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Orange has announced it will be the first operator to offer new Touch watch phone LG G910 in Europe, which the company claims as the world’s first Touch watch phone. The watch phone with full touch screen UI will give customers a new experience in mobile communication. The LG G910 is stylish designed with high metal casing and a curve tempered glass face.
Featured with camera and video recording, LG G910 is also integrated with MP3 player. In addition, it also comes with Bluetooth headset and offers 7.2 Mbps 3G HSDPA connectivity. With LG G910, the users will get the same multimedia experience as on normal mobile phone like play MP3, watch video clips and etc.

The LG G910 watch phone is expected to be available from flagship stores across Orange’s European footprint later this year and the price is not yet specify.

It is amazing what kind of money some people are making online. In the beginning I thought that $5000 per month was high, but when I saw the list that Paula Neal Mooney (what’s in a name) has put together I had to rub my eyes and look again. I found her site after reading the story of Kevin Ham, nicknamed ‘the man who owns the internet‘. That is a must read too, and a story that really opened my eyes. There will be another post on that item soon.Here are the top 20 earners. Names you will probably have never seen before, but worth checking out:

• Al Carlton
• Amit Agarwal
• Brian Clark
• Brian Heys
• Chris Lawrence
• Daniel Kovach
• Darren Rowse
• David Miles
• Frank Schilling
• Jason Calacanish
• Jeff Pulver
• Jeremy Shoemaker
• Jim Barksdale
• Jim Clark
• Jim Romenensko
• Jim Sha
• Joel Comm
• John Chow
• John Warnock
• Karl Stadler
• Kato Leonard
• Kevin Ham
• Kevin Rose
• Kris Jones
• Lee Dodd
• Marc Andreessen
• Marc Ostrofsky
• Mario Lavandeira
• Markus Frind
• Matt Drudge
• Matther Daimler
• Max Goldberg
• Michael Arrington
• Mike Walsh
• Richard Schell
• Rosalind Gardner
• Sharon Maguire
• Shawn Hogan
• Shoemoney
• Steve Pavlina
• Tim Carter

As you can see this list is alphabetical. That’s because I feel the amounts of money mentioned in Paula’s list are kinda hypothetical, because her sources are questionable. Owners statements tend to be either too high, to impress, or too low, to avoid tax problems.

Anyway, I learned a lot when I started looking up these people and read what they did and how they did it. So enjoy, check those names, read their stories and start learning. And oh, yes, here is Paula’s list. Start rubbing your eyes

Source : www.212articles.com

Today, Apple unveiled the new iPod Shuffle, which is only half the volume of the previous iPod Shuffle, which itself was about the size of a quarter. The new one looks like a sleek aluminum tie clip, or maybe a slightly elongated stick of Trident gum; a AA battery hides it completely. There’s just enough room on the back for a mirror-finish spring clip for fastening to your clothes. (If you order from apple.com, you can get a custom message laser-etched onto the clip.)

When I told someone that the Shuffle now holds 1,000 songs (in its 4 gigabytes of memory), he laughed. “It’s like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit about smaller and smaller iPods,” he said. “Or like the micro-cellphone in the movie ‘Zoolander.’”

And indeed it is. Apple says that it’s the smallest music player on earth. Let’s put it this way: it’s really, really small.

It’s so small, in fact, that there’s no room for a screen, or even buttons or controls; it’s just a tiny, sleek slab with pleasantly rounded corners.

Instead, Apple has put a tiny remote control right on the earbud cord. It has three clickable spots: + and – to control the volume, and a center button that acts as a play/pause button.

Yet incredibly, even though this Shuffle is even smaller than the previous one, it’s actually more useful. No iPod Shuffle has ever had a screen, and therefore you’ve never been able to identify the song or band you’re hearing. You’ve also never been able to work with playlists, since there’s no user interface with which to navigate them.

Now there is. You can tell all this stuff not by looking, but by listening; according to Apple, the new Shuffle is the world’s first talking music player, thanks to a new feature called VoiceOver.

(It’s not the first, actually. Older iPods have had talking menus to help blind people. But anyway.)

If you hold down the center clicker for one second, you hear, in your earbuds, a crystal-clear male voice identifying the song and the performer; it knows 14 languages, so it can handle Italian aria names, for example. If you hold down the clicker longer, until you hear a beep, the voice starts rattling off the names of your playlists (“Jogging Tunes…Purchased…Makeout Music.”) You click the clicker when he gets to the one you want, or use the + and – buttons to go forward or back through them.

You can also flip the power switch off and on again to hear him tell you how full your battery is—for example, “Battery 50 percent.” Apple says that a single charge plays music for 10 hours.

It’s looking like 2009 may be the year that synthesized voices go mainstream; this talking iPod comes hot on the heels of Amazon’s Kindle 2, which can read your e-books aloud to you. In the Shuffle’s case, this is an especially interesting development, because it means that the player itself can be out of sight. It can be clipped deep inside your clothes, for example, away from subway iPod thieves. Yet you can still operate and navigate your music using only the earbud clicker and feedback from Mr. VoiceOver.

You should know, however, that the voice you hear differs depending on whether you’ve loaded up the Shuffle from a Mac (clear, American, accent-free voice) or a Windows PC (much more synthesized-sounding, vaguely Scandinavian accent).

But hey—all’s fair in business, right? Microsoft has given the Mac universe slightly stunted versions of its programs for years; now, evidently, it’s payback time.

Instead of the built-in USB connector of the original Shuffle, or the tiny plastic dock of the second-generation one, this third-generation Shuffle comes with a tiny, three-inch white USB cord. That’s how you charge it, and that’s how you load it up with music and podcasts from a copy of iTunes 8.1 (a required download before you can use the Shuffle on your Mac or PC).

Now, overall, new design is ingenious. The solid-slab-of-aluminum approach surely makes this the most rugged iPod ever. The sound is fantastic. And the price is right: The new Shuffle is available in black or silver aluminum for $80.

But the old, square Shuffle is still available (half the capacity, $50). And why would you want it?
Because the new Shuffle locks you into using Apple’s earbuds. No other headphones have the clicker on the cord, and so can’t make the music play music at all.

Personally, I’m in love with the Arriva.com headphones for the old Shuffle. It’s a headband that goes around the back of your head, placing the earbuds neatly into your ears without any cords or tangling; the Shuffle itself clips into the middle, at the back of your head where you can easily reach it. The whole thing is inconspicuous, doesn’t fall off and doesn’t interfere with glasses—and if you have long hair, you can listen to the iPod completely undetected (hello, PTA meetings!). The new Shuffle, however, wouldn’t work with those headphones.

Apple says that it has been working with headset makers to help them design Shuffle-compatible headphones; announcements should be forthcoming shortly. For now, though, potential Shufflers should be aware that it’s the included earbuds, Apple’s $80 in-ear earbuds, or nothing.

As iPods’ size approaches that of atomic particles, some online are pointing out that they’re becoming ever more likely to get lost. I’m not convinced that that’s an issue; that three-foot white strand of earbud cord makes a pretty good landmark when you’re rooting through a purse or a drawer.

No, the only real cause for pause is that headphone-selection issue—and whether you might prefer an iPod with a screen (which would give you photo and video playback, plus compatibility with the zillions of iPod chargers, car adapters, speaker docks and other accessories). But if you want really big sound in a really small package, the iPod Shuffle may be speaking your name.
By DAVID POGUE
Source : pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

If Google search revolutionized the Web, and Gmail revolutionized free e-mail, then one thing’s for sure: Google Voice, unveiled Thursday, will revolutionize telephones.

It unifies your phone numbers, transcribes your voice mail, blocks telemarketers and elevates text messages to first-class communication citizens. And that’s just the warm-up.

Google Voice began life in 2005 as something called GrandCentral. It was, in its own way, revolutionary.

It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check multiple answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). Sending around e-mail at work that says, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.” And having to change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities.

GrandCentral’s solution was to offer you a new, single, unified phone number, in an area code of your choice. Whenever somebody dialed your uni-number, all of your phones rang at once.

No longer did people have to track you down by dialing multiple numbers; no matter where you were, your uni-number found you. And all voice mail messages landed in a single voice mail box, on the Web. (You could also dial in to hear them as usual.)

On the Web, you could play back your messages or even download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You could even ask to be notified of new voice mail by e-mail.

But wait, there was more. Each time you answered a call, while the caller was still hearing “one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies,” you heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call: “Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call.” If you pressed 3, the call went directly to voice mail, but you could listen in. If you felt that the caller deserved your immediate attention, you could press * to pick up and join the call. This subtle feature saved time, conserved cellular minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of interpersonal conflict.

GrandCentral also let you record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book: “Hey, dollface, leave me a sweet nothing” for your love interest, “Hi, boss, I’m out making us both some money” for your employer.

You could also specify which phones would ring when certain people called. (For the really annoying people in your life, you could even tell GrandCentral to answer with the classic, three-tone “The number you have dialed is no longer in service” message.)

Also very cool: Any time during a call, you could press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you could pick up on a different phone in midcall. If you were heading out the door, you could switch a landline call to your cellphone.

GrandCentral also offered telemarketing spam filters, off-hour call blocking (“never ring my BlackBerry on weekends”), and a dizzying number of other functions. For people with complicated lives, GrandCentral was a breath of fresh air. It felt like a secret power that nobody else had.

Then, in 2007, Google bought GrandCentral. It stopped accepting new members, ceased any visible work on it, and, apparently, forgot about it completely. The early adopters, several hundred thousand of them, were able to keep using GrandCentral’s features. But as time went on, their hearts sank. In January, Salon.com summed it up in an editorial called, “Will the Last One to Leave GrandCentral Please Turn Out the Lights?”

As it turns out, the joke was on them. Google was quietly working on GrandCentral all along. Starting Thursday, existing GrandCentral members can upgrade to Google Voice. In a few weeks, after debugging the system, Google will open the service to all.

Google Voice starts with a clean, redesigned Web site that looks like an in-box, à la Gmail. It maintains all of those original GrandCentral features — but more important, introduces four game-changing new ones.

FREE VOICE MAIL TRANSCRIPTIONS From now on, you don’t have to listen to your messages in order; you don’t have to listen to them at all. In seconds, these recordings are converted into typed text. They show up as e-mail messages or text messages on your cellphone.

This is huge. It means that you can search, sort, save, forward, copy and paste voice mail messages.

No human effort is involved; it’s all done with software. As a result, the transcriptions are rarely perfect. For one thing, Google’s software doesn’t seem to have discovered punctuation yet. (“ohh hi it’s michelle i just wanted to let you know that i really had fun last night and it’s really great to see you okay talk to you later bye bye.”)

There are errors, of course; it’s hard enough for people to understand cellphone conversations, let alone computers. Cleverly enough, the Web site displays transcribed words more faintly (light gray) when it is less confident about the transcription. Fortunately, it generally nails numbers — phone numbers, arrival times, addresses. And the rest is accurate enough to convey the gist.

Companies like PhoneTag, Callwave and Spinvox already transcribe voice mail, complete with punctuation. They’re great, but they cost money. Google Voice is free.

FREE CONFERENCE CALLING Never again will you pay for a conference call, or require a special dial-in number, or mess around with access codes. All you do is tell your friends to call your GrandCentral at the specified time — and boom, you can conference them in as they call you. No charge.

DIRT-CHEAP INTERNATIONAL CALLS If you dial your own Google Voice number from one of your phones, you’re offered an option to call overseas at rates even lower than Skype’s (and much lower than your cellphone company’s): 2 cents a minute to France or China, 3 cents to Chile or the Czech Republic. Sweet.

TEXT MESSAGE ORGANIZATION Google Voice’s last feature is its most profound. The old GrandCentral wasn’t great with text messages sent to your uni-number. In fact, it ignored them. They just disappeared.

Google Voice, however, does the right thing: it sends text messages to whichever cellphones you want — even multiple phones simultaneously.

Even more important, it collects them in your Web in-box just like e-mail. You can file them, search them and, for the first time in cellphone history, keep them. They don’t vanish forever once your cellphone gets full.

You can also reply to them with a click, either with a call or another text; your back-and-forths appear online as a conversation.

Google Voice eliminates some of the annoyances of its predecessor. You can, if you wish, turn off that “press 1, press 2” option, so when the phone rings, you can just pick it up and start talking. Google has also done some Googlish integration; for example, your Gmail and Google Voice address books are the same.

Nitpicks? Sure. The service has vastly beefed up its selection of available uni-numbers, but there are still some area codes you can’t get (212 is especially rare). As a side effect of Google Voice’s ring-all-phones-at-once technology, you sometimes find fragments of Google Voice error recordings on the answering machines of the phones you didn’t answer. (Solution: make your voice mail greeting at least 15 seconds long.) There’s a learning curve to all of this, too.

Still, you can’t imagine how much the game changes when you have a single phone number, voice mail transcriptions and nondeleting text messages on every phone. Suddenly, your communications are not only unified, but they’re unified everywhere at once — the cellphone, the Web and the e-mail program. And all of it free — even ad-free.

There may be some fallout as a result; I’d hate to be a company that sells voice mail transcription or conferencing calling services right about now. But that’s life, right? Every now and then, a little revolution is good for us.

By DAVID POGUE
Source : www.nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms.

Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired 20 months ago. It is intended to simplify the way people handle phone calls, voice mail and text messages. The service will initially be made available only to existing GrandCentral subscribers; Google says the general public will be able to use it in the coming weeks.

Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally.

Analysts singled out the Internet calling features as the aspect of the service that is potentially most disruptive to established companies. While inexpensive Internet calls have become commonplace, Google’s potential to reach a mass audience could make a difference, some analysts said.

“I would consider Google to have the potential to change the rules of the game because of their ability to bring all kinds of people into their new tools from their existing tools,” said Phil Wolff, the editor of Skype Journal.

But in Skype, the dominant player in Internet calling, Google will find a formidable competitor. The service, which is free when people call other Skype users and carries slight fees for calls to regular phones, has 400 million registered users and is adding 350,000 users a day, eBay said. The company is focused on enhancing the service’s video and videoconferencing capabilities.

“Skype is light years ahead in terms of video, simultaneous chat and voice, and the installed base is huge,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “I don’t think they have anything to worry about.”

In a presentation to investors on Wednesday, Josh Silverman, Skype’s president, said that “chat and voice will become table stakes” in Internet telephony. “People will make their choice of communication software based on who makes the richest video experience.”

EBay has acknowledged that Skype does not have synergies with other parts of eBay, signaling that it may try to sell the service in the months ahead.

Internet calls work differently on Google Voice than on Skype. Rather than starting a call from a computer, a specialized phone or an application on a mobile device, Google Voice users call into their voice mail service from any phone. Once there, they can push a button to get a dial tone and call a different number. As such, the service is not set up to handle video calls, though Google offers simple video-chatting capabilities through Google Talk, its instant-messaging service.

For international calls to landlines in a handful of major countries, Google Voice is marginally cheaper than Skype, while Google Voice calls to international mobile phones are as much as a third cheaper than Skype’s.

Vincent Paquet, a co-founder of GrandCentral and now a senior product manager at Google, said that fees from Internet calls would probably play an important role in subsidizing the free service, which for now will not carry advertisements.

“We can generate enough revenue from international calling to support the service,” he said, noting that Google Voice was now running on Google’s servers and could operate at very low cost.

Analysts said it was not clear how much domestic or international calling business Google Voice could take from telephone companies. Google, which makes software for cellphones, is already at odds with several telecommunications companies over policy issues and over who will control the quickly growing revenue generated by mobile Internet services and advertising.

Some of Google Voice’s other features, like voice mail transcription services, are offered for a fee by start-ups like Spinvox and PhoneTag. And conferencing capabilities are sold by some telecommunications providers, but they are also available free through some online services.

Google Voice may raise more hackles with privacy advocates, and perhaps regulators, than it does with competitors. The service would allow Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about the behavior of Internet users, to gather information on their calling habits.

“It raises two distinct problems,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “In the privacy world, it is increased profiling and tracking of users without safeguards. But the other problem is the growing consolidation of Internet-based services around one dominant company.”

Brad Stone contributed reporting.
By MIGUEL HELFT
Source : www.nytimes.com