Songbird this week finally made its 1.0 release:

What is Song Bird?
Songbird is an opensource music player build on Mozilla technology, VLC Player & SQLite. Purely based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, the same engine that powers Firefox. Like Firefox, Songbird allows for tabbed browsing, themes and addtions of add-ons to customize the extendibility of your media player. So far packed with more then 90 Add Ons you can customize SongBird as you want.

“Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players” according to Aaron Boodman, Greasemonkey.

SongBird is currently in its early stages but have a very active development teams, this week they released there 1.0 release, powered with an addition in features, performance according to their blog post

• Drastically Faster Search: Searching in Songbird is now anywhere from 10x faster for small libraries to 1000x for large ones.
• Reduced RAM Usage: There’s a 70% reduction in RAM usage when importing and using large (100,000 track) libraries.
• Faster Media Importing: Importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.
• Reduced Startup Times: Large library users (10,000 tracks or more) will notice that Songbird startup times are now twice as fast.
• Efficient Scrolling: Scrolling through your library now uses half the amount of CPU.
• Snappier Sorting: Sorting your library is now 3-4x faster, which adds up to significantly smoother browsing when scrolling and filtering.
• Optimized DB Size: We’ve optimized the database in Songbird and reduced its size by, on average, 60%. This leads to a variety of performance improvements throughout the application.
• Fewer Crashers: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix 11 of the most common crashes in Songbird.

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Holiday season and this time you can gift an iPhone 3G easily with the help of iPhone 3G gift card being offered by Apple. Simply log on to the site, fill in the form add a person message and the iPhone 3G gift card will be delivered to your loved one who can pick it up from any Apple store close to their home. An once the person redeem it, an Apple Store specialist will take care of every details and setup the iPhone for all features and give a sort of personalized service.

Give someone an iPhone 3G Gift Card and when the lucky recipient comes in to redeem it, an Apple Retail Store Specialist will take care of every detail. The Specialist will get your recipient’s iPhone 3G up and calling, set up email, and help customize the Home screen, choose some great iPhone applications, personalize ringtones, and find favorite songs.

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BMW is currently working on a replacement for the Z4 Roadster. Codenamed E89, the new Z4 will be a conventional soft-top and will come as a competitor for the next generation Porsche Boxster and Mercedes SLK-Class. It will be priced somewhere around $40.000.

Here is a leaked picture taken from a BMW dealership, where a movie (Solitary Man) with Michael Douglas is being shot. 

2009-bmw-z4

Courtesy Zpost.com

This is an interesting fact, Google and Yahoo have released the top keywords used in 2008 for searching information and both have totally oposit results.

Let look at what People have been searching on Google

Top & Popular Keywords of 2008 by Google

1. obama
2. facebook
3. att
4. iphone
5. youtube
6. fox news
7. palin
8. beijing 2008
9. david cook
10. surf the channel

Top & Popular keywords of 2008 by Yahoo

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

So what does it tell us ?

Well this data does show an insight on what kind of people use Google and what kind of people use Yahoo so here is what i think :

1. People using Google are more interested in global events, spend most of there time online watching tv / news & videos
2. People using Yahoo are slaves to Hollywood celebrities & Entertainment.

So what do you have to say on this ?

Its holiday season, Christmas is next and then its new year time. So what is our web community doing to celebrate the new year & Christmas online.

Google Countdown to 2009

Google got a page setup called “Google Countdown to 2009“, where google will be counting down to 2009 along with unique tip of the day for the whole month of december, well the tip will a keyword linking up to the google search. read more

Dot be scared from the title its not a scam. Microsoft Corporation has launched a campaign called “SearchPerks” where you start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web, oh did i mentione that the lines “whenever you search the web” actually means “whenever you search the web using Microsoft Live Search, on a Microsoft Windows using a Microsoft IE6 or above”.

So whats the fuss about, well SearchPerks is a short lived campaign by Microsoft where they are making an effort to study how the users use the search engine to search the web, sort of lab rat experiment that’s what i get out of it so far. read more

Today (22 October 2008 at 9:00 AM), Google announced the launch of “Android Market” a global location to buy, sell, download Android based applications.

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Google today announced a new feature of integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account. Thus giving the publishers reports on how and where to optimize there site not only to generate good traffic but a good revenue as well. The feature is so far invite only and a very few bunch of publishers will be invited but as the feature gets pass its testing phase hopefully we all will be invited to it.

The integration is no doubt a positive step in terms of publishers, we know where the traffic comes from but where we make the most revenue is not yet clear and with this new feature rolling out i am sure its going to help us in improving not only our site traffic but its revenue stream as well. According to Google : read more

This seems like a fun application for people involved with web. Well do you really want to know where exactly your web server is located physically, if yes is the answer then log on to 81solutions.com.

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Sony Ericsson “XPERIA 1″ the first business phone by Sony Ericsson which uses the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, the phone is ready to hit the market and expected to be released by the end of october. Not only its the first business phone from sony ericsson but it is also the first touchscreen phone with a overlaying Qwerty keypad which emerges when the user slides the touchscreen face upwards.

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