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Adobe has just unleashed a new online platform containing a word processor, file storage and sharing, both tied together with a Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.
The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.
Users of Acrobat.com can join each other in virtual rooms, and all those in the room have access to the same document. This is a great feature for virtual meetings, paper editing, and much more.
Acrobat 9 will include many features aided by the integration of Flash. Some of these features include animation integration and dynamic maps.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
With this Acrobat facelift, we can also expect a speedier environment. Everyone has had the ‘PDF opening blues’, which is hoped to be eliminated with Acrobat 9.

View: news.com
Visit: Acrobat.com Beta

The European Commission has set a target for 25 per cent of the continent’s businesses, authorities and homes to adopt IPv6 – the next generation internet protocol - by 2010. The previous protocol, IPv4, has been in use since 1984 and supports a total of 4.3 billion web addresses. But only 16 per cent of these are still available for the creation of new connections – a situation that could potentially curb the growth of the web.
The new protocol will remove this problem by making available a near-infinite selection of new addresses. The transition will take time, but such a move is essential for Europe to make the most of next-generation technology, said Viviane Reding, European commissioner for information society and media. “In the short term, businesses and public authorities might be tempted to try to squeeze their needs into the straitjacket of the old system, but this would mean Europe is badly placed to take advantage of the latest internet technology, and could face a crisis when the old system runs out of addresses,” she said.

View: The full story @ vnunet

I’ve been getting a little more familiar with the little video camera I picked up a few weeks ago. Today at the Advance08 advertisers summit at Microsoft in Redmond, as part of the keynote with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella, Satya showed off Farecast, a recent acquistion that is now integrated into Live Search, and I pointed the little Sanyo toward the stage:

Video: Farecast DEMO by Satya Nadella at Advance08 (8:44)

Source: www.liveside.net

The results for the Webware 100 have been released. WordPress.org along with WordPress.com have taken home the award for best publisher. Congratulations to the team at Automattic, the core developers of WordPress.org and last but not least, thanks to all of you who voted and continue to use and support WordPress on a daily basis.

Source: Weblog Tools Collection

Well Done WordPress

Congratulations from Zakeh.com

Yahoo’s Flickr has launched Flickr Video, which allows “pro” accounts to upload 90-second video clips. Flickr’s limit is much lower than Google’s YouTube and is designed to avoid copyright issues. Adobe rolled out Media Player 1.0, based on its Air platform. Adobe’s Media Player 1.0 makes online video available outside a browser.
Flickr, a groundbreaking Web 2.0 site when it launched but relatively quiet since it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, launched Flickr Video, which allows “pro” users to upload 90-second video clips. Pro accounts start at $25 a year and offer unlimited uploads, although no individual video can exceed 150 megabytes.

View: Full Article @ Techachino

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

News Source: Times Online

Internet addiction should be considered a true mental illness, according to a recent editorial published in the prestigious American Journal of Psychiatry. Jerald Block MD says excessive online gaming, porn surfing along with e-mail and text messaging are signs of mental collapse and “merit inclusion” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V).
Block pointed to ten deaths in South Korean Internet cafes as sure signs of addiction. He adds that the average high school student in South Korea plays online games 23 hours a week and that more than 210,000 children required treatment for excessive gaming and Internet usage in 2006. Chinese figures show that 13.7% of teenagers are addicted to the Internet, according to Block.
You can read Dr. Block’s editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry here.

Now that ICANN is in the process of upgrading its root servers to handle IPv6 records, somebody has to get the word out to businesses about the benefits of the updated protocol.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is hosting the “IPv6 Experience” in Philadelphia, a meeting geared largely toward generating interest in the next generation IP.

One activity at the convention is an immersive exercise where IPv4 access is turned off, and all attendees can only connect to IPv6 addresses. The outcome, IETF hopes, will be an improved awareness of how IPv6 “just works,” and how much more work is needed to facilitate a global rollout.

IPv4 is in a critical state, and some speculate that the window of viability for its four-octet enumeration system has less than two years before unallocated IP addresses are exhausted. When this occurs, network operators and other entities who rely on numbering allocations on the IPv4 standard will find obtaining new addresses for their networks increasingly difficult and expensive. Implementation of these IPs once obtained could also suffer as a result of a drop in efficiency.

In order for IPv6 to see a complete transition, three areas need to be brought up to speed: the “Three P’s”: Protocol, Product, and Practices.

Protocol is stable, as it’s been in development for almost ten years. Products have presented a problem in rollout because many major software providers cannot agree upon Zone ID syntax, as explained in this PDF file from Cisco.

One problem Zone IDs face involves the use of a single character, %, which is a part of IPv6 shorthand. It’s used in resolving routing dilemmas, but since % is also an important character in URIs, operating system vendors have had to implement work-arounds for how the character is encoded. As a result, Windows, Linux, and BSD all have their own approaches to the matter.

And since enterprise networks are largely heterogeneous, vendors for software that have to implement IPv6 on those networks continue to find themselves stymied.

The IETF, therefore suggests that an additional effort needs to be put forth by hardware vendors, application developers, network operators and end users for IPv6’s deployment to succeed.

Source: BetaNews

Do you like twitter a lot like me? It is great yeah… the next BIG thing on the Internet.. maybe?

Oh… In case that you did not add zakeh’s twitter account yet to your twitter friends, then do this here.

Why not sharing your website’s updates or your blog’s RSS with your friends on twitter? That would be awesome for your friends to get notifications on their twitter accounts and getting some sms notifications for your website

Here is a code that might makes this happen

I used the PHP curl features to do the same thing from PHP (obviously with a real username and password):

<?php
// Set username and password
$username = ‘username’;
$password = ‘password’;
// The message you want to send
$message = ‘is twittering from php using curl’;
// The twitter API address
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
// Alternative JSON version
// $url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json’;
// Set up and execute the curl process
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$message”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
// check for success or failure
if (empty($buffer)) {
    echo ‘message’;
} else {
    echo ’success’;
}
?>

Obviously you could do more with the return than print out a success or failure message. The $buffer variable has the returned XML or JSON for you’re parsing pleasure.

The code has been tried many times and it works great on WordPress. Feel free to edit, change, and share the code.

Microsoft has just posted a press release announcing that IE8 will support standards by default, which is a change from what had been previously announced (that IE8 would support IE7 “mode” by default, and render to standards only with the inclusion of a <meta> tag - read more at A List Apart).  Ray Ozzie explains, from the press release:

“IE8 has been significantly enhanced, and was designed with great support for current Internet standards. This is evidenced by the fact that even in its first beta, IE8 correctly renders the popular test known as ‘Acid2,’ which was created by the Web community to promote real-world interoperability,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect. “Our initial plan had been to use IE7-compatible behavior as the default setting for IE8, to minimize potential impact on the world’s existing Web sites. We have now decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default in IE8.

“This is obviously a complex issue, with important considerations on both sides,” Ozzie said. “On one hand, there are literally billions of Web pages designed to render on previous browser versions, including many sites that are no longer actively managed. On the other hand, there is a concrete benefit to Web designers if all vendors give priority to interoperability around commonly accepted standards as they evolve. After weighing these very legitimate concerns, we have decided to give top priority to support for these new Web standards. In keeping with the commitment we made in our Interoperability Principles of being even more transparent in how we support standards in our products, we will work with content publishers to ensure they fully understand the steps we are taking and will encourage them to use this beta period to update their sites to transition to the more current Web standards supported by IE8.”

While of course this is not strictly Windows Live news, it will be a big topic at Mix of course, and will also play an important role in Microsoft’s standing in the web space.

You can read more on the IE Blog.