Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc said on Sunday it was giving its e-mail users more ways to reach friends and online contacts by allowing them to trade messages with mobile phone users. The new e-mail-to-phone connection is one of the features the Internet media giant plans to add as it makes available to the more than 250 million Yahoo Mail users a new version of the world's most popular e-mail program in coming weeks. The Yahoo Mail overhaul is part of a drive to transform its e-mail franchise into more of a social activity that blends the convenience of instant communication with the implicit network of relationships found in one's online address book. Already this year Yahoo has been testing another feature that lets its e-mail users communicate using conventional e-mail or via instant messages using either Yahoo Messenger or Microsoft Live Messenger . "Our goal is to make (Yahoo) Mail a more social experience," John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said i...

Manufacturer PLANon Systems Solutions ( planon.com ) advertises the RC800 as a full-color scanner capable of recording 100 pages, each in as little as four seconds. Planon introduces the DocuPen RC800 color handheld scanner - the latest technology breakthrough from our R&D efforts. We have been able to achieve full color 24 bit scanning in a remarkably compact and light form that provides you with the ultimate convenience. The RC800 is capable of storing 100's of pages into memory and it takes just seconds to scan a page. Choose the mode you want to scan: black and white, standard color or high 24bit color and the resolution from 100 to 400 dpi. Now you can scan your letters, color documents, pictures and bring them into Paperport software (included with the Docupen). The DocuPen is different from other pen sized scanners in that...

HELSINKI (Reuters) - After hitting alarm clock makers and camera manufacturers, the cell phone industry has a new target -- personal navigation device makers. Handset makers see navigation as one of the next major value-adding offerings and even at this very early stage, analysts say the annual market for phone navigation is worth hundreds of millions of euros. While a few years ago personal navigation device makers like Dutch TomTom shrugged off possible rivalry from the handset industry, they have now acknowledged the potential risk to their business. Reuters Pictures Photo The world's top handset maker Nokia started to sell its first navigation phone Nokia N95 a month ago, and other top vendors are expected to follow shortly, hoping to make 2007 the breakthrough year for cell phone navigation. The N95, with a 700-euro price tag , is not in reach of the masses despite first reports showing strong sales, but the Finnish firm aims to bring GPS positioning chips to a wide array of ...

It's the company's first desktop media player. Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Adobe Systems has developed its first desktop media player and plans to give the industry an early peek at it at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show in Las Vegas this week. The company is already a major player in the exploding market for online video with its ubiquitous Flash player and accompanying authoring and streaming products. Adobe hopes to extends its presence with Adobe Media Player: a desktop application that will let content owners embed ads in clips that users can play back offline. The ability to let consumers "download and carry" ad-supported videos and play them back offline makes the product an important one for media companies, which already use Flash to distribute 80 percent to 90 percent of their content, an analyst said. "It provides a way to share media and make money, which until now has been a scary proposition for most media companies,"...

Dell Inc., on Tuesday announced the commencement of work on its India manufacturing facility at Sriperumbudur Hi-Tech park, near Chennai. Chief minister M. Karunanidhi launched the project with the ceremonial unveiling of an architectural model of the proposed plant. Dell Asia Pacific president Steve Felice told reporters the $30-million project would be completed by July 2007 and would start shipping desktop computers from Chennai from August 2007. The new facility coming up in a 50-acre land in the special economic zone would be set up in three phases and would have an initial production capacity of 400,000 desktop computers. Desktop computers make up about 60 per cent of Dell’s current business in India. The state government has also allotted 150 acres land adjacent to the plant where the company will house its suppliers. The suppliers are likely to invest $210 million in the setting up plants. Dell has already commenced hiring for the new plant. The new facility will provide 1,000 ...

With the launch of a new online application unveiled by Microsoft, users will be able to “fly” over cities and in between buildings just like they do in virtual reality environments. Known as Virtual Earth 3D, this new technology lets users view a three-dimensional map of, initially, 15 American cities when they use “Live Search”, Newsweek magazine reported in its latest issue. With the upgraded Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft has edged ahead of Google in at least one aspect of the race to bring immersive maps to the Internet: it has added a missing piece — photorealistic buildings that sprout from the ground and evoke the lifelike but illusory world of The Matrix, the magazine said. For now, it’s merely a novel way to spend some time. But if Microsoft continues to add new cities and improves an already expensive project, the 3D Web could become a carbon copy of the real world and a powerful new platform on which to blend advertising, social networks, search and e-commerce, the report sai...

Robert Levine: Owners of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console will soon be able to watch sci-fi epics as well as play them. Microsoft said it would offer movies and episodes of television shows for downloading through its Xbox Live online service in the US from November 22. With the new offerings, Microsoft is joining cable giants and Internet start-ups on the long list of companies hoping to profit from video downloading. But Internetbased services have had trouble getting traction because it can be complex to send a downloaded film to a television screen and frustrating to watch it on the small screen of a computer. Owners of the Xbox have already connected it to a TV and, in most cases, the Net. “What makes this big is that there’s no PC in the middle,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. Microsoft has negotiated the rights to rent or sell more than 1,000 hours of material from CBS, MTV, Paramount, Warner Bros and Turner Broadcasting. The video store will work much li...

Glenn Chapman, San Francisco: Google is in behind-the-scenes talks with film and music studios trying to make newly acquired video-sharing website YouTube a gold mine, and not a lawsuit-generating black hole. While some analysts questioned the sanity of Google buying YouTube in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal, Internet insiders contend that Google is shrewdly manoeuvring on solid ground. “The Internet offers real opportunities for media companies to reach a wider, global audience and to interact more directly with users,” Google said. On the day the online search powerhouse bought superstar start-up YouTube it also announced deals with CBS, Sony, BMG, Vivendi Universal Music and Warner Group to feature their videos on the Internet. A number of studios have contacted Google to explore ways to cash-in on their shows, films or songs becoming Internet sensations. Google can shield itself from lawsuits by taking down copyrighted videos after the owners complain, according to attorney Jason...

WARREN BUCKLEITNER With the recent flurry of devices that play both digital music and movies, it only makes sense that content companies like Walt Disney get into the act, wrapping their branding, or in this case mouse ears, around the gadgets themselves. The Disney Mix Max Personal Media Player is slightly larger than an iPod Nano and can play MP3 or WMA music files. But the hallmark of this player is the 2.2-inch screen, created especially to display TV-quality Disney videos and movies. The movies, including High School Musical and Ella Enchanted, are available on specially formatted memory chips that sell for $15 and slip into a side port that also accepts standard SD memory cards.

Cell phone users seeking more computing power for mobile online activities but wary of clunky laptops have a new option: the Ultra-Mobile Personal Computer (UMPC). Built-in Bluetooth wireless technology makes agopc's 1.87 lb. ago7 capable of using any Bluetooth-ready, EDGE- or EV-DO-networked cell phone to make an Internet connection. “Our lightweight ago7 UMPC is ideally suited to using ‘phone as modem,’ or PAM,” says agopc president and CEO David Carroll, in a posting on the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company’s web site. agopc has posted a one-page setup guide entitled “Using Your ago7 and PAM” on their website,www.agopc.com (linked from the “Buy/Specs” page). ago7 has two USB ports, either of which could be used to communicate with a cell phone’s data network via USB cable. “Using both Bluetooth wireless and USB cables, the agopc team has extensively field-tested EDGE and EV-DO networked phones,” Mr. Carroll says. “All phone tests with the ago7 worked well and provided conveni...