Tag: COMMUNICATION

Mozilla Messaging, citing Mozilla's increased focus on Web-borne communications, will be reintegrating with Mozilla Labs. The Messaging subsidiary was formed in 2008 to focus on Thunderbird, but given Mozilla Labs' current focus on identity and contact management, it now makes sense for the groups to be merged. Thunderbird will be unaffected by the change -- some URLs might change, but that's ...

After a lengthy stay in Skype's beta sandbox, group video calling has finally been given the green light. The new stable Windows version now includes this feature as part of Skype's $8.99/mo premium offering. You can also get a group video calling day pass for $4.99. The official Skype blog post also mentions that the new build includes several improvements to video stability and quality. In ...

Now that Skype has recovered from the serious worldwide outage on December 22nd, CIO Lars Rabbe has blogged about what went wrong behind the scenes. The problem began when a group servers that handle Skype's offline instant messaging became overloaded, in turn causing some Skype clients to receive delayed responses and crash. The bug only affected users of version 5.0.0.152 on Windows -- ...

The Apache Software Foundation, that is, not an ominously portentous, Wagner-blaring helicopter. The beleaguered Wave project, which Google has ceased developing, will soon shut down. Last week, Google gave us the ability to export our existing waves as Zip files, and now, thanks to Apache and the Wave in a Box off-shoot, you may soon have somewhere to import them to. It won't be exactly the ...

Microsoft Messenger for Mac, Microsoft's instant messaging application for Apple-made computers has hit version 8, finished its beta testing, and is now ready to download and use. Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 will be included in the upcoming Office for Mac 2011 suite as well. Messenger for Mac has all the features you'd expect -- it lets you instant message, audio and video call your friends ...

Skype for Windows has officially reached version 5. The most important feature addition is, as expected, Facebook integration. Group video calls, a feature that has been available in Skype 5 betas, has also made the jump to the stable version. Some work to clean up the UI has also been done. The new Facebook tab brings your News Feed into Skype and lets you post messages, comment, and like ...

If you're the biggest social network around and you need to tap someone for video chat, who better to do it than the biggest name in video calling? That's what Facebook thinks, and they're teaming up with Skype to deliver SMS and voice/video chat using Facebook Connect. As Kara Swisher reports, Facebook hopes that giving users stronger communication tools will lead to a tighter community -- ...

In a first that has been deemed "historic," though by who I do not know, Minnesota has become the first US state to move its communications and collaboration suite into the cloud. Last year, Los Angeles switched to the enterprise version of Gmail, but this is the first entire state to move into the cloud. (We should point out that LA has a larger population than Minnesota, however...) The ...

"In many cases, sarcasm is difficult even for people to recognise," says Ari Rappoport of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. No shit, Ari, really? Given a sample set of Amazon product reviews and random Twitter posts, the new sarcasm software agreed with human analysis more than 75% of the time! While this is a pretty nifty advance for natural language processing, the implications ...

If you somehow missed it, Google Wave is now a bonafide Labs project: rather than being an invite-only alpha, it's now a public beta test! If you don't already have an account, just head on over to Wave and use your regular Google login details. If you've not seen any of the Google Wave introductory videos, you should check them out -- they explain the whole thing a lot more succinctly than I ever ...

Showing off the truly omnivorous and omnipotent nature of Wave, there is now an internal Extension Gallery. All you have to do is hit the 'Extensions' button on Wave's Navigation menu and voila! Until now, it's always been a bit tricky to find 'proper' extensions for Wave. There have been a few lists, but gadgets are often plagued with stability issues (or they don't work at all), and robots ...

Not only will the next version of Microsoft Exchange transcribe telephone calls, it'll go one step further: Microsoft is also trying to translate telephone calls in real time. You're speaking English, she's speaking Russian -- but you can both understand each other! HOW COOL IS THAT? It was only a matter of time, of course -- and Google's also working on the same tech -- but still, watch the ...

I send out lots of emails. I can't possibly remember them all, but in some cases, a forgotten email can come back and bite you. Your boss suddenly asks about that thing you promised to have done, and it's delayed because someone didn't reply to an email which you forgot you sent, and then the finger-pointing begins and it's all great fun (nothing I've ever personally experienced, of ...

With the tagline 'work outside the inbox', and customary all-lower-case branding, Cc:Betty has just been relaunched and rebranded as Threadbox. Citing 'branding issues' and the need to 'reel in the cute', Threadbox is still the same software -- it just has a different name. If you haven't heard of Cc:Betty, it's a very neat email organizer. As you probably guessed from the (old) name, you add ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/11/30/the-ultimate-list-of-google-wave-robots/'; This list has been a long time coming, and for that I apologise. But I think it will be worth the wait. In just the last month invites for Google Wave have opened right up with second and third generation testers getting invite codes of their own to distribute. Developers and users are now ...