Kiran Upadhyay

Did you know that, on average, you only spend 4 1/2 minutes on Google every day? That's how good it is: you plug in your search and, chances are, 11 seconds later you walk away with the result you need. Throw Pac-Man into the mix however and the average goes up to over 5 minutes! Thanks to Google's celebration of Pac-Man's 30th anniversary, and  RescueTime's juicy analytical power ,  we spent 36 seconds extra on Google on Friday. That doesn't sound like a large number until you multiply it by Google's average number of daily visitors...  500 million.  Apparently that comes to a global total of  4,819,352 hours  spent playing Pac-Man on just Sunday May 23. It's even scarier when you realise that the Pac-Man game was actually online for  two days.  The total tally of scuppered man-hours might be closer to 10 million... or 250 million dollars... When I  originally covered RescueTime  I had no idea it would be used to produce such fantastic statistics! Its

This post will be updated: more details to follow (scroll down) -- http://www.google.com/tv -- coming Fall 2010! We currently spend more time watching TV than we have ever done throughout history. Advertisers spend $70 billion dollars a year on TV advertising. There are over 4 billion TV viewers around the world -- and only 1 billion PC users! TV just works. It gives you access to really cool stuff. It's pervasive -- you don't have to think about how it works. It has hardly evolved; it has basically been the same service. Today we are torn between PC and TV. Split loyalty -- they are both awesome. Now, people have tried to bring the Web to the television before, but it's always been a closed system with limited numbers of apps and a cut-down cross-section of the actual Web. The answer: Google TV -- the best of TV and the best of the Web. A new platform that will change the future of television. The key is a new method of navigation: with Google TV you

Ubuntu 10.04 was released last month, and comes with some breath taking design enhancements, and has some fabulous art work integrated into it. We’ve put together a collection of wallpapers to make it more customized. We thought of pulling out some of the best Ubuntu wallpapers in this post so that you have a good mix to choose from when you are slightly bored of the default Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) wallpaper. The following is a collection of top 21 Ubuntu wallpapers. To download the wallpaper just click on the hyperlink above the image. Ubuntu Wallpapers EgFox Lucid Lynx Blue 2010 by ~Eg-Art EgFox Lucid Lynx K HD 2010 by ~Eg-Art Lucid Lynx 10 04 by ~Momez Ubokeh Wallpaper Pack by ~giantspeck lucid fog brown by ~darkburt EgFox Lucid Lynx HD 2010 by ~Eg-Art LTS 2010 by ~alkore31 Ubuntu Bokeh by ~ttk1opc Ubuntu Aurora by *monkeymagico Ubuntu by ~gorkisview Ubuntu Glow by ~BigAction Destroy Ubuntu by ~lukeroberts Ubuntu Triskell by ~deviantdark Ubuntu 2.0 by ~monsteer Ubuntu leaves by ~

Chrome OS — Google’s lightning quick operating system that’s based entirely on the Chrome browser — is due out the second half of this year (check out our  report earlier this evening on its progress).  We’ve seen some  demos  of it in action, and even  tried out  an early version ourselves, but there are still plenty of question marks as far as how people will actually  use  this thing. After all, while the browser will be able to accomplish most tasks, users are going to want some degree of multitasking, and there’s also the question of how users will be navigating Chrome OS’s basic file structure. Luckily,  Chromium  — the open source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS — has been posting some conceptual screenshots of what the OS may look like. The Chromium site is full of reminders that the UI is under development and that “designs are subject to change”, but I suspect that we’ll see many of these ideas incorporated into the final builds of Chrome OS. Some of these screenshots

Slowly but surely, Google has been beefing up Chrome sync abilities. Bookmarks, preferences, themes, typed URLs, and autofill settings can all march in unison across your Chrome installs on all your computers. There are still two notable absences: extensions and passwords. Make that one: password sync has just landed in the Chromium source code. Like other sync additions, it'll be a short trip from Chromium to the Chrome Dev Channel -- beta and stable users will have a longer wait. It's also currently hidden behind the -- enable-sync-passwords switch . This is obviously a very useful addition, but I think it's one which underscores the need for Google to add a master password option to Chrome. If I'm going to take the jump and sync all my passwords to their cloud, I'd like to be able to lock the front door to my browser. At least with LastPass I'm able to do that -- if someone stole my laptop, they'd still need the master password for

Typography on the web is a major source of difficulty for designers today. There are so few "web-safe" fonts, and there's no standard way to bring new ones into the equation. Well, Google has taken a big step toward addressing that problem, by introducing an open source font library , and an API that makes it easy to use the new fonts on your own webpage. That means that along with Georgia, Arial and the rest, you're about to start seeing a lot more Droid Serif, Molengo, and Tangerine on the web. Along with the Google Font Directory and Google Font API , there's also a partnership with Typekit to create something called the WebFont Loader . The WebFont Loader is a JavaScript library that works with Google's API, but gives you more control over font loading, and even allows you to pull in fonts from other web-font sources.

Jason Clarke did it first , and now I feel the time has come for me to say goodbye to Facebook . For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they're broadcasting their status to "friends of friends". Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy settings ? There's a huge difference between reading bad things about a company, and witnessing it yourself in the UI you use every day. And that's where it crosses the line for me. I mean, whenever a company does well (and Facebook is doing very well), there are detractors crying out about how evil it all is. Usually, this is just a knee-jerk response to a company growing large. I think that on some basic level, some people just don't like large, successful anything . But today's Facebook actually has a split personality; on the one hand, it puts on a