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Google has steadily increased the drumbeat behind Google Apps over the past several months, openly touting it as an alternative to Microsoft’s suite of office productivity and e-mail software with customer testimonials and applications designed to make the switch easier. The company said 1.75 million organizations are now using Google’s online services for word processing and e-mail, which is still a drop in the overall bucket but growing.

Commuters in New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco will be greeted by a progressive series of ads for Google Apps starting Monday and running for a month. The idea is to catch IT managers stuck in horrific traffic spots like New York’s West Side Highway or San Francisco’s U.S. 101 and press them on the benefits of switching to Google Apps with a different ad for each day of the week.

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Google)

Traditionally Google hasn’t been big on ads, but it has produced TV spots for its Chrome browser and posted a cryptic series of job ads on Silicon Valley billboards years ago.

Some commuters will see billboards such as these touting Google Apps for a solid month.

Google is taking its marketing strategy for Google Apps to the next level by renting prominent billboards in major U.S. cities.

Sony announced late Wednesday night from the Tokyo Game Show that it plans to release a new motion-sensitive controller for its PlayStation 3 video game console sometime during spring of 2010. The news came just hours after Nintendo’s own announcement that it was cutting the price of its Wii console from $250 to $200.

Sony announced it was working on a new motion controller at E3 last June in Los Angeles.

As for Sony, it didn’t say last June when its new device would hit the market. So Wednesday night’s announcement marks the first time it has given any specificity about the date.

Earlier Wednesday evening, Nintendo said it was slashing the price of the Wii from $250 to $200. Although both announcements were made during the Tokyo Game Show, the timing is notable given that with Sony’s announcement, PS3 users and fans now have a better sense of when their favorite console will take on some additional Wii-like functionality. Nintendo may well have decided it couldn’t waste any time in making its own move to protect its console.

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Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

The company originally announced that it was working on a new controller at E3 last June. That news seemed, at the time, to indicate that Sony was aiming at taking on the Nintendo Wii and its intuitive Wii-mote. Microsoft, too, unveiled a hot new controller system, code-named Natal, but revealed no substantial details about how it would be used, what it would cost or when it would be available.

“The newly announced Motion Controller is equipped with two motion sensors, three axes gyroscope and three axes accelerometer that can detect the controller’s angle and movement held in the user’s hand,” Sony said in a release. “Together with the PlayStation Eye camera for PS3 which can accurately track the absolute position of the controller, the controller can detect the natural and intuitive movement of the hand and reflect the precise movement on to the game.”

Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software–such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Macromedia? Studio 8 Software–support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6)?

The upgrade from to Photoshop CS4 costs about $190; various Creative Suite collections that include other Adobe software packages such as Flash Professional, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver cost more.

Wrote one commenter, “I understand that you don’t want to waste resources, but I plan on upgrading to Snow Leopard, but cannot afford a new version of CS. At this point, I will not be out growing this version for some time. PLEASE don’t leave thousands of us weekend warriors behind with version after version. True, the new tools are cool for the power users, but average folk just can’t keep up on price!!! HELP - please support CS3 for a little while longer!!!”

Nack denied that particular idea.

And another: “The lack of CS3 testing is very disturbing. It was one thing for Adobe not to release CS4 in 64 bit for the Mac. I understand that recompiling the program in a different language is a major undertaking. OK, I can wait for CS5. But now, in what can only be interpreted as an attempt to force an upgrade to a program that doesn’t even take advantage of the 64-bit programming in Snow Leopard, Adobe will not even test CS3 for Snow Leopard compatibility.”

“This isn’t some kind of ploy to force people to upgrade; rather, it’s a recognition that resources are not infinite, and we need to focus our efforts on current and future technology,” he said.

An Adobe Systems executive is trying to calm Photoshop users who were alarmed to hear an earlier but still widely used version of Photoshop isn’t supported on Snow Leopard, the new Apple operating system arriving Friday.

Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack on Tuesday published Adobe’s FAQ about its Creative Suite support for Snow Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.6, that said the current CS4 version from October 2008 is the only one that’s supported. The comments quickly took on panicky and angry tones among people who thought their older CS3 version of the software wouldn’t work on the new operating system, so Nack followed up on Wednesday with a new post to clarify that CS3 would work, albeit with some caveats.

“To the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard,” Nack said. “We have reason to expect that all meaningful issues of running Photoshop CS3 under Snow Leopard have been resolved. However, because we have not done the level of testing that true certification demands, we need to stand by our statement that we don’t officially support CS3 on Snow Leopard.”

A. Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts. While older Adobe and Macromedia applications may install and run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).

This is the statement in the FAQ that got people riled up:

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Virtual Balance Tracker Virtual Balance Tracker allows you to input bills, stock accounts, checking accounts, and other financial balances to track it as the month goes on. You can set up recurring debits or credits or manually adjust it as the real balance changes. It’s not the easiest gadget to use, but it might come in handy for those who want to know where their money is without going to individual bank sites.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Track the price of gold with Live Gold.

3. Google Finance Portfolios: Google Finance Portfolios provides easy access to your stocks.

The economy is in a major state of flux right now. Although unemployment is still on the rise, the stock market is on the rise too as of late.

Dow Jones Chart Dow Jones Chart is the most accurate Dow Jones gadget in this roundup. Although some other gadgets list the Dow Jones’ level at any given time, the Dow Jones Chart is accurate to the minute. In other words, it provides the closest tally of what the market’s price is at any moment. It’s extremely useful for investors. Slight fluctuations in the market will be seen with this gadget. It’s worth checking out.

Google Finance Portfolios provides your portfolio's performance.

Dow Jones Chart gives you real-time Dow Jones tallies.

2. Commodities Market: Who doesn’t want to know what the price of oil is today?

Live Gold The Live Gold gadget provides real-time information on gold’s price at any moment. The gadget also features news about the gold market and a listing of other metals, including silver and platinum, if you want to check their price, as well.

Commodities Market If you’re looking to find a way to easily track the price of oil and natural gas, the Commodities Market gadget is for you. The gadget displays the major commodity indexes, including crude oil, natural gas, and even coffee. You’ll see the price fluctuate as market factors change throughout the day. It’s a great way to stay up on the commodity market.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Sector Summary Sector Summary is a simple gadget that sits in your iGoogle home page. It also displays how each sector of the economy, including technology stocks and industrial companies, performed the last time the market was open. It displays the sector and how much it was up or down on the day. If you want to dig a little deeper, you can click on any sector. You’ll be brought to Google Finance where you’ll find more information. It’s a great gadget for anyone trying to diversify.

Currency Converter Currency Converter does what you would expect: it converts currency based on up-to-date exchange rates. So, if you want to know how many euros are in a single dollar, you can do it. If you want to convert your dollars to yuan, you can do that too. It’s a simple gadget, but it comes in handy.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Stock Charts Stock Charts is an extremely handy gadget to have on your iGoogle page. Simply input a stock’s ticker symbol and the gadget will display how the stock’s share price has fluctuated over one month, three months, six months, or a year. Stock Charts won’t be enough to help you make a decision on a stock purchase, but thanks to its usability, it will come in handy when you’re making that decision.

Currency Converter helps you convert money.

After Google Finance Portfolios is added to your iGoogle page, it displays your portfolio, including the net change for the day. It also features overall market performance. Any of those items can be hidden in the gadget. If you want more detail on a particular stock you own, you can click on it to be brought to its respective Google Finance page.

1. Company Overview: With so much great information, Company Overview is a great gadget.

Company Overview displays a lot of great information.

Sector Summary will help you see how well all the economy's sectors performed.

My top 3

Latest Bulls will give you information on overseas markets.

Company Overview After you install Company Overview, you can input any company’s ticker symbol and see an overview of its operation. You can also get company news, see key financial ratios, check out its financial performance, and even see who the company’s key managers are. If you want to listen in on quarterly earnings calls, you can find all the information you need to join those calls in this gadget. Check it out.

If you’re one of those people trying to make sense of the markets, you might be happy to know that instead of jumping from site to site to get all your financial information, you can simply add some gadgets to your iGoogle home page. From currencies to commodities, iGoogle gadgets will satisfy any desire.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Stay up-to-date on commodities with Commodities Market.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Latest Bulls Latest Bulls features the world’s indexes to see how different markets around the world are performing. It lists the S&P 500, the FTSE 100, and Shanghai Exchange, among other markets. In the gadget, it only lists whether a respective item is up or down. When you click on one of those items, you’ll be brought to a page from Marcoaxis, giving you more detailed information on the market. Any advanced investor who dabbles in overseas markets should find this gadget quite useful.

10 finance gadgets

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Google Finance Portfolios Google Finance Portfolios gadget tells you how well your stocks are doing right on your iGoogle page.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Virtual Balance Tracker displays balances and recurring payments.

Stock Charts lets you know how your favorite stocks are performing.

If you’ve followed the Road Trip picture of the day challenges, you may have noticed that a number of them have featured big rock formations. And why not? When you drive more than 5,000 miles through states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, as I did during Road Trip 2009, you see some of the most beautiful things nature can throw at you.

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Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

To that end, if you are the first to tell me (by e-mail to daniel–dot–terdiman–at–cnet–dot–com) what this is called, and where it is, you’ll win a prize.

Click here for the entire Road Trip 2009 package.

Do you know what this is? If so, you could win a prize in the Road Trip picture of the day challenge.

But this is the penultimate daily challenge, so I figured, why not dip into the well once more and task you with identifying one last wondrous piece of nature?

So good luck.

After tomorrow, however, there won’t be any more daily challenges. Until Road Trip 2010, that is.

The program gives YouTube the ability to choose only the choice material.

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Greg Sandoval/CNET News)

Critics have always knocked YouTube’s alleged inability to monetize the amateur-made videos on the site. Advertisers were afraid to get anywhere near this kind of content because it was too unpredictable. But that was when people thought YouTube would only serve ads against all of the content on its site.

Google announced Tuesday that its video site is opening the YouTube Partnership Program to the masses–provided they’re packing a hot video.

YouTube said in a note posted to Google’s blog that it will enable users who start accumulating lots of hits to generate revenue from their clips–provided they meet YouTube’s terms.

“It’s taken us some time,” YouTube wrote, “to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content-management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the (program) to so many individual users and videos.”

You don’t have to be some high-paid auteur or even create a wildly popular character like “Fred” to cash in on YouTube.

“To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video’s virality, and compliance with the YouTube terms of service,” YouTube said in the blog. “If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an e-mail and see an ‘Enable Revenue Sharing’ message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account.”

Once a user says yes, YouTube goes to work selling advertising against the user’s video.

Now anyone has the potential to share in ad revenue, not just megahits like "Fred", the YouTube character created by teen Lucas Cruikshank, seen here.

Following the news, shares of Nokia stock fell 6.6 percent to 9.62 euros.

“The demand for mobile devices improved in many markets during Q3,” Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a statement. “With the average selling price of our devices holding firm quarter-on-quarter, our higher device volumes translated into increased net sales in our Devices & Services business. Our volumes and net sales were, however, somewhat constrained by component shortages we encountered across the portfolio.

Nokia expects the market for its mobile infrastructure and related services market to fall 5 percent for the year from 2008 levels, an improvement over earlier estimates of a 10 percent drop.

Nokia on Thursday reported a loss for its third quarter of 559 million euros ($832 million) compared with a profit of 1.09 billion euros in the same quarter of 2008.

The company said that its share of the mobile device market for the quarter was 38 percent, the same as in the year-earlier period and in the second quarter of 2009.

Though Nokia’s mobile phone sales managed to eke out some gains, overall revenues were hurt by a shortage of components for many of its products.

Despite weakness in the mobile phone sector, Nokia is optimistic about its near-term outlook. The company now sees volume for its phones hitting 1.12 billion units for the year, down 7 percent from 2008, but better than Nokia’s earlier estimate of a 10 percent decline.

The net loss for the period that ended September 30 was triggered by declining sales, which fell 20 percent to 9.18 billion euros from 12.2 billion euros the prior year’s quarter. A write-down of the company’s weak Nokia Siemens Networks unit also put a big drag on the bottom line.

However, the future remains cloudy for Nokia Siemens Network, which is likely to see its market share drop even further for 2009 than previously forecast, said the company.

Nokia Siemens Networks, the network equipment unit formed in 2007 and co-owned by Nokia and Siemens, has struggled to turn a solid profit from the get-go. In a write-down of this failing business, Nokia was forced to spend 908 million euros.

“The challenging competitive factors and market conditions in the infrastructure and related services business necessitated non-cash impairment charges at Nokia Siemens Networks,” said Kallasvuo.

Net sales for the third quarter came in at 9.8 billion euros, down 20 percent from 12.2 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

(Credit: Nokia)

During the third quarter, Nokia also completed its acquisition of GPS map specialist Navteq.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username”–where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID–into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period–after which the call will end–as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

Coming on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Facebook users will now be able to communicate with each other via voice–using a third-party application from Vivox–it’s clear that there is a strong interest, among service providers, at least, in taking leading social networks beyond strictly text communications. Whether large numbers of users choose to get on board is unknown at this point, of course. And given that neither the Facebook nor the Twitter voice services are being provided by the social networks themselves means that some users will choose not to get involved for fear of privacy, stability or other concerns.

And while it may be some time before such a thing happens with either Facebook or Twitter, or any other major social network, one would have to think that it’s only a matter of time.

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts. The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.

Still, if these third-party services end up being successful, it would be natural to expect that Facebook and Twitter may decide they need to step up and directly embed such technologies into their offerings. And there is a precedent for such a move. After Vivox began offering Second Life users a third-party voice solution, the virtual world’s publisher, Linden Lab, decided it needed to take advantage of the technology. Today, thanks to a formal partnership, Vivox’s voice service is formally integrated into Second Life.

There are currently several applications that allow users to create voice-to-text Twitter posts–known as tweets–but it does not appear that anyone has yet made it possible to initiate voice communications directly between Twitter users.

One important element of the service is that users can keep their phone numbers private, yet be able to have voice chats with just about anyone on Twitter. To be sure, since the calls are initiated by one person, the recipient may well not be online, or may choose to ignore the call if they don’t want to talk.

It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t belong in an app (having to sync to save the data is a bad idea). Rather, this is the kind of thing you should be able to get online from your mobile phone carrier. They already have the data anyway,gucci bags, so why can’t they display it for you? Hopefully the Rseven team realizes this and is trying to get their service out to the carriers.

Everything you've done on your phone gets pushed to the Web.

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Rafe Needleman/CNET)

SAN DIEGO–Rseven makes an interesting service that archives everything you do on your mobile phone so you can review and analyze your activities later. With the app on your phone (it was shown on Series 60 phone — the first demo at DemoFall 09 not on an iPhone), everything you do on the phone is stored, including recordings of incoming and outgoing calls. Call logs, text messages, and photos. (Actually, it wasn’t clear if activities in other apps, like e-mail,chanel bags, are also saved.)

Once you sync your phone to the service,prada bags, all the data goes onto the Web so you can pick over it later. You get charts and graphs showing you who you communicate with the most. You can easily tag and share your photos. Mostly, you can just see what you’ve been doing with your phone at any time. The CEO calls it a “lifecache” service.

So it looks like more waiting for those living outside Japan. But if you can’t take the wait, check out Square Enix’s Final Fantasy page. It’s really well done.

Final Fantasy XIII is one of the most highly anticipated games in the industry. Its story is set in the city of Cocoon. Another world called Pulse is the “wilderness” in the game. The main character, Lightning, is destined to destroy the world. His mission is to fight against that destiny and save the world while fighting off the enemy,louis vuitton handbags, called Fal’Cie. Unfortunately, Square Enix wouldn’t reveal too much more information about the storyline.

Check out Don’s Facebook profile, Twitter stream,replica handbags, and FriendFeed.

Square Enix didn’t pinpoint a U.S. release date. The company said in previous releases, it took about a “half a year to a year” for it to bring the game to U.S. store shelves. It’s still hoping to make it available in spring 2010. Unlike the Japanese version, which only be made available on the PS3, Final Fantasy XIII will be offered to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners. No price has been announced.

Final Fantasy XIII will also be used to help Sony sell consoles. At the event, Square Enix said its game will come bundled with the PlayStation 3 Slim in Japan. It wouldn’t divulge any more details on when it will be made available or at what price it will be offered.

Final Fantasy XIII is on its way to Japan.

Square Enix announced at a press event Tuesday in Japan that Final Fantasy XIII, the next installment in the venerable franchise,chanel bags, will be coming to Japanese stores on December 17, according to the company’s site and a Reuters report. It will be offered exclusively on the PlayStation 3 for about $95.

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Square Enix)

Regardless, Final Fantasy XIII follows a long line of games in the series that has captivated players. At its Tuesday event, the company said the franchise has sold more than 85 million units worldwide since the first installment was released in 1987.