Idea for startups to use Google Buzz for product development

For a startup going through early tests of their product, using Buzz could mean further involving your earliest adopters in deciding what features to keep, kill or add. Platforms for customer feedback do exist already, but Buzz is already gaining lots of traction and sits close to a place where people live online: their inbox. Despite Buzz's apparent privacy concerns, the product at its heart is an excellent tool to foster rich discussions.

Read more: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/02/startups-dont-be-redundant-on-buzz.php

New Domain .Co

The .co TLD will provide companies with a TLD that represents "company", which is a viable and possibly even superior alternative to .com. With the .com domain inventory nearly exhausted, .co gives businesses the opportunity to brand themselves online to the fullest extent possible.

The New TLD Release Process

Sunrise Period: This phase allows registered trademark holders to secure the exact-match domains for their trademarks secured prior to July 30, 2008. Trademark holders go through a process that includes submission of trademarks to registrars that are offering the new TLD, validation of the trademarks, auctioning if multiple trademark holders apply for the same domain, and awarding of domains.

Landrush: The Landrush phase is open to everyone and lets customers pay a premium to have a chance to secure high-commercial-value domains. Domains with more than one interested party will be awarded via auction. The domains that get attention during the Landrush phase are short and memorable non-trademarked terms. For example, something like pizza.co would have high value to a pizza company. That domain has the potential to rank well in search engines and would be a fantastic addition to a company's marketing and branding efforts.

General Availability: This is the final, broad-release period when all remaining domains are available for registration. Like other currently available TLDs, .co will be available on a first-come, first-served basis to be registered at a fixed yearly cost. Most domain names are still available at the beginning of this phase, with only trademarked domains and the most valuable generic domains being claimed during the Sunrise and Landrush periods.

Best way to store high re images?

Mozy - lets you create a free account for storing large sized items.

http://mozy.com/

Click to call on Indian Websites

HDFC Standard Life has started a click to call facility on their website ... cool!!

Check the button on the right bottom.

Blogger FTP shutting down

I write on my blog:

Without getting into criticism myself, I am trying to analyze the repercussions on sites using this service. For more details on who's impacted and blogger team's efforts to ease the load, go here.

Impacted Websites i.e. those using the FTP publishing feature like www.arbitmba.com, now have two options:

• Move their Site to Blogger's hosting via the custom domain functionality or
• Start using a different blog management software like Wordpress.org

In both cases you will have to perform a migration activity, but as far I have studied, neither migration is going be any more or any less painful than the other. In both cases some functionalities will have to be recoded.

Read Details here.

Internet lingo in Hindi

इचिट्ठी = email

चिठ्ठा = (orkut) scrap 

निम्नागमन गति = download speed

उर्ध्वागमन गति = upload स्पीड

दीवार = (फसबूक) wall 

सन्मित्र = friend-of-friend (orkut / facebook)

परिचित = contact

... please add to it and tweet the URL on #internethindilingo

Twitter for Consumer Businesses

A very good presentation on how some companies are using Twitter - a definitive guide to Enterprise2.0 aspect of Twitter.

Twitter for Consumer Businesses: Overview of Twitter Business Uses & Trends

View more presentations from Adam Schoenfeld.

Drag-n-Drop attachments into GMail

Most of us still prefer Outlook to the GMail web interface - in fact some people still use outlook to check their GMail accounts.

While there are several reasons such as availability of backup to using Outlook; one of the reasons is also usability features of Outlook like ability to Drag-and-Drop attachments into the compose window. Well, the good news is GMail also offers this service now.

To use this, go to Settings->General Tab, scroll down to the end of the page and locate "Attachments". Select the option "Basic attachment features - Attach one file at a time and don't show progress bars"

Now whenever you drop a file on the "Choose File" button on the Compose window, it gets attached automatically in GMail.

Check this link for more: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=4228a207d43735f2&hl=en

Google to the power of 4

http://GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com Follow the link and you can open four Google searches in a single window. So can search for four criteria at a single time.

Blogger FTP shutting down

Blogger / Google have announced that they will be deprecating Blogger FTP support from March 3 onwards. In an email to all FTP publishers they said:

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1]Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs.FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improveBlogger: only .5% of active blogs are published viaFTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Bloggerafter March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way.

Google Apps not to support IE6 and older browsers

Notice from Google:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Google Inc.

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