URL shorteners are great for services like Twitter, where characters are counted in posts, or for when a fully-sized link would look rather out of place. There tons of alternatives to choose from, but at the moment, there are only a few very popular ones (such as bit.ly). Google's new offering is only available through its own products, according to the blog post on the subject, but it comes with a few benefits, listed below.

• Stability: Google's scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we've worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We'll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

The proper link for the site, goo.gl, has nothing much to offer (as the service is limited to a couple products), but you can test out the Google URL Shortener (the official name) by using the Google Toolbar or FeedBurner.

A cool program! But sadly, many nice features are only found in the paid version.

Official website: BumpTop™

According to Liveside, Microsoft is considering the following names for it's new anti-malware program: Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft Antivirus Plus, Microsoft Personal Security, and Microsoft Security Fundamentals.

"Morro", has been in limited alpha testing, will be available for free to all licensed Windows users, and while there is no confirmed release date yet.

[Via Liveside]

I've used this tool in 2004-05 for secondary school for some of my projects and internet speeds at that time wern't as fast as it is now so size matters. However, sometimes it screws up your 97-2003 files (esp powerpoint) which still happens today.

File optimisation can reduce the size of image-heavy files far more effectively than compression methods, such as ZIP compression. Optimising a large PowerPoint presentation will often reduce its file size by 90% or more (zipping the same presentation will result in a compression rate of just 10-15%). And, as optimised files remain in their original format, there's no need to unzip an optimised file before using it.

It is flawless with 2007 formats though. Remember the excellence awards not too long ago? The powerpoint file generated by keynote was a whopping 200MB. Conversion to 2007 format with compression end up with a 40MB file. After optimising the 2007 file, it ended up being 7MB! That was some great optimisation, note: no visible quality degration was seen. A free trial is available on the site.

NXPowerLite

The other utilities included are: advanced process monitor, memory optimiser (the only useless app), uninstall manager, advanced system info, styler (allows you to change most system icons and visual styles without modifying your system)& system control.

Personally, i think this is a great app that had reduced my Vista/XP startup (welcome/login screen to desktop) time from a few mins to a few secs. Version 2009 adds more tweaks to the collection.

A 30-day trial is available on the product homepage

There are also some youtube videos to illustrate their service. Pretty interesting and funny.

This one gives you an insight on how much you can save with Hoiio. In chinese though.

It seems like a good service. It's pre-paid; whereby you have to pay using ibanking, visa/mastercard or paypal first before you can use your talk credits. Calls are charged at 3.8c a min, as compared to 16c a min from telcos.

There are also GPRS data charges per call; about 2-3kb, which amounts to about 1c - 2c per call. (Based on Singtel charges of 0.53c per kb of data)

The only drawback for me is that the other party will receive an incoming call from Hoiio's number. Hence it would be hard for him to keep track on who the caller was. Also, people may not pick up the call from an unknown number; and will call Hoiio's number back in the case of a missed call.

Hence maybe this service is good, only if the other party is aware that you are using Hoiio to call.

Media-Convert is a free online service that will convert audio, video, and text files for you, from and to virtually any kind of format.

All you have to do is upload the file  or provide the file URL to the service and ask it to convert for you. Usually the conversion is fast and you can request for extended file hosting. Another great feature is the ability to take website screenshots.

Visit Media-Convert