Some highlights of how Yahoo! Axis:

Smarter, Faster Search with Rich Design: Get instant answers and visual previews so you can continuously discover and explore content without interruption. Never leave the page you are on to view your search results again.

Connected Experience: Move seamlessly across devices, picking up wherever you left off as you move across your desktop, iPhone, and iPad. Recently visited sites, searches, saved articles, and bookmarks are automatically accessible across all your devices.

Personal Home Page: Get direct access to your favorite sites and content across all your devices with the customizable Home Page.

There are versions for iPad and iPhone, and plug-ins for the desktop browsers Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari.

Watch this video to see how Axis works on…

Yahoo! Axis

Between Facebook, Google+, Myspace, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and even Lady Gaga’s new social network, there are more social networks than you likely know what do to with. But if you really insist on having yet another in the mix, then Microsoft’s got just the thing: So.cl (pronounced ‘social’), a new “experiment in social search.”

Microsoft has quietly launched its own social network; but the company swears it isn’t a Facebook competitor. You can even use your Facebook account to log in to it.

The So.cl experimental research project combines social networking and search, according to Microsoft. It was created by Microsoft’s Fuse labs, a “skunkworks” style development lab that is exploring how social information can change and enhance sharing on the web in conjunction with the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. But it only opened to the public at large this weekend.

So how does it all work? Redmond says searches conducted through So.cl, which is powered by Bing, will be shared publicly by default:

“As students work together, they often search for the same items, and discover new shared interests by sharing links,” the site reads. “We see this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content. So.cl experiments with this concept by automatically sharing links as you search.”

In other words, the project is meant to complement Microsoft’s competitors.

So.cl distinguishes itself by focusing on learning and education. The company says its meant to make it easier for students to collaborate, sharing the results of Internet searches and the photos, videos and stories they uncover. The layout resembles an amalgamation of existing social networks, taking cues from Google+, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Have a Look

Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac.
OS X Mountain Lion arrives this summer. With all new features inspired by iPad, the Mac just getting better and better

OS X Mountain Lion is the ninth and next major release of OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Mountain Lion was announced on February 16, 2012 and is scheduled for release in late summer 2012. It will gain additional features from iOS, some of which were previously introduced to the Mac in OS X Lion. In contrast to prior versions, Apple consistently refers to OS X Mountain Lion as “OS X” rather than “Mac OS X”.

iCloud
Apple’s iCloud technology syncs media (music, photos) and some data among iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches and to a limited extent Macs.

Messages
With iOS 5, Apple introduced iMessage for its mobile devices, which emulated BlackBerry Messenger’s ability to send messages either as text messages or pure data. Now iMessage gets a desktop friend: Messages, which replaces iChat and acts as an instant-messaging app (for accounts on AIM, Google Chat and others) that’s iMessage-friendly.

Notification Center
A desktop version similar to the one introduced in iOS 5. Application pop-ups are now concentrated on the corner of the screen, and the Centre itself is pulled from the right side of the screen.

Share Sheets
Mountain Lion introduces an interface element inspired by iOS—Share Sheets. They’re a pop-up menu that appears when you click on the Share icon in an app. Apple has implemented Share Sheets in several Mountain Lion apps, including Safari, Preview, and Notes, and developers can add them to their apps as well.

Full Twitter integration
OS X Mountain Lion keeps you on top of all things Twitter. Sign in once and you’re all set to start tweeting — and you don’t have to leave the app you’re in. Tweet links and photos directly from Safari, iPhoto, or Photo Booth with the new Tweet Sheet.

Game Centre
The iOS Game Centre comes to the Mac, bringing with it leaderboards, game discovery from friends and even multiplayer gameplay. That’s right; with Mountain Lion you’ll be able to play games on your Mac with your friends in iOS devices, in real time.

AirPlay mirroring
iOS 5 introduced the concept of AirPlay mirroring, in which an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S can display the contents of its screen on any HDTV that’s connected to a second-generation Apple TV. On the Mac, AirPlay mirroring can send whatever’s on your screen to a TV set connected to an Apple TV (at 720p resolution), giving those videos and presentations room to stretch out.

Reminders and Notes
Reminders and Notes look very much like they do on iOS. And thanks to iCloud syncing, they’ll display the same data that shows up on your mobile devices. These are still quite simple apps—the goal seems to have been to provide parity with their iOS analogs. The Notes app does support rich text, so you can choose different fonts, insert photos and attachments, create bulleted lists, and drag in URLs to create hyperlinks.

Safari Tweaks
Apple’s web browser gets a makeover with Mountain Lion, with many of the changes clearly influenced by the rapidly rising Google Chrome. The biggest change: the address bar and search field get combined into an “omnibox.” Also, the Reader button becomes much more prominent, and Safari is finally ditching the “http://” — just the URL is visible in casual browsing. Finally, you can now sync Safari tabs across devices via iCloud.

Gatekeeper
An anti-malware feature based on digital signatures and the Mac App Store.

More Chinese features
has additional features for users in China, including support for Baidu as an option for Safari search engine, QQ, 163.com and 126.com services for Mail, Contacts and Calendar, Youku, Tudou and Sina Weibo are integrated into share sheets.

Software Update has been unified into the Mac App Store, iCal is renamed “Calendar” and Address Book is renamed “Contacts”.

The company is also be collaborating with third party publishers such as Ubisoft to create more game titles geared towards hardcore gamers. They also are focusing on innovative games that will enhance gameplay utilizing the Wii U’s new controller and console technology.

Recently, Ubisoft announced Marvel Avengers: Battle for Earth for the Wii U and Xbox 360 Kinect. Other Ubisoft games for the Wii U include Assassin’s Creed 3 and Killer Freaks from Outer Space. Rayman Legends was also recently leaked via a Wii U demonstration video in April showing off some impressive NFC technology similar to that of Activision’s Skylanders.Wii U will also come with games like Super Mario and Pikmin 3 and this will be shown during the E3 Expo. Pikmin 3 is the sequel to the 2004 Pikmin 2 and is the third game in the Pikmin series.

The Wii U is the first Nintendo console to produce 1080p high-definition graphics, and features a new controller with an embedded touchscreen. The controller allows a player to continue playing certain games by displaying the game even when the television is off. The system will be backwards compatible with Wii, and Wii U games can support compatibility with Wii peripherals, such as the Wii Remote Plus, Nunchuck, and Classic Controller Pro. It will not be backwards compatible with Nintendo GameCube media or peripherals.

It’s been revealed that the PS4 is packing an AMD x64 CPU and 28nm AMD Southern Islands graphics power. The source doesn’t go into any detail about what revision of AMD CPU hardware it’s going to be using, but it could be the forthcoming Piledriver revision of the weak Bulldozer architecture from the AMD FX-8150 CPU.

PlayStation3, Original(left) and SLim version (right)

Meanwhile, IGN reports that the PS4 will be powered specifically by the AMD Radeon HD 7670 chip and the A8-3850 APU.If that’s true, it really is a big surprise. Those chips aren’t even the best that AMD currently has to offer – so by the time the PS4 goes on sale it would be woefully lacking in power compared to the latest AMD tech, let alone the most advanced chips from Nvidia and Intel.

Wii-U

The Xbox 720, again an informal term and with the codename Durango is to launch in time for Christmas 2013, according to information previously published by VG247, with key development studios briefed in February. Sony is believed to be holding its own developer summits in May and June.

Nintendo’s successor to the Wii, know as the Wii-U, was treated to an official announcement at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June 2011, though representatives for both Microsoft and Sony have indicated that their own machines won’t be subject to the same treatment at this year’s event.

Nighttime photograph of much of the Atlantic coast of the United States. Large metropolitan areas and other easily recognizable sites from the Virginia/Maryland/Washington, D.C. area are visible in the image that spans almost to Rhode Island. Boston is just out of frame at right. Long Island and the New York City area are visible in the lower right quadrant. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are near the center.

Moscow appears at the center of this nighttime image photographed by the NASA, Expedition 30 crew aboard the International Space Station, flying at an altitude of approximately 240 miles on March 28, 2012.

Nile River Delta at Night – One of the fascinating aspects of viewing Earth at night is how well the lights show the distribution of people. In this view of Egypt, the population is shown to be almost completely concentrated along the Nile Valley, just a small percentage of the country’s land area.

Panorama of much of the East Coast, photographed by one of the Expedition 30 crew members aboard the International Space Station, provides a look generally northeastward: Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center); western Lake Ontario shoreline with Toronto (left edge); Montreal (near center). An optical illusion in the photo makes the atmospheric limb and light activity from Aurora Borealis appear “intertwined.”

Western Europe at Night – With hardware from the Earth-orbiting International Space Station appearing in the near foreground, a night time European panorama reveals city lights from Belgium and the Netherlands at bottom center. The British Isles partially obscured by solar array panels at left, the North Sea at left center, and Scandinavia at right center beneath the end effector of the Space Station Remote Manipulator System or Canadarm2.

Image Credit: NASA

Wire Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the older form of privacy developed in 1999 to secure wireless Access Points. WEP is used at the two lowest layers of the of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model – the data link and physical layers; it is therefore does not offer end-to-end security.

Then come the WiFi Protected Areas (WPA), which replaced WEP while using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to enhance security. TKIP works by generating a sequence of WEP keys based on a master key, and re-keying periodically before enough volume of info could be captured to recover the WEP key.

WPA2 is built on WPA to prevent more advanced tools from cracking WPA security. With WPA2 comes the introduction of AES algorithm, which is easily implemented in hardware and theoretically impossible to cracked.