Mobifun’s Weblog

According to BusinessWeek, an Israeli startup, aptly named Deep Breeze, has developed a high-tech replacement for the 200-year-old stethoscope. This noninvasive device can draw in seconds an image of your lungs by listening to its vibrations. The Vibration Response Imaging (VRI) system could already be used in Israel, in Europe and in South Korea. Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved its introduction in the U.S. But don’t expect to see one of these systems used by your local physician anytime soon. This VRI system will carry a price tag of over $40K.

With more of our lives being lived online, it’s nice to centralize our media as much as possible. New aggregated social networks are springing up, but did you know you can do much of this already from your blog? These 30+ WordPress tools will help you display and run more of your digital life from WordPress itself.

This post is part of the WordPress Tips series posted by Mashable

Google announced a new feature today for their Google News web site that allows people involved in news stories to post dissenting (or concurring) view points next to published news items

Google News is asking people who are in news stories to email them comments about the story, which will be associated with those articles. From the Google News Blog post:

The way this whole crazy thing works is that any person mentioned in a story picked up by Google News can email their comment to news-comments@google.com. The wannabe commenter must use their real name and be able to verify they are, in fact, the person represented in the story (this should be SO fun for Google to figure out!). Once approved, the comment with be attached to the story on an individual story page (!). It’s probably also worth noting that there’s no link involved. There’s not even a nofollowed link, the link just isn’t present at all. If Google thinks this is going to deter comment spam, it’s not. Anybody even remotely mentioned in the story is going to start leaving “valuable” comments just to get themselves a little more search engine love for vanity searches. This is bad, bad, bad.

 This help page explains the process more. You email Google telling them your comment, the story you’re commenting on, your contact info and how they can verify your address.

Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) - upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages.

Google has its studio of tools, but Zoho is close on Google’s tail. I learned about Zoho from Kathy Schrock’s presentation at NECC 2007, but she only mentioned the Zoho database. Since then Zoho has added a number of applications

 Zoho isn’t looking to create a community around documents like Scribd does. All documents are private and you must know the URL to view them. They are not listed in any directory or searcheable. So it is useful primarily to quickly upload email attachments and other documents you want to share with a few people but not the whole world. Viewers can also quickly download the document in its original format.

Zoho Writer - Online Word Processor
Zoho Sheet - Online Spreadsheet
Zoho Show - Online Presentation tool
Zoho Notebook - Create, Aggregate and Collaborate with multiple types of content online.
Zoho Planner - Online todo list
Zoho CRM - Customer Relationship Management. This looks like a help desk for small businesses. The first 3 lines are free and then it is $12/month for each line after that.
Zoho Creator - Online database (I embedded my first database file below)
Zoho Wiki - Online Wiki
Zoho Chat - You guessed it - a way to type at each other online.
Zoho Mail - Collaboration groupware. Sounded interesting but it is a beta and I believe that it is all written in the Indian language (Hindi? Tamil?) I look forward to this being developed.
Zoho Meeting - Hold an online meeting. Looked like you can share slideshows, communicate through VOIP, even take control of another person’s computer for troubleshooting.
Zoho Polls - Create surveys and polls.

These are all free. I haven’t had a chance to look at all of them, but it looks promising.

I am embedding a form for completing my database for Web 2.0 Applications below. I copied the HTML code from the Zoho Creator database page and pasted it into the HTML for this page. I have even set it so that I will receive an email notification whenever someone adds a record.