Skype on Verizon Blackberrys and Google Phones

This is huge! I read this as I was looking up some information on the Google Phone. It originally from www.pcworld.com...

I'm not sure if this is just an intriguing partnership or a major moment in phone history. But at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Verizon Wireless and Skype announced that they're working together to bring Skype to nine BlackBerry and Android phones on the Verizon network. A version of Skype Mobile will be available next month, permitting free Skype-to-Skype calls, chatting, and Skype Out calls to any phone number, including cheap international rates. And it'll all be done using flat-rate data plans rather than phone minutes.

There's nothing inherently historic about Skype being available on phones -- it's on the iPhone (albeit over Wi-Fi only right now) and I first used the service on a Windows Mobile handset years ago. (Only briefly, though -- it taxed the phone to the breaking point, and voice quality was pretty miserable.)

But a major carrier such as Verizon not only grudgingly permitting Skype but buddying up with it as a selling point for its phones is an interesting twist. I look forward to trying Skype Mobile on my Droid when it's available. And I have a few questions in the meantime...

Is there any integration with the phones' standard phone features? Say, access to the phone address book from within Skype? Or-dare I wish for it-the ability to route all calls through Skype, as Google's Google Voice app permits on BlackBerry and Android handsets? (Yes, I know that Google Voice isn't comparable to Skype-it uses phone minutes, and Skype doesn't)

How well does it work for incoming calls? Skype Mobile can run in the background, and I presume that you can use a Skypein phone number to permit people to dial a standard phone number and reach you in Skype. But does all this work smoothly enough that you could comfortably use Skype to take calls rather than the phone's standard phone features?

How's the quality? As good as a standard cell call? Better?

Are there any gotchas? On paper, this whole deal sounds...suspiciously enticing. The better Skype Mobile works, the more likely it is that lots of Verizon customers will do most (or all?) of their calling using it. Even if Skype cut Verizon in on any revenue it made, that couldn't be good for Verizon's bottom line.

How to Sync Your Google Calendar with Any Email Client

In my case it was with Mozilla Thunderbird, but this article written by Adam Pash is great!

Thanks Adam!!

Check it out for your convenience below...

Adam Pash, 9:00 AM on Tue Jul 29 2008, 232,816 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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As of yesterday's announcement of CalDAV support in Google Calendar, you can now sync your Google Calendar with virtually any popular desktop calendar for free. Not only can you enjoy your favorite desktop calendar software and still get the benefit of the web interface, but you can also sync any desktop calendar with any other across platforms using GCal as a go-between. Let's take a comprehensive look at how to set up bidirectional syncing between Google Calendar and your favorite desktop calendar—from Outlook and iCal to Sunbird and Thunderbird—for free.

Remember, this doesn't mean that you can sync Google Calendar with just one desktop calendar. It means that no matter what you're using—Outlook at work and iCal at home, for example—you can always stick to desktop calendars if that's what you prefer. Google Calendar now works as both a great web application and a dedicated syncing tool. It's the cloud, and once it's set up, you don't ever have to access your calendar through the web again if you don't feel like it. But when you're not at a desktop, you can fire up GCal from any web browser, make changes, and still be confident your desktop is completely in sync next time you fire it up. Let's get started.

Sync Microsoft Outlook with Google Calendar

Syncing calendar events between Outlook and Google Calendar has been a cinch ever since Google came out with Google Calendar Sync, a free application that provides bidirectional syncing between the two. (It also supports one-way sync in either direction, if for some reason you don't want two-way syncing.) Assuming you're using a supported setup (Outlook 2003 or 2007 and either Vista or XP), here's how to get it working.

1. Download and install Google Calendar Sync.
2. Enter your Google account email address and password.
3. Select your sync method (most likely you want two-way syncing) and the sync frequency you prefer. It defaults to syncing every 120 minutes, which seems a little long for most.
4. Hit Save and you're done. Easy, right?

If you've added a new item to your calendar and you want to force a new sync rather than waiting for Google Calendar Sync to run its next sync, just right-click the system tray app and choose Sync. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Sync iCal with Google Calendar

UPDATE: Since this post was written, Google released a new utility called Calaboration that handles iCal-to-Gcal sync setup with even more ease. (Original post)

As of yesterday, Google Calendar supports two-way synchronization with iCal through the CalDAV remote calendar standard. Setting up iCal with GCal varies slightly based on whether or not you're using your default GCal calendar or a secondary calendar. First, here's how to set up your Google Calendar default with iCal:

1. Open iCal, then fire up your iCal Preferences (iCal -> Preferences or Cmd-,).
2. Click on the Accounts tab, and then click the '+' button to add a new remote calendar to iCal.
3. Call the calendar whatever you want (I went with 'Personal' for my main calendar), then enter the Google account username (which is normally your Gmail address) and password.
4. Click on Server options to display the Account URL text box. For your default calendar, enter the following URL:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/youremail@gmail.com/user

   ...replacing youremail@gmail.com with your actual email address.

5. Once you've done that, just hit Add and you're finished. Give iCal a few minutes to download all your events and you're good to go.

If you want to add a secondary calendar, the steps are exactly the same as above with one small difference. Instead of inserting your email address in the Account URL as described in step 4, you need to grab the calendar ID for that specific calendar. You can find it by opening GCal, clicking the arrow next to the calendar you want to sync, and selecting Calendar settings. In the settings, find the Calendar Address section near the bottom of the window, then just copy and paste the Calendar ID (which is formatted like an email address) in place of youremail@gmail.com in the URL above.

You can refresh iCal to make sure you've synced the latest-and-greatest at any time by selecting Calendar -> Refresh or hitting Cmd-R. (Original post)

Sync Mozilla Sunbird or Thunderbird with Google Calendar

Whether you're using Mozilla's standalone calendar application Sunbird or Thunderbird with the Lightning extension installed (Lightning integrates Sunbird into Thunderbird), bidirectional calendar syncing between either application and Google Calendar is a breeze. The special sauce in this sync is the Provider for Google Calendar extension. Installing Provider in either Sunbird or Thunderbird is basically the same procedure, and here's how it works:

1. Download and install the Provider extension by saving it to your desktop, opening the Add-ons dialog in either Sunbird or Thunderbird, and dragging the file you just downloaded into the Add-ons dialog. Once installed, make sure to restart the application.
2. Now that Provider is installed, you have to add your new Google Calendar. In Sunbird, go to File -> New Calendar; in Thunderbird, it's File -> New -> Calendar when you're in the calendar view.
3. You're now looking at the Create new calendar wizard. Select "On the Network" and hit Continue.
4. Choose Google Calendar as the calendar type. The Location field requires the XML flavor of your calendar's Private Address, which you can get by opening GCal and choosing Calendar settings from the drop-down next to the calendar you want to access.
   At the bottom of the settings page you'll see the Private Address section. Copy the XML link and paste it into the Location field in Sunbird or T-bird.
5. When you hit Continue, you'll be asked for your Google Calendar username (again, your Gmail address) and password. Enter it, give your new calendar a name, and hit Continue. You're done.

From now on, any event you add to that calendar will automatically sync to GCal and vice versa. You can reload the calendar to get the most up-to-date information at any time by clicking the Reload button in your toolbar. (The button is installed in the toolbar by default in Thunderbird, but you may have to customize your Sunbird calendar to add it to the toolbar.)

Sync Your Mobile Device with Google Calendar

If you're interested in syncing your mobile device with Google Calendar, you've also got a ton of great and free options. BlackBerry users can check out Google Sync, a BlackBerry app made by Google specifically for Gcal-to-BlackBerry syncing.

Alternatively, the free, open-source application GCalSync does bidirectional syncing between Gcal and tons of supported phones. (Original post)

If you're an iPhone or iPod touch user, you can set up automatic, two-way syncing between your Google Calendar (and Gmail contacts) with web site NuevaSync. (Original post)

Finally, if your phone supports SyncML, web application GooSync can handle Gcal syncing without installing anything.

Other Options

If you're not happy with the methods detailed above—which I selected because each represents the easiest and cheapest (read: free) option—there are still tons of other tools to sync Google Calendar with your desktop calendar. First, we've covered how to sync Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with the more technical GCALDaemon. Also, the cross-platform Calgoo just went free, with both Outlook and iCal syncing capabilities.

On a somewhat unrelated but still useful note, you can also now sync Google contacts with your Mac OS X Address Book.

How do you like to get your GCal on your desktop? Let us know in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who isn't happy until everything syncs. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Yet Another Browser: Google Chrome Browser!

Man, as if I didn't have a hard enough job with testing out my web sites in 3 browsers, now I have to check another: the new Chrome Google Browser! Check out what Google said about their new browser:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.

Flash is About to Become Searchable by Google and Yahoo!

I just found this article by SchoolOfFlash.com and they said the following. How exciting!!

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For years, the advice has always been that if you want good search engine results, then you don’t want to create your website entirely with Flash, because search engines have no way of effectively indexing swf files. Well, all of that is about to change.

Adobe just announced that they are teaming up with Google and Yahoo in order to address this issue. Adobe has supplied these search industry leaders with technology that will allow them to index swf files in a way that has never been possible before. In fact, Google has already started implementing this technology, and as I understand it, Yahoo won’t be too far behind.

“But wait,” you say. “I thought search engines already had a way to index swf files.”

Well, you’re right, but up until now, they could only index the static information and static links within your swf file. With this new technology, even the dynamic content of your Flash files will be open to search engine indexing, making it infinitely more possible for your all-Flash website to achieve top rankings in search engine results.