Though Vista is much more stable than the Windows XP Pro, many people decided to ditch it because it’s a resource hog like no other. But in the meantime, MSFT has been working hard on Windows 7 which is now in Beta mode. Renai LeMay of ZDnet Australia got a look at the new OS and the first impressions are pretty good.

Windows 7 is built on Vista’s strengths and managed to get the flaws taken care of, but it’s still far from being perfect. Faster, running simultaneous applications better than its predecessors, with photo-realistic device icons and an accent on security (they advise for a 3rd party antivirus like AVG or Kaspersky), it has much more of that nebulous “Windows XP feel” than Vista ever did.

It sure looks like Microsoft spent a great deal of time to please customers and if the final version is going to be like the first impressions, Windows 7 is going to be the next XP when it comes to sales and customer satisfaction.

I’ve seen a lot of musical instruments running on the iPhone, but this is the first one I’ve come across that involves the user to use their mouth to generate sounds from the 3g iphone. Smule’s Ocarina turns your iPhone into a fully-functional musical wind instrument, and whats really exciting about Ocarina is that none of the sounds are pre-generated, rather they’re built in real-time based, in other words the sounds are generated through your exact gestures and movements.

Also, like most Smule products, Ocarina is a social application. Tap on the globe icon and you will see and hear other Ocarina players throughout the world.

Just place your fingers over four virtual “holes” on the multi-touch screen, and blow into your iPhone’s microphone.

Ocarina is already a massive success, especially in Japan and the US. This app is available for purchase at the itunes app store for the low price of 99 cents (US Dollar cents).

*NOTE: (From Smule)
Although ocarina is a very simple instrument to learn, don’t expect to be an ocarina virtuoso after five minutes. Start slow, Take your time learning the instrument, and have fun!

This week Bandwidth Blog office photo features takes you inside the office of ‘drag n drop’ site builder Synthasite. I traveled to Silicon Valley a few weeks ago and managed to meet up with Vinny Lingham, the CEO of Synthasite. Their office is based in the heart of San Francisco and Vinny and his team is living the US startup dream. Synthasite also has a development office based in Cape Town, Vinny’s home town*. We previously covered Synthasite here and here.

Vinny Lingham and Graeme Cumming from MNET new media (he accompanied me on the trip)

*Vinny grew up in the Eastern Cape

More office photos here

Using the Afrigator blogging platform, Adgator – Africa’s first blog ad network, plans on becoming market leader for blog advertising throughout the continent. Launched in November 2008 as a solution for bloggers to make money from blogging, Adgator is first being rolled out in South Africa, while in 2009 every African blogger should have access to it.

Running on some 150 top African blogs, Adgator just announced that they managed to secure their first contract with an advertiser – The Times Online. Embracing the digital world, The Times has seen the potential, hence choosing to be the first to reach more than 1.7 million unique users, in November 2008.

With such a great name on the advertisers list, we’re pretty sure more high quality companies will embrace the digital world to present their products and for Africa, Adgator seems to be the best solution.

First thing I noticed when opening up my Google Reader today was that it has a different color an that I have the option to hide those two menus up in the right to get more space for the folders. Recently we’ve seen Gmail changing the classic looks and offering a bunch of themes, so I suppose it was time for Google Reader to change clothes, too.

The biggest change however, has to do with feed bundles which are small sets of feeds related to a topic that you can subscribe to all at once. No need to be done manually anymore, because Google managed to algorithmically generate them.

What changed? The “refresh” and the “show all update” buttons are in the subscriptions options menu, while the “Add subscription” button has moved to the top of the navigation panel.

With less rounded corners and emphasizing on shared content, the new Google Reader seems to be a bit faster and gives everything a bit more breathing room. Looks more web 2.0, right?

A recent talk with Twitter’s co-founder and CEO Evan Williams has given everyone plenty of inputs into the direction in which they’re heading but also left us with an equal number of lingering doubts.

Evan Williams claims that Twitter is indeed looking ahead towards making rapid strides forward when it comes to cashing in on its name, but is still reluctant to give us the method the company would take up.

Williams talks about adding new features like ‘grouping’ which will help businesses to specifically carry around and pass on pieces of news and write-ups that interest them the best.

The company is also looking at large consumer packaged good companies so that Twitter can expand and generate revenue that is ‘product-based’ and not just limited to advertising.

Apparently they’re interested in generating revenue not only from advertising and said that “We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”

Williams talks about keeping Twitter small and making it big, but that is still a long path ahead as neither Google nor Facebook were the first in their chosen domain in the virtual world and yet have a lion’s share of their respective markets today.

Similarly, starting first does not guarantee success, either. We’re waiting to see what Twitter will come up with.

Cnet

Facebook has still not entirely forgotten the horror of the experiment gone wrong in case of Beacon last year and the world’s largest social networking site is working twice as harder and is a lot more careful as it introduces Facebook Connect to both users and the internet community.

The new feature enables you to browse through different sites using Facebook identity allowing you to move across the net with complete freedom. This most importantly means that you will not have to re-enter all your identification details on sites that have integrated themselves with the Connect feature.

And sites like Discovery Channel, The San Francisco Chronicle, Digg, Geni and Hulu are ready for it.

This not only makes browsing more convenient and will actually increase traffic to those websites that implemented it, as Facebook users will feel at home progressively in these sites which they might otherwise have not taken time to visit. The feature not just offers a way to generate revenue for both parties in the future, but could create a larger community in the virtual world.

For now though Facebook is threading early waters with plenty of care.

MANGO-OMC is a Cape Town based public relations and communications consultancy behind some of the leading social media and traditional PR campaigns we have witnessed in our local market this year. Bandwidth blog continues our series of office photos and take you inside the clean white offices of MANGO-OMC.