Google launches Google Drive, upgrades Gmail to 10 GB for all users

Google has launched Google Drive, a cloud storage service where users can upload and access all of their files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond. The service is offering new users 5GB of storage for free with upgrades starting at 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. Google also increased the free storage in Gmail from the existing 7.5 GB to 10 GB to all users.

“Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future,” Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps, Google has said.

Google’s Dropbox competitor ‘Drive’ to launch today?

Google is preparing to roll out a service to let consumers store photos and other content online, a source familiar with the matter said, pushing into a market now dominated by the likes of Dropbox and Box.

The service, to be called Google Drive, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and would be offered with both free and premium for-pay versions, the source said.

Google’s “cloud storage” offering will incorporate search capabilities and allow users to store pictures, notes and other documents on the Internet and access them from any Web-connected device.

Consumers will get 5 Gigabytes of storage for free with Google Drive, while various versions with incrementally more storage capacity, topping out at about 100 Gibabytes, will be available for monthly fees, the source said.

It was not immediately clear how much Google will charge for the premium versions.

A Google spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation.

The move turns up the competitive heat with high-profile Web startups such as Dropbox, Box and Evernote, as well as with Microsoft Corp and its SkyDrive service.

Some of those services, such as Box, have offered an increasing array of business-oriented features such as online collaboration capabilities.

Google is increasingly developing services to let consumers store their personal information, from digital music to photos, on remote internet servers and access the data any time with any device, such as smartphones, tablets and desktop computers.

The world’s No.1 web search engine with roughly $38 billion in 2011 revenue, Google generates 96 per cent of its revenue from advertising, such as the small ads that appear alongside its search results.

Google Drive will work with sophisticated image search technology to let consumers sift through a wide variety of document types, which could include the likes of Adobe PDF files and photographs, the source said.

Some details of Google Drive have appeared in various online blogs in recent months, including The Next Web, which first reported that the service could be rolled out this week.

8.7 quake hits Indonesia, India issues tsunami warning for Andaman and Nicobar Islands

India issued a tsunami warning for Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the eastern coast on Wednesday after a 8.7 magnitude quake in Indonesia shook major cities, causing panic and sending people fleeing onto the streets.

The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Service issued a red high-level warning for the islands, and also put out lower alerts for the coasts of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

India’s tsunami warning center said waves measuring up to 6 metres were expected along parts of its eastern coast, which was heavily hit by the 2004 tsunami. Smaller waves were expected to hit the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands.

The US Geological Survey said the quake was centred 33 kilometres beneath the ocean floor around 495 kilometres from the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.

Said, an official at Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency who goes by only one name, said a tsunami warning has been issued.

Indonesia straddles a series of fault lines that makes the vast island nation prone to volcanic and seismic activity.

A giant 9.1-magnitude quake off the country on December 26, 2004, triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed 230,000 people, nearly three quarter of them in Aceh.

Email more popular than social networking in India

Facebook, Twitter might be flavour of the season, but email remains more popular than social media as a method of internet communication for Indians, says a survey.

According to global research firm Ipsos, 68 per cent of people across India, who are connected online, send and receive emails while about 60 per cent communicate via social networking sites.

“Internet penetration in India has been very good in recent years, however, relative to country like China, India still does lack behind,” Biswarup Banerjee, Head of Marketing & Communications, Ipsos in India said.

Only 25 per cent use voice-over IP ( VOIP) for audio conversations conducted via an internet connection.

The Indian trend of communicating online is largely similar to the global scenario, as a strong majority (85 per cent) of online-connected global citizens in 24 countries use the internet for emails. Globally, 60 per cent use it for social networking, and little over one in ten use the internet for connecting with people through voice-over IP.

According to industry estimates, 103.6 million people will go online in 2012, and the number of users is expected to more than double to 221.6 million by 2015.

“This along with proliferation of internet access through smart phone will further increase the usage of email, social networking sites and other online communication tools,” said Banerjee.

Incidentally, according to another Ipsos survey, around 40 million Indians access the internet through their smart phones, 56 per cent of smartphone users in the country access the internet multiple times a day. Nearly 40 per cent surf the net at least once a day and only 6 per cent never use their phone for connecting to the Web.

Internet users in Hungary (94 per cent) are most likely to say they use the web for emailing, followed by nine in ten of those in Sweden (92 per cent), Belgium (91 per cent), Indonesia (91 per cent), Argentina (90 per cent) and Poland (90 per cent).

Meanwhile, 83 per cent of Indonesians access the net for social media, in Argentina the figure stands at 76 per cent, Russia (75 per cent) and seven in ten of those in South Africa (73 per cent), Sweden (72 per cent), Spain (71 per cent) and Hungary (70 per cent).

“Although Facebook and other popular social networking sites, blogs and forums, were founded in the United States the percentage of users was lower at six in 10, and in Japan it fell to 35 per cent, the lowest of the 24 countries in the global survey,” added Banerjee.

Ipsos interviewed a total of 19,216 adults in the month of February in an online survey across 24 countries.

Advantage of jQuery over JavaScript Tools

There are many ways in building an Ajax based application. Developers who are proficient in JavaScript can directly write the code and weave it with HTML and XML to build a good looking website. Those who are not familiar with JavaScript could go for frameworks to easily build an application with the programming language they are familiar with.

There are also JavaScript developers who have opted in using these frameworks to build lightweight yet highly interactive online applications.

One of the well known tools in building an efficient Ajax based application is jQuery. This programming language is often used in developing plug-ins for JavaScript and Ajax based applications. This language has been very successful in its role as a plug-in development tool that it can be used to build an entirely new JavaScript or Ajax based applications.

There are other tools that are similar to jQuery but it has stood out in its performance for varying reasons.

Prototype and mooTools are libraries that provide usable functions in JavaScript applications. However, these libraries often slow down the application if they are not properly tested. The global namespace of the application isn’t properly distributed most of the time.

This is due to the fact that these libraries aim to be as exact as possible. As a result, they would limit certain functions from extending their use. JQuery tackles this problem by extending the functions of JavaScript. Since the coding is local, it will never be shared to other languages.

jQuery is also recognized to be an improvement when developers transfer their functions from YUI to jQuery. Yahoo’s framework for developers has its advantages. Developers could easily build an Ajax and JavaScript plug-ins with the help of easy to use interface of YUI. However, the application is too simple for additional developments. Developers will be greatly limited on what they could do in a plug-in.

You’ll also be forced to use YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsByClassName() which is very limiting since the server will be focused on processing data and Yahoo will take care of the functions. Although Yahoo is reliable, it can’t be counted for faster and more interactive applications.

jQuery is also better when compared to Dojo. But that doesn’t mean that Dojo is bad in itself. This highly powerful framework could build highly interactive Ajax based applications in no time. The functions are very extensive and once the developer is familiar with Dojo, the options are almost unlimited.

However, mastering Dojo is like mastering a brand new programming language. It would usually take months before a decent application is built with the help of Dojo. jQuery on the other hand, is originally an easy to use plug-in tool. Developers could easily build an application with the help of jQuery in days only. jQuery also offers almost the same functionality and options as Dojo.

If you’re planning to build a highly interactive application, jQuery should be one of your choices. It’s easy to use and easy to figure out and will ultimately have the same effect compared to other tools for Ajax development.

Life of a Google Query

The “perfect search engine,” defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” To that end, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

From the beginning, our developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads, ours employed linked PCs to quickly find each query’s answer. The innovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It’s an idea that others have since copied, while we have continued to refine our back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

• PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

  PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

• Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Google innovations don’t stop at the desktop. To give people access to the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, we continue to develop new mobile applications and services that are more accessible and customizable. And we’re partnering with industry-leading carriers and device manufacturers to deliver these innovative services globally. We’re working with many of these industry leaders through the Open Handset Alliance to develop Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, which will offer people a less expensive and better mobile experience.

The life span of a Google query normally lasts less than half a second, yet involves a number of different steps that must be completed before results can be delivered to a person seeking information.

3.The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.			1. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book – it tells which pages contain the words that match the query.

	2. The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result.

Displaying Latest Twitter Feeds

PHP Function to Displaying Latest Twitter Feeds

<?php

function display_latest_tweets(
$twitter_user_id, $cache_file = ‘./twitter.txt’,
$tweets_to_display = 100, $ignore_replies = false,
$twitter_wrap_open = ‘<h2>Latest tweets</h2><ul id=”twitter”>’,
$twitter_wrap_close = ‘</ul>’, $tweet_wrap_open = ‘<li><span class=”status”>’,
$meta_wrap_open = ‘</span><span class=”meta”> ‘, $meta_wrap_close = ‘</span>’,
$tweet_wrap_close = ‘</li>’, $date_format = ‘g:i A M jS’, $twitter_style_dates = false) {
// Seconds to cache feed (1 hour).
$cachetime = 60*60;

// Time that the cache was last filled.
$cache_file_created = ((@file_exists($cache_file))) ? @filemtime($cache_file) : 0;

// A flag so we know if the feed was successfully parsed.
$tweet_found = false;

// Show file from cache if still valid.
if (time() – $cachetime < $cache_file_created) {
$tweet_found = true;

// Display tweets from the cache.
@readfile($cache_file);
}
else {
// Cache file not found, or old. Fetch the RSS feed from Twitter.
$rss = @file_get_contents(‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/&#8217;.$twitter_user_id.’.rss’);
if($rss) {
// Parse the RSS feed to an XML object.
$xml = @simplexml_load_string($rss);

if($xml !== false) {
// Error check: Make sure there is at least one item.
if (count($xml->channel->item)) {
$tweet_count = 0;
// Start output buffering.
ob_start();

// Open the twitter wrapping element.
$twitter_html = $twitter_wrap_open;

// Iterate over tweets.
foreach($xml->channel->item as $tweet) {
// Twitter feeds begin with the username, “e.g. User name: Blah”
// so we need to strip that from the front of our tweet.
$tweet_desc = substr($tweet->description,strpos($tweet->description,”:”)+2);
$tweet_desc = htmlspecialchars($tweet_desc);
$tweet_first_char = substr($tweet_desc,0,1);

// If we are not gnoring replies, or tweet is not a reply, process it.
if ($tweet_first_char!=’@’ || $ignore_replies==false) {
$tweet_found = true;
$tweet_count++;

// Add hyperlink html tags to any urls, twitter ids or hashtags in the tweet.
$tweet_desc = preg_replace(‘/(https?:\/\/[^\s”<>]+)/’,'<a href=”$1″>$1</a>’,$tweet_desc);
$tweet_desc = preg_replace(‘/(^|[\n\s])@([^\s”\t\n\r<:]*)/is’, ‘$1<a href=”http://twitter.com/$2″>@$2</a>&#8217;, $tweet_desc);
$tweet_desc = preg_replace(‘/(^|[\n\s])#([^\s”\t\n\r<:]*)/is’, ‘$1<a href=”http://twitter.com/search?q=%23$2″>#$2</a>&#8217;, $tweet_desc);

// Convert Tweet display time to a UNIX timestamp. Twitter timestamps are in UTC/GMT time.
$tweet_time = strtotime($tweet->pubDate);
if ($twitter_style_dates) {
// Current UNIX timestamp.
$current_time = time();
$time_diff = abs($current_time – $tweet_time);
switch ($time_diff) {
case ($time_diff < 60):
$display_time = $time_diff.’ seconds ago’;
break;
case ($time_diff >= 60 && $time_diff < 3600):
$min = floor($time_diff/60);
$display_time = $min.’ minutes ago’;
break;
case ($time_diff >= 3600 && $time_diff < 86400):
$hour = floor($time_diff/3600);
$display_time = ‘about ‘.$hour.’ hour’;
if ($hour > 1){ $display_time .= ‘s’; }
$display_time .= ‘ ago’;
break;
default:
$display_time = date($date_format,$tweet_time);
break;
}
}
else {
$display_time = date($date_format,$tweet_time);
}

// Render the tweet.
$twitter_html .= $tweet_wrap_open.$tweet_desc.$meta_wrap_open.'<a href=”http://twitter.com/&#8217;.$twitter_user_id.'”>’.$display_time.'</a>’.$meta_wrap_close.$tweet_wrap_close;
}

// If we have processed enough tweets, stop.
if ($tweet_count >= $tweets_to_display) {
break;
}
}

// Close the twitter wrapping element.
$twitter_html .= $twitter_wrap_close;
echo $twitter_html;

// Generate a new cache file.
$file = @fopen($cache_file, ‘w’);

// Save the contents of output buffer to the file, and flush the buffer.
@fwrite($file, ob_get_contents());
@fclose($file);
ob_end_flush();
}
}
}
}

// In case the RSS feed did not parse or load correctly, show a link to the Twitter account.
if (!$tweet_found) {
echo $twitter_wrap_open.$tweet_wrap_open.’Oops, our twitter feed is unavailable right now. ‘.$meta_wrap_open.'<a href=”http://twitter.com/&#8217;.$twitter_user_id.'”>Follow us on Twitter</a>’.$meta_wrap_close.$tweet_wrap_close.$twitter_wrap_close;
}
}

display_latest_tweets(‘<twitter-username>’);

?>

Mozilla, Google Patch Browsers Before Hacker Fest

Google and Mozilla have been preparing for the Pwn2Own contest by patching their browsers. This is in anticipation to the contest, where hackers congregate to find and exploit vulnerabilities, especially in browsers. The same contest in the past had hackers holding on to existing but undiscovered vulnerabilities they knew about until the contest, when they exploited the same to save time. It’s little wonder that the Internet majors have patched up their browsers, as Google had paid $1,000 for their troubles last year. Google had also announced a $20,000 reward last month to anyone who can compromise its Chrome browser, which wasn’t be exploited in the last contest.

Google was the first to release a patch fixing 19 flaws in the Chrome browser; of which three bugs were classified as “medium” while the rest were marked as “high” risk vulnerabilities. This was followed by Mozilla publishing fixes for 10 security flaws in Firefox that included eight rated “critical,” while the remaining two were rated “High” and “Moderate”. One of those was particularly malicious, with the hackers being able to code a JPEG image that could save malicious code onto the system memory.

Speaking on the vulnerability, Mozilla warned its users, “Security researcher Jordi Chancel reported that a JPEG image could be constructed that would be decoded incorrectly, causing data to be written past the end of a buffer created to store the image. An attacker could potentially craft such an image that would cause malicious code to be stored in memory and then later executed on a victim’s computer.”

The Pwn2Own hacker contest has been an annual event since 2007, where hackers are encouraged, and even paid to compromise software, computing platforms and web browsers. However, it’s nothing illegal. The event sponsor pays reward money to the hacker and it in turn profits by alerting the vendors of vulnerabilities in their software/OS. The browsers targeted include Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Opera hasn’t been targeted because of the lack of widespread usage and the fact that the contestants use the browser for the same reason.

Successful hackers are asked to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding the vulnerabilities, and the vendors are free to patch their code with the information on vulnerabilities provided the sponsor. Think of this as a monetised form of ethical hacking, and everyone profits at the end of the day.

Eat an apple a day to live longer

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Now, scientists claim the fruit may help one live longer — at least among flies.

Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that when given an apple extract, fruit flies, which share many genes with humans despite their tiny size, lived 10% longer than those fed normally. The flies with normal diet lived an average of 50 days — five days fewer than those whose food was supplemented with apple extract, the Daily Mail reported.

Not only did the flies given the apple extract live 10% longer, they also found it easier to walk, climb and move about as they aged.

The apple extract also cut levels of various biochemicals found in older fruit flies and linked to age-related deterioration, the researchers found.

They believe that the antioxidants in the extract mopped up free radicals, the dangerous chemicals blamed for a host of ills, including ageing.

“The results, obtained with fruit flies — stand-ins for humans in hundreds of research projects each year — bolster similar findings on apple antioxidants in other animal tests,” said a spokesman for the American Chemical Society.

In another study, researchers who quizzed women about their diets found that those who regularly ate apples were 20% less likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes.

Endhiran tickets sold out in US

Superstar Rajinikanth starrer Endhiran‘s ticket booking was started soon after Sun Pictures announced the release date of the film. According to reports, tickets for all the three versions were sold out within hours after bookings were opened.

The US rights was acquired by FICUS Movies, a U.S. based production house. It has bagged the rights of both Tamil and Telugu version for a whooping amount of Rs.35 Crores. However, Venus has acquired the Hindi rights and it will release the Hindi version of the film in US.

Meanwhile, the entire team of Sun Network is vigorously promoting the film by featuring cover stories in all its print network and teasers in satellite channels. The producers have also set up a special team to be vigilant over curbing down the piracy.