Bally Chohan - News, Views & Reviews on Information System

The neat Google Alert service lets you subscribe to certain search queries to get updates emailed to you. For instance, you can subscribe to mentions of your website name in Google News. The newest member in the Alerts family is Video. I subscribed to the query “google” to give this a try, setting the alert schedule to “as it happens,” and found several videos thumbnails + links in my inbox this morning.
The alerted videos come from all kinds of sources, not just Google-owned properties; along with YouTube, there’s e.g. German Clipfish.de, or Metacafe.com. However, the link will always point to the Google Video frame wrapper for displaying the actual video. Google – framing the web for outgoing links so you’ll always bookmark their site? Let’s hope this doesn’t catch on with other services of theirs, like web search.

…more on blogoscoped

Yahoo just acquired Zimbra for 350 million bucks, TechCrunch reports and Yahoo confirms. In Zimbra’s own, slightly cryptic words…

Zimbra is open source server and client software for messaging and collaboration – email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. The Zimbra server is available for Linux, Mac OS X, appliances, and virtualization platforms. The Zimbra Web 2.0 Ajax client runs on Firefox, Safari, and IE, and features easy integration / mash-ups of web portals, business applications, and VoIP using web services.

Yahoo says:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us.

Yahoo in their blog remarks, “We see great opportunities to incorporate some of [Zimbra’s] best-of-breed* features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!’s industry-leading communications products.” Mike Arrington, who calls Zimbra an “online/offline office suite”, adds that he wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo picks up online office maker Zoho.com next. “That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.”

Source : blogoscoped

With the start of the Twenty20 world championship, cricket fever is upon legions of enthusiasts. To make it easier for you to indulge your interest in a game John Fowles characterized as “chess made flesh,” we’ve simplified your search for cricket scores. Just type [cricket] in a Google search box and you’ll see a brief score of all the current cricket matches. A single click will also give you access to a detailed cricket score card.

If you’re a diehard India fan, then type [cricket india] or [cricket score India England] to get results for Indian matches. Of course, feel free to replace India with the country of your choice for country-specific results.

Posted by: Sadeesh Duraisamy

Google Spreadsheets just got a bit more powerful. There are four new cell functions to automatically import external data: importXml, importData, importHtml and googleReader.

For instance, importXML has two parameters, URL and an XPath query. Entering =importXML(”http://waxy.org/links/”, “//a/@href”)into a Google Spreadsheets cell and hitting return will load all links from the Waxy.org link blog in the subsequent cells. (I’m not sure if this data is automatically updated or if it’s a one-time fill, though it seems to be auto-updating.) A similar feature had been around in online spreadsheets competitor EditGrid, and so far set EditGrid apart from Spreadsheets in that regard.

Another new feature in Spreadsheets is auto-filling of cells. Enter “Monday” and “Tuesday” in two cells, select them, and click the blue dot on the cell edge to drag it over subsequent cells. They will now read “Wednesday”, “Thursday” and so on. You might know this from other spreadsheet applications, but what’s more, if you hold down Ctrl when you perform this auto-fill, Google will poll data from Google Sets to automatically complete almost anything (at least that’s the theory).

I think auto-filling based on Google Sets is a really cool idea, though during my tests that feature was very unstable, didn’t show a load bar (so you won’t know if there’s something still being polled from Google Sets), and mostly didn’t work at all… or returned results much less relevant than what Google Sets returns, incidentally.

Full source: blogoscoped.com