wave-fullconference-rm-eng

To think, it was about this time last year that Google first unveiled its collaboration tool Wave, and today the company’s taking out the invitational step and opening it to the public at large — which begs the question, did anyone not have an invite that wanted one at this point? It’ll also be now available in the enterprise-centric Apps suite for no extra charge. On the developer side of things, expect some more open source code be unleashed, including most importantly the rich text editor. Can’t say we’ve really dug around in the service ourselves since its beta launched, but co-creator Lars Rasmussen tells us we should be giving it another go. He further acknowledged that they’ve got some work to do on educating users on the best ways to use the service, which at this point seems to be mid- and small-scale collaboration. To that end, expect some new tutorial videos, and with any luck, some amusing animation.

Source: Engadget

google-gip

We’re not entirely sure what Google is up to, but we’re inclined to think that there’s an awful lot of voice over IP magic coming, with the company announcing the anticipated acquisition of another VOIP company. Back in November it acquired Gizmo5 for about $30 million, and now it has made a $68.2 million offer for Global IP Solutions.

That company provides VOIP solutions for a number of clients, including Yahoo, and recently announced plans to release an Android library that would enable easy video conferencing in apps. We’re guessing someone in Menlo Park liked what they saw and decided to bake it right into the OS, but that’s pure, unfounded speculation. This offer still needs to be approved by 90% of Global IP’s shareholders but, since that $68.2 million represents a nearly 30 percent boost in the company’s stock price last week, we don’t think there will be any problem there — but there we go speculating again.

Source: Engadget

naika tei twitter yodobashi

We just saw how Twitter should not be used in case of emergencies like fires. But then that theory seems to be turned on its head with this instance that comes in from the Far East. A twitter user @naika_tei made his was casually making his way into the toilets of Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara. With hope in sight and relief on his mind he made himself comfortable on his perch, only to realize that there was no toilet paper there. All he did was sent out a few tweets, which were picked up by a good Samaritan who dropped him a toilet paper roll. How he managed to get it across to the man on his seat remains to be a question.

ICANN decided late last year that URLs would finally be allowed with non-Latin characters, but it wasn’t until this week that the first one was set free onto the world wide web. The new hot place to visit is http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/, and while you’ll need to know a bit of Arabic to actually pronounce it, you don’t have to have any foreign language skills to click the link and see what happens. As of know, the site loads as http://xn--4gbrim.xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ in pretty much every browser we’ve tried here in the US, but all of the site content seems to populate just fine. Remember that URL gold rush from last century? Round two is officially on.

neverknowtech

A site we can’t pronounce