Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta

image source: Yahoo!

Yahoo! launch Beta version 9 of their messenger service. The new version has a whole lot of features. It has the ability to View Yahoo Videos, YouTube, Flickr, Forward Text messages, Voice calls between computers and whole lot more.

The Yahoo Messenger 9 will flaunt its new design interface and the favorite emoticons will feature new moods and stylish icons. The interactions and features using this new app has been improved at higher levels. For example, when you mouse over a friend's ID, options to IM, call or sms appear making it easier to navigate. Another interesting feature is the increase of file size that can be transferred over the messenger service, its upto 2GB of data which is a GB more than what was available before.

A very good package all together...

Flash Loaded

With plenty of interactive flash websites coming up everyday. We see drastic change in design and creativity over years now. This is purely because of broadband prevailing across the globe. With the popularity of Flash used on website, Flashloaded has come up with many flash components for designers to integrate on websites for a price.

Have a look at their extensive library of flash components and widgets.

Also check: FlashDen

The Winepocket

Now something to improve the way you gift a Wine bottle to your friend or family member. Tired of the good old brown bag? Here is something to impress your friend/party host with a cool and presentable carry bag and its the Winepocket. The design gives a comfortable opening at the top to grip onto the Winepocket and the same opening is used to place and pull the wine bottle out. The Winepocket is made out of industrial wool.

Cow-powered laptops !

One Laptop Per Child Project is finalizing the design of a cow-powered generator that can be used as a low-cost energy source in Indian villages. The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost cows.

There is a plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat that is commonly used as taxis in Mumbai ) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle.

The goal is to develop a low-cost energy source that can be used in Indian villages. Working in a village close to Mumbai, OLPC's Sarwal said the group considered using solar energy but sunlight near Mumbai was not "consistently strong." There was not enough wind or running water nearby to use these as sources of power, and the cost of running a gas-powered motor was too high.But the village had an abundance of cattle that were being used in the fields. So we decided to design something around that.

Blue Pulse introduce Social Networking over a mobile phone. Future is mobile and right from banking, chatting, communicating, internet and now Social Networking. The service features a Universal Inbox where messages, updates and invites from friends are consolidated in one box. Group messaging is also possible on this service.

Bountii, product search engine

Bountii, is a search engine to look-up and compare price and best deals of consumer products. Their unique point is having detailed and intense price information and details on products when compared with other product based search engines. The site targets users looking for best deals on consumer electronics, digital cameras, television, LCD s, computers etc. The information shared with the users based on search results include Shipping, low prices of a specific product etc.

With the festive season just around the corner Bountii could have a lot of people hitting the site for better and smart deals to go for.

Sony launch HDMS-S1D 80GB photo album

With digital cameras giving the freedom to take as many pictures as any photographer would want, there are just too many photos to manage, store and organize the same. Sony with its HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album help us solve the issues faced by us to manage all our photo collection.

The device not only has the ability to store and maintain 50,000 digital photos but also has the ports to support HDTV. The Sony HDMS-S1D has multiple ports on front facet to import pictures from different storage devices.

Microsoft mashes it up for beginners with Popfly

Popfly is the fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, and Web pages. It’s made up of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups and a social network where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

Users can use Popfly to add games, slide shows, Halo 3 statistics or eBay auctions to their Facebook profile, blog or personal Web page; build a Web page for a club or organization; and leverage blocks from Popfly partners like Twitter, Facebook and Dapper to drive site awareness and traffic.

Here are some things you can do with Popfly:

1. Add some fun to your Facebook page, web site, or Windows Live Spaces page


2. Build a home page


3. Mix and re-mix photos and videos


4. Unify your online personality

Visit Popfly for more details.

Forus SR-500N speakers

I was looking for a nice set of desktop speakers for my PC and came across these cool speakers sets made and sold in Korea. These can be used with any music players in the market.

Andrew Fentem's touch screen game

Andrew Fentem's Research Design Art Engineering has gone through extensive research on touch screen computer games. Multi-object tracking and kinetic surfaces technology. This is a good form of game device. To start with Andrew Fentem has come out with the digital touch surface of the good old Rubik's cube and its called the FENTIX CUBE game.

This digital puzzle cube has multi-colored LEDs controlled by the touch sensitive surface. Have a look at the video to see how it works for real.

Wild Charger the wireless charger

Its no science fiction now. The Wild Charger charging pad is a wireless mobile phone charger and is exclusive to Motorola Razr phone for now. All you need t do is jsut place the electronic device on the charging plate of Wild Charger and voila the device starts to charge its batteries.

Wild Charger will soon introduce charger for other leading phone, mp3 players, apple products brands. If this device gets compatible to most of our daily use devices then we are talking of jsut placing all these devices on one single charge plate and have all our electronics on full charge with no hassle.

Findings from Web Design Survey - A List Apart

A List apart has released their Findings From the Web Design Survey. The downloadable pdf gives a huge understanding about the web design and the people involved. They conducted a survey with 37 questions across the people in web design. With the data collected by this survey, they have presented their findings meaningfully in the PDF. The findings involves very interesting topics from Gender, Geographic region, Hours worked per week to most wanted topics like Salary range, Claimed skills etc.

Also Check: 2007surveyresults.pdf

Jonas Samson's light-emitting wallpaper

Its big market for mood lighting this year. Here is a light emitting wallpaper which displays 2 dimensional objects. The wallpaper when turned off does not give any clue of having any light source being embedded in it. Jonas Samson came up with this cool idea of lighting up the walls.

Blurb online book builder

Blurb allow users to choose default template and design the book online using their user friendly and easy to use BookSmart software. Users have the flexibility to create Business Portfolio, Management books, Books based on blogs and many more. These books can be sold for profit too by showcasing your book on Blurb's online store.

There are over 150 layouts to choose from and personalize the same. The cover can be customized too, you can have a hard or soft finish cover with dust jackets too. The cost of books start from $12.95 onwards.

Button Devkit from Bartelme Design

Bartelme is back with this DevKit, and this time he is back with "Button Devkit". Like all his previous kit, he has provided enough scope of fun for designers in source files. Designers can improvise to make thier own version from the source files. More than the button kit I liked his previous Smiley Devkit. Its fun to play with smiley dev kit, were you will end up in lot many versions of smiley.

Above all the fun, these buttons can be used on both personal and commercial websites.

Also Check:
Smiley Devkit
Flag Button Devkit
Deep Blue Wallpaper
WP Dark Customization Kit
Wallpaper Devkit 3
Wallpaper Devkit 2
Wallpaper Devkit