Music lovers should get ready for a phone that is exclusively dedicated to them, kudos to Samsung. It will soon, introduce in market, Samsung M3310 Dual slider which is termed as ‘a music phone’, however the launch date and price is still not known.                                                      

It is expected to be first launched in selected Asian Market. Let’s have a glance at the features of phone that have been revealed till now: 

• It sports a Dual Slider. When you slide it up you can use the alphanumeric keyboard and when you slide it down you can see the built in speakers.
• Dimensions : 101.8 x 46.9 x 15.9 mm ; Weight : 94 gm
• There are dedicated music control buttons.
• It comes with 40 MB of internal memory and also has MicroSD Card support for people who feel the internal memory won’t suffice them.
• It has a QVGA TFT display with 65 colours.
• For all camera admirers there is a reasonable 3.2 megapixel camera but it is still in dark if it is equipped with auto-focus feature or not.
• For connectivity you have Quad-Band GSM/EDGE and Bluetooth
• Another appreciable feature for music buffs is the FM Radio, which it possesses. 

All these features in concurrence with an unconventional trendy look, definitely makes it a good deal to own one (Subjected to price announcement!!).

Reliance mobile launches job search service 

Reliance mobile has come up with an appealing job search which is aimed to benefit the common people of India. This is meant for people who are not very tech savvy and not very comfortable in using web but definitely have potential and a lot of hidden latent. 

Reliance mobile in collaboration with Babajob.com (A company that specialises in informal job hiring) has launched this service on its VAS platform, the R- World. It will be available in five languages – Hindi, English Telugu, Kannada and Tamil.

It will not only become easier for job seekers to find the right job for them based on their skill but also be a great channel for the employers to reach out to the larger untapped market in rural India, for the so called blue-collared jobs. It educates the rural users about the jobs available in their area as well as higher paying job in near-by cities. 

Until now there have been many job search portals, but they featured only white collar job vacancies which require a great deal of experience and educational qualification.

So India, which has a large rural and sub-urban population, is definitely going to relate, accept and take full advantage of this new service.

As the job market looks bright again after the downturn, Reliance Job search service might give a good competition to the current market leaders in that segment.

Lets watch and see how it brings valued service to jobseekers and employers.

LG unveiled NetTop XPION X30 

Its LGs turn now, after Asus and Acer, to make its mark in the race of slim and laconic PCs. LG has rolled out its first small desktop computer known as the XPION X30 that will be powered by the vaunted NVIDIA ION graphics. LG has done it with style, launching its first ever nettop, XPION X30 on 18 Sept, 2009 in its native market, Korea. 

Let’s have a quick look at the tech spec of this Ion based nettop: 

• It is powered with 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N230 processor.
• It also encloses 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD.
• It is pre-loaded with Windows vista, but is soon expected to come with Windows 7 (after its launch).
• Nvidia Ion (MCP7A) enables it to handle full 1080p HD video with 7.1 HD audio and supports DirectX10 which liberates you from the worries of sluggish behaviour of the system when playing a high definition video and a game simultaneously.
• With a weight of mere 1.54 kg, it draws a power of just 40 W.
• It sports a sliding cover on a 3.5” case, under which there are 6 USB ports , audio ports and a 4-in-1 memory card reader. 

The most scintillating feature of this nettop is its ability to get VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) mounted to an LCD.

Let’s wait and watch when LG plans to open up its nettop sale to other countries.

Gist : Know better what you already know 

Gist is a web based tool that intelligently sums up the vast information a user has in and needs from his/her email, social networking sites, CRM tools and search engines. Gist Inc., a Seattle based company headed and founded by T.A. McCann has opened Gist for public beta since 15 Sept, 2009 after an approximate 1 year of private beta testing by around 10,000 testers. Gist amalgamates email with rest of the web to organize, prioritize and present to you the information that matters the most to you. Gist has collaborated with Outlook, Salesforce, g-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Email/IMAP. You need to upload your profiles by adding these applications to your Gist account and the rest will be taken care by Gist.   

Whom is GIST going to benefit? 

This is looked upon as a Personal Relationship Manager which will make life easier for professionals who are overwhelmed with their flooded mail box and scattered information all over the web. Most of the time, business professionals need some information about an important contact and the events related to them.  For instance it’s a very frequent practice to have a look on the profile of people (May be a potential client) whom you are going to have a meeting or call with. It might become a tedious task to update you with information about such contacts by searching in Google, their Linkedin, Facebook profiles. Let’s see how Gist will solve this concern. 

What does Gist offer? 

• Depending upon the frequency and type of communication you have had Gist comes out with the most important profiles (both individual and company).
• It automatically generates a profile of various contacts by taking information from their profile in Linkedin, Facebook and also from the news and blogs associated with them on the web.
• It enables you to share news, blogs, contact details via Twitter, Facebook.
• Gist dashboard includes upcoming events, attachments involved in previous communications, list of important contacts and companies, events revolving, recently shared.
• Apart from the automatic organization of various information, you can have a customized organization by grouping your contacts, tagging them, increasing or decreasing the automatically set importance of a contact. The Gist generated profile can be viewed by clicking on the contact name.
• You can see contact’s blogs, news related to them and their public tweets that Gist pulls from twitter.
• There are various criterion on which a contact or information can be searched like search based on the updates on contact since 24 hrs, 48 hrs, 30 days and so on till 90 days. Search can also be performed on the basis of contacts added recently or depending on the person with whom the upcoming meeting is scheduled which is based on calendar info available.
• One of the most appreciated feature is you can use this tool as a plug-in with Outlook and Salesforce.com. If you see any contacts in your mails and want to get some info about him/her, you can get it there and then using Gist with the help of profile generated by it. You need not go out of the Outlook or Salesforce window.
• CSV can be uploaded as well. 

This is a much awaited step towards integration of social media and CRM and is available for free but there is an advanced version that is coming up which will be chargeable. 

Log on to http://www.gist.com/ to have a first hand experience of one of the most innovative mashups that we have seen off-late.

Facebook launches Facebook Lite

Facebook goes on diet with its new version, the Facebook Lite. It is a simpler, lighter, cleaner, crispier and faster Facebook. This step by Facebook,  is seen as a milestone to take a leading edge in the sphere of real-time streaming web. The beta version is launched for specific regions like US and India, where the traffic of people joining this social networking site is heavy.

 Why Facebook Lite ?

• The main focus of the Lite version is writing on walls, sending messages, viewing and posting photos and videos, the crux of a social networking site.
• Facebook classic imbibes a whole set of versatile third-party applications making it richer and heavier whereas we find most of these applications missing in Lite, making it easier to load in a slower internet connection.
• Newer version is specifically targeted for the new users who might find the older version overwhelming with too much of information on a single page.

The changes in Facebook lite:

• The navigation and info buttons on the left of the page, highlights on the right is missing.
• There is no requests other than suggested friends and the friends request.
• The friends tab on the facebook tab is replaced by events tab that is meant for seeing and creating events.
• Another add-on is ‘View Top Stories’ instead of viewing all the post listed in order.
• Updates appear real-time along the bottom of the page, this is something worth experiencing.
• As mentioned earlier, most of the third-party applications are taken away and there is no tool bar and chat available in bottom as well.

This is considered as twitter-like site with no word count limit in posting a message and in comment. Also, a normal facebook page has a size of 778 KB while a page of facebook Lite weighs only 113 KB. Though this depends on the photos and videos a profile has.

A lot of users who enjoyed the various games and quizzes coupled with Facebook Classic might not be very enthusiastic about it.

Check out http://lite.facebook.com/ to have hands-on the newer Facebook and see if you are one of the beta testers!! Users who don’t have an access to Facebook Lite will be automatically linked to Facebook Classic.

This definitely is going to be a hit among folks who love speed. Who doesn’t?

Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications and it comes under the broader picture of second generation of  web or better known as Web 2.0. Mashups are the creative hybrids when created from 2 or more external data sources and finally produces a new innovative product or services. Nowadays, there are various classes of Mashups being created for various consumer and business purposes. With the growing need, innovation and players, more and more Mashups are coming to our Mashups community.

There are many types of mashups, such as consumer mashups, enterprise mashups, data mashups, and business mashups. The most common type of mashup is the consumer mashup, aimed at the general public.
Data mashups combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single representation. Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

Mashups and portals are both content aggregation technologies. Though Portals represents the older concepts where the dynamic markup languages play the key part and makes different fragments over the web, popularly known as ‘Portlets’ but with Mashups this becomes a more hybrid way to mix multiple applications (rather APIs) to totally transform to a new creation.

There are different set of technologies available now to create such Mashups and out of that worth mentioning the Web 2.0 technology called ‘Ajax’

Ajax – Ajax is an acronym “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”. Ajax is a Web application model rather than a specific technology. It comprises several technologies focused around the asynchronous loading and presentation of content:

      • XHTML and CSS for style presentation
      • The Document Object Model (DOM) API exposed by the browser for dynamic display and interaction
      • Asynchronous data exchange, typically of XML data
      • Browser-side scripting, primarily JavaScript

Mashups are certainly an exciting new genre of Web applications. The combination of data modeling technologies stemming from the Semantic Web domain and the maturation of loosely-coupled, service-oriented-architecture, platform-agnostic communication protocols is finally providing the infrastructure needed to start developing applications that can leverage and integrate the massive amount of information that is available on the Web.

If you surf the web, maybe you will not be aware that you actually are browsing over such a Mashup application site. These have become extremely popular and many such are based on Google Maps, Flickr and many other popular apps.

Some more examples for you:

Happn.in – Mashup of Google maps and local Twitter trends from Happn.in. This map will show the top 10 trending phrases in over 80+ major cities around the world.

Twitpickr.com – An easy way to upload your TwitPic images to Flickr. Uses APIs from Flickr, TwitPic and Twitter.

Mp32tube.com – Mp32tube allows YouTube users to easily upload mp3s on youtube.com, as YouTube does not allow this feature.

http://f1gmap.googlepages.com/f12009.html – Displays satellite images of all 2008 Formula One Grand Prix Circuits with race results and grand prix information.

Gympost.com – Fitness facility locator that shows gyms, athletic clubs, pilates studios, and other similar places on a Google Map.

Related worth reading could on Rich Internet Application

 Nokia with miniature N97

Here comes Nokia with miniature N97, not that it is miniature in any of the major performance parameters. In Nokia world, 2009, a conference in Stuttgart, Germany, Nokia disclosed its plans to launch N97 mini in October. This one is another addition to Nokia’s touch screen portfolio.  And the buzz around is – what is it in N97 Mini which is not present in N97 and vice versa. 

Let’s try to get an answer to this question by having a look at features the new N97 Mini exhibits: 

• The most striking add-on is the software on which N97 mini is going to run. The usual Symbian S60 OS will be running with user interface improvements like flick scrolling, more home widgets and more social networking tools.
• The first of its kind is the addition of, Lifecasting with Ovi (a partnership with facebook). This program gives user, the liberty to post their location, update their status, photos on facebook, directly from the device homescreen.
• It will have new Ovi maps loaded in it, where contents will be accessible from Lonely Planet, Michelin and Wcities.
• The dimension of N97 mini is 4.4 inches x 2 inches x 0.5 inches where as N97 measures 4.6 inches x 2.1 inches x 0.6 inches.
• N97 mini weighs 138 g, slightly lighter than N97 which weighs 150g.
• It has a 5 Mega pixel, 4x zoom, 640 x 480 video recording resolution, 30fps recording frame rate, Carl Zeiss camera which is as good as N97 but is accompanied with more features like Geo-tagging, video stabilization.
• It will support RealVideo and Flash Lite 3.0.
• It sports a 3.2 inches inclined resistive touch screen as compared to N97’s 3.5 inches screen.
• It possesses 8 GB of memory expandable to 24GB with an addition of 16GB  microSD card while N97 has 32 GB of memory.
• The stand-by time is as long as 12 days and music playback in offline mode is 28 hours.
• This is accompanied with a QWERTY keyboard, with no D-Pad(directional pad) which was present in its predecessor, N97.
• It is a Wi-fi, Bluetooth, and Quadband ( 850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM device. 

Some drawbacks:  

• The smaller keyboard, which makes typing difficult.
• There is no camera lens cover which makes the camera vulnerable to dust, scratches and finger prints.
• There is no North American 3G Bands support. 

This high end phone will cost $639 approximately, definitely not a miniature to N97 in this aspect, which costs around$700 Lets see it impresses how many and it will be interesting to keep a watch on N97 vs N97 mini battle.

Lets watch it more before you decide to go for it.