Mozilla has released the fifth beta of the 3rd generation of its award winning Firefox browser. With this, it has inched closer towards releasing the final build to the public. The beta phase is lasting longer than expected, the primary reason being the enthusiasm being shown by developers around the world in contributing to the nightly builds, resulting in improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

As reported in the release notes,  Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever.

Some of the major enhancements are

- One-click site info   - New Web Forgery Protection page      -  Anti-virus integration

- Full page zoom        - Easier password management               - Resumable downloading

- Simplified add-on installation    &      - Improved Speed and Memory Usage.

Sir Richard Branson has announced on the Google Blog Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars.

Sir Richard writes:

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.

Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source.

Update: there’s also a YouTube competition and official video channel.

Okay, come on — seriously. Is this Virgle thing for real?

What, you doubt us? Well, yes — Virgle is real.

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Get started now:

Try gDay™

“I could never wake up on time to get to our team meetings. But thanks to the new Google Wake Up Kit, I’m always on time now!”
Pedro C.

Do you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? The guys at Google do have, too. In fact this problem became so serious at times that it sometimes resulted in lacklustre attendance at team meetings. To help solve the problem they have created an innovative solution called the Google Wake Up Kit.

In combination with the kit, you can receive a new type of notification from Google Calendar, called the “wake up” notification. This notification is relentless in ensuring your timely awakening from restful slumber.

The “wake up” notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used. The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters. Learn more

Instead of building one super computer to satisfy the computing needs of a corporation, or a cluster of organizations, cloud computing is based on thousands of simple computers managed by complex software. Google is concentrated in this technology like a laser beam. As this concept spreads, it promises to expand Google’s footprint in industry far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world’s primary computer.

For full article, visit <http://epiac1216.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/the-power-of-cloud-computing/>

Mozilla released yesterday the second beta for Firefox 3 with some 900 bug fixes and improvements over the previous version, including some new features, user interface enhancements and more.

High on the list of priorities for many users is tightening up Firefox’s memory usage and beta 2 shows Firefox 3 continues to squash and eliminate the memory leak bugs. The “what’s new” page for Firefox 3 beta 2 says that over 300 memory leaks have been plugged since Firefox 2, with 30 of those coming since the release of beta 1. The release notes also claim that Firefox 3’s memory footprint has been significantly reduced.

Some comments:

• Perhaps the most striking change is the redesigned Location Bar autocomplete menu, which now highlights which parts of the page title and/or URL match the entered text … <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22782>
• Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins … <http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/12/18/firefox-3-beta-2-now-available-for-download/>
• [Improved in Beta 2!] Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in Beta 2, and will show further gains in future Beta releases … <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b2/releasenotes/>
• There are of course some known issues which you might want consider before upgrading. Firefox 3 is still a beta after all. For instance, the new versions of Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail are both a mess in Firefox 3, though the classic versions work just fine. A rather annoying bug in beta 1 on OS X, which causes the CTRL-L shortcut (and occasionally the mouse as well) to not actually put the cursor in the location bar appears to still be around in beta 2.However, despite some bugs here and there I’ve been using beta 1 as my primary browser since it was released and have had no problems with it crashing or leaking memory. The speed is phenomenal compared to Firefox 2 and with the second beta out the door Firefox 3 is shaping up to be the best browser since, well, Firefox 2.

  Here’s the new Places Manager in action (note that I’m using the Proto theme for OS X):

  The new location bar makes finding visited and bookmarked sites much easier than previous versions:

  

  The Firefox 3 Download Manager now lets you see not just where a file is, but where it came from and more:

  …  for full article <http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/firefox-3-beta.html>

Remember the time-lapse movie that helped you visualize the movement of tech stories on Techmeme? It did attract lot of eye-balls and as promised, here’s the secret recipe on how to make such a time lapse video with (almost) free software.

The process is simple and has two main parts - 1) Capturing screenshots and 2) Stitching all these images together so they appear as an animated movie or a flipbook.

Techmeme saves a snapshot of its homepage every 5 minutes and each snapshot has a unique URL with the timestamp. For instance, the snapshot of Techmeme at 1:50 PM ET, January 15, 2008 is available at www.techmeme.com/080115/h1350.

To capture those hundreds of screenshots, I created a simple macro (snippet below) using AutoHotKey that would automatically generate URLs, type them in the web browser, press the print screen key and then save the screenshot as an image - this ran in a loop 600 times capturing 50 hours of changes.

techmeme=http://www.techmeme.com/08010
url=%techmeme%%Date%/h%Hours%%Minutes% <- Create URL
Send, {CTRLDOWN}l{CTRLUP} <- Reach the Browser Address Bar
Send, %url% {ENTER} <- Paste the URL and Hit Enter
Sleep, 5000 <- Wait 5 seconds for the web page to load
Send, {PRINTSCREEN} <- Capture a screenshot

You may be wondering how the Print Screen key will save the screenshot to an image file when all it does is capture the current screen content to the clipboard ? That’s possible through SnagIt (available for a 30-day trial at techsmith.com) - You just mark the region that you wish to capture and SnagIt will do everything else.

Once you have all the screenshots, import all of them as a sequence inside Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro, Camtasia, QuickTime Pro or any other video editor - just bring down the image transition time to 0.1 second (or less) and export the animation as a GIF or any video format. The results are always pretty amazing.

You can extend the trick to make time lapse movies of Google Maps, your road trips, construction sites, etc.

(Originally written by Amit at Labnol)

Have you ever come across a situation where you don’t have access to the Internet but can send or receive email messages? With email and no Internet, how do you read websites and blogs or check the current stock prices, or find what’s the top story on CNN homepage.Well, you can do a lot of interesting things over email without a web connection - you can read any webpages over email, maintain your task list, convert documents, upload photo and videos, get dictionary meanings of words and more.

Just make sure that you have added the following address to your email address book:

10. pdf@koolwire.com - You have an Office document or a picture on your computer or mobile phone that you wish to convert into a PDF file. Just email that file an email attachment to the above address and it will soon return to your Inbox as a PDF file. [koolwire review]

[...]

4. pdf2txt@adobe.com - Send a PDF document to this email address as an attachment and it will come back as a plain text file. Handy when your don’t have a PDF viewer to open the PDF document. Alternatively, you can send the PDF file to pdf2html@adobe.com for conversion to HTML format. [Extract Text from PDF]

3. ..@prod.writely.com - Google Docs provides a unique email address here - you can upload your documents, spreadsheets and presentations to Google Docs through this address and read them on your mobile phone using the just launched Google Docs mobile at docs.google.com/m. [Google Docs Upload]

[...]

And now the most useful email address that will help you read webpages through email without requiring a web connection:

0. www@web2mail.com - Send an email with the URL of the web page in the Subject field (e.g. www.cnn.com) and you’ll soon find a copy of that web page in your Inbox. A perfect option when there’s no Internet access in the area or access is restricted (for instance, you want to read the BBC homepage in China).

Another similar service is www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it - it will also fetch websites for you through email though in this case, the site address should go in the body of the email message.

(For full article visit, http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/access-websites-over-email-without-internet-connection/1660/)

Pretty girls and fancy new models didn’t help Fiat much. Close by, Skoda’s swanky new cars looked relatively pale. At a show where car lovers come to check out the latest, the fanciest, the fastest and luxurious new cars, Tata’s Rs 1-lakh car was a winner by a huge margin. It was clearly ‘The Car’ of Auto Expo 2008. The car is not yet on road.

And a verdict on its success — as a commercially viable car — will have to wait. But there are three big messages that Tata’s car has already sent out.

One, it takes a lot of guts and courage to do a breakthrough innovation in India. The scepticism and criticism for the Rs 1-lakh car have been coming from all over. Will it be a two-wheeler or four-wheeler? Will it be a car with canopied, foldable roofs? Don’t call it a car — it just won’t meet the safety standards? And the latest — will it ever make money?

If the cynicism from business rivals wasn’t enough — NGOs have joined in raking up the issue of Singur bloodshed at the auto show. You need to have the guts and doggedness of the Tatas to achieve what they have done.

Two, there are reasons why Maruti Suzuki, a company best placed to beat Tatas at it, could not/did not take the lead here. The DNA of MNCs make it extremely difficult for them to do the kind of innovation that Tatas have managed to do. “They (MNCs) have in many ways established ideas of doing things,” says BCG India chairman Arun Maira.

Newer entrants like Tatas — with not much physical capacity locked in — have the flexibility and nimbleness to do some groundbreaking innovation. Headquartered in India, Tatas had both the push from its headquarters and the pull from potential customer segments to go down that path, unlike an MNC.

“Their home market influences their global vision significantly,” says Tata Sons executive director R Gopalakrishnan. MNCs see a flattened world and want to have products that will give them economies of scale and can move across geographies. “That organisational structure constraints and militates (against this kind of innovation),” he says.

This is not just about frugal engineering and low cost. “Its about priorities and desires — and being able to pay attention to a (low-end) segment with the same seriousness and quality,” says Future Brands MD and CEO Santosh Desai.

Three, Tata’s Rs 1-lakh car may be a defining moment for the global auto industry. The biggest draw of the Tata’s car — 250-odd journalists attended the press conference this morning, virtually every news agency and top global newspapers have already written about it — is its price tag. It is everything that a car and the global auto industry isn’t about — style, comfort, sophistication, speed, technology, design and luxury.

Suddenly, it has opened up a vast new market and showed possibilities that global auto majors didn’t think existed. The rush of announcements on small cars haven’t stopped coming.

As global attention moves from mature markets to the emerging markets, as corporate world looks at bottom of the pyramid rather than top of the pyramid to expand business — increasingly key product attributes in many industries might get redefined globally — with a dramatically new customer segment.

Tata’s 1 lakh car may be just the beginning.

(As reported by The Economic Times)