Mozilla recently introduced concept series on Mozilla Labs and calls for participation. This initiative is aimed at knowing what a common man or a geek or anyone using Internet, would like to see in the coming years in terms of on-line technologies.

Its an interesting initiative, the series does not promise to collate ideas and launch a product the conclude the series but they are certainly banking on discussing, brainstorming and so on.. which will influence the upcoming versions of Firefox and Mozilla products.

No Idea is stupid or invalid, the crazier the better. Think out of the box and suggest whatever comes to your mind be futuristic, you are not expected to be logical but creative! This is an excellent way to peak ahead of times and see what future holds or at least what we think about the future of the technologies we interact with.

Following videos is posted as inaugural concepts on Mozilla labs, watch the video and you will get an Idea of what the whole concept series is all about.

1. Our offline lives will be much more transparent, visible, accessible and operable online. Gadgets and technologies that we use offline will be merged with the technologies online so that they can be accessed and operated from anywhere in the world. 

    

2. We see online services merging with each other. One application will let you read the news and also blog, call your blogger friends and talk to them and chat with others at the same time, maintain your calendar, upload your pictures or share your HD videos with family or watch videos together sitting in two different parts of the world. One application does it all.

This niffty service is called as sendible. I discovered it when I was stumbling using stumbleupon. Stumbleupon deserves another day for a great blog post and to the extent it is under rated as a service. Right now the service that I am going to try and enlighten you with is called as sendible. Still in beta this service has a great potential to become your one spot hub for all the scheduling and organizing related needs.

I always feel that any great service when blogged about deserves the description as it is from it’s home page/authors/webmasters. So although it might look that I am scraping; my intention is to emphasis about the site in a manner which is "right from the horse’s mouth". And hence following is what the site owners have to say about the site:

Sendible is a free tool you can use to…

• send messages to your friends, customers or colleagues in the future
• schedule reminders for things you might forget
• organise and manage your contacts
• jot down notes and have them sent at a time you choose
• schedule appointment reminders for your customers
• subscribe to content that interests you most and choose how to receive it

The above description I’d say would be the feature offered to a user of sendible. However, all good things in this world cannot be free and hence this service comes with some advertising. Following is what the service promises to offer to it’s advertisers:

Sendible allows you to create targeted ads that will appear in the messages that our users are sending. Your ads will appear in Email, SMS, Facebook and other social messages that people are sending to:

• Their friends
• Their colleagues
• Their customers
• Their loved ones

Before we get into the details I’d suggest that you sign-up with the service and check for yourself. Although  it’s in Beta stage, it’s still open for anyone to sign-up free of cost. No invite or waiting list is required.

Let’s now take a look at the interface and what features are available with this service to evaluate it and understand it’s potential. The following is a snapshot of it’s home page. I have marked important areas/sections with arrows and have put in my comments for User-Interface where ever required. I feel a picture can talk louder than 1000 words so I try to incorporate my comments in the picture.

I tested the service and it’s pretty accurate when it comes to sending sms/email and updating Twitter and facebook on a specified time. This means that I can schedule a twitter to be posted in the year 2009 at this very moment. I think it defeats the purpose of having a great service like twitter. However, you are the discretionary authority on this.

Following are the service which are supported right now for scheduling:

• Email
• SMS
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Friendster
• Hi5
• Orkut

You can also schedule yourself to receive sms for important Birthdays and dates. I am sure with right kind of business model (it looks formidable as it integrates users and advertisers) this service is here to stay for long. Does it alos makes a good case for Google to acquire it and use it’s creepy datamining to predict the future actions of it’s users and hence come out with an amazingly exciting ad-revenue model. Just a thought! Have your say by commenting on it.

However, there’s probably a better service that’s spreading it’s wings in the Internet arena for having a great potential as Image search service. This site actually is smart enough to search for similar images. The service is called as TinEye.

TinEye is smart and different from a traditional keyword based service as it uses another image to search for a similar image else where on the Internet. This service is right now in Beta stage, and you’ll have to sign-up for invitation to use this service. I got my invitation under 24 hours so if you are keep to try please sign-up for an invitation.

Before we go into the details of what the service looks like and how it works, let’s see what the creator of this this highly potential service has to say.

What is TinEye?

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified. Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.

Why Use TinEye?

• Find out where and how an image appears online
• Research products using a product photo
• Find modified versions of unmodified images or vice-versa
• Research the usage of editorial or stock images
• Get international, multilingual websites in your search results
• Research corporate imagery or brand usage online
• Use a webcam to digitize any image and search for it on the web
• Search for your images to see where they are being used
• If I were to suggest a great usage, it would be to check on internet how many other girls on Internet look like your Girl Friend. I’ll leave the rest for your imagination and action.

How does TinEye work? Every day TinEye’s spiders crawl the web for additional images. Using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for each one and adds it to the index. When you want to find out where an image is being used on the web, you submit it to TinEye. The attributes of the image are analyzed instantly, and its fingerprint is compared to the fingerprint of every single image in the TinEye search index. The result? A detailed list of any websites using that image, worldwide.

Let’s see briefly how this service looks and how to use it. The following is a snapshot of how it’s home page looks. I have put arrows to point the important areas of the web page.

It’s pretty simple to search images. This can be done in 2 ways. One by uploading the image from your computer and two by giving the URL of the image. However, my favorite way is by using the Firefox extension that this service provides. Following is a snapshot of how to use the extension from the context menu in Firefox. Just right click the image and hit Search background image in TinEye.

Launched by the popular, IDEE (A web technology firm), TinEye seems to have a lot of potential. You can find what various stumblers are saying about this service at http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/tineye.com/.

Let’s say you have been having long days without much adventure with your personal computer. I suffer from this problem and I keep flirting with my PC. However, sometimes I mess the shit up and have no one else to blame but me. Now, there’s a better way of trying to mess the shit up and feel safe to recover from it. SteadyState does exactly this. Let’s say you have been flirting with your PC and wanted to recover from it, and you realized that you never setup the Windows Restore option, or you recently deleted the restore points.

With SteadyState all this would be taken care off. More importantly let’s say you share your PC and at the end of the day you want to have it the way you gave it to the person. Just hit a button and you should be good. Let’s see how Microsoft describes SteadyState:

Share computers, not headaches

What state is your shared computer in at the end of the day?

• Hard disk filled with downloaded files?
• Strange options configured?
• Programs installed that you don’t want?
• System infected with viruses and spyware?
• Computer bogged down for unknown reasons?

So this means you can restart your PC and have your favorite configuration back. Let’s see the features in details:

This is how the main window looks like:

The main components are marked by the Square brackets. You can hit the three global computer settings and set it up. The “Set Computer restrictions” screen looks like this:

The check boxes are self explanatory. The third setting under Global Computer Setting is Protect the Hard Disk. It looks something like this:

This one’s the most important setting you might want to look into if you want to mess some shit up someday with your PC or if you share your computer. I hope the scheduling window in future will include scheduling to bring your PC to a state you set it up. Say every night 12 you it can set your PC back to a particular state. Right now this window allows you to set SteadyState to manage your Windows Update Downloads.

Where does a common man come face to face with this so called “technology”?  Innovation that we have seen so far in India is a result of competition among bigwigs in different industries.

You see innovation in cars because one car company wants to outsell the other or innovation in mobile industry because one mobile company wants to have a bigger user base than the other. Innovation and advancement in good no matter how it happens, but it should also happen based on common man’s need and not only based on the competition.

So how does population (Population: 1,129,866,154 (July 2007 est.)) beat innovation and technology in countries like ours? 100 applicants for one job bring the value of the job down triggering exploitation of Labor resulting in low pays and long hours. I am certainly not talking about the tech industry in India, I am talking about sectors other than tech industry such as retail, etc..

We haven’t seen innovation in the way a kirana/banya shop works or how a gas station functions because of the availability of cheap labour. The cost of automation is higher than the cost of labour but the advantages and benefits of automation in the long run are being ignored.

Does this mean that these sectors will never see innovation? No, it means that the innovation will be slow but eventually they will “have to” innovate as most of the people from poor class and lower middle class is moving to job in tech industry or call centers, this does not leave them with any option.

What do you think?

From thousands of participants (websites) Webware burns the list down to 300 and we (users) get to vote for our favorite site in each category from the list of 300. You can vote from the following categories:

• Audio
• Browsing
• Commerce and Events
• Communication
• Productivity
• Publishing and Photography
• Search and Reference
• Social
• Utility and Security
• Video

I voted for my favorite content management system WordPress under Publishing and Photography.  Click on the following image to vote for WordPress.

Voting will freeze on 31st of March and winners will be announced on 21st April. Passes for the Expo are available at the following price:

Conference Plus Workshops
$1,545.00 / Early registration $1,345.00 / Walk-in $1,745.00

Conference Only
$1,245.00 / Early registration $1,045.00 / Walk-in $1,445.00

Workshops Day Only
$695.00 / Early registration $545.00 / Walk-in $895.00

Expo Hall Pass
$100.00 / Early registration $100.00 / Walk-in $100.00

At the time of registration use this “websf08br1” code to get an additional $100 discount.

Expo Resources:

• Register here
• Expo Schedule
• WorkShop
• Speakers
• Expo Blog
• Expo Brochure

Following is the list of other web awards:

• http://www.webaward.org/
• http://www.thefwa.com/
• http://www.webbyawards.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0 (claims to be the first in the race since 2006)

Watch the following video for more information

People who accept it are the ones who play the “Sex Sells” card the most and being a (self proclaimed) geek I think the best combination so far is Technology with Sex.

Let’s look at a few Technology companies who openly sell technology coupled with sex.

Godaddy.com
What hits your mind the moment I mention Super Bowl ads? Most of the straight men would say Sexy and Hot Godaddy ads. According to Hitwise, one of the on-line competitive intelligence services, reported that after the advertisement (below) was aired on Sunday, Godaddy witnessed 260% increase in traffic but how many actually bought a service from Godaddy remains a question. Bob Parson (CEO, Godaddy) admits that Sex sells and such ads help Godaddy sell domains as well. Enjoy the video below:

T3.co.uk
T3 is another magazine which completely believes in the concept of Technology+Sex = Quick growth and larger market share. Though the magazine is not sold in India officially, I managed to get my hands on it. This is one of the best (and most expensive, INR.700) Gadget magazine I have seen in recent past.