Categories
Tech News

New limitations in Google Apps free edition

Google Apps is undoubtedly one of the best cloud computing application. Since the time Google has launched the Google Apps, it has been embraced by millions of businesses ranging from a partnership firm to big Enterprise. This Google Apps has undergone various changes in terms of features as well as versions and editions. Currently Google Apps is available in various flavors like Google Apps Standard Edition, Google Apps Business, Google Apps Education editions, Google Apps Government editions and Google Apps non-profit editions.

All the versions mentioned above have their features and limitations and not all the versions are available to any one who wants to deploy Google Apps. Out of the 5 flavors of Google Apps, the Google Apps Standard or Free edition is available to all for free and Business edition can only be obtained through subscription.

The following image below gives a comparative overview of the features available in both the primary flavors of Google Apps:

The free version of Google Apps is available to any one for free without much restriction, however it has certain limitations as indicated in the above image. Initially when Google Apps was launched the free edition was available with a user limit of 50 while sign up and later on if you needed more number of users you can easily increase the limit by sending a request with a valid reason to Google. But this was the time when only the free edition was in the market.

Looking at the popularity, Google decided to monetize the opportunity and the business edition was launched. So on 14th January 2009, Google made an announcement to fix the maximum number of users for free edition at 50. That means after the announcement, even if you had a valid reason, you will not be able to increase the number of users beyond 50. Instead Google directed businesses with more than 50 users to the Business edition. Google being a philanthropic company, did not let existing users of free editions down by allowing them to operate with more than 50 users if they had.

Now Google has made another announcement today saying the limitation of 50 users will further be reduced to 10 users starting 10th May 2011. But like earlier announcement the existing users with limitations of 50 users will continue to enjoy the service. So this will only be applicable to users who signs up for a new Google Apps account after 10th may 2011. This the complete mail from Google.

Hello,

We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.

As of May 10, any organisation that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for xxxx.com at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

In my opinion this is a best move by Google as any business which needs more than 10 users must be making a good money and need to pay some amount to Google for such a  nice service. But Google should also re-consider about the pricing of Business edition with an altogether different pricing model to suit the small business owners who may need just 15 or 20 users. Please share your opinion on this.

Categories
Social Media Tech News

Facebook account not available

Facebook seems to have a hard time maintaining the infrastructure to support it’s more than 600 millions users. So in recent time people have started facing many irregularities with Facebook. Even I have experienced a few issues on my own. Issues like the online users section shown at the left side of Facebook showing multiple times or chat windows not opening when you click on  user name seems to be quite common. Moreover there are issues like messages disappearing from wall and Facebook group is a matter of concern.

I moderate 2 groups in Facebook and I have seen threads with a lot of response have suddenly disappeared from the

Facebook Groups. I inquired with other members about the issues and some of them told they are able to see and some reported as not available to them. So it seems to be issues related on per account basis.  Contacting Facebook for such things did not yield any result. So I was ignoring that thinking it will be a temporary issue and will be rectified soon. But today an extremely strange thing happened. I was chatting with the members of one of the group when I tried to post a comment to one of my friend’s status message. It did not get posted and I received an error saying not posted and try again. I tried again, but that also did not result in success. I tried refreshing my page and I was surprised to see the following message instead of my Facebook wall:

Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.

I tried refreshing my page numerous times but that did not work and I was greeted with same message. I was suddenly concerned and thought that Facebook has deleted my account or banned me. I tried to access it with another browser. I put my username and password and huh…instead of logging me in, I was greeted with a slightly different message with option to login with a  different user name and password.

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This message looked bit relaxing as I became sure by now that my account has not been banned or deleted. And seems like a Facebook issue.

Such incidents are not new to users and Facebook is aware of it. They told to CNET long back about some internal glitch in their server which is preventing users to access their account intermittently.  But as Facebook is growing like anything and many users and enterprise are heavily dependent on Facebook for their brand promotion and connecting with their customers, such downtime will definitely hamper their business. Facebook should take care of such issues by expanding their infrastructure more aggressively. Also they need to publish any anticipated downtime or issues in a publicly available location.

By the time I am writing this, I tried again refreshing browser and Alas I am inside my Facebook profile. So it was definitely a  temporary glitch. If you had a similar experience with Facebook recently, we would love to know about it. So please share it through comment.

Categories
Internet Social Media Tech News

How to use Google +1 social recommendation feature

The Search Engine giant Google announced yesterday about  a new Social recommendation features called Google +1 which is inline with the Facebook’s like button. Google seems to be in a hurry in releasing new features to enhance the end users experience and provide the best search result. Some days back they released the feature to block unwanted search result and now this Google +1. Google claims that it is their endeavor to provide better result through human recommendation rather then completely relying on machine. With this new Google +1 feature you can now publicly recommend any search result or ads that appear in Google search result and it will be included with the search result. Google will show the number of recommendations for that search result when it will appear for any query.

Google +1 is now released as an Experimental feature and in order to be able to use this service you need to have a Google profile and join this experiment. In order to enjoy the Google +1 feature, please perform the following steps in the same order as they are given below:

1. If you do not have a Google profile create a Google profile and make it public. If you have a Google profile upgrade it to accommodate the new features.

2. Go to Google Labs experimental search page and click on Join this experiment button. (Thanks Vibin Reddy)

3. While logged in to your Google account search for something in Google and look for the search result. You will see the +1 button beside the search result now. Click on the +1 button near any relevant result to leave your recommendation for that page to the world.

4. For the first time when you click on the +1 button you will see a pop up window where you will need to confirm for the +1 to take effect.4. You can undo your action immediately by clicking on the button again.

While showing the recommendations to you or any one in the search result Google takes into account your social connections to determine. The social connection includes people from your Google contact, Google Buzz  and Google reader followers and Google chat contacts.

Managing the +1s

All the +1 recommendation you have done will be available in your Google profile +1’s tab. However you have the option to choose whether to make this tab publicly available or make it private by clicking on Edit Profile and un checking the option “Show this tab on my profile”. In order to manage the +1s:

1. Login to your Google profile and click on +1’s tab.(For me the +1 tab did not appear immediately but took almost 5 minutes after I did a recommendation)

2. You can delete any recommendations, you no longer want to share from this tab by clicking on the X mark towards the right of the +1 content.

+ 1 on non-Google sites: (This part is a direct copy from Google as the information is not clear)

The only time the +1 button will associate your identity with specific web content is when you choose to click the +1 button for something on the web. By clicking the +1 button, you’re explicitly signaling interest in displaying, sharing, or recommending specific online content, including ads. So if your friend chooses to +1 an ad, page, or search result, you might see that +1 on other websites. Google stores your +1’s to personalize the web, for example, by showing them to your social connections and others who may find it relevant. To change the +1 preference on non-Google sites:

1. Login to your Google account

2. Click on the Edit link near + 1 on non-Google sites

3. Select the appropriate option in the following window and click on save.

Google will utilize the +1 activity, Google profile and your social connection to tailor made the content for and ads for you. Though this is a nice move from Google to make their search result more social but it has lot of potential for exploitation. In order to promote the search result website owner will now hire people to recommend their website and gain higher recommendation for crappy results. But when this is used without any evil purpose this will definitely going to help web searcher to find good result for their queries. Please share your opinion on what you feel about this new Google +1 feature.

Categories
Browsers Internet Product release Tech News

Firefox 4 Release date and Features walkthrough

An Update to the post has been provided at the bottom. Mozilla took down the ftp download link.

Finally the wait is going to be over in a couple of hours when the much awaited Firefox 4.0 will be released on 22nd March 2011. All thanks to Microsoft for releasing IE 9. The war of the browser has intensified. As IE 9 has been released last week and people are quite gung-ho about the new Internet explorer, Mozilla could not have delayed the release of the final version of Firefox 4. So the decision came at the right time.

The Release Candidate (RC) version of a program can be regarded as the final version when functionality or design is concerned. So the final version of Firefox 4 will sport the same look and offer same functionality as the RC version. So let’s have a quick look at the features and improvements we are going to see in Firefox 4.

– User Interface

> Menu Bar

The menu bar is by default hidden in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is to give it a more consistent look with the User Interface of the OS. Instead of the menu bar you can see a new Firefox button in orange color at the top left corner. (It mimics the Opera).

> Tabs

The tab position has been moved to the top of the Window. This is to give more visual priority to the tabs. But while switching to Firefox 4, you might feel it bit awkward especially if you are regular Firefox user. After I switched to Firefox 4, I have looked for the tabs in it’s old location because of the habit :).

Firefox Panorama is another improvements which organizes tabs into groups and lets you perform various operations on tab groups.

Switch to Tabs is another feature in Firefox 4 which lets you switch to an already opened tab when you type the same website name.

App Tab feature in Firefox 4 lets you keep the always open sites like Web Mail, Facebook etc a permanent position on the browser. So you do not need to have a separate tab for those. Just right click on the opened Tab and Select Make into App Tab and you are done.

> Stop/Refresh/Go button

The stop, Refresh and Go button has been combined into one and placed at the right of address bar. The buttons appearance changes dynamically depending upon the page status.

Overall the improvement is user Interface gives Firefox a much need look and removes lot of clutter present in older versions.

– Firefox Sync:

The Firefox Sync is an Add-on released for earlier version of Firefox. But With Firefox 4 this feature is built-in. Firefox Sync helps in  synchronizing bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, preferences  and last 25 opened tabs across multiple computers. The user data are synced to Mozilla seever and kept there in an encrypted format and it is synced to PCs you use.

– New Add-on Manager

Firefox 4 sports a brand new Add-on manager window. This new Add-on manager gives an easier way to manage Addons and personalizing the browsing. The new add-on manager has 4 categories viz. get Add-ons, Extensions, Appearance and Plugins.

Apart from the above visual changes, there are a lot of changes as given below in the core as well as security improvements in Firefox 4 which undoubtedly makes Firefox the best browser.

– Complete CSS3 and HTML 5 support

– Supports WebM video standard so you can watch HD quality video and 3D graphics support through Web GL.

– Integrate Multi Touch support for Windows 7.

– Support for different platform like Windows, mac and Linux.

– Improved security through HSTS (Http Strict Transport Security)

– Firefox 4 is the fastest browser in handling JavaScript, thanks to JagerMonkey JavaScript engine.

-Download

The Firefox RC download link is available at the Mozilla Firefox web page. However it says it is the RC 2 release and the file name is Firefox Setup 4.0 RC2.exe however the FTP location of Mozilla gives this file Firefox Setup 4.0.exe

When I installed the file from FTP location it still says Mozilla Firefox 4 like the RC version when you click on Help > About. It may happen that Mozilla has already kept the final version in the ftp as they are getting ready for the release.

UPDATE:

After many bloggers published the news of the presence of final version of Firefox 4.0  in Mozilla FTP repository, they have taken down the download link and now the link says “Page Cannot be displayed”. I noticed this at IST 2.40AM.

UPDATE:

The link has not actually been taken down, but gives a permission denied error when tryng to downlaod drectly. SO go to the following link and right click on Firefox Setup 4.0.exe and selct Save link as ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0/win32/en-US/

Categories
Product release Wordpress

JetPack lets you get wordpress.com features in your self hosted wordpress

Without an iota of doubt, I would like to say that WordPress is the best and most popular blogging platform. This comes in 2 flavors, One is the self hosted version of WordPress, which is released by Automattic under GNU-GPL license. The other one is WordPress.com, which provides a free as well as paid (premium) platform hosted iin cloud to publish your blog. So even if you do not have a domain name or web server you can still create your blog as a subdomain of WordPress.com and publish it.

There are certain extremely good features and benefits that a WordPress.com users enjoys, those until now were officially not available in self hosted version of WordPress. Though some of the features like WordPress.com stats were made available in self-hosted version with the help of specialized plugins. According to the founder of Automattic & man behind WordPress Matt, it was his dream to provide feature parity between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress. And finally his dream has turned into reality in the form of a plugin called JetPack , which gives you all the features in WordPress.com that we always wanted in our self hosted version of WordPress.

With the launch of the first version of JetPack, following 8 features (cloud goodies) of WordPress.com will be activated in your self-hosted version of WordPress when you activate JetPack plugin. JetPack connects to WordPress.com and enables the awesome features in your self hosted version of WordPress.

1. WordPress.com Stats : It provides a simple and concise statistics for yur website without any additional load on your server.

2. Twitter Widget: If your theme supports widget, it will show latest tweets from a twitter user.

3. Gravatar Hovercards: It is a cool feature & I always wanted to have in my website. This will show a pop-up business card of user’s gravatar profile when you hover the mouse over their name.

4. Wp.me shortlinks: The default URL shortening service from Automattic. All your posts & pages will be able to sue this for better sharing in micro blogging platform like twitter.

5. Sharedaddy: It will make the Sharing of your posts easier over the social networks & social bookmarking sites

6. Latex: is the famous markup language to insert mathematical equations inside your post and pages.

7. After the deadline: This a spelling, grammar and style checker with built-in AI.

8. Shortcode Embeds: Add movies, images, flash etc into your posts & pages with single line of code.

The list does not end here. In the coming version of the plugin, expect to see some more uberly cool features of WordPress.com.

If you are hosted with partner hosts of Automattic like Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, and Network Solutions then the one click installation of WordPress available with them is JetPack enabled.  That means when you install WordPress through one click install, you do not need to install the JetPack plugin separately.

Download, Install & Pre-requisite:

1. Please note that Jetpack will work only with WordPress 3.0.5 and later version, you also need a WordPress.com account (if you do not have one you can create so during the setup process. If you meet these 2 requirements,

2. Visit the JetPack website to download the plugin.

3. Unpack and upload it to the plugins directory.

4. Log in to WordPress admin area and Activate the JetPack plugin. Upon Activation, it will show you a message to connect to WordPress.com. Click on the (see the image below)

Jetpack actvation alert5. It will take you to an authorization page as shown in image below. Put your WordPress.com user name and Password and click on Authorize. If you do not have a WordPress.com account, you can create one here by clicking on need an account.

6. Upon successful authorization, you will be redirected back to your WordPress admin area and jetpack setting page will be shown. This looks like the one in the below image:

JetPack Dashboard

From here, you can customize the required features. JetPack not only connects you to WordPress.com  to provide awesome features, but also provides you the convenience of not installing several plugins.

Categories
Tech News

Google Calling all Junior Scientists Huge scholarship on Offer

The almighty Google is looking for the brightest and the best young scientist around the world to take part in one of it’s kind of a science fair called Google Science Fair. Every student in the age group of 13-18 yrs are eligible to participate either as an individual contestant or as a group.

How to Enter

The application process is rather simple.

– You need to have a google account. If you do not have one, Create a Google Account.

– Complete the Google Science Fair sign up form. After you submit the form, you will see an important link on the confirmation page. This link will create the Google project submission site where you will post your science fair project details.

– If you have signed up but can’t find the link,  Click here to create your Google project submission site.

– Plan your science project, conduct your experiment, and write up your results. – Complete all of the sections of your Google project submission site (see sample project submission site).

– Create either a two-minute video or 20-slide presentation giving an overview of your project and embed it on the Summary page of your project submission. A video or presentation is required to enter. – When your project site is done, make sure to submit it via this form by 4 April 2011.

Notes: * The last date for submission is 4th April 2011.

* The entries must be submitted only in English.

* There are huge amount of scholarship, national geographic expedition as well as gadgets and goodies for the winner.

Categories
Tech News

Protect your notebook from being stolen

When we look at the statistics, it can be noticed that thousands of notebooks are reported as stolen every year. So many time we wish, there should be a way to protect those notebooks from being stolen. I am sure some of the geeky readers might have come across some software based solutions to track the stolen laptop. But all those softwares have some sorts of limitations. However Intel has come up with a hardware based solution to help the laptop owners.

This new technology developed by Intel is called Intel Anti-Theft technology and it is a hardware based solution with software configuration. Notebooks having this technology pre-built to them can disable themselves if they got lost or stolen.

Technology Overview:

– It is hardware-based anti-theft technology with software configuration using LoJack by Absolute software or any other compatible service provider.

– Requires Intel chipset support (not a software-only solution)

– Hardware-level theft detection and data encryption.

– Can disable laptop completely if owner reports as stolen.

– The system periodically checks with LoJack server and verify report status.

How it Works:

System will regularly check with LoJack server and verify the report status.

– If it finds any stolen report it will disable the laptop.

– The disabling of notebook occurs if system detects suspicious behavior like excessive login attempts or counter expiry or stolen report in LoJack server.

– Once system is disabled the data access from hard drive is also restricted even if hard drive is removed and connected to a different system.

– The timer expiry might occur in case of OS re-installation or BIOS flashing, HDD wiped or removed or laptop being disconnected from Internet. In order to prevent this there is an option to disable lockout timer using the LoJack software.

– Once laptop is recovered, it can be unlocked using a pass code or  a security token obtained from the software vendor.

– By default the Anti-Theft technology will be disabled in the notebook when you purchase it. So first thing you need to do before you start using it is to enable it.

How to check if Anti-theft technology is supported:

In order to verify the support of Anti-theft technology in your notebook, you need to go to your BIOS configuration page. (Refer to notebook manual for the correct key to use to go to BIOS). Look for Intel AT under Security. If supported and enabled it will be set to ON, if supported but disabled it will be set to OFF.

If you have purchased the laptop long back, then theer is high chance that it does not support Ant-theft.

The hardware based Anti-theft technology is more secure and provide better result. Being a hardware based technology it comes pre-installed with a new notebook purchase.