How about a service that gets you the directions and list of places in an SMS? Does that interest you? Then LatLong would be the ideal choice.

LatLong is a Indian-based startup that basically offers you routes and directions on the map of the city. So how is it different from the other big alternatives such as Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps? LatLong is not just a map service, it can list out restaurants, petrol bunks, and shops (amongst many others) in any particular area (that’s right, not ‘city’, they’re narrowing it down to the area). You can then choose to lookup the route to these places, or send them an SMS asking them to send the list of places and the directions to them.

As an example, I asked LatLong to find me a petrol bunk in the area that I live. As you can see from the screenshot below, it correctly displayed all of the petrol bunks available in my area.

LatLong also works as a stand-alone SMS based service. Users can send an SMS “help” to 9008890088 to start using the service. The best part is, unlike most of the SMS services that require you to send SMS to a 5-digit premium number, LatLong’s number is local. So those of us with free SMS plans can conveniently message them and get back answers, FREE. You can try out a demo here.

Unfortunately, since the startup is still small, LatLong is currently operating only in Bangalore and Chennai, with plans to include Mumbai by next month. Another drawback is that their website is quite slow in responding to queries, and the SMS service takes at least an hour or more to send out replies. We love the service, and we’re sure that it will be a hit in the upcoming weeks.

Check out LatLong on the web or send “help” to 9008890088 to get started.

WordPress.org just released the latest version of their popular blogging platform, WordPress. The new 2.8 version has quite a lot of new features compared to the previous 2.7.1 version.

WP 2.8 is a major update. It’s much faster than any of the previous versions because of a new way of scripting and lots of tweaks to the styling. One major update is the way themes can now be installed. Remember when WordPress 2.7 brought installation of plugins from within the admin menu? We can now install themes in pretty much the same way. Just browse or search for the theme, and hit install.

Here are a few highlights of the changes in the new version:

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

The full list can be viewed here. Download WordPress 2.8 here, or you can just upgrade from within the Admin menu by going to Tools->Upgrade.

Loading up a website just to check the WHOIS details or DNS details of a particular website can be annoying if you do so very often. With eToolz, you can perform DNS lookups, WHOIS lookups, ping a website, perform trace, check the header details and much more right from the desktop.

eToolz is a freeware that can be a very useful tool for webmasters, domainers, and for the rest of us too. It’s a handy portable software that can be useful for looking up the PageRank of a webpage besides performing DNS and WHOIS lookups, performing trace, pinging a website for a reply, and a lot more. Take a look at the screenshot.

Just download the software, no installation required. You might have to change the language to English. Do so from Extras -> Language.

Windows 7 comes with a few “ringtones” that are actually used to indicate an incoming call on VoIP, but these can still be used on your mobile phone.

The istartedsomething blog has the entire collection of ringtones uploaded and ready for download. You can get them here. The ringtones are available in convenient formats such as MP3 and even for the iPhone.

The popular Amar Chitra Katha Comics are now available on iRemedi’s ‘Ether Media’, a proprietary media content delivery solution for the iPhone platform.

Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), is an assortment of popular Indian myth, epics, history and fables. It follows an Indian version of story telling that presents a perfect combination of commentary, dialogue and illustration.

For now, the only free offering of the comics is ‘The Tale of Arjuna (Lite) – World’s Greatest Warrior‘ and ‘Tales of Saibaba (Preview)‘. Other comics such as the classic ‘Jatakas – The Tales of Courage’, ‘Birbal – The Clever Minister’, ‘Birbal – The Witty Minister’, ‘Ganga’, ‘Dhrona’, ‘Bheeshma’, ‘Dashavatar’, amongst many others, are all very nicely priced at $1.99 to $2.99. This is quite a treat. I still have fond memories of reading these comics (albeit picked up for a price of 10 cents at the time) through my childhood.

Sridhar Bhat, CEO and Founder of iRemedi, mentioned, “This is a historic moment for both ACK and iRemedi. At iRemedi, we are very thrilled to have ACK as our first media partner for our high quality intuitive media app for iPhones and iPods. We always strive to deliver the best experience for the iPhone user community and we are confident ACK’s fans will share our excitement in enjoying ACK comics on the go. For ACK this is a key milestone in bringing the classical Indian mythology and rich culture to the global community instantly in the amazing user experience with iPhones. The iPhone’s revolutionary platform brings limitless avenues for various dreams to become.”

The Amar Chitra Katha digital comics can be read in a panel by panel view, by page numbers, and navigated with the slider. A slide show mode is available for reading through the comics in a faster manner. The app also makes use of the iPhone’s landscape and portrait modes quite well. I would definitely recommend this to anybody, Indian or foreign, who would like to read some great Indian mythology, to download at least the free version.

Picture this, you’ve positioned all your icons on the desktop in a nice little manner that you like, say some icons on the left of the screen, on top of the screen and to the right. If Windows Explorer experiences a crash, or if you change your screen resolution, all your icon placement are lost. Frustrating right?

IconRestorer can help you in such situations by restoring all the icons to their respective positions before the crash, saving you of a boring and tedious job of restoring them manually. You can even have more than one profile (with different layouts). You can even choose to save the layouts automatically, say for instance, hourly backups. You can then restore any of the backups at anytime you want. With the free version however, you can only save two backups and you cannot save layouts automatically. It can even remember what wallpaper you were using with the saved icon layout!

With IconRestorer, you can also have your icons displayed as a list. Helpful if you’re into keeping a lot of desktop icons. =P

You can download the freeware from here. Available for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and works with all versions of Windows including the new Win 7.

Google just launched a stand-alone Java app for mobile phones that now enables you to quickly use Orkut on your Internet-enabled mobile phones.

Some of the features of the mobile app are:

• Upload photos to orkut on-the-go, directly from your phone.
• View scraps, friends’ updates, and photo albums while you’re offline.
• Share your orkut albums with all of your friends whether they use orkut or not (via SMS).
• Easily call or SMS your orkut friends and address book contacts from within the app.
• Get automatic updates when your friends change their contact information or orkut profiles.

Below are some of the screenshots of the app from the Official Orkut Blog. The app should work for almost all the new phones out there with support for Java ME (J2ME), MIDP 2.0. Hope we can see an iPhone version come out soon. =)

To install the Orkut mobile app (available in English and Portuguese), head over to m.google.com/orkut on your phone browser.

How would you like to easily group a bunch of JPEG images into a single PDF that can then be shared with others? You could make your very own scrapbook from the pictures of your last trip and share it with your friends. =)

With JPEG to PDF, you can convert JPG images into a PDF file with the least effort. The free software can convert a hundred plus images into a single PDF or multiple PDF files in a matter of seconds. When I converted a few logos into PDF, the conversion process took less than a second!

Download JPEG to PDF free.

Love shortcuts on your Windows installation? Then you’ll surely love this trick. By making a few registry modifications, you can now have the Copy To and Move To options right from the context menu!

Here’s how you do it. All you need to do is download this registry file. Right click the download link and click Save Link As.

Once you’re done downloading it, double click it and add it to the registry. You will now be able to see the Move To and Copy To shortcuts when you right click any file.

[This post was originally written by me at TechnoBeta a long time back. Thought I'd share this here since I haven't written anything here in quite a while owing to work.]