Popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring just launched an Application Programming Interface that could bring some awesome new applications to mobile phones around the world. Fring offers peer to peer mobile VOIP and allows users to chat, call, and transfer files from mobile to PC or mobile to mobile, completely free of charge, using the mobile devices’ Wi-Fi connection.

The Fring API offers developers the ability to build Fring add-ons, with access to the core Fring services like talk, chat, presence, and file transfer. At launch the API is only available for Symbian S60 9.2 phones and there are no working examples of apps yet. The platform should expand and a catalog of applications open by the end of July.

Roy Timor-Rousso, fring’s Product Marketing VP pointed out that currently the company is not focusing on earning revenue, but rather on building the fring community and brand. According to fring, they have experienced phenomenal growth since their launch in January 2007 with users in more than 200 countries, growing at more than 100,000 new users each month. fring is available on more than 600 mobile phones and devices, such as Symbian Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and the iPhone.

fring is currently integrated with Skype, AIM, Twitter, Google Talk, SIP and more, and is working on a Facebook application that will be coming out soon.

Gil Regev, Online Marketing Coordinator fring underlined: “We’re very excited about this, as with the fringAPI we are adding mobile applications by welcoming in an entire world of talented developers (they only need a working knowledge of basic server-side language such as PHP, JSP, ASPX etc and XML). These mobile applications will bring users a richer experience and, potentially, an unlimited selection of mobile games, services, communities and more.”

Source: the::unwired Article

The popular Windows implementation for Unix has reached a new achievement with their 1.0 RC4 release. This release provides bug fixes only.

Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows Win32 and Win16 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows 3.x/95/98/ME/NT/W2K/XP binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
The sources will be available from the following locations:

http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.0-rc4.tar.bz2
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.0-rc4.tar.bz2
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
http://www.winehq.org/site/download
You will find documentation on
http://www.winehq.org/site/documentation

Source: Digg

Google explained its vision for Web Development in the next three years at its developers conference being held in San Francisco. Google Inc. will invest in three key areas for developers, including opening up its servers to host their applications, encouraging pervasive connectivity to the Web, and making the browser more powerful, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering,

“After years of competition among platforms, the Web has won because it’s open, because it’s ubiquitous, and because there’s a passionate community working together to move it forward,” said Gundotra in a statement. “Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The Web doesn’t depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source.”

Here is a brief summary of the plan:

Making the Cloud More Accessible

Google will open up the Google data centers so that developers can more easily scale their applications. It allows developers to run applications on Google’s huge server infrastructure. This will be done using the Google App Engine.

Android for Windows Mobile Platform

Steve Horowtiz, engineering director for Google’s Android mobile phone platform, demonstrated that you don’t need an iPhone to have an appealing mobile interface and compelling mobile applications. When he showed how an Android phone, using an internal compass, could dynamically adjust Google Street View images to match the facing of the phone user, there was applause.

Make the Browser More Powerful

As Per Google, Gears plug-in (which allows people to take Web apps offline and utilize the power of their desktop) and HTML 5 represent the future of the Web browser. By using these tools to extend the capabilities of JavaScript, Gundotra said, Web apps can become more powerful and more rich.

Source: ComputerWorld

Based on the popular Web 2.0 infrastructure, Paglo’s software-as-a-service (Saas) was first introduced to the public in November, but today marks the first day it is available for public use. The service will be available for free until the fall, when Paglo says it will implement a paid model.

Paglo’s relevance within an organization can be as simple as telling users whether their business IT system complies with Microsoft licensing policies to whether their individual machines have the latest security patches for installed software such as Microsoft Office. Paglo creates indexes of businesses’ information and keeps these data hidden from within the members of the organization.

Paglo users download a crawler application that traverses their IT environments and collects performance-related data and other information. The results then get pushed up to Paglo’s server, where they are stored in a separate index for each customer. Users can set how often they want the crawler to canvass the network or a particular asset in order to get the most up-to-date information into the index.

Users conduct searches through a Web-based interface. Results can come back in traditional, Google-like form, or as tables and chart visualizations, such as for the traffic patterns on a particular server over a length of time.

In addition, Paglo has created an API (application programming interface) that enables users to create connections to additional network assets.

“Imagine you have an old mainframe that has an old ERP (enterprise resource planning) system on it. We want to make it really easy for an IT administrator to have that information available in their [search] index,” said Paglo Chief Technology Officer Chris Waters.

The customizable Paglo Dashboard allows users to implement widgets and other technologies to make the Dashboard as user friendly as possible.

Source: BetaNews

The search giant Google is going to open the doors for its Google App Engine at Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco. Google will also outline the pricing details for the application at the conference.

Google’s App Engine, which the company first announced in April, provides hosted dynamic Web serving, persistent storage, automatic scaling, a local development environment, and authentication and load balancing aimed at making it easier for developers to build Web applications.

Google also announced that it will be adding new developer APIs for the Google App Engine in the coming weeks; a new image-manipulation API will allow developers to scale, rotate and crop images on the server, and a new memcache API is aimed at making page rendering faster for developers through a high performance caching layer.

In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through “dumb terminals” that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these “clients” prospered. Now it’s the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.

It will have a free quota of 500 Megabytes of storage and enough computing power and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month. But for further usage Google said it would charge developers.

“The Web is really the de facto platform for application developers,” noted Tom Stocky, Google’s director of product management for developer products, in an interview about the conference. “We think this in many ways represents an inflection point for Web developers. The Web has brought a new level of interoperability for apps. Developers can choose between APIs and bring a new level of utility to end users.”

Source: ComputerWorld

Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. The new tool is going to compete with data portability crowd like Facebook Connect from Facebook or Data Availability from MySpace.

Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties), ” said TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington.

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Although, Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet.

Source: TechCrunch

You can now run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. The Google App Engine enables developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power our own applications. Here is FAQ on the Google App Engine. The product is one of several offering cheap infrastructure to Web businesses, so that they can rent storage and processing power and avoid expensive hardware purchases.

The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

Google App Engine allows you to write your applications with Python 2.5. For security reasons, some Python modules written in C are disabled in our system. Also, since Google App Engine doesn’t support writing to disk, some libraries that support this and other functionalities are only partially enabled. The developer documentation gives a good overview of the Python runtime environment.

Google App Engine is free to use during the preview release, but the amount of computing resources any app can use is limited.

Microsoft’s Live Mesh, in its current preview form, represents an effort to define the Windows operating system as a platform that spans PCs, the Internet, and Windows-capable devices. At its heart, it is a data synchronization service, but it is also a bid to define Microsoft as the source of cloud computing. Microsoft, it seems, is embracing software as a service, rather than as a reason to commit to Windows.

Live Mesh is Microsoft’s late entry into a rapidly growing market described as cloud computing. The term refers to the movement of software applications and services from PCs to centralized data centers, where they are made available via the Internet. Companies like Amazon.com, Google, Salesforce and dozens of others are building computing centers that will effectively outsource data processing and make it a commodity that companies purchase as they would electricity.

Displayed within a Web browser, the Live Desktop page will not be so much a Web-based operating system, said Jeff Hansen, general manager of Microsoft’s Live Services group, but a control mechanism that blurs the location of documents ranging from MP3 and video files to spreadsheets and text documents. The Live Mesh system, however, is viewed by the company as a software platform in the data center for an evolving array of services, ranging from remote control of computers and electronic devices to data storage. Microsoft also hopes that software and service developers will create applications based on the service.

The Live Mesh platform provides a number of core services, including storage, membership, sync, peer-to-peer communication and newsfeed, accessed through the Live Mesh API. The system uses the same API for client devices and “the cloud” and includes an extendable data model that developers can customize for specific applications. Microsoft will provide more details and a software development kit in the near future. For the moment the user interface is available only in English and the service is being hosted in the company’s U.S. data center. The preview initially supports only Windows Vista and XP machines with support for Macintosh computers and other devices to follow.

Source: New York Times

One of the most innovative additions that Google may be making of its application suite, Google Doc is the ability to save locally. Writing a document on-line and the power goes out, taking with it your entire creativity. It is really very frustrating. However, the days of on-line document editing are over. Google Docs has recently enabled offline editing for Word documents to Google Doc users.

To access the Google Docs offline you would need to make use of Google Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs. With Google Gears you can store and serve application resources locally, store data locally in a searchable database and run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness. You might want to check out the Google Gears API blog too. Once you have enabled offline access you can see you documents synchronize, like they do in Google Reader.

“The offline access could open the door to government or healthcare accounts that would not consider a 100 percent cloud computing based productivity suite. This could make Google a great alternative to to Microsoft in those accounts given the price disparity,” said Dikman.

The ability to work offline will greatly benefit a lot of people, especially, businesses. Although, spreadsheets and presentations created through Google Docs aren’t available offline as yet, Google plans to add offline availability to them as soon as possible. This is a huge step taken by Google that would definitely make people wonder, why to spend so much money on Microsoft Office Package. When it is just as easy to create, save, edit and do just about everything in Google Docs.

It would be a great move from Google to make available the application offline, and it comes as a welcome move, the others in similar business could very well be troubled by the move!

Source: BetaNews