Kiran Upadhyay

Waze, the incredibly popular mobile navigation app, has just launched an update to their mobile applications that will give users with real-time gas prices along their route. No longer will you need to stop at the first gas station you see only to find the one up the street could be cheaper, or it could cost more. Now you will be able to find out exactly how much the gas costs, so you can plan accordingly. Much like Waze’s real-time traffic, the information about the gas prices will come from other users. Just like reporting an accident or other incident that could impede fellow travelers, users can report the prices of gasoline. Dedicated Waze users say their traffic reporting is incredibly accurate. If they are using a similar system for gas, you can expect it to be a trustworthy way of finding out the price of fuel. To go along with this, Waze has partnered with some major gas stations to bring discounts to their users. These locations will show up along your route, and they ...

After more than 3 years of development,  Skype for Linux  has lost its beta tag and hit version 4.0. An update that landed on Thursday codenamed “Four Rooms for Improvement” sees the app catapult from version 2.2 to 4.0, closing the gap that had existed between the various desktop versions of the VoIP client. If you have used Skype on Windows or Mac OS X recently then the changes won’t strike you as particularly new, but Linux users have been waiting a while for such an update. The Skype team have highlighted four main areas in which major improvements have been made, and they are: A unified view for all text chats, rather than separate windows for each. A brand new view for voice calls. Improved audio quality. Improved video quality as well as a wider range of supported cameras. Version 4.0 is a big update seeing further improvements to stability, synchronisation between chats, load speeds and localisation as the Czech and Norwegian are added to the list of sup...

The Chrome Web Store has just received several updates. These are not major changes, and upon first glance you might not see the difference, but these are changes worth knowing about, especially if you’re a developer, you like offline apps, or you live in Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco or the United Arab Emirates. If you live in one of these six countries, the Chrome Web Store is now available in your country, which means you can enjoy all the extensions and apps it has to offer. This also adds a substantial audience to existing apps in the store. If you work with offline apps, or have developed one, you’ll be happy to know the Chrome Web Store now has a new section dedicated entirely to offline apps. Offline apps are apps that work regardless of your Internet connection, and the addition of this category means it’s now easier to find these apps among the huge available selection. The last change in the Chrome Store has to do with usage stats, and is aimed at de...

I’ve always been a big supporter of  Twitter  being a social network run by leaders and popularized by followers. With that formula in mind, it’s a celebrity network. You go on Twitter more often to see what your favorite actress or sports figure is up to, not what your friend down the street is doing with his time. It just usually doesn’t work that way. Thanks to Twitter, we’re put in reach of our favorite celebrities and other important people. Sure, the vast majority of Twitter is retweet spam and younger kids tweeting their every single thought out onto the internet, but it’s nice to know what  Ashton Kutcher  had for breakfast every now and then, right? Even after the induction of verified accounts, Twitter is still a spam haven when it comes to imposters. Let’s thwart those. Here are five websites that you can trust and use to point you towards your favorite celebrities on Twitter. CelebrityTweet CelebrityTweet will present celebrities on Twitter t...

Opera 12 beta is  officially out , bringing many new improvement and features to Opera fans, as well as for Opera newcomers who’d like to give the browser a first try. According to Opera Software, 250 million people already use Opera web browsers for computers, mobile phones, TVs and other connected devices and with this new iteration they are hoping to increase that number even more. Among the most notable new feature in Opera 12 beta, codenamed Wahoo, is the addition of  browser themes . Users can now choose out of a growing list of colorful themes to create their own customized look for Opera. Designers can also add their own themes to the list. Aside from looks, there are also some performance enhancements, the most prominent of those is a separate process for plugins. Plugin crashes which used to take the entire browser with them were obviously bothersome for users, so Opera decided to give these plugins their very own process. Now when a plugin crashes, the brow...

The online world is fast becoming a dangerous place: the UK government is planning a  big brother net spying  system; from July, US ISPs will need to start  policing their users ; and we’ve heard from some of you who are already burning through copyright infringment notices. A premium VPN service is a small price to pay for the ultimate in online security, allowing you to both download what you wish and avoid being snooped on. Today I’ll show you how to set up one such service,  BTGuard . As the name would suggest,  BTGuard  is a torrent-friendly  premium VPN service , but they offer two levels of service depending on if you’d just like to use it for torrents (which is a proxy only), or for everything (a full VPN service). I’m recommending this particular service because of it’s popularity among filesharers, personal experience of similar services, and the fact that they allow torrents which is something most VPNs specifically ban. The full VPN se...

If you’re reading this, I’m betting there’s a good chance you quite like computers, the Internet, or technology in general. A few weeks ago, Dave showed you  10 websites that all geeks should bookmark . This week, I’d like to introduce you to 5 technology podcasts you should all add to iTunes. Some are new, some are old favorites – all are awesome. This Week in Tech  (Audio & Video) Of all the podcasts that come and go, TWiT has remained steadfast at the top of my favourites. Hosted weekly by Leo Laporte and guests,  This Week in Tech  is strictly all about the tech news that changes the industry. With endearing regulars like Brain Brushwood, John C. Dvorak and Patrick Norton,  This Week in Tech  began in April 2005 as a response to the cancelled G4 technology TV show  The Screensavers , but TWiT has had its share of drama of its own. Other ex-Screensavers members Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht went on to create the hugely successful Diggnat...