Well, it may not be a big deal. But it's a record of its kind. According to Firefox, it set a Guinness record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. There were 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 in 24 hours. That's amazing. The browser deserves its moment of glory.

It is one of the most stable internet browsers today. I don't remember if it ever crashed since I started using it. Whereas, Internet Explorer still does the ugly thing once in a while. And the best part about using Firefox is the Tabs that open up in a single window. Way to go Firefox..

Want to have a quick look at the traffic pattern of your favorite websites. Try Google Trends for Websites.



You can see the traffic distribution across various countries. If you are logged into your Google Account, you can also see the count of daily unique visitors to the site. Otherwise, the traffic graph will display without the count.

You can also do a quick comparison of multiple websites. You can enter upto 5 sites at a time.



Google Trends for Websites displays information only for those sites that have significant traffic.

Microsoft is giving a new look to its Live Search homepage Live.com. The new design on the homepage will have background images that will keep changing frequently. These images will have something called "hotspots". These hotspots are interactive areas that highlight parts of the image and help in exploring search results related to the highlighted part of the image.


When a user arrives on the homepage, the hotspots will twinke and then fade into the image. These will appear again when a mouse is placed on them, showing up details about the image and a link to a related search result.

As of now, the homepage will be released in the US only. Users in other countries will probably have to wait for a while before they get to try the new homepage of live search.

There is good news for online merchants. Amazon.com has launched its payment processing services that will compete with eBay's Paypal and Google's 'Google Checkout' services.

Amazon services are called "Checkout By Amazon" and "Amazon Simple Pay".



Checkout By Amazon is a "complete checkout solution" which is similar to what Amazon.com provides at its own online store. It includes features such as Amazon's 1-Click functionality, tools for managing shipping charges, sales tax, promotions, and post-sales activities such as refunds, cancellations and charge-backs.

Amazon Simple Pay is simple version of 'Checkout by Amazon' with limited features.
If you don't need Amazon's end-to-end checkout pipeline and order management capabilities, but still want to enable your customers to use their payment information already on file at Amazon.com, use Amazon Simple Pay.

Both products have the same fee structure, which is pretty much standard. For transactions of $10 and up, merchants would pay 2.9% of the amount plus a 30-cent fee. For transactions lower than $10, the fee is 5% of the amount plus 5 cents.

Perhaps Amazon could have kept more competitive fees. But with a base of 81 million buyer accounts, it is expected to give Paypal (62 million accounts) and Google Checkout (no figures available on the number of accounts) a run for their money.

If you can spare $200,000, you can book flight to space. Virgin Atlantic's boss Richard Branson has unveiled this project saying that the maiden space voyage would take place in 18 months.

The spacecraft has the capacity to carry two crew and six passengers on sub-orbital flights. Richard has named it Eve.

More than 250 people have already paid $200,000 to reserve their place for a trip to space on this spacecraft.

Cuil.com, the new search engine , launched by ex-Google guys was slated to out-do Google. Apparently, it misjudged its strength (or perhaps that of Google). The site barely managed to stay live on its first day of launch. And to add to its agony, users indicated that they got inaccurate results for their search query.

It looks like Cuil has a long way to go before it comes anywhere near Google. But, let's not write off the efforts of its founders. After all, Google has been around for a decade now.