TechBlog

Square is a mobile credit card transaction application founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. The app became available for the iPad about one month ago, and now it’s also available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. The app is free, but in order to work, you need a small credit card reader that connects to the iPhone via the 2.5mm headphone jack. The app looks beautiful and has lots of nifty features, such as SMS receipts, the ability to track of your sales online, as well as tip and tax calculation. However, in its current iteration it also has certain drawbacks; for example, you cannot delete or refund transactions. ...

With Clearwire and Sprint pushing for mobile WiMAX coverage in 80 U.S. markets by the end of 2010, and promising three new WiMAX-powered smartphones in the near future, it’s easy to lose sight of the wireless technology as a solution for rural residential broadband. Today, Kansas Broadband Internet (KBI) announced it is moving ahead with the construction of its own WiMAX network with PureWave as the exclusive hardware provider. The finished network will cover 18 counties, and more than 12,000 square miles. With only 33 residents per square mile, Kansas is one of the United States’ ten least densely populated states. ...

Macro Monday Theme: Life is Hard Credit cards and debt make life hard. It seems so easy at the time, but after time, you realize what a mistake it is. Strobist: Canon 430ex II at 1/4 power through a softbox camera left. Triggered with a Cactus V4.” Macro Monday Theme: Life is HardCredit cards and debt make life hard. It seems so easy at the time, but after time, you realize what a mistake it is.Strobist: Canon 430ex II at 1/4 power through a softbox camera left. Triggered with a Cactus V4.” ...

Google began offering free turn-by-turn navigation with Android 2.0 in late 2009, and Nokia announced at the beginning of 2010 that Ovi Maps navigation would be free on all its future handsets. Today Microsoft announced that it is following suit with free turn-by-turn navigation for Windows 6.x and up phones, powered by Bing Maps. When getting directions with Bing, there will now be a “Navigate” button which starts the turn-by-turn voice navigation. The voice navigation feature was developed by the Microsoft Tellme team. ...

Last week, VMware and Salesforce.com announced a new partnership around VMforce, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering aimed at enterprise Java developers. The companies’ CEOs Paul Maritz (VMware) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce) described VMforce as an enterprise cloud designed to serve the needs of more than six million enterprise Java developers, including some two million who are using the Spring framework VMware acquired last August when it purchased SpringSource. ...

The first significant change to Internet domain names in many years was made today when ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved and deployed three domain names using a non-Latin script: Arabic. You can already visit http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/ and two other Arabic script domain names, though they might not display correctly if your browser doesn’t have IDN (International Domain Name) support. Using Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 and Google Chrome Developer Build 5.0.375.29 for Mac, I was able to visit that web address but it displayed incorrectly in the address bar. When I visited the site in Apple Safari 4.0.5, it was written out correctly. ...

In February we learned that a future version of Google Googles would translate text in photos. The future is here — Google Goggles v.1.1 for Android 1.6 and higher can now read and translate English, French, Italian, German and Spanish language text. The Google Goggles translation feature is pretty simple to use. Simply point-and-shot a word or phrase by drawing a box around desired text and snapping a photo. Should Google recognize the text, you can then select the translate button and define the source and destination languages for translation. ...

Facebook has extended its “Gross National Happiness” prototype app to 18 new countries. The app analyzes words in status updates like “awesome” or “tragic” to track changes in the collective emotional state of its users. When Facebook applied the methods to its U.S. userbase last year, it found that happiness went way up on holidays and way down when celebrities like Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger passed away. While the results of the study weren’t surprising, the idea of using status updates to measure national happiness was a novel one. ...

Information has leaked that Facebook is set to roll out location-based features for users and brands as soon as this month. According to Advertising Age, users could see location options any day now. These features include the ability to check in at various locations, including retail spots and restaurants. We’re unclear as to whether users will be able to add or customize their own locations, but we are fairly positive that this move will put Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla and other location-based services in an uncomfortable position. ...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally begun to enable top-level domain names based on non-Latin alphabets. The first three country code top level domains (ccTLD) written in Arabic script are now available for use. The three new top-level domains are: “Al-Saudiah,” “Emarat, and “Misr,” and they allow site names to be written right-to-left. ICANN began testing internationalized domain name (IDN) back in the Fall of 2006, and tested 11 languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. ...