Video Conferencing experts Lifesize have become one of the few qualified to integrate into Microsoft Office Communication server 2007. Microsoft OCS Read more…
Office Tools
Video Conferencing experts Lifesize have become one of the few qualified to integrate into Microsoft Office Communication server 2007. Microsoft OCS Read more…
We are starting a new weekly series whereby we will listdown "5 bests" from the tech world. You will find great plugins, extensions, customizations, tips, tricks, etc. in this series. Read more…
Recently Skype went down and with it, a lot of vchat addicts went through hours of frustration. Skype has certainly gone mainstream and it’s the first thing that strikes one’s head when it comes to video chat. Well, very few of us do know that there are some great alternatives to Skype. Based on performance and stability, we have listed the 4 best that come at par with Skype itself.
ooVoo is a free video chat solution that offers video sharing for upto 4 users simultaneously. Simply download and install the software, import your contacts from your email and social network accounts and your are good to go. You can even chat with people who do not have the software installed using the browser-based applet.
TinyChat is a browser-based video chat solution where you can connect with upto 12 users (including you) simultaneously. There is nothing to install so that’s a plus.
FaceFlow is a relatively new service and is still in a beta but is quite decent. It offers free, browser based video chat with upto 3 users along with features like photo sharing, file sharing, games, full screen mode and ability to stay anonymous.
Tokbox offers video chat to upto 20 participants in a single call. You can import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Sharing YouTube videos within the interface might appeal to many. You can invite more people to join the video chat by promoting your call URL to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
Chrome 6 has been released with some great new features like form autofill, Extension Sync, support for WebM videos and (bet you didn’t know this) a built-in PDF viewer! Yes, it does mean a lot to serious professionals. But it’s not enabled by default. So here’s how you get it working:
In the address-bar, type ‘chrome://plugins/‘ and press ‘Enter’.
Here, simply click ‘Enable’ link in the Chrome PDF Viewer entry.
With the new default PDF viewer, it’s now irrelevant to have an Adobe Reader installed on your computer for viewing PDF files online.
This probably shouldn’t need an intro paragraph. What else can be more straightforward than 3 beautifully minimalistic, web-based notepad applications that lets you write (and sync and save) random pieces of text on the go? Today we feature 3 web-based notepad applications that’ll prove to be very useful.
I just fell in love with SimpleText at first sight. Clean, distraction-free UI. You can log in using your Google account, write as many text documents and save them. You can access your text files from anywhere.
Next up, Gist.Github. If you are a developer, you might want to go for this one. It can detect the programming language based on the filename you provide. Store and share snippets of code easily.
Notepad.cc – the most minimalist of ‘em all. All you see is big white block and tiny links at the bottom to change sharing URL of the text file and to add password security. If you want to share some paragraphs or a poetry on Twitter or Facebook, I’d day use this one and share the URL.
So you are a high profile secret agent and need to send a really secure email to your party ;), you might want to try OneTimeMessage – a web-service that lets you send self-destructing emails to your friends.
There is no sign-up required. Just put in your and the recipient’s name and email address, write your secret message and send it. You might want to set additional options to send you a message when your email is read and when to destroy the message in case it remains unread.
The system then gives you a ‘key’ which you need to send to the recipient by any means of communication. Once the recipient reads the message, it destroys itself automatically within 5 minutes. I have used it and it’s really great.
Few hours ago Google launched a tool to convert the script of any webpage into your desired language script. Google learnt that many people know a language but cannot read the script in which it is written. For example you might be knowing Hindi but does not know how to comprehend the ‘Devnagri’ script. In such a case, you can use Google’s ‘Script Converter’ to transliterate (convert to a phonetic equivalent) the text on any webpage into your preferred language script.
Script Converter currently supports inter-transliteration between 17 languages: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
The tool is good for casual transliteration purposes but must not be used solely if you wish to learn a certain language script. It still needs to be tweaked on a large scale; especially for Indic scripts.
