If you’re one of those who’ve dumped your old browser for Chrome and you’re also a member of Orkut,a social networking service by Google, then you can notice an alert on your profile page saying…

“Awesome, you’re using Google Chrome! Don’t forget to feed it donuts!”

Quote such as “Feeding donuts to Chrome” should have been properly elaborated for the sake of disambiguation but there is no link associated with this message to elaborate the statement..

According to us, this is an indirect way of convincing a Chrome user to enable an option of sending user’s usage statistics to Google for their analysis.

However, Google is projecting this “Stats feedback” as a method of improving Chrome but the story does not end here.

One of the main purposes of Google behind this is to analyse a user’s web surfing trends which has always received a ‘blurred estimation’ by various web analytics and internet companies.

We have earlier reviewed Chrome (by comparing with IE8) & wrote a lot of good things about this Google’s product. But one area, where IE8 scores more than Chrome is definitely Safer browsing.

This is a reminder, just in case you forgot to Subscribe to TechPluto for latest tech news,updates and web services

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Relevant updates on TechPluto

Update: Orkut has recently reverted back one of its actions that was bugging orkut users since its implementation : ‘Link suppression’. Here’s the full post.

Update 2: If you want to know what’s latest with Facebook, the biggest social network on web today, check it out here. Also check out the best of Twitter apps.

Recommended: Download Full version of Microsoft Office 2010 a.k.a.  Office 2010

And the features of Mac outshine Windows in majority of the areas(specially in user experience).But Microsoft is still the OS Monopolist due to its deep roots and hardware independency.

The so-called Mac vs PC war started from day one of Mac’s launch and this always pushed Microsoft to produce better successor of Windows year after year.

The war is still on but…it’s less about better features,more usability,cheaper cost etc now but more about killer branding,viral marketing and a lot of Advertising.

Microsoft has went on to spend(rather burn) $300 Mn on an aggressive marketing campaign for Windows Vista.And most of you must have seen(if not,then see the first,second and third ad here) all the three Microsoft ads(all the three featuring Bill Gates himself) and the latest Mac commercial(targeting Microsoft).

One thing is crystal clear……The fight has certainly changed

For MS & Apple,it’s more about outshining  with ‘branding’ and ‘marketing’ rather than ‘technology’ now.

And in this regard,Microsoft is a looser but still a Winner

Why looser ?

Microsoft ads(the first two) were more of a puzzle than a convincing commercial.Although,the third one was much better than the earlier two but it couldn’t prove convincing enough for non-windows guys to think again.

Why Winner ?   

One could easily observe that any of Microsoft ad(till now) hasn’t pointed fingers against Mac.They have spoken about MS,in a way praised about themselves but didn’t say anything wrong about Mac.

But when you watch the latest Mac commercial,whether you laugh or not but you will certainly realise that they are bitching more about Vista than talking good about their own product.This is ceratinly not expected from a respectable company like Apple(however they’ve been doing it earlier as well).

Here,Microsoft wins just because they have kept their ethics alive…

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Conclusion : Being ethically correct isn’t enough for MS.And the ads(and probably the entire marketing campaign) won’t do wonders for MS at all.Microsoft desperately needs a killer Windows version now to continue being the monopolist in OS industry.

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Hi there,

We are excited to announce the launch of our own Widget Lab(fourth link in upper tab).

And the reason is simple…

The widgets are countless in number today,many are good,millions are crap & hardly of any use…

So,at Widget Lab,our aim will be to experiment a widget for 24 hrs in our lab(Don’t worry,we will experiment on good ones only) and replace it with the next Good widget for another 24 hrs and so on…

Giving only 24 hrs of attention to any widget is just to keep TechPluto even more dynamic and to create and maintain a level of curiosity and unpredictability within our readership.

In Widget Lab,we will be experimenting on widgets belonging to various species such as : cool,funny,technical,sporty,humorous,financial,educational,bloggy,friendly and many others…

We will also rate the ‘featured widget’ taking its utility into consideration(if it’s in “Cool” category,then how cool it actually is…)

Your suggestions for any deserving widget is always welcome…(techpluto@gmail.com)

And the inaugural widget under experimentation in our lab(flagship widget of Widget Lab) is Cyber pet.

Take a look !

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See ya,

Prashant Sharma

Editor-in-Chief,TechPluto

So,what’s that one product/service that made Google where it actually is right now ?

Is it ‘Google Images’,'Google News’,'Orkut’,'Youtube’,'Blogger’,'Gmail’,'Google Books’,'Picasa’,'Google Docs’,'GTalk’ or ‘Chrome’ ?

Or is it the “Google Search” that made Google rock its unconventional IPO and create an unprecedented worth(both money and assets) ?

No,it’s not even Google Search….

First of all,search was already brought in the market by Yahoo! and Excite,much before Google.Google actually wanted to make searching better and relevant but ‘Search’ wasn’t an innovation of Google at all…

And also,becoming a popular search engine from early 2000,beating Yahoo! and dumping Excite was fetching Google nothing but half a million dollars of expense every month with no cashflow into the company.It was a fight of survival for Google at that time.

So what made Google monetize its search engine and the huge traffic coming their way ?

It’s AdWords…an innovation that made Google a multi-billion dollar company.

A solution that redefined ‘Online advertising’ completely.It proposed a competitive bidding system for advertisers to buy out relevant real estate on Google for certain keywords.

This worked ! Really worked for Google…This basically turned this loss making company into a profit-making empire.

BUT here is a shock statement…

“AdWords wasn’t an innovation of Google.It was Overture’s(later acquired by Yahoo! for $1.63 Bn)”

Overture,then known as GoTo.com,filed a patent in May 1999 for a ‘system and method’ for influencing a position on a search result list.The 43-page patent application details a system in which the advertisers would be able to bid for better placement for ads in search engine results and manage their accounts through a web browser.

Google basically replicated Overture’s concept for online advertising and presented it with a cluster of improvements in the name of AdWords.

In reply,Overture filed a lawsuit against Google for patent infringement.Later on,the matter was resolved outside the court(probably with a relevant share given to Overture in Google’s profits).

The ultimate fact is that Google made AdWords a commercial success but the ‘Idea’ came from Overture(or rather Idealab,which gave birth to Overture services in 1998)

However Flash is ubiquitous but Silverlight is making up the gap quite faster.There is a strong possibility that Windows 7 (the successor of Vista) may come with Silverlight pre-installed.

Both the competitors best the other one in some areas or the other.Let’s have a look….

Flex over Silverlight

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Mature

Flex has a mature and growing component set.With third version of flex in the market already,they have worked over their limitations quite well. There are lots of developers creating open source components for Flex and the source code for all the components is available in the Flex SDK

Market acceptance

There are countless small to large companies actively developing RIA’s with Flex, from Yahoo to Google to many Web 2.0 start-ups.And it’s a safe bet for them as well because mostly all browsers have flash player installed with them.Also,

Flash Player is installed on 98% of machines today.75% of advertising online & 70% of online videos are flash supported.

Open source

Flex has gone fully open source under the Mozilla Public License(MPL) .The compilers and framework are available for extension and embedding within the Flex 3 SDK.

Strong media engine

Flex has a stronger graphics and media engine.Adobe has got a higher hand in Imaging and graphics,majorly because of its strong foundation in this field

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Silverlight over Flex

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.NET homeground

Silverlight ties and intregrates into the .NET architecture quite seamlessly.Also,if a programmer is already into .NET, then learning curve will be much lower for silverlight.The concepts are quite familiar to .NET,unlike flex where AS(Actionscript) is far different from Flash and also tough to master

Light and Fast

Silverlight is relatively light and faster. The 1.1 alpha was about 5 times faster than flex using bubblemark (standard benchmark for RIAs)

Deep zoom

When it comes to user experience,deep zooming (like zooming into an area in Google maps) has never been there in flash/flex but silverlight allows you to smoothly zoom from a wide angle display to an extreme closeup on any object

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Although flex is the frontrunner at the moment,the buzz(Google trends comparison below) is more about Silverlight(may be driven) and more developers are shifting themselves from flex to silverlight nowadays.

The weaker competitor(current) has a lot to come up with in recent future…

Not to forget our re-ideation,just before the start of this month…

So,here we are listing the write-ups that our readers liked the most…(It will be good specially for those who just in case missed out any of them)

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Date : Sept 1,2008

Title : ‘cuil’ might be the next Microsoft acquisition !

“There has already been a lot of talks of cuil’s claims and then it’s performance from Day 1 of their launch but one thing is crystal clear…it certainly takes a lot of guts…more

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Date : Sept 1,2008

Title : What is Web 3.0 Anyway ?

“There has already been a lot of buzz in the blogosphereregarding ‘Knol’,coz it’s none other than “Google’s baby” and expectations are really high from it.Things like ‘Google may bless it’s newborn child‘ more

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Date : Sept 3,2008

Title : Chrome vs. IE8 : And the winner among the latest two is…

“IE8,despite being much improved and evolved than its previous version has been completely overshadowed by the recent launch of Chrome .After having our first hand-on experience with Chrome,the reaction was… more

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Date : Sept 3,2008

Title : Mozilla kicks Chrome’s ass.Gets TraceMonkey to the front

“They are back !…But not with an upgraded Mozilla but with a sneak peak at the Mozilla’s next delivery Mozilla 3.1.According to one if their coders Brendan Eich,they have tested their browser with a new engine in place called Tracemonkey,which they believe will make Mozilla,even faster than Chrome…more

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Date : Sept 4,2008

Title : 5 “Unconventional” yet “Highly influential” professions on the Web !

“Nowadays,you will find a huge number of people(kids included) striving to become a “Famed Blogger”,a “Professional Digger”, a “Social media expert” or a “ Clueless hacker” and they have reasons for it…more

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Date : Sept 5,2008

Title : Teacher’s Day Special : Five frontrunners of “e-learning 2.0″

“They are open(unlike closed,transaction based systems),community fueled(unlike tutor sourced) and employ Web 2.0 technologies to execute their mission(and that’s actually a special and unique thing about this list).They defy the old methods of learning on the web and…more

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Date : Sept 7,2008

Title : Why developers are dumping PHP for ColdFusion

“It’s costly,it isn’t ‘open source’ but still it’s becoming a handy replacement of PHP(and .NET) for plenty of developers worldwide.And there are a number of reasons why PHP guys are preferring ColdFusion nowadays.…more

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Date : Sept 8,2008

Title : Five reasons why ‘NOT’ to buy an iPhone3G

“They launched iPhone3G in India on Aug 22,2008.Since that day, all the iPhone3G hype that was created has been literally busted and the indian masses(we mean,the iPhone crazy guys) are looking to drop their plans to buy an iPhone3G…more

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Date : Sept 9,2008

Title : Experience seamless ‘Foreign language learning’ with “Myngle”

“With an angel funding of $1.1 Mn,it appears that Myngle has made a smart utilization of the money it fed into the system.The website is easy to use and the tools provided for language learning look intelligent enough…more

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Date : Sept 10,2008

Title : Five popular websites which ‘desperately’ need a re-design

“Craigslist attracts hundreds of millions of visitors every month as it serves as a local classified for more than 500 cities in 50 countries.It was founded in the early days of web and survived the dot-com bubble stage as well.Today,when Web 3.0 is on its way,this website still appears like the same old 1995 web service…more

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Date : Sept 11,2008

Title : Why TechCrunch50 has been a BIG disappointment !

“TC50 had a neck-to-neck competition with DEMO and they were scoring pointing over DEMO in many ways,but the results have really disappointed not just us but a lot of guys keeping an eagle eye over this event..

We aren’t aware of the parameters that were counted in this decision but the decision could be a lot better than what it is now…more

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Thanks to all our readers…

Keep your eye over this Technology Planet…Coz “This is just the beginning !”

See ya,

Prashant Sharma

Editor-in-Chief,TechPluto

They are STUPID….completely stupid deals in the history of domain resale industry…

Have a look at them…

—1—

Sex.com

Resale price : $14 Mn

Year of resale : 2005

When “Sex” is searched on Google : Sex.com isn’t listed in Top 10 results

—2—

Fund.com

Resale price : $10 Mn

Year of resale : 2008

When “Fund” is searched on Google : Fund.com isn’t listed in Top 10 results

—3—

Business.com

Resale price : $7.5 Mn

Year of resale : 1999

When “Business” is searched on Google : 3rd position of Business.com

—4—

Casino.com

Resale price : $5.5 Mn

Year of resale : 2003

When “Casino” is searched on Google : Casino.com isn’t listed in Top 10 results

—5—

Vodka.com

Resale price : $3 Mn

Year of resale : 2006

When “Vodka” is searched on Google : Vodka.com isn’t listed in Top 10 results

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These five most expensive domain resale deals sum up to a whopping $40 Mn

Atleast 40 startups(if not more than that) could be seed-funded with this much amount.

If domain names would have mattered so much then

Google.com would have been Search.com

Wikipedia.org would have been Resource.com

Paypal.com would have been transaction.com

but they’re not and they don’t need to…because what matters is ‘services’,not the ‘name’

Actually a brilliant ‘service’ transforms a name into a ‘Brand’

If the current owners of these domain names would be asked about the ROI of their investment on these domain names then the answer wouldn’t be encouraging for any future tycoon planning to go for a such a deal in the future.

According to us,what these domains and their high priced resale values fetch is just a short term “Media publicity” which vanishes after a day or two.

One such social network which has been recently launched(September 9th ) is Sunoh.fm(‘Sunoh’ means ‘listen’).

It’s an indian music oriented social network which lets one share his music preferences with his friends and find out what his friend circle likes to hear. A user can browse his friend’s music library and discover new stuff out there.

Sunoh’s users can also join communities of popular indian artists and get their voices reach out directly to those artists.

It’s also a good platform for indian artists to let their music reach out to the masses and have a connection with their audiences as well.

In their own words…

“Sunoh.fm is an Indian company in online space to provide a digital distribution platform for artists in India. Artists can signup, claim, and customize their profile at Sunoh.fm, enabling them to reach out to their fans in a very interactive manner. Sunoh.fm provides comprehensive set of free digital tools to artists including photo, video, and music uploads, using which they can instantly make their content available to their fans at Sunoh.fm“

It seems that Vivek Puri,founder of this New Jersey based music oriented startup has given ‘security’ and ‘privacy’, a special attention while developing this social platform.(at the moment,it can only be accessed by people from certain listed colleges and companies).People from India and those who are outside the country but are of indian origin will find this social network,a hotspot for online music discovery.

Now comes the tough part….

There are websites like Muziboo(we covered it here) and Shtyle.fm which have been there in the indian market for quite a while now(both of them are music oriented networking platforms).Muziboo,in particular has come up with a cluster of features for music lovers and the music passionates are populating well on Muziboo.

But Sunoh.fm seems to have a novelty because it focusses on building a social network for fresh music discovery and connecting with popular artists rather than Muziboo and Shtyle.fm,where concept of “music crowdsourcing” has been implemented.

However,if they continue to keep the system so closed(for an increasing but defined list of colleges and companies),they may loose out of a critical mass in longer run.If some heavy-weight marketing of this website is done in India,then only,they can secure their space in online indian market with such a closed system.