mYpassion » whats new

When Bing joins hands with Wolfram | Alpha, we get more new features

sharath — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:06:26 +0000

Joining hands with wolfram | alpha, Bing is rolling out a new “task-focused” version of its home page. It looks relatively the same as before, but when you mouse over different categories, you will get more search options. For example, if you mouse over “Travel,” you will get links like “find flights”, “find hotels,” and destinations you can conduct your search from there.

“There is also an interactive Instant Answer that allows you to enter your origin, destination, travel dates and…click…you are in Bing travel,” says Bing Product Manager. “Within Bing travel you have fast access to flight purchase recommendations via the price predictor that tells you the least expensive times to fly. In addition to money, you’ll save time as well with Bing travel’s comprehensive flight listing results and links to top travel sites and airlines.”

Bing is also enhancing local information for hundreds of cities looking for things like local attractions, points of interest, restaurants and other local information sources like newspaper web sites. Bing has developed enhanced city results, which include links to key information and high-resolution slide shows.

Bing is also doing a better job mining things like contact phone numbers and email addresses from web pages and displaying them clearly under a Contact banner, and generally cleaning up the interface to make it easier to decide if this a site you want to visit. It also includes images in some preview results. Bing believes that all these features will allow for a faster decision about whether a site is right for your needs, which means less clicking on your browser’s back button.

An all new Event Search feature has also been added to Bing recently, which gives users a summary of events for major cities, which can be filtered by things like performances, food & dining, fairs & festivals, music, etc.

Now that Bing has been getting more new features, would you Bing more that you Google? Share your views by posting comments below.

New themes and avatars in Twitter

sharath — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:16:56 +0000

Twitter has four new themes added and the number of available themes now to 16. Twitter has also updated the default theme and avatar to match the twitter front page.

Finally, you also get new default avatar when creating a new account . This is also updated and available in six colors.

To change your Twitter page design, visit Settings > Design.

Microsoft office 2010 – Pre release screenshots leaked!

sharath — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:41:50 +0000

Another build of Microsoft Office 2010 pre release screenshots has been leaked on the web. This is the Ultimate version of Office in which all elements of the package are available. In build 14.0.4417.1000 icons of the various programs like Word and Outlook has a new Office logo and also has a new synchronization center.

These leaked screenshots also shows the menu, which looks better compared to Office 2007. Check out the new screenshots below:

Installation 1:

Installation 2:

Installation 3:

Installation 4 – Complete:

5 – Icons view 2010:

6 – Word 2010 :

7 – Word Menu 2010 view:

8 – Powerpoint 2010 Menu view:

9 – Powerpoint 2010 view:

10- Outlook view:

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BingTweets: Now search Bing and get realtime search results from twitter too with just one search!!!

sharath — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:28:36 +0000

BingTweets combines Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling you to see deeper, real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. You can also search for anything in the BingTweets search box (at the top right of every page) and see Bing search results alongside the most recent related tweets.

In partnership with Federated Media and Twitter, Microsoft created “BingTweets” which fuses Bing search results and real time content from Twitter in an interesting new interface. BingTweets pulls in real-time trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now,” “People,” “Places” and “Products” enabling easier navigation of the ever changing trends on the Web. You can also fire off a search on any topic of your choosing to see the related search results from Bing and Twitter discussion.

For e.g., when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out, you may want official reviews, local theater listing, and latest Tweets on the movie. With BingTweets, you can cover all that ground in one place, annoumced Bing Search blog.

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Twitter gets a new following/followers page, major UI redesigns and multiple new features!!!

sharath — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:31:39 +0000

If you are wondering what happened to the old boring and simple following and followers page in twitter, all that has been changed! Twitter announced, viewing other people’s followers and followings temporarily disabled http://tinyurl.com/lsq3gg and as all of you might have guessed it was disabled because of the new updates that was coming on its way ….

Now when you click the Following and Followers links from your Twitter account you’ll notice some major changes. Twitter has upgraded some of the design of the pages and added multiple new features.

Here is a screenshot of the new Expanded and List view in twitter followers’ page!

In addition those new features, When you click on Followers, Twitter now shows you a check mark beside the people who you are reciprocally following. Like with the page I mentioned above you can @ message, direct message, follow (if you’re not doing so already) and the option to block.

Here is someting from the official Twitter blog about the new upgrade to twitter…

“Instead of a basic list, there are now actions you can perform that provide a better overall experience. For example, you can turn on SMS, unfollow, mention, block, direct message, and more.”

What do you think about the new updates? Did it help you? Do you like it? Let me know by posting comments below

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Windows vista service pack 2 available for download now!!

sharath — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:43:30 +0000

Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista is now available via Windows Update in 31 other languages including Dutch. Service Pack 2 was already available for English language. Microsoft revealed on May 26 Service Pack 2 in the first five languages, English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese. Service Pack 2 includes Windows Search 4, support for the latest Bluetooth technology and all previously released updates for Windows Vista and this does not include Internet Explorer 8, so you’ll have to download it separately. Service Pack 2 is also sold separately through the download links.

Download: Windows Vista SP 2 to 32 bits (475.5 MB)
Download: Windows Vista SP 2 to 64 bits (745.2 MB)

Download ISO: Windows Vista SP 2 (1695.1 MB)

Mozilla releases its new version of Firefox – 3.5, ohh Yeah!!

sharath — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:12:41 +0000

Mozilla releases its new version of Firefox 3.5. Here is a quick look at what’s new with Mozilla 3.5 or watch a new video. You can also get yourself a new Firefox by click on the link below

What’s New in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

* Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
* Support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
* Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
* The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage,

Watch a quick video of what’s new in firefox 3.5!!

Click on the Firefox button to get yourself one New Firefox 3.5 now!! -

Facebook to roll out its new realtime search! – What does it really mean for you and me?

sharath — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:01:47 +0000

Facebook to roll out its new search results that will continue to include people’s profiles, Facebook Pages, groups and applications, and some entirely new Search features. With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan.

You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone.

So the question now is, what does all this mean for a normal Facebook user like you and me?

It means anything you typed\shared with friends is not private anymore if you haven’t selected the right privacy settings on Facebook. And all your info can be found by a simple Facebook search in the future.

Since Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with a new type of search that could actually make it a social search alternative to Google, Bing and other major search engines.

Stay safe and choose your privacy properly. Here is how you can set your data as private on Facebook:

Go to the Facebook settings and select privacy settings
Now click on manage next to Privacy
Click and select from Profile, News Feed and Wall, Search and Application settings

Choose the right privacy setting and your data should stay protected!!

Facebook’s search feature searches status updates, links, notes, photos, and videos, and it can search both your friends and anybody who has a public profile. This puts it in direct competition with Twitter’s realtime search of public messages and a realtime threat to your Facebook information if you haven’t chosen the right privacy settings.

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Know your search engine better – A closer look at Bing.com, Tips and tricks!

sharath — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:27:53 +0000

Bing – Another search engine by Microsoft but this one is Good!! Now that Bing’s around for some time and is available for everyone to use, here are some quick tips and tricks that will help you do more with Bing.com and to know your search engine better.

1. Bing helps you search the Web, Images, Videos, News, Maps & more…

- Web searches:

All web searches have a “related searches” on the left side of the page. This gives you the recent & related searches that most people are commonly looking for. What’s more, you can also save the search results if you have signed into the Hotmail, Messenger, Xbox LIVE accounts right from the Bing search pages!!

- Image searches:

If you have a Facebook account and have set your privacy settings as public then don’t be fascinated to find your photo on the top of the list of Bing results. And yes, Bing also gives you many image search options like Size, Layout, Color, Style and People.

Size: allows you to filter image size types. For example small, medium, large, wallpaper sized images
Layout: filters Square, wide, tall
Color: Color images black & white images
Style: Photograph, illustration
People: just faces, head & shoulders & other.

- Video searches:

Best thing about Bing video searches is it lets you play the videos right from the Bing search window. If you only want to watch the preview of the video all you need to do is just move the mouse of the video show on the search results page.

Even the video search on Bing gives you filter options like length, screen size, resolution and source of the videos, which is really cool.

- News, Maps & More (more includes search trends):

Just like Google, Bing also provides the latest news results from all over the world and local results for the search terms and maps.
Bing has an additional feature called xRank, where you can see who and what everyone’s searching for most . This feature is something likeGoogle trends but here you can search for your favorite celebrities and compare them together .

2. Always use Bing worldwide for your searches, instead of the local search.

To explore the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English – US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere (Global search results).

3. Add Bing to track Stock market.

Add Bing to your default search engine list on IE or Firefox!

4. Save and Email search results

With Bing, you can save your search history on to a local folder inside Bing or to your Windows Skydrive account. Alternatively, you may send your search queries to a friend via email or publish them on your Facebook wall via Bing. You’ll need Silverlight to share queries in Bing.

5. RSS Feeds of Search Results

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

This RSS feature is only available for Web searches and currently not available for Image or Video search in Bing.

6. Bing quick search keywords:

Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique “contains” search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types. Advanced keywords in Bing can give you better search results so that you find only what you want. Use the following keywords to help limit and focus your searches. Here are few keywords and examples.

Contains: – To search for websites that contain links to Microsoft Windows Media Audio (.wma) files, type music contains:wma.

Filetype: – To find reports created in PDF format, type your subject, followed by filetype:pdf.

Inanchor: or inbody: or intitle: – To find webpages that contain msn in the anchor, and the terms spaces and magog in the body, type inanchor:msn inbody:spaces inbody:magog.

Ip: – Type IP:207.46.249.252.

Language: – To see webpages only in English about antiques, type “antiques” language:en.

Loc: or location: – To see webpages about sculpture from the U.S. or Great Britain, type sculpture (loc:US OR loc:GB). For a list of language codes that you can use with Bing, see Country, region, and language codes.

Prefer: – To find results about football but that primarily pertain to the organization, type football prefer:organization.

Site: – To see webpages about heart disease from the BBC or CNN websites, type “heart disease” (site:bbc.co.uk OR site:cnn.com).

To find webpages about the PC version of Halo on the Microsoft website, type site:www.microsoft.com/games/pc halo.

Feed: – To find RSS or Atom feeds about football, type feed:football.

Hasfeed: – To find webpages on the New York Times website that contain RSS or Atom feeds, type site:www.nytimes.com hasfeed:football.

Url: – To verify that the Microsoft domain is in the index, type url:microsoft.com.

Google always fascinates me but I kind of like the new Bing now! Go on try Bing.com and you could find more …. If you liked this post, subscribe to the mYpassion RSS feed to get instant updates.

Orkut goes mobile – download orkut mobile application for your phone now!!

sharath — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:10:11 +0000

If you are an Orkut fan just like me and can’t stay away from checking your Orkut scrapbook now and then, then you need the Orkut mobile application.

Every day, many of the users sign in to Orkut on the phones from all over the world– checking out scraps, updates from friends, and even viewing photos. As mobile phones are becoming one of the major ways that you access Orkut. This feature is real hand and helps to stay connected with friends always!!

Orkut mobile application, is a downloadable app for Java-enabled phones (including popular phones like the Nokia N95, Nokia 6300, and Sony Ericsson W580i), that truly makes your orkut experience as mobile as you are .

Thats not all, here is a list of top 5 handy uses – tips & tricks of the Orkut mobile application:

- Upload photos to orkut on-the-go, directly from your phone.

- View scraps, friends’ updates, and photo albums while you’re offline.

- Share your orkut albums with all of your friends whether they use orkut or not (via SMS).

- Easily call or SMS your orkut friends and address book contacts from within the app.

- Get automatic updates when your friends change their contact information or orkut profiles.

Install the orkut mobile app (available in English and Portuguese), by heading to m.google.com/orkut on your mobile phone’s browser. While the app is free to download and use, your mobile provider’s regular data charges will apply.