Some geography teachers teach students using Google Earth as the free desktop mapping software is packed with lots of useful and interesting features. On the other hand, my English teacher who a Briton (quarantined for a week because of H1N1) loves using BBC's English learning service as an educational tool to help us brush up on our writing and grammar skills. Well, for History, I'll not hesitate to introduce my History teacher about Vizerra. Dubbed as a "portal filled with treasure chest", Vizerra is a free educational software that allows students or even adults to view 3D virtual models of world heritage sites. A handful of you guys might say that what's the purpose of learning about the past when it's already over? However, in my own opinion, the past has value to our society and it helps us learn about what worked well and what did not. If something worked really well in the past, then we are likely to repeat the same action.

Running a website and want to incorporate live streaming video into it? But what if you're cash-strap? Well, this is when StreamAPI comes in really handy. Touted as "the easiest and most cost effective way to incorporate live streaming video into your website or application", this premium service offers a fully-customizable and scalable, white label solution for companies looking to easily take their website live without any hassle. All thanks to its reliable and world-class data centers, this service helps bloggers or webmasters to host as many simultaneous live streams as they require, be it for small- or medium-size businesses. Full high-definition streaming is supported using a state-of-the-art Flash technology VP6 and H.264 with 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. StreamAPI offers very low-rates whereby users would have to pay only $0.45 per GB. It even comes with an online calculator to estimate the cost of live streaming, depending on the duration, quality and number of simultaneous viewers. The average cost of a medium quality event and social network site are priced at $74.16 an hour and $5,339.36 per month respectively.

PollyTrade is one the coolest and most amazing Twitter application I've ever seen. Well, it's actually a free service that allows users to execute a trade with minimal effort on the world's most popular micro-blogging platform and is the middleman of your Twitter account and brokerage account. When users post an update that cause orders to be placed in your brokerage account, the system will then tweet each order status back to you. After registering an account on PollyTrade, users can start to execute trades by sending tweets replies on Twitter to @pollytrade. However, you must follow a standard format when tweeting so that the system is able to recognize the keywords and do the rest of the job for you. Let's say you would like to buy/sell 200 shares of Apple - "@pollytrade buy/sell 200 shares AAPL". As simple as that.

To start with, the political turmoil which gripped Iran over the last two weeks seemed curiously old-fashioned: Large numbers of demonstrators fighting the authorities, as people in other countries have done in the past. Yet in one important respect, the events in Iran appear to have transformed the world. This was the first political crisis fought not only in the streets, but also over the airwaves and the Internet, and with the most modern communication. Despite their image as dour opponents of anything Western, Iran's religious leaders have been surprisingly adept at harnessing technology to their advantage. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic republic's founder, used tape recorders and video cassettes to launch a revolution against the Shah. His successors encountered a few difficulties in migrating from the analogue to the digital age. At religious seminaries in Qom - the center of Iran's Islamic studies - lessons in holy scriptures have been combined with workshops about blogging for years. As a result, Iran is an anomaly in the Middle East: A country where 21 million people - 28 per cent of the nation - are online, more than 100,000 blogs are constantly updated and almost everyone has a mobile phone. The Iranian authorities should have realized long ago that their techno-savvy citizens can no longer be controlled with traditional methods.

If you're not a great artist but have the interest to create comic strips to spice up your lives, then I would suggest to give Pixton a try. It's a free and simple web application that enables users to create interactive comic strips without any drawing needed. It comes with many impressive features that allows you to create, animate and remix comics in an online community. What's more is that it's fun and easy-to-use for all ages, and is available in over 40 languages. To start, simply sign up for a free account and select the format of comic strip you would like to create. Currently, it offers 3 different types of formats - Quickie comic, Regular comic and Large format. After choosing a template, you're able to customize everything right on the page under a drag-and-drop interface, be it inserting cartoon-like images and adding text into bubbles. No downloading or installation of any software is needed as everything is done online. Here's one of the coolest and best feature Pixton provides. Different from the traditional comic strip, you can bring your comics and avatars to life with animation. Dubbed as the "world's first remixable comics", you can remix them with their friends to form a more interesting animated comic. Users are only required to set the keyframes and the rest will be done by Pixton itself.

Well, I'm not very sure whether Windows Live messenger is popular among young kids in the United States of America or any parts of the world but as for Singaporean teenagers, we seriously can't live without it. Everyday, we would use the world's most popular IM to chat with our friends after school to either discuss about school homework or share our thoughts and opinions on some random topics. Despite being an MSN addict, I must admit that I seriously don't know what is MSN Web Messenger all about. I've heard it before but haven't try it out yet. And now the latest news from the Windows Live team said that it'll be retiring soon on June 30 2009.

EmbedVid a newly-launched Twitter application which allows users to embed and share videos on the world's most popular micro-blogging platform without any hassle. With this free and simple service, you can share interesting or funny videos with your friends and hence creating a wonderful experience on the Internet. All you need to do is to punch in your Twitter username, video label, video embed code, video grouping and last but not least select a suitable rating into the respestive textfields and you're good to go. For each video embeded, there will be a unique URL which you can post on your profile for others to view it. When you friends click on that link, they will be directed to a new window whereby they are able to watch, favorite, comment or even re-tweet the video. There is also a page-view count on the top right hand corner for you to find out how popular the video is. Currenly, it supports almost all popular video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, Hulu, DailyMotion and the list goes on.

If you've a request to change something (also known as a petition) and would like people especially on social networking websites to sign it, then you should give act.ly a try. Developed by Jim Gilliam and Jesse Haff, Act.ly is a free and simple application aims to help Twitterers create petitions and make use of the large community to sign them. To start a petition, simply identify a target by entering in his/her Twitter username and then type in what you want the person to do or not to do. You signed the petition by tweeting it and anybody can sign it too by just re-tweeting it. What's more is that the person which you've targeted earlier on will be able to view the tweets in their mentions. He or she has to click on the link and log in with their Twitter account to respond. The system then sends a DM to the person who started the petition to verify if it’s completed. According to the folks at act.ly, they have planned to add several new features in the near future and one of them includes a powerful set of analytics since nearly the entire social graph on Twitter is public.