Google Voice Search Available For Your Nokia S60 Phones

Google has launched Google Search by Voice Application for Nokia S60 phones, which are hugely popular around the globe.

The new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 phones which cover most N-Series and E-Series phones, when installed, places a a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone’s home screen.This allows you to search either by voice or by typing.

google app nokia s60

[image: Official Google blog]

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Also, the Google Search by Voice has been extended to support Mandarin Chinese.This means that Chinese users can just say the keyword they want to search and it will do come up with Google search result in a blink.

Note:To download the latest version of Google Mobile App directly from your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone’s browser

Orkut’s Cool New Version Launched

Facebook has been gaining a lot of ground among the users in recent times outplaying Google’s Orkut. The Google has finally gets up to the challenge by launching more faster, lighter and much more safer version of their social networking site.

This new version has been developed using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

What’s new ?

  • Simpler and faster loading
  • Easy navigation to other Google properties [You can find links to other Google tools like Gmail, right at the top]
  • One-stop notifications[friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements, all at one place]
  • Fast photo uploads and photo sharing
  • Video Chat Integration
  • Inline comments for status messages, photos and videos
orkut new homepage

New Inline comments feature

More Customization:

Picking up favorite color in orkut

You can now customize your own profile page like never before.The new version claims to have added features like picking your favourite color from a list of 5 available default colors.

But this new version has been allotted to selected few users and you can identify them with thisOrkut favicon symbol next to their profile name.You can ask them for an invite to get started with this new version.

find out more at this page.

Configure Google Friend Connect For WordPress Blogs

Google Friend Connect made its debut to WordPress.Google Friend Connect was previously available only to Blogger blogs through a simple gadget (although you can insert in any other non-blogger sites). Now there’s a more simpler way to this for WordPress , thanks to Mauro Gonzalez, Globant who developed this FriendConnect plugin  plugin to extend GFC to WordPress blogs.

He adds in a guest post in Google Social Web blog,

This plugin allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form.

Now, Let’s see how to setup Google Friend Connect for your WordPress blog:

Step 1: Go to google.com/friendconnect and add your new site details

Google Friend connect adding new site

Step 2: Once you have added you blog’s details, find your unique site ID of your site and note it down.

GFC site ID wordpress

Step 3: Download Google Friend Connect  WordPress Plugin and upload it to plugins folder in your WordPress installation.

Step 4: Under Settings in your dashboard visit ‘FriendConnect’ to configure that plugin.

Enter your site ID in the filed Google FriendConnect ID:

Google FriendConnect wp plugin configuration

Step 5: You can customize the GFC using various colour schemes.

Step 6: If you want to add various GFC widgets, visit widgets tab, you’ll find the widgets like

‘GFC Members’, ‘GFC Recommendations’ & ‘GFC Site Wide Comments’

GFC widgets wordpress

you can also try out various possible settings under them to find out which one best suits your blog.

Is Google Chrome OS Virus Free? A Review

It has been a very exciting news for all of us with the announcement of the Google’s first Desktop Operating System last week. This has been filling up good hopes for all of us as this OS is said to be free, I mean Open source. Moreover the Google Chrome team has claimed it as virus free. We will check the validity of their claim and will this OS will be a hit or will be lost in the air in the near future.

Chrome OS

Google has already launched the light weight Chrome Browser nine months ago. They have claimed that already 30 million people are regularly using it. Google Chrome OS will be an open source OS which will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. But they have not made the code open source yet. It seems the code will be available for us later this year.

Well coming to the point we will have a brief discussion whether it is going to be possible to make a virus-free Operating System. Well we have different views over this one. Some say that this claim is idiotic and it is not possible to make a virus-free OS. Others claim that it may be possible that if we take into account the various security concerns in the developing stages.

In my opinion, if Google has been redesigning an operating system from scratch, taking security into account all the way bottom up, they could make for a more secure OS than ones that  have been developed so far. As they have promised that users won’t have to deal with viruses or malware, we have to assume that they have addressed all the security concerns. Anyhow we have to hope for the best. Well nothing can be labelled virus proof but lets hope that the Chrome team is making the OS more tougher to be attacked.

Another thing is that this will be available for free to everyone and everyone can take part in the development process. The Chrome team has intimated that after the release of the source code later this year they are looking forward to work with the Open Source community and make the OS better to be used. We have been told that the Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies like Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Well talking about the coming OS and its future, there are a lot of tough competitions to be taken care of. The OS giant Microsoft had already seen Google as a potential threat when it emerged a decade ago. They have been trying to beat Google and introduced Live search, now Bing! In order to survive in the market they need to make better products, name and provide better services than others. Seeing the current condition like Google had recently taken off their Beta tag off the Non search services, the OS will also be available to us for testing like Beta. But testing an Operating System in the Beta format is not an easy job over web services.

To summarize, there are a lot that can be done in an OS to reduce the threat of viruses and malwares. If the Chrome team started from scratch and took security seriously all through the design and development process, they have to potential to develop something really secure. And if they have done so, and they have developed a n OS really secure then I am sure that their effort will never go to vain whether the competition is tough or not.

Google Now Lets You Recover Password Through SMS

Some times we go so mad that we even forget our account password :), no one is exception.

google account password recovery Then we have to go through the difficult tasks of verifying our DOB, or secret security questions etc.

Google thought about it, and has added a new option which allows users to recover their Google account password through SMS [Text Message].

How to Enable This Feature?

Just sign into your Google account and as shown in the above screen shot, click on ‘Change Password Recovery Options’.Just enter your mobile number in the required filed to avail this feature.

account password recovery

[image:Official Gmail Blog Post]

Adsense now allows you to change font size of ad units

Google Adsense in a recent program update, has announced the introduction of new option that lets users to change the size of the fonts in ad units, which was previously available only to premium Adsense publishers.

Change Font size Adsense

The above picture which has been taken from Adsense Blog Post(Link) shows how this new option looks like.You can select any font size ranging from Small to Large.To see this options navigate to My Account>>and open Ad Display Preferences.

More Experimenting:

Adsense team has announced that the default ad font which is now ‘Small’ for all the publishers will soon be changed to ‘Medium’ .

We’ve heard from some of you that the current font size can be too small, and our testing also showed that slightly larger font sizes improved performance.

Techrena wants to hear from the Adsense publishers who have implemented this.Do comment about this new Adsense here.

Google SEO Starter Guide now in 40 languages

Google logo Search Engine giant Google had released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide way back in November 2008.It includes a list of best practices that are being used inside Google that many webmasters would want to know.Now Google made this SEO guide to be available in 40 languages.

The languages include Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US & GB), Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuania, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (BR & PT), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Image Ads introduced below Adsense Link Unit Pages

Google Adsense, in a way to improve the revenue for publishers has introduced an image ad at the bottom of the page that one would get after clicking on any Adsense link unit topic.

Image ads below link units in Adsense
Image source:Adsense Official Blog

As in the above image, an image ad will appear on each page that users see after clicking on any link unit.These image ads are contextually targeted as well, and can be either CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Impressions).

P.S: Adsense publishers are strictly prohibited from clicking on their own ads, so never click on your own Ad link unit to see this new feature.[Of course, you always have other ways to test this 🙂 ]

Google PageRank Update May 2009: Techrena now has PR 2

It’s been rather quiet journey here for us since we started this blog 2 months ago, and here comes our first milestone (really??), a Google PageRank 2 !! something that we can cheer about.

Yes, in the recent Google PageRank update which was underway in the last week of May 2009, Techrena Hompage was gifted with a PageRank of 2 by Google and our old techrena.blogspot.com blog still stays at PR 1. PageRank is just a way that Google measures the importance of any site, it doesn’t however effect Search Engine Ranking Positions(SERPs).

Techrena PR2 update may 2009

And how did we manage to get it? Well, we haven’t really participated in any link exchanges (which always never in our minds), but then we have been getting lot of good back links for our quality, content rich blog posts, that helped a lot to achieve this PR 2, now that we have reached this, it’s now all goes in how well we live up to it and reach probably even better PR.

Way to Go, Techrena !!

Expect more from us.

Gmail Adds Automatic Message Translation Feature

Search Engine giant Google has just announced one more interesting feature (actually a Labs launch) which lets you instantly translate Gmail messages to language which you feel comfortable reading.

The new Automatic Message Translation is currently between 41 languages.This feature as Google says is mainly to woo the multi-national companies that use Gmail as their native email provider.

gmail auto translation screen shot

if your entire company uses Gmail, email communications between people in your company can take place in the language that’s most comfortable for them – each person can write messages in their native language and the recipients can translate the messages into their respective native languages.

This new Gmail feature is powered by Cloud Computing. To enable this feature in your Gmail, simply go to “Labs” tab under “Settings” within your Gmail and enable “Message Translation.”. And  for some reasons if you find the translation to be awkward,  you can quickly revert back to the original message just by clicking “View original message”.