The two new features are Automatic-Captions and Automatic-Timings. These features let the video uploaders add captions automatically or simply upload the transcript of the video and let Youtube figure which text goes were in the video.

Automatic-Captions: Once the video is uploaded choose “Transcribe Audio” from the captions menu, that’s it! This will add captions to your video automatically. Not just that but once the automatic-captions are created for the video, these captions can later be translated to other languages.

Imagine how great it would be if the browser detects the default language and delivers captions on the video in the same language as default. I am quite certain we will see that feature on Youtube soon.

Automatic-Timing: If you don’t want to go with the Automatic-Captions feature because you are not getting the best results, you can also upload a transcript file to make sure the subtitles on the video are perfect.

With the Automatic-Timing feature in action the users just have to upload the transcript file with the text in it and Youtube will automatically figure out which word was said when in the video and add the appropriate subtitle at the appropriate time unlike earlier where users had to time their transcript manually.

The features are currently being rolled out so if you don’t see them yet, don’t worry, you should see it by the end of the week.

Both the features are great for uploaders and viewers; however, they might not get you the best of results every time you use them. Google always relies on machine learning techniques to improve its language based services and features. So, if not now, these features will work great in the time to come.

If you are looking to achieve great results using softwares, here are two free ones that can help you get the results you are looking for.

• http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?cat=sw
• http://www.synchrimedia.com/ (Mac Only)

Also, watch the following video to see these features in action.

Internet is an amazing place. Here you meet people with the brightest of minds that come up with the most creative concepts. While quite a few of these concepts have a mass appeal only few manage to show impressive numbers on the balance sheet at the end of the year.

The concept we are going to discuss today falls into the category where only few manage to get you excited about the concept and keep the excitement alive when it comes to seeing the records at the end of the year.

iPodMeister operates on a very interesting business model of exchanging used CD’s and DVD’s for iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPhone 3G/3G S and HDD’s.

Users interested in exchange are supposed to send an e-mail to promo@ipodmeister.com with the following information to receive free Fedex shipping labels. (Don’t even spend on shipping)

• First + last name
• Complete address
• Phone number (required)
• Number of CDs and DVDs in each box
• Number of boxes

Once the boxes and labels arrive, just put the CD’s or DVD’s and ship it back. Users will receive the exchange item as per their request or based on the exchange chart.

Senders should also be careful with the quality of the stuff they are sending in. Company requires the senders to make sure they qualify before they send their material in.

Here are few of the things that will get your stuff disqualified

• We do NOT accept CD singles or radio edits.
• We do NOT accept CDs that have been put in albums or case logic binders.
• We do NOT accept compilations, from stores such as Virgin Records, GAP, Victoria’s Secret, etc.  We do accept CDs issued by Time Warner or Starbucks.
• We don’t take CDs which have your initials written on the CD/Cover Art or bear labels or stickers.

Click here to read more about eligible CD’s

Users who send music to iPodMeister can also request a digitized version of their music. In this case senders will receive a set of back-up DVD’s of original sound tracks they sent in. But you will have to shell out more CD’s or DVD’s than you otherwise will.

See the following chart to see how many CDs or DVDs will get you an iPhone, iPod, Touch, etc..

Click to enlarge

You can even make up by paying if you are falling short of DVD’s or CD’s. For example if you want an iPhone 3G S 32GB and only have 300 CD’s you can make up by paying $1 per CD, in this case you would end up paying $50 with 300 CD’s to get an iPhone.

You can pay for up to 50 CD’s or DVD’s only, not more than that.

I don’t know how legit the service is but I haven’t seen anyone complaining or alerting about the service on any online forums or blogs.

I decided to call on the number mentioned on the site to know more about it and if you thought just the concept was interesting, read further to know about the interesting stuff that goes on in the background.

I talk to Kris, founder of iPodMeister. Kris was kind enough to share some background information about iPodMeister.

iPodMeister is a student effort and it was formed to help the involved students pay off their educational expenses without taking a loan. There are about 6 students involved (core-team) from institutions like Queens College, LaGuardia, NYU, Colombia, etc..

That’s the core team – 6th member is behind the camera I guess! (click to enlarge)

Once the CD’s/DVD’s are acquired from the senders they are packed in the containers of at least 20,000 CD’s or DVD’s each and shipped to countries like Jamaica, Ecuador, Colombia, Italy, Switzerland, Europe, Tiwan, Korea, etc.. where these CD’s and DVD’s are sold for a cheaper price and still manage to make enough profits to keep the cycle running.

iPodMeister has strong ties with the buyers in several countries which keep the business going. According to Kris, iPodMiester has shipped thousands of containers to the countries listed above and they are still going strong.

Overall its an interesting concept that appeals to the masses. I will give it a try soon, click here If you are interested too.

WolframAlpha and Bing come together to bring some interesting search experience for Bing users. WolframAlpha is one of the most advanced computational engine on the web which converts queries to graphs and numbers.

For example one could simply compare a number of US states to see crime rate in each state.

I ran a query (crime chicago / new york /detroit ) to see the crime rate in 3 US states and I got the following results.

Click to enlarge

Though the results shown on the site are not the latest it does give you a good idea of the criminal activities going on in each of these states.

This is the kind of experience Bing is trying to offer to its users as a decision engine.

To start with, Bing is targeting its services at the health conscious and students. Soon you will be able to nutrition related and math related queries and get processed results from Bing.

For example if you want to see how many calories does each serving of cheese fries has just type in 200 g Cheese Fries or Cheese Fries to see the results.

Click here to read the announcement and see more examples of the kind of results you can see on Bing in the coming days. Also visit this link to know how WolframAlpha works!

For readers who don’t know what WolframAlpha is or haven’t used it yet, this is a good time to learn more about what it does and how to use it.

Following is 1st of 2 videos introductory videos of WolframAlpha

If you don’t see the colored balls on the search page, go back to the settings page and verify the lock. Enabling this feature not only filters Google search and Image results but it also applies the filter across all Google properties.

Watch the following video to see how it really works.

This feature comes in really handy; however, it won’t stop the tech savvy kids from seeing the unfiltered results.

This safe search locking can be bypassed if not applied in all user profiles and on all browsers. It can also be bypassed by simply deleting cookies stored on the profile.

Nonetheless it’s a good feature to have as the video states, Technology cannot replace parents supervision.

One of the other less known philosophies is “Focus on the user and all else will follow”, while all the innovation gives Google the edge over its competitors this philosophy is what helps the company maintain that edge.

Reacting to users feedback not only keeps the existing users happy and brings more users to the product but these little tweaks add unprecedented value to the product over others.

Adsense recently announced the new and better version of the application that is just around the corner.  A limited number of publishers got access to the new dashboard at Content Revenue Strategies conference in New York, yesterday.

The new Adsense interface has more Analytics look to it. The new interface is designed to offer more insights into the trends and let the webmasters know what’s working and what isn’t. The enhanced version lets publishers manage and modify several ad units simultaneously.

Following image from the Adsense blog gives you a good sense of how Adsense is about to change.

This interface is available to limited publishers and will be open to all in the coming weeks. I am certainly looking forward to it.

Related links, the name is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a widget that shows all the related links/articles/content that’s published on a particular domain.

WordPress and other CMS package plugins have been offering this plugin since ages now. The only difference is that Googles gadget as expected queries Google search instead of quering the blogs database.

This tools is not available publically yet its only available for invited users. You can send an e-mail to relatedlinks@google.com with the following information to get an invite.

• Domain URL:
• Invite e-mail address:
• Page Views Per Day:

The management area of the tool lets you black list URLs, Filter prefixes and suffixes, etc. Following image shows what the widget looks like..

Notice the link “Document Search” which is a tag URL. One feature that’s missing is that it does not let you blacklist wildcards but it lets you filter a specific URL only. Blacklisting is not that helpful if you have about 2k tags.

Script Converter lets you convert the language script of any English site to one of the 9 Indian languages or the other way round.

9 Indian languages include Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali and Tamil.

The following image shows Tnerd converted to Tamil. For some reason all the ads on the site are converted to Chinese script.

Click here to try Related Links and here to Script Converter.

Recent stats from Alexa show Orkut is not doing as well as it used to do about 6 months ago. Traffic Rank, Reach, PageViews, Time on Site, etc.. has witnessed a steady fall. So what the next best thing to do? Overhaul the existing service and features!

Without taking much away from Orkut which is the most popular social networking site in India and few other parts of the world I think Orkut will find it tough to keep its momentum going with other services (Twitter, Facebook) which are aggressively moving towards global domination in the social space.

The new Orkut offers features like “Super-Fast” Photo upload, Video chat, One-Stop Notification, Custom Profiles, Dynamic Friends list,  and other tweaks to make it a better social experience.

Currently, these features are only accessible by a selected few. If you are one of the eager socialites on you network who wants to show off with the new features, click here to sign-up for an invite or here to visit the new Orkut community page.

Watch the following video to see what Shashi and Poppy are excited about!

Quite a few companies including Google, ebay and others have tried to shorten the steps involved in shopping/checking out as short and simple as possible.

Today Amazon launched a new service as part of Amazon Payments which makes checking out a little more easier and secure.

Amazon introduced something called Amazon Payphrase which lets you choose a phrase, e.g. “Crazy Geek”, assign a 4 digit security pin and attach a shipping address and a credit card number.

Once you setup a PayPhrase, it can be used on any site which uses Amazon Payment system. DKNY, Jockey, Buy and JR are few of the sites using Amazon payment system.

Following wizard will take you through the process of setting up your own PayPhrase and remember these PayPhrases are unique across the Amazon Payment system, meaning if I create a PayPhrase “Technology Nerd” no one on the network can create the same PayPhrase and each account can hold upto 20 PayPhrase only. Once created these PayPhrase’s can be edited/deleted from your Amazon Payments account.

Alright here goes..

Step 1: Choose a PayPhrase

Step 2: Assign spending limits and E-mail and SMS alerts

Step 3: Assign a Security Pin to the PayPhrase

Step 4: Assign Shipping and Credit Card information and you are all set to use your PayPhrase!

Once PayPhrase is setup the checkout process on the sites using Amazon Payments system involves only 3 steps..

1. Enter PayPhrase
2. Review and Confirm Order
3. Order Placed

That’s simple isnt it? Click here to visit Amazon Payments and setup your own PayPhrase!

Or if I managed to confuse you enough watch the video below to know what more about Amazon PayPhrase.

For this I have a dummy TNerd setup where I install the latest version and mirror TNerd on it to see if all the plugins work, if Yes, only then TNerd is updated.

It’s a lengthy process because of which I don’t upgrade very often, but that’s about to change.

Next time you visit the Plugins directory over at WordPress.org you’ll notice a “Compatibility Beta” on the right sidebar which lets you select the version of the Plugin and WordPress version and then vote if that version of plugin is compatible with the selected version of WordPress or not. Voting options are “Broken” if the plugin does not work or breaks the core functionality of WordPress and “Works” if the plugins works fine!

That’s for voters but if you are not a voter and just want to check if the plugin will work with the version of WordPress you are about to upgrade to, just select the version and the “Consensus” bar below will show you the percentage of success and faliures.

It a logical feature to have and is just the right thing to do. Folks at WordPress plan to add this functionality to WordPress admin area so that accessing this information becomes much more easier for webmasters.

So, all the webmasters using WordPress click here to visit WordPress Plugin Directory and start voting on the plugins.

I have been a Godaddy customer for a long long time, superbowl ads being one of the reasons

I am sure with the newly launched GeoDomainMap a lot of you are about to become Godaddy customers unless you check the availability on Godaddy and buy the domains with your existing domain registrar.

So what’s GeoDomainMap tool from Godaddy is all about?

GeoDomainMap is a map based approach to registering local domain names. All you got to do is either browse the map to dwell into the local area you are interested into or simply enter an area code. Also, it lets you add keywords as filters which help you find the domain you are looking for.

Click on the image below to see an enlarged version

As you can see above the orange-brown balloons carry the domain names which are available for registration and the green balloons with the domains names that are up for auction.

For example I clicked on one of the balloon to find out UnionCity.com is available for registration. This domain can be used to put up a local business directory for UnionCity.

Advance search option lets you search using the area code and keyword for more and refined results.

It also lets you select the domain extensions you want to see in the results.

This tool will certainly cut the frustration involved in registering a domain and help the local businesses find what they are looking for easily.

Click here to check it out.