Cricket World Cup: Australia completes hat-trick

Australia have stamped their authority on the cricket world by winning their fourth and the third successive World Cup defeating Sri Lanka in a rain-shortened match at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown (Barbados) by 53 runs.

The World Cup final, shortened to 38 overs a side due to an almost three-hour rain-delayed start, failed to live up to its expectations of being a thriller as more rain delays saw Sri Lanka needing to score 269 runs in 36 overs to win their second title thanks to the Duckworth-Lewis system.

And Australia’s win was not without its share of drama, as after the 33 overs, it seemed that Sri Lanka had conceded the match after being offered the lights by the umpires. The Australian players started celebrating their fourth World Cup triumph with the scoreboard also flashing the team from Down under as the winner but then the umpires decided to play the remaining three overs in growing darkness as the premier One-Day tournament descended into a farce.

Sri Lanka ended their innings on 215/8 in 36 overs to end as the runners up for the first time in the World Cups.

Google beats Microsoft - Amazing

Google Inc has knocked Microsoft Corp from its perch as the world's top-ranked brand, according to findings released on Monday.The rankings, compiled by market research firm Millward Brown, also put Google ahead of well-established brands like General Electric Co, No 2; Coca-Cola Co, No 4; Wal-Mart Stores, No 7; and IBM, No 9.

Some key factors seen this year in building brand recognition ranged from corporate responsibility to serving customers in emerging markets like Brazil and India, according to the study.The top-ranked brand from a non-US-based company was China Mobile, which dropped a spot but still came in at No 5.

The rankings were based on publicly available financial data along with primary research, including interviews with a million consumers worldwide, Millward Brown said.For Google, which ranked No 7 a year ago, the jump to the top underscores how quickly the Web search leader has become an everyday name. The company uses relatively little advertising, instead relying on word-of-mouth promotion.

By contrast, Microsoft's slide down to third place from first comes even as the software company has been rolling out its new Windows Vista operating system with a massive global marketing blitz.Eileen Campbell, global chief executive of Millward Brown, said the rankings showed "a blend of good business leadership, responsible financial management and powerful marketing ... can be leveraged to create and grow corporate wealth."

Some of the other big movers on the list included Apple Inc which rose 13 spots to No 16 and Starbucks Corp, which rose 13 spots to No 35. Those losing ground in the brand rankings included Intel Corp, Home Depot Inc and Dell Inc.Millward Brown is a unit of WPP Group and the findings were published in cooperation with the Financial Times.

Courtesy: expressindia.com

Amazing Scene - Niagara Frozen

This pictures was taken when niagara falls was completely frozen in the year 1911. A Very rate photos. I read of this but never saw the photos before this. Makes you wonder just HOW COLD and HOW LONG it was that cold.

WEIRD FACT OF THE DAY

In the U.S., the sport that causes the most injuries among the age group of 15-24 is basketball.

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.

Women use Net to do tasks, than to have fun

A study indicates that more women than men go online in the United States, defying the perception of the Internet as a male-dominated realm.

Approximately 97.2 million women use the Internet in the US, compared to 90.9 million men, according to research by eMarketer.

Women are inclined to use the Internet to accomplish tasks instead of as a diversion, said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the "Women Online" report, yesterday.

"Females, especially adult women, are more likely to use the Internet to get things done, rather than to have fun," the eMarketer report states.

"Many adult women, busy juggling work with their relationships and child-caring responsibilities, don't have time to surf the Web for video."

Seventy-eight per cent of male US Internet users will watch video online this year while only 66 per cent of the female users will, according to eMarketer.

Reasons given for the difference in video-viewing proclivities included men adopting new technologies faster than women and having greater access to high-capacity broadband Internet connections needed to handle data-rich video streams.

The gap between the genders is expected to narrow in coming years as broadband connections become ubiquitous and television shows popular with women are made available for viewing online, according to eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

"Early data indicate that female teens are as enthusiastic as male teens about online video," Williamson said.

Source: Expressindia.com

Google CEO, Co-Founders Get $1 Salary

The three executives who run Google Inc. each drew a salary last year of $1. But Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin more than made up for it in the large stakes they own in the online search leader, which has made them billionaires.

Besides his $1 salary, Schmidt, who was No. 116 on Forbes magazine's most recent ranking of American billionaires, received a bonus of $1,723 and "other compensation" valued at $555,742, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. The bulk of that other compensation, $532,755, was for personal security.

Google's shares closed 2006 at $460.48 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, up 11 percent for the year. The stock started at $85 when it went public in August 2004.

Schmidt, 51, owns 10,096 of Google's Class A shares and 10.7 million of its Class B shares. At the end of 2006, those securities were worth about $4.9 billion.

Brin, 33, and Page, 34, shared the No. 26 spot on the Forbes U.S. billionarie list, published in March. Each are worth $16.6 billion, according to the magazine's estimate. Brin beneficially owns 28.6 million of Google's B stock, which was worth about $13.2 billion at the end of 2006. and Page owns 29.2 million shares, worth about $13.4 billion at the end of the year.

In addition to their $1 salaries, Brin and Page each received a bonus of $1,723 — of this, $1,000 was a holiday bonus awarded to each Google employee. Page, whose title is president of products, topped Brin's $1,724 compensation package with compensation valued at $38,519. He received perks totaling $36,795, which consisted of $33,195 for transportation, logistics and security during personal travel and $3,600 for personal travel using rental cars.

Google does not maintain executive retirement programs such as executive pension plans, deferred compensation plans or other executive retirement benefits.

The Associated Press calculations of total pay include executives' salary, bonus, incentives, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year. The calculations do not include changes to the present value of pension benefits and may vary from totals that companies report.

Source: foxnews.com

Fun Facts: How Tech Companies Got Their Names

Here’s some fun facts: A list of how companies got their names. The list isn’t exclusively tech companies, but some of the more interesting stories are from web-tech leaders.

Keep in mind that this is from Wikipedia, so I wouldn't want bet the farm on the veracity of them all, but it's still some good trivia for the boring work party this evening.

Apple - for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard. Apple wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time.

eBay - Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. “Echo Bay” didn’t refer to the town in Nevada, “It just sounded cool,” Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.

Google - a deliberate misspelling of the word googol, reflecting the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available online.

Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters “HTML” — the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

Yahoo - a backronym for ‘Y’et Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The word Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver’s Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos

And my personal favorite and most fitting: Lycos - from Lycosidae, the family of wolf spiders.

Source: wired.com

An Amazing Calculator

An Amazing Calculator - Calculates/ Converts Almost anything...

Just check out this Amazing Calculator... Its called the Powertoy Calculator. Used for Graphs and Conversions of almost all kinds...

Convert length, mass, time, velocity, and temperature with the Windows XP

Also has a History Window for you to View your Calculations!!

You can download it here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/PowerCalcPowertoySetup.exe

Some Interesting Facts

Here are some interesting, but true facts, that you may or may not have known.

1. The Statue of Liberty's index finger is eight feet long

2. Rain has never been recorded in some parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile

3. A 75 year old person will have slept about 23 years.

4. A Boeing 747's wing span is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.(the Wright brother's invented the airplane)

5. There are as many chickens on earth as there are humans.

6. One type of hummingbird weighs less than a penny

7. The word "set " has the most number of definitions in the English language - 192

8. Slugs have four noses

9. Sharks can live up to 100 years

10. Mosquitos are more attracted to the color blue than any other color.

11. Kangaroos can't walk backwards

12. About 75 acres of pizza are eaten in in the U.S. everyday

13. The largest recorded snowflake was 15in wide and 8in thick. It fell in Montana in 1887

14. The tip of a bullwhip moves so fast that the sound it makes is actually a tiny sonic boom.

15. Former president Bill Clinton only sent 2 emails in his entire 8 year presidency

16. Koalas and humans are the only animals that have finger prints

17. There are 200,000,000 insects for every one human

18. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery had in it to begin with.

19. The world's largest Montessori school is in India, with 26,312 students in 2002

20. Octopus have three hearts

21. If you ate too many carrots, you'd turn orange

22. The average person spends two weeks waiting for a traffic light to change.

23. 1 in 2,000,000,000 people will live to be 116 or old

24. The body has 2-3 million sweat glands

25. Sperm whales have the biggest brains; 20 lbs

26. Tiger shark embroyos fight each other in their mother's womb. The survivor is born.

27. Most cats are left pawed

28. 250 people have fallen off the Leaning Tower of Pisa

29. A Blue whale's tongue weighs more than an elephant

30. You use 14 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. Keep Smiling!

31. Bamboo can grow up to 3 ft in 24 hours

32. An eyeball weighs about 1 ounce

33. Bone is five times stronger than steel.

Almost Faster Than Superman - Amazing

Almost Faster Than Superman: France Rail Train Sets New World Record

A French high-speed train has smashed the world speed record on rails after reaching 357.2mph. The specially-designed bullet train easily topped the old speed record of 320mph, also set by a French train in 1990.

The double-decker TGV, short for "train a grande vitesse", hurtled along a new stretch of track from Paris towards Strasbourg as crowds watched from bridges over the line.

It had been equipped with larger wheels and a beefed-up 25,000-horsepower engine.

The souped-up train recorded 357.2mph on the speedometer - about the speed of a short-distance freight propeller plane. Britain's fastest Virgin trains reach a maximum speed of 125mph.

"We saw the countryside go by a little faster than we did during the tests," train driver Eric Pieczac said. "I'm proud to have fulfilled the mission." "Everything went very well," he added. Alain Cuccaroni, in charge of the technical aspects of testing, said the feat was about "more than just breaking a record".

He said technicians, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "French excellence", would be able to collect data that would help them improve the safety and comfort of the TGV. France is keen to consolidate its reputation in the expanding market for high-speed technology as countries like China turn to bullet trains.

The TGV came within just 4mph of the absolute train speed record of 361mph, held by Japan's Maglev. Powerful magnetic fields propel the hovering Maglev train along a guideway without it ever touching the track.

Courtesy: sky.com