If you want to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox in Windows here’s a little trick:

Firefox Memory Optimization

• Open Firefox browser, go to address bar, type about:config and hit enter
• You’ll see a page full with text under 4 columns: Preference Name, Status, Type, Value
• Right-click anywhere on that page and select New -> Boolean
• You’ll get prompted to enter a Preference Name – enter this:config.trim_on_minimize and hit enter
• You’ll be prompted for a value – select True and hit enter
• That’s it – close Firefox and open it again!

Now, whenever you minimize your Firefox, the amount of memory used will be reduced to approximately 20%.

If you want to test it yourself, follow these steps:

• Open Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+DEL)
• Load several pages into Firefox and watch the memory usage (going up)
• Minimize Firefox and see what happens!

Enjoy!

Weather

To see the weather for many Indian and worldwide cities, type “weather” followed by the city and state, or country.

Example: Search weather bangalore

Local Businesses

If you’re looking for a store, restaurant, or other local business you can search for the category of business and the location and well return results right on the page, along with a map, reviews, and contact information.

Example: Search chinese restaurants mumbai

Unit Conversion

You can use Google to convert between many different units of measurement of height, weight, and volume among many others. Just enter your desired conversion into the search box and well do the rest.

Example: Search 5 feet 8 inches in cm

Movie Times

To find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you, search for “movies”. If you’ve already saved your location on a previous search, the top search result will display showtimes for nearby theaters.

Example: Search movies gurgaon

Cricket Scores

To get the latest cricket scores during any season, just type ‘cricket’ in your search box.

Example: Search cricket india

Dictionary

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word “define” followed by the word(s) you want defined.

Example: Search define transpicuous

Time

To see the time in many cities around the world, type in “time” and the name of the city.

Example: Search time dubai

Calculator

To use Google’s built-in calculator function, simply enter the calculation you’d like done into the search box

Example: Search square root 1521

Currency Conversion

To use our built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion youd like done into the Google search box and well provide your answer directly on the results page.

Example: Search 100 INR in Dirham

Package Tracking

You can track packages by typing the tracking number for your UPS or Fedex package directly into the search box. Well return results that include quick links to easily track the status of your shipment.

Example: Search 1Z9999W99999999999

Web analytics firm Compete has released its data for the month of May, and as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook has already pointed out, US traffic to Facebook.com has increased by nearly 8% to 82.9 million unique visitors last month, with Facebook Connect sites generating an additional 65 million uniques. That means that, according to Compete, a total of 113 million people in the U.S. interacted with the Facebook service. The data also shows MySpace is (still) steadily decreasing compared to the beginning of the year, while Twitter growth seems to have flattened all of the sudden.

While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I’d also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. To my surprise, Facebook appears to have become a real challenger to these Internet juggernauts, who are relatively old compared to the social network that started out in 2004 as a university student-only service and only really opened up to the public in September 2006.

Evidently. this is only one way to look at things. First, Compete does not always provide spot-on traffic estimates (data from comScore suggested Facebook had yet to surpass MySpace in US traffic back in March) and second it’s hardly fair to compare these websites as they all serve different purposes and audiences. But the picture painted here is that Facebook has unmistakingly grown up to become one of the most popular Internet destinations on the planet, both in terms of registered users (well beyond 200 million at this point) and in terms of received traffic. And we’re still talking about a privately-held (albeit massively funded) company that has come this far. No wonder its valuation is surging.

Then there’s our model of the true value of social networks, which gave Facebook a clear lead as well.

For comparison, Compete pegs Google to have received a total of 145.5 million unique visitors in May, ahead of Yahoo (135.5 million) and MSN.com (97.5 million), which means Facebook has already overtaken the MSN website and is nearing the former two. It’s important to note that all four sites show a significant increase in U.S. traffic since the beginning of this year, but Facebook is definitely on the steepest growth curve here. In January 2009, total traffic to Facebook was somewhere around 68.5 million uniques, which means the May number of 113 million represents a 61% jump, mostly thanks to the successful spread of the Facebook Connect service.

If these trends persist, expect Facebook to come out on top of the Compete charts well before the year ends.

It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as go Google yourself, but now you can go Bingyourself. (Then again, Google took a few years ti become a verb.). Bing, Microsoft’s latest effort to compete in search, is now live on a “preview” site. The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.

A few things to try:

An ambiguous Web search: “turkey” (do you want images, recipes, facts, or a map of the country? The topic guides in the left explore pane will help you narrow your search).

A travel search: “SFO to JFK”

Video search: “Simpsons” (hover over the thumbnail to play the video)

Image search: “Rollercoasters” (notice the infinite scroll).

A health search: “Sore throat”

Shopping: “Digital SLR” (sort by price or brand, get average ratings and CashBack).

Maps: “BBQ” (automatically knows what city you are in and offers up geo-appropriate results).

News Search: “Bing”  (what else?)

Check it out. Try a few searches and then tell us in comments if you will ever go back.

OMCAR 2009, the Online Marketing Summit, is a non-profit initiative, which focuses on ‘empowering businesses to grow by leveraging the power of Online Marketing’, is being held on May 23rd, 2009, from 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM, Amity Innovation Incubator, Noida. OMCAR 2009 will bring together online marketing professionals, sales & marketing people, advertisers & brand managers, entrepreneurs, CXOs of SMBs, web developers & designers and students under one roof to provide opportunities for networking, sharing of views and interacting with the experts from the Online Marketing industry.

The key speakers at OMCAR 2009 include Mahesh Murthy (CEO, Pinstorm), Vivek Bhargava (CEO, Communicate2), Pradeep Chopra (Co-founder, OMLogic) & Alok Mittal (General Partner, Canaan Partners). The major topics on which various thought leaders will provide insights and share their own practical experiences include ‘Reaching out to your customers cost effectively’, ‘Entrepreneurial opportunities in the Online World’, ‘Digital Media Integration – SEO, PPC, SMM & Mobile’ and ‘The Future of Internet Marketing’.

In addition, the summit will showcase 3 successful online marketing case studies on businesses that’ve effectively leveraged online marketing to growth them. To add to the excitement, OMCAR 2009 will be blogged live by OMShare (the 1st from India, Online Events Promotion Platform).

“After the astounding success of OMCAR 2008, we are very proud to present OMCAR 2009. We are sure this event will be an enriching experience for anybody who is interested in or is already associated with online media and want to learn about, discuss and imbibe the latest online marketing techniques and strategies.” said Mr. Pradeep Chopra, Co founder & President, OM Careers.

Register now if you want to be part of this highly awaited online marketing event for 2009.

About TiE Delhi

The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) is a global not-for-profit organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship. TiE helps budding entrepreneurs through advice, guidance and assistance from successful & experienced entrepreneurs and professionals.

TiE’s greatest strength is its network through 53 cities in 12 countries that consists of many participants in the entrepreneurial ecosystem – successful & experienced as well as budding entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, angel investors, service providers, etc. The membership structure of TiE includes Charter Members and Associate members and is open to anyone who pays nominal dues and can thus access the various activities and services that help them become better informed and better connected entrepreneurs. Charter members are invited based on their accomplishments and willingness to help the next generation of entrepreneurs. Associate Members benefit from the education, knowledge, inspiration, guidance, mentoring and, most importantly, the global connectivity that the TiE platform can provide.

About OM Careers

OM Careers is world’s first online marketing careers community. A non-profit organization based out of New Delhi, India, OM Careers aims to empower current and budding online marketing professionals in their careers by providing them a platform for networking and learning.

Its ultimate motive is to contribute to the growth of the online marketing industry by providing a platform to create & connect right skills to the right opportunities.

Founded & managed by online marketing industry experts including CEO’s & Founders of India’s leading online marketing companies, OM Careers is committed to address the challenge of lack of skilled & experienced professionals in the online marketing industry.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 10 months. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users:

    * This beta is now available in 70 languages – get your local version.

    * Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.

    * Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

    * The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.

    * Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

    * Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

    * Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

For whatever reason this week’s launch of the beta version of AMD’s Fusion Media Explorer, the company’s first forray in the social media hub / browser space, isn’t being met with a mountain of buzz. For a 40-year old giant of a tech company that’s mostly known for its micro-processors and related technologies, that’s quite surprising, especially because the product actually appears to be quite cool, if not very innovative these days.

I say appears, because the installation failed on my computer for lack of an AMD processor (I should have known), and I should probably note the application has only been tested for use on Windows and Linux machines. From what I can gather, it most certainly makes me want to test it asap though.

IS YOUR Google Toolbar not running on Microsoft Internet Explorer? Google launched its own Chrome browser well after it had shipped toolbars for IE and Firefox. A beta version of an update is now available.

Google launched its Google Toolbar 6 Beta for the Internet Explorer. It has many exciting features. The toolbar team of Google described the same as a major upgrade. Interestingly, the Google Toolbar 6 Beta is available in 40 languages also.

t features the Quick Search Box, in which the users can click on an icon in the Windows task bar to open a small dialog box from which the users can search and even launch applications.

The updated IE toolbar also features the Firefox version. It can restore bookmarks and recently viewed sites. Google is also upgrading its “enhanced search suggestions”. The programming team of Google is eager for the users to try it out and provide some comments and suggestions.

With more and more social sites popping up on the Web, your preferred username is becoming directly entangled with your social identify. The reality is that it’s becoming a priority to claim your username everywhere.

So how do you know if your username is available on most social sites? You could try each site individually, or you could check 76 of them all at the same site with namechk.

What is Woopra

Woopra is a robust web-tracking & analysis tool that works perfectly on any website. It is mainly targeted for small to medium websites ranging from few hundreds up to tens of thousands of daily page views.

Essentially, it is targeted for blogs interested in the most minuscule details of every single action. In addition, Woopra provides a precise real-time streaming of every single activity on the website.

Woopra also features a clean interface, including many graphical visualization components, such as charts, maps, panels… Along with many other clean and advanced options that make Woopra an ideal solution for webmasters who desire to discern all the aspects of their website.

After reading the introduction of woopra I felt like why some one will creates one more Analytics tool to compete to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is already providing some of those features which woopra is going to provide so what’s use. But then I felt “people are not fool to compete with Google giving same functionally like Google Analytics”. it has to be some thing more then that. So I decided to give a look at woopra features

Here is list of Woopra Analytics Features

• Live Tracking
• Rich Interface
• Visitor Tagging
• Instance Messaging
• Real Time Analytics
• Custom Notification
• Developer Tool

Now if we compare this with Google Analytics then we will find none of this features are provided by Google Analytics

Let me discuss some of issue/Disadvantages/Cons of Woopra over Google Analytics.

1. I have registered for woopra but after you add site for analytics it requires approval. it takes up to 7 business days to receive Approval/Response of added site. Which is not a case for Google analytics
2. Real Time Analytics is one of features of Woopra, if its going to be real time then think about you site bandwidth and website loading time. I am sure it’s going to be increased by marginal percentag
3. Goal Conversion one of most powerful features of Google analytics for every webmaster is missing in Woopra

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is the fifth development milestone and third beta release of Firefox 3.1, the next version of the Firefox web browser. While this release is considered to be stable, it is intended for developers and members of our testing community to use for early evaluation and feedback. Users of the latest released version of Firefox should not expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this beta.

Check out what’s new, the known issues and frequently asked questions about the latest version of Firefox. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, either using this feedback form or by filing a bug in Bugzilla.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 9 months. Firefox 3.1 is an incremental release on the previous version with significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance, and ease of use

• This beta is now available in 64 languages – get your local version.
• Improved the new Private Browsing Mode.
• Improvements to web worker thread support.
• Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• New native JSON support.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.

The long awaited Google venture capital fund, Google Ventures, is now open for business. The Fund is led by managing partners Bill Maris and Rich Miner.

The fund’s FAQ says they’ll invest in just about any type of startup (”consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others”) and they’re willing to invest just about any amount you might need (”from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital”). It’s not exactly what you’d call a tight investment focus, but hey, it’s not like they need to worry about keeping limited partners happy so they can raise the next fund.

Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies, your are also be one of them.

Office Locations
Google Ventures, Mountain View:
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
United States
+1 650 253 0000

Google Ventures, Cambridge:
5 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States
+1 617 575 1300

Features

• Features of the Google Talk Gadget on your desktop (emoticons, group chat, and more!)
• New! Desktop notifications from the following services
  

  	Gmail
  	Calendar (with a new snooze option!)

  

Here are a few of the exciting features

* Performance graphs: Spot trends over time with custom graphs on every campaign management page.
* Insight across ad groups: Focus on the high-impact areas of your account with new roll-up tabs on every page. You can see and edit keywords, placements or ads from all ad groups on a single tab.
* In-line editing: Want to change a keyword or bid? Click on it and make changes in-line instead of loading a separate page.
* Easier content network management: Improve content network performance through a new Networks tab. Look at statistics for the placements where your ads have appeared, and then take action by setting unique bids or excluding placements directly from the report.

Keyboard shortcuts

* g then o: Go to All Online Campaigns
* g then c: Go to Campaigns tab
* g then r: Go to Ad groups tab
* g then k: Go to Keywords tab
* g then n: Go to Networks tab
* g then a: Go to Ads tab
* g then s: Go to Settings tab

Learn More About the New AdWords Interface

The e-book market is still up for grabs. And in a sign that Sony is far from ready to let Amazon get a lock on the market, yesterday it announced a deal with Google to include in its eBook Store over 500,000 public domain books scanned by the search company.

That means that while the Amazon Kindle allows readers to select for purchase from among 245,000-plus books (in addition to assorted newspapers, magazines, and blog content), the Sony Reader will now offer more than 600,000 book titles.

The big difference, however, is that many of the Sony Reader titles will be those books in the public domain and not more recent releases. In that area the Kindle will still have the edge

If anything, this news is a sign that Book Search is one product that GoogleGoogle reviewsGoogle reviews remains committed to in light of the discontinuation of other, non-core products. Other recent improvements to the tool include options for embedding books on your own site, an API, and deals with publishers to bring more content into the tool.

” Every hardship, let down, or tough time in my life has made me who I am today. And I cannot imagine being anyone different.”

Google and Yahoo! both increase Internet search engine market share with their own advertising programs Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing respectively. Similarly, Microsoft Corporation also increases Internet search engine marketing through Microsoft Advertising and Microsoft adCenter. Google collected majority part of Internet advertising marketing by launching a publisher program which is popularly called as Google AdSense. Similarly, Yahoo! follows Google’s route by launching Private Beta publisher program Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN). Google and Yahoo! is increased Internet advertising market share with their companies’ sites as well as publishers’ websites. Microsoft also increased Internet advertising market share with Microsoft’s sites as well as partners’ websites.

Microsoft adCenter collects interesting publisher details including their present participating publishers programs. Microsoft shows below advertising programs in publisher application to know the new publishers’ present publisher programs.

1. Google AdSense
2. Yahoo! Publisher Network
3. Kanoodle
4. Quigo

Well not quite a Google Toolbar, but as close as we can get with no plugin API. Also this has a lot of the functionality of the SEOQuake addon for Firefox, so if your a webmaster or SEO these can be pretty useful for Chrome.

They are used just like bookmarks, so create a new bookmark, name it something self explanitory and for the URL place the corresponding code. Until we get real webmaster or SEO tools for Google Chrome these do a pretty good job of getting around the problem.

Google Cache

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href. replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:”+escape(a);})())

Google Links

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href. replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=link:”+escape(a);})())

Google site

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href. replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=site:”+escape(a);})())

Google Images from Site

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href. replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=”+escape(a);})())

Google Info

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href. replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=info:”+escape(a);})())

Related Sites/Pages

javascript:void((function(){var%20a=location.href. replace(/^http%5C:%5C/%5C/(.*)$/,”$1″);location.href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=related:”+escape(a);})())

Google Chrome launch has a new beta

What Google claim about his new beta version. it’s 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.

The new youtube logo its green color not bad. YouTube has released a subtly redesigned site today, complete with a marginally updated logo and a series of cosmetic improvements.The social filters have moved too: they now appear down the left hand side, rather than along the top. They’ve added a footer to every page for quick access to key features, and the menu under the player has been redesigned with new icons and more javascript. The most notable additions to this menu are more advanced stats and a section that displays all the sites linking to the video: these are essentially trackbacks, encouraging users to link more frequently to the clips. Changing a much-loved site is always a risk, but these tweaks do seem like an improvement.

This product allows a person to store transcripts of voicemail phone messages in their email (gmail) inbox and also makes it possible to find a specific information within a phone message as its converted into a text based email conversation.

This is inline with Googles strategy to organize all the worlds information and make it accessible.

Features

* Call screening – Announce and screen callers
* Listen in – Listen before taking a call
* Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
* SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
* Place calls – Call US numbers for free
* Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
* Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
* Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring

This product is currently open to Grand Central Users only and the features of the same can be looked up here. Its not difficult to imagine how effective this would be for business users in India.

Today, I’m pleased to share some exciting news about Inquisitor – the pioneering instant search experience that brings instant web search and suggestions to your browser search box. Inquisitor originally had been available exclusively for the Safari browser on Mac OS X, but as of today it is now also available (in beta form) for both Firefox (on Mac and PC) and Internet Explorer 7/8 (on Windows XP and Vista).

Naturally, we want our instant results to be as “instant” as possible, so this is a fantastic development. We’ve also fully transitioned our keyword suggestions & autocompletion technology to Yahoo’s with the end result being more relevant and useful suggestions.

About Google Health

Google Health allows you to store and manage all of your health information in one central place. And it’s completely free. All you need to get started is a Google username and password.

Google believes that you own your medical records and should have easy access to them. The way we see it, it’s your information; why shouldn’t you control it?

* Keep your doctors up-to-date
* Stop filling out the same paperwork every time you see a new doctor
* Avoid getting the same lab tests done over and over again because your doctor cannot get copies of your latest results
* Don’t lose your medical records because of a move, change in jobs or health insurance
* Share your health information securely with a family member, caregiver, or doctor

With Google Health, you manage your health information, and you can access it anywhere, at any time.

Features

*  Build online health profiles

*  Import medical records from hospitals and pharmacies

*  Share your health records

*  Explore online health services

Browse the online health services directory to find services that are integrated with Google Health that can help you better manage your health needs.

Microsoft has announced today at CeBIT the expanded commercial availability of its Surface machines.

Up until now Microsoft Surface, the computing platform that responds to natural hand gestures and the like, has only been available to purchase from the US and Canada.

Now it is being made available to buy in 12 markets in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), including France, Germany, United Arab Emirates and the UK.

As with the Surface machines available from the US and Canada, the devices are still only available for commercial businesses.

Give your computer a new lease of life in just a few minutes

Free up hard drive space

The very first thing to do is check whether your hard drive has enough free space. If it’s completely full, your PC will crawl. The general rule of thumb is to leave at least 15-20 per cent of your hard drive empty, so if you have a 500GB hard drive, you should keep at least 60-70GB of space free.

Start by removing any installed programs that you no longer use. You can do this by going to Start > Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall a program. Click any programs you want to remove, and select Uninstall/Change.

If you’re struggling to find those last few gigabytes, then it’s worth doing a disk cleanup. This will get rid of all the unnecessary files that have been left on your PC after you’ve been surfing the web or when a program has crashed. Windows Vista comes with a pretty good tool for cleaning things up as standard (Start > Disk Cleanup) but there are other programs available that do a more thorough job.

CCleaner scans your hard drive and automatically removes anything you don’t need. Depending on how old your PC is, you can expect to gain, at the very least, one or two gigabytes of extra space.

If you’re willing to go one step further, you could consider deleting your System Restore points, as each of these take up a lot of space. You obviously want a recent one, but the rest aren’t really needed. To do this, you need to open the Disk Cleanup utility, and when prompted select Choose to clean files from all users of this computer. Then, in the More Options tab, click Clean up underneath the System Restore and Shadow Copies option.

Once you’ve had a good tidy, now’s a great time to give your hard drive a re-jigging. If your hard drive is fragmented, it will take much longer to open files or programs. Click Start, type disk defragmenter and then click Defragment now.

Speed up boot times

One of the most common gripes with Windows Vista is the time it takes to start up when you turn on the PC. One of the biggest factors in a lengthy start-up time is the number of programs that load during this time. You can easily speed up your start-up time by removing anything you don’t need.

Click Start and type msconfig. In the System Configuration window that appears, select the Startup tab. This will show you all the programs that are opening when you turn on your PC. Clear the check box of each program you want to remove from the startup and click Apply.

You can improve the overall speed of Windows Vista by removing the eye-candy that makes it look so nice: Windows Aero. This is especially pertinent to those who have slow graphics cards – the kind you get with basic desktop PCs and laptops. Turning it off is easy – right-click the desktop and choose Properties > Aero off. If you turn off the Windows Sidebar as well, you’ll get even better performance

Add more memory

The first thing you should consider doing to give your PC a big speed boost is to upgrade the memory. If it’s only got 1GB installed, it will probably be pretty sluggish, but for just £15 you can upgrade this to 2GB – which is the minimum you really need to run Windows Vista smoothly.

Go one step further and install 4GB (2 x 2GB sticks) and you’ll be rewarded with a PC that feels brand new. Memory is dead easy to install; it will take you the best part of five minutes to remove your old memory and put some new stuff in.

To make sure you get the right memory for your PC, run the Crucial System Scanner. Chances are it will be of the DDR2 kind if your PC isn’t more than a couple of years old.

Get the Good Ads on your facebook apps to maximise your profits

Google is taking a multi-pronged approach when it comes to winning over the hearts and minds of Facebook developers. We already know that it will attempt a direct appeal to get developers to come over to Google’s side and create social applications via its OpenSocial APIs. But Google is also trying to convince Facebook developers to use Google’s new pay-per-action ads (still in beta) to get more people to install their apps on Facebook. Google’s AdSense team is specifically targeting Facebook developers with an invitation to its pay-per-action beta program (reprinted beow).

A pay-per-action (PPA) ad only costs the advertiser something if a specific action is taken by a consumer—in this case, installing a Facebook app or going to a developer’s application page on Facebook, where the developer can make money showing his or her own ads. For the most part, it seems these PPA ads will appear on Google itself or on sites elsewhere on the Web that are part of the AdSense network. Thus they will (ironically) drive more traffic to Facebook.

Google has finally fleshed out its Google Sync to work beyond just BlackBerry handsets – enabling (most) smartphone (and iPod touch) users the ability to perform bi-directional syncing of Google contacts and calendars. Today’s update adds support for iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, and any phone with SyncML support.

Google provides specific usage instructions for the following platforms: iPhone (including iPod touch), BlackBerry, Nokia S60, Nokia standard, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile.  That’s pretty much all there is to it.  An official app.  Contact syncing.  Calendar syncing

Supported phone

* iPhone
* BlackBerry
* Nokia S60
* Nokia standard
* Sony Ericsson
* Windows Mobile

To make your life easier, google are introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

I highly suggest signing up for the beta and taking this very powerful tool for a test drive because it totally kills Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. I am not sure how Google measures the traffic because they are a third party and they can’t actually track users unless they are directly auditing ALL users of a website.

GMail team announced the addition of a new feature in the Gmail Labs – a Task Manager, or to do list. It’s quite an elegant little feature, when it and the rest of GMail work. Below we’ve got a two minute video tour that shows how the feature works, in case Gmail is down for you and you can’t see it for yourself!

To turn on the task manager for yourself, click on the settings link in your Gmail, then go to labs, enable Task Manager and then scroll to the bottom of the page to save your changes

To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab (or just click here if you’re signed in). Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link. Just click it to get started.

Tasks in Gmail Labs for your phone also

Keep track of what you need to do with this simple list that’s with you everywhere you go. http://gmail.com/tasks