Hafiz Ismail sent me a comprehensive review of Smart2Go he did last week. He is a Malaysian reader of this blog who currently stays in the UK. Not to mention he is an enthusiast of mobile application too. I sincerely thank him for the wonderful review and for informing me Smart2Go now supports maps in Malaysia!

Download Hafiz’s Review of Smart2Go (PDF, 573KB)

In this review, Hafiz discloses 2 popular free navigation application for mobile phone as alternatives to some fee-based satellite navigation applications. Anyway, Smart2Go is the main focus of the review after all.

Basically, the review covers from the installation of Smart2Go to navigating the Nokia Maps using the Smart2Go. As a Malaysian, Hafiz tried on navigating from Jalan Ampang to Jalan Tun Razak in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia map. On top of that, Hafiz generously offers his priceless insight of the newly launched Smart2Go as well as provides some useful screen shots too. A picture worths a thousand words ya!

Thanks Hafiz for your time and efforts!

Well, usually we use major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves to search whatever we need on the Internet. What if we are looking for something special and can’t manage to find via these search engines?

I came across at least 3 search engines which respectively target different niche search items, one is specialized as Photo Search Engine, another is Programming Code Search Engine and another is Mobile Content Search Engine by Nokia.

Let me start with the first one of a kind search engine, Riya – The Next Generation Photo Search Engine. Well, of course I know Google has its images search feature as well but Riya uses proprietary face and text recognition which can intelligently recognize each and every instance of that person or place in the photo.

Quoted:
Riya’s bag of tricks is pretty big–besides looking at facial features, it also examines people’s clothing to help recognize individuals in multiple pictures. It does subtle analysis of the timestamps on photos to help it make further intelligent guesses about who’s who. And it also does optical recognition of signs and other text in pictures (if you’re wearing a nametag, it may be able to read it).

Wanna try it out now? Take a tour at Riya’s website now.
Continue Reading »
Tips To Search Special Search Items

We have been waiting for this moment to come anxiously since the last Release Candidate version of Firefox (Firefox 1.5RC3) on November 17, 2005. Now the final version of Firefox 1.5 is available. Previously, we can reach the download page of Firefox from either www.getfirefox.com or www.spreadfirefox.com, but now all these websites will be directed to the main page of www.mozilla.com, which is the developer of the famous Firefox.

Since quite a number of bloggers have already talked about the release of Firefox 1.5 in PPS by providing the download link and some introduction of the new features, I will skip those parts as you can read it from the link.

I, Myself just downloaded Firefox 1.5 and started playing with it to see what are the new features and stuffs. I found out most of the themes are not compatible with this latest version. Out of 8 themes I have, only 2 have the latest compatible version, they are Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) and Aquatint. Anyway, you still can download whichever compatible themes that suit you from the themes page.
Continue Reading »
Short Review Of Latest Firefox 1.5

Suanie posted an entry about some sweet memories in the 90s. It reminded me that I was still a teenager that time who only used PC for games and entertainment.

For some of you who were web surfers back in 1990s, might still remember how the old Yahoo! and Google looked like. Just to bring back the old memory of these 2 search engine giant, here I present you Yahoo! in 1996 and Google in 1998. For those who have not seen the old version of Yahoo! and Google, enjoy too. :)

Yahoo! in 1996

Well, back in 1996, Yahoo! was still a web directory itself comprised of around 370,000 sites. That time, Yahoo! was more or less a place served as Yellow pages and to search for latest news. For your information, this is the 2-year-old Yahoo! as Yahoo! was created in April 1994.
Continue Reading »
Yahoo in 1996 & Google in 1998

I just got an invitation from Microsoft last Friday to test the forthcoming Hotmail service, Kahuna. I am definitely not the first to do a review for Kahuna but I hope this entry shares the experience of using it from a diffrent point of view. Well, there are quite a number of good reviews written, such as this article from PC World, this article from PCMag or even this comprehensive list of features from MSN.

Kahuna is the next version of Hotmail and it will have 2GB capacity. It utilizes the latest web technologies such as AJAX, which GMail is also using. Since Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express is still having the largest user base for Windows-based email client applicaiton, Kahuna tries to bring the same user experience into the web application.

Click To Enlarge

Mail Box

On the Today page, which happened to be the welcome page, we will see some messages from Microsoft regarding this beta version of next Hotmail. To give us the user experience of Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, we will see the user interface of Kahuna is very similar to them with three columns design:-
Continue Reading »
The Next Version Of Hotmail – Kahuna

Just a few days ago, in the post of Google Blog Search Strategy, I mentioned in the comments that by submitting the posts in your blog to Google Sitemaps might help Google to update your latest posts. Hence, it will increase the chances of your readers to reach your blog through Google Blog Search.

Usually, your posts will get indexed by Google when its spider crawls to your blog, but this is not guaranteed when it will come. Instead of waiting for the spider to come, why not submit all your posts to Google Sitemaps and let all of them get indexed as soon as possible? In fact, my blog has got more than 18,000 20,000 pages (Updated!) indexed by Google, I strongly think partly due to my frequent submission to Google Sitemaps.

Some of you, including Andrew, might not have submitted your posts to Google Sitemaps and would like to know how to do it, right? I will try my best to show you how. However, I will break this post into three parts :-

• Part 1. For anyone using any blog script, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Blogsome, Blogspot, etc.
• Part 2. For WordPress user.
• Part 3. For Movable Type user. I am not a MT user, but I’ll see what I can do about it. :)

First of all, you will need a Google Sitemaps account. If you already have a GMail account, go login to Google Sitemaps. If you still do not have a GMail account, drop me a line or two to my GMail account, I will send an invitation to you right away.

Next, you will need to generate a sitemap to submit to Google Sitemaps. In this post, I will only cover how to generate sitemap using online tools.
Continue Reading »
Boost Ranking In Google Blog Search Using Google Sitemaps – [Part 1]