Google Voice, What Is It?

June 26, 2009 · Filed Under Google, Tech · 1 Comment 

Google bought a company known as Grand Central that was dedicated to providing Voice Over IP to users. Each user would get a specific phone number to which they would be associated and different features would be provided with this service. It allows you to make free calls everywhere in the United States and you can forward calls from your GV (Google Voice) account to one of your phones. It has screening services and other cool things. ReadWriteWeb wrote a great article on things that you can expect from this new Google Service. One thing that people will be looking forward to will be making International calls and the cost associated with it. As of now Skype offers this service for a small fee.

Google Voice has started as an “open beta”, similar to how GMail started. Invitations have been starting to roll out to specific group of peoples on waiting list and after that more invitations will be sent until it has reached a great amount of the market and probably just let anyone register for the service. It seems like it will be a great success so far. I’m just hoping that international calls will be cheap enough.

Yasser

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China Keeps Censoring Google Applications

June 24, 2009 · Filed Under Politics, Tech · 1 Comment 

China has been known lately for censoring all sort of things in China, adding slowly things like certain keywords and YouTube. Recently it was just known that now China has censored more Google Applications such as GMail, Picasa, Google Images, etc. TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook and Twitter and other web services are still working in China but the way things are going they will probably be added to the list of things to be censored.

In my opinion companies need to start standing up to Chinas censorship and stop agreeing to their demands of helping them censor everyone in China.

UPDATE: It seems that everything got back to “normal” at around 6pm yesterday.

Yasser

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MiFi, the new WiFi.

June 18, 2009 · Filed Under Tech · 2 Comments 

Novatel MiFi













I ran into some new products lately including something from Verizon which was called MiFi. I was a bit confused at first thinking that they got WiFi wrong but as soon as I started reading I realized about this whole new idea called MiFi. The basic idea behind MiFi technology is to take the 3G Network and convert it to WiFi network and possible making it a hot spot for you and others. The benefit of this is that you could easily get a 3G signal than some WiFi Hotspot that is available for you. Novatel seems to be the company behind this technology and already releasing a version in Spain for Telefonica. Besides providing a HotSpot it can also serve as a “server” for software since it brings a small storage capacity. At the moment only Verizon and Sprint are the ones that have this in the U.S. but you can expect it to go big through out the year if it is successful. Note to mention, the speed on these isn’t great and depending on how many people are you sharing the network with it could be even slower. None the less you could expect to hear more of this soon.

Update: A new product from Huawei, check it out.

Yasser

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True Blood.

June 17, 2009 · Filed Under Entertainment, Tv · Comment 

True Blood is definetly the new television show addiction. It reminds me a lot of Twilight in the whole vampire setting and mixes with romance. But True Blood has a lot more interesting characters with different abilities. Also since it is an HBO series it could get pretty bloody at times. Most of the episodes also include a lot of sex scenes. But none the less it is very addicting to watch always wanting to find out what is going to happen next or why are certain things happening. It takes place in a parallel present, vampires exist and have come out to the public but most of the public don’t see them as a human and thus do not deserve certain rights or any rights and maybe shouldn’t exist. Vampire blood is considered a drug which will give you different effects depending on where the blood came from and how much you take of it. The whole story is very interesting and is no wonder why it is one of HBOs biggest hit since The Sopranos. Try catching it on HBO Sunday nights

Yasser

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