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Google Wave Now in Google Labs, No Need for Invites to Use It

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Six months after unveiling Google Wave in by-invitation-only beta, Google has finally put this service into Google Labs. This means that you don’t need to search or wait for invites anymore. You can just visit wave.google.com and start using this collaboration and communication tool.

According to Google, the latest version of Google Wave in Labs is faster, more stable and much more easier to use. Google has done many improvements to the service for the past six months. These include – email notifications when a wave has changed, easy navigation to unread parts of a wave, and a facility for removing participants which you’ve added by mistake.  In addition, Google has also added permission management options and an extensions gallery to Google Wave.

For Google Apps administrator, Google has also activated Wave. So, you can now easily enable it for all your users.

For developers, Google has also launched several improvements to the Wave APIs and has open-sourced additional components for building customized Wave services.

And in case you have no idea how to use Google Wave for your own collaboration and communication work, here are examples that you might want to emulate:

Business: Co-workers at companies large and small are using Wave, from writing software code at Lyn and Line and coordinating ad campaigns at Clear Channel Radio, to international project communications for Deloitte’s As One project.

Education: University students and professors worldwide have used waves within and beyond the classroom to collaborate on Latin poetry translations, write academic research papers and even build new functionality with Wave’s APIs. An ICT teacher also enjoyed having her 5th-graders do their class research in Wave.

Creative collaboration: From virtual art classes to writing the Complete Guide to Google Wave itself, waves make it easier for groups to review and critique multimedia content like images and videos. (We’ve heard that Wave is fun for gaming, too.)

Organizations and conferences: The Debatewise Global Youth panel explored climate change across 100 countries and waves at eComm (Emerging Communication Conference),LCA 2010 conference and HASTAC 2010 helped track speaking sessions. We are using waves in the same manner at today’s Google I/O conference.

Journalism: Mashable used Wave to interview journalists on the future of journalism, and The Seattle Times experimented with a public Wave to develop their Pulitzer Prize-winning news coverage.

Originally posted on May 19, 2010 @ 4:34 pm

Opera Mini Gets More Downloads from iPhone Owners in March

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Opera’s latest State of the Mobile Web Report is showing some pretty interesting results for iPhone usage and global mobile handset trends. According to the report, the iPhone is now the third most used handset used by Opera Mini users worldwide. Even more interesting is the fact that the other top 20 mobile phones are either Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones.

The report also highlighted the fact that the iPhone is the number one device used by Opera Mini users in the United States. displacing the BlackBerry.  In addition, of the 10 countries using the Opera Mini, the United States and United Kingdom tops the countries where the iPhone is the most used device by Opera Mini users. This is pretty significant since Opera Mini for iPhone was only made available last month.

Going now to the global mobile statistics presented by Opera, in March 2010, Opera Mini had more than 55.2 million users, wherein 25.8 billion pages where viewed increasing page views by 17.4%. Opera Mini has also generated more than 396 million MB of data for oeprators worldwide. And the top countries for Opera Mini usage in 2010 include – Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, Nigeria, Vietnam, United Kingdom and the U.S.

Some pretty impressive stats for Opera Mini, right? Have you downloaded the latest version of Opera Mini on your mobile phone?  What is your phone’s mobile web browser if not Opera Mini?

Originally posted on April 28, 2010 @ 6:51 am

Faster Google Chrome Beta Release Gives You New Reasons to Ditch IE Anew

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How does web page loading speed of 2700 frames-per-second sound to you? If you don’t think its fast enough, I don’t know what else is.  That’s actually the speed that  the new Google Chrome Beta Release promises to give. And while the Google Chrome folks are still busy preparing the results of their speed test you might want to start downloading the new release now, either for your Linux, Windows or Mac machines.

And to encourage you some more, the Official Chrome blog tells us:

Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpiderbenchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.

If browser speed is not really a big thing for you, Google Chrome Beta’s new features might entice you to get the browser. This new release offers not only bookmark synching capability also browser preferences such as themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings and language. This means that you don’t have to do all those stuff again in all your installation of Google Chrome on various machines.

For current Chrome users, if you loved Chrome extensions and Incognito mode, well you can now use extensions while in the said browser mode.

Other new features of the new Google Chrome Beta release include geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets and file drag-and-drop capabilities.  Chrome also welcomes Adobe Flash Player plug-in into the fold – allowing you to browse rich, dynamic websites.

If you haven’t switched to Google Chrome yet or if you’re still using IE, now is the best time to join the world. Grab the new Chrome Beta Release now.

Originally posted on May 4, 2010 @ 5:38 pm

Place Pages for Google Maps Now on Your Mobile Phone Too

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Sometime last year, Google introduced a feature in Google Maps called Place Pages which display relevant information about  places in Google Maps.  These Place Pages cover detailed information about businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world. Now, those Place Pages are now optimized for mobile phones.

Place Pages for Mobile offer the same detailed information about different places you see on Google Maps, whenever available.  But this time, the display tab is optimized for mobile phone’s smaller screen estate.

The mobile service would be more useful if you’re out somewhere and you want to search for speficic information about a particular place – its exact location, customer ratings, opening hours as well as reviews from people who have gone to the said place. This will save you time and the trouble of checking out a place without knowing what you might encounter there.

Place Pages also gives you links to useful websites as well as a full screen dynamic map that you can pan and zoom, giving you a clearer picture of a place’s exact location.

Place Pages is currently optimized for Android phones and iPhones/iPod Touches in the U.S.

Originally posted on April 27, 2010 @ 8:13 pm

Who Says Foursquare Has No Business Potential?

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Don’t look now folks, but pretty soon,  your favorite restaurants and other business establishments might soon be offering various discounts, freebies and other promotional gigs in cooperation with Foursquare. Yes Foursquare, you it right?  This is because Foursquare has just launched a business strategy that encourages establishment owners to use its service to engage mobile customers with specials and give them the ability to track how their venues is performing over time – through venue analytics.

Foursquare Business provides simple self-service tools that would allow you, as a business manager, to cook up with various kinds of special gigs that would attract customers to your business establishments. Specifically Foursquare Business will let you created the following specials:

  • Mayor specials can be unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days).
  • Count-based specials are unlocked when a user checks in a certain number of times.
  • Frequency-based specials are unlocked every so many check-ins.
  • Wildcard specials are always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the special.

What’s cool about this is that Foursquare has mobile apps in three major mobile platforms – Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. And Foursquare can use this mobile apps to send notices to potential customers nearby to possibly invite them to check out your Foursquare promotional gigs.

To use Foursquare’s business tools, all you need to do is claim your venue. Once you’ve done that you can have access to various Foursquare venue analytics tools that will let you view:

  • most recent visitors
  • most frequent visitors
  • the times of day people check in
  • total number of unique visitors
  • a histogram of check-ins per day

So, what are you waiting for? Get into Foursquare and claim your venue now before somebody else takes it.

Originally posted on April 22, 2010 @ 5:23 pm