This series introduces Windows 7 with an emphasis on those new features that will be of most interest and use to developers. Watch it here

VS.NET 2008 Express is itself free and it comes with many other free resources too:

- Developer Kit
- Vista P2P kit
- Windows Live Tools nd demo applications

- Facebook developers toolkit and walkthroughs

and...

- Game creators DarkGDK with lots of DarkMATTER 3D objects and other game assets and tutorials

Have you checked out Google Indic Transliteration tool and Google presentation tool lately? Or heard speculations about OpneMoko based Google Phone?

Ok "nothing new" as such because Hindi IME has been around for a very long time now and many chat/web based emails(epatra.com/, rediff.com etc.) have phonetic input for many Indic languages for long. Recently yahoo also came up with an Indic Plug-in to Y! Messenger.

And Microsoft PowerPoint and other presentation graphic packages have been around long long before Google itself!!... Web based slide show also is a very common feature and is present in almost all online Photo sharing sites...

Windows Mobile is picking up fast and iPhone is already hyped more than it’s actually worth.

So why is Google reinventing the wheel again? Are these different pieces of same puzzle? Whats cooking at Googleplex? Is Google in process of building a complete one stop solution for 'everything'  or just preparing for a big war against Microsoft or are these just small 20% project which google employees do for innovation? Only time can tell. From all this...lets hope the end-user benefit, innovation continues from all technology camps and World be a better place to live.

If you have not watched this before see the Google ‘master plan’ movie here.

This site seems to have done some research on Google. It tells how Google uses the content of your mails (in Gmail ), query words(in Search) and so on ...  to show relevant ads next to it and that Google is also collecting personal user-data in various ways (including setting a cookie till 2038!).

Site claims that Google, by analysing this data can any day create a detailed profile about any user and also that former CIA agent Robert David Steele has talked about Google supplying this info to CIA(!) Not only this it claims Google is cooperating with leading molecular scientist Dr. Craig Venter (who claims to get insight in Google users' genes!).

Now how true is this? Have a look at a report from PrivacyInternational.org here. Privacy International has analysed and tested many sites including following brands - Amazon, AOL, Apple, BBC, eBay, Facebook, Friendster, Google, Hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Microsoft, Myspace, Orkut, Skype, Wikipedia, Windows Live Space, Yahoo and YouTube. According to this report Google is the only one to score a BLACK (Hostile to privacy!!) ranking. Now given the number of users who uses google... that’s scary!!

PS: Another interesting (half-joke half serious) Google master plan pictures from GooglePlex’ whiteboard can be found here. (The complete picture is here.) 

In 2005 I posted about Yahoo increasing its free web mail storage to 1GB to compete with Google's Gmail. Now I just noticed the storage actually has been made unlimited! There were times when free web mails provided free space - limited to few MB's. Mails used to bounce back due to overfilled mail boxes. And then recently it was in GB's and now infinite storage size! With decreasing storage price, it seems that the storage size really doesn't matter now. 

Hotmail was always late in increasing its free mail storage (today of 2 GB). Now that yahoo is unlimited, Gmail is kind of unlimited. Let’s see when hotmail does the same :) 

PS: I also found an indic language plug-in for Yahoo messenger. Download it from here

Bill, who dropped out from Harvard University to co-found Microsoft with Paul Allen, finally got his Harvard degree on 7th June 2007 (after 30 years!)

I guess Harvard would be honoured to have such a student and Bill’d be glad that his dropping out was worth the risk taken.

Gmail was born making an April fool of all in 2004. And today on valentine it sheds its invitation only barrier for some (US, Canada, Mexico and some of Asian and South American countries). If you are in any of these regions you can see ‘Sign up for Gmail’ link, though it wisely still retails its ‘beta’ status.

And not surprisingly they also have their valentinish google logo on their home page today!

Okay this post wasn't about .net, though you can see Google’s orkut  also celebrating Valentine (and orkut uses ASP.NET but that’s a different story... nothing to do with google:) )