digitalBuzz!

Let’s welcome 2010 and Google Nexus One, a smartphone from Google running the Android open source mobile operating system. The device is manufactured by HTC and has since been available from 5th January 2010.

Nexus One is now widely regarded as the number 1 competitor of Apple iPhone. Other smartphones released in the past (such as Palm Pre, HTC T-Mobile G2 Touch, etc.) have also been touted to threaten iPhone’s market domination but their efforts proved futile.

Seriously I don’t see Nexus One winning the battle against iPhone in years to come but it could greatly undermine iPhone’s market domination, so much as so that we might see a 60/40 or 55/45 figures (in the high end smartphone market), in favour of iPhone. Being the pioneer of touch screen smartphone, iPhone has a greatly established user base (and one that is almost unanimously satisfied) as well as a booming software market. Nexus One has to play catch up here but I suppose being the underdogs in this market is quite lucractive as well, never mind being the top of the pack.

So what are the features offered by Nexus One? It has all the usual functions in a smartphone which we have come to expect and take for granted, i.e. 3G, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, Micro-USB, A-GPS connectivity, touchscreen, digital compass, accelerometer. Its only superior pieces of hardwares are 5 megapixel camera. On the software and functionality sides though, it is harder to compare. The Android platform itself seems to give Nexus One an advantage, allowing multi application support and better integration with other web and high-tech applications and services. There is also voice to text transcription, noise canceling microphone and voice directions while driving.

They say picture paints a thousand words, but I’m feeling really generous today, I will you show a Nexus One video instead. Please see below.

Google Nexus One - Video Preview

Will Microsoft be jumping into the game too anytime soon? I wonder. Let’s wait and see.

 Yet another milestone from PollDaddy. If you have not already heard, PollDaddy is a platform that powers polling and survey widgets, which has served over half a million online users around the world to date. PollDaddy is owned by Automattic, the creative and industrious company behind one of the most popular blogging platforms ever (my humble opinion), WordPress.

Polling and survey applications are always popular and useful, allowing interactions between website owners and visitors. An independent third-party platform like PollDaddy is also especially important to web entity which does not provide native support for polls and surveys, i.e. blogger.com.

As blogger.com user myself, I have easily integrated PollDaddy widgets into my blogs and I am glad that they work reliably and professionally. There are no doubt other poll widgets for blogger.com but unfortunately I could name any which has as much potential and as easy to use as PollDaddy widgets. PollDaddy recently announced that its Facebook App is now ready for use:

Announcing the new PollDaddy Facebook App

PollDaddy provides many ways for user to participate in polls and surveys. Its widgets can be integrated in any websites or blogs that support Javascript (like the one on this blog’s sidebar, can you find it?), it has its own Facebook and Myspace apps, there is a plugin for WordPress blogs, Flash poll is also available for sites that don’t support Javascript and one can also send emails containing polls for the recipients to participate in conveniently.

PollDaddy has two types of account: free and pro account. The free account is powerful enough for most individual website owners. You can always try out its features with a free account and only upgrade to pro account if you have such need. Don’t take my words for it, try it out yourself today.

HAPPY POLLING

And don’t forget to share your findings with us

Comments are welcomed. What do you use for polling/surveys? What you think of PollDaddy’s service?

Are you living an internet lifestyle? No, I don’t mean sitting all day long at home with your pajamas and cashing your checks the same way too (for work at home entrepreneurs or business owners). Sorry, I meant social internet lifestyle. In plain words, do you “hang out” in MySpace and Facebook?

Who doesn’t? Right.

What about Twitter, LiveJournal, Blogger, plurk, Wordpress.com, etc? Do you use them too?

If your answer is yes, I am sure you find it troublesome to upload same set of pictures, videos, documents, audios and other files on different social networking sites, micro blogging sites, platforms, etc. in an attempt to share your latest exploits of life with family and friends.

If you do not feel so yet, you most definitely would in the near future as you take a deeper plunge into internet interactivity, which  only about 1/5 of the world’s population are doing as well. The emergence of more social community sites and even more micro niche sites just made sure of that too, even if the crowd you hangs out with do not grow (much) larger.

Fortunately, the solution is never far from the problems. Pixelpipe is the solution to our problems of having too many accounts to update. It is a content distribution service, a photo can be uploaded to all of your social networking sites or only those of your choice. You just have to upload once and Pixelpipe takes care of the rest. In the LOTR lingo, we would say it is the “1 service that distribute them all”.

How many sites can Pixelpipe distribute to?

At least 115 sites. The latest supported sites can be seen here.

How  to optimize my experience with Pixelpipe?

Pixelpipe aims to impress and make your life easier. To that end, it has many useful tools for (almost) everyone. For starters, you can have a media uploader right in your browser. You can also upload content with MMS through your mobile or with specific apps designed for different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Nokia, Android). Those tools are available here:

http://pixelpipe.com/tools

Lastly, content can also be shared by easily sending an email to a special address designated for your Pixelpipe account. Ain’t that convenient?

Kudos to the people at Pixelpipe! I am looking forward to busying myself learning how to use Pixelpipe to my advantage.

To people who are skeptical and paranoid, please don’t use this service. It require you to input your usernames and passwords before it can distribute content to your accounts. So by all means, stay away!

Less than a week ago, Google surprised us by announcing its new instant translation feature of its reliable language translation service Google Translate. Although this feature is nothing new among dozens of language translation and multi-language dictionary softwares, it took Google a few years before the Translate button is done away with. Now we can look forward to receiving instant translation as we type each word, it even analyzes and cross check with its database every time we type or remove an alphabet!

This is indeed a good news to both web users and developers. With this tool, language barrier among people from different regions is literally removed.

Unfortunately the structure and grammar of each language differ so much from others that it is almost impossible for Google translate to get all words and phrases right. Therefore, to help improve this tool, everyone should contribute to a better translation. When there are sufficient suggestions of better translations, they would be retained while the odd or incorrect translations would be discarded, making this tool more efficient than ever.

Google translate is actually performing quite well and I have used it often enough to tell that it does not take too much of an effort to be a universal  language translator with (little) errors in translation. Imagine the sheer amount of information which will be available to our children in the future. It’s a little scary, to be honest!

Apart from instant translation, other new features include transliteration, show romanization and text-to-speech. Transliteration helps translate from phonetic Hindi, Persian and Arabic when the user does not have the appropriate fonts or keyboard layout. With the show romanization option, a phonetic pronunciation guide will be provided to help you with less familiar script. Text-to-speech feature is currently only available when translating from other languages into English. The voice synthesiser is pleasant but it is not able to correctly speak of everything yet (a web address, for instance).

Finally, if any Google engineers are reading this, can you please improve the Google translate interface? I know Google does not place much emphasis on aesthetic values but a fresh design could mean more publicity and users for Google translate. Can you at least take this suggestion into consideration?

How often do you use Google translate? Do you use its translation page or use it on your site or your browser? Is there other services which you used to translate from one language to another?