http://reviews.cnet.com/Canon_PowerShot_SD_850_IS/4660-6501_7-6763807.html

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SD850 IS / IXUS 950 IS specifications

 Google’s storage service.

Google’s much-rumored online storage service should be available in a few months, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal late on Monday that cites unnamed sources.

Time has come to store in all you’re necessary docs over the internet storage, and then access over the internet. Google is planning to host a storage service in coming months.

Google spokespeople did not return calls seeking comment on the report. A spokeswoman for the search company reached by the newspaper declined to comment on any specific plans but said “storage is an important component of making Web (applications) fit easily into consumers’ and business users’ lives.”

Rumors of GDrive ended with an explanation saying,  it’s not an product but the way Google employees to store and share files.

The move would raise the stakes in Google’s rivalry with Microsoft, whose productivity applications rule the desktop world. Google has been releasing hosted e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, calendar, and other programs that compete with Microsoft. While consumers are attracted to the online services of Google’s, corporations have yet to sign up for security and functionality reasons.

Microsoft offers a hosted storage offering of its own, which it renamed Windows Live SkyDrive this summer and has readied Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing, but not editing, Office documents online.

Google executives espouse a digital world where people can access their data from anywhere in what is called “cloud computing.”

Live Documents To Break Microsoft…We’ll See

New product press releases unencumbered by the complexities of releasing actual software set off alarm bells. And when those press releases are so boastful as to suggest that the (unlaunched) product can hurt a competitor’s $20 billion revenue stream, the alarm bells get much louder.

So with alarm bells screaming, Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia announces he’s going to war with Microsoft by (someday) launching an online version of Office. The fact that Bhatia got rich when Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million in 1997 only adds additional drama to the story.

The as yet unlaunched product, called Live Documents (see our review from a year ago when the product was significantly different), will be a Flash based online suite that competes with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The company will also release plugins that work with the desktop Office software that lets users store and collaborate on documents online.

If this sounds a bit like Google Docs and Zoho, that’s because it is. The differentiating factors for Live Documents, besides the fact that it’s built on Flash (Google Docs and Zoho are Ajax applications), is that they are promising feature matches with Office 2007 and they have the offline plugin component.

It’s not clear that Flash is a better (or worse) interface than Javascript, but it isn’t much of a competitive advantage either way. And we note that Zoho has their own plugins for the desktop Office. Zoho also has an offline version of their product via Google Gears; its likely that Google is not far behind.

CTO Sumanth Raghavendra says Live Documents “break’s Microsoft’s proprietary format lock-in.” But in reality Live Documents has absolutely nothing new to offer users based on what we’ve been told so far. And as Dan Farber notes, they aren’t yet releasing the product and don’t even have screen shots to share with us.

There are additional red flags as well. As Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu notes, Bhatia is making a big mistake by estimating Live Documents revenue based on taking market share from Microsoft. Bhatia says “If Live Documents makes 1 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues, then we would earn USD 200 million a year. If Live Documents makes 10 per cent of Microsoft Office revenues then our revenues would be USD 2 billion a year in the next three to four years.” Vembu notes Guy Kawasaki and others who’ve warned against this kind of analysis.

So far Live Documents is nothing more than bullshit and smokescreens. That may have been the way to do business when Bhatia co-founded Hotmail in 1996, but his software is going to have to survive on its own in a hyper competitive marketplace when it actually launches. Hubris alone won’t do it. We’ll see if he can pull off a second win, or if Bhatia is, in the end, just another one trick pony. So far, I’m underwhelmed.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It’s dumb to test the Amazon Kindle by sitting at a desk, pressing a lot of buttons. The real judgment as to its usefulness has to come after experiencing it throughout the week in three key real-life reading scenarios:

• In the bedroom
• On an airplane
• Atop the porcelain throne (yes, I’m talking about the toilet)

Join us as we take you where we don’t like to take too many strangers, and experience the real-life Kindle review:

I understand the Kindle. Book reading is always a one-on-one activity, and there is more or less only one way to experience a book-from a rectangular object in your hand. An e-book reader that’s PC-free, connected directly to the book source, is even smarter than an MP3 player or phone that’s connected to a music store, because music ends up all over the place, while books will always stay in your lap.

People bitch about a lack of Wi-Fi, but as a fan of wide-area wireless, I think Sprint’s EV-DO was a good way to go, because it’s available in more places. And as far as the lack of backlight, I am inclined to believe the messaging from both Amazon and Sony, that E-Ink is easier on the eyes than anything backlit, and that long battery life is more important. I used the Kindle regularly without charging for four days straight before it completely crapped out just this morning.

As for the criticism about document and e-book format compatibility, I suspect these problems will work themselves out over time, as the Kindle’s Linux platform is surely easy to enhance through software. At any rate, you already know many of the issues, so there’s no point rehashing them here, especially when much of it is a matter of personal preference.

No, none of these theoretical concerns were in my mind as I read using the Kindle this week, but that’s not to say I didn’t uncover some issues. Here’s what I discovered this week while reading a book on Kindle-Heat by Bill Buford- that I was already halfway through in its old-world hardcover paper form:

In Bed:
• Next Page buttons on both sides mean tremendous comfort in bed. No matter which hand you are holding the Kindle in, you can easily turn the page, and if you have it sitting on the bed next to you, you can even tap the large button on the right with a finger or your elbow.

• Since it’s much larger than a hardcover or even a trade paperback, you can hold it without tiring out your arm, or needing to use your leg to prop it up.
• Normally when reading in bed, you have to shift positions when you turn the page, especially when at the beginning or end of a large book. Since the Kindle only displays one page at a time, and doesn’t have a shifting weight of pages from one side to the other, you can pick a position and stick to it.
• I have a lamp next to my bed for reading old-school printed books; it works just as well with Kindle.

In the Air:
• EV-DO isn’t available everywhere, or even at all airports. The one I flew out of only provided a paltry 1X signal, and it took me about five minutes to download the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly.• Speaking of The Atlantic, text-heavy weeklies and monthlies really are the target. Newspapers are a problem, because the editions that appear on Kindle are already outdated by their own websites, so newshounds would get frustrated. The lineup of magazines needs to grow, though. I won’t be happy until The Economist and The New Yorker appear on the menu. (I may come from the Great Red State of Indiana, but I prefer my current events smart and a little left-leaning. But while we’re at it, Amazon, a Guns N’ Ammo Kindle Edition might be nice too.)

• Once aboard, FAA regulation required that I not use the Kindle at takeoff and landing. Though obvious, this pissed me off because that’s when I always read on planes, before iPod time kicks in and I have the option of a movie.
• There’s a handy switch to shut off the cellular data modem, and prove to the flight attendants you’re no rule-breaker.
• The onboard Oxford New American Dictionary is good but not great with proper nouns. It picked up “Romanesque” but did not get “Florentine,” for instance. And Wikipedia, which would have more elaborate data on both, is of no use when you’re airborne. Private reading lights have been part of the airplane experience since time immemorial. No backlighting on e-book readers means this glorious tradition will continue.

On the Toilet:
• Friction rubber grip makes it okay to set down on the side of your sink or back of toilet without it slipping. We have a porcelain pedestal sink in one bathroom that anything without a grip would slide off of-and smash on the floor.• Buttons on both sides of the Kindle mean that it’s sometimes hard to grip it securely and not press a button. I were to hypothetically make a mad dash to the toilet, Kindle in hand, I would risk flipping a bunch of pages on the way and losing my place.

Other usage discoveries:
• As I mentioned, the battery lasted four full days of regular use, mostly with the EV-DO switch turned on. (It probably would have run much longer if I had left it off.) When your battery gets low, you get the error message below, but shutting down EV-DO that late in the game does nothing to conserve battery life, which died 5 minutes after I saw this. Charging is quick though-juice it for 15 or 20 minutes and it’s good to go for a while.• I never turned the thing off, either: when you leave it alone for a few minutes, it turns to a keylock screen with a pretty picture or a promotional tip (see gallery below-I’ve shot 8 so far, but there are tons of ‘em). You click and hold the Alt and font-size buttons to release it.
• I will never understand the magical technology behind the shiny LCD bar on the right. It is sooo pretty I sometimes do stuff just to watch it jump around. Very unique in this copycat-heavy CE universe.• The leather case is good for protecting and carrying around without hitting buttons (see “On the Toilet”), but it is totally lame when you are trying to read. Slip it out and hide the case until you are ready to move again.

• The Highlight clipping tool is too primitive to be cool. You can only highlight a line at a time, so your clippings, particularly when viewed by themselves, look ugly and confusing. Anything you highlight is automatically saved in My Clippings, where all of your Clippings, from all publications, are lumped together. In natural settings, I never used the web browser. I surf the web a-plenty in my daily life, and while I’m reading, I’m just not thinking about dot coms.
• The keyboard does have a bit of a lag, as we reported, but that’s not too problematic. My biggest problem is the spacebar, hidden on the left side. Little known trivia: As it turns out, I SPACE with my right hand. Footnotes are weird. I was reading a David Foster Wallace piece that, like most of his work, was riddled with footnotes, and each time I had to click it to see the note, which could get annoying. Same goes for Colbert’s book I Am America.
• My wife likes it. OK, so you weren’t curious about that, maybe, but she’s a voracious reader and she generally turns her nose up at most of the gadgets that arrives at our doorstep. With the Kindle, though, she got excited. She picked it up and started reading the Atlantic Monthly, saying how “amazing” it was that Amazon got the magazine’s formatting right, and how pleasant the E-Ink was to read.
• In the end, looks mattered least of all. Even though my wife thinks it looks like a “medical device,” it was not a turn off. I think people underestimate its wedgey coolness, while overestimating the impact that would have. Bezos said you don’t look at the thing, you look at the book within-maybe he was anticipating a hazing from the Style Police, but I think he’s right. I just read my damn book.

My verdict is that a connected e-book reader was what the world needed, and as long as Amazon’s library expands to encompass every book I want to read, I see no reason why I should be upset that I have to buy it from them. Yes, $399 is expensive, but that’s likely to drop, and the more market-resistant $9.99 book price hits a Jobsian sweet spot.

Having lived with the Kindle, I can say that it serves most of my immediate reading needs. As a guy who enjoys amassing a vast library of books and displaying them in bookcases, I am a little frightened of the future, but inevitability is the name of the game, and fear of change isn’t a good enough excuse. Will I continue to buy books or will I jump into Amazon book buying mode? That remains to be seen, but you, o early adopter, should not share my fears. The Kindle is a quality invention, and I can see why the first batch sold out so fast. [More Kindle Coverage from Giz; Amazon.com]

Buffalo announces 320GB portable hard drive

You can never be too good looking or have too many gigabytes on your person, which is why Buffalo has just announced what it’s touting as the “world’s largest” portable external hard drive, a 320GB dynamo called the MiniStation Turbo USB HD-PS320U2. This 5,400rpm platter features 256-bit AES encryption courtesy of Buffalo’s Secure Lock Ware utility, and Windows users also getting Memeo’s AutoBackup software thrown in to boot. Look for this portable powerhouse next month for around £155 ($319).

Creative prepping 4GB Zen Stone Plus?

So it looks like Creative will be continuing to attack Apple on the features front, with Crave UK reporting that the Singaporean manufacturer is poised to release an updated version of its diminutive, Shuffle-esque Zen Stone Plus — packing in a hefty 4GB of flash memory, no less. Besides the capacity bump, the unannounced upgrade is also said to boost battery life to a more respectable 12 hours and add support for unprotected AAC files, clearly a move designed to sway fans of the iTunes Plus DRM-free music selection. Being a rumor and all, we don’t even have a clue as to when you can expect to see the latest Stone on store shelves, so keep your eyes peeled.

Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them?

Earlier this month I wrote a blog post showing that a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. Facebook blamed the problem on a bug (unofficially, via comments by employees to that post), which was later corrected.

But a new issue may be harder to explain. On Tuesday, scores of mainstream press organizations (see WSJ, NYT, LATimes, CNET, AP, etc.). and bloggers reported on a privacy issue around part of Facebook’s new advertising platform.

MoveOn.org was leading the charge, and created a petition to demand Facebook not disclose personal information about a user without their explicit consent.

But now a side story is developing around the issue that relates to search censoring, again, at Facebook. Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.

The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable” (see image to right). But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.

Later search began working again, but the MoveOn Group was not included in the results even though it clearly had the term “privacy” in the title. A filtered search yielded seventeen results, but only sixteen could be viewed. The MoveOn group was likely the seventeenth, unseen result. See bottom image below.

MoveOn contacted Facebook to complain, and the search is now working. Facebook has not responded to a request for comment sent yesterday on why this may have happened, although we are in the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday.

MoveOn’s Adam Green, who alerted us of the issue, had this to say:

Facebook has the potential to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. But to succeed, they need the trust of their users. That trust will be undercut if they continue to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users. It would also be undercut if it turned out our group was intentionally hidden from Facebook users — as opposed to it being an accident.

We’ll see if Facebook responds at all, and if they blame this on a bug as well.

Flickr’s Uploadr 3.0 beta offers more control

Flickr’s new Uploadr 3.0 beta lets users change the order of photos, among other things.

Flickr has begun public testing of a new version of its Uploadr tool to send pictures to its online photo-sharing site.

The new version gives more elaborate control over photos before they’re uploaded, said Flickr’s Robert Crowley in a Flickr forum posting announcing Uploadr 3.0 beta software Monday. The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site posted a second beta Wednesday that fixed several issues.

“With this version you can select any number of photos and add titles, tags, descriptions, sets, and privacy data for those photos. You can also drag your photos into a different order,” Crowley said.

Alas, though, it seems there’s no mechanism for setting geoprivacy, which governs who can see where on a map your photo was taken, if you’re among those who takes the trouble to geotag your photo and set Flickr to capture the data when you upload.

The beta software is available as a downloaded for Windows and Mac OS X.

Verizon’s LG Venus Reviewed (Verdict: Better Than Chocolate) [Venus Undressed]

The $200 LG VX8800 Venus from Verizon Wireless may be the Voyager’s little sister, but it’s closest in form and function to the ill-fated Chocolate. Unlike the Voyager, which has a QWERTY keyboards and aspirations to be an e-mail and messaging hub, the Venus is a “music phone” with a cool camera feature. Though slightly bulkier than even the current slimmed-down Chocolate, it’s one of LG’s best looking phones to date, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who would be happiest toting around one of these shiny little girly-named bricks.

Like I said, it’s got a sleek sexy look, with a shiny chrome bezel, a faux leather grip and retro grillwork on the top and bottom to accentuate the speaker and mic holes. It also gets extra style points for a subtle paintjob we didn’t notice when we first looked at it: half of the keys are a deep sparkly navy blue, while the remaining keys on the checkerboard are matte black. Like the Voyager and Chocolate, it’s gives touch feedback in the form of a noise and a little vibration. It feels sturdy, and its sliding action is satisfying. If you want a new, funky look and feel, the Venus is a good choice. Just don’t slide the lid too much while doing other things: if you close it during an operation, the operation may shut down.

The key feature is the touchscreen that occupies the lower third of its face, exactly where the Chocolate’s touch-sensitive solid-state keys used to be. The other two-thirds are a regular, non-touch-sensitive screen.

At first it can be confusing; even now I try to tap stuff on the main screen. It’s also pointless in most cases, since the majority of the time the screen is divided up into buttons or a directional pad that would be better if felt. But now and again, the Venus makes real Nintendo DS use of its double screen. In photo and video shooting modes, you get five option buttons with specific tasks, and when you review your still shots, the thumbnails are actually on the touchscreen side. But unlike the menu-happy, iPhone-wannabe Voyager, the Venus’ main menu is dry and linear, so much so that a fancy touch interface almost seems like a mockery. (The upside: no new, counterintuitive menu-scrolling technique to learn, like on the Voyager.)This primarily being a music phone, I was happy to discover that its speaker sounded tolerably well, especially when placed flat down on a table. Even though the grilles on the top and bottom of the face suggest stereo speakers, they are mainly for show. The only speaker is on the back, two slits cut into the fake leather just above the antenna.Like the Voyager, you can move your own photos and videos off the Venus and move your own MP3s onto it by way of the microSD card slot. But unfortunately also like big brother, the music player was primitive at best. This one had trouble reading the tags of songs ripped by iTunes. (But gee, whoever would think to rip a CD in iTunes? That won’t affect much of the target population.)

Higher level stuff like navigation and messaging are really not worth it on this phone. The Voyager’s use of VZ Navigator is great (though it’s still no match for the cheapest Garmin nüvi). The Venus’ VZ Navigator is too small to be of great use visually. See for example the map on the right, and the size of my own thumbnail next to it:I’m as mixed as I ever was on the Venus, and I think part of that has to do with the name. Venus is an unambiguously feminine name, even though a solar-system motif is supposed to remind boy shoppers of its interplanetary connotation. Venus therefore is a girl’s phone. But is it? Hell no. I don’t know what LG and Verizon are up to here, but the message is unclear. Would I care more about this phone more if it were instead called the Baretta or the Sphinx or the Turbine? Sad to admit it, but I think I would. [Verizon Wireless]

Bangalore – City of Pubs, IT hub of India, Hi-tech city, Silicon Valley of India and list goes on… I remember the day when I got my selection letter and training location given to me was Bangalore recently called as Bengaluru. Initially, I was happy, with a small pain in the neck of being apart from home town. But, then I thought, everyone has to find their own place in this lonely world and move ahead. So, it all started off with packing and final day of departure arrived… My new life was about to begin, being studied on home town till Graduation, I didn’t had any pre-experience of staying without parents. So, some nervousness was definitely their, but at the same time, excitement about the job and then salary didn’t made me feel much.

When I came to Bangalore, it was really different than what I thought. It was comparatively well organized city, clean, techie. Secondly, climate was extremely cool and loving. Somehow my life got settled with whatever I got from Bangalore, job started finely, and 1 year went off. Within 1 year, I had hardly 2-3 trips to my native, Aurangabad – City of Gates. My parents came in between to see my room life, and they were pretty impressed the way we use to live. Within that period, I realized that, this city is not for us. And it’s a fact; climate being good, hi-tech, etc didn’t count much as far as our home town is considered. Whatever city we may go, but we’ll like only our hometown, because our roots are from their. No matter how far we fly, how far we go, we’ve to come back to origin. This I’m realizing it after completing 1 yr.

Currently, I’m going through perfect dilemma wherein I am unable to decide, whether to continue with flow or go against the flow. I’ve my companies DC near my native place, so I’m deciding whether to go their or stay back here in Bangalore. There are many factors attached to my decision, and so I need to take utmost care that it doesn’t hamper my career. So, far, I moved with flow, whatever I was given, I accepted and continued but now, the time has changed, sometimes; we need to go against the flow and struggle. So, I’m going to take my own time to decide, which way to go for. Hope everything works out nicely. Pray for me.