Google and a group of telecommunications companies are about ready to turn on a fast Internet cable running under the Pacific Ocean from the U.S. to Japan, increasing bandwidth by about 20 percent and giving Google its own connection to Asia.

The Unity Consortium, which consists of Google, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, has nearly completed the testing of the $300 million project. Internet users in Asia will start seeing faster Internet speeds over the next several months from the new cable, which has the potential to create a 7.68Tbps (terabits per second) connection under the Pacific.

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Google, on Tuesday evening launched its online app store, called the Google Apps Marketplace to enable third-party developers to do business by selling their applications.

Through this online app store, Google would allow its customers to discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.

According to a blog post by Scott McMullan, Google Apps partner lead, Google Enterprise team, “The Google Apps Marketplace gives software vendors access to a rapidly growing Google Apps customer base of 25 million users from 2 million businesses and universities.”

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Although I am missing getting to see TechFest first hand this year (it's not open to the press), it has been interesting to look at some of the projects that Microsoft is detailing publicly.

In addition to the digital air guitar, mobile Surface and Project Gustav efforts that I wrote about on Tuesday, there are some other interesting ones, including a phone that can help bridge a language divide.

Essentially the "translating telephone" works by converting speech to text, machine translating that text, and then converting the text back to speech. When all works well, it is like having an on-demand language translator.

"The universal translator is one of those dream technologies that has always captivated minds," Microsoft researcher Kit Thambiratnam said in an article on Microsoft's Web site. "It's incredibly hard, though, requiring a combination of technologies that are far from perfect, particularly since we are trying to target free-flowing conversations, as opposed to dictation or structured speaking."

It's not that unlike a technology that showed up in a Microsoft workplace of the future video last year, that showed a whiteboard that could do much the same thing.

And while the translating phone technology isn't perfect, it could be good enough in cases where two parties really want to talk and don't speak the same language.

"We aren't quite there," Thambiratnam said. "But we feel they are good enough for two people to communicate in their native languages, as long as they are willing to speak carefully and maybe occasionally repeat themselves."

Another project, OneAlbum, is designed to help bring together photos that are scattered in postings by different people across multiple social networks; the idea being that today it is hard enough to manage one's own photos, let alone have any way to categorize and view the photos one cares about that live in other people's albums.

OneAlbum, as seen in the video below, uses image recognition technology to bring together photos of the same people from the same event, regardless of whose album the pictures are in.

SnappyFingers is a new startup out of Bangalore and calls itself a search engine for Question and Answers. Their crawler crawls and indexes Question and Answers and FAQ’s from across the Internet and provides a convenient, single point of search from their website.

The site is currently in beta and as per Chirayu, the founder, they have a database of 3 million questions in their search index.

The concept is really nice and has some pretty good potential but in its current form, there are a few shortcomings. For example, a search for “Miami weather” shows some a few good results and also few bad results. Check this out..

-Ramesh

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” In other words, a not-yet-finished product.

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

Note that we didn’t include any Google Labs products since they can be considered to be a “playground” for future products. If we had included those, the percent of beta products would have been much higher (57%).

Notable Google beta products

PickyDomains.Com is a perfect example of how to turn one’s talent into a profitable business. With ever expanding Internet and tens of millions existing websites, finding an available domain name that’s not already taken by cybersquatters can be a real nightmare.

But one man’s problem is another man’s solution. Rather than to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a domain name on the aftermarket, an increasing number of web entrepreneurs turn to professional “domain namers”.

While most naming agencies charge a non-refundable fee that can be as high as $1500 for a corporate domain, one service that unites 17 professional domain namers from countries like United States, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, decided to offer a risk-free service that costs only 50 dollars per domain.

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Hello all,

I'm using a site to make free calls currently, U too can also try and enjoy :) Yeah, FREE Local, STD, ISD (Long Distance) calls as well! You can make calls from India to USA, Canada, UK, France, etc. Actually,  the site claims that you can make calls from anywhere to anywhere in the world. Infact, you can even make calls within a country.. all this for FREE!! Can you believe this?

The site is www.parrot-media.com.They say they get revinue from advertisements. The call duration is limited to 5 minutes in case of land line and it is 2 minutes in case of domestic calls. I used it to make calls to USA and the service is good. Not sure about the service to other locations, if you happen to try this service, please post your experiences in the comments section.

The other day, I had to convert a microsoft word (.doc) format file to adobe acrobat reader (.pdf) file. In ideal world, we should be able to do it easily.. but I had terrible experience. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe provide easy ways to acheive this. I had to download number of software applications (inculding some viruses), also downloaded some driver-plugins for word to print it to pdf. Tried so manythings but nothing seems to work. Some converted the file, but had their ads on it.. I got frustrated and tired with this.. just then I landed on www.zamzar.com.. which was a life saver for me.

As you could guess by now, this website offers a tool to convert files from nearly any format to nearly any format. For example, you could convert a .rm (real media) file to 3gp, 3g3, ac3, aac, avi, flac, flv, gif, iphone, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, wmv, ogg and wav formats. As you explore their service, it gets more exciting, you could even convert a You Tube video to wmv and store it on your PC! Amazing Idea!!

The best thing is you don't need to install any softwrare. You just upload your file.. zamzar does its job and e-mails you when the conversion is done with a link to the converted file. With this free service, you could conert files upto 100MB size and zamzar holds your converted file for 24 hours. If you need to convert a file over 100 MB or looking for perminant online storage, they provide those services for a fee. By signing up, you could convert files as big as 1 GB and have upto 100GB online storage.

And if you are thinking what all things you can convert.. You could convert documents (html - Hypertext Markup Language, odt - OpenDocument Text Document, pcx - Paintbrush Bitmap Image, pdf - Portable Document Format, png - Portable Network Graphic, ps - Postscript document, txt - Text document mdb - Microsoft Access Database, ods - OpenDocument spreadsheet, rtf - Rich text format, ppt,pptx - Power Point, doc, docx - Word Document, xls,xlsx - Excel Spread Sheet, swf, flv - Macromedia Flash files, etc.), you could convert images (gif - Compuserve graphics interchange, ico - Windows Icon, jpg - JPEG compliant image, pcx - PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic, ps - Postscript document, png - Portable Network Graphic, tga - Truevision Targa Graphic, thumbnail - Thumbnail image, tiff - Tagged image file format, wbmp - Wireless Bitmap File Format, etc. ), you can convert  music formats (as mentioned above), video formats (3g2 - 3GPP2 Multimedia File, 3gp - 3GPP Multimedia File, aac - Advanced Audio Coding File, ac3 - AC3 Audio File, avi - Windows video file, flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec, flv - Flash Video, ipod - MPEG-4 Video File, mov - Apple QuickTime Movie, mp3 - Compressed audio file, mp4 - MPEG-4 Video File, mpg - Moving Picture Experts Group File, ogg - Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio File, wav - Windows audio file, wmv - Windows Media File, etc.), and even the compressed formats (7z - 7-Zip Compressed File, tar.bz2 - Bzip 2 UNIX, Compressed File, cab - Cabinet File, lzh - Compressed Archive File, tar - Tape Archive File, tar.gzh - Gzip Compressed Archive, yz1 - DeepFreezer Compressed Archive, zip - Compressed Archive File).

For a complete list of supported formats, you could visit this link. I used it few times to convert simple files and it worked well for me. If you use this tool, do post your experience here for people to understand zamzar service.

-Rakesh