I came across this while reading a research article I came across via LiveSide. The article, recently published by Microsoft summarizes a research study they conducted on the European internet market. While the focus of the research was something else, I did find some amazing numbers that reflect how well Microsoft is doing in keeping up with its claims.

The main focus of the article was the fact that by 2010, people in Europe would be spending more time doing online activities than watching television. This would benefit from Microsoft’s effort in unifying the PC, Mobile and the Web experiences into one, allowing seamless access of resources and information from any device, be it a computer, a smartphone, a video game console or anything in between. While the article contains many facts and figures to support those claims, the thing that appealed to me the most was about the Windows Live community.

The article states that over 320 Million users exchange 8.2 Billion messages everyday. That tips 5% of the total internet traffic to the MSN messaging service. This makes it the number one Instant Messenger in the world, (I know it because I love it). What was even more interesting is the fact that Windows Live Hotmail is still the number one webmail service in the world, responsible for over 271 million emails sent everyday. I personally don’t have a Hotmail account and If it were up to me, I would have put my money on Gmail as the biggest webmail service in the world.

Now if that wasn’t overwhelming already, you would be surprised to know that the total Windows Live community user base is almost half a billion (nearly 500 Million). That is twice that of Facebook or MySpace. If Windows Live users decide to for a country one day, they would be ranked number 3 in the world in terms of population.

All these facts give a pretty good idea of how well Microsoft is going with their plans to unify the rich internet experience and make it accessible for everyone. I just wish they throw in a better (non-trident) web browser and the whole world would be theirs for the taking. Oh and just to let you know that these claims were made after long careful studies, not like random shots in the air like those Linux folks recently did. I left you a presentation extracted from that article below.

Being true to the rumors, Nokia today announced its own App store, termed the Nokia Ovi Store at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Even though Nokia got into the game pretty late compared to rest of the competition, it has a pretty good chance of even beating the Apple App store. Now most fan boys would start to argue that I probably wrote this article after taking down a couple of bottles but a look into the facts may very well change your mind.

Despite the recent drop in sales, Nokia is undoubtedly the biggest cellphone maker in the industry, with a market share of over 38 percent. In comparison, Apple has only managed to capture 1% of the total market (which was its plan by the way).

If you compare by platform, Symbian devices dominate half of the market with a 57 percent share, compared to a mere 2.8 percent of Apple. Note that these figures also include Symbian devices from other manufactures like Sony Ericsson and Samsung.

A major reason for the popularity of the Apple App Store was its revenue sharing model; 30 percent of the revenues from a product sale go to Apple while the remaining 70 go to the developer. The developer could also opt to sell the application for free, and wouldn’t have to pay anything to Apple per download. Nokia seems to be following Apple’s proven formula and is also offering the 70/30 revenue sharing model.

But why would Symbian developers let go of their existing business model and opt for only 70 percent of the total revenue? The answer is simple; they can reach a wider audience because it is a hell lot more easier for the end user to just browse a single catalog instead of visiting a hundred stores. On top of that, Nokia Ovi Store has some very intuitive features like built in Social Networking and Location Based Services, further promoting the sale of the applications.

The Ovi Store would offer services which include Ovi Music Store, N-Gage Gaming Service, Ovi App Store, Mashable Widgets and Nokia Maps. Think of it as iTunes, App Store and Google Maps combined with a couple more services. Though this doesn’t necessarily mean that it would do better than these individual services.

The real killer features of Ovi would be the built in artificial intelligence and the social networking features. The service would know what your friends and contacts are buying (or downloading) as well as feature reviews and suggestions from them. It also has a built in recommendation system that would learn your taste over time and organize and offer content accordingly, kinda like the Genius Music Recommendation system from iTunes. The selection of applications also vary depending on your current location. During the demo at the Mobile World Congress, most the content shown in the Ovi Store was targeted towards Spanish users.

The N97 would be the first handset to have the Ovi Store pre-installed when it is released this June. But Nokia’s biggest shot at market dominance lies in the fact that they would have the Ovi Store download-able and running on “tons” of Series 40 and Series 60 devices starting from may. Now how will they manage Application compatibility between these platforms is a major issue or they would just leave that out to the developers to choose the compatible devices.

The Ovi Store has all the ingredients for success built right into it along with big name launch partners already signed including Facebook, MySpace, EA, Qik and a lot more. After all these facts do you still believe that Apple’s App Store still has a chance?

The latest Labs release is again a welcoming feature, that lets you see “Multiple Inboxes” at the same time.What it essentially does is divide your main inbox screen into multiple widgets allowing you to set custom filters on each one. You can view the widgets as a sidebar, or directly above or below the main inbox.

Those 5 additional widgets can have any sort of filter applied to them to suite your needs. I did a quick setup of my drafts, Facebook related email, Twitter related messages and my sent messages in the right pane.

You can set the custom filters through Multiple Inboxes in the settings. If you aren’t familiar with the syntax, then simply open up filters in the settings and create a new filter from the wizard and copy the filter code and paste it in the multiple inboxes settings.

This feature would be very useful for people like me who have to go through a lot of emails, and wouldn’t have to switch their folder views to browse through them all.

As the name implies, MyTweetSpace is inspired from MySpace, and lets you do redesign of your entire profile page on Twitter. They claim to be the only service that let you do that, and that fact is pretty much accurate. But how effectively do they do it, is a whole another story.Your first impression about MyTweetSpace is enough to give you an idea of how they work. The main application is designed in flash so it actually loads well after all the advertisements on the site, which surround the content from every possible direction. This makes it impossible to concentrate on the real deal, thanks to a poor interface design.

The process of “designing a custom profile” is wizard driven, which is actually the only good thing about it. I had trouble figuring out how to start at first because they did a good job of mixing up the interface with the advertisements. You don’t get very creative or impressive backgrounds to choose from here but you can spice things up a bit by adding fancy borders and badges (yeah that’s what all the pro minded people want right?) detailing your information.

You can put in IDs of various services from around the web to display on your badge, and I really don’t understand the point of doing this. Because in the end, it would just be an image, and it would be impossible to click on any of those links anyways. You can choose to enter as much information as you like (or as little), but frankly you would be happier just clicking the next button. In the end, they would give you a background image of what you created to download, along with the instructions on how to set them up on Twitter. Here is something I cooked up, and believe me I can do a lot better in Photoshop or Fireworks.

But none of these gadgets excites me more than the upcoming Nokia N97, the flagship for the Nokia Nseries line. The N97 will bring the touch to the Nseries line up, and would be Nokia’s 2nd touchscreen handset after the 5800 XpressMusic (which didn’t quite impress me). While there are still a couple of months before it is released I thought it would be good to compile a post with all the information we currently have about this device. I’ll be updating this post along the way when more information comes out, so it would be a good idea to subscribe.

First of all, lets look at the official N97 trailer by Nokia for an appetizer.

I’m sure most of the people had already seen that video, but still its a fun one to watch every time. Next lets see some technical specifications on the handset.

• Series 60 5th Edition (Symbian OS 9.4)
• Touchscreen / Tilt Slider form factor
• 3.5″ TFT Touchscreen with a 640×360 wide screen resolution
• Physical and virtual QWERTY Keyboard
• 32GB of internal memory onboard
• Support for upto 32GB MicroSDHC (16GB MicroSDHC card included)
• GSM / UMTS / EDGE / 3G / HSDPA capable
• 5 Mega Pixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, Auto focus, and Dual LED Flash
• DVD Video Recording at 30 Fps (640×480 resolution)
• 32-Bit ARM 11 CPU running at 369 MHz
• Talk time up to 400 minutes
• Standby time up to 430 hours
• Video playback up to 4.5 hours
• Music playback up to 37 hours

And that’s not all. The N97 features a fully customizable home screen with Widget support (a little like the Active Standby in Series 40), including 3rd Widgets like Facebook for example. The text input is another very strong point of the N97, which supports a QWERTY physical keyboard, or you can have a number of virtual keyboards ranging from a full screen QWERTY, a miniature QWERTY, a predictive text capable Numeric Keypad and even Handwriting Recognition. Here is another video demoing the features.

Nokia have went beyond the traditional Assisted GPS integration and added a built in compass that points to the true north. Couple that with GPS and you have a full blown turn by turn navigation system powered by Nokia Maps 2.0 Touch. There would be several apps available for the device at launch, and you can even emulate applications designed for the older Series 60 editions as well as Java MIDP. How will that compete with the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace remains to be seen. Oh and since we’re on the subject, here’s another video showing comparisons between the iPhone 3G, Nokia N97 and HTC Android G1.

We have to admit one thing here, the iPhone is still the sexiest of them all, and that’s really not surprising because it is a product of Apple, which excels in aesthetic quality.

The N97 is set to launch around June/July in the Europe and Asia markets and around October in the rest of the world (including North America). The launch price is speculated to be around $600 to $700, which isn’t very surprising for a Nokia Flagship device. Please do share your comments and opinions on the handset, and be sure to check back on the article as I would be updating it to reflect new information.

Google Earth has evolved over the years, introducing features like Sky View, Mars and Street View in the desktop client. Google has continued the trend with its latest beta, Google Earth 5, introducing Ocean and History views along with other features and enhancements.I played with the latest version a bit, and checked out the new features. I specifically liked the Record a Tour mode, which could be very helpful at sending driving instructions of that new restaurant to your virtual girlfriend (if you had a real one, you would pick her up yourself). The other two major enhancements, while pretty impressive, didn’t work out for me that well.

I tried to use the history view at a number of places, but sadly those locations didn’t change much over time. I added some shots of Times Square, New York below. One is the latest version, while the other one is a 1995 black and white shot.

To be honest, I couldn’t get the ocean view to work for me, even after a full hour of unsuccessful attempts. I could get most of the features in the new ocean layer to work, but still wasn’t able to dive under the surface. This is actually a big hurdle towards the success of this new feature as it isn’t clear exactly how to dive under water.

I tried the Mariana Trench, Pacific, Atlantic, the Mediterranean and even the Indian ocean but still no luck. That’s why I decided to put the full review of Google Earth 5 on hold. As a filler for now, I have included the new features demo, Google had shared with us below. Oh and if you have managed to take an underwater swim, then please do let me know how via the comments.

You can find the download link in the box below.

The Technopath will not just be a blog, rather it would be a whole portal based on some well established technologies today. The back-end will be running on WordPress no doubt, but I will also be adding custom functionality, to give this site a rich user experience. As the name implies, this site would revolve around the world of technology because this is what interests me, and more importantly, this is something I can share most knowledge on. I would however like to point out, that I won’t be following the general blogging approach here. In fact I am going to experiment something totally different and try to introduce interactivity into the content.Most of the time, I would be reviewing web applications and software here, sharing along tips and hacks to get most of what we use everyday. I would also be focusing on important news and developments in the industry, though with my very own perspective detailing my own point of view. Gadgets would be another major feature here, and since I’m in love with most Apple products, you can expect to find a good amount of articles on the iPod or the iPhone including App reviews.

In the coming weeks I will be launching new features and integrate them with the current design (which I have designed from scratch). I should also point out that the site is still in development, and most features would primarily be released for (and fully compatible with) Firefox. Chrome and Safari tweaks would be a day or two behind, while I develop some work around to the limitations in Internet Explorer. I’ll try my best to keep the design and user interface simple and clean. Oh and if you don’t like anything about it, feel free to drop me a line via comments or email.

I think this is enough introduction for the site, and you will learn more about it once you start following it. Oh and in case anyone is wondering, the name is inspired from Heroes (I love that series).

The web has changed a lot since then, but its still the same old 2D web pages that end up in our browser windows. Sure there are interactive technologies like Flash and SIlverlight, but their scope is limited. With advancement in technology, there should be a better way to view the web. Meet Cooliris (formerly PicLens)!

Cooliris is a new way to view your photos and videos on various social networking sites. It maps your images and videos on a 3D Wall all lets you zip through hundreds of images in seconds. It supports a lot of social networking and photo sharing sites including Facebook, Picassa, Flickr, Photobucket, Google Image Search, YouTube etc. and you can even implement the functionality on your own site.

It has been around for a while now, under the name PicLens, until version 3.0 renamed it to Cooliris. It is a free download for both Windows and Mac OS X, and runs on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. You can search from within Cooliris, and even shop and discover new stuff. For photo bloggers, this addon is a must have.

You can find the download link in the box below.