Yahoo! is pulling out all the stops into becoming the web's most comprehensive search engine. Yahoo's Australian chapter has just made available the beta of its new search engine called "Alpha" which makes use of search results from other portals and gives them to the user in an orderly manner.

Essentially, what Alpha does is take results from Yahoo's base search and places them in a main widget. It compiles search results from other sites and places them in minor widgets. That way, the user can search Wikipedia, Flickr and other popular search engines without having to leave the Yahoo Alpha page.

Software testers have spoken and the beta seems to be working nicely. More features such as customizable widgets and filters should become available as the development nears its last stages. We're excited about this innovation in searching and we'll keep you updated as we monitor its progress.

Too attached to your smartphone and laptop? You're not alone. Three out of four people in Yahoo! HotJobs say that they now have a sense of blurring when it comes to drawing the line between their jobs and their private lives thanks to wireless communication.

According to the survey, 10 percent of the respondents rely on their Blackberry mobile devices to stay in touch, 65 percent use laptops and 81 percent are into mobile phones. Blackberry is a hybrid of a mobile phone and a computer. It offers a compact frame and connection via a mobile provider while allowing the user to enjoy the functionality of a PC with its software.

The respondents say that the line between home and office is blurred because of the good degree of connectivity that allows workers to coordinate seamlessly with offices even while off-site. The ability to submit work from just about every point of the globe has extended the workplace almost infinitely.

Susan Vobejda, Vice President of marketing of Yahoo! commented "while they were intended to provide convenience and flexibility for workers' lives, they have changed the physical parameters of the workplace and extended the work day. Professionals can work from anywhere and connect at any time."

Most of the people who responded to the poll feel that it's wonderful that the technology has allowed connectivity to almost integrate the home with offices while a minority of the respondents say that the wireless connections are helping companies keep employees on a short leash.

What do you get when you shove a webcam and a 2.5" Color LCD screen inside a vintage 1950s snapshot camera case? Well, truth be told, we don't know what you'd get but one guy did end up with the color field camera.

Now what in the name of Thomas Edison is a color field camera? It's a de-hickey-vice-doodad thingamajig that blends live video data with flickr images that match the color of the object in the center of the viewfinder. It loads up a flicker image onto the LCD screen that matches the color of the object the camera is pointed at. Let's say you've got a red piece of paper in your camera's sights. What you'll see on the LCD screen would be a flickr image that is also of a hue that matches the red piece of paper's. Yeah, it's kinda hard to digest all at once, so just check out the video above to see what we mean.

Here's a little quote from the creator's webite: "With the color field camera, framing remains a central activity, but you are giving other people control of your viewfinder. By showing other people's images that are related to your current field of view, the color field camera offers glimpses into remote spaces, images, and memories through the exploration of the color properties of local surroundings."

Interesting little gadget. It has also received some due recognition, having won "Best Flickr Hack" at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day on 10/01/2006, plus the retro-stylin' design looks absolutely gorgeous. We'd totally love one of these for Christmas, even though it's not commercially available. Maybe we still have some time to stock up on some brownie points so Santa Claus can grant our wishes and give us one of these babies for Christmas.

 

The problem with having GPS systems is that you have to pull out maps and points-of-interest from databases and memory sticks. But here comes the Upstart GPS-startup Dash to get you out of that (traffic) jam. Their trump card is being able to pluck out all those maps and POIs via WiFi or cellular data. And it's all done in real-time.

What does this mean? Your info is never outdated since it's being fed into Google, Yahoo!, etc. And it doesn't just give you street directions of, say, how to get to the nearest movie theater. It will also show you the movie schedules. You can download RSS feeds, for really up-to-date reports: traffic accidents and the like.

Another feature of the Dash is that every unit affects the central server. If you're stuck in traffic down at Main, the Dash sends a signal to the central database, saying that it's traffic where you're at and signals it out to other dash units that might be in the area to warn them.

The Dash is mapped for a shipping release early in 2007. It's still a long way, but once it's out, expect it to sell like hot cakes. Lots of motorists will surely want this godsend.

Our article, "The Foundations of Fortress iTunes", covered what the entertainment industry sees as the challengers to Apple's dominance in the digital media download market: SpiralFrog, Zune, PSP and Connect, MP3 cell phones, MySpace and MTV Urge. We forgot to include one possible candidate: Sirius. As in the satellite radio. And just like the other upstars we covered in Part 1, a Wired.com reporter speculated that Sirius is looking like an assault on Fortress iTunes, too.

Remember Sirius' Stiletto 100 portable satellite radio and MP3 player that we featured last month? The company also announced an online subscription - "satellite-free" - service called Sirius Internet Radio (SIR). As mentioned in Part 1, iPod and iTunes were the perfect partners to capture an entire market for Apple. Yeah, well SIR isn't iTunes. The latter is an online media store. SIR's an internet radio service that streams CD-quality music and selected talk channels.

Enter Yahoo! Music, one of the partners of Stiletto's manufacturer, Zing. Stiletto 100 will reportedly work in conjunction with SIR and Yahoo! Music so that listeners can choose to purchase-download the song they're listening to. As announced by Bob Law, senior VP of Sirius, "The market for digital audio on-the-go is exploding. We are working with Zing to expand the availability of Sirius content on new platforms and bring the best in satellite radio programming to an increasingly mobile audience."

In other words, they're making Sirius and the Stiletto into an iTunes-iPod teamup of sorts.


And there's more after the jump: guess where the CEO of the Stiletto's manufacturer worked before.

With all the news of Dell laptops blowing up, you can't help but wonder if Dell is going to get back up from all the problems it's facing this year.

Well, this isn't the news that's going to turn the tide of bad press they're getting. In fact, it doesn't look good for Dell on both the laptop AND desktop side of the business.

In an Associated Press review on Yahoo by Robert Weston, the Mac Pro defeated a Dell desktop PC with similar specs on both price and functionality.

According to the review, there is more than a $900 difference between a low-end Mac Pro and a Dell Precision 490 with identical configurations, and the difference in price gets even better for Apple with more upgrades.

Borrowing a high-end Mac Pro with a pair of 3 gigahertz processors, an Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics card with 512 megabytes of video memory and four 500 gig hard drives and 4 gigs of system memory, Weston compared the Mac Pro setup to a Dell Precision 690 with the same specs. The result? $7449 vs $8534 in Apple's favor.

Not only that, but there is a large amount of easy customizability. As Weston notes, "It comes with two optical drive bays, four PCI Express expansion slots and four hard drive bays. The computer also can handle up to 16 gigabytes of system memory." The changing of hard drives is also a breeze with the Mac Pro - just pull out a tray, take out one drive, stick another one in, and push it back! No cables and a ton of ports for different uses makes it versatile, with the ease of use only making it more enticing.

Dell has a lot of catching up to do, or they may just get completely decimated by the competition. First, they have to stop their products from blowing up, then they have improve their tech and their pricing scheme. Then they have to pray for a bigger miracle. Let's hope something good happens for Dell soon, before the final nail gets driven into their coffin.

Speaking of nails and coffins... You may want to know that the Mac Pro can just as easily run Windows as a Mac OS. Another point to Apple.

The days of the proud 2.5-ish Gigahertz processors may soon be coming to an end. Quentin Diduck, a graduate student of the University of Rochester, has come up with a new chip design that may make the overclocker's dream, a 3-Terahertz processor, become a reality. The creator proudly claims that it may be the next stage of evolution after relays, tubes, and semiconductors.

The design which has been named as the Ballistic Deflection Transistor (BDT) is based upon the idea of bouncing the electrons into their chosen trajectories with the use of inertia, and not brute force. Because inertia doesn't require extra energy to be exerted, far less power is required and the BDT produces very little heat. Experiments have recorded heat generation to be as low as a few microwatts per transistor, and that was without the use of coolants, fans or any type of refrigerant. However, the BDT relies heavily on "2D electron gas", which will facilitate the movement of electrons without the interference of impurities.

The BDT isn't about to be installed into laptops any time soon, though, since it still doesn't have a capacitance layer the way that current transistors do, and this causes problems at very small scales. At the moment, data centers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have been looking forward to the completion of this new technology, and the National Science Foundation has just granted the University of Rochester team $1.1 Million to create the first prototypes.

On the 27th of June, RCA brought three new MP3 player models into the market - the 4GB RCA H100 ($139), the 6GB RCA H106 and the H116 (both $169 each). All models are available to purchase right now, but lack features such as an FM tuner, recording capabilities, photo support, and video support.

The RCA H100 series is compatible with WMA subscriptions and audible files. Although it is much bulkier than an iPod Nano and lacks the flamboyance of a Creative Zen V, so those looking for an affordable medium-capacity player with no extra features at all should check this player out. That will do it for the H100, next is the H116.

While the H116 series isn't ugly, the lack of a glossy high-tech appeal and prominent branding gives the lightweight player a very generic buzz about it. Holding it in the hand comes natural, and at its thinnest point on the player the device measures 3.5 by 2 by .5 inches. It's not as skinny as a Nano nor the Creative Zen V Plus, but that doesn't take away from the overall user experience.

As RCA representatives have stated, the H100 series is "so small, that it can hide behind a business card." RCA reps have also confirmed that there isn't a difference between the H106 and H116 models- in fact, all of the series models are practically identical from the outside.

The full review awaits after the jump!

Ever wanted to call your mom but were too busy cutting down zombies to pieces? Want to order pizza but you're chatting with a hottie? Worry no more. Logitech developed a keyboard, headset, mouse, and microphone set-up, the Logitech EasyCall Desktop, that will allow you to make calls without ever getting off your PC Station.

The European version of the keyboard will include buttons for Skype-launching, making and ending calls, and speed dialing. The speakerphone eliminates echo and has buttons that can also start and end calls. The US version will be optimized for Yahoo Messenger with Voice. Hopefully, Skype will get in on the action - stateside - as well.

All products will be available before the end of the year. For now, let's place a call in that old-fashioned way - voice dialing.

We all know that most of us keep at least two different email accounts - one for work and one for personal use, then there's others who also keep emails for groups, community newsletters, website, for stalking, and so on and so forth. We also all know how tedious it can be to have to log in to each of these accounts separately. That was then. Now, say hello to the ability to access all your mail, all at once.

This is made possible by, first and foremost, having the WebMail extension installed in your system. This extension integrates website-based email accounts into Mozilla Thunderbird, and allows Thunderbird to download and to send emails using the website. The extension is known to be slick, as it’s just a case of downloading the core package plus the package for the particular service you’re using, installing them, restarting Thunderbird, and then setting up the account.

To get started, you will need to install WebMail first and at least one of its optional components. Once WebMail is up and running, the next thing to check for is if the the status of the enabled servers are "running". This can be viewed in the Options menu. This is also the menu that should display the list of supported domains.

From there, you can move to creating a POP account by going to the main menu and opting to create a new account. You may then set your name and email address in the Identity Page. Then, just enter the appropriate server information and the domain name, follow the instructions until you reach "Finish", and you're all set!

Support is currently available for Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, Libero, Lycos, AOL and Mail.com accounts.