Archive for the 'New Sites' Category

I recently came across NanoScan, an online antivirus by Panda Software. What makes this different from other online virus scanners is the ease of use and the speed with which scanning is completed. On my system it took about 10 seconds to download the scanning engine (an activex control) and another 40 seconds to scan the system.

According to their blog, the scanning software is merely 400K and can detect over 800,000 known malware samples! Now that would make it the fastest and smallest antivirus out there. Do give it a try, you have nothing to loose if it doesn’t find any virus!

Please note that NanoScan is only a detection tool, it cannot remove viruses. For that you will have to use other online antivirus tools such as ActiveScan or TrendMicro . Following diagram shows the NanoScan capabilities.

Recently I came across InstaCalc, an online calculator. Initially I thought - “what the heck, who will start a site on a calculator?” But after using it for sometime I quickly realized that it is infact a brilliant idea!

Here are a couple of things that makes this unique,

1. Ultra fast calculator with immediate preview of results. You can also create and use equations.

2. You can create complex calculations and share them. For example, check out the Youtube Analysis.

3. You can embed calculations to a blog/site. InstaCalc can also generate charts and graphs. Embed feature is not yet available for graphs.

For more details on this cool tool, check out the InstaCalc feature tour.

I recently came across this cool Flash game site called Kongregate. This is a Web 2.0 style site with no annoying popup or ads. It is still in alpha stage. You need to register using mail address to start playing, but that is a quick process.

From the site,

Kongregate operates with an understanding of how difficult it can be for talented game developers - from the aspiring gamesmith to the independent studio - to get the recognition and compensation that they deserve. That’s why Kongregate shares microtransaction and advertising revenue with contributing developers, who retain the full rights to their games.

I found some of the games featured very addictive! For example, Scribble. Also the site gives a community feeling by attaching a chat window to the game you are playing. This allows you to contact people with similar interests and is pretty cool. So if you like playing games on the Web, do give this a try.

Scribble game on Kongregate - The idea is to connect the dots using the mouse.

Remember Alex Tew who created milliondollarhomepage and made a million dollars by selling pixels on his Web page? It was a cool idea and soon thousands of sites tried to make money in a similar way. Few even succeeded in getting some money!

After all the interviews and TV shows, Alex is now back with a new venture called pixelotto. This time he is offering the Web site visitors a million dollars! Here is how it works - Advertisers can place ads for 2$ per pixel and there are a million pixels available. Now the visitors must click on the ads if they want to get the million dollars prize!

Man, that is one clever idea! It is sure to generate a lot of Web traffic on to the advertised pages. Also Alex is going to get the other million dollars generated

Pixelotto has already generated over $130K in ad revenue. The site was down today (13th Dec) for sometime. It appears that the site is unable to handle the traffic.

GPSies allows you to view and download tracks which have been recorded by a GPS device. Tracks are visible on a map(as in Google earth) and similar options are also available on the site (zoom, satellite or map mode etc.). The tracks are classified based on the mode of transport (by foot, bike, motor and others). Uploaded tracks can be changed by entering the original user id used to create it.

The cool thing about this site is that you can download the tracks to your GPS device and be sure that you are on track!

GPSies uses Google Maps API as its mapping engine. As of now there aren’t many tracks on the site, but like any Wiki will get built soon.

Today when I went to Google suddenly a new link appeared after the news tab - scholar. This service is still in beta and provides a search on scholarly material.

Features of Google scholar

Search diverse sources from one convenient place.
Find papers, abstracts and citations.
Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web.
Learn about key papers in any area of research.

This is the results I got for relativity. Pretty impressive.

As per Google, articles are ranked based on the text of the article, author, publication in which it appeared and how many times it is featured in scholarly material.

Google provides scholar integration services to publishers and librarians. Librarians can add their resources to Google scholar and hence Google scholar can in future become the ultimate catalog of all the libraries!

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