NextStop was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who were brains behind Google Calender, Google Groups and Picasa. The site came out of the idea of finding interesting things to do, and places to visit at an unfamiliar location. It featured short, positive recommendations, with photos, maps, and factual information about all the places in their system.

According to NextStop’s post, nextstop.com will be shut down on Sept. 1, 2010 and whatever recommendations have been posted can be downloaded using proper export tools. Large user base of Facebook was given as the primary reason for change.

..we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own..

What can be expected of this change?

The suspense around Facebook’s location feature has further mystified. Will the location based products, contain images and recommendations? Or will it give features like tagging pictures based on locations?
These are mere speculations, but yesterday’s event makes it something to keep an eye upon.

Image via ReadWriteWeb

Apple’s PR officer said

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

Later on in the letter, Natalie, acknowledged the possible reduction in the number of reception bars in when gripped, which usually is less when in the area of strong signal strength. But when the user moves to certain locations where signal strength is low, the number of bars reduced is far in greater number than it should.

Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

Sighting the formula of calculation of number of bars being the possible reason for the drop in number of bars and also quoting that the number of bars observed were non-existent in the first place, the Press Contact pointed towards the fact that the hardware was not to be blamed, rather the iOS running had an inherent flaw in programming.

The possible solution that is going to come up soon would be a software update from Apple that will contain a better algorithm for the bars provided by AT&T.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

The whole response seems to be like a cover up-act from Apple. If it would have been simply because of a few bars less or more in the display and not because of some real hardware deal, then there wouldn’t have been such hue and cry. But then since we are not some technical-experts on antenna its better we give credit to Apple and give them the chance to come up with solutions.

There can be many number of reasons for the system to be slow and sluggish, and as the time goes by, the performance degrades even further. The sole cause for such a depreciation is chiefly because of the numerous software and the temporary garbage being accumulated. These mischievous applications, that we install, often modify the registry settings, system files and add themselves in the Windows startup-list. There are a few excellent tools to deal with these problems like Tune Up utilities and CCleaner.  Nevertheless solving the startup issue still remains a heck of a job for a basic PC users. Experienced users may play around with msconfig and do the needful but for the naives; well there is an excellent application to help them out of utter chaos.

Soluto is the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 and qoutes itself as Anti-Frustration software. In its present state it’s a startup optimizer with features like disabling a particular application from starting up on start-up, delaying the start of an application and thus decreasing the start-up time

This award winning application classifies startup processes in three categories - No-Brainer, Potentially Removable, Required. For each process running on the system, it provides a description and recommended course of action. It even explains why a particular application is required in the first place and points out the cost of running that particular application in the startup. If a particular application is required immediately after the boot, it may not be completely removed from the startup; using this application it can be delayed for the startup thus  saving precious after boot time.

Soluto has an ambitious plan. The idea of PC Gnome project is to figure out which processes, in general, are cause of frustration for PC users. Concept revolves around the fact that, most of the users are not power users and often are not able to figure out the cause of problems they face. The aim is to assist even the basic PC users to pin-point the cause of the ‘frustration’ and take the necessary action. PC Gnome collects data from the Soluto users. One needs to press ‘My PC just frustrated me’ link whenever a problem is encountered and the application will try to analyze the state of the system and report it, so that a future build may include the solution to the problem.

If Soluto indeed achieves the aimed goal, it would indeed be a must have killer app. Yet even in its present state it’s a must have for basic users.

In reply to the criticism, Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Corporate Communications, gave a flaunting demonstration of numbers to remind that they still hold the top berth even if the world is going frenzy over ‘i’.

Here is the synopsis of crunching of the numbers.

• Windows 7 has sold 150 Million licenses to date, and is the fastest growing OS ever.
• PC: In spite of the speculations of decline in PC sales and i-Pads being some PC killers, Microsoft projected a 355 million PC sales in year 2010.
• Netbooks: There has been a rapid rise in number of netbooks using Windows in past year.
• Server Market: The dwindling market share of Linux servers is indeed a ray of hope for Windows even though it is not its strong point.
• Office: Office 2010 has indeed been a huge success. The part that its beta has been downloaded 9 million times just proves this point.
• X-Box Live: Microsoft outshines Netflix with 23 million subscribers.
• Bing: Bing has been a making slow yet steady progress and now has 24.1 million users.
• Windows Live Hotmail: Hotmail might not be acclaimed as the best mail client, yet it holds the top spot as the market leaders with 360 million users subscribed.
• Overall Income: Apple or Google might have beaten Microsoft in some places, yet it they are far from near in overall income, with Microsoft at 14.5 billion in previous fiscal year.

• HTML5 Features: Geolocation, App Cache, web sockets, file drag-and-drop.
• Integrated Flash Player Plugin
• V8 performance improvements
• Preferences synchronization
• NaCl behind a flag

But the Flash Player was not enabled by default, but in this build it has been. There is no mention by Google as to when these rich features will be available in stable build. As for the current build the bugs and issues can be reported at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry

1. Xmarks

Xmarks serves as an excellent add-on for making synchronization of bookmarks possible. Though Chrome has already got an inbuilt bookmark synchronizer, but for people fond of using multiple browsers still its not possible to synchronize through Google account. Unlike Firefox, Xmarks cannot be used to synchronize passwords, yet its extremely useful.

Download Xmarks

2. Last Pass

As the name suggests, its a password manager which can be used to store password across various browsers and also in the web vault. Apart from being an excellent password manager, it has other features like automatic form filling, secure notes and backup/restore utility.

Download LastPass

3.  Goog.gl Url Shortner

This extension allows the shortening of  url using Google’s URL shortening service. Its very useful as once the url is compresses the shortened URL is included in the clipboard. This extension also has the ability to create custom keys for creation of the shortened URL.

Download Goog.gl Shortner

4. Ad-Thwart Plus

Ad-Thwart Plus extension does exactly what it has been named as, removing the ads and making the browsing experience better. There is an option to choose any of the available filter lists, which is updates itself automatically; So all you have to do is to install and forget!

Download AdThwart

5. Speed Dial

Chrome itself has its own new-tab design which has been inspired by Opera. Yet its not very customizable. To make it a little more intutive we need this extension. One can modify the number of speed dials in the page, site logos can be used too in place of normal thumbnails.

Download Speed Dials

The memory leak problem is caused by the allocation and de-allocation of memory for the cache that Firefox builds. This process makes the memory fragmented and hence it gives sluggish responses. It further worsens if you are a power user and have lots of extensions installed.

In quest for the means to eradicate this problem, I stumbled upon an excellent plugin for Firefox called Memory Fox. This addon takes care of all the issues in regards to memory management and personally I can assure you that my own Firefox experience was enhanced.

The current version of this addon can be used to optimize the memory usages globally. It concentrates on following applications.

1. Mozilla’s Firefox
2. Tweet Deck
3. Songbird
4. iTunes

This extension gives you an option to work in two different modes. One in which it works from the browser and it takes care of Firefox memory only and the other one is working as a system task and taking care of above mentioned applications and all those applications that shows up in task manager (the global processes).

There are a lot of options that can be modified, but for basic users it is better not to modify them. It is suggested that the instruction be read carefully before installing this extension. Memory Fox can be downloaded from here.

While I was looking for means to enhance my blog’s presence in this blogging world I was stuck with the same problem which ever startup faces, how do I optimize the traffic coming in from the search engines. Being no expert in ‘SEO’ (Search Engine Optimization), i decided to look for the means by which i could do the same. I used some excellent plug-ins for my Wordpress install and  used them. But alas i was stuck again. The problem was to test what I did actually worked or not!

Spending hours looking for the right tool, I stumbled upon a Firefox addon called SEO Worker Web-Page Analysis Tool. The very functionality of this addon is to provide a very basic SEO information of a particular page.

The Wordpress plugins, that is used to enhance SEO, often work by building meta description tag, tittle tag, meta keyword tag  of a particular page. (To know further about SEO read here.) The SEO Workerr’s Page analysis tool gives you an insight of various stats and their relevance. General status, meta tags listing, meta tags analysis, the pages displayed within search engine results, keywords found in the anchor tags, keywords found in the image “alt” attribute text, keywords found on the page, URLs found in the page, headers returned from the server; all are displayed in orderly fashion with their percentage relevance with the post.

Title Tag Analysis

Meta Description

This might not be the best or even ‘better’ of the tools available, yet because of its ease of usability and  simplicity its one of the best for the beginners.

SEO Analysis Tool can be downloaded from here.

The World Cup kicks off today with South Africa taking on Mexico.

Google is providing widget to its iGoogle page which displays the the entire schedule with local time and the location to be held.

iGoogle App link here