It was 15 years ago when Microsoft developed this browser for its operating system. It came, it saw, and it stayed, stayed there at every step of the way. It had its ups and downs but when the version 6 of this browser came out, it came with its countless security issues and bugs which was the beginning of the end for microsoft’s internet browser. It is still the most popular web browser with almost 60% of market share. Firefox from Mozilla comes is 2nd and has a lot of ground to cover with a market share of 23%.

Internet explorer, when it first came out was a big hit and it had no rivalry at that time. In 2004 though, things started to change when mozilla came out with its open source web browser Firefox. That, and the fact that Internet explorer version 6 was a nuisance for most of the users and was found to be problematic by most of the users. That was the time when IE started to lose its market hold to Firefox and other web browsers such as Google Chrome and Opera.

At this time. Microsoft is planning to launch its latest version of its web browser Internet Explorer 9. The first beta version is expected to be made public on 15 th of September in San Francisco. Only time will tell whether Microsoft’s new version has improved from its predecessors or not.

Okay, its time to dry your hair at the the speed of a Ferrari. The new Conair Babyliss hair dryer is out and it is made up of real Ferrari parts with the help of Ferrari team. Finally you can tell your women they can feel the wind blowing through their hair and you won’t be lying.

The Volare is the first of its kind that uses ball bearing design so it can operate really smooth. It is also extremely light weight and comes in a Ferrari natch. There is also turbo boost button to boost air speed. This Ferrari designed hair dryer is a beast since it has a power of 2200 watts and can generate wind speeds up to a maximum of 80mph and can run for 2000 hours.

All this comes with a hefty price tag of 400$ but that is all overshadowed by the mere fact that its from Ferrari.

A top executive and Apple who was in charge of the hardware realated to the iPhone is saying good bye to the company after facing massive problems with the newest version of the smart phone.

Much has already been said about the antenna problems of the lastest smart phone from Apple, iPhone 4G, and it comes as no surprise that the official in charge of this is leaving the compamy since this issue has been a source of colossal criticism and a feeling of disappointment among the smart phone’s user.

It is also worth mentioning that Apple was forced to offer free fix for the antenna after numerous complains from the customers and reported problems from media outlets regarding dropped calls.

In a response to all of  this mess, Mark Papermaster, Apple’s senoir vice president of iPhone an iPod engineering, has taked the decision to to step down according to Apple spokesman Steve Dowling.Dowling abstained from commenting whether the executive was fired or is leaving on his own.

This desicion comes weeks after Apple’s acnnouncement to give free protective cases to buyers of iPhone 4G to solve the “Death Grip” problem.

A group of influential Digg users was brought into the limelight yesterday when Alternet claimed to have uncovered a massive censorship from a group conservatives that were systematically down voting “liberal” stories from the link sharing website Digg.com.

The group named “Digg Patriots” has supposedly been burying and and eliminating any kind of liberal stories that appeared on the social bookmarking website. After the claims were made public, senior authorities at Digg have shown signs of starting an investigation which has come as a little bit of a surprise since Digg has turned a deaf year to such activities in the past too.

The founder of Digg, Kevin Rose said yesterday on his twitter, “We’re looking into this”.

Digg, one of the top 50 websites works on a concept where stories submitted by the member users are voted up and down and depending upon the the highest number of upvotes, also called “diggs” , the story appears on the front page which can generate thousands of views for external websites. Now, the “Digg Patriots” whose political allegiances are with the “conservatives” used there influence and worked to censor the promotion of  articles even slightly against the GOP,Tea Party, Fox news and pretty much anything they considered “liberal”.

This claim comes at a critical stage for Digg since it is about to launch its new version in the coming days and it will be interesting to see to what extent they go in eliminating this censorship and the users involved therein.

The primary reason why people never liked Wave is because nobody really understood what the heck it supposed to do.

a)    It took too much effort to learn
b)    Even if you took the effort, you didn’t actually know if you could get anything useful out of it. Chatting with friends? Skype/MSN/Gtalk. Sharing stuff? Don’t get me started

I think Google should have invested more in telling people the benefits of using Google Wave vs. the other chatting and collaborating apps if they wanted to get more widespread acceptance.

Funny exercise: Try searching for “Google Wave’ in Google News search for 2009 to see all the hype about it

Update: 3 stories on Google Wave have gone on the front page on Digg and some of the top comments seem to share the same opinion:

Update 2: These 25 people search engines are a good way to find people to communicate with (not through wave though, you have a lot of instant messengers ).

It might be called The Street Orchestra, but it’s got nothing to do with hobos banging out Shostakovich on trashcans. Nope, it’s a cute little iPhone app produced at the behest of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. It’s basically Tap Tap Revolution or Guitar Hero, except it’s free, the focus is strictly classical and, amazingly, you can sync the game with up to 200,000 other players to create some kind of hellish wireless orchestra.

Yerp, you read that right – 200,000 people. Which, assuming everybody playing bought an iPhone 4 off-contract, is like $140 million worth of tech. Apparently impromptu sync-mobs have been turning up all over Gothenburg to harangue the locals with classical music – presumably closely followed by a pack of excited pickpockets.

The game plays pretty simply – you sync, then you tap along. The neat thing is that player mistakes are audible, allowing whoever’s conducting your virtual orchestra to furrow their brow disapprovingly in your direction. We’re just hoping for some more tracks to be added in future updates – imagine 200,000 people playing Flight of the Bumblebee together? That’s a lot of bloody fingers and ruined iPhones.

Anyway, check out this clip of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra playing with the app. It’s pretty swell.

Google is good at most of the things it does but one thing it is not really good at is keeping secrets. According to reports, Google has secretly invested a considerable amount believed to be somewhere in the range of  $100-200 Million in Facebook games developer Zynga in an attempt to launch its own online gaming portal.

Google has secretly invested in social gaming behemoth, Zinga

If this rumor is true Zynga wold most probably play a vital role in runing the service for Google.The most important attribute that Zynga could provdide is the social graph information that would be essenstial in the development of “Google Me”. The transaction mehtods used by Zynga in most of its product promises a huge investement opportunity for Google in the gaming arena. Also, this would allow Google to use the user data with anohter of its products, Google Checkout,a PayPal copetitor,which has not been a success for Google by any means.

Whether you run one of the most successful companies in the world, a startup firm, or a singly handed business, the right marketing strategy is the winning key in any kind of commerce or business model. Reaching out to people in the most effective way and engaging with your customers to stay updated with the user expectations via their feedback, forms the most integral part of determining the gradient of your performance graphs in the industry. So far the traditional media outlets that include hoardings, commercials, booths, rallies, freebies, forums and hundreds out there have served the marketing needs of the businesses. But with the recent buzz of social media, companies are singing a completely new marketing tune now.

With the world population becoming more social and tech savvy, social media has become the prime mode of self expression and voicing the opinions. This very social web also offers companies a myriad collection of channels to engage with their online consumers. Finding the perfect audience to run your marketing campaign, then building a community around your brand or product followed by managing the group, sharing the relevant content and creating a perfect conversation hubspot for chatter on brand / product/ service among the consumers and company, outline the most basic prerequisites for a successful online rapport. The real journey begins from here. It is time to monitor your brand online and track the conversations across social web to watch your performance, manage your reputation and be utterly responsive as per needs.

So lets take a look at five such most useful tools that leverage online performance and brand monitoring for your business.

Radian6:

Radian6 is one of the broadly used brand monitoring tool that offers usefulinsight into how your brand is faring in the market. It not only allows you to hear the chatter that involves you and your brand; it also gives you the opportunity to put the data into quantitative formats. Radina6 helps you understand the landscape of social media, where your brand fits in and how you can benchmark and evaluate the impact of your work. It scans millions of posts across various social networks, videos comments, micromedia, various mainstream online news , blogs, forums  and so on to know how your community engagement efforts affect your business.

Addictomati:

Addioctomati generates a dynamic page for the keywords mentioned by you by searching across the social web that include images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts shared on Digg and lots more. You can even personalize your results dashboard by moving around the source boxes and then bookmark these nicely designed pages and use them regularly to track the latest discussions related to your brand.

SocialMention:

It is just like Google alerts but for social media. Google  alerts is one of the widely used tool that helps staying updated via emails whenever a press release, blog post, or any other kind of document uses the keywords specified by the user. SocialMention too works in a similar manner. It searches all over the web for any mention of your keyword/brand. It is a social media search engine that hunts down various sources such as Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Digg etc. and provide real time data to the user. It also offers email alerts and personalized RSS feeds. 

Trackur :

Similar to SocialMention, Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pagesthat include news, blogs, video, images, and forums and intimates on finding anything that matches the keywords that interest you. It also allows users to export any search result to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

Buzzom Premium:

Last but not the least; brand monitoring could never have been so seamless without Buzzom Premium. The tool which packs a bunch of features that help you grow and manage your Twitter accounts easily, launch social media campaigns and much more now offers its great brand monitoring service that examines the performance of your brand across the web. Know how people perceive your brand, track conversations, find the buzz around your keywords and view interesting and actionable statistics that can be further scrutinized to help you decide your next marketing move. It also allows users to reply, retweet the updates and also follow or unfollow people right from their dashboard. Buzzom Premium is a perfect social media manager offered at the most economical price.

Monitoring your brand online is important. You must keep track of what is being said about your brand, where links are posted and are there any competitors rumbling and trying to pull you down and hampering you integrity. This plays a vital role in building up and/or maintaining a good repute both online and offline. While there are a number of other options available in the market today which we will be delighted to know about at the end from you, I hope all these tools prove to be of some help to you in maintaining control of your persona and credibility amongst your customers.

Reacting to complaints that the new iPhone 4 loses signal when it’s held in a certain way, Apple today announced a remedy to a problem that has plagued the company’s trust rank over recent weeks.

Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the iHand. Like any Apple product, the iHand is a product that redefines the way we use or in this case, hold our phones. The Swine flu proof synthetic product makes it easy for anyone to get a firm ‘grip’ on their iPhones without having to worry about signal loss when calling 911.

, iHand is precision-carved from a single piece of European beechwood.

The iHand comes with adjustable fingers to allow you to raise and calibrate its grip or elevation to your ear. It doesn’t even require a manual.The iHand will be available throughout stores for only $69.

Source: Scoopertino

Finland will be officially the first country to make broadband connection a legal right for every citizen from the 1st of July, 2010.

Every Finnish will have the right to access 1Mbps internet connection and the government has vowed to take that value to 100Mbps by the end of 2015. Finland’s communication minister Suvi Linden explained the idea behind the new law saying “We considered the role of the internet in Finns everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment. Finland has worked hard to develop an information society and a couple of years ago we realised not everyone had access“.

According to estimates, more than 95% of the population already has access to internet and a mere 4000 homes require to be connected to the inter webs in order to comply with the legislation.

While this decision will be highly appreciated by the masses in Finland it will be interesting to see how the authorities deal with the ever increasing illegal file sharing and piracy which is bound to go up further once the entire country is online.