TechJournal

Aside from getting real time Tweets, people using Twitter seems also to want some pics or photos to go with the text Tweets they receive. Yahoo now tries to make it easier for Twitter users to share their photos via Flickr with their new Flickr2Twitter feature.

People with Flickr accounts and are avid sharers of photos to friends and family may now be able to share them the easy way via the new Flickr2Twitter feature. This feature allows Flickr users to directly also send out selected Flickr images as Tweets. After uploading a photo in Flickr, users may then simultaneously send it as a Tweet. Users only add up Twitter as an approved app (add as a blog) on their account. The next time they upload a picture on Flickr, they can send it to Twitter by simply clicking on the "Blog This" tab and choose their twitter account. It sends out the Tweet along with its own shortened URL.

Flickr has been testing this feature for about a month or so and has finally made it available for its members to use. Although Flickr may have offered the Twitter feature quite a bit later in the game than other photo sites such as Twitpic, Photobucket and Posterous, it may still catch on with its huge number of members who (this would be quite safe to say) are also avid Twitter users. ...more

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The Europeans are fed up with it:  Changing one phone charger after another among different mobile phone brands, and even to different models.  The European Commission demanded that there should be a standard phone charger, which many mobile phone companies declined because of the usual alibis:  They have different battery requirements or what not.

Many manufacturers try to solve this problem by providing multiple chargers in a single unit, such as the one in the picture.  However, with over 30 different types of mobile phone chargers being used in Europe, shouldn't it be better if all of these simply use a single type of charger?

After much pressure, top mobile phone companies have agreed with demands of European Union and will push for a harmonized phone charger.  Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple, LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, and Texas Instruments will have a standard charging device available in Europe starting next year. ...more

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With the competition among portable gaming systems becoming ever tighter, the makers are trying to consider different ways in order to attract more consumers to their products. Sony is about to come out with its new baby, the Sony PSP Go. But the company does not just stop there. Sony might also be considering adding a phone feature into the next generation of PSP's.

It is not the first time that a combination portable gaming system and mobile phone gadget has ever been introduced into the market. Nokia did it with their own N-Gage line. Sadly, the endeavor never took off.

The Nokia N-Gage model was considered a failure since the device never really got popular with the people, both gamers and cell phone users alike. Despite the popular idea of having both a mobile phone and a portable gaming system in one device, the N-Gage concept never really hit it off with the public. One of the reasons might have been Nokia's lack of insight into the great features of the device (selling N-Gage without any free built-in games to try out? Come on!). ...more

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A death of a celebrity surely would cause sadness to a lot of fans. That is why the Web gets inundated with searches associated with a recent celebrity death. Search trends seem to follow the lead of such news. But in the case of Michael Jackson's death, things can get really out of hand on the Web.

It was maybe due to the suddenness of the news that the Web came in with a huge wave of users trying to get more updates about the recent news of MJ's death. According to reports, the first news that ever came online was from the hugely popular TMZ site. The news came in on Tuesday at around 2 pm. As people got word of it, many wanted to get into the site to confirm the report. It was maybe due to the sudden huge influx of visits to the site that TMZ was then reported to have gone down several times.

The news further spread into Twitter. People hearing about the then unconfirmed news sent out Tweets to friends to get some confirmation. This led to the news further spreading into the Twitter community as more and more people wanted confirmation on the news. It got so huge that the Search and Trending feature on Twitter was mostly about Michael Jackson. It was maybe due to the huge avalanche of searches for info on MJ's death that this usual Twitter feature was temporarily disabled in order for the site to stay up.  ...more

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Mobile giant Nokia is partnering up with chip giant Intel Corporation to develop a long term relationship that would greatly influence the mobile computing industry of the future. The said partnership will be aiming to develop a new class of Intel-based chip architecture for mobile phones. The partnership is geared toward developing faster and better smart phones and other similar portable devices in the future.

The Nokia-Intel partnership is geared to create a team with each company's set of expertise merging and working towards a common goal, that of making the next generation smart phones and PDA's. Nokia is an established leader in the mobile phone industry. Intel is the market leader when it comes to providing processors to today's computers. Put them together and you get a partnership having the means to usher in the next generation mobile devices.

Nokia and Intel also includes collaborating in several open source project developments, most notably involving use of Linux in order to come up with technologies that would work along a common platform and systems for the next generation mobile computing devices. Ideas and designs that go beyond what is currently available in the market is a key feature that the long term partnership would be tackling according to the top brass in both companies. This would surely make the mobile as well as the computing industry continuously buzzing with excitement in the years to come. ...more

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Facebook is recently going through a problem with click fraud. Many advertisers on its pages are increasingly complaining that clicks on the ads that the popular social network site may not be a realistic view of clicks actually made by visiting users.

According to an article on TechCrunch, some advertisers have alleged that clicks not accounted as real clicks find their way in the results that Facebook comes up with. Advertisers even say that some of these clicks don't seem to exist at all.

This scenario seems to be quite different from the type of click fraud that that have hounded many online search engines with pay per click advertising such as Google and Yahoo. On the search engines, the fraud is made by automated bots that click on the ads. This comes out as artificial and with misleading results, since automated clicks never convert into any desired consumer action. But the results that click fraud brings bigger ad payments made by advertisers since charges are made on a per click basis. It can be considered as a loss on the part of the advertisers since such automated clicks never lead to actual conversion in terms of sale or any other action. ...more

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It still rings true that whoever (or whatever) offers information in real time may have better appeal to most people. This can never be truer than in the social Web. The active people on the social Web usually look for information about their colleagues, friends or even news the earliest that it comes out online. No wonder real time search engines are suddenly cropping up everywhere on the Web.

The best search engine in the social Web is one that offers real time updates to its users. One of such search engines that recently came out on the Web (like just a couple of days ago) was one named Collecta. Although there have been other real time search engines out there such as OneRiot and Tweetmeme (which tracks popular Twitter links in real time), Collecta seems to be working in actual real time. Results change on certain keywords by the second, as new stories and links are being posted on different sites that this real time search engine follows.

The Collecta real time search engine makes use of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) technology which allows one site to send small pieces of XML code to another in real time. This allows Collecta to gather information from sites such as Twitter, news sites, popular social media and blogs as they are being posted online. ...more

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Although it may not be entirely new, cloud gaming is something that has been around for a year or two. With cloud computing being considered by experts as the next big trend of the near future, it would make sense that cloud gaming may also follow suit and might just become the biggest thing to happen in the gaming world.

When you say cloud computing, the basic idea is that computers try to access or harness computing power from a so-called "cloud" which can be a group of servers accessible through the Internet where a bunch of online applications reside. Through this server, computer users can then call on to any application of their choosing and run it from the "cloud" to perform a variety of tasks.

Under cloud computing, computer users no longer have to go through the process of arming their own PC's with applications that they use or upgrading their computer to be able to support newer applications. Everything would be available through the "cloud". That is the very basic idea behind the concept. ...more

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Dell may have shown just how potentially profitable having a Twitter page can be. At least it is something that Twitter itself has not yet solved. But while the people at Twitter may still be finding ways to generate revenue, other companies like Dell have made it work to their advantage the way that they know how.

According to a blog post at Dell, their DellOutlet Twitter page has generated around $2 million worth of revenue for the company. Well, it was sometime last year that the online world was abuzz with the growing popularity of Twitter. Dell somehow managed to make this work to their advantage by putting up their own Twitter page that provides customers and other Twitter users with updates on new products as well as discounts in real time. The Dell Twitter page also provided customers with some real time customer service through Twitter, making it quite a novel yet popular use of the new micro-blogging site to a company's advantage.

Since then, Dell has reported around $2 million in sales that can be attributed to their @DellOutlet on Twitter. This proves to be quite interesting given that Twitter itself has not yet made strides in trying to establish its own stream of revenue from the service it offers. From its inception up until now, the popular micro-blogging site is still operating under investment capital and not yet making money. ...more

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