Yahoo Photos: Start Migrating your Photos

Last month, Yahoo had announced that they will shutdown Yahoo Photos for the benefit of Flickr. They said that they whole process would take several months to complete and those who had stored their photos on Yahoo Photos were given different option to move an alternative service.

Yahoo has now announced that September 20^th is the last working day for Yahoo Photos. By then, users must move their photos to a different service because all photos on their site will be deleted. Although they are doing this for the benefit of Flickr, they are not forcing everyone to migrate to Flickr. Instead, they give you plenty of different options like Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Photobucket.

If you are not interested in migrating, you can download all your photos or buy an archive CD from Englaze for $6.95 + $1.70 (shipping). Englaze, which is integrated with both Yahoo Photos and Flickr, is relatively weak in comparison to other options. You can try Backupr which gives users more control over which photos they’d like to back up and a CD of photos is free (plus $3.99 shipping worldwide), adding up to a total cost of less then half what Englaze is charging.

Usually, such announcements are potential headaches for users as services get transferred, moved, and users are forced to make decisions about how best to manage their photos. Blogs and other services like personals which rely on Yahoo Photos are the ones to be worst affected by this move.

Interestingly, Yahoo Photos provides no option for users to migrate their photos to Google owned Picasa Web Albums.

Google Video Adds Frames

Google Video, which recently turned into a video search engine, has now introduced a frame above the resulting video hosting site. The frame looks much like the one we see on Google Images and can be collapsed or removed.

The frame is mainly focused on search and showing related videos, however, it also lets you to do other things like emailing the page to your contact, rating the video or skipping through results using the left/right arrow icons.

MetaCafe doesn’t let any site put a frame on their site, so they’ve used javascript to redirect users to their video page. I’m not sure, if they did it specifically for Google Videos, but it seems MetaCafe doesn’t like frames at all!

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, because Google had already announced their intentions to turn Google Video into a video search engine.

Talking about videos, YouTube now lets you try their new interface by clicking “Try out the New (beta) version of this page!” in the yellow box. Nothing major, but they’ve moved things up a little bit. If you are not happy, you can safely jump back to the old version of the page.

Google, Intel to go green

Google, Intel and a number of other IT manufacturers came together to launch a project to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emission by reducing power consumption from computers in the adoption of energy-efficient computers, components and power management tools, according to media reports Wednesday.

The goal of the initiative, which currently includes Dell, EDS, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Pacific Gas & Electric, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and more than 25 other organizations, is to cut the power consumption of computers by 50 percent by 2010.

The plan would save an estimated 5.5 billion U.S. dollars in energy costs and would, its proponents say, increase the cost of a computer by only about 30 dollars per unit. Reduced running costs would pay for the extra outlay within a couple of years.

Google's Bill Weihl, head of Google's green tech division, said as much as 80 percent of the power used by computers today is wasteful. Google has also spearheaded a fuel efficient vehicle incentive program, and its offices are environmentally friendly, including a shuttle service for employees, organic food in the company cafe, and solar panels installed throughout the corporate campus.

Pat Gelsinger, an executive of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said: "By 2010, the initiative will cut greenhouse gas emissions in an amount equal to removing more than 11 million cars from the road or shutting down 20 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants - a significant step in reducing the emissions affecting our planet."

The move was widely welcomed by environmental groups. But analysts argued that the move was motivated by regulation and the need to reduce costs and that more needs to be done to reduce the total carbon footprint of electronic devices during production and disposal processes.

Steve Prentice, the chief of research at the research company Gartner, said that it makes sense for a company such as Google to urge computer makers to develop more energy efficient machines because the cost of running a server has now exceeded the cost of buying one.

"The reality is that when a company is running as many servers as Google does, the thing that will help their bottom line is reducing the electricity bill. This is primarily about reducing costs," Prentice said.

Gmail can now view PowerPoint Presentations

Google has rolled out an integrated PowerPoint viewer for Gmail which enables you to view PowerPoint presentations as slideshows in your browser, without any dependency on PowerPoint or any third party app.

When you open an email which contains a PowerPoint Presentation (with .ppt extension), you’ll notice a new option “View as slideshow” along with other options like “View as HTML” and “Download” links. The down side is that the built-in viewer doesn’t support sound effects and transitions, you’ll have to manually move through slides using the keyboard or the on-screen arrow keys. Sadly, it’s also a bit handicapped because it fails to recognize the new Microsoft Office 2007 presentation format (PPTX filetype) as a PowerPoint file.

Although Google’s PowerPoint Viewer needs some polishing to be done, it’s still a reason to worry for Microsoft because most users, who purchase Microsoft’s Office Suite, use it to open the documents they receive and rarely to create new ones. Google’s Presentation App, which not just lets you to view, but also edit and create new presentations, is arriving this summer. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

source:techbuzz

How To Find Specific E-Books Online

E-books serve very well in two cases. First, the electronic version of a book is the ideal companion to the real physical book you already own, especially with technical literature, when you are learning, studying or using it as a reference. With an accompanying e-book, you can easily search and find specific keywords in a glimpse (the power of Ctrl-F!) which would be a tedious task if done manually. Second, before you buy a new book in an online bookstore, you may want to have a deeper look at it in order to verify that the contents match your expectations. In some online stores such as Amazon you have the ability to get a preview for some books, but the preview is very limited (you can see the table of contents, and search for specific terms) but you can't freely browse through it.

Even though the price for commercially available e-books is often quite high (considering that there are essentially no copy costs), there are many projects aiming to make ebooks freely available (check out this article for a more comprehensive list). These public domain ebooks are great resources of knowledge, but what if you already have a specific book and want to find an electronic edition copy of it?

Well, you could just try googling them. However, using a simple query for the book's title might not get you the expected results in most cases, therefore people came up with more specialized queries using Google's advanced query operators. Surely, you could also search it in your favorite bittorrent sites if you don't care about possibly "extra-legal" findings.

The solution. I'd like to recommend you a tool that makes finding ebooks easier: eBook Searchr! It's an e-book search engine based on Google's Custom Search technology and it currently searches more than 200 selected and categorized e-book sites, including the ones mentioned above. Although the default settings contain "extra-legal" results as well, if you don't like to see those, you can restrict your search to the "Public Domain" area or to "Commercial" stores only. Anything you find on eBook Searchr, you can also find it googling. However, the difference with this custom search engine is this:

source:Thikingblog