Archive for the ‘ Technology News ’ Category

Yahoo Mobile iPhone Video Chat

Ask and you shall receive. For some time now, on the iPhone you’ve been able to chat phone-to-phone with FaceTime or various other 3rd party applications. What’s been missing until a few days ago is the ability to chat phone-to-computer. Yahoo recently put out an update to their Messenger app which allowed you to chat via 3G or Wifi to and from any device or computer able to run the Yahoo Messenger app. The great thing is that it doesn’t just work for the new iPhone 4, but even lets you utilize the camera on an iPhone 3G(S), letting you steam live video to whoever you want. It’s completely free, and can work across a ton of devices. Quality over 3G is acceptable, but nothing to write home about, while Wifi is significantly better. Kudos Yahoo.

Google Goggles for iPhone

My love for Google grows with each passing day. If there is a service they offer, I probably use it. From GMail to Maps to just their original search, I’d pay a good hundred dollars a year just to use them, but they’re nice enough (and smart enough) to give them up for free.

Today Google released their much anticipated update for the Google app on the iPhone to include Google Goggles. This little known service basically provides a way to search with images, instead of text. It’s been long available for the android market, but has just now been released to iPhone users.

The Goggles app not only recognizes obvious things, such as logos and trademarks, but not so obvious stuff, such as text and barcodes. For example, the scan of a book will bring up the book itself as a product (allowing you to purchase), the writing on the cover as text (allowing yo to translate or save), as well related websites from a search. Doing a business card does the same, even going so far as to allow you to save the contact information to your phone or call the number directly. You can scan a text page and translate the text, all without having to type in a word. The possibilities are pretty limitless.

They’re expanding the service slowly, to allow for more creative search options; people, plants, etc. It’s still a great feature, and for the price, you really can’t beat it.