In our jet-set daily life, Fastfood is always there as part of our daily life. May be we are not always aware of the side effects and other alarming facts of these fastfoods. We sometimes term them as Junk foods in the sense of the effect that they cause to us. Read on for some quick facts and figures on Fast Foods:

credit: onlineschools.org

enjoy… remember before you order your next burger and french fries !!

Apple, earlier we used to refer this fruit as a symbol of health which keeps docs away and then we learnt the relationship of this fruit with Newton, but this generation is crazy about Apple…. oops, the fruit of Steve Jobs. So here are some quick and interesting things that we probably don’t know about the creator of Apple, Steve Jobs. Enjoy reading !

credit:onlineschools.org

Want to watch a 3D movie? The first thought that comes in mind is to go to a 3D theatre. This is soon going to be a history. Come 2010 and we will see 3D televisions making its way in many of our households.  As we see, IFA 2009 in Berlin conclude on 9-Sept-09, it brought with it, the promise of a new beginning in the home entertainment in the form of 3DTV.  Big players like Sony and Panasonic have declared that most likely by next year end they will launch 3D television. 

Yoshiiku Miyata, Vice President, Panasonic declared that Panasonic will take the lead in launching the first 3D TV in market using a technology called HD frame sequential. This technology uses two image views in frame sequence managed by active shutters. 

Sony’s plan to launch 3D TV by 2010 was announced by their CEO Sir Howard Stringer and as speculated Sony might opt for “active shutter” technology with electronic glasses that have tiny shutters that flicker in accord with the on-screen image to produce 3D effect. 

An Interesting point worth noting is that the first 3D channel will be broadcasted by sky. 

But there exists a few debatable issues like one should wear glasses with polarised lenses or use the glasses that are based on active shutter technologies? Will it actually be feasible to where a glass at home every time you want to see something on TV? Has the market matured enough to accept it as a household commodity? 

With so many ifs and buts around, it will be worth keeping an eye on to see how does 3D TV become a part of our day to day life.

Keep watching for more!

See how the evolution really happened with YouTube through the graphical representation.

Credit: Onlineschools.org

We have seen some of the finest Journalists in TV journalism in the recent times. They have given a different look and feel to the once very monotonous news reading and news channels. Lets have a brief overview of professional and personal journey of some of our star journalists.

credit: indiantelevision.com

Dr. Prannoy Roy:

The 60 year old prominent journalist founded the largest private television production house, New Delhi Television (NDTV) in 1988. The president of NDTV is also the Director on board of NDTV Media Limited, NDTV News Limited , NDTV Imagine Limited, NDTV Lifestyle Limited, NDTV Convergence Limited, NDTV Labs Limited, NDTV Investments Private Limited, RRPR Holding Private Limited, Metronation Chennai Television Private Limited, Alliance Lumiere Limited and NGEN Media Services Private Limited. Also, he is a Member of the Shareholder’s Investors Grievance Committee of the Board of Directors of the Company.

Born on October 15, 1949, to a Bengali Father and an English mother, he spent his childhood in Kolkata and Dehradun, studying in La Martiniere Calcutta and then in The Doon School, Dehradun. He then received a scholarship to study at the Haileybury, a renowned public school in England. He graduated in economics from The Queen Mary College, The University of London in 1973. He completed his doctorate from the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. He worked as chartered accountant for sometime and then for 2 years (1985-1987) he was with the Ministry of Finance, Government of India working as Economic Advisor.

Prannoy Roy, who also is famous writer Arundhati Roy’s cousin, got married to Radhika Roy (Director NDTV, a speech therapist and Brinda Karat’s sister) in 1973 and is father of two children.

One of his most noteworthy contribution is his election analysis, that he does with Vinod Dua.  Dua-Roy duo has analyzed every election since 1984. Amongst the myriad of awards he has been acknowledged with, a few are: the B. D. Goenka Award for excellence in Journalism in 1994 and 1995, Ernst & Young – Entrepreneur of the year award (Media), the Screen Videocon Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1998 and the Limca Book of Records -Person of the Year award in 1998. 

credit: indiantelevision.com

Vinod Dua:

Vinod Dua, the anchor, the election analyst, the political commentator, he is one of the most famous and influential personalities Indian Journalism has witnessed. He was born on March 11, 1954. He is from a very humble background with his early days spent in refugee camp in Delhi, but his achievements are not as humble. He graduated in English Literature from Hans Raj College, University of Delhi. He completed his Masters in literature from the same university.

He made his debut in Indian television on 27th November 1974,  appearing in Yuv Manch, a youth program on Doordarshan. Subsequently he anchored a series of youth programs like Yuv Jan( for Satellite Instructional Television Experiment), Jawan Tarang ( for Amritsar TV).  Co-anchoring the election analysis programs on Doordarshan with Dr. Prannoy Roy gave him the well deserved breakthrough in his career. He hosted a program called Janvani, which was the first program in the history of Indian television to have allowed direct questions from common man to the politician. He ventured into direction and production business with the current affairs magazine Newsline(first one to be produced and sponsered privately), anchored by eminent journalist M.J. Akbar, and promoted by Ananda Bazar group. In 1987, after working as chief producer in T.V. Today, he started his own production company ‘The Communication Group’ to produce and anchor current affairs programs, budget analyses and documentary films.

Chakravyuha on Zee T.V, Parakh, on Doordarshan, Tasveer-e-Hind on DD3, Chunav Chunauti on Sony Entertainment Television, election analysis on Zee News, Pratidin and Parakh on Sahara T.V. and Kaun Banega Mukhyamantri on Star News have been some of the memorable programs with Vinod Dua’s involvement. As of now he is associated with NDTV,  for daily news analysis, election and budget analysis. He also produces a weekly show Zaika India Ka for food enthusiasts.

Vinod Dua was awarded esteemed BD Goenka Award for excellence in journalism in 1996. Dua has been honored with the Padma Shri  for Journalism in 2008.

Rajdeep Sardesai:

Rajdeep Sardesai, the editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on 24 may,1965. His father, Dilip Sardesai is a former Indian Test cricketer and mother, Nalini Sardesai, former Head of the Department of sociology, St. Xavier’s college, Mumbai. He did his schooling from Cathedral and John Connon School, Campion School in Mumbai.  He holds multiple degrees like Bachelor’s in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai,  Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Bachelor of Civil Law from University College, Oxford.

He started his Television journalism career as Political Editor in NDTV in 1994 and then later he became the Managing editor of NDTV 24/7 and NDTV India. He came into limelight because of the super hit show ‘The Big Fight’ that he hosted. Later in his career he quit NDTV on April 17, 2007 and founded Global Broadcast News (GBN) in collaboration with CNN and Raghav Bahl’s TV18.  Then the channel named CNN-IBN with Rajdeep Sardesai as Editor-in-Chief went live on air. CNN-IBN overtook Channel 7, buying 46 percent stake in the channel. Since then Channel 7 is known by the name of IBN-7. He was conferred with prestigious Padma Shri award in 2008 for his contribution to journalism.

Rajdeep married his colleague, senior editor and anchor at CNN-IBN, Sagarika Ghose in 1994. They met in Oxford University. They are blessed with two children, son Ishan (14) and daughter Tarini (12). His out of domain interest includes cricket and has played for the Oxford University team as a right-hand batsman and a right-arm offbreak bowler.

Check out the next one:  popular-faces-of-indian-journalism-2

Now Listen to Blogs and Articles as MP3

Are you hard-pressed with time and that is the reason you find sometimes difficult to be updated with the latest articles, news snippets and blog posts? To make reading simple, here is a latest innovation that will help you to convert your text article to audio file. Amazing isn’t it? Additionally it can happen in just few simple steps. Just read on…

Carryout Text is the latest FREE web service that will help you convert your simple text file into an audio file.This software is simple to use and is available with no additional cost.

Instead of spending time by reading an article, you can convert that particular text file into a MP3 format and listen to it while working out in the treadmill.

So, the greatest advantage of Carryout Text is to get more things done in less time.

How to use this software application?

In the Carryout Text website do a copy and paste of the selected article and finally click on the submit to process button. This will help you get the MP3 file. All you need to do is download it into MP3 player or iPod and tune into the latest buzz, news and views. Remember to download the created audio MP3 files because CarryoutText does Not keep them stored for long time. Automatically these files will be removed the next day after creation.

Isn’t it cool guys !  Dont forget to CLICK HERE to get my updates….

WordPress – is an award-winning CMS, which enables you to build Blogs, Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made WordPress the most popular blog software available. Best of all, WordPress is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

There are hundreds of WordPress themes online waiting to be paid for. Some of them are worth it, some are not. Just because many of our followers decided to stay with Premium themes, that doesn’t mean Free Themes are ugly, cluttered, and boring.

In this showcase below, I have handpicked some Excellent Collection of Fresh High-Quality Free WordPress Themes Around because We all know that we’re going to use our blog as a tool to promote our business, with a clean, professional, corporate look.

Most important they are FREE !!

1.  Foodiary

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2.  ThrillingHeroics

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3.  Morning After

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4.  Berryllimous

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5.  Mayumi

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6.  WP Premium WordPress Theme

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Hope you will enjoy using them and make your Blogs worth a visit !

This month is the 15th anniversary of the release of Internet Explorer, actually it was released at midnight on August 13th 1996. Since then, it has been a long journey especially in the war of browsers like with Firefox and Chrome. But now, Microsoft plans to launch the beta of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta browser on Sept. 15, 2010.

Microsoft HQ, Redmond is counting on IE9 to get it back in to serious technical competition with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. This IE 9 Beta needs either Windows Vista or Windows 7 (no XP).

People would eagerly wait for the new promises that Microsoft brings with their latest Internet Explorer Browser 9.

Now is the time to start getting their sites ready for Internet Explorer 9 Beta. What are the key new things?

• Internet Explorer 9 would help enable the same markup to work across browsers
• Internet Explorer 9 would be all-round fast
• Through Windows and modern hardware, Internet Explorer 9 would unlock the next class of experiences for the web
• Enabling the same markup to work across browsers
• Delivering all-round performance
• Through Windows and modern hardware, unlocking the next class of experiences for the web with hardware acceleration

The software giant few months back released another platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the form of IE9 Preview 2 and this latest incarnation scores 68 out of 100 on the Acid3 test.  The latest build also claims to improve JavaScript and HTML5 performance while the full hardware acceleration for HTML5 on IE9 is able to take the workload off your computer’s processor, shifting it to the graphics chipset.

Credit Net Apps

Developers and partners have been excited to experience the new IE9 web development and design capabilities, including fully hardware accelerating all graphics and text through Windows, the new Chakra JavaScript engine, as well as the support for modern standards like HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 and DOM.Interestingly, we saw coverage about Internet Explorer posting a worldwide gain in usage share. That encouraging news continues today with Net Applications’ release of their July usage share numbers.

Net Applications reports overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July, while Firefox lost 0.90% share and Chrome dipped 0.08% in share. Most interesting is the fact that Internet Explorer 8 continues to be the fastest growing browser with a 0.98% increase worldwide in July – and now represents more than 30% of browser usage worldwide.

It is iPhone or Blackberry, the dream smartphone for most where one can sent a tweet; check the important emails as well make a purchase while listening to the latest music tunes. But a distant dream to owe such a high-end phone for lot many people. There is an ever increasing market potential for mobile phone usage in the emerging market economies. According to Gartner, the mobile-phone usage in India alone is going to take a quantum leap from usage of 38.7 percent in 2009 to almost 63.5 percent in 2013. 

Microsoft, the leading software giant has been quick to tap this huge market potential. And read on to know what they are going to launch in two weeks time from now. 

Microsoft has developed software called OneApp that will allow users with non-smartphone devices to send a message in facebook and check their emails. This software has been the result of research by Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group that uses their brain to bring out revolutionary ideas and products for poor people living in the developing countries. 

So, how much memory will this particular application software from Microsoft will eat up? The answer is simple and that is not much. This is because it has been so designed that feature phones can use and access one application at a time and the graphics will not have high resolution as the iPhones or Blackberry. 

Amit Mital who leads the team of researchers of Unlimited Potential Group at Microsoft is of the opinion that this software program will not eat up a lot of energy. The underlying reasons behind developing this application are: 

First, to tap the growing market potential in the developing countries as people would love to have smarter feature phones since there is a growing market demand for applications for low-end phones. 

Second, Microsoft wants the concept of Cloud Computing to take a big leap so that low-end consumers with their handsets would be able to access the cloud computing services of this IT giant. This will enable the company to enhance their market share manifold. 

Third, though this OneApp program is designed for the developing countries nonetheless it might get popular with the developed-world consumers when they would find that applications can be used without much usage of data storage and energy. 

Next, Microsoft wants to soak their feet in the promotion of mobile wallets and that is using of mobile phones as a purchasing tool. This has led to the tie up of Microsoft with Blue Label Telecom that has become popular for its mobile-wallet concept usage as the company does lot of mobile phone payments. 

The launch of OneApp will initially feature a lot of free applications but soon growing entrepreneurs and programmers can generate revenue by developing application for this program and thereby charging for the same. 

So, if you cannot owe an iPhone or Blackberry, don’t be worried. Just be happy as Microsoft is here to make your dream come true with OneApp that will transform dumb phones into smartphones. 

Ain’t this good… keep checking for more updates on this. Would like to hear your comments as well.

Google or Bing Map-based mashups abound these days. Mashups require services that can be mashed up. Location-based mashups need services that provide boundary information. With Web-based mapping providers, you can easily create a map-based mashup with little or no capital investment and now it covers wide variety of areas starting from Celebrity location to Real Estate to YouTube video popularities.

See some of them in Action here, following site www.taxiwiz.com helps you to calculate the Taxi Fares, mostly though in US cities. Check out !

Since Google and Bing have its’ Maps API, numerous applications, called Mashups, have been developed that integrate customized data on top of Google’s map interface. With the Maps API, it’s straightforward to center a map at a given location, add markers, and display content in info windows—especially if the location is static. However, if the location is driven by user input or retrieved dynamically, the process is somewhat more complex because of the need to geo-code the address.

The following is one cool example that provides a map of all the airports in the world along with routes from those airports and operating airlines. Also provides the ability to read and write reviews for each airport and airline.

Check it out at: http://www.whereables.co.uk/

Finally, see the way to follow the Centuries hit by Sachin Tendulkar, again based on Maps.

Find out more at http://www.mibazaar.com/cricket/sachintestrecord.html

Do let me know how you like these. Also read “Mashups” to know what it means.

“A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are hit first.”

“Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous.”

“The biggest guru-mantra is: Never share your secrets with anybody. ! It will destroy you.”

“There is some self-interest behind every friendship.There is no Friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.”

“Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.”

“As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.”

“Once you start a working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.”

“The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all direction.”

“Whores don’t live in company of poor men, citizens never support a weak company and birds don’t build nests on a tree that doesn’t bear fruits.”

“God is not present in idols. Your feelings are your god.The soul is your temple.”

“A man is great by deeds, not by birth.”

“Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.”

“Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.”

“Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.”

“Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.”

These quotes are ages old but I am sure still applicable in our current times. What do you say ?

It’s the browser which takes to the world of websites and makes our browsing experience better with the variety of add-ons stuff. No wonder, there is a competitive war with these browsers in the market to capture for web-audience. Since earlier days, when we had only 2 prominent browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, we have come across a long way and now have the options like Mozilla Firefox, IE, Google Chrome, Mac Safari and so on….

In this browsers domain, here is the latest entrant and that too from India. Hidden Reflex, a Bangalore based startup, came with another interesting ‘Indian’ browser, called the ‘Epic Browser’.

This has been developed based on Mozilla. This browser wants to capture the Indian audience with the service offerings like share market and Cricket updates, video streams and more.

It also has a built-in Antivirus solution to prevent malwares and Trojans etc. This bowser has over 1500 applications and also it supports Firefox add-ons. So to catch it live why don’t you try it …. You can download Epic browser from here.

Happy Browsing !

When brains at Microsoft Research Labs are at work, we can  definitely expect some path breaking techno developments. Techfest 2010 at Redmond witnessed many such demos on various projects. Lets have a look at some of them:

1. The Translating phone and The Transcriptor: Transcriptor generates a live transcript of the coversation we have over a call on a PC based communicator. The scripts are merged in email as well for searching.

The Translator is a wonderful concept that takes away the about the difference of language we might have over an important client call or anything like that. The translator translates the speech of the person on the other side of the phone to the language you want at real time. This 2-way translator also generates a live translated transcript. Find out more about the project @ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/transcriptor/default.aspx

2. Project Gustav: Project Gustav is a creative endeavor of Microsoft to make digital painting a perfect realistic experience. It is a realistic painting system prototype that simulates natural, real-world painting environment.

For a better knowhow of the project visit the official page on Project Gustav.

3. Skinput: Skinput is a technology that favors the skin of our body to be used as an input device. Various signals like location of finger taps are collected by sensors worn as armbands. To know more about the Skinput check out http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/gustav/default.aspx

4. Mobile Surface: It aims at making any surface around you as a touch interface surface by linking together a mobile device, camera and a projector. It allows you to project an image on any surface and interact with it even without touching the image.

Click on http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mobilesurface/default.aspx for more information.

An altogether new world of technologies. Exciting!! Isn’t it?? Lets wait and watch how these project finally turn out. Till then keep reading and commenting.