Facebook’s New Features Get Animated [VIDEO]

The Taiwanese are at it again! This time the humorists at Next Media Animation (NMA) have turned their computer-animation reenactment efforts to the latest Facebook changes.

NMA takes on the latest updates from the f8 conference including the new Timeline and music features.

As usual, NMA nails it.

Check out some images from the event below.

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A Xobni Alternative for your Microsoft Outlook

Xobni, if you are new, is a popular Microsoft Outlook plugin that lets you know more about the sender of an email. You get to see the sender’s picture, Linked profile, tweets and, if public, their Facebook profile right next to the email message. Xobni probably uses the sender’s name and email address to bring this information and it is quite efficient at that.

If you write the word Inbox backwards, you get Xobni. If you write Evil Xobni backwards, you get Live Inbox – that’s exactly the name of a new Outlook plugin which is showcasing itself as a better alternative to Xobni. The feature set is similar and so is the UI - compare the screenshots of Live Inbox with Xobni below to get an idea.

If you have used Xobni before, you’ll have absolutely no trouble getting to speed with Live Inbox as this new program has lot in common with Xobni.

Once you install the plugin, you need to connect it with your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It then offers a rich profile of the email sender in the sidebar, much like Xobni, and if there are multiple matches, you can pick any of the matching profiles manually.

The bottom half of the Live Inbox sidebar displays a list of email messages and file attachments that you have exchanged with the sender in the past. Xobni does this as well. There’s a unified instant search box to help you quickly find contacts or one of your old emails. The Live Inbox website says that it returns search results “50 times faster than Outlook” though I did not experience that difference in my testing.

Live Inbox is expected to become available for $29.95 though you may use this link to download the free 30-day trial right now. Xobni is available in both free (that’s what I use) and paid edition that costs $9.99 per month.

Live Inbox does mostly work as advertised - I tried it on Microsoft Outlook 2010 running on a Windows 7 machine - and, because of the one-time fee, it may appeal to Xobni Pro users who otherwise have to pay $9.99 per month. If you are using the free version of Xobni, I see no reason for making the switch. That said, I find it amusing that the company, which has only created an almost exact replica of another successful product without much innovation, is still calling their inspiration “evil.”

Here’s an ET Now video where Mahesh Murthy and Sudhir Syal discuss Live Inbox from the funding perspective. The website has no information about the founders but it looks like a product of Instacoll, the same team that worked with Sabeer Bhatia in the past to create Live Documents, an online office suite.

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Microsoft Has Sold 450 Million Copies of Windows 7

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7, its flagship OS, has sold 450 million copies worldwide.

Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft’s Windows division, also announced that Windows 7 is now (finally) being used by more people than Windows XP. Sinofsky made these announcements at the Microsoft Build conference in Anaheim, Calif. Tuesday.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Launches Windows 8 [LIVE]

In addition to announcing 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold, Sinofsky also boasted that 542 million people are now using Windows Live.

While the growth of Windows 7 must be pleasing to Microsoft executives, the big show today is the unveiling of Windows 8. Stay tuned for more on Microsoft’s next-generation operating system.

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A Desktop Search Tool for your USB Drive

You like to carry all your important files and documents on a USB drive but when you plug that drive into another computer, you are unable to search the contents of that external disk through the built-in Windows search as the files have not been indexed yet.

Rather than wait for Windows to index your files for searching, what you may do is carry a desktop search utility in the USB disk itself that knows everything about your existing files and thus you can use search as soon as you plug the drive.

One such utility that you may want to give a try is Dropout – this is a portable Windows search tool that requires no configuration or installation. You just need to copy the Dropout.exe file to your USB disk’s root folder (home directory) and it will let you instantly search all the files in the current directory and those inside sub-folders.

When you first run Dropout, it creates its own search index inside an hidden sub-directory and thus it won’t have to re-index files when you use the USB stick on a different computer. The search index updates itself in an incremental manner whenever you run Dropout next so your new / updated files are automatically included.

And Dropout just doesn’t let search files based on their names or extensions, it even lets you find files based on their content (full text search) just like the real Windows search. Get it!

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Scientists Turn Brain’s Visual Memories into a Mind-Blowing Video

Ever dreamed of recording your dreams and turning them into a video clip? The technology that enables you to do that is near: UC Berkeley scientists figured out a way to turn the way our brains interpret visual stimuli into a video, and the result is amazing.

To be able to do this, the researches used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure the blood flow through brain’s visual cortex. Then, different parts of the brain were divided into volumetric pixels or voxels (the term might be familiar to those who remember early 3D games which were based on voxels instead of polygons which are more commonly used today). Finally, the scientists built a computational model which describes how visual information is mapped into brain activity.

In practice, test subjects viewed some video clips, and their brain activity was recorded by a computer program, which learned how to associate the visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Then, test subjects viewed a second set of clips. The movie reconstruction algorithm was fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos, which were used to teach the program how to predict the brain activity evoked by film clips. Finally, the program chose 100 clips which were most similar to the movie the subject had seen, which were merged to create a reconstruction of the original movie.

The result is a video that shows how our brain sees things, and at moments it’s eerily similar to the original imagery.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published in the journal Current Biology.

Recording our dreams and “reading” the minds of coma patients requires a lot of work still, as current technology only enables scientists to interpret brain activity while the test subject is watching a movie. Ultimately, it could be used to decode how our brain processes visual events in everyday life or, perhaps, our dreams.

Check out another video, which shows the movie reconstruction algorithm at work, below. More details about the study can be found here.

[UC Berkeley via Gizmodo]

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10 Unique Creations Made From Computer Hard Drives [PICS]

On this day in 1956, IBM introduced the IBM 305 RAMAC — the first computer with a hard drive. It boasted capacity for less than 5MB of data stored on 50 24-inch disks.

Fast forward to today. The progress achieved in the computer storage market is quite astonishing. Although necessary, storage itself isn’t something that normally gets us excited, but we’ve decided to mark this important anniversary by exploring how people have gotten creative with hard disk drives.

SEE ALSO: Media Format Flops | Vintage Games Console Ads | Vintage Apple Products

From upcylcled drives made into jewelry, to discarded drives transformed into sculptures, we’ve found 10 interesting examples of hard drive creations from all around the world. Take a look through the photo gallery below and let us know in the comments which you like — and why.

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Italian artist Franco Recchia takes apart computers and "breathes new life into their component parts by reusing them to build ingenious skylines." The skyline pictured is Recchia's recycled view of Manhattan.

Made up of five small washers salvaged from old hard drives, this delicate necklace gives storage a second chance.

Cost: $12

This stunning vase can rotate 360-degrees thanks to its unique base, made from the insides of a hard disk drive.

Image courtesy of Jalex Studios

We've seen plenty of hard drive clocks, but this vintage version is special. Its disk platter dates from the early 1960s from a pack used in IBM's 2311 disk drives.

Cost: $129

One of the best DIY HDD projects we've seen, these hard drive wind chimes are a great use of old platters, which apparently make a lovely sound. There's a complete how-to available if you feel inspired.

Image courtesy of Windell Oskay

Staff at the Russian IT store VIST hand-made a range of toys created from old hard drives. Sadly our Russian isn't good enough to determine whether they're for sale or were a special side project.

The amazing Hard Drive Coffee Table features an original 26-inch diameter hard drive platter manufactured by Bryant-Excello back in the late sixties. With creations this stunning, we're almost sad storage has shrunk so much.

Hard drive spacers make up the planetary rings of this unique designer jewelry.

Cost: $38

The 86th Expeditionary Communications Squadron's sys-admin Miguel Rivera made headlines after being featured on Wired for his sculptures made from hard drives. Cars, bikes and even a robot were featured in Rivera's unusual series.

Finally, this example is a little different. Here, the external hard drive is presented as art by Manuel Palou. 5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte is a sculpture that consists of a 1TB hard drive containing $5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded software, games and books. Interesting, but is it art? Have your say in the comments below.

Image courtesy of VIST

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Friends Can Help Recover Your Facebook Account

There are a couple of simple but important steps you may take to ensure that your Facebook account is always safe and secure from hackers.

For instance, you may associate a phone number to your account and Facebook will send a text message whenever someone logs into your Facebook account from a new location or from another computer. It also helps if you can add an alternate email address to your Facebook account as a backup in case you lose access to the primary email address.

Trusted Friends is one of the other useful security related feature of Facebook that some of us may not be aware of  (video).

You choose any 3-5 friends, who you trust, and Facebook will send them recovery instructions for your account in the worst case scenario where you have forgotten your Facebook password and have also lost access to your email accounts and your mobile phone.

To set up a trusted friends list for your Facebook account, go to your Account Settings –> Security –> Trusted Friends and pick any 3-5 close friends.

If you ever get locked out of our account, Facebook will send recovery codes to all these trusted friends. Next you need to call your friends, collect the codes and submit them to Facebook. After you submit the security codes, you'll have to wait for 24-hours before you can log into Facebook again.

Here’s a quick video detailing how you may specify Trusted Friends in Facebook.

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Quick Updates – WSJ and ET

A break from regular programming, I have two quick updates to share with you.

The Wall Street Journal added an India specific online edition - india.wsj.com - some two years ago and, more recently, they have expanded their India Real Time team by adding new columnists who would cover a wide variety of India related topics.

As some of you would know, starting this month, I have started writing a weekly column on personal technology and consumer gadgets for WSJ India and the column appears every Thursday. You can find all my recently published tech columns at blogs.wsj.com.

In other news, the Economic Times newspaper (Sunday edition) recently did a story on a couple of Indian bloggers who have made a business around various Google tools and services (YouTube Partners and AdSense to particular).

In case you missed reading the story in ET’s print edition yesterday, here’s a PDF copy of the same. I was fortunate enough to get featured in this article though am sure there are much bigger success stories out there.

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Man Turns Random Tech Into Musical Instruments [VIDEO]

Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.

The guys at StoryAmp pointed us to this video created by musician Mikael Mutti. Mutti likes to reverse engineer electronics and game controllers to create instruments and new sounds.

This video was made using the controllers featured in the video — including a Rockband Guitar/iPad hybrid, Japanese office telephone, a Wii remote and a Beamz laser motion sensor. Mutti even created an instrument out of a Dance Dance Revolution floor mat.

Using bluetooth and USB, Mutti feeds two controllers into his laptop and he creates the music using Reason and Pro Tools.

Frankly, we love seeing weird tech repurposed as musical instruments. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

And Don’t miss yesterday’s YouTube Video of the Day: Nissan iAd Creates 360-Degree Experience on Your iPhone [VIDEO].”

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Is Facebook Trying to Kill Privacy? [OPINION]

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Facebook has finally done it. It’s just a few updates away now from euthanizing the concept of privacy, already ailing on its network.

Timelines and Open Graph, introduced at this week’s f8 conference, sit on either edge of the sword that’s just been run through privacy’s heart. It is finished. It is done. This turn of events probably makes CEO Mark Zuckerberg happy. Let’s look back:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

That was Zuckerberg’s January 2010 argument that sharing is the new social norm. But that’s only half of the sharing equation. Zuckerberg didn’t talk about the other half: privacy.

The first big change Zuckerberg revealed on stage was Timeline, the completely overhauled version of profile pages. No longer is your Facebook profile about what you did recently–now it’s about everything you’ve done on Facebook and beyond.

SEE ALSO: Facebook’s New Profiles: First Impressions

The Timeline interface lays out everything you’ve shared on Facebook. One of the new features, Map, lays out your checkins on a world map. My map is sparse because I primarily use Foursquare to share my location. But now that I see how sparse that map looks, I feel compelled to start sharing my location via Facebook.

In addition to laying out everything you already shared for the world to see, the Timeline encourages you to share more than ever about your life so far. Millions of people are likely to post their baby pictures so that the beginning of their Timelines — birth — isn’t just an empty box.

Timeline is just the appetizer. The second announcement, the launch of the new Facebook Open Graph, is what will forever transform the world’s largest social network.

There are a couple of key changes that deserve mentioning. The first is the addition of customizable actions and gestures. No longer do apps prompt you just to “like” something on Facebook. Instead, you’ll share that you “hiked a trail” or “rode your bike” or “kissed a girl” (and liked it). Any action can be shared via Facebook, and the only limit is the imagination of developers.

The second addition is the new permissions screen for giving apps access to your Facebook account. It’s more robust and explains exactly what an app will be sharing with it. The result is that the prompt will only appear once. Once you accept, the app can share exactly what you’re doing to your Facebook wall as you’re doing it.

There is no longer a “Would you like to post this to Facebook?” prompt. It just posts. When you run with Nike+, it gets posted. When you use your favorite cooking site to make a new dish, it gets posted. When you go to bed with a device tracking your sleep patterns, it gets posted.

Everything can, and eventually will, get posted. Facebook has done something nobody has ever been able to do at scale: It has enabled passive sharing.

In 2009, Mashable‘s CEO and founder Pete Cashmore argued on CNN that privacy was dead, and social media was holding the smoking gun:

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

“Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.”

While I agree with his assertion that in an age where attention is king, privacy is simply an illusion, I disagree about the murderer. Sure, Twitter, Flickr, Google and others played a part in privacy’s death, but Facebook made the killing blow.

But thanks to what Facebook launched at f8, we’re at the point of no return. Facebook’s passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain.

Sharing with just your friends doesn’t protect your privacy. I know the people at Facebook will disagree and argue that users can control what is shared with whom. But this is simply an illusion that makes us feel better about all the sharing we have done and are about to do.

We may not notice the impact on our lives immediately. But it won’t be long until your life is on display for all of your friends to see, and then we’ll all know what Facebook has wrought.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RapidEye

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Editor-at-Large Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

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Mashable is the largest independent online news site dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology. With more than 50 million monthly pageviews and 14 million unique monthly visitors, Mashable has one of the most engaged online news communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

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Run a User-Submitted Photo or Video Contest On Your Site With Olapic

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Olapic

Quick Pitch: Olapic helps online publishers add galleries of user-contributed images.

Genius Idea: Pooling images in a database of social content.

83% of Americans own a smartphone, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet Project. Most of those phones, even the “dumb” ones, are equipped with some kind of camera. More cameras equal more photos, which can be a great opportunity for publishers — if they can find a way to leverage it.

Olapic’s product is one way to do this. The startup makes it easy for site publishers to collect and display user’s photos through widgets they can embed on their sites. Visitors to the publications can either drag and drop files into a box on the site, choose to upload photos from social networks like Facebook or Instagram, email their photos to a special address or tweet their photos with a specific hashtag. Publications get a centralized moderation dashboard. As soon as they approve photos, they appear in a Gallery on the site.

New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune and Styleist have either used the widget on their site or purchased a white label version [Disclosure: Mashable is a customer of Olapic's]. Olapic charges a monthly fee based on each customer’s number of monthly unique visitors.

The majority of Olapic’s customers are news organizations, but co-founder Jose de Cabo said he also thinks the application has a future with sports teams and event organizations. One soccer team, the New England Revolution, already uses it to collect fan photos on its Facebook Page.

From a revenue standpoint, advertising seems to be an even more promising route than subscription fees. Olapic is, for instance, coordinating a branded Facebook version of its widget for Pepsi. It’s an instant campaign that engages consumers, and it can work well for hosting a branded contest. Eventually it may also share revenue with publications for ads the company can incorporate into the gallery widget.

But the startup’s grand vision extends far beyond interactive galleries.

“We’re building a very large network of sites that have video and photo-sharing,” De Cabo says. “What we want is to have this network where users can contribute with photos and videos, and get more exposure to their pictures.”

In other words, any website could search the entire database for material to publish. It sounds like a convenient solution for publishers, but will site visitors be eager to share their photos with the world without compensation? De Cabo says their excited reactions to the widget so far suggest that they will. That, and what he calls “vanity coins.”

Would you be willing to share your photos this way? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Thomas Hawk

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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NASA Details the Next 25 Years of Space Exploration

NASA has just published the Global Exploration Roadmap, a document detailing the agency’s plans for the next 25 years of space exploration. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the future of space technology, travel and exploration.

The 38-page document was developed by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group, which is comprised by 14 space agencies including Roscosmos (Russia), UKSA (the UK), CNSA (China) and NASA. It’s a vision of robotic and human space exploration within the Solar System, with the premise humans may one day live and work in space, the Moon and, perhaps, Mars.

The document is only a first iteration of the roadmap. But it’s very detailed and contains two post-ISS mission scenarios for the next 25-year period: “Asteroid Next” and “Moon Next.” Both options emphasize sustainability, but prioritize the order of sending humans to the Moon and asteroids differently.

Both scenarios are exciting, including a human mission to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) in the 2030's, a deep space habitat (DSH) in 2034, and – in the Moon Next scenario – a human mission to the moon in the 2020's. The step next step would be sending humans to Mars, a dream many of us would love to see come true in our lifetimes.

Global Exploration Roadmap further details key objectives of space exploration and its impact on the economy and Earth safety. A special chapter is devoted to long-range human exploration strategy and the many challenges it brings. Another chapter details the role of the International Space Station as the first step towards the future of space exploration. There’s also mention of robotic missions, which should pave the way to human deep-space exploration.

Check out the two mission scenarios below and the entire Global Exploration Roadmap (in PDF format) here or the high-resolution version here or click below.

Images courtesy of NASA

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HP Shares Tank as Meg Whitman Takes the Helm

Shares of Hewlett-Packard are taking a beating Friday as investors express skepticism that former eBay CEO Meg Whitman can right the ship.

HP’s stock price closed at 22.86 on Thursday, just before Whitman was appointed as the company’s new CEO. Shares of HP were trading at 21.96 as of 11:02 a.m. ET though, a drop of more than 3.5% (the stock is slowly recovering). It’s even worse if you consider that HP’s stock price hit 24.90 on Wednesday, not long after the news leaked that Leo Apotheker was out as CEO.

The problem is simple: Investors are not keen on the company’s decision to put a person with mostly consumer experience in charge of a business whose strength is in enterprise. Whitman, who most believe did a good job building eBay into a powerhouse business, just doesn’t have experience in hardware and enterprise sales. Investors wonder whether Whitman has the knowledge needed to fix the problems at the massive HP empire (which employs 300,000 people).

SEE ALSO: Meg Whitman’s First Email to HP Employees

Mashable‘s readers seem to agree with this assessment. In a recent poll where we asked readers what they think Whitman should do first, 42.5% of respondents said that she should revive the TouchPad and the webOS division. Another 25% said that she should save the PC division, while another 16% said that she should kill the $11 billion acquisition of British software maker Autonomy.

Despite Whitman’s statement that she intends to “stay the course” set by her predecessor, you can bet that she and new Executive Chairman Ray Lane (a partner at Kleiner Perkins and the former COO of Oracle) are reviewing all of their options with haste. If they don’t quickly communicate a vision for the company, employees and investors could panic, and who knows what would happen next.

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Sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

There’s little denying that Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the three most active social networks at this time where billions of pieces of content are shared every single day.

To give you an idea, more than 200 million tweets are written every day by 100+ million users on Twitter while the numbers are even more impressive for Facebook. The 800+ million users of Facebook like and share more than 2 billion posts per day. Google+ is growing at an impressive rate but is still a relatively small player with 43 million users.

Thus, as a web publisher, it definitely makes lot of sense for you to share your content across all these channels but have you ever wondered which of these networks have the highest engagement level? Which of them would bring the maximum eyeballs to your content?

Kevin Rose, best known as the founder of Digg, recently did an interesting experiment. He shared the same web article on his Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles simultaneously and, with the help of bit.ly analytics, calculated the number of clicks coming from each of these social networks for the next two days. The results aren’t very surprising.

 

Kevin has 1.2 million followers on Twitter who clicked on the link ~5800 times. Some 135k people have added Kevin to their Google+ circle and that got him ~3600 clicks. Finally, his 261k subscribers on Facebook clicked on the link link more than 11000 times.

The click-through ratio, or the engagement level, was the highest on Facebook.

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How the World Uses Social Networks [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Amidst the Facebook-centric society in which we now seem to live, it’s important to remember that groups of people around the world use social networks differently. We’ve taken a look at the social media breakdown in 10 countries — how they’re engaging with social networks, blogs and Internet culture.

Based on data provided by Nielsen, Facebook is clearly the favored social network. However, you might be surprised to see how runners-up like Twitter and LinkedIn rank on a global scale.

Take a peek at our infographic, and please let us know in the comments below which social networks are popular (or gaining popularity) in your country of residence.

Editor’s Note: Because reliable data about emerging online markets like China and India is difficult to source, they were regrettably omitted from this graphic.

Infographic design by Nick Sigler

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

Infographic design by Lorena Guerra

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Most Common Places to Lose a Cell Phone

Your mobile phone is an important part of your life and losing it even for a minute can be both frustrating and very alarming.

Lookout, a company that develops security and tracking software for mobile phones, has put together a neat infographic that illustrates the top ten locations where one is most likely to lose his or her precious cell phone.

Airplane seat pockets, buses, subway trains and the taxi seats are among the most likely places where people lose their cell phones and the unfortunate part is that the chance of recovering the phone in these places is extremely low. People also seem to forget their phones at the Airport security scanner but the recover chances are pretty good in that case.

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Windows 8 Developer Preview Launches Tuesday [PICS]

Can’t wait to get your hands on Windows 8? You can get it tonight — as long as you’re willing to suffer through countless bugs without any technical support.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 on Tuesday at its Build conference in Anaheim, California. The tech giant detailed how its next-generation OS bridges the gap between tablets, laptops and desktops with a lightweight system that is built for both touchscreens and keyboards.

Windows 8's features include a Metro style interface, fast boot times (Windows loads in less than eight seconds), a new Windows Store for apps, communication between apps, support for ARM and Intel-based hardware and countless UX and UI changes that are a dramatic departure from its predecessors.

While attendees of the Build conference already have access to the Windows 8 Developer Preview (our review is coming soon), you can take it for a spin as well, starting Tuesday, Sept. 13 at 8 p.m. PT. That is when Microsoft will post the download links for Windows 8. During the developer preview, Windows 8 will be free. It will be available in 32 and 64-bit configurations.

Be warned, though — this is not a finished product. It will come with bugs, constant updates and lots of incompatible software. And Microsoft will not be offering any technical support for the OS. If you install it, you’re on your own.

If you want to get a better idea of what is coming in Windows 8 before you install it, check out the screenshots we’ve collected below. Let us know if you intend to try out the new Microsoft OS in the comments.

View As Slideshow » Microsoft demonstrated a lot of Windows 8 devices, including tablet devices, at its Build conference in Anaheim, CA. Windows 8 Devices: A Closer Look These are some of the devices running Windows 8 at Microsoft's Build conference.

"Your personalized lock screen shows you unread emails and other app notifications. The image shown here is a photo of the road leading to Mt. Cook National Park in New Zealand."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"See your apps and content in a glance on the start screen."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Pick the files you want to send or share from one place."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Touch browsing is fast, fluid and intuitive."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"The thumb keyboard feels natural and comfortable."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Large buttons help you type on the touch keyboard."

Courtesy of Microsoft

Windows division President Steven Sinofsky Windows division President Steven Sinofsky takes the stage at Build.

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Google Chrome is now Bundled with Adobe Reader

Not long ago, the Google Toolbar was bundled with some popular software programs including Skype, Adobe Reader, Real Player, WinZip and more.

Next on the bundled software list is probably Google Chrome. If you are on the Adobe.com website to download Adobe Reader X, you may also be prompted to install the Google Chrome browser on your computer (screenshot).

This looks a strange combination to me for one very-obvious reason.

A majority of people could be using Adobe Reader primarily for viewing PDF files on their computer but the newer versions of Google Chrome include a built-in PDF viewer by default. Would people still want to install Adobe Reader on their machines when they’ve already got Chrome, courtesy Adobe?

Yes, Adobe Reader is a more powerful and capable software that Chrome’s PDF viewer but for reading simple PDFs, wouldn’t the latter tool just suffice?

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Amazon’s Android Appstore now Available in India

The Android App store at Amazon is a good alternative to Google’s own Android market for several reasons.

Amazon frequently has deals in place where you can download premium Android apps either for free or at a discount, their app store is nicely integrated with the Amazon.com website and, best of all, you can test drive apps in the browser without having to buy them.

The Android App store was earlier available to customers in the United States only but that restriction is no longer in place. You can now download Android apps from the Amazon store in India and possibly other international countries as well.

To get started, open the following URL - amazon.com/appstorelanding - in the mobile browser of your Android phone. This should download the Amazon Appstore app on your phone and you can then log in using your existing Amazon.com to start shopping.

I tried downloading a free app, a paid app and a premium is available for free today and all three transactions went through without a hitch. Once you have installed the Amazon App on your Android phone, you can also start shopping from the Amazon’s online store and your purchases will auto-download the next time you launch the Android app.

The only downside is that the test-drive feature for Android apps on Amazon.com is still not live for international users. Thank you Shantanu Goel for the tip.

[*] Google has a 15-minute refund policy for Android Market.

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Gift Engine Predicts What Your Facebook Friends Want

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: GiveEmThis

Quick Pitch: GiveEmThis is a personalized gift engine that analyzes your friends’ social media updates to recommend relevant gift ideas.

Genius Idea: A bevy of gift suggestions for every Facebook or Twitter friend.

Facebook’s 750 million-member social network makes connecting with family members, friends and occasional acquaintances easy. More friends means more birthdays and anniversaries to remember. For the thoughtful among us, that equates to more gifts to buy.

Herein lies the promise of GiveEmThis, a simple to use gift-giving assistant from Imply Labs. It promises to help you discover gift ideas your Facebook friends might actually want.

Sign in with Facebook. Select a Facebook friend. Enter the friend’s gender and age (the info will auto-populate if it’s in your friend’s Facebook profile), and enter the person’s Twitter user name (if he has one). A few seconds later, GiveEmThis will spit out a selection of gift ideas — all sourced from Amazon for the time being — tailored to your friend’s interests.

The GiveEmThis prediction engine, powered by Imply Labs’ predictive technology, considers a Facebook user’s demographic data, as well as her on-site behaviors and patterns. Events, status updates, shared links and “Likes” all factor into Imply Labs’ arcane algorithmic calculations. Twitter data is computed, albeit to a lesser extent, and natural language processing is used to understand the context of status updates.

The sum total of everything Imply Labs can glean about a person via social data makes its way into individual user profiles. These profiles rub up against Amazon’s catalogue to generate product matches.

How well does it work? Imply Labs founder Zack Oates says 87% of users found the right gift for themselves, based on survey data the startup collected from alpha testers.

Even so, we think GiveEmThis has plenty of room for improvement. It works really well — except for when it doesn’t. I highly doubt my friend and colleague Ben Parr, a diehard Chicago Bears fan, would ever appreciate Green Bay Packers gear.

“The more users that we get, the more that we can improve the algorithm,” Oates counters “It’s a constantly learning system.”

In due time, GiveEmThis product listings will expand to include Zappos’ product catalog, and Imply Labs will eventually allow companies to add their own products to the system. GiveEmThis will also get Google+ and LinkedIn integration, Oates says.

GiveEmThis is the consumer-facing version of the startup’s prediction engine. Imply Labs will also provide businesses with a white label version of its predictive technologies.

Founded in 2009, Imply Labs is a privately funded Utah-based startup.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Chris P.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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Facebook Now Recommends People to Subscribe to

The new subscribe feature of Facebook seems to have lot in common with Twitter but with one key difference - if you follow someone on Twitter, you get to see all their shares whereas if you subscribe to someone on Facebook, you only see stuff that they have specifically made 'public.'

Today, Facebook has added a new feature where they recommend you other public Facebook profiles to subscribe to and these recommendations are probably based on your existing subscriptions (see screenshot). Twitter too has a similar recommendation engine which offers suggestions based on who you are currently following.

Twitter has a valid reason to worry here. They just touched 100 million users while Facebook has a 750+ million user base and people spend more time on Facebook than any other site on the web. Twitter only recently added support for multimedia while Facebook does a far better job at rendering shared content with rich snippets and inline previews.

I created my Twitter account some five years and it has taken me all this time to reach a few thousand followers. I enabled subscriptions for my Facebook profile a few days ago and the number of subscribers has already crossed the first thousand mark. That's just because of the sheer reach of Facebook.

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Add a Subscribe Button to your Facebook Profile

Like most other Facebook users, I have a public page where I share updates from my blog and a personal profile which is private and I primarily use it for connecting with my offline friends and family members.

Most of the stuff that I share on my personal Facebook profile – like pictures of kids, songs, cooking recipes, etc. – would be extremely boring to the external world and, fortunately, they don’t get to see any of that.

Having said that, I occasionally post updates on my personal profile page that could be of interest to a wider audience and I would therefore be more than happy if people - who are not my “friends” on Facebook - can see or comment on them. How can you do that without making your profile public?

Facebook has just added a new option to profile pages that would let people “subscribe” to your profile just like the way people follow you on Twitter. Whenever you post an update on Facebook with the privacy set as “public,” it will appear in the news stream of your subscribers.

To put this in more simple terms, Subscribe is to Facebook profiles what Like is to Facebook pages. The only difference is that you get each and update when your “like” a Facebook page whereas you only get public updates when your “subscribe” to a Facebook profile.

You can subscribe to my public Facebook updates at facebook.com/agarwal.amit.

If you would like to add the Subscribe button to your own Facebook profile, go here. Before you do that, it may be a good idea to double-check that only stuff that you really want to share with non-friends is public.

To confirm, go your Facebook profile page, hit the “View As” button and then click the “public” link to see what updates in your profile are public. You can have unlimited number of subscribers to your profile but you can subscribe to a maximum of 5,000 profiles.

You can download this PDF, courtesy the Facebook Public Figures page, to learn more about the new Subscribe option and how it differs from a regular Facebook page.

On a related note, Facebook is using the standard RSS icon with the new Subscribe feature which is confusing because, technically, these aren’t really RSS feeds – you can’t get them in, say, Google Reader.

Also see: Customize your Facebook Profile

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