Google may dominate the online world, but they are finding out the hard way that jumping into the mobile phone industry is a different story entirely.

In November, Google, along with more than 30 partners, announced that they would be offering handsets based off of their mobile software, Android. At the time, Google was confident that they would be able to have these phones on the market sometime during the early part of the second half of 2008. Of course, a project of this magnitude can change many times over and is based on thousands of factors. For this reason, Google has announced that the phones will not be made available to the public until sometime during the 4th quarter.

Although the project has been delayed by several months, many insiders are still reporting that many carriers are having a difficult time keeping up. The same holds true for companies that are working on programs for the Android operating system.

T-Mobile believes that they will be able to have an Android powered phone offered in the United States by the 4th quarter. That being said, since Google is working so closely with T-Mobile, it has pushed other carriers further behind. For instance, Sprint Nextel was hoping to also launch during the 4th quarter, but it now appears that they will have to wait until 2009 to move forward.

The United States mobile market is not the only one missing out due to these delays. China Mobile, a company with 400 million subscribers, had major plans to launch an Android powered phone during the 3rd quarter of 2008. This project is believed to have been put off until late this year, or early 2009.

It is safe to say that Google has a thing or two to learn about the cell phone industry. When the company’s phones finally arrive, they will be up against stiff competition from the likes of Apple as well as many others. The results are sure to attract a lot of attention!

As a freelancer, one of the most important tasks of your job is to accurately track the amount of time that you spend on each project. Of course, you may be able to get away with not doing this, but there is no point in taking the risk. Generally speaking, Tick seems like a simple service on the surface; it is nothing more than a web based time tracking service. But when you dive deeper into the services that are offered by Tick, you will begin to see just how much it has to offer.

First off, you need to know how Tick works. The nice thing about this is that the service is web based. What does this mean to you? Simply put, it means that you can use Tick on any browser. And since it is web based, you can also use the service on any computer. This is a huge advantage if you are a freelancer because many have more than one computer that they use on a regular basis. As long as you have your log in you will be fine.
The interface is a simple design, and despite some confusing sample images, you should be able to find your way around without too much trouble.

After you sign in via your login page, you will have the ability to get started with the many services that are offered by Tick. The main duties that you can perform include: maintenance to your account, creating a new project, entering time for a project that you are currently working on, or viewing reports on projects. As you can imagine, you will more than likely sign into your Tick account with one of these duties in mind.

Before you can create a new project, you will first need to create a new client. Remember, you need to be an administrator in order to do this. Tick gives you the ability to be either an administrator or non administrator. This works out well if you are going to have other people working on projects with you. If you have other people who may want to use the system, you will want to make sure that they are set up as administrators as well. Of course, this is personal preference based on the way that you want to run your company.

After you have created a new client, you can then proceed to do the same with your project. Doing this is easy enough, and once you create one project you will have a much better grip for future jobs. You then need to make a decision on your project’s budget. This is up to you, but if you are not sure you do not have to set a budget.

If you are dealing with a large project, you can break it down into smaller tasks and assign separate budgets. This will help you to better track the project, and is a huge benefit if you have more than one employee working on the same job.
Tick offers freelancers the ability to purchase the subscription that will best suit their needs. This ranges from a free membership, to $79 for the top of the line set up.

Benefits

1. Once you have your account set up, it is easy to customize to suit your needs and projects.
2. A simple interface makes for little to no hassles.
3. The system moves fast no matter what you are doing. This is a huge benefit that many people may take for granted.

Cons

1. Sample images can confuse new users.
2. Customer service is not as effective as it could be.
3. It takes some time to set up additional employees as either admin or non admin.

All in all, Tick offers a functional and effective way for freelancers and companies to track time and budgets. Although there are some bugs that need to be worked out, for now, Tick is a great service.

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From the innovators who brought you the peer-to-peer file sharing program Kazaa, and the free peer-to-peer online phone carrier Skype, now introduce Joost™ (pronounced “juiced”), an Internet television application that’s transposed the television industry. Co-founders Janus Friis, 30, and Niklas Zennström, 40, are known for “sticking it to the man” with their programs that put the control back to the people. Joost™ works like an on-demand television, removing all of its negative qualities, one of which being what Friis describes as “televisions being locked in linear time”. Joost™ offers “high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.”

“At Joost™ just about all our software is built on top of open source stuff, and we’re proud of it! These pages attempt to skim the surface of what we do with open source, and also provide a glimpse of how we try to contribute back to the community.”

Sources:
Details Magazine
The Register
Web TV Wire

First Impressions
Brilliant! The spiffy box arrived at my house just a few days before Christmas. On opening the box, I was greeted by another brown cardboard box, this one more tightly sealed. Inside lay a bubble wrap bag containing two CD pouches with the installation discs inside. A users guide and ‘Quick Reference’ book were also included, along with a wired headset. So far, so good!
In goes the disc. Okay, okay… I got through the installation process till the ‘Select a drive to install your copy of Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 on’, or somthing like that. I had lots of trouble installing the software, as it was claiming I had insufficient space on my main hard drive. Infact, I had “22.6 GB of free space” on my computer, and I finally got it up and running, after repeatedly retrying to install the software. The installation itself time took a resonable amount of time and I quickly registered my product with Nuance.
Training
I did about 30 minutes of training no problem. I was told to read the sentences that appeared on the screen so that the software could ‘calibrate’ my voice pattern. Thinking that everything will be fine, I opened up Dragon’s special dictation software, ‘Dragon Pad’. In the English language, there are a couple of things that are considered ‘standard sentences’.
The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Hen.
You want to see what Dragon Pad thought I was saying? No, you really don’t… But for the purpose of providing an honest review, I have to post the results.
‘My thick round ox jumped over my daisy’s pen.’
All in all, I can type a lot quicker and more accurately than that anyway. Since I was delivered the software, I’ve used it over 20 times. I must have done the training that many times too. The software crashes every single time I use it. I’m kind of fed up now, after many unsuccessful attempts. Okay, my PC isn’t state of the art, but it’s only a year old, and has twice the recommended amount of RAM, and a 3.3Ghz P4 processor, far more than needed to run a program like this.
Overall Impressions
I’m sure that the software really is a good product, and I know it’s had outstanding reviews from many top-class websites, but for me, it’s just not worked out. I’ve had heap loads of problems, and only a few sentences of garbled text and a new Skype headset to show for it.
Maybe next time I’ll have better luck.

*Update* I accidentally deleted this post while I was deleting some spam comments for this post, so I had to repost this as a new article. Don’t you just hate it when this happens!

You can check out a demo of the program running.
Update: The contest is now over, we will announce the winners in a few days.

It isn’t always easy to find free software that does what you are looking for, much less free software that does what you are looking for with quality results, and often times so much time is spent searching, downloading, installing, and then uninstalling software, that by the time you find one that looks promising, you don’t feel like using it anymore. That’s why lists are good, other people have done all the downloading and testing for you, and then they share their results by telling you which programs preformed the best.

Here are a few pages of lists I’ve stumbled across while searching around the internet. These lists include programs like openoffice.org’s suite of programs that have all the functionality of Microsoft Office(top), and GIMP, a photo editing program along the lines of Adobe Photoshop(above):

These are by no means complete lists of free software, and they aren’t all open source, but they are good resources to find what you may be looking for. If you need something that isn’t on this list, why not do a quick search for it, I’m sure you’ll find what you are looking for pretty quickly. If you do find something that is worthwhile let me know about it in the comments.

10. Audacity

Audacity is a free cross platform digital audio editor. Audacity is extremely popular in the podcasting world due to its wide availability, its multiplatform support, and free pricing.

9. BitTorrent

The BitTorrent client is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution client application and also of its related file sharing protocol, both of which were created by programmer Bram Cohen. BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. CacheLogic suggests that BitTorrent traffic accounts for ~35% of all traffic on the Internet

8. OpenSSH

OpenSSH (Open Secure Shell) is a set of free software computer programs providing encrypted communication sessions over a computer network using the SSH protocol. It was created as an open alternative to the proprietary Secure Shell software. The project is led by Theo de Raadt from Calgary, Alberta.

7. PHP

PHP is an open-source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high-level tool for producing dynamic web content, PHP is used mainly in server-side applications.

6. The Gimp

The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is a free software bitmap image editor. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

5. OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org is a free and open source office suite, including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing and database components. It is available for many different platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Unix-like systems with the X Window System including GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. It is intended to be compatible with, and compete with, Microsoft Office. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange, and can be used at no cost.

4. MySql

MySQL is popular for web applications such as MediaWiki or PHP-Nuke and acts as the database component of the LAMP and WAMP platforms (Linux/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python). Its popularity as a web application is closely tied to the popularity of PHP, which is often combined with MySQL.

3. Apache Server

Apache HTTP Server is a free software/open source HTTP web server for Unix-like systems (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and other platforms.

2. Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers. Firefox includes an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, support for open standards, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although other browsers have some of these features, Firefox became the first such browser to include them all and achieve wide adoption. PCWorld reviewed Firefox as the best product of 2005.

1. Linux

Linux is a computer operating system. It is one of the most prominent examples of open source development and free software; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, and redistribute. Some of the most popular distributions are Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Suse.

Some programs that didn’t make the list, but worth mentioning.

Gaim

Gaim is a multi-platform instant messaging client that supports many commonly used instant messaging systems

eMule

eMule is a filesharing client which is based on the eDonkey2000 network but offers more features than the standard client. The most downloaded program on sourceforge.net.

Digg it 

• Built in Phishing Protection.
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on NullSoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

One of the features I am looking for out of Firefox 2.0 is the ability to easily subscribe and view RSS feeds.

7. Ogg

Ogg is a patent-free, fully open multimedia bitstream container format designed for efficient streaming and file compression. The term “ogg” often refers to the audio file format Ogg Vorbis, that is, Vorbis-encoded audio in an Ogg container. Other prominent components of Ogg are its video codec Theora, and the human speech audio compression format, Speex.

6. PHP

PHP is an open-source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high-level tool for producing dynamic web content, PHP is used mainly in server-side applications.

5. Wiki

The wiki software is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change all content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing.

4. Azureus

Azureus is a Java based BitTorrent client. It currently supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix. It is one of the most popular bit-torrent clients

3. Open Office

OpenOffice.org is a free and open source office suite, including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing and database components. It is available for many different platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Unix-like systems with the X Window System including GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. It is intended to be compatible with, and compete with, Microsoft Office. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange, and can be used at no cost.

2. Linux

Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a computer operating system. It is one of the most prominent examples of open source development and free software; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, and redistribute. Some of the most popular distributions are Ubuntu, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Suse.

1. Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers. Firefox includes an integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, support for open standards, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although other browsers have some of these features, Firefox became the first such browser to include them all and achieve wide adoption. PCWorld reviewed Firefox as the best product of 2005.

Some that didn’t make the list but worth mentioning.

Apache Server

Apache HTTP Server is a free software/open source HTTP web server for Unix-like systems (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and other platforms.

MySQL

MySQL is popular for web applications such as MediaWiki or PHP-Nuke and acts as the database component of the LAMP and WAMP platforms (Linux/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python). Its popularity as a web application is closely tied to the popularity of PHP, which is often combined with MySQL and nicknamed the Dynamic Duo.

Digg it

But I have to say I am very please with mint and the many plugins there are, I already installed 3 new plugins for mint, a way to find out the visitors IP address, a map of where they came from, and a statistical graph.

However, these type of features are already included in google analytics, but here with mint you have more control over your plugins, and there are much more that I didn’t get to install.

The one drawback to mint is that it is hosted on your own server so it might be slow at times when their is traffic at your site. Unlike analytics which is hosted with google, all you need to do is just add a line of javascript code to your site. However, being locally hosted that mint is it might be a nice feature because what if for some reason google’s servers go down then you’re out of luck, so this can go both ways.
Mint Pros

• Fast
• great user interface
• plugins
• locally hosted
• good support
• Get your tracking via RSS

Mint Cons

• locally hosted
• price ($30)
• Doesn’t work with IE
• Buggy

Google Analytics Pros

• Free
• In depth tracking
• Graphs
• Remotely hosted

Google Analytics Cons

• Wait for an invitation
• Remotely hosted
• No third party plugins

Another great alternative tracking service is sitemeter which is free, until you want a more indepth tracking service which wouldn’t make all that big of a difference. Good alternative fast and free, might not have all the bells and whistles of the other services but worth a mention.

Final Thoughts

Overall these services are for the site owners to find out about their visitors and know how to improve their site for future visitors. If this is not the reason you want these tracking services than you should probably just use sitemeter. But if you are more serious and are willing to pay up $30 for mint for the features its a great investment, if you are willing to wait for it, I would defiantly say wait for the google analytics service, the main difference between them is the price and the wait. The features are pretty much the same, just a little differnce in presentation, all in all both great services.

Download here for Windows

Download here for Mac

Update: Firefox has now implemented the new updates, so that you can now update it automatically, with firefox update feature: Help>Check for Updates