Author: Tehseen Baweja

Blippy, is a social network for shoppers. Blippy users share with each other what they have just bought and socialize around their purchases. Apparently, some users got much more than they signed up for when there credit card numbers showed up on Google recently.

When a power user entered search term site:blippy.com “from card” , Google showed him a number of recent purchases by Blippy users along with their credit card numbers. As reported by VentureBeat, most of them were Citibank issued master card numbers. Investigation is still underway to determine how this happened, but Google has meanwhile blocked all searches for the site Blippy.com

What makes the event more interesting is the reply by Blippy Co-Founder Philip Kaplan, who says it is not as bad as it looks. According to him, we hand our credit card to waiters and cashiers all the time and the 4 users affected by this incident need not worry since they are not responsible for any purchases made without their permission. He further explains how the credit card numbers go back during Blippy’s beta days when the data was on HTML pages and somehow those pages were still in Google cache.

Even though, the incident didn’t cause much damage, it is still shocking to see how vulnerable sensitive information has become due to it being accessed by every mom and pop social network. It is also interesting to know that Blippy had raised $11 Million of funding just a day before this credit card fiasco.

[Image Credit VentureBeat]

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FourSqaure is probably the hottest web property in town right now. We already knew that Yahoo! is probably trying to buy out FourSqaure, but it seems like Microsoft and Facebook have joined the bandwagon too. The valuation FourSqaure is getting right now seems to be north of $100 Million.

One should keep in mind though that besides these acquisition and partnership offers, FourSqaure still has lots of VCs eager to pour money in. What will Dennis Crowley, the founder of FourSqaure, decide? He has already sold one of his startups , Dodgeball, to Google before and that wasn’t the best decision of his life.

Techcrunch is also reporting that Facebook may be more interested in a strategic partnership instead of an outright acquisition. This will serve Facebook well in complementing its own , location based service, which is talk of the town since last few weeks. Do you think Dennis Crowley should sell FourSqaure or just trust its growth rate and wait for a bigger and better opportunity?

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We told you earlier about 3 Idiots becoming available on YouTube for a legal download. Now it seems like the official YouTube video rental store has been launched at YouTube.com/store. You can use the store to rent movies and TV shows for a specific price ($0.99 to 419.99) and be able to watch them for upto a pre-defined limit (usually 24 hours).

The store already contains a number of movies (lots of Bollywood), documentaries, popular TV shows, biographies and even some educational videos. Most of the TV shows include information about the air date and even the number of views the videos have received. Before renting out a video, you can watch a 2 minute preview to see the video quality. You do need a YouTube account to use the rental service. Payments are made through Google Checkout.

If you need help with the service, YouTube has a separate support platform. The service does not currently allow you to download videos, but you can play it as much as you want during the allotted 24 hours. Another catch is that YouTube rentals are only available to US users right now. Plus, like every good video rental store if you were unable to play a video due to a technical issue, you can claim a refund by filling out this form.

It is interesting to see that some of the videos can be rented out for an unlimited period of time which means you’ll have access to them forever. Any organization with authentic videos that have a demand can become a YouTube partner and start renting out videos online. There is no fixed fee for listing but YouTube shares the revenue with you.

Do you think this model will work for YouTube? Also, with so many streaming movies available at Netflix for a fixed price, why would somebody pay-per-video to watch the videos on YouTube?

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Everyday the battle between iPhone and Android gets more intense. Even though Android is nowhere close to iPhone yet, but the growth rate is phenomenal. A recent proof of that comes from the fact that Android market now has over 38,000 apps. FierceMobileContent reports that this is a 70% increase from last quarter.

More interestingly, Google claims that they are now selling and activating around 60,000 new Android phones every day. There are now 34 different phones from a dozen different manufacturers that are powered by Android. With Google’s acquisition of adMob, Apple starting a rival mobile ad platform and the high growth rate of Android apps, the competition between iPhone and Android will just get more fierce.

However, it is clear that Google has its fair share of problems when it comes to mobile. For example, the FTC still doesn’t like Google’s acquisition of adMob for $750 Million and is trying to mount an anti-trust challenge. If Google cannot hold ground in this issue, it would be a huge below for Android. There are tens of other mobile ad networks out there and with so many new phones coming out each week, the market is getting quiet competitive.

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Facebook’s recently launched “Like” feature, which aims to make the whole web more social, is the most actively discussed topic right now. Webmasters across the world seem to be debating whether to implement the feature or not. Buy if you use Google Chrome, you don’t need to wait to see your favorite website implement the feature.

The Google Chrome extension let you ‘Like’ any website with a couple of clicks. Once you install the add-on from here, a small facebook icons appear next to your address bar. Clicking on that button while browsing any website would allow you to show your likeness for the website and also display recent activity from your friends. However, you do need to be logged in to Facebook to access this feature, if you are not, a pop-up window will ask you to do so first.

Whenever you ‘Like’ a webpage, the activity will show in your Facebook feeds, so make sure you don’t click on any websites that you don’t want to show up on your Facebook profile. It is a great little tool to make your browsing more social and share good stuff from across the web with your Facebook friends.

[Via DownloadSquad]

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When 59 year old Bill Jordan went to get his iPad from the local Apple store, he paid a little more than the agreed price of $499. As the story goes, when the Denver resident left Apple store with his prized gadget, he had his fingers wrapped around the device so he doesn’t drop it. Little did he know that somebody more enthusiastic than him has been stalking him. As soon as the thief got a chance, he got into a physical struggle with Bill Jordan to snatch his iPad.

As crazy as it sounds, the thief tried so hard that in addition to the iPad, he was able to tore some flesh off the pinky. The finger had to be amputated to prevent further damage. The police, however, has caught the event on a surveillance camera and is trying to catch the culprit. Here is a picture of Bill Jordan after the incident:

The funniest part of the story is that Bill Jordan didn’t even know what an iPad is; rather, his company told him to get one as a business gift to a co-worker. Denver Crime Stoppers are offering a reward of $2000 to anybody who can lead to the capture of this iPad culprit. Am I the only one who thinks this iPad craze is going a bit too far? Below is the video from one of the surveillance cameras showing the incident:

[Image Credit: Mashable]

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Traditionally, if you want to sell something online you would either setup a store or put it up on eBay. Even though both these options are great, they don’t work for each and every situation. For example, if you want to sell only a couple of items and want to target them to a certain group of people, none of these would work. In such situations, a better solution is to use a service like TinyPayMe.

It takes less than 2 minutes to setup a sale on TinyPayMe; you can include as little or as much information possible including price, quantity, pictures, description, tags, location and any personal info that you want to publish. You can sell physical items as well as digital content using TinyPayMe. Once you have created your listing, simply share the link with desired audience or embed it on your website or blog. A user will be able to purchase the item through PayPal instantly.

The service however is not free, they do charge 5% of the selling price as their service fee. You can also donate a portion of every sale to a specific charity if you want. There is also an option to display pageviews, include listing in search results and require a shipment address from the buyer. Over all, TinyPayMe is not a world-changing solution but can work really well if you are trying to do a very targeted sale and think the convenience is worth the 5% fees.

[Via DownloadSquad]

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Far away from all the hubbub of China vs. Google, a Chinese company has made a silent albeit important acquisition. The company being acquired is Echolane, one of the top solution providers and consultants for many cloud-based technologies including Salesforce.com. Echolane has been bought by a Chinese technology company called hiSoft which is one of the leading IT outsourcing companies in the world. Founded by Salesforce.com alumni, Echolane will remain a wholly owned subsidiary of hiSoft.

With this latest acquisition in the cloud-based technology, it is clear that Chinese companies know where the future lies and are trying to get ahead of the game. They might not beat Google or Microsoft when it comes to offering cloud-computing, but with globally dominant outsourcing, they’ll probably be involved in the process somewhere in between. With this ever increasing reliance on Chinese companies for outsourcing, would the US ever be able to confront China on any technology issue? Let’s just say Google had deep enough pockets to accept the consequences of walking out of China, but would small and mid-size companies be able to afford to do so? I don’t think so.

With every such move, it’ll just get harder for US to sever technology ties with China. On the other hand, China has proved again and again that when it comes to technology, the world needs them more than they need the world. With Baidu and AliPay, China doesn’t need Google or PayPal, but these global internet giants still dream of establishing themselves in the huge Chinese market and capture billions of dollars of potential revenue.

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Wikipedia is no doubt one of the most commonly used websites for reference. It is the first place people turn to when looking to explore a new topic. However, reading all those pages online is not always easy, so, here is a way to organize multiple Wikipedia pages into a PDF book that can be downloaded, printed and read on your favorite mobile device.

Here are a few short steps you need to take to turn any set of pages into an eBook:

1. Go to Wikipedia and create a free account.

2. Enable the Beta interface.

3. Under the Print/Export menu on left side-bar, click on Create a book.

4. Now every article you visit will have an Add this page to your book option. Click on that to add as many articles to your book as you want.

5. Once done, click on the show book button to see and download your book.

You can also give your book a title, create chapters, sort it alphabetically and download it as an OpenDocument. If you want to have it printed and delivered to you, there is an option to do that as well costing $7.90 for a book of up to 100 pages. While managing your book, you can simply drag and drop the items to re-arrange their order or click on the trash button to remove them quickly.

[Via DigitalInspiration]

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With the battle between iPhone and Android gaining serious momentum, the two parties are not leaving any chance to drag each other out. In a recent response to a customer inquiry about Apple’s policies, Steve Jobs said that users who want porn on their phones should get an Android device.

When Matthew Browning, an Apple customer, emailed Steve Jobs about unjustified removal of Mark Fiore’s application and ranted out about Apple’s recent policies regarding seemingly inappropriate apps, here is what Steve Jobs had to say:

Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and Android phone.

Originally shared with TechCrunch by Matthew, this email clearly shows how a corporate/brand war has converted into an aggressive PR battle. However, this is not the first time Steve Jobs has tried to criticize Android for allowing porn. At the recent iPhone 4.0 OS event, he said:

You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.

To me, that is a little bit more than what we call bashing your competition. It is almost as if Jobs think of Android as a promoter of pornography and iPhone as a saint. Can somebody ask him how his views about adult apps changed so suddenly and why he allowed them in his app store for a long while before blocking them without any notice? One thing is clear though, the Android and iPhone war is much more serious than we think it is.

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If you have read any newspaper or watched any news channel in last 3-4 days, you are sure to know about the disaster in Iceland and its implications. A volcano has erupted in Iceland but the ash cloud formed by the lava has moved so fast across Europe that thousands of flights have been canceled due to low visibility.

NewYorkTimes has designed an interactive tool that tracks flight cancellations based on airports and countries. A nice colorful map shows you which airports have all flights canceled (marked in red), which airports have some flights canceled (marked in yellow) and which airports are open (marked in green). Below the map, is a complete list of European airports that have been affected along with their airport code and a recently updates status. Clicking on any of the airport takes you directly to their website where you can read latest news.

It is a great tool to track impacted airports and flights through this natural disaster that has already caused airlines billions of dollars.

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With 400 Million users and a FacebookConnect button on thousands of websites, Facebook is slowly monopolizing the way people do social sharing. Not any more. Meebo, the company behind Meebo Bar and web-based chat platform is introducing a new way for people to share links.

Instead of giving users 10, 15 or 20 top social bookmarking sites to choose from, XAuth will find out what services the site visitor uses and prompt them to log-in so they can share stuff with friends on those networks. It completely eliminates the need to guess is visitors to a site would be more interested in Digg or Reddit or StumbleUpon. What makes XAuth seriously competitive to FacebookConnect is the fact that Google, MySpace and Yahoo! have already joined in.

This is how XAuth would work. When a visitor comes to Techie-Buzz, XAuth will ping all participating social networks like MySpace and Yahoo! and Google Buzz to see which of these services are used by the visitor. Whichever services return a positive reply, will be displayed to the user. For Meebo, it provides another opportunity to display more ads and make some money. For other networks who will opt-in, it will just provide a way to counter the growing share of FacebookConnect on social sharing.

There are ofcourse privacy implications because not every user would want every website in the world to know what social networks it uses. For example, if a NSFW or adult website implements the XAuth system, it can also get information about the social networks you use, something most of the people would not like due to privacy concerns.

[Image Credit: VentureBeat]

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There are many tools that let you resize or watermark your images but very few that let you do both. PicGhost is an online tool that lets you edit images, resize them and add watermark to them in bulk. The images can either be uploaded from your computer or from the web.

Once the images are selected, you can specify a custom width and height or resize them to match the smallest or the largest image. You can also choose from one of the many recommended sizes to quickly resize the images. The option to lock the aspect ratio maintains the proportionality of your images.

The tool also lets you add a text or image watermark to your images. You can either upload the watermark image from your computer, or enter the text to display. Custom selection of font, font size and color let you customize the look of your watermark. You can also choose the alignment of the watermark on your images or have it tiled. Once the images are edited, you can preview them before downloading them as a single zip file.

Techie Buzz Verdict:

PicGhost is a great multi-purpose image editor and resizer that saves a lot of time and effort. The interface is intuitive and the the functionality is simple.

Rating: 4/5

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People often think what 237 Million monthly active users mean for the popular social gaming company Zynga. Well, according to some equity analysts, the traffic, monthly revenue and some other metrics mean Zynga is worth around $5 Billion right now. The report was recently released by analysts at SecondaryShares.com and  claims that each Zynga share would fetch $15 if it were to go IPO right now.

Currently, Zynga is a privately-held company and the shares are traded by accredited investors at places like the SecondaryMarket at $9 per share. Analysts think that with projected $500 Million revenue for the current year and cross-marketing opportunities Zynga has, the revenues might go as up as $1.6 Billion in next few years. These assumptions are based on an estimated $2.25 revenue per Monthly Active User. If Zynga continues at the projected growth rate, it may very well be worth up to $15 Billion by 2015.

The assumptions are also , quite heavily. based on the numbers that Chinese social gaming company Tencent brings in. It is also interesting to note that Zynga was the #2 merchant for PayPal in 2009 and owns 6 of the top 7 games on Facebook. However, with Facebook as well as Farmville about to reach the peak of their popularity soon, it would be quite difficult for Zynga to maintain the same growth rate in coming years. Still, Zynga is one of the best examples of how something as casual as social games can turn into a very serious business.

The complete report can be downloaded here.

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FourSquare, the popular location-based social network, is probably only rivaled by Twitter when it comes to growth in early years. With millions of users checking-in daily, it is the hottest property around. BusinessInsider reports that Yahoo! deal-makers are talking about buying FourSqaure for $100 Million. The story which is quite vague on details reads

“Yahoo’s M&A deal-makers are deciding right now whether or not to buy super-hot location-based startup Foursquare for ~$100 million, says a source close to bankers involved in Foursquare’s current fund-raising efforts.”

But with some of the biggest VCs (Khosla and Accel) fighting to invest in FourSqaure at a valuation of $80 Million, the sale price of $100 Million doesn’t sound a really good deal. Moreover, with no comments from Dennis Crowley, FourSqaure founder, or Yahoo!, it seems more probable that the whole deal is just an effort by the investment bankers to sweeten the $80 Million valuation.

Dennis Crowley’s first project was Dodgeball, a Twitter-like service that was bought by Google in 2005. Dennis claims he only sold it because of the lack of funding. This, however, isn’t the case with FourSqaure and with the current growth and popularity FourSqaure enjoys, the deal would be a very cheap bargain for Yahoo! but a very unfortunate one for Dennis.

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Postal service in Finland, it seems, has had enough of sending postmen out in freezing temperatures and on long routes. In order to be more time and energy efficient, they will now open the letters, scan them and send them electronically to recipients. Currently, the program is in a trial mode and 126 households and 20 businesses are participating.

The message would be sent to a secure digital mailbox that can only be accessed by the original recipient. An email and mobile phone alert would also be sent informing the recipient about new mail. The exercise of opening and scanning the mail would take place in specially secured premises where the staff is bound by confidentiality obligations.

The program aims at reducing CO2 emissions and the number of employees used to distribute mail in the scattered population of one of the coldest countries in the world. The trial program starts on April 12th and will continue through the end of the year. However, despite all the claimed social, economical and environmental benefits, the program is being heavily debated by people who think that it would compromise the privacy. People are going as far as to suggest that this program will be used to spy on the confidential communication.

Do you think it will work in Finland or elsewhere in the world? Or is it too impractical due to privacy and other issues?

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With the whole world drooling for the recently launched Apple iPad, HP is trying to assure its employees, through an internal presentation, that HP Slate wouldn’t be anything less than competitive. As Engadget reports, HP Slate will have a 1.6 GHz processor compared to iPad’s 1 GHz, and the minimum storage would be 32 GB compared to iPad’s 16 GB.

HP Slate will also have an SD/SDHC.SDXC Card Reader providing up to 12 GB of extra storage for all those movies and songs. It will run on the very successful Windows 7 Home Premium edition and will have a VGA Webcam. While Webcam and SD Card give a big advantage to HP Slate, the smaller screen, lower-performing battery and an extra 50 bucks would make it difficult for HP to win the hearts.

Some other specs also include a 1 GB RAM, USB Port, a 1024 x 600 multi-touch display, an extra 3MP outward facing camera and an HDMI outlet. The whole list of specs is displayed below via Engadget.

Over all, iPad might be the better looking one of two, but when it comes to functionality and possible integration with other devices such as Computers and Mobile Phones, I believe HP Slate would be better off.  What do you think? Would you wait for an HP Slate or are rushing to get an iPad right now?

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To start with, aMSN is an exact clone of MSN Messenger offering the same functionality and even the same look and feel. It lets you chat, transfer files, arrange contacts in groups, save chat logs, set automated away messages, do conferencing, use web cam and almost all the other good stuff that the original MSN Messenger allows you to. However, there are many features that make this clone almost better than the original MSN:

• Multi OS Support. Works with Windows, Mac OS, Linux and even Nokia N900.
• Multi language support: currently in over 40 languages.
• Multi-account sign in.
• Over 25 different skins to choose from.
• Much lighter and quicker to install than MSN.
• Lots of third-party plug-ins to customize the functionality.
• Time stamping and tabbed chat windows.
• Dual display pictures.
• You can create your own plug-in.

These are just some of the features that, to me, make aMSN a much better candidate to use than the original MSN Messenger. Of course there are other uses of it too for example if your school/office doesn’t allow you to install MSN or if the original MSN messes up your OS. To me, the simple fact that it is such a light-weight alternative is good enough to make the switch.

Download aMSN here. [Via ilovefreesoftware]

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Hyper-links probably have a history as old as the internet. They are used almost in every article, blog post or website pretty heavily to point the user to a different web page. They work very well indeed, but how about a situation when you want to point your reader to multiple web sites. Traditionally you would create multiple hyper-links for them since it is the norm.

Butns is a new web service that is trying to revolutionize the way hyper0links work. It allows you to hide multiple hyper-links under one. For example, instead of saying “Check out Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Bing and Twitter” you would say, check out these websites”.

These multiple hyper-links are called butns and can be easily generated at butns.com. Just start by entering the word you want to turn into hyper-links and then choose a style for your hyper link. You can have it underlined, double underlined, bold or even dotted. After that, specify the hyper-links you want to include in your butn; you can choose from many popular URLs or enter a custom one. Once done, butns will generate a code for your hyper-link that can be pasted on your website or blog.

It may take a couple of minutes more to do than the traditional hyper-links, but it will definitely save some screen real-estate and make your website look good.

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Millions of views on a video is okay but even a few comments can make it annoying for some people. YouTube does have an option to block comments in works but how about if you can do it more easily. If Google Chrome is your browser of choice, there is a great extension that can block all the YouTube comments for you.

Once you have installed the extension from here, browse YouTube like you normally do and you won’t even notice that the comments section has completely disappeared. The extension works seamlessly without making it obvious that the comments have actually been blocked. In addition to keeping out the useless banter between users, blocking the comments also makes the page shorter and hence easier to scroll.

The extension was introduced very recently so might have a few bugs but overall seems to be a very useful and productive add-on. If you are looking for some more useful Chrome extensions, here are some really good ones that we have covered in the past. On the other hand, if you are a Firefox user and want to manage YouTube comments better, here is a great add-on for that.

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