Author: Varun Krish

News.com says that Open-source database company MySQL said it has secured $18.5 million in series C funding, a round led by Institutional Venture Partners. The total venture investment in the company, which has operations in Sweden and Cupertino, Calif., is about $39 million.

The money will be used to fund the company’s growth, product development and expanded marketing and sales operations, MySQL said. Also participating in the round were Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP Ventures and Presidio STV, the venture investment subsidiary of Sumitomo. “With the release of MySQL 5.0, the company is offering deep functionality at a fraction of the cost of the competition, prompting many CIOs to reconsider their database strategy,” said Steve Harrick, managing director and general partner of Institutional Venture Partners.

Google has launched a beta for hosted e-mail accounts that feature the user’s domain instead of gmail.com.The hosted-Gmail beta, which is going head-to-head with a similar beta that Microsoft launched in November, is offering 2GB of storage, e-mail search tools and a control panel to manage user accounts, aliases and mailing lists, as part of its test version.

Google’s beta follows on the heels of a similar one Microsoft launched in November. The Microsoft Windows Live Custom Domains beta features hosted e-mail and instant messaging.

According to a statement issued yesterday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google Desktop ain’t what it seems. A new feature of the application now records the contents of your hard drive, storing actual copies of your files — including Word documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Concern about the new “Search Across Computers” feature arises out of the possibility that making such files available to Google opens users up to severe invasion of privacy, not only from hackers, but from government surveillance as well.

via wired newsÃ?Â

Don’t leave the lair without adding these 10 indispensable add-ons to your Firefox pack.

You probably know what Firefox extensions are and how they work. Here’s the quick-and-dirty definition, from the Fox’s mouth:

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while keeping Firefox small to download.

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The new chip, called Clovertown, bundles four processors in a single package, allowing computers to process data more quickly or run more applications at the same time, while using less power than a single-core design.

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The preview of Microsoft’s Windows AntiSpyware wrongly fingered two Symantec enterprise anti-virus products as password-stealing programs last week. If users followed Microsoft’s recommendation and removed the offending Registry key, the Symantec software turned into so much digital junk. Read more

Today, Google announced Gmail Chat, the first integration of email and instant messaging in the browser that offers users a seamless communications experience.

Gmail Chat enables Gmail users to quickly and easily reach their contacts from directly
within their existing Gmail account.

This new offering solves some of the current frustrations with communications, whereby users must choose between different email or IM applications.

With Gmail Chat, there’s nothing to download and no new contact lists to build. When users see their existing contacts online, they can either send email or chat instantly.

Additionally, Gmail Chat breaks down the arbitrary difference between emails and chats. When chats are saved, they appear as email messages in Gmail, making it easier for users to access and search over important information from their conversations.

Key features of Gmail Chat include:

– Quick Contacts: Located on the left side of users’ Gmail screens, the Quick Contacts list automatically displays the people they communicate with most frequently.

From the Quick Contacts list, users are now one click away from starting an email or chat or viewing recent conversations with a contact.

– Online presence and status: Users can easily see which contacts are online and available to chat, denoted by a colored icon next to each contact’s name.

They can also set their own status message for others to see.

– Chat history: Users can choose to automatically save chats in their Gmail account, where the chat history is formatted and saved the same as an email conversation.

Chats can be easily viewed, searched, forwarded, printed or deleted. Users may also “Reply” to a chat, which sends an email message to the person with whom they were chatting.

– Chatting off the record: Users can “go off the record” so that a given chat conversation will not be automatically saved in Gmail, by either party.

– Google Talk synchronization: Users’ Quick Contacts lists sync with their Google Talk Friends list (although the Google Talk download is still needed for free voice calling).

– No download needed: Innovative AJAX technology enables instant messaging directly in the browser, which means users can chat with their friends anywhere they have Internet access.

The launch of Gmail Chat begins today, and all Gmail users worldwide will have access to Gmail Chat in the coming weeks, further increasing the size of the Google Talk network and broadening the reach of the open standards-based instant messaging community by millions of people.

More information about Gmail Chat can be found at Gmail Home Page.

Additional Information

– Gmail Home

Screenshots will be availble soon.

Source : Google

via:www.go4i.net

The New 1GB Ipod Nano can hold about 240 songs, and is going to cost you around $149. As usual the whole package includes:

udwig Gatzke has created a huge image of Web 2.0 Logos. The image can be found on his Flickr account here.Steve Rubel, of Micro Persuasion,
plays a little game called ââ?¬â?? Guess Who Flops ââ?¬â?? where he asks vistors to guess which of these Web 2.0 companies will end up crashing.

In this site you�ll find a link to each company in the picture:

Day 1 was pretty much a surprise..

i had to take a bus ride to a venue which i had never seen before.. i took my id

card and notebook and left home early having no idea what the conference

would be like.Registrations were between 7 and 9 .. i reached there at abt 8. i

got my id card scanned and got the itenary and stuff.. There was supposed to

be a Concert in the evening.. ( Drum Maestro Sivamani and Ghatam Maestro Vikku Vinayakaram along with Mandolin Rajesh )

We had our morning coffee and biscuits and then moved on to the show .

We took our seats in the main audi and we were shown some videos and ppts on Java and Sun.

Matt Thompson spoke for a while and then the show was taken over by Kiran Karnik of NASSCOMM and Laura Merling of SD Forum.

Then we did not have the so called break.. Then i moved to

Track2 :Java EE and Web 2.0 Programming using the Blueprints .

Here i got to meet the speaker Mr. Sridhar Reddy,Technology Evanagelist .. We did some chit chat on AJAX and I promised him to attend the AJAX session later in the day

Then came Java and .NET interoperability using Web Services.

Lunch followed this

after lunch came the keynote by Laurie Tolson & Karen.

Tegan Padir.

After this i went to the wrong track Persistence Techniques for Java SE and Javaââ??¢ EE Applications using EJB 3.0. I have no idea what EJB is, so it found some sleep in this session .. he he ..

Next was

Web-tier Programming Codecamp I : Java Server Faces .

Java Server Faces is a very new trend in Web Server Programming. The power

of Sun studio creator in creating Java Server Faces was shown. It was a very

cool session ..The next session was

Web-tier Programming Codecamp II : AJAX.

AJAX is a relatively new technlogy being used too widely these days .. i have worked on small AJAX projects… So was very interested in the name and technology.. I grabbed my seat in he front rows for this session as the speaker seemed to interest me a lot.

The speaker elaborately explained AJAX in and out using Adaptive Paths whitepaper on AJAX…

I was so engrossed in the discussions that i forgot about the concert that was at 7 pm…I was talking to all AJAX savvy people in the crowd who had thronged the speaker with questions..

Suddenly i realised tat it was time for the concert and rushed towards it …

On the way i had to give the survey form to get my Sun Tech Days Strolley

bag…wow .. i was right in time for the concert … i got to stand near the dias

… Man i almost went deaf.. The music was so loud and fast.. Everyone enjoyed

it for sure. People enjoyed the concert much more than anything on that day 😛

The concert went on for about 1 hour upto 8 approx… After the concert it was

time to catch the bus back home.. and get back here for another set of

sessions tomorrow .. What a great day it was… I am dead tired.

Thanks to Balakumar .M for most of the photos