by Akila Mendis

1.   Microsoft Vine

Microsoft has launched a new product called ‘Vine’ into private beta with the aim of keeping friends and family in touch during emergencies. Vine is designed to keep family and friends in touch when other communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient. Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone or other key communication infrastructures, and Vine is designed to be as hardy as possible to keep people connected. Vine can be accessed via a desktop client (Windows only for now), text message or email.

So what is it? Vine is a tool keep people connected during a crisis, but it’s also used to for more everyday tasks. It will gather local news (you tell it where you live or are at the moment). News items are gathered from 20,000 local and national news sources. You can choose to filter out certain types of news (sports, entertainment, etc.).

Vine also gives you status updates from Facebook for close friends and family. Twitter and other social network news feeds will also be added over time. This lets you see what people are up to, as well as their location on a map if they share it. For more details you can find a demo here…

At the moment it’s for US only but let’s wait until it’ll available for all of us!

Sources: techcrunch.com, mashable.com

2.   Google Chrome 2.0 Released

Google has released Chrome 2.0. The speed-demon browser gets an additional kick of speed, a few more features, and a load of bug fixes. Here are some of the most significant newly added features to Chrome 2.0:

• Ability to delete thumbnails from new tab page
• Full page zoom
• Full screen mode (by pressing F11)
• Autofill for web forms

Then there are the bug fixes. More than 300 of them according to Google. To hear more about these improvements, check out this video by Product Manager, Brian Rakowski.

If you are a Chrome user, the browser will automatically update when run. If not, head over to the Google Chrome download page. For Mac and Linux users, there’s still no Google Chrome for you.

Sources: Google Chrome Blog, ZDNet.com

  3.   Oracle buys Sun; Now owns Java; Becomes a hardware player

After the weeks and weeks of hype surrounding IBM buying Sun, Oracle announced it was buying Sun -- for $7.4 Billion. With Sun in tow, Oracle will now finally have its own operating system with Solaris, instead of just its own Oracle Enterprise Linux (which is based on Red Hat). Perhaps more importantly, with one swift stroke Oracle has effectively cornered even more of the database market than it already owned.

With MySQL, Oracle will have one of the leading open source databases, and a vendor that has been a bit of a competitor to Oracle over the last several years. It's a win-win for Oracle. They'll be able to continue to push their proprietary Oracle database offering, while chewing away at the open source and Web 2.0 sides of the market they didn't already hold.

Source: Internetnews.com

4.   Import your mail and contacts from other accounts

Gmail now imports email and contacts from other email providers, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, and many more. It's much easier to make the transition now that you can bring along all your old email and contacts. You can even have your messages forwarded from your old account for 30 days, giving you time to take Gmail for a test drive while you make up your mind.

This new feature is available in all newly-created Gmail accounts, and it is slowly being rolled out to all existing accounts. It'll take longer than the few hours or days that most Gmail features take to get out to everyone. You'll know it's on for your account when you see the Accounts and Import tab (formerly just called Accounts) under Settings.

Read more on Gmail Blog

5.   Inside Microsoft’s future home

The BBC has filmed what Microsoft plans to do in the future to enhance our lives, from cooking from what medication you should be taking.

Although none of this is likely ever going to reach your home within the next 10-20 years, it is very interesting to see what types of new technologies will be available in the very near future.

Enjoy the video here