Yahoo Opens Web Mail to Developers

Yahoo Inc. is opening up its Web mail platform to external developers, so that they can create plug-ins, utilities and applications for the popular Yahoo Mail service.

Late on Wednesday, Yahoo plans to deliver application programming interfaces (APIs) for Yahoo Mail, said Chad Dickerson, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. The move comes on the heels of an announcement to offer unlimited storage capacity for Yahoo Mail users starting from May.

Yahoo officials had indicated in September of last year their intention to let external developers write applications for Yahoo Mail, and the tools will now be available at the Yahoo Developer Network Web site.

Yahoo provides similar development tools for other of its services, like the photo sharing site Flickr, the Yahoo search engine and the Yahoo Shopping product comparison site.

Yahoo rivals like Google Inc. also offer tools to third-party developers to build applications for their sites and online services. Companies like Yahoo, eBay Inc. and Google believe that it is to their benefit if external developers come up with useful and interesting applications for their online services that their internal developers don't have the time or resources to create.

With about 250 million users, Yahoo Mail has a gigantic audience, and the company is confident external developers will be very interested in writing applications for it, Dickerson said.

"By opening up our APIs, we'll begin to tap into the world's ideas about mail," said John Kremer, Yahoo Mail's vice president.

As an incentive for developers to use the Yahoo Mail Web Service to create applications, Yahoo will pay a commission of US$10 for every Yahoo Mail Plus account created as a result of a referral from an approved developer. Yahoo may come up with other monetary incentives and business models for developers, partners and independent software vendors.

Sugar-powered fuel cells

Advances in lithium batteries have made possible the multitude of portable gadgets that we take for granted these days, from the laptop I'm writing this article on to the cellphone beside me that keeps ringing. But batteries aren't terribly environmentally friendly, and even rechargeable ones have finite lifespans. Now scientists at Saint Louis University have developed a special fuel cell that might replace them, and just like you or I, it runs on sugar.

Sugar is useful stuff. It's made by plants from sunlight and carbon dioxide (photosynthesis), and powers just about every living creature on earth. The oxygen we need to breathe is a by-product of photosynthesis that happened several billion years ago by early life, and the oil we burn to power our cars and cities used to be sugar (amongst other things) millions of years ago, before heat and pressure worked their magic.

This new fuel cell uses sugar, which is very energy dense, to produce electricity with the help of an enzyme. Although this trick isn't new, Dr. Shelley Minteer, the lead investigator, claims that this this new creation has longevity and power not seen before. In comparison with other fuel cells, the sugar fuel cell is biodegradable. Dr. Minteer has tested it with glucose in solution, flat soda, and tree sap. Carbonated drinks weren't so good, as the bubbles affected the fuel cell's efficiency, and plain table sugar in water gave the best results.

The work is of great interest to the US Department of Defense, who funded the study. A sugar-powered fuel cell could be used to charge the multitude of electronic gadgets US soldiers take into the battlefield, from night sights to radios. But the technology obviously has even greater potential in the wider consumer electronics market, and would help better the environmental credentials of an industry that is responsible for a fair amount of heavy metals and other hazardous waste as devices become obsolete.

EVDO Rev. B promises more than 9Mbps down

EVDO Revision A is already old and busted—get ready for EVDO Revision B.

Chipset maker Qualcomm has announced its roadmap to upgrade EVDO chipsets—both with new hardware and software updates to offer backward compatibility in older models. The company claims that during its tests on EVDO Rev. B they saw an average data rate of 9.3Mbps down, via the 5MHz spectrum—a drastic increase over Rev. A's 800kbps download speed.

The evolution of CDMA2000 networks from EVDO Rev. A to EVDO Rev. B allows network operators to remain leading-edge in their service and performance offerings without the need for any infrastructure hardware changes. The key is the lack of significant infrastructure hardware change, which means that uptake in the US should be good.

If Rev. B is truly this good, streaming video to mobile phones could potentially become an enjoyable experience. Qualcomm has another usage in mind, too: VoIP.

9.3Mbps download would be a dream come true to many mobile users—particularly traveling businesspeople who rely on EVDO for the constant net connection—but we know very well that actually achieving that kind of download speed anywhere outside of Fantasy Island is unlikely in the near future. Verizon, which currently supports EVDO Rev. A, says that users should expect perfomance to be lower than the theoretical maximum, going down as far as 450kbps down—just a hair above the halfway mark of the advertised max (800 kbps) for Rev. A. But even half of the advertised speed for Rev. B, roughly 4.6Mbps, would still be a major upgrade from EVDO Rev. A.

Gadget puts GTalk on web pages

A new Google Inc. gadget lets users embed the company's Talk instant-messaging service in Web pages, expanding the reach of this product, originally introduced as a downloadable PC application.

The Google Talk Gadget, released Wednesday, displays a Flash-based interface on Web pages for users to exchange text messages with people on their Google Talk contacts list. Unlike the Talk PC application, the gadget requires no software download. It loads automatically with the Web page it's on.

By inserting a line of code, the gadget can be added to Web pages, including Google's Personalized Home Page, a customized Web portal users can tailor with Google and third-party online services and information sources. For the gadget to work, users must have version 8 or above of Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash Player.

In addition to text messaging, people can use the gadget interface to initiate a voice chat, but the Talk application is needed to host the conversation, said Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk product manager. However, Google hopes to extend this functionality so that voice chats can happen within the gadget interface, he said.

The gadget has some features the PC application lacks, like the ability to organize multiple text chats with tabs and to share and watch photos and videos within the Talk interface from Google's Picasa photo manager and YouTube video site, he said. When asked if the Talk application will gain these features, he declined to comment.

Conversely, the gadget lacks some of the PC application's features, including the ability to transfer files and the voicemail functionality.

Meet cGrid, the real-time P2P punisher

There's a tool in the war on piracy that's picking up steam, and its proponents are thrilled with what it can do. Dubbed "cGrid," the application is powerful and daunting to those caught in its snares, for it can boot users off the network in real-time if it suspects that they are engaging in P2P file sharing, or even if they are using so-called darknets. As you might expect, the entertainment industry loves it.

cGrid's developer Red Lambda hopes that the current imbroglio between the RIAA and America's colleges will turn into a business opportunity.

cGrid's developers describe it as "the industry's most advanced P2P and file-sharing mitigation technology." It uses undisclosed techniques to monitor and record traffic at the packet-level and also uses proprietary behavioral analysis to determine whether individual users are participating in illegal file sharing. It monitors local networks and keeps historical logs on users according to their MAC addresses. In this way, cGrid can also monitor private file sharing such as that done with invitation-only FTP servers and other normally closed "networks."

The software provides detailed usage reports to administrators which can then be used to discipline students who have had multiple infractions. However, one of the most distinct features of the software is its ability to instantly kick users off of the network for engaging in suspicious behavior.

Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors "a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others," and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.

cGrid is lauded by the RIAA and MPAA because of its ability to automatically determine usage patterns and remove offenders' Internet access on the spot, without the lag of involving bureaucracy. The University of Florida, where the cGrid was first developed under the name "Icarus," itself reports that it has been monitoring its dorm networks since 2003 with some success.

While students have been finding ways around the service (as discussed, perhaps not too wisely, on Facebook), UF's interim CIO Marc Hoit told Gainesville.com that the university has seen a dramatic reduction in downloading. Instantly kicking students off the network for suspected infractions seems to work, too: "The first and second warnings are sufficient" in scaring students straight about piracy, Hoit said.