David Sifry, the chief executive of Offbeat Guides, which provides personalized on-line guides for 30,000 destinations, said Google Apps allow him to travel without a computer because he can access all of his applications on-line. Also, with operating system-based applications most companies would have to maintain, update, install, costing time and money, he said. In contrast, Offbeat Guides contractors around the world collaborate online with the main office, Sifry said. “The fact that I don’t have to worry about doing technical support on their computers and software helps an extraordinary amount,” he said. “Whenever Google does a bug fix it works on all of their systems, without us having to spend any effort.” Analysts estimate about 2 percent of PC users will try out the Chrome OS in its first year. Google has said it will first try to persuade the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Acer to offer its operating system in low-cost netbooks that work mostly off the Web, allowing existing individual users to switch painlessly. But analysts are uncertain if Google’s Chrome can gain rapid traction among corporations, law firms and other businesses because of the sheer cost of switching. James Siminoff, chief executive of PhoneTag – which faces direct competition from Google for software that transcribes phone messages – uses both Google and Microsoft and similarly lets his employees use any application they want. But he concedes that some Microsoft applications remain indispensable. Both Siminoff and Sifry say they need at least a few copies of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software so they can exchange data with lawyers and accountants. Chad Wilbur, a senior Quist Valuation financial analyst, said Excel enjoys “mindshare” among long-standing users. “It’s beat into you from the time you learn on a computer. All our client documents arrive in Excel format. There are no comparable products,” he said. But Tzuo argues that will change. “Sure, there are certain functions that are still only in Excel,” he said, noting his finance department uses it for complex spreadsheets spanning multiple files. But every day that passes, the number of things that Excel does, that Google Spreadsheet doesn’t, gets smaller and smaller.”

The Spinpoint N3U stores up to 125 Gigabytes per platter for a total 250GB data storage capacity.

Samsung’s N3U drive, however, uses a native USB interface and as such does not require this bridge board.

“The new high-capacity 1.8″ 250GB drive enhances Samsung’s product offerings and is ideal for consumers who require a small form factor, high capacity data storage,” said Choel-Hee Lee, vice president of marketing Storage System Division, Samsung Electronics. “It is easy to carry around and it is designed to withstand a free fall drop of up to 50 centimeters and be resistant to a maximum shock incident of up to 1500G.”

As a native USB interface device, the Spinpoint N3U eliminates possible points of failure due to loose cable connections and optimizes performance by eliminating the interrupt service time for the bridge board to convert PATA to USB signals. The N3U 1.8″ drive also consumes about 40 percent less power than a 2.5″ hard drive of an equivalent capacity.

The Spinpoint N3U comes in 120-, 160-, 200- and 250-GB capacities, the disk rotation speed is 3600rpm, and it supports a USB 2.0 interface. The drives are equipped with an 8MB cache memory. Initial shipments to OEMs are scheduled from mid-July with a MSRP at $199.00.

Netbooks generally sell for $300 to $400, but prices are dropping as new offerings flood the market and wireless carriers offer subsidies with the purchase of a data plan. Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu noted that while the prices on nearly all PC components have been falling, “the one thing that has not been coming down is the cost of the operating system. This is going to put some pressure on Microsoft.” Microsoft doesn’t say how much it charges PC brands for Windows, but analysts estimate it gets $20 to $40 for the older XP system used in the vast majority of netbooks, and at least $150 for the current Vista system. Wu said price competition could ultimately give a bump to PC makers’ margins. “I think overall it should improve the profitability for PC vendors. It’s really a question of how much they pass on to the customers,” he said.

Between 20 million and 30 million netbooks are expected to be shipped this year, and the devices continue to rewrite the rules for the PC industry. Even as heavyweights such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc roll out new netbooks, analysts expect new players, including Taiwan-based equipment manufacturers and carriers such as AT&T Inc, to release branded netbooks running on either Intel Corp’s x86 chip platform or ARM chips. Google said Chrome will work on either architecture. HP said it is studying the Chrome operating system. Dell did not return a call seeking comment. Microsoft has not commented on Google’s move. Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar was skeptical that Chrome poses any near-term threat to Microsoft, but he expects the company to react nonetheless. “I think Microsoft will be flexible in pricing to respond to any challenge,” he said. “Over time I think that Linux will gain traction, and as more carriers jump on this netbook opportunity, Google might provide them a way to differentiate their platform. But this is just the first stage of a marathon,” he added.

Gartner analyst Michael Silver said Google’s move does present some risk to Microsoft, but he was doubtful the software giant would cut the price of Windows any time soon. “Microsoft is a bit limited because what they do for one they have to do for everybody. If they see it as a threat they’ll respond. But netbooks have been shipping with Windows XP for a while and have actually been doing quite well compared with Linux, even though they’re more expensive.”

A couple of reports are now saying Microsoft has apparently answered Google’s advancement into the netbook OS field with an  ‘announcement’ due to be made the coming Monday 13th of June 2009. Another Blog post has been making rounds about a new Microsoft browser in the works being called Gazelle, which is I’m presuming another alternative to Internet Explorer. The blog states that Microsoft’s announcement could be that Windows 7 will be released to marketing and possibly an announcement of the new browser as well. Nothing is confirmed just yet.

The new Gazelle browser will be designed to act as what reports are saying, a ‘self-contained OS to handle multiple processes and web applications in a secure manner’.  It’s apparently built on a browser kernel that’s designed to be a secure system so as to provide for security from viruses and such to prevent them from accessing your device’s OS.

It’s all speculation as of now but it’s not too long a wait to see what Microsoft has in store for us. And if  you’re wondering if the Chrome OS was the reason for all the hullabaloo from MS, your guess is as good as mine. Stay tuned.

The device, vLink, is a CDMA USB modem offering one GB data storage priced at Rs 2,100, Virgin Mobile India said in a statement.    

“vLink comes with a starter kit… Which includes free unlimited promo data usage time of 30 days. We have launched two tariff plans – Rs 801 per month (for unlimited data usage) and Rs 349 per month (with a facility of balance roll over to next month),” Virgin Mobile India Chief Officer (Handset, VAS and Procurement) Deval Parikh said.    

The second plan has a rate of 25 paise per minute (between 8 am-10 pm) and 13 paise per minute (between 10 pm-8 am), he added.    

“vLink will offer instant connectivity on the move to the style conscious youth, be it students, professionals, SMBs or SOHOs…It is a carry-along device that will allow users to access internet anywhere as well as store their music, photos, videos etc,” Virgin Mobile India Chief Executive Officer M A Madhusudan said.    

The statement added that India has a total internet user base of 49.40 million, of which net users ‘under 25′ years of age account for 52 per cent.

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter. Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent. Bing’s share peaked in the first week of June at 9.21 percent, falling away in the middle two weeks before coming back at 8.45 percent in the last week of June. The results may give heart to Microsoft, which is investing heavily in its loss-making online services business and is refusing to cede the market to Google.

“At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive,” StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen said in a statement. The world’s largest software company may yet strike an online search partnership with Yahoo to make itself a credible competitor, but talk of such a deal has quietened down. StatCounter, based in Dublin, says its data are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Other data research firms such as comScore are not expected to release figures on Bing’s share until mid-July.

Wang Junxiu, an Internet entrepreneur in Beijing who has objected to Green Dam and other forms of censorship, said the plan appeared to be poorly thought out and doomed to fail. “The leaders apparently decided the controversy and problems were too much and decided to make a break,” said Wang. “If this had been a well-prepared plan with senior support, the result would have been very different. But it wasn’t.” China said the Green Dam software was designed to block objectionable images, but the policy stoked opposition from industry and human rights groups and foreign governments who said it distorted fair market competition and strengthened Beijing’s ability to censor political views. On Monday, the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing urged China to reconsider the move, saying it “poses significant questions in relation to security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information and user choice”. Last week, the United States also said the policy was “draconian” and the European Union urged it to be scrapped. But the most potent opposition may have been the many Chinese Internet activists, bloggers and lawyers who threatened protests, law suits and other actions against the plan. Susan Shirk, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of California, San Diego, said that earlier open criticism of “Green Dam” in the Chinese media suggested the plan did not have the backing of senior government leaders. “They do watch public opinion very carefully,” Shirk said of China’s Communist Party leaders. “There’s a very dynamic interaction between the Party authorities and the Internet public.”

If the approach does take off, it could become big business: Microsoft’s Office division rang up sales of $60 billion in the software company’s most-recent fiscal year. Google Inc sells Google Apps, an Internet-based alternative to Microsoft Office that includes a spreadsheet, word processor and presentation software. Design software maker Adobe Systems and privately held Zoho Corp offer similar products. Dennerline, who manages Cisco’s online collaboration products, said he is interested in getting into that area. “That is an interesting space. We are certainly thinking about that,” he said on Tuesday during an online news conference. He did not elaborate. Dennerline also said Cisco is not interested in competing with Salesforce.com Inc in selling online applications that companies use to manage sales and marketing activities – an area analysts have long speculated that Cisco planned to go into. Salesforce is the biggest maker of web-based applications, a segment of the software industry that research firm Gartner estimates will see sales rise about 30 percent this year to $6.5 billion.

Cisco, over the past decade, has expanded its focus from routers and switches to a wider range of products including software and video products, such as a high-end video conferencing systems called TelePresence and the WebEx service that facilitates online meetings. Chief Executive John Chambers said on Tuesday the expansion into new services would continue, including a TelePresence product for homes in the next one to two years. Chambers has in the past cited plans for a consumer TelePresence system, but analysts have said it would be hard to come up with a cheaper version of the high-definition, life-size video conference system for corporate customers. “On the one hand, make no mistake about it, we will stay focused on our core competencies, switching and routing. You will see a constant flood of product capabilities and directions coming in these areas,” Chambers said. “At the same time, we realize that the network has evolved.”

According to our information, the issues seem to be a technical problem at the Vodafone end.

So in case you’re a BlackBerry user from Mumbai it may take a little while before the service is restored to normal. Since there’s no time frame specified by Vodafone, we can only hope it gets back on track soon.

Everyday two million web pages are poisoned by hidden threats and 60 percent of those threats shut down or move to a different destination on the web making real-time link scanning crucial. Any type of site can be affected and if a user simply visits one of these poisoned web pages they don’t even need to click on anything to get into real trouble, to lose their credit card details, their ID or other valuable information or files. Regular anti-virus software alone cannot protect against this type of threat.

AVG LinkScanner gives users an additional real-time layer of protection apart from their existing security software. It works by looking at the web page behind a link or a web address typed into a browser and analyzing whether it harbors a threat. If it does, then AVG LinkScanner stops the user from downloading that page.  This means that Windows XP and Vista users can now know whether it is safe to click on a link when they click on it.

AVG LinkScanner also applies this targeted analysis of web pages to search results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Whenever users search using these search engines, they will see safety rankings for all ‘organic’ search results. In addition, the AVG LinkScanner will scan your bookmarks as well as links contained in instant messages and emails before you open them to ensure they are safe.

AVG LinkScanner’s ability to analyze web links in real time enables AVG to deliver more accurate and relevant protection than other safe-surfing solutions. AVG LinkScanner analyzes individual pages on a web site to generate a rating for those pages.

“The Web has become the primary distribution mechanism for viruses (and other malware), drive-by downloads and other stealthy web threats which represent vast majority of attacks,” said AVG Technologies CTO Karel Obluk. “So we’ve evolved our product range to put greater emphasis on combating this more insidious and dangerous form of attack. AVG LinkScanner is at the front line of this additional protective layer. It’s our goal, by making this layer freely available, to give users the confidence to always feel safe when they go online.”

AVG’s “neighborhood watch” approach to AVG LinkScanner research also increases the product’s ability to provide relevant protection to users – putting the protection where users actually go and when they go there, rather than trying to map and secure the entire Internet. 

The software is free for use on any personal home computer for non-commercial purposes. It can be downloaded from http://linkscanner.avg.com . Support is available through a free online forum hosted by AVG at http://freeforum.avg.com.

AVG LinkScanner runs under all current versions of Windows XP and Vista, both 32- and 64-bit. The software is compatible with all major security software and with Internet Explorer 6 or later and Firefox 2 or later browsers and is available in English.