Tag: LABS

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 ...

Hopefully you've checked out GMail labs before. It's packed with slick additional functionality that you can bolt on to your Web mail client like these 10 useful options. Two new features have been made available that are definitely worth enabling: Message Sneak Peek and Nested Labels. With Sneak Peek turned on, you can right-click a message in your inbox and a snapshot will appear above your ...

If you're someone who has to take a lot of meetings, you've undoubtedly run into scheduling issues at some point and had to reschedule one . Google Calendar just added a new feature that you can enable in Labs to make the process a lot easier (if your company uses Google Calendar). Smart Rescheduler looks at other Google Calendars that have been shared with you and creates a ranked list of the ...

Finally, Google enabled an easy way to check for incoming POP3 email from within GMail. This is a very welcome addition. To enable it, go to the Labs tab under Settings (or click on the Labs icon if you enabled it), and turn on the option called "Refresh POP accounts". From that moment on, every time you hit "Refresh", GMail would check all of your incoming POP mailboxes for new messages. So ...

Microsoft Labs has an insanely-cool tech demo product called Pivot. In a nutshell, it's a completely new browsing paradigm which lets you "swim" in the ocean of data rather than drown in it. You can zoom in and out on complex sets of data, and slice and dice them in all sorts of crazy ways. I saw a TED talk about it (you can watch it too, after the jump) and on the one hand it seemed very ...

Yes, you too can now be that kind of hero; the type usually associated with guitars. Perhaps you lack the manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination, or maybe you just don't like playing the same damn songs for months on end. Maybe, like the Microsoft Office Labs team, you don't think guitar/drum/DJ heroics should be reserved for the home! That's right, you can now be a frickin' office hero. ...

One of my favorite features of Gmail has come to Google Maps: the Labs feature. In Gmail, Labs allows you to turn on a bunch of different experimental features that Google engineers have coded. In Maps, it's exactly the same thing. Just click on the little green beaker up in the top right menu area to activate Labs. Google warns that the Labs features are "not quite ready for primetime", and might ...

I'm so rarely without an internet connection these days that I barely give a second thought to offline access to my GMail, but it's a welcome "in case of emergency" feature. It's been available in GMail Labs for a long time, but today Google has pushed Offline Mail to full-fledged GMail option status. As with other GMail feature rollouts, you might not see the change right away (not a big ...

There are some great little tweaks available in Google Labs for GMail, one of which is pictured above - 'Green Robot!'! Like many of the labs additions (accessed by clicking the little green conical flask at the top of the GMail page), the beauty of Green Robot is in it's simplicity. It changes the appearance of your Google Talk contact list to illustrate which of your contacts are using ...

I've been using Weave for a while now to stay on top of my browsing syncing chores. While it's still in beta, Weave has already come a long way since its initial release. Yesterday, Mozilla Labs debuted version .5. The most noticeable change? Weave now stays out of the way while you're actively browsing in Firefox, waiting to go idle. On a mostly bare Firefox install (the only other addon I have ...

Google is fleshing out its personal information management offerings. First, the company announce that Gmail Tasks has graduated from Gmail labs and is now available to every Gmail user whether they want the feature or not. And now Google has also added an experimental "labs" feature to Google Calendar. At launch, there are just 6 experimental features for Google Calendar users. You can: ...

We mentioned Microsoft TownSquare today, the new offering from Microsoft for internal social networking and document sharing, and we have a screenshot for you to check out. From what we can see it looks like you get a steady stream of activity based on employee which is really, really cool and helpful, along with an RSS feed to track the activity. From a project management standpoint, this is a ...

Google Talk Labs edition is a new desktop version of Google Talk that borrows some features from the online Google Talk Gadget, including the addition of Group Chat, emoticons and more. Google Talk Labs edition also adds new desktop notifications from Google Calendar, Orkut, and Gmail. Unfortunately, it skimps on a few of the desktop features, and seems more like an intermediate step toward a ...

Zurfer is straight out of the Yahoo! Research Berkeley facility. This handheld application is a location based photo browser. What it is in basic terms is Flickr for your mobile device. The Zurfer application is currently being developed in the Yahoo research labs, and will -- when loaded on mobile phones -- showcase photos taken around you based on current gps co-ordinates. You can also pull ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_launches_GOOG_411'; Google has announced a new labs project, a free 411 service. The Google Voice Local Search is an experiment, but it aims to get users fully automated access to local business information. The GOOG 411 service holds the same information that would typically be found on Google.com, but for times when you just cant get to an internet ...