ION - a new startup

The team at ION has developed an iPod charger. As they say in their own words, get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss. For more on it, hear it from the creators themselves at ION.

USB Cell recharger - A cool product

One of the coolest ideas ever. Recharge your batteries through USB ports and there you are…back and fully energized . For more information on the product check out USBCELL. It currently costs somewhere around 1K. Costs may drop with more innovation in the production line and with mass market adoption.

StumbleUpon - A cool site

I was going through my daily dose of Biz-Tech news on RedHerring, when I stumbled upon this. StumbleUpon offers a cool Firefox extension. Although this has been there for a long time, I stumbled upon it very late. Wish I had it long back :(. The founders have rejected funding from VCs and have instead gone in for Angel funding from the likes of Ram Shriram, Mitch Kapor, Josh Kopelman, Rajeev Motwani, etc. In my personal opinion it was indeed a very smart move from them. Leveraging the experience and guidance of such high profile angel investors will definitely see them scaling greater heights. With such large user base and going by the acquisition spree of all the biggies out there, this one may be somewhere on top of their list. We never know what's cooking in the acquisition space ;). Here is a snippet that I am pasting from their site which quotes the difference between the regular search and their offering.

"Search vs. Stumble: Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences."

There is more to it. Check it out, it is really cool. It already has more users than digg.

Google Adds a Finance Service

Taking advantage of its access to its medley of related information services from news to blogs, Google on Tuesday introduced Google Finance, a beta web site that offers much of the same data as Yahoo and Microsoft, but also provides information on many privately held companies.

Microsoft Reveals Origami

The hype had died down 2 days ahead of MSFT drawing its curtains on Origami, courtesy Intel Developer Forum. More on Origami can be found at Engadget’s site.

Web 2.0 Innovation Map

The Web 2.0 Innovation Map grew out of an interest in how Web 2.0 development is distributed geographically. More on this over here

GMail Drive

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer.

GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n'drop files to. GMail Drive shell extension is a tool that creates a virtual filesystem. More details on download and usage here

Google Pack is live

Google Pack is:

Essential: Enjoy safe, useful software for your computer Simple: Download and install everything in just a few clicks Customizable: Choose only the software you want Up to date: Get updates and new software via Google Updater

System Requirements • Windows XP with Administrator privileges • Firefox 1.0+ or Internet Explorer 6.0+

List of Google Software included - Google Earth, Picasa , Google Pack Screensaver, Google Desktop and Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Other softwares include Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition and Adobe Reader 7. Check out more on this here.

Seems MSFTies will lose some more sleep over this. One thing that is worth mentioning is that this company is always coming out with new and unexpected products/features that catch the imagination of many. Sure this bubble will not burst early as predicted. With a rock solid business-model, innovative products are the ones that are going to keep them in the limelight, while stealing the same from the already established biggies. Seems like GOOG is one tough not to crack for MSFT and is taking longer time than expected. But MSFTies aren’t keeping quite. They are coming out in full strength and are slated to launch some importantproducts like the VISTA. Till then, letz wait and watch…

Now Yahoo! goes mobile

Close on the heels of competitor Google’s foray into Mobile Space, Yahoo! is set to announce on Friday, that its e-mail, instant messenger, photo and other services will be available on mobile phones and PC-connected TVs, as well as on personal computers without using a browser. Yahoo Go Mobile, to become available on Friday, is a set of communications and media applications, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, Photos, calendar, address book, Web and image search, news, sports and finance. Check out more on this here

TPM - Trusted Platform Module

TPM is a tiny security chip that comes equipped in a PC, will do something never before seen on the Internet: provide virtually fool-proof verification that you are who you say you are. This chip was created by a consortium of biggies in both s/w and h/w industry. As you browse through the URL below, it becomes obvious that users of unlicensed/unregistered s/w will not go scot-free… Of course this for all this to happen, the chip needs to be enabled first …

chk it out.. TPM.