AVG 9 is nearly here! AVG 9 antivirus is coming on October the 15th with great enhancements such as speed, performance and it also minimizes the impact on your system resources.
The new AVG is install process has been streamlined, with developers reducing the number of tedious, finger-numbing mouse clicks from 22 to 11.
Grisoft says scanning speeds have been increased by as much as 50% and that version 9 also reduces Windows boot lag by 10 to 15%. The firewall is more intuitive and has been made less intrusive — another small but welcome change.
The paid versions are available now through the AVG web site, and we’ve been told that the much-loved free version will be good to go in ten days.
If you’re a believer in free antivirus, your preferred version will be up for grabs on October 15th. Keep your browser tuned to free.avg.com — that’s where the download will appear when it goes live.
Nearly exactly a month after launch Google has announced more cool themes for Chrome. This release is based upon prominent artists which include Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Karim Rashid, Jonathan Adler, Oscar de la Renta, Anita Kunz, Tom Sachs, Kate Spade, Donna Karan, Kid Robot, Casey Reas, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Graves, Todd Oldham, Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Mariah Carey (and that’s just to name a few!).
For a behind-the-scenes look at one illustrator’s unique creative process, check out the Google Chrome Blog. And for a preview of these themes, here’s a video flipbook we’ve compiled to showcase some of the artistry behind this project:
iCyte is a tool that allows you to capture web pages and highlight text on them and then save them to your account. It comes in the form of an ad-on for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox and it is available here.
It works by saving the webpage and its formatting into a file (or Cyte) which you can then add tags and notes too. When you need to retrieve the file you can open up iCyte in the sidebar of your browser and see all of the Cytes you’ve stored so far.
I found this tool to be especially useful for research and taking notes without printing off dozens of pages. The ability to separate your Cytes into different ‘projects’ makes it easy to use, as does the search function.
For anyone who engages in high amounts of research or just likes a little bit of order among their saved web pages – Cyte is for you.
One of the most common problems for customer support agents who take calls from customers with malfunctioning computers is not actually the technical problem, but the person who is complaining about it. The fact is that the person who rings customer support for advice will not be a technical expert and as such it will be difficult to guide them through the process of fixing the problem.
Team Viewer is a new piece of software that allows customer support to cut out the middle man completely. Basically, it allows customer support agents access to a customer’s computer to fix any problem. Not only this, but it’s incredibly easy to use. I tested it using my laptop and an older laptop that I have lying around for such tests like when I reviewed the first ever Warcraft game on WireNinja. I found it really easy to gain access with the installation only taking five minutes. Also, the customer’s computer (i.e. my old laptop) didn’t need to download any software; I just had to accept a small .exe file.
All you need is the users IP address and once you exchange an auto-generated password to allow access to the computer then you’ll have access to their machine via a window half the scale of theirs monitor. It looks just like it does on their end as you can see from the screenshot. Using this screen, you can easily fix a problem with little or no need to consult with the customer.
This program has other applications such as for office workers who need remote access to their computer. However, its main function is for customer support.
Despite all the apps, iPhones, e-mail, IM etc… The best way to organise something is with a text. Why? Because not everyone is on call at the same time or checks their e-mails regularly. But they do have their mobile phone with them 95% of the time. So, a group message it is. Say you want to organise a get together with friends, or an office party simply send them all a quick text using Swaggle.
Swaggle is an online service that lets you send pre defined groups text messages. You can have as many groups as you like and sending them all texts is free. All you have to do is log into Swaggle.mobi and select which group you want to contact; family, gym, work, school, friends etc…
This is way handier than doing it on your mobile where it will cost you and take a long time to select the desired contacts in your phonebook; especially if there are over ten people working in your office!
Many of us have blogs, websites or at least a profile or two on a few social networking sites, right? And many of us are also on twitter. So instead of just posting a link saying “hey, follow me”, you could have a cool, professional looking twitter logo or cartoon for people to click on to go to your Twitter profile.
TwitterLogos.com is a collection of free twitter logos submitted by hundreds of graphic designers for our disposal. On the homepage you can see all the latest posts. Most of them are really good. You have the well-known chubby bird but I also found some new faces…or beaks such as a kind of pelican bird, a cheerleading bird and randomly enough, a can of twitter beer.
When you have found the series that you like, simply click on it and download the file. There will be instructions on how to use the Twitter badges in the .zip file.
These are easy to insert into blogging platforms such as Wordpress or into text for a profile on Facebook, MySpace etc…
Apple is currently offering corporations Mac OS X Server v.10.6 “Snow Leopard” for a free trial.
Mac OS X Server v.10.6 “Snow Leopard” has everything you need to deliver standards-based workgroup and Internet services, providing an ideal solution for education, small businesses, and large enterprises. The amazing features in Snow Leopard Server make it easy to share contacts and calendars, collaborate on projects, access information remotely, create and distribute podcasts, and more.
Snow Leopard Server offers countless behind-the-scenes features, which greatly reduce IT time and effort, improve compatibility in mixed environments, enhance support for iPhone and iPod touch users, and boost the already robust security of Mac OS X Server. With a full 64-bit operating system, Mac OS X Server is designed to maximize the computing potential of today’s Xserve and Mac Pro systems and dramatically increases the total number of simultaneous system processes, threads, and network connections that the server can utilize. Designed to handle the most demanding server operations, Snow Leopard Server is up to twice as fast as its predecessor.
All you need to do to receive your copy is fill out the form located here. You must be a USA citizen however.
Voddler is a new video startup that launch back in private beta back in July 2009. Currently it is rumoured that only 1,500 people have access to the site, so we wanted to run through the service for everyone else.
Voddler won’t be launched officially until sometime this fall, and then only in the Nordic countries for starters. The agenda is to go global, though.
Voddler aims to do for movies and TV series what Spotify is doing for music. Although in private beta Voddler already seems to be getting a lot of buzz in Scandinavia, so we hope to let everyone else know about it.
Voddler is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Voddler will also be providing a Linux-based box with a pre-installed client that you can easily connect to your TV to get that home cinema feel.
Here below is a screenshot of the latest design of the landing page, designed to work best on widescreen televisions.
Movies are of course a lot more bandwidth-intensive than music. How well Voddler works for you will depend on your Internet connection. To get 1080p HD quality you should have an 8 Mbit/s connection, for 720p HD quality you should have a 5 Mbit/s connection, and for DVD quality you should have a 2.5 Mbit/s connection. Contrast this with Spotify which only has to deal with music streaming and therefore works just fine with a mere 256 kbit/s connection.
Picok stands for Personal Information Cockpit. It’s an open source software package, aimed at enabling users to build their personal information dashboards. The interface is very similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes, in which allows users to loaded their own content into small draggable boxes.
There are a quite few standard portlets shipped with Picok, but since it is an open system, maintainers of picok installations can easily create portlets of their own.
Picok is written in PHP 5, uses the Yahoo User Interface Library and Zend Framework Components and supports MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Lotus Notes and is ready to be integrated into your corporate intranet, website or community platform as well.
Ever fancied building a website but wouldn’t know the first thing about design or hosting. Now, there is a FREE website tool that will allow you to do it – BlueVoda. I downloaded BlueVoda expecting another knockoff that the minute you start it up it will be asking for your credit card number so you can upgrade or only giving you access to some of the features – I was wrong.
You get the whole shebang for free. The file itself is only 4Mb and you’ll have it installed and started up in under twenty minutes. Within an 20 minutes of using the software I had a homepage made up with a video player, banner, text and images all working well together.
It’s incredibly simple to use. All the tools are along the top and to the left. If you want to say… insert a flash application all you do is click on the button with the ‘flash’ icon, select where on the webpage you want it to be, adjust the size and then just click to position it there. What’s more, everything is interchangeable. When building a small website to try out the software, I felt more like I was playing with Lego blocks because you can just drag and drop things until you have it looking the way to want it to.
Other features include inserting in-line frames, galleries, lines, page breaks, Windows Media Players and literally hundreds of other features.
Then, all you do is copy and paste the HTML to your server, upload the files you used like images etc… and you’re up and running! There are tons of articles on the BlueVoda website to show you how to use the software and how to get your site on the internet.
For anyone looking to build a basic personal or business website this is the one for you. It’s simple to use, fast, effective and free. I can hardly think of a bad aspect (except maybe those annoying monthly e-mails you get from BlueVoda asking if everything is going okay or do you need hosting services). 8/10
Ever been dying to go to a concert, football match or F1 Grand Prix but the most plausible thing happened and you went to buy the tickets two seconds too late. Despair and anger (mostly towards yourself). The only chance you stand now is going on a mission to hunt down someone who has tickets (that may or may not be genuine) and pay two weeks wages for them.
Fear not – seathound.com has the answer. It’s a pretty basic idea and that’s why I love it. Ask any businessman/entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that tackling everyday, well-known problems is the way to make millions in this world.
Seat Hound will locate dozens of tickets for sale. Some are on eBay, others are on independent ticket sales sites – but who cares where you get them? The point is that you’re going!
I typed in ‘U2’ to check it out. I was greeted by dozens of search results from their upcoming gig in Croke Park here in Dublin to events as far away as October in Phoenix. The guys at Seat Hound have clearly done their work. Even small artists that you wouldn’t hear of everyday are listed. This is a great service that I fully intend to use – a lot!
It also saves you money as it displays the ticket prices right next to one another so you can get the best one. Seat Hound will also be so kind as to tell you where the ticket is in relation to the stage, pitch or track etc…. so you won’t need to bring the binoculars.
One bad thing that I will say about it however (and I really am nit picking here) is that it is US focused. While you can still find gigs all over the world – the homepage is dominated by the stripes and the stars. A UK or European version wouldn’t go amiss. 9/10
For a long time now a lot of people have been using Adblock firefox extension, however when people use this tool publishers lose their key source of income. Svetlana at Profy thinks that she may have found the key to unlock this issue, CancelAds.com. CancelAds is a very basic idea in which allows publishers to signup and add their sites to the service. Users are then able to signup and choose which sites they want to see without ads, in which they can pay a small subscription fee to view the sites without ads. Publishers have the ability to control the price of subscriptions and this is a very simple way for sites to add a new revenue source.
However, is CancelAds really a new revenue stream or is it just taking revenues away from advertising and just redistributing it. The idea of CancelAds is a good one, however practically im not too sure if it will take off, as users will only be likely to purchase a subscription for a major site in which have high quality content. Thus, this product isnt for the masses, it just for the high end publishers.
One of the most common problems for customer support agents who take calls from customers with malfunctioning computers is not actually the technical problem, but the person who is complaining about it. The fact is that the person who rings customer support for advice will not be a technical expert and as such it will be difficult to guide them through the process of fixing the problem.
Despite all the apps,
Many of us have blogs, websites or at least a profile or two on a few social networking sites, right? And many of us are also on 
Ever fancied building a website but wouldn’t know the first thing about design or hosting. Now, there is a FREE website tool that will allow you to do it – 
