Fluther | Yet another place to find answers to any questions

After the success of Yahoo Answers, there are now many sites on the web, which provide answers to your questions. After the launch of websites like Microsoft's QnA and Ask Metafilter, now you can find your answers at Fluther.

The exact meaning of the word Fluther is a group of jellyfish. Fluther community of users, who ask questions and other answer that. It tracks your activities and let you monitor questions you've asked or answered in real time. They also promise to send your questions to so-called experts, who are considered experts because they have successfully answered questions on related topics in the past.

The Big 'G' Google is also present in this market, but on a more serious note. Google Answers, relies on paid experts to generate answers, and therefore, it costs you to get your answers through them..

Fluther is hand-tailored for you. The more you participate, the more Fluther gets personalized for you. Fluther also a large tag cloud, which displays the topics of questions asked in a easily comprehendible tag cloud format.

Fluther has installed a ranking system also, where you get points for good and bad answers. People rate you based upon the quality of your activity on Fluther. And based upon your ratings, you are given access to advanced features.

In all such website, one thing I really wish. If these services could start a feature, where the person can also be able to discuss the answer in real time, it will be really interesting.

You can find many other services also on this question / answer these. With the presence of Wondir, Oyugi and Yedda, this space seems to be getting over-crowded.

del.icio.us tags: fluther, answers, questions, google answers, QnA, Wondir, Yedda, Oyugi, yahoo answers, ask metafilter

Yahoo follows Google to launch Search Suggest

Seems like all Google innovations are likely to get replicated by Yahoo.

The latest being the search suggest.

The feature of Google suggesting the keywords for your search as you type your query is quite old now. But as per this blog post by the Yahoo's Kevin Lee, the search suggest facility is now also available in Yahoo.

Using eSnailer to send physical mails may be risky

Despite the seemingly indispensability of emails, there is huge section of our population, which still cannot access it and are still dependent upon the paper form of communications.

A new servicee eSnailer seemingly promises to bridge that divide. It allows to send you a letter in the form of paper in an envelope to anyone. The sender has to just fill in the receipient' and sender's name & address and the message in a form provided on their website. And the beutiful part is that this is absolutely free.

But what is the catch.

Yeah, you guessed it right, there is surely a catch. In fact before sending, you are asked to sign up at least two of the available offers from their promoters. It was also bearable, but the saddest part is that eSnailer seems to be having an affiliation with the website MyInsiderDeals, which is rated "very spammy" by McAfee SiteAdvisor. [After signing up at MyInsiderDeals, the SiteAdvisor team received 240 e-mails per week.]

Another important point to be noted on their site is the lack of a privacy policy. This raises a doubt about the real motives of the site. I am not saying that this service is a scam, but this great idea could have done better if taken care of these points.

Free Wordprocessors | Bean for Apple

This is the second article from the series on free word processors. First one was about Roughdraft.

Till recently, TextEdit was the de-facto choice for word processor for Apple. When you ned to scribe quickly a note or two, and don't want to use a full word processor, Text Edit was a great help.

You can get more information about TextEdit or download it at the Apple website here and here. Peach has given a nice article here.

But now, they have come out with Bean, which starts from where TextEdit has left.

What is Bean

It is a small, simple word processor (actually a rich text editor), with many niceties added to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable.

Don't compare Bean with MS Word. It will be comparing Apples with Oranges. Bean is open source and right now is in Beta.

Cool Features

• a live word count
• a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
• a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
• an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
• date-stamped backups
• autosaving
• a page layout mode
• an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
• an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
• selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
• a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
• easy to use menus
• remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)
• all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

You can get more information on the OS-X website and down it here.

FactSpotter | A new context based Search Engine from Xerox

If you are fed up with the process of choosing different sets of keywords in Google to get your desired results, here comes factSpotter, the Xerox's new context based semantic oriented search engine, which is now in Beta.

What does it mean: Present Search Engines including Google work on keywords. e.g. if you search for parade ground, it will also give you results like naked parade of models to baseball grounds in US. Both of which are of no use to you. But FactSpotter proposes to be intelligent enough to go much deeper into the context of the result pages to bring you only the relevant pages.

Xerox Press Release says...

• What it is: New Xerox text mining software for service offerings is discriminating, smart and easy to use.
  
• How it's different: Takes ordinary search to the next level by digging into more documents, analyzing meaning of words and context, accepting queries in everyday language.
  
• Why it matters: Makes it easy to retrieve information from massive data bases in legal cases, fraud detection, drug discovery, risk management, and more.

Veoh TV | The new webtool for turning your PC into IPTV

After the mention of the new IPTV services like Joost and Babelgum on this blog, it was very natural that the latest announced service Veoh will also be talked here. Announced this week itself, Veoh claims that the services like Joost are offering the same old concept of cable or satellite TV in a new bottle, i.e. they are changing only the media, which is now Internet. The content is still in the hands of the service provider.

On the other hand, Veoh claims that through their Veoh TV, users will be able to share their videos also to their audience or clients and this makes a different proposition altogether.

Veoh TV is being launched presently in a limited, invite-only beta that will become more widely available to the general public later this year.

Why Apple launched Safari

Much has already been written about Safari, the latest browser for Windows from Apple. Reports are there that already 1 million downloads of Safari have taken place and it is grabbing the browser market very fast.But what had actually been the reason that Apple chose this time, just before the release of iPhone, to release Safari. There have been many theories behind them, right from the desire of apple to control the lucrative browsing business to Apple's to intentions to install a particular malware supporting iPhone. Read two of the interesting stories at ZDNet and Business2.com

YouTube videos may be injurious to your PC health

I recently came across an article at Websense, which indicates the potential use of YouTube videos downloaded onto your PC for installing malware and viruses.

When you download and run an application file, cleverly disguised as a video file, your browser opens a video but in the background it also connects to its another webserver, which uploads a few Trojan Horses in to your machine with the primary objective of stealing your valuable information.

Websense has also upoladed a video about it on YouTube here.

Mozilla Firefox add-on Blog

Firefox add-ons are always a treat to watch and use. Although many of them are just fads, but a few of them are really useful. A few of such add-ons like Searchstatus, CoolIris, Firefox Showcase, pdf Download, Joey, Fasterfox, Answers and IE Tab have already been discussed on this blog.

Latest from the firefox is that they have started a blog especially focussed on fire-fox add-ons.

As they say...

"This blog will be used to keep add-on users and developers up to date on the latest news and information regarding add-ons and addons.mozilla.org. Stay tuned for information on Firefox 3 extension compatibility, upcoming changes to the site, and a few surprises."

Check it out here.

Voice Pay | Online payment system based upon voice

Internet is growing and so is e-commerce and online payments. But the biggest threat, phishing or frauds, to online payments still looms large.

Voice Pay is the latest method for online payment based upon voice recognition, where your voice acts as a verification tool instead of a PIN or chip. On every payment order, you have to enter you PIN vocally, your speech components are analyzed and compared with the sample given by you at the time of the registration of the service. On authorization, the transaction is completed.

They claim that the technology works everywhere, “ in a shop, on a train, on TV, in a newspaper and on-line”. But definitely it will have its limitation in case of poor signal or voice quality.

Let's see, how far does the system goes.

Fingerprint recognition: New tools for cellphone security

TMCNet has reported that Qiao Xing Mobile, a Chinese manufacturer has introduced their most innovative handset to date, T100. The most important feature, besides ultra long standby, multimedia features such as streaming TV, is its fingerprint recognition feature.

"...we think people are going to start using their handsets to conduct such wireless transactions as electronic banking, securities trading and Internet shopping. The fingerprint recognition scanner on our new T100 model will specifically ensure that such confidential data that is stored on handsets remains secure," said CECT Chairman Wu Zhi Yang."

Fingerprint recognition in cellphones is not a new concept in advanced cellphones anymore. Many cellphones of manufacturers like Pantech, LG etc have been offering them for quite some time now.

iPhone to be sold on first come first served basis

An unmatched degree of hype is being created about Apple's iphone.

The latest news being that AT&T, the official distributor of iphone, will sell iPhone on First Come, First Served Basis, which means there will not be any pre-sale or pre-ordering.

In case you wanna know...
What is iphone: go here
What is the hype all about: go here

Free webtools: Firefox add-on for webpage acess through Cellphones

Now, Mozilla is exploring to provide you online space called Joey page, where you can store any information, related to any website (or a portion of website), which you can later access from your cellphone. This information may be static or dynamically changing also.

For instance, suppose a website provides you dynamically changing online scores of some sport activity. You can store that portion on your Joey Page, and retrieve the current score through your cellphone. This way you get the latest updates on your cellphone and also do not encounter the ads and other unrelated stuff available on the original page.

It is possible through a Mozilla Firefox add-on. For more information, visit infoworld or mozilla.org.

VoIP: Skype shakes hands with Wal-Mart

The biggest VoIP service provider Skype has now shaken hands with retail juggernaut Wal-mart to distribute its range of VoIP products through more than 1800 Wal-Mart outlets in US.

There’s a pretty wide range, which include

• Headsets
• Webcams
• Plug-in Handsets (via USB)
• Cordless Handset (base plugs into computer via USB)
• Cordless Phone (no computer required)

You can read about the announcement in today’s USA Today, and get more information (including store locations) at www.skype.com/walmart.

VoIP: Now Skype will send your caller ID for outgoing calls

Three days back, Skype rolled out the eagerly awaited Caller-ID facility in selected countries (reports one Skype update).

Till now, if you use Skype service to call Landline or mobile phones, an awkward ID was sent to the called party, sometimes irritating him. Now you can now choose to show your number as your Caller-ID.

All you have to do is to go to Your Account and then look for the “Caller Identification” bit. Click the “Change” link to set it up. See also the FAQ for more information.

As of now, this service is available in UK, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, Estonia and Poland. and this list will keep changing.