT$37.60. The broader market closed up 0.9%.

But Yuanta Securities analyst Vincent Chen said the share price gains may be limited as orders from Apple may not be large.

"Apple is unlikely to make very cheap products. The netbook would most likely be very niche, meaning volume is going to be small."

For more information visit here

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200903100213DOWJONESDJONLINE000077_FORTUNE5.htm Read More