Just last week, the keyword 'Cibai' has been a trending topic on Twitter for a few hours during Americans' sleep period of the day. Some Americans or Europeans were wondering what's so special about this word. Well, for those who don't know the real meaning of the word 'Cibai', it's actually means vagina in Hokkien (a Chinese dialect) and also a popular vulgarity used by Singaporeans and Malaysians to vent one's displeasure towards others. But the humor comes in when the folks at Microsoft use it as a research project title! Sounds funny and odd right?

EA Mobile™, a division of Electronic Arts Inc, today announced six new titles available on the Apple App Store including: Star Trek®, AMERICAN IDOL™, TRIVIAL PURSUIT, Lemonade Tycoon™, Pandemonium™! and Anytime Pool. Delivering genre diverse titles to its already robust offering on the App Store, EA Mobile continues to offer both world-class licensed properties as well as original IP titles for players to enjoy on iPhone™ and iPod® touch. “EA Mobile games have consistently been top performers in the App Store’s Top Paid rankings and their revenue performance has been even more impressive,” said Adam Sussman, Vice President of Worldwide Publishing for EA Mobile. “We are excited to expand our offerings to include these six new games, joining our all-time top-selling apps, including MONOPOLY Here & Now: World Edition, Tetris and the recently released Need for Speed™ Undercover and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR.”

All thanks to Twitter, FriendFeed, OneRiot and other similar platforms, real-time web has been a popular concept since 2006. It is not only a main focus of the Internet, but also a trend too. So what does a real-time web looks like? Check it out below... Objectives Present: Real-time Web has provided Internet users an easy way to get a specific thing at once, and this can be anything, be it 'What are you doing?', 'What's in your mind', 'What's the answer of...?', 'How do you think about...?', etc. Besides that, real-time web also offers a quick way for communications, and satisfies curiosity of people about following others. Future: Real-time web will be filled with instant data; it can provide a trend of 'What has happened just now?', 'Does the world change?', 'What's the latest...?'. Also, Real-time Web can be used to let people get what they want at once, such as answers, solutions and ideas.

Nowadays, people frequently use online maps to locate their favorite coffee houses in the vicinity, rather than just wasting time to roam around their neighborhoods to find one. Besides searching for coffee houses, a German developer has came up with a brilliant idea and created a website called Courts of the World (COTW). COTW is a a directory of streetball courts whereby it enables users to find basketball courts worldwide and connect with others by posting their courts along with related videos and photos.

Microsoft Corp. today launched Microsoft Mediaroom with virtualization, making Mediaroom the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform to offer virtualization support. Mediaroom with virtualization can deliver up to a sixfold reduction in the number of physical servers required to support a full-featured IPTV service, significantly reducing hardware and management costs and speeding time to market for Mediaroom customers by up to three weeks. Mediaroom with virtualization is designed to provide a cost-effective yet full-featured IPTV platform for smaller operators, for operators launching new services as they scale their subscriber base, and for operators who want to extend an existing service into new markets to serve lower-density communities.

Living in a technologically-advanced world, many people nowadays flock to dating sites rather than the traditionally way of finding romance using match-making companies. Some even head to popular social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace to look for their perfect match online. This has been further encouraged by the launch of IamFreeTonight.com, a Facebook application that allows users to potentially meet people online who they are interested in dating. With the exponential growth of Twitter, many developers are racking their brains to create Twitter applications to attract more users to use them. Most of the applications are pretty beneficial whereas some of them are just odd and useless.

The Vacationeers, a four person comedic film group based in Los Angeles, have struck viral and comedy gold with Google. They have been hired by the Internet giant to write and produce a series of short videos, the first of which launches today at youtube.com/thevacationeers. The Vacationeers, comprised of Todd Berger, Blaise Miller, Jeff Grace and Kevin M. Brennan made over 30 short films between 2006 and 2008 including one that poked fun of the paranoia surrounding the "street view" feature of Google Maps. This short, aptly called "Google Maps," received millions of views, coverage on CNN, and garnered the guys a revenue sharing deal with YouTube.

I have researched a lot regarding the next generation of search engines, and in this post I will relate to you guys my own definition about the 3rd generation of search engines. As you know, the 1st generation search engines are known as indexing search engines or directories. People can use keywords, but that is really 'searching', no other process to determine the relevance of data. Directory is a really good idea and is invented by the portal giant, Yahoo. In this generation, at least people can find something from a huge set of data.