Microsoft Chairman BillGates announced MSN Virtual Earth, Microsoft's Satellite/Geo Mapping & Local Search service, on 3D conference in California. It lets the user to zoom in on a local area and get information about the restaurants, cafes, hotels, dry cleaners, coffee shops & so on. The first release of it will be available in the summer, sometime between June & September.

Google, Yahoo & other search engine giants have this Local Search service running already.


Features include :

· Imagery -- satellite maps and a unique 45-degree-angle view of buildings and neighborhoods, Eagle Eye view.

· Hybrid Maps -- street maps overlaid over satellite maps

· Full-bleed Map Views – a nearly full screen map that users interact with

"High-fidelity images captured by a fleet of small planes will be added to the service in the fall", said Stephen Lawler, General Manager Microsoft's MapPoint business.

The aerial images are provided by Pictometry, the worldwide leader in Digital Aerial Photography.

MSN coming late but with Latest.

For more than a month im using Microsoft Money 2005. Its pretty good. Its basic features include  Spending By Category, Payee, then Monthly Income, Expense etc., in Reports and to say more, its having options for Investment Planning, Credit Card(even Bonus Point option is there), Loans, etc., Its having all the day-to-day activity categories. Reports in the form of Graphs are also possible(supports Bar & Pie Graphs). Actually its a web based application. And accessing the data stored in a flat file. And another advantage is  many of the indian banks like ICICI, CITI Bank etc., supports Money File Format, means we can download the account statement in Money File Format. Thats very useful, since you can't type all the bank transactions.

As I said before, it supports heavily for Stocks, Shares, Mutual Funds etc., It has a option of getting the latest Share/Stock value. But unfortunately Indian Stock Markets are not there in the list. Hopefully we can expect soon.  So as of now manually we can update it.

Even graphs for the stocks are also displayed with many tailored set of attributes. If you are using any other Personel Financial Package, you can sure try this. A 90 day free-trial is available for download.

Namakkal Leads like before in HSC results

This time also in the TamilNadu State Higher Secondary Exam results, Namakkal student leads. G Sathya of  KURINJI Higher Secondary School, Namakkal leads 5,72,249 students. She got 1185 for 1200 (98.75 %) - 200 out of 200 in Maths, Physics, Chemistry & Biology. And also 196 in tamil which is also the first mark in the state. 

This Kurunji School is owned by few of ex-school teachers. Mr. Gunasekaran, a key person in the school is a Maths teacher. He took me 11th & 12th Maths, while he was working in Kandasami Kandar Matriculation Higher Secondary School (we call it as Kandar school in short)  in Namakkal.

For nearly a decade, Namakkal district is famous for schools(mainly for HSC). SRV in Rasipuram, Vidhya Vikas in Tiruchengode and Kurunji too. And there are more schools. 

From :   [Dinamalar] [DinaThanthi] [The Hindu]

Its high time for Firefox..... Tons and tons of things are getting towards it.

Yahoo launches its toolbar available for Firefox. Its a beta release.

Features include, Bookmarks, Search this Site, Translate this page, Yahoo mail alerts etc.,   Sounds better in Windows, but I found it difficult to use it in FC3, Firefox1.0.3

I was alloted 201 shares. Nearly 35 saksoft employees applied it seems, and only myself &  Mr. Sankaran from the Admin department got it. So its a mere luck. It is due to oversubsription. Nearly, 37 times it was oversubscribed in retail investments sector.

201 shares @ a price of Rs. 30/- so totally Rs. 6030/- Now im waiting for the shares to listed on the NSE. Will be there  in NSE from 10th or 11th of this month. I hope it will exceed Rs. 50 (so that i will have more gain ;) )

For information on allotment  : http://www.saksoft.com/sak_feb05/saksoft_allotment.pdf