3 New AMD Processors

I have to start by saying that I'm a fan of AMD processors. I know Intel has more advanced products, and is the industry leader for ages now, but AMD has my vote because of it's energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. That said, here are the newbies:

AMD Athlon 64 single-core processors 3500+
AMD Athlon 64 single-core processors 3800+
AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor 6000+

The first two are made for cost efficiency, selling at $88 and $93 respectively. The third one is made for high performance and sells at $464. It boasts of great graphics, and video capability, and is based on the 65nm technology for more efficient use of processors.

MSN Soapbox - Late

MSN today made Soapbox, their Youtube rival, available to the public. Youtube began the online video phenomenon in February, 2005, and was bought by Google in November, 2006 (after their futile attempts to catch up in Google Video).
And thinking of how Google Video faired, with all it's brand appeal, and few better features over Youtube, I highly doubt that Soapbox will be a threat to Youtube. Soapbox has a 100mb filesize limit just like Youtube.

I watched a couple of videos, and the performance was satisfactory. However, the interface could do better, I don't like the striking blue color. They've tried something new by placing the video to the right of the screen, and the data on the left side of the screen. We'll wait and watch how Soapbox does from here...

Counting on Google Reader

Don't you get a kick out of reading the visitors to your website, or clicks on your ads? Well, Google Reader gives you another feature to boost your feel-good-factor - you can now find out how many people have subscribed to your feed. I'm an avid user of Google Reader, and I think it's a great way to organize your information.

BTW, Feedburner already allows their users to view the number of subscribers to their feed. Something I need to do is get a feedburner account for this page, and I encourage you to do so if you have a web page and want returning users.

And The Winners Are...

In a previous post I told you about the 3GSM mobile conference in Barcelona. This is a follow up to announce the winners of the Global Mobile Award winners of 2007. The best GSM mobile phones for this year are:

1. Samsung D900
2. Sony Ericsson K800 Cyber-Shot
3. Samsung Z560

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Yahoo! Comes up with Autos

Yahoo! today launched a new product called Autos which helps you do research on cars. I think it's cool to have a product help you do research on what to buy, but one product dedicated to automobile research is kinda small minded for a company like Yahoo! in my opinion. However, I'm sure to a person who's about to buy a car it makes a world of a difference.

Check out Yahoo! Autos

Yahoo's taken some blows for copying the model from Digg. You have to check out this thread at a Digg forum

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GMail Now Open!

After GMail hit the web-based email market on April Fool's Day, 2004 its huge success has come from people sending out invites to each other. Although this hasn't protected GMail inboxes from spammers, it sure has kept us wondering how big its user base would grow if it opened subscriptions to all.

Key Features of GMail: Single email thread, speed, search, chat from inbox

Let's wait and see how much the usage increases from here. And go get your GMail ID if you don't have one!

World's Biggest Mobile Conference

Barcelona hosts the 2007 3GSM conference for mobile phones, and has all the big guns of mobile devices and networks speaking. There are representatives of Ericsson, Vodafone, Yahoo, Orange, Nokia, and even Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

With all the 3G mobiles already hitting the market fast, I'm curious to see what major trends and devices come from this conference. There's also the Global Mobile Awards '07. You can see the list of award winning mobiles for '06 here.

New Kids on the Block:
Nokia announces 3 new E-series phones at the conference. Stay tuned for more..

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Introducing Yahoo! Pipes

I tried finding out what this new product of Yahoo! is, but the page was down. It's only available to a few countries at this time.

From my research, it seems like this tool will make RSS feeds a lot more fun. It allows you to set manipulate your feeds for a set of trimmed results. I've already been having a lot of fun using Google Reader, and I can't wait to try out Yahoo! Pipes.

From Yahoo!:
"Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line."

"pipes let you combine small command-line tools easily by routing the output of one tool into the input of another tool. For example “cat census-names | cut -d’,’ -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg” might take a list of peoples’ names, extract just the last names, sort the list, unique-ify the list and produce a count of how many times each name occurred, then sort by the biggest number. Voilà, from a raw list of names you’ve now got a list of the most popular last names." - Matt Cutts

TechCrunch Review
Jeremy Zawodny's Review
Matt Cutts' Review

Keep watching for more after the international launch of Yahoo! Pipes.

Yahoo! Launches Panama

Today Yahoo! begins migration of it's advertising model from Overture's to its own Panama.

Changes: Focus on quality plus bids (not just bids)
For Users: Instant keyword activation, improved interface
When: Complete by March, '07
Sepculation: Good, but not enough to catch Google AdWords

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Broadcom's New Wiz Chip

Ranking #1 in wi-fi production, and #2 with Bluetooth, is enough pedigree for Broadcom to put together a chip combining wi-fi, Bluetooth, and FM all onto one chip.

Impact - Saves space, reduces cost, and increases power efficiency in devices
Uses - In mobile phones, mp3 players, portable gaming devices, etc.
For users - Breakthrough in connectivity with other users, and devices
Availability - Early 2008

Quote - "Integrating multiple wireless technologies onto a single chip is a landmark achievement that will be welcomed by mobile device manufacturers due to the inherent cost, space and power savings it will enable" - Stuart Carlaw, Wireless Research Director at ABI Research

More on this topic

New Zoho Notebook

Zoho has launched a great looking web-based notebook, and it looks loaded with every feature you can think of.

- Upload images, audio, video files, and embed videos from video sites
- Advanced sharing features - for example, share only one part of a page with someone even if there's lots of other content on the page



I like the simplicity of the interface, and think it's very well integrated for such a complex tool. Let's wait and see how it takes on Google Notebook. Meanwhile, here's a video showing a demo of the Zoho Notebook.

Google Announces Q4 Earnings

This is my first post to this blog, and what a way to get it started. Google's Q4 earnings were out today. Here are the figures:

Total revenue - $3.21 billion
Total expenses - $862 million

From Google websites - $1.98 billion
From AdSense network - $1.20 billion

44% of revenue came from outside of the USA