Xobni is a new plugin for Outlook 2007 users and it kicks your email capabilities ass. That’s right Brandon, even GMail.

Xobni’s functionality includes:

• Email search. Way faster than the current Outlook07 search. When I started typing in the first two or three letters in Xobni it immediately began pulling up emails with those letters used. It has been a time saver because Outlook takes forever to search through 2 years of emails. With Xobni, it’s pulling them up in seconds.

• Email Analyticss. Fancy little graph showing you the frequency of email usage between you and your contact. Below the graph, it shows you the number of messages sent in and out and the contacts rank based on that number.

• Click-to Functions. Click on their phone number, click to schedule time with person (creates a default email and pulls your availability from your calendar!), or click to email this person.

• Linkedin. If your contact has a Linkedin profile, their information (Company & Title) is shown above the network. Click on the Linkedin logo and your browser will open and take you to that person’s profile.

• Network. Shows you all the people you and that person are associated with.

• Conversations. Shows you the history of correspondence between you and that person. How easy!

• Files Exchanged. Shows you all the files you and that person have exchanged. How convenient!

• Fun Facts. Share fun facts with your contacts, such as who responds the fastest to your emails.

I have a feeling I am going to be a promoter of this tool for a while, or at least until everyone in our Company is using it. Xobni is a snapshot of history with your contacts, without any extra links to click. The tool creates instant satisfaction because it’s information accessible NOW. Outlook is now easier & more fun with a tool like this one.

Xobni is based in San Francisco and was founded by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina in 2006. Xobni is the word Inbox spelled backward. Their mission is “to “take back” the email inbox for our users.” I believe they are on the right track.

Shortcuts are essential if you want to make the most when you’re working or browsing on the web. I have listed the basic, and a few advanced, shortcuts for Firefox users. Sure, you won’t use all of them, but at least try a few throughout the next couple of days and see if one, two, or maybe three work for you. You’ll start to see how productive being online can be without having to constantly reach for your mouse.

Control + A – Highlights all content on the current page

Control + C - Copy

Control + V - Paste

Control + P – Print

Control + S – Save

Control + T – Open a new tab in your current Firefox browser

Control + tab – Go back and forth between tabs

Control + N – Opens a new Firefox browser window

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Not that I need to rant about it, but I’ve become slightly addicted to twitter and much to my dismay something is technically wrong as always. At least this time it’s not that damn flying whale.

On my way in to the office this morning I heard one of the most absurd and disturbing announcements from the automotive industry to date; apparently Chrysler will be offering wireless internet as an option for their 2009 vehicles.

I thought it was a joke, but got in this morning and clearly idiot is reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me begin this post with two definitions
Galaxy - A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system consisting of stars, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and dark matter.
Light Year is the distance traveled by light in one year which is 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles
With the above two definitions in mind just read the below statement carefully and take few minutes to imagine what you read

The size of our galaxy is estimated to be 100,000 light-years across and 10,000 light-years thick. If our entire solar system were reduced to the size of a quarter, then the galaxy would be width of the United States.
This is as per nasa.
THERE ARE BILLIONS OF GALAXIES IN THE UNIVERSE.

Are you amazed by these facts and would like to explore more about our space then here is something for you.

World Wide Telescope Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

The best part of this project byMicrosoft is that the images that shown are from observations associated with real instrument, like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). These are the few advanced telescopes that mankind has sent in to space.

There are different views available to look at the same celestial body. One can see the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. There is the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way.

You will not get bored and lost by just zooming IN and OUT in the dark sky. The Software allows you to download guided tours by various authors on different planets, galaxies etc. The images are worth downloading if you have any interest in astronomy.

You can download the software from its website Download

Tomorrow morning I leave for New York. Thursday I will be attending a conference and Friday I will be traveling to Boston. I hoped to make the four hour trip from NY to Boston by train in an attempt to be a bit greener and as homage to my grandfather who sold trains for GE during his life. I visited Amtrak’s webpage to purchase tickets for a morning train into Boston a week and a half ago. Short timing I realize but the decision to go was very last minute. No seats were available. The site was easy enough to use, it wasn’t user error but nothing was offered.

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If you would like to learn about web technologies then spare few minutes to take a look at this really good website ( http://w3schools.com/ ) which provides free web building tutorial. The website is more useful to a novice user. I learnt about PHP from this site after which i understood what the question marks in the PHP code means. It has tutorials on HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML and other technologies like JavaScript, PHP, ASP, SQL and much more.

It is good starting point for beginners who want to learn about different web technologies. The website besides providing a step by step tutorials also has code snippets and actual code in a particular language so that one can try out how the language actually works.
The website if pretty much simple but here are few things worth noting….
1)Once you click on a particular tutorial the left column of the website changes to a table of content like structure for that particular language.
2)The right column has examples (source code) written in different languages. It also has reference material links which you can refer to for more details
3)Many users of the website overlook the useful and pretty active forum of the website wherein you can post your questions and you tend to get a pretty quick response. The link to the forum is at the top of the right hand column
Have a good learning experience

Where Social Media has been a community of people exchanging information endlessly over the last 12 years¹, The New York Times is working its way into the network (within its own network of journalists). TimesPeople is an online community composed of those reading the Times and recommending the Times to other friends/followers, who then read your Times and recommend those articles to their friends/followers.

Time Out!

This is beginning to look like an endless cycle of a one-track mind. In a time when we should be seeking additional sources of information, TimesPeople has now taken Social Media one step back – limiting the user to only recommend articles within The Times network. Social Media is not a socialist community! Read the rest of this entry »

With Social Networking Sites on the rise it is interesting to see how sites differentiate themselves. There are some great niche specific networks pertaining to: the social good, business applications, medical applications and various personal pursuits. With all these options available, I think it is important to focus and to be involved in the networks that offer what you need.
I joined my first networks upon entering college. Initially, Facebook and MySpace helped me keep tabs on all my old friends. The novelties of the resources were very exciting, and for a couple of years these sites have offered everything I wanted. It has taken a bit longer to realize they don’t offer all that I need.

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Download Day 2008 has been launched by Mozilla Firefox to beat the Guinness Book of Records for most downloads in one day. Their goal is to reach 5 million downloads. As of 4:08pm CST the total number of downloads is 2,623,432. There is even a map of total region downloads and a rollover feature for each country’s total downloads. Sleek.

There are over 15,000 new features in Firefox 3, including:

• One-click bookmarking
• “Awesome Bar” which recommends sites that you have visited before
• Better security
• Easy to use password management
• Simplified add-on installation
• Improved performance of speed and memory usage

I just installed ScreenGrabber. The screen grabber function allows you to save/copy the whole screen, visible portion, or selection (like the image above) to your folder or desktop. The whole process took less than 10 seconds.

Mozilla’s open source project started back in 1998. Today it’s known as Mozilla Corporation. The Company has over 800 code contributors, supports 35 languages, and has 3 affiliates in China, Europe and Japan.

Update: As of June 29, 2008, 13 days after Mozilla launched Firefox 3, the total number of downloads has reached 25,462,056. That’s equivalent to 1.9 million downloads per day, 81.6 thousand per hour, 1.3 thousand per minute, and 22 downloads per second.