The Zune HD

Microsoft announced yesterday that their music entertainment service Zune will extend its video service to Xbox Live later this year, bringing tons of TV and film content to an international audience for the first time. Zune has thus far been mostly incubating in the States, and this is the first blow of the battle horn, as it were, where world domination is concerned. They also confirmed the launch of its next-gen portable media player, Zune HD, which will only be available in the States for the time being. Zune HD is the first portable player with a built-in HD radio receiver, HD video output capabilities, OLED touch screen, Wi-Fi and an internet browser.So what do you think? Will Microsoft ever be able to break Apple’s domination of the music entertainment service industry? Would you rather have a Zune player over an iPod? Would you use Zune over iTunes? Or do you avoid the whole mess altogether by reverting to old school WinAmp? Tell us what you think.

Bing! a new search engine from Microsoft

Today, Microsoft publicly unveiled its soon-to-launch search engine Bing. It will become available over the next few days, and be fully launched by June 3. On the surface, Bing has a distinct gloss. The home page features a rotation of stunning photography, for instance, which can be clicked on to produce related image search results. But the most significant changes are under the covers. “We have taken the algorithmic programming up an order of magnitude,” says Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi. Each search result page is customized according to what type of search you do (health, travel, shopping, news, sports). The algorithms determine not only the order of results on the page, but the layout of the page itself, concluding what sections appear. These sections can include anything from guided refinements and a list of related searches in the left-hand pane to images, videos, and local results.I’ve been playing around with a preview version of Bing for about a week. It is designed to be “more of a decision engine,” says Mehdi. Bing helps people make decisions through guided search and a focus on task completion. In a time when a new Website is created every 4.5 seconds, information overload is becoming a real problem. ” People are getting hundreds of thousands of links but not getting what they want,” says Mehdi. Bing tries to alleviate problem by offering up different experiences depending on the search. It also acts more like a destination site for certain searches. Travel and product searches bring in comparison pricing, reviews, images, and more. Hulu videos can be played within the video search results. Bing pulls in data from other Web services when it can so that you often don’t have to leave to get the information you want.The internal codename for Bing is Kumo (which is what you see in the screenshots), and the current release is called Kiev. Rather than a spare, blank screen, Bing’s homepage surrounds the search box with a single beautiful image, such as the one of the tribesmen above or a kinkajou. You can hover over parts of the image to get factoids about the image or click through to an image search result page to explore more. The left-hand pane offers the option to narrow your search on images, videos, shopping, news, maps, or travel. Each of these has a different look and feel. A travel search will turn up a page based on Microsoft’s Farecast technology asking you where you want to go, with flights, hotels, and destination information. A news search offers up headlines, photos, videos, and local news in a column on the right. A shopping search will bring up products and is tied into Microsoft’s Cashback program.Every search also generates a guide on the left to help you refine your search. A search for “kinkajou,” for example, lets you refine by images, facts, sale, breeders, care, diseases, and videos. A search for “Samsung LCD TVs” brings up an entirely different set of guided results: shopping, review, manual, repair, buy, stand, images, and videos. If you search for images of “butterflies,” it lets you sift to show just Monarch, Swallowtail, Viceroy, Owl, and other types of butterflies. All of this categorization and concept-matching is Microsoft’s early attempt to bring in some basic semantic search technologies into a mainstream search engine. Each guided option is dynamically generated, just like the different sections of the search results page. “Google, tried to preempt this,” says Mehdi, referring to Google’s new search refinement options it launched last week, which is also in the left pane. Those Google options, which include the ability to search across different time periods or for related keywords, are “completely static,” criticizes Mehdi. “There is nothing new about it. It is a very minor rev, not as sophisticated as what we are doing. For us ever query is special.”Bing also takes advantage of Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset to provide better previews and snippets of text when you hover over a result. Also, whenever a search brings up a “reference” tab in the guided exploration pane, clicking on that will bring up an enhanced Wikipedia article with semantic tags.Onstage at the D7 conference, Steve Ballmer acknowledges: “There is no way to change the whole game in one step.” But search “deserves a good feature war.” And Bing will be rolling out new features as it goes forward. But is it enough to get people to switch? Bing is certainly not a game-changer, but it does cut out a lot of the back and forth that happens with so many searches today. If Bing can help people find what they are looking for faster, it will put pressure on

About Google Wave

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool.
More information visit wave.google.com

Shorten any link and make money

Talk of how to monetize Twitter, both from its founders perspective and a third-party point of view, is dominating conversation on the web these days. Tweetbucks, a startup founded by entrepreneur Chris Sukornyk, is hoping to make money for users of Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed through leveraging affiliate fees and CPCs from ads.Here’s how it works. Tweetbucks has a database with thousands of online merchants that offer referral fees (or money you get from merchants when your advertisements of a product result in a purchase ), including Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and Shoes.com. All you need to do is find a product on a retail site, enter it on Tweetbuck’s site, and the startup will automatically shorten (via Bit.ly) and convert it to an affiliate enabled link, referencing the site’s data base of online merchants that pay out affiliate fees. You can then add the link to in a Tweet, Facebook status update or FriendFeed message.Every time people click your link and your recommendation results in a purchase, the online merchant pays a commission to you. For example, referral fees for Amazon’s Associates program hover around 6%, BestBuy pays out 3-4%, and CompUSA pays around 6%. Tweetbucks will take 30% of the money you earn through each referral leaving you with 70%. So if you send out a link via a Tweet to a Kindle being sold on Amazon for $359.00 and someone purchases the Kindle from the link, you will receive $15.12 and Tweetbucks will take $6.46. On the other hand, if your affiliate fee comes from a book on Barnes & Noble (which also pays out 6%) that totals $16.76, you will receive $0.70 cents and Tweetbucks will get $0.30 cents.Tweetbucks also lets you earn money off of any non-retail site, by allowing you to enable a “custom ad-frame,” on a site you Tweet the link to. Tweetbucks displays an ad at the top of your destination page and you earn a variable rate (CPC) on every click. You can also customize this ad frame to include a hyperlinked logo of your choice. The compensation from this doesn’t seem to have as much potential as the affiliate fees; Sukornyk says returns are around $1 to $2 per thousand clicks.

Clik here to join

Memory Card

memory cardMEMORY CARDS are one option for the storage of various types of electronic data. Sometimes referred to as a flash memory card, the standard memory card is capable of storing a wide range of data files, such as audio and video clips, images, and text documents. In general, the memory card makes use of flash memory in order to maintain the integrity of the files loaded onto the card. The main function of flash memory cards is to provide a simple method of data storage without a great deal of trouble. In general, any type of memory card will include a high amount of capacity, which makes it ideal for storing larger data files. The storage card has many different variations on the market today, with some of them being somewhat specialized in application and the type of data that can be stored in the memory of the card. Among the different types of memory card devices available today are the secure digital card, memory stick, multimedia cards, and the SmartMedia card. In actual configuration, just about any memory card will employ the use of nonvolatile memory. Essentially, this means that the data stored on the device will be stable, and is not subject to corruption or loss in the event of a power failure. There is also no need to refresh the stored data from time to time, as it will remain intact. There are no moving parts associated with the memory card, which helps to minimize the chances of a malfunction of the device. While the storage capacity of the device was always compared favorably to the total capacity on a standard computer hard drive. In order to accommodate varying consumer needs, different variations of the memory card will feature a range of capacities. Generally, more memory or capacity available on a given card will mean a higher price tag. However, many of the lower priced units have enough data storage capacity to accommodate personal usage, making it relatively affordable for any home computer user to also afford a memory card. Source: www.wisegeek.com

Sektor Penerangan, KPKK - Memory Card

50% discount on DiGi prepaid calls tomorrow

DiGi prepaid users are in for a treat tomorrow! After a service disruption (both SMS and voice services) that lasted between 8am to 11.45am yesterday, the folks at DiGi are making up to a million prepaid users. In a statement issued by the telco's CEO, Johan Dennelind said, "I take this extremely seriously. Our customers have an expectation to be always on, and I am disappointed that they have been inconvenienced, and for that I apologise."For that, DiGi prepaid users will get a 50% discount on prepaid calls made between 7am and 7pm tomorrow!Full report is available here.

Bussiness made easy with PayPal