Tech Week in Review 8-27-2010

Kodak Releases Camera with One-Touch Sharing to Social Media Sites

The new Kodak EasyShare M590 not only is it world’s thinnest 5X optical zoom digital camera, but it also allows you to easily upload your photos to your favorite social media websites. All you have to do is hook up your camera to your computer, press the Share button, and the software uploads your photos to the sites you’ve specified. You can tag photos directly on the camera. The software connects with the Kodak Gallery, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Orkut. The M590 comes in purple, red, blue, or silver and you can grab one for $199.95. via TNW

Firefox 4 Beta with Sync and Panorama

Firefox 4 Beta is packing a couple of interesting feature enhancements. The Sync feature makes it simple to take your Firefox experience with you. It makes your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible across multiple computers and mobile devices.

Panorama is a cool way for managing and prioritizing all those tabs you keep open. As hard as we might try, many of us just can’t figure out how get rid of all those browser tabs. Others are just fine with 20 or so tabs open at a time. No matter which side of the fence you’re on, Panorama can help you manage your tabs and get things done. Check out the video for more.

via The Mozilla Blog

Orkut Comes Out of Hiding Encouraging Different Personas

Remember Orkut? No? It’s Google’s social networking site that few Americans use. A few days ago, Google posted about one of the problems with the way most social networking sites work. Most sites treat all of your friends the same and show them all the same you. This isn’t how it works in the real world. You probably act differently depending on which group you’re around. As far as social networking goes, this is one of the reasons many people just lock everything down, hiding from their boss, their parents, and potential employers.

Until now, social networks treated people from different groups like they were all the same: they were all “friends”. So we asked ourselves: does it need to work this way on the Internet? Can we reproduce our groups of friends from real life on the Internet? The answer is “yes!” Starting today, we will change the core function of Orkut so we can share and interact with different groups of friends on the Internet just like we do in real life.

While sites like Facebook do offer lists, their just not that easy to manage. Orkut can automatically create your groups for you based on your interactions. Because of this update, many have started to speculate that Orkut itself is this mythical Facebook killer called Google Me. More info and updates at the Orkut blog.

Users Make 1 Million Voice Calls via Gmail on First Day

Google Tweeted on Thursday that 1,000,000 calls had been placed from Gmail in just 24hrs. Pretty impressive given the service is only available to a fraction of the population. What’s more interesting is how you can end up benefiting from the service unintentionally. Stephen Shankland of CNET recounts how, after setting up the service by installing the plugin, a call came in to his mobile and rang his computer as well. This let him conduct an interview using his computer headphones rather than trying to squeeze his mobile phone between his shoulder and ear for an hour. In addition, he was able to see and return a missed call from the computer, which I have done as well. These examples assume you’ve hooked up a Google Voice account, but you can’t deny the convenience of making free calls from your computer with minimum setup.

Foursquare Mayor Alerts

Ever wonder how close you are to becoming the Foursquare mayor of your favorite spots? If you get within 10 checkins of the current mayor, you’ll be able to see a countdown to when you will oust them. They’ve also made changes so that Managers and Employees for each venue can’t become the mayor. This should open things up for other users and will probably get many users motivated to make sure they get that daily checkin. via RWW