IBM adds Notes capabilities to LotusLive

IBM has upgraded its Lotuslive with additional features such as revamped emails,messaging, calendars, instant messaging and contacts. It has got an interesting set of collaboration tools which called as communities.

Communities is one of the major additions to lotuslive. Communities closely resembles with IBM's social networking software Connections, though it does not include the ability to create blogs and wikis.Anyways, Commuinities are usefull in cross-organization collabartions. Using this users can interact via discussion forums,project tracking tools ,bookmarks, filesharing and information tagging.

Users can deploy either a Web edition or thick-client software. Previously, LotusLive had offered Web-based e-mail for $3 per user per month, but the new messaging/calendaring service starts at $5 per user per month. In the new plan, each user is allotted 25 gigabytes of storage.

Coming to Lotus notes, there is no support for lotus notes provided yet But the service can be integrated with an enterprise's in-house Lotus Notes deployment, using internal LotusLive capabilities and IBM's Tivoli Directory Integrator.

IBM has integrated LotusLive with Tungle's scheduling and calendar applications allowing LotusLive users to schedule meetings across different calendaring applications and with Bricsys' software  for sharing, viewing and annotating documents, with support for more than 70 document types.

Read more...

Google's Liquid Galaxy environment open sourced for Google Earth

Liquid Galaxy by Google has been opensourced now. Liquid Galaxy is a cluster of computers running Google Earth to create an immersive experience. It started as a Google 20% project, and just kept growing.


you might never heard about liquid galaxy. Well this is a software designed to have a surround view that covers a users entire field of vision with images and 3D content, such as buildings, landscapes and various landmarks.

These Liquid Landscapes are placed accross the google offices around the world and they have also showcased these instruments in conferences. But now they felt it is pretty difficult to take this in to general public who can experience this awesome view of the geography.

So they decided to bring all the features of liquid landscape into Google Earth and it will be released to opensource communities so that users can build their own liquid galaxies. Google is going to release all of its Ubuntu sysadmin scripts and also mechanical design of the custom frames.


For the users who donot want to build their own , they can buy the complete system from its supplier.

Read more...

Twitter Launches Promote Accounts

Twitter has annouced a new money making scheme !! Twitter has launched another application which allows users to advertise their products through twitter to more than 200 million users registered with twitter. Social networking was defined as one of most powerful media for marketing and twitter is ready to exploit its 200 million registered users..

By the way twitter has got new CEO "costolo" and Evan Williams who was earlier CEO, stepped down from the responsibilities as he wants to concentrate more on product developement.

Now, coming to Promoted Accounts, it allows advertisers to buy spots in the "Who To Follow" column placed beside a user's tweet stream. The feature is designed to help users discover other users with similar interests. For advertisers, it would serve as a way to pump up their following.

To make the feature more agreeable to members, the same algorithm that's used to suggest members a user should follow will also be used to determine if a promoted account should appear in the list.

There are two places on the screen where this promoted accounts is visible. One is on the "whom to follow " and other is at "suggestions for you" area on the right side of a user's Twitter home page.

This feature is still in testing phase and only few companies are participating at the initial stages.

Read more...