Announcement

Google Earth 6 doesn’t have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. “To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available,” explains Google. ...

CNN – Mashable: Today, users can start connecting with all their favorite social causes in one online sphere, as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has launched his much-buzzed-about social network, Jumo. Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007 to become the Obama campaign’s director of online organizing, soft-launched Jumo last March. At that time the site existed merely as a homepage featuring a rather intriguing survey box that asked the site visitor an array of questions from, “If you had a daughter tomorrow, which would you name her?” to “Would you say the world is getting better or worse?” ...

Mozilla announced Miramar Alpha 1, an early version of their next Thunderbird. Miramar Alpha 1, available here for download, is for testers, extension developers, and other friends who are curious to follow the development of the next release of Thunderbird. Miramar Alpha 1 is built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 2.0 and includes a new Addon Manager and over 190 platform fixes to improve performance and stability. We expect to release further interim releases as we work towards a major new release of Thunderbird. ...

Take a look in the email I got from AOL: Hi! There are hundreds of millions of people of all ages using email across the globe today. And because communication is often very personal, we realize a one-size-fits-all solution isn’t always the right answer. So, while we’re proud of the AOL Mail that you know and love today, earlier this week we launched a new email product, code named: Project Phoenix. ...

Mashable: We know that a number of Android tablets are coming in the next couple of months. But will these devices be able to compete with Apple’s iPad, which is currently dominating the market? According to NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, not only the new Android tablets will be competitive, they’ll be better than the iPad in many areas. Many of the upcoming tablets will be using NVidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor, which will “give you the benefit of higher performance and much, much better multitasking and better graphics”, Huang said in an interview with Cnet. ...

Mashable: If you live for data, slave over spreadsheets and constantly find yourself sifting through endless rows and columns of facts and figures, Google’s got a lovely new product just for you — and it’s free and open-source, too. Google Refine is a project born of Freebase Gridworks, a data-cleaning tool Google acquired when it bought Metaweb during the summer. Google has since renamed Gridworks and relaunched it as Refine. ...

Mashable: Months ago, Twitter released a clunky tool called Blackbird Pie for embedding tweets in blog posts. Today WordPress has radically simplified and improved tweet embedding with a new feature, also named Twitter Blackbird Pie. Beginning today, WordPress.com users simply need to copy a tweet’s URL and paste it on a line by itself to embed it in a blog post. Pasted URLs are converted into full tweets, which means these embedded tweets look as good as screenshots, but include the link back to the tweet, a link to the source and a retweet option. The new feature will also save users time — letting them avoid the much more manual process of snapping screenshots of tweets. ...

Jared Smith: It’s here! It’s here! It’s really here! Fedora 14 has been officially released! Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release approximately every six months. Fedora 14, codename Laughlin, is now available for download. Join us and share the joy of free software and the community with friends and family. We know you can’t wait to get started with Fedora 14, so simply follow this link to download it today: ...

Nepali mobile network operator Ncell has installed the first 3G base station at the summit of Mount Everest, giving visitors, climbers and people living in the Khumbu Valley the ability to make calls and wirelessly connect to the Internet. To test out the new facility, Ncell also made the world’s highest video call at 17,388 feet. So far, visitors of Mount Everest had to depend on satellite phones to make calls, but now they can do so through a standard GSM, 3G-enabled network. “The coverage of the network will reach up to the peak of the Everest,” Ncell Nepal chief Pasi Koistinen said to reporters in Kathmandu on Thursday. ...

VLC Media Player, an app that lets you watch videos in several formats that aren’t natively supported by the iPhone, has arrived in Apple’s iTunes store. The app originated on the iPad and is now compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and “recent” versions of the iPod touch. The features include quick decoding of “almost every” video format, playback in landscape and portrait mode, as well as deleting files directly from the application (bypassing iTunes). Check out an early video review of the application over at 9to5Mac. ...