More Power To Your Email With GMail Video Chats

About a decade back when the Internet was still in it’s early period and no one had even thought of terms like Web 2.0 or Social Networking, people used to consider communicating by e-mail as a privilege and having an e-mail address was considered to be a status symbol. At that point and even for many years after that, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were the only major e-mail providers. Their e-mail services provided only basic word-processor utilities and a meager space of just 1-2 Mb. These companies never developed a strategy around their e-mail service and never looked to improvise it in any way for many years.

All that changed however after the arrival of Google and it’s e-mail service Gmail. The arrival of Gmail and it’s 1Gb of storage space was a revolution as no one else provided that much space back then. Even now Gmail’s ever growing account space (over 7 Gb as of today) is far more than that of Hotmail and Yahoo. And while it may still lag behind Microsoft and Yahoo in terms numbers (Gmail is only the third-largest email service worldwide, with 113 million users, while Microsoft Live mail is on top with 283 million users, closely followed by Yahoo Mail with 274 million) it is still one of the most innovative in spite of the fact that it has been in beta for 4 years and has a number of other problems and flaws associated with it.

Google has a completely different division called Gmail Labs (you can see this as the rightmost option in the settings page of your Gmail) and offers a range of amazing features like Forgotten Attachment Detector, Google Calender Gadget, Google Docs Gadget and much more. Needless to say the most amazing feature of Gmail is the Gmail chat which is boon for all employees across the world as many organizations do not permit the use of Instant messengers during office hours.

A couple of days back Gmail integrated Video chat into it’s Gmail chat service thereby allowing gmail users to have a video conference with each other. Gmail Video and Voice requires a browser plug-in and either a microphone (for straight audio chatting) or a Webcam (for video and audio chatting) to function. The plug-in — a proprietary, non-Flash-based system — runs about 2MB and supports Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0. As of now, the video chat service will not be made available within the standalone Google Talk application. Once the plug-in is installed, all you do is click on a contact within your Gmail Chat list. If they also have the required software, a camera icon will pop up next to their name and let you initiate a two-way multimedia session. If they don’t have the hardware, you can still start a one-way session in which they’ll be able to see and hear you, even if you can’t see and hear them. The service is expected to be fully rolled out to all Gmail users by the end of Tuesday.

The technology, by the way, comes from Google’s acquisition of video conferencing software by Marratech last year. Google hired the engineers involved in the software, at the time declining to reveal its ultimate plans (Source). Gmail’s new video and audio calling feature definitely sets aside Google’s email service from competition. Now a one-stop communications hub, Gmail will certainly become ever more popular among both email and avid chat users. While other upcoming (or delayed) features such as SMS Chat in Gmail will again raise the bar against competition (Source).

Gmail’s Social Initiative – Don’t Drink And Mail

“It’s Saturday night and I am sitting alone at home, surfing aimlessly on the World Wide Web. This week hasn’t been so good. My girlfriend broke up with me, cause she didn’t trust me anymore. All thanks to a couple of pictures that I sent to her by mistake after a wild night at Havana and Pure. How much I wish there was a way I could take that e-mail back. I wonder if someone can develop a technology, that wouldn’t allow a drunk guy to send e-mail”.

If you’re the kind of person who types tipsy and regrets it in the morning, Google’s “Mail Goggles,” a new test-phase feature in the free Gmail service, might save you some angst, regret and potential break-ups. As Gmail engineer and Mail Goggle’s creator John Perlow writes, “Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.”

The Goggles can kick in late at night on weekends. The feature requires you to solve a few easy math problems in short order before hitting “send.” If your logical thinking skills are intact, Google is betting you’re sober enough to work out the repercussions of sending that screed you just drafted. And if you can’t multiply two times five, you’ll probably thank Google in the morning. To activate Goggles, Gmail users should click the “Settings” link at the top of a Gmail page, then go to the “Labs” section.

While the concept does appears to be interesting and useful it seems to have been implemented as more of a gag, as pointed out by Brennon Slattery on his pcworld blog, read here. Anyways, the nice thing about Google is that it keeps innovating and at times even implements features suggested by it’s users (a look at the Labs feature in Gmail shows the number of cool Gmail apps that are available ), maybe that’s one of the reasons why no google product ever comes out of beta.

Delhi Planet Weekends – Conspiracy Theories

“A conspiracy theory is a theory that claims an event or series of events is the result of secret manipulations by two or more individuals or an organization, rather than the result of a single perpetrator or natural occurrence. Conspiracy theories often defy an official or dominant understanding of events, and proponents sometimes substitute zeal for logic. “ So goes the wiki defintion for conspiracy theory. In simple words, a conspiracy theory is an alternate version of something that is common knowledge but is much more sensational and astounding.

DelhiPlanet brings to you 2 such conspiracy theories which, once read would make you seriously doubt your knowledge of world history.

Area 51

Area 51 is a remote tract of land in southern Nevada, owned by the government of the United States, containing an air field apparently used for the secret development and testing of new military aircraft. It is famed as the subject of many UFO conspiracy theories. Area 51 is famously known to be a super-secret Air Force test facility, and in the 1980′s and 1990′s there have been many sightings of unidentified objects near the base. Of all the things that Area 51 maybe associated with, it’s most famous for the storage, examination, and reverse engineering of crashed alien spacecraft (including material supposedly recovered at Roswell), the study of their occupants (living and dead), and the manufacture of aircraft based on alien technology.

Infact much of it’s fame comes from the speculation that it’s the place which houses the alien spacecraft and dead bodies of aliens recovered from the Roswell UFO Incident( it is believed that a UFO crashed here in 1947).Today, UFO tourism provides a major income for people around Roswell. The 1947 incident has been featured in many books, comics, movies and television series, the most popular being the movie Independence Day, where Will Smith flies the UFO Aircraft to the mother ship to infect it with a virus.

Whether all this is true or not, no one will ever know, cause the US government denies having any knowledge and it’s something classified as very very confidential , supposedly even the president is not given any information about it.

Who Scaled Mount Everest First

Most text books and general knowledge books would tell you that it was Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgary who were the first ever to successfully reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. What can be surely said, is that they were the first ever to successfully reach the summit and come back alive. There is a strong belief that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first to have reached the summit in 1924 , but unfortunately they couldn’t come back alive.

The goal of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition of 1999 was to discover whether George Mallory had summited Mt. Everest in the ill-fated attempt he made with Andrew Irvine in 1924. A group of climbers from the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany, set off towards the summit in hope of finding Mallory’s camera, which would have had a picture of the summit. On the North Face, at 8,155 m, the expedition found Mallory’s body perfectly preserved. Closer investigation proved that the had been a victim of a tragic fall in which he slipped, tried to correct himself, but did not survive. Whether this happened while he was going towards the summit or coming down from it is not known.

During a second expedition in 2001, the team abandoned their search to rescue another climbing party stranded on the mountain and in deep distress. Two of the climbers were suffering from cerebral edema, a condition in which the victim hallucinates due to lack of oxygen in the brain. Again whether Mallory and Irvine were able to reach the summit or not, is something we would never know.

If you missed out on Previous DelhiPlanet Weekend action, then you can catch it all again here.

• Weekend Trivia – 1
• Secret Receipes
• Things you Won’t know about Google
• Weekend Trivia – 2

Delhi Planet Weekends – Things You Won’t Know About Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two names that may not be as famous as Shahrukh Khan or Angelina Jolie but names that would live on for many decades to come. Today in the year 2007, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the internet without Google.

Google Inc, the company that started out purely as a Search Engine in September 1998 now offers a gamut of services like Gmail,Video Sharing,News,Blogging platforms and lots more.So much so that “google”,has become a major part of our lives. DelhiPlanet bring to you some unknown facts about Google and it’s two founders.

• Q.Connect Bill Gates and the Google Guys(Page and Brin) ?
  Ans.No,it’s not the rivalry that they currently share.Larry Page and Sergey Brin both of whom were Stanford Dropouts,did most of the research work for their Phd program at the William Gates Computer Science Center in stanford. Bill gates had donated $6 mn to the center and it was here that the early seeds of google were sown.




• Page Rank, was a concept developed by Page. Page derived this concept of ranking web pages from the fact that references to whitepapers published by scholars are cited in numerous other places. So a really famous whitepaper would automatically have many references in other whitepapers. The Pagerank alogorithm was developed by page and his mentor Rajeev Motwani and was orginally called backrub.




• The word Google is derived from the mathematical term Googol which is 1 followed by 100 zero’s. Brin and Page orginally wanted to name their company Googol, but a spelling mistake made it google. The term Googol was coined by American Mathematician Edward Kasner and his nephew Milton Sirotta. Kasner also coined the term Googolplex which is 1 followed by a googol of zero’s. Not suprisingly Googleplex is the name of the Google Headquarters in Mountain View.




• Google.com is a website that possesses one of the cleanest interfaces and that has been one of it’s major selling points. However Page and Brin did not desire such an interface initially. It turned out this way only because they did not have enough money to hire a good designer.




• People working at Google, better known as Googlers are not allowed to tell one another “to Google” someone or something. It’s because there is a risk that the word “Google” could become so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with the word “search”. If this happens, they could lose protection for their trademark, which could result in other people using the word “Google” to refer to their own products, thus diminishing the google brand.(Source)




• Google and Microsoft are arch rivals and even Google fears that Microsoft can harm it if it wishes, one of their identified risks as stated by them is as follows “A large amount of information on the Internet is provided in proprietary document formats such as Microsoft Word. The providers of the software application used to create these documents could engineer the document format to prevent or interfere with our ability to access the document contents with our search technology. This would mean that the document contents would not be included in our search results even if the contents were directly relevant to a search. The software providers may also seek to require us to pay them royalties in exchange for giving us the ability to search documents in their format. If the software provider also competes with us in the search business, they may give their search technology a preferential ability to search documents in their proprietary format. Any of these results could harm our brand and our operating results.” . In short if microsoft desires it can prevent google software form indexing or reading microsoft office documents, thus harming google’s search capabilities. (Source)

If you wish to know more about Google and how it has become what it is today, then checkout The Google Story, by David Wise and Mark Malseed.