Starbucks have come up with two new mobile applications for the iPhone that would certainly bring people closer to the Starbucks chain, and take mobile commerce to a new level altogether.

The myStarbucks application has a slew of features that include finding the nearest Starbucks store (one could also search using amenities), or to remember yours or your friend’s favorite flavor. The Starbucks card, on the other hand, lets people pay at Starbucks outlets using a barcode that appears/generates on their mobile screens.

With myStarbucks app, one could store the recipe of his/her favorite concoction and share it with others. For those who do not know what to drink, they can use the flavor selector to pick a coffee based on the different flavors available. One could also see the nutritional information for each concoction in the list.

The other app is the Starbucks card mobile app, which is now being tested at selected outlets in Cupertino, San Jose, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale in California and in Seattle. It works basically like a regular Starbucks card, wherein one buys credit to use it against orders in Starbucks outlets. That is, when someone wants to buy coffee, they just need to turn on the app, which in turn generates a barcode, if there is sufficient credit in the customer account. The store will then scan the barcode, before processing the order. Subsequently, the $ value of the selected drink will be subtracted from purchased credit.

Gmail, the fast growing free email service provider in the world, has experienced another service outage in different parts of the world this Thursday. It has experienced several such outages, owing to different technical reasons, in the past few months.

Gmail lets Internet users write/send e-mail messages, archive documents/emails, chat online, and store contact lists.

Clarifying on the issue, Google Inc has posted a note stating that all e-mail service was working by 11 a.m. ET, and the problems have only caused email to slow down a bit, and it did not crash as some news reports had claimed. The company in its report further stated that “A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today.” “We’re sorry for the inconvenience. As usual, we’ll provide an incident report on the Google Apps Status Dashboard, where we also gave ongoing status updates as this issue progressed.”

As with the previous cases of Gmail outage, the current episode has also triggered an animated discussion/debate in the online community, especially among those who rely heavily on Gmail for their professional as well as daily personal communication. But this time around, fortunately, the outage was short lived, and before most of its users could knew about it, Gmail was able to put its defense back in place, inside an hour or so since the outage occurred. Perhaps, these days, Google Inc has become well versed in damage control management as well!

It was the worst kept secret in the world, but now that the regulatory body has come through with approval, the unofficial official standard for wireless networking can now become the official standard for wireless networking.

The 802.11n technology has been in use for the better part of a decade. While it is certainly more expensive, the six times faster speed that it offers has been seen as more than worth it on the part of many people. Because IEEE had not ratified the standard (and therefore not guaranteed that future wireless networking would use the standard), companies had referred to it by names such as 802.11n draft just to illustrate to customers that the technology was not mainstream as of yet.

IEEE has finally come through however and for that reason the 802.11n is well on its way to becoming the international standard. And when it does, people will be able to transfer across the internet at speeds of 300 Mbps, trumping the previous 802.11g wireless standard many times over.

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Apple’s snow leopard hides some interesting and new features under its hood. Not only it is faster than its predecessors, but also gives ample interfacing for third party developers to build their applications on the Mac OS X, 10.6 platform.

So, for the common man, how faster is the new OS after the upgrade? Well, to get a measure of the new upgrade, a 9 GB email application that used to take around 15 seconds earlier will open now in Snow Leopard in less than three seconds. The new upgrade will also improve start up and shutdown times, alongside saving a whole bunch of disk space, to the tune of 7 GB, post installation. But there is a catch; in the new upgrade, Apple changed the way it calculates the space on hard disk (i.e. from base 2 to base 10), a move that will inflate the true hard-disk-space-saved figure.

The new upgrade comes with a whole set of bells and whistles. Apart from it being a 64-bit OS, Apple has also introduced a new technology called OpenCL that lets applications harness the number-crunching power of modern graphics cards. The application Grand Central Dispatch lets users create applications that could exploit the computational powers of current generation processors. The Finder, Mac’s IE, is user friendly and robust. Further, accessibility to visually impaired uses has improved, so are some other features in already existing applications. Also, since Apple had licensed Microsoft’s Exchange server technology, Mac users can now seamlessly integrate Mail, iCal and Address Book, the built in organizational tools on the Mac, with Microsoft mail system.

On the downside, there are some glitches reported in Parallels, the application that lets Mac users run Windows, plus few compatibility issues with other softwares. Otherwise, the snow leopard gives the much needed boost to Apple Mac OS against Windows.