Google to offer book downloads

Adam Smith, group product manager of Google Book Search and Google Scholar has confirmed Google's plans to start offering book downloads as of today. The whole books will be packed in the universal PDF format to make their printing easier.

Scitec IR-001W Internet Radio plays it aloud

Japanese Scitec company has released its new babe: the Scitec IR-001W internet radio. The box uses a local WLAN to access the Internet (it's compatible with WEP and WPA security protocols so you don't have to lift your WLAN-protection) and play music streams encoded in either MP3, WMA, AAC or RealMedia, so you presumably won't face no special difficulties with almost all online-broadcasters.

France to rival Google Earth

Last Friday French Geoportail has unveiled a new service that lets people download and study satellite images of the country. Although not nearly as global as the famous Google Earth, the new service gives French users much better resolution of the terrain.

Opera 9 Officially Launched

The newest member of the Opera family now supports widgets and BitTorrent file-sharing technology. And it has finally passed the Acid2 test for CSS compatibility.

RSS Feeds Are No Match to Email Newsletters, Says Nielsen

Internet usability 'guru' Jakob Nielsen has conducted another survey using his new darling -- eye-tracking technologies. Now he claims that, although being quite an efficient way to syndicate site's content, RSS news feed can not successfully compete against good old e-mail newsletters.

Nintendo DS Will Feature The Opera Browser

Nintendo DS users will now be able to surf the full Internet from their systems using the famous Opera browser. It is announced, that the Opera browser for Nintendo DS will be sold as a DS card. Insert the card into the Wi-Fi enabled Nintendo DS, connect to a network, and begin browsing on two screens.

LifeSize Delivers LifeSize Room Video Conferencing System

LifeSize Room is the first high-def video conferencing system that provides almost ten times the quality of existing solutions. At 1Mbps, users of LifeSize Room will experience HDTV resolution, DVD quality at 512kbps and Cable TV quality at 384kbps.

Opera Gets Rid of The Banner

Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its Opera browser. Starting today, 'the fastest browser on Earth' can be downloaded completely free of charge.

Macromedia Presents Its New Flash Media Server 2

The new Flash Media Server 2 application complements the recently announced Macromedia Flash Professional 8 and Flash Player 8 solutions. The Flash Media Server 2 public beta will be available in September, 2005.

ZyXEL Shows Off New ZyXEL ZyAIR AG-225H Wi-Fi Finder

ZyXEL ZyAIR AG-225H is the first hotspot finder, client adapter and soft access point all in one, that locates all the 802.11a and 802.11b/g access points in range and provides detailed information like SSID, security, and signal strength.

Radio2MP3 -- Internet-to-mp3 Radio Recorder

Radio2MP3 software records Internet radio stations, burns music to a CD, converts it to different format and splits songs into individual MP3s. The software also tags each file with the artist, title, genre and album.

Nokia Presents Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet sports a nice high-res (800x480) widescreen display with zoom and on-screen keyboard. The device is ready for viewing online content over Wi-Fi. Aside from Wi-Fi, the Internet Tablet can also connect to the Internet utilizing Bluetooth wireless technology via a compatible mobile phone.

Opera 8 Web Browser: It's Ready

The highly anticipated Opera 8 Web browser has at last been launched. Internet users can now surf the Web faster, safer and easier than before.

Copernic Desktop Search Version 1.5

The final release of CDS 1.5 features smarter CPU resource usage, improved integration of the Copernic Desktop Search with Mozilla Thunderbird support, broader metadata indexing, support for Netscape 8, multiple performance increases, and much more.

Free MP3 Playlist Swapping

A new web site, FIQL.com, offers its users a way to trade favorite mp3 playlists. The site, pronounced "fickle," is free to join and is divided into musical genres and themed categories, letting students find playlists for any occasion or mood.