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- Google Apps Marketplace announced.

- Details: $100 flat fee, no matter the amount of apps you launch. 20% revenue share. This is an important number, as most app stores charge 30% revenue share, especially Apple’s iPhone app store.

- Over 50 partners for Google Apps, including Aviary, Expensify, Intuit, and others.

- Now Google is talking about the technical details of how to get your app added into the Google Apps interface.

- Google’s diving into secure data access via OAuth. Google’s clearly thought about how to make sure that information that apps need is received from users, but that apps don’t take more information than they need.

- Google has brought up a developer, Ryan, to demo some of the code to integrate his app with Google Apps Marketplace. It’s a “Hello World” type of app.

- If you go to http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/, you’ll see the store’s future splash page.

Apple finally announced the exact date. It’s Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models, while models with both Wi-Fi and 3G will be available in late April.

As far as other countries go, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering your iPad, you can do it from March 12 onwards; U.S. customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

Pricing and availability are the same as announced: Wi-Fi models will be available for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB.

It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets. While Gigatweet’s counter is down due to over-traffic., you can tell by the actual tweet ID numbers that we have crossed the magical threshold.

The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets in November 2008 and 5 billion tweets just four months ago.

So who was the lucky person that sent out tweet 10 billionth tweet? We’re checking now and will let you know ASAP.

Update: Tweet #10 billion apparently belongs to a protected user, as API calls won’t allow us to see that specific status update. Via @timdorr, here is Tweet #9,999,999,999 and tweet #10,000,000,001.

Admit it: seeing Microsoft release an application for Google’s operating system seems a little weird, doesn’t it? Still, it’s true; Microsoft has launched its first Android app, called Tag.

It’s an app that lets you link physical objects with content on the Internet. You point your smartphone’s camera at a specially designed barcode, and your smartphone opens a link to any sort of online content: video, image, or text.

At launch, Microsoft supported most mobile operating systems – Symbian, iPhone OS, BlackBerry – with Android also being on the list, but clicking on that link actually revealed a “coming soon” message. Now, Android users can try out the app too, but its significance lies in the fact that Microsoft has created an application for Google’s Android. It’s not that big of a deal, since the same app exists for the iPhone OS, another competitor to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems. Still, in the epic battle of Microsoft vs. Google, this is another small victory for the online giant from Mountain View.

Google has just released Gesture Search, a new and experimental feature for phones running the Google Android 2.0 software or above.

Gesture Search is pretty straightforward: you open it up and then draw letters. Draw a M and you’ll get contacts, bookmarks, and apps that start with M. Draw an o and you’ll get results starting with “Mo,” and so on until you find what you’re looking for. Queries can also be erased by drawing a line left to right, while drawing right to left removes the last letter in the current sequence.

In its announcement, Google highlighted how Gesture Search could be a good option for those who may not be able to use voice search and may find that typing to find queries takes too long. While we don’t expect Google to replace Android typing with gestures, it is a nice Google Labs experiment that we’re sure a lot of people will enjoy using.

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, European director of Google’s online sales John Herlihy said that Google is mostly oriented towards mobile devices, claiming they’ll become more important than desktop PCs.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” he said.

True, with Android and Nexus One Google has shown a commitment to extend its dominance from the online world to the mobile world. But will desktop PCs really become irrelevant? Depends on how you look at it. Google isn’t really interested in how we edit our photos; it’s interested in where we store them, and increasingly, we do that at a place is a part of their domain – the cloud.

And if your data moves to the cloud, and most of your daily online activities are done on devices such as the Nexus One and the iPad, where simple, widget-style applications cater to your precise needs, then yes, desktop PCs as we know them now will become a lot less important.

Source – TechCrunch

Windows: Windows 7 install discs are edition-specific—if you’ve got a valid license key, you still need the right disc for installation. The ei.cfg Removal Utility, however, lets you create a new, universal installation ISO for Windows 7.

Although your Windows installation disc may say “Home Premium Edition,” it still contains the other versions (such as Pro or Ultimate) on the disc—it just has a very small file called ei.cfg that tells the disc what version to install. The ei.cfg Removal Utility creates a new ISO of your install disc that ignores this file, thus letting you choose what edition you want when you start the installer.

While this tool is especially useful for computer technicians who have to install Windows a lot, it’s also nice to have for those of us that tend to lose discs often—especially in this day and age of emailed product keys. Now, if you need to reinstall Windows but can’t find your disc, you can just borrow a friend’s—even if it’s an edition that’s different than yours. You just need let the installer know which edition matches your product key (Note: Your disc still needs to be the same kernel as your key (i.e. 32 or 64-bit).

The ei.cfg Removal Utility is a free download, Windows only, and requires a Windows 7 install disc to use. Thanks, Cody Ryan Harrod!

These are the 10 Worst Captchas

From best to worst:

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Last night, Twitter was hijacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army”; while there’ve been no confirmed password leaks or anything of the sort, now seems to us like a great time to change up your passwords. Here’s why:

The Twitter blog reported that the problem was due to compromised DNS records, meaning that the hackers were able to redirect user requests for Twitter.com to their own server—which served up the page in the screenshot above. Although the redirect doesn’t appear to have done anything malicious beyond that—and a DNS hijack doesn’t mean the hackers would have access to Twitter’s database—the hackers could just as easily have set up a fake login page and harvested plenty of passwords phishing-style if they had wanted to. Which is why—even though this DNS hijack appears to have been relatively benign—we think now’s a very good time to do a little password refreshing (which you should already do on occasion, anyway).