In today’s competitive browsers’ world, many updates and upgrades are made only in the range of months. Just like the Opera that released its 10.5 alpha version on January 2010, and this summer will be the release of Opera 10.6 Beta.

Opera 10.6 Beta claims to be the fastest browser among its rivals, and offers many new features and better improvements with 75% faster than its former versions and 50% better than its former performances. Of course some of the old useful features are still available, such as Opera Unite, Opera Turbo and Opera Link.

Opera 10.6 Beta offers many new features, such as :

1. Geolocation, allows you to mark certain location to your web applications.
2. Appcache or the HTML5 offline application, allows you to work without internet connection.
3. WebM, lets you watch your favorite videos in high quality and free of charge (‘open source’ format).

Some improvements in Opera 10.6 Beta are :

1. Faster browsing – 75% faster than its former versions and believed to be the fastest browser available.
2. Improved tab previews – give you visual effect of the content of a page when you put your mouse on the Tab.
3. Smarter searching – make it easier for you to find more results of your searching.
4. A more visible Menu Button – significant menu buttons for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD users.
5. Wide-screen speed dial – the speed dial that fits the wide-screen monitor for your better preview.
6. Attractive icons – Opera’s features, such as bookmarks, download manager and history have their own unique icons.
7. Windows, Mac and Linux in Sync – the same opera version that is applicable for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Bundle up the two for just under $150.00 or purchase them separately for around $100.00 each. If you’re a gigabyte junky, naturally, you can “up” the software for an additional $40.00 and get another 2GB, providing you with free membership to the “hub” website Photoshop.com. This additional $40.00 also gives you access to the usual templates and tutorials. And while we’re talking money, annual renewal fees will set you back another $50.00. While it is never a forced issue, purchasing a membership here for this wizardry of synchronization, would be worthwhile as you may find your 2GB of memory gone in a blink of an eye!

Both Mac and Windows users will enjoy many applications including face recognition, geotagging and maping. However, the Mac version of Photoshop Elements might leave you wanting for more. Seems Mac loses out on direct upload to Facebook. Both products provide an “organizer” feature, a “smarts” feature, “motion tracking” and many other features.

As with any new product on the market, there will surely be some adjustment and tweaking of interfacing bumps along the way which will be necessary on both the software creator’s and the end user’s part.

In a purported effort to extract the truth of the “he said/she said”, the FCC sent a letter to Apple questioning this ostensible rejection wherein Apple flatly denied any such elimination of the Google Voice app, with a “we’re still looking into it” reply.  Now the FCC has to play principal and decide who to believe.  Not to be made a fool by anyone, Google posed a “bet me/call our bluff” invitation to Apple stating that it has hard core never before published evidence of the Apple dissing and was contemplating sending it to the FCC.

Knowing that the truth will soon be known, Apple will probably concede it loss, raise the proverbial white flag in surrender, albeit all but admitting it lied to a government entity and allow the app to be used on the iPhone — with small changes.  Should this fail to come to fruition, Google apparently has another ace up its sleeve – it says it has a screen shot picture of authenticity proving as concrete evidence of Apple’s refusal of the Google Voice app.   How this will or will not affect Google’s or Apple’s reputation is yet to be seen.  If two lesser known giants in the world of search engines and computer technologies when mano a mano, it probably wouldn’t even may the evening news.  Bottom line, however, greedy a company may be to monopolize technology, lying to the government has never been a good thing, so kudos to Apple for playing nice, at least in theory.

Google’s statement reads in respect of the tie up between Microsoft and Yahoo that they are for healthy competition, which brings more benefits for users and would like to learn more about the deal.

Same views were expressed by Marissa Mayer of Google, saying the deal would likely to pose a negative impact for online competition and her company is studying the pact deeply.

It is noteworthy that during last year Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo as a whole – not the search engine part alone – when Google vehemently attacked the bid and made a contract with Yahoo regarding search engine operations.

But what happened was Google backed out of the deal, as US Department of Justice threatened to file a law suit, questioning the antitrust implications.

If their earlier deal with Yahoo had materialized, Google would have got a lion’s share of 90 percent in the Internet search market. Now Google questions about Bing’s competition, which commands barely 30 per cent of the market share.
However some people have expressed opinion that the Bing deal would only bolster competition to Google. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says in a blog post that competition equals innovation. In a field where one player is dominating the majority 70 percent share of search market, it is completely lopsided and Bing’s deal would mean a healthy competitor emerging on the scene, to keep everyone on their toes – Carol added.

Onlookers are of the view that Google still maintains its 65 to 73 percent share in the search market, although Microsoft Bing is increasing its search reach and advertisers may shift their loyalty from Google to Bing, if at all Bing shows a progress of 30 percent share, instead of 10 or 20 percent. But there is no alternative to Google for those who want maximum volume.

The new tools including search by image type and color are so simple, to save valuable searching time and get the search results most accurately.

Images in color or only black and white can be searched by the new search option, as also images of specific colors – red, pink or green.

Type search option will enable trimming down the results, if you are searching a specific kind of image like – a clip art; photo; face; or line drawing. Further users can get the specific size, irrespective of the usual size of images, by the Size option.

According to Google’s official blog, they have completely revamped their size search, whereby users can search, in addition to commonly searched-for sizes, exact image size or larger images than a specific size. Practically any image size including 70 megapixeles or more can be found.

Combined search options have been made possible now and Google will introduce more on this in future. These are not new, but were available already as “Advanced’ search. But they have been moved to the left-hand column and by clicking “Show options” in the blue bar on the search result page, one can get all these new tools – more than one option to trim down the search.

With the Creative Common License one more option of sorting by images is also available. Although Yahoo and Bing boast of similar options for filtering, Google has advanced tools to sort upto 12 different colors, whereas the other two can only allow sort by color or black and white.

The Direct Message Spam – getting messages from people that they are following is troubling John Reese and Mike Filasmi and they have unfollowed recently nearly 80,000 people on their Twitter accounts because of this. The way Twitter is heading they are not the only ones.

The biggest problem with Twitter is their “Trends “which is continuously spammed by different applications and stupid quizzes.  In my opinion, that is not what Trends portion of Twitter is meant for. In all honesty this facility is meant for sharing important information about offline and online happenings. Personally this is not a problem for me as I am following a different stance for Twitter use with other people to deal with direct message “spam”.

The strategy of “follow me, follow you” used by many Twits is gaining far more followers, which in my opinion is satisfying their “ego” as to show they have X numbers of followers. Although there is nothing wrong in that, I consider Twitter is not the place.

Just like John and Mike there are other two Twits  – @ChrisBrogan and @Pro Blogger. These two are also getting a lot of Direct Message “spam”. Darren at Pro Blogger is following everyone back and so he opens up Direct Message communications. But this only allows his account to be hit with number of Direct Messages from numerous third party applications including http://www.fun140.com to advertise their products.

So it is time for Twitter to think seriously about what they are doing, as otherwise they will be losing a lot of users very quickly. Already Twitter is losing respect among their influential and most loyal users.

What you think Twitter is doing and what is your Twitter Strategy? Pour your comments in the comments section if you really feel Twitter Is Losing Respect.

Here is a chance to skip a website design that is costly, by selecting a ready-made template. This is most advantageous for small businesses, because they are most likely to lack the facility of larger companies to get a crafty website infrastructure. Even those big companies may require these off-the-shelf templates for their HR official for running a website and shoot out internal newsletters or other uses.

One of the many sites selling theme templates is ThemeForest. More than 1000 theme templates are available here. Different situations warrant themes to work in Flash-based or plain HTML or WordPress sites and you get them all here.

All you have to do is download the required theme, make alterations like adding a particular company logo and install the same on a server.  Many of these themes work with others inclusive of Drupal, Blogger and Joomla, although most of the themes are for WorldPress CMS. It is likely to get even great-looking HTML and Photoshop.

With just about $10-50 price these themes are cheap. Unlike some sites, which require subscriptions to be paid regularly, you can download these ready-made theme templates individually.

Though a custom job could never be replaced by a site theme of dedicated design and coding team, many situations can fit into the themes templates. Examples are a brick and mortar store wishes to lure local customers, or may be a company employee wants to run a company bulletin for soccer league. These themes can be got readily online as a perfect match for these kinds of sites.

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While writing on a company blog, Sean Suchter, general manager of Silicon Valley Search Technology Center of Microsoft quipped that for the time being Microsoft is indexing “few thousand people, primarily based on follower count they have and their volume of tweets”.

It appears that the company is not working directly with Twitter, towards delivering this capability. Suchter wrote that this is their first step in using Twitter’s public API, to bring up Tweets for the people while searching.

As it reflects popular public sentiment, there has been an increased interest in the content value of Twitter, from the search community worldwide. Wednesday’s launch of this new capability in Bing seems to be a coup, albeit limited, because the other major search engines are not indexing recent Twitter messages anyway.

The practice is most of the existing search engines, at best, turn up old Twitter messages and a link to a Twitter page of the concerned person is displayed. This has been changed by Bing of Microsoft, by listing recent individual messages along with other search results. However Suchter cautioned some users may not see the messages in Twitter now, as the new future is scheduled to roll out gradually.

Incidentally, the arrival of this new capability of Bing falls on the same day, when a new study showed Bing’s growth chart is steady upwards, at the expense of most popular Google search engine. According to Researchers at StateCounter, Bing has definitely increased the share of Microsoft in the search market, by 1 percent in June in the United States. This shows Bing is still behind Yahoo search engine and way back in the lead by Google though. StateCounter found Google still has a market share of 78.48 percent, although shedding some market share to Bing during the month.

Microsoft has recently unfurled a new and attractive alternative to Google search engine. And people want the two compared for performance appraisal.

Almost the usual thing happening is your web browser may contain Google’s Search box prominently on top. And yes of course Google is thorough in tendering search results in micro seconds with such a great speed.

To compare Bing, Microsoft’s new prop up just a month ago, although it is very impressive, with a Live Search Engine like Google would be – comparing two champions in two different leagues, unfairly.

On aesthetics, Bing seems best than Google. The Google Search button is prominent in otherwise clean and sparse Google Home page and links for videos, images, news, shopping, maps, Gmail and a lot more.

In contrast, the Homepage of Bing attracts with breathtaking travel related photographs being pasted daily. One day on this week, an amazing image of Mexico’s manta rays appeared at Bing homepage, with a beautiful description when your mouse crawled over the image “These curious creatures are gentle, sociable and playful”. And what fun these brief digressions make! Actually Bing offers facility to click on images to take you to shopping, videos, news, travel and maps.

Thinking of searches made in search engines like Google, there is more to it rather than a wild manta chase and you want comprehensive, relevant and also fast results. On this aspect, Microsoft holds its grounds more, particularly in the fields Bing is concentrating initially – health; travel; shopping and finding local businesses. What is more, you get on certain items a cash-back program when you buy through Bing.com.

For example if you type “New York Mets” on Bing, it shows on top of its results – most recent scores of the team and upcoming schedules – whereas Google will only display the score of their last game and when the next game will be played.

Similarly if you type a company name in Bing, what you get is the telephone number of the company’s customer service, which you can hardly get through Google.

Another charm of Bing search engine experience is, when you make a search you get the right snippets of only the information you want and not more leads. On moving the cursor to the right of the search result tendered by Bing, there appears a window containing excerpts derived from the site underlying it. This will enable you decide instantly whether or not to go into the full site.

Videos like YouTube, Hulu etc. start playing at once, when you crawl over a video thumb nail with your cursor and there is no need to click “play”. And you will watch the video in a larger window, when you click the thumbnail, not necessarily leaving Bing.com. Also hovering on an image will show the same to you in a larger window.

There is one more plus – on the down left side “the quick tabs” appear on the results pane and assist you in refining a search. Simply when you enter “Charleston, South Carolina”, category-wise results are shown – restaurants; hotels; real estate; local weather and so on. For the same thing on Google, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and see “related searches”, although you have the choice to a side panel “show options”.
In real-time searches also Bing excels. For instance, when you make a search for a celebrity such as “Al Gore Twitter” adding Twitter to your search – you are able to get a full list of their recent tweets.

Following is the illustration as how Google and Bing fared on some sample searches:

Cataracts: Bing search engine showed at the top of the search results, a full description of this eye condition, taken out of a Mayo Clinic article. It was an advertisement sponsored by a lens manufacturer Transition, showed at Google at its top result.  But both Bing and Google showed many relevant listings from same sources though. Google showed 3.3 million search results, whereas it was nearly 2.3 million in Bing.

Hilton, Paris: When searched with an intentionally vague query, Google results had a sponsored listing for Hilton.com as the starter and followed it with a news result for the socialite. For Bing it was hotelreservations.com at the top, followed by the site of The Hotels by Hilton and the “official” website of Paris Hilton.

Travel is Bing’s forte and if you click “Travel” you get a site resembling Expedia, where you can further search for hotels, flights, cars etc. Another help from Bing is its prediction about airfares and their fall or rise for certain cities, whereby you can decide whether to buy the ticket now or later.

Michael Jackson: For this search of the legendry Pop King, both Google and Bing tendered news stories about him first. Google linked first to Wikipedia entry for Michael Jackson and led to his official site – michaelackson.com over images and videos about him. All other related searches of jokes, songs, kids not his, came at the bottom.  On Bing search, similar sites were listed but putting images and videos higher up. The pane on the left of this Michael Jackson search enable me to narrow my search by songs, news, downloads, biography, merchandise and so on. It was only 85 million search results at Google, whereas it was 101 million at Bing.

Ford Fusion: When searched for this automobile, it was Bing that got relevant statistics at the top – user ratings, fuel economy, and price range. More help was available in the side panel for categories of reviews, dealers, manual, forum, recalls as also images. Google needs poking around a bit to get these details.

Accurate searches can be Google’s strength but Bing is for more elaborate and relevant searches readily.

Summing Up the Comparison:

Google = www.google.com – Gets two stars out of four.

Pros: Comprehensive and fast in searches that seldom go wrong.

Cons: Some search tools which are powerful are shadowed.

Microsoft Bing = www.bing.com – Gets two stars out of four.

Pros: Functioning is attractive to give voluminous information instantly, with no need to look elsewhere. Excels on resources of travels and plays videos within Bing.com site. Presentation of related searches is good and additional attraction is cash-back discount program for shopping through its links.

Cons: On some particular searches, not as exhaustive as Google and not strong on news items. Video glitches are experienced occasionally.

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Talking of hotspots – please understand they are the little squares you notice, when your mouse scrawls over the photographic image of the Homepage. They are there to tell you more particulars about the photographs you are watching.

And when you crawl over the photo in the bottom right corner, a quick caption appears to show these particulars, including the name and agency of the photographer. This does not end there – if you click the arrows – you can find the home page images for the last 7 days. For this all you need is to install Microsoft’s “Silverlight Version 2” open source facility.

If you see a nice photograph and want to share it with your friends? No problem – just go to Bing Photo sharing application on Facebook – and you are done. Want to see previous Bing Homepage images? – here is Long Zheng – a private site, which brings the Bing Image Archive. This site enables you to see all background images presented at Bing, on a calendar format of the day, when that image was displayed originally.

About the Photo Contest announced by Bing.com

While you indulge about images, please note that Bing.com team has announced their first ever photo submission Contest on Facebook. They have chosen the theme “Summer Travel” for this Contest and the winner selected out of this Contest will have his or her photo get displayed on Bing Homepage, on August 3rd, Monday.

For obtaining more details about the Contest and participation terms and conditions, you can go to Bingo photo contest on Facebook. Accordingly you can upload your photos and plunge head on in the contest….. who knows?

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