Google is celebrating its 10th birthday, not actually a day as Google itself isn’t sure about the exact day of its launch.In fact, knowing exactly when Google’s birthday is depends on your point of view. Some milestones to consider below, which make Google as old as 12 and as young as 9. Plus, more special Google birthday logos.

Google The 12 Year Old
January 1996

This is when Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on BackRub, what later become Google. Use this month, and Google is 12 years old.

Google The 10 Year Old
Sept. 15, 1997

This is when Google registered google.com because they both( Larry Page and Sergery Brin)  felt that BackRub needs a new name, and Google was derived from Googol which means a mathematical term with 1 followed by 100 zeros(A geeky decision right?)

Google The 9 Year Old
Sept. 7, 1998

This is when Google may have officially incorporated.

Google The 9 Year Old
Sept. 27, 1998 (Current Official Date)

Back in 2005, Google declared that Sept. 27 was its birthday. But wait — what happened with that Sept. 7 date? Well, in 2005, Yahoo came along and freaked Google out by announcing an index that was larger than Google’s. It had been ages since anyone did that.

Things got resolved by Google doing some PR. They announced that for their “birthday,” they’d gotten bigger — but were also dropping the count of pages from the home page, which helped (thankfully) defuse the size wars that often meant nothing about search quality.

It’s Their Party, They’ll Party When They Want To!

Google Birthday Logos

Google’s been putting them up consistently since 2002. The first year, it happened on September 27, then shifted to September 7, then back to September 27 from 2005 onward.

4th Birthday: 2002

Celebrated on September 27th, 2002.

5th Birthday: 2003

Celebrated on September 7th, 2003.

6th Birthday: 2004

Celebrated on September 7th, 2004.

7th Birthday: 2005

Celebrated on September 27th, 2005.

8th Birthday: 2006

Celebrated on September 27th, 2006.

9th Birthday: 2007:

10th Birthday 2008

Google is offering $10 million as prize money in a competition aimed at transforming the world’s best ideas into useful products.

The competition is open to anyone. The seven categories include sustainable energy use, environment, health, education, shelter, encouraging communities, and building opportunities to help people better provide for themselves and their families. An eighth category is simply titled “everything else”.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Ideas can be submitted through a form available on the Project 10 to the 100th website  ,  which poses questions including, “If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?” and “Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented”.

Members of the public have until 20th October to submit their ideas by completing a simple form and answering a few short questions about their idea. Entrants can also include a link to a 30 second video either demonstrating their idea in action or giving a more detailed explanation.

Entries will be accepted in 25 languages and Google have placed no limit on the number of ideas any one individual can share.

An advisory board will work with Google employees to narrow the entrants down to the top 100, with the results to be announced on 27th January, 2009. It will then be up to the public to vote for their favourites before 2nd February when the top 20 ideas will be passed on to a panel of judges to whittle down.

All the best my friends!! I hope atleast one idea in top 20 from OUR INDIANS

Google has updated Chrome to version 0.2.149.30 – Build 2200.  After its initial release, Google has finally released the next updated version to patch its bugs and security fixes.  The previous version of Google Chrome was 0.2.149.29 Build 1798.

Here is how to get the latest update:

1. Go to Tools (wrench icon) located at the upper right hand corner of browser.
2. Click “About Google Chrome” .
3. Click “Update Now”.
4. Restart the browser and now it should say 0.2.149.30 Build 2200.

Security Updates

• [r2042] Fix a potential denial of service with very long title attributes on tags. The title attribute sets the tooltip text when you hover the mouse over an element.
  Security Rating: Low risk. This can lead to 100% CPU usage or a tab crash.
  More information: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/30975

Other Changes

• [r1927] Stop adding content from HTTPS sites to the searchable index.
  Google Chrome keeps a searchable history of pages you visit. This history is only stored locally on your computer. Previously, this searchable history included the text from secure sites, such as your online bank (any sites using SSL for security). Google Chrome no longer saves text from secure pages in its local history. The address bar and local history search page will no longer find data from secure sites you have visited.If you are concerned about data that might have been indexed for searching before this release, you can follow the

  Google Chrome Help Center instructions for clearing your browsing history.

• [r1978] Don’t send sensitive URLs to search suggest services. Google Chrome stops sending data to a suggest service if the typed URL:
  • contains a username:password field (http://username:password@example.com/)
  • has query parameters (the trailing ?param=data following the URL)
  • is an https URL with any path component (any part following the hostname, such as /path in https://www.example.com/path)

• [r1848, r1943, r2003] Fixes to the Google Chrome updater to make updates more reliable.

• [r1859] Fix problems with Flash not playing video if too many connections are opened. For example, using the slider to advance video on YouTube could cause video to stop playing.

• [r2059] Allow JavaScript to communicate with Java applets. Fixes bug 580.

• [r1299] JavaScript: Dispatch contextmenu events after mouseup events. This fixes the right-click menu not working on Google Spreadsheets. Fixes bug 745.

• [r1692] Fix crashes with some plugins –3dvia was the most widely reported– when they return an error for NPN_GetValue. Fixes bug 493.

Google Chrome’s incognito mode is less sophisticated than IE8’s InPrivate browsing, but it has a feature that will be useful for those who have more than one Google account.

When you open a window in incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N), your cookies from the standard session are no longer available and you can easily log in to a new Google account.

Chrome’s help center has more details about this feature. “Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won’t be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window. You can browse normally and in incognito mode at the same time by using separate windows.” Michael Jeffrey explains that “incognito mode is a window-level mode – all pages viewed within this window are not persisted to the user’s history, and incognito pages use a temporary cookie store that is blank at the start of the incognito session”.

When you close the incognito window, all the cookies are deleted so you need to log in again the next time you browse in incognito mode. This trick can be used for any other services that allow multiple accounts, but you can only use two accounts at the same time: one in a standard window and the other one in incognito mode.

May be by tomorrow i.e 2nd of Sept 2008, Google is going to announce its Web browser called as Google Chrome – a direct competitor to Mozilla Firefox. Google Chrome is an open source browser based on Webkit and powered by Google Gears. The browser, which should be available for download sometime today night( In India), offers a tab bar above the address bar. It lets you fire up Web apps without the toolbar and menus. And, there are thumbnails that show recently visited sites.The scree shots of Google Chrome are available at blogoscoped. Two of the them are

Features of Google Chrome includes…

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information

To know more information about this, Google released a Comicbook.Check it

This shows that Google is serious about dethroning Microsoft for consumer and business productivity.

Microsoft new browser IE 8 Beta 2 version which was released on 27th of August 2008 looks more elegant and easier to use, while adding many of the missing features.

“The brand-new implementation of Standards mode in Internet Explorer 8 offers the best viewing experience of web pages created according to the latest web standards.” That means many of the web pages that include code custom tailored for IE won’t look very good, so you need to enable a compatibility view (for some reason, intranet sites are rendered in the compatibility mode by default). A post from March has more information about Microsoft’s decision to apply the standards mode by default.

IE brings CSS improvements, support for data URIs, AJAX enhancements and support for DOM storage. There’s a new tool for developers that includes a DOM inspector, a JavaScript profiler, a color picker and ruler, options to outline objects, disable CSS and validate web pages.

IE8 adds support for suggestions in the search box and this is not restricted to Live Search. Microsoft lists many search providers that can be added: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and others. The new interface makes it easy to switch between search providers by clicking on the icons displayed at the bottom.

New feature that was added to IE7 is Inline search that can search inside a page from an elegant bar similar to the one from Safari.can search inside a page from an elegant bar similar to the one from Safari.  IE8 includes a simple text viewer with syntax highlighting to view source.Microsift IE8 has a new feature called “Accelerator” which is similar to  “Send to” option from Google toolbar which enables to send the selected to text to google services.”Tired of cutting and pasting information from one website to another for everyday tasks? Now there’s a better way. Accelerators give you ready access to the online services you use everyday—from any page you visit.”

The bookmarks placed in a folder are treated as a group: the advantage is that all the bookmarks can be opened with one click, the tabs have a new color and there’s also an option to close the entire group. IE8 automatically creates groups from links opened in new tabs. It’s easy to duplicate a tab and its history, to reopen recently closed tabs and to reopen the last browsing session.

Overall, this is a highly recommended update for IE7, even though you’ll find some sites aren’t displayed properly.

Links

Download IE 8 Beta

Notes on IE 8

Windows IE8 Screenshots

More about Beta 2: IE Team Blog

As Web surfers become more knowledgeable of how affiliate programs work, more people will omit your affiliate ID or use someone else’s ID when ordering. Either way, you lose commissions you’re supposed to get.

A complete tutorial on cloaking your affiliate links. Learn how to do cloak your links and protect yourself from commission hijacking

Young CEO

Bill Gates, about 27, in his Microsoft office in 1982.

Bill Gates: The Early Years2 of 9 Geniuses at Work

Gates watches his friend and future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen typing on a teletype terminal at the Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968. Gates was 13 when he entered the exclusive prep school, which was around the time this photo was taken.

Slacker?

Much of the computer equipment at Lakeside was bought with proceeds from a rummage sale organized by the students’ mothers. Gates was drawn to programming the machines and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.


Graduate

Gates during Commencement at the Lakeside School in 1973.

Partners

Gates and Allen in Microsoft’s offices in 1982. Started initially in New Mexico, the company moved to Bellevue, Wash., in January 1979.


The Staff

The early team at Microsoft paused for a group portrait in 1978. Gates is at the bottom left.


Lots of Memory

Gates demonstrates the memory power of a CD in 1987.

Bill Introducing Microsoft

Bill and Melinda Gates

Gates’ 40,000 sq. ft. “ecology house” in Seattle – 7 years to built at estimated cost of $97 million (1998.)

Bill Gates gets knighthood from Queen Elizabeth (2005)

Bill Gates playing video games at CES (2005)

Bill Gates hands over beta 2 of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Longhorn Server at WinHEC 2006 in Seattle (2006)

Bill Gates launches Windows Vista and Office 2007 at New York’s Times Square (2007 )

“Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become!!!

Firefox 3 launch a success: 8 million downloads in 24 hours

Mozilla’s Firefox 3 release event on June 18th was an epic success. The servers logged over 8 million downloads during the 24-hour download day, and Mozilla has declared victory after exceeding its initial goal of 5 million downloads.

 Number of Pledges per region

Google released the Google toolbar for Firefox 3. This new version adds support for custom buttons, which is one of everyone’s favorite features for the IE Google Toolbar. The toolbar also adds a “Send To” feature. The Send To feature lets you share web pages via email.