Social Convention states that “Christmas is the season for holiday parties and gift exchanges for friends, family,co-workers and lover ones”. The real question is this ! what if your economic situation is not very good, no worries.

I suggest you give this free pack as your Christmas present to your friends, family, co-workers and love ones. The Google Pack.

Google Pack is a collection of free Google and third-party software that’s ready to use in just a few clicks. From anti-virus software to keep a computer more secure and voice applications like Skype, to Google applications like Google Earth (where you can track Santa over Christmas), Google Pack’s applications help your friends, family, co-workers, and love ones get the most out of their computing Experience.

The pack includes the following :

• Google Chrome Web Browser
• Google Apps
• Spyware Doctor with Anti-Virus
• Picasa
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
• Skype
• Google Earth
• Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer
• Google Desktop
• Adobe Reader
• Google Talk
• RealPlayer

If you can’t get them to smile, at least let their computers smile for them.

Mobile advertising is a rapidly growing and competitive space, and Google and AdMob are currently specializing in different areas. Though Google offers many forms of mobile advertising, its focus to date has been on mobile search ads, while AdMob’s focus has been mobile display ads and in-application ads.

Message From The Founder - Omar

Source – Google

As they say WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it and you can be part of the community. WordPress users includes : people,Number10, The New york times just to mention a few.

There are a number of different ways in which you can get involved in the testing process, and each way is suited for each persons skill set and comfort level. First of all, you can join the wp-testers mailing list to keep up to date with the testing progress and to discuss things with the other testers. Secondly, you can head over to the Trac ticketing system and either create tickets for bugs you find or use some of the useful searches to look for patches that need testing or that need someone to try and reproduce the issue.

visit www.wordpress.org for more information.

The vision of the Insitute is to be the Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology for West Africa.

I never expected the programme to start late, but I was  wrong, I had to wait for about an hour and half before it started. Because I registered on the web site before coming, I had my name tag waiting for me on the front desk. Hearsay says about 300 people registered for the Barcamp. I guess the other 299 people didn’t show up.

There were sticky nametags for people and various A4-size tags for labeling things. During the first talk slot, a group of people tagged Ghanaian bloggers shared their experience on blogging in Ghana.

Unfortunately I had to travel to the Ashanti Region so I can only guess what happened next.

What is a BarCamp? Wikipedia’s description is “BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Organised by IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, in collaboration with CATO Institute and African Liberty.org, the seminar brought together university students as well as young workers who listened to a number of high caliber academics, professionals and industrialists; who gave the participants insight into their various fields of achievement.

Members of the faculty included Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, a leading economist and Executive Director of Development Policy Institute, Herman Chinery Hesse, Chairman of Softribe Ghana Limited, Mrs. Dorothy Gordon, Director General of the Kofi Annan ICT Centre of Excellence, Tom Palmer, Vice president of CATO Institute and many others.

The six-day seminar was parked with lectures and discussions on several topics aimed at opening up the minds of the participants to the challenges of modern times.

Some of the topics that attracted heated debates between the students and faculty as well as among the students themselves included Energy Security, Internet governance and accessibility, The Rule of law and the accountability of public institutions, Trade liberalization and rationalization and Policy monitoring and evaluation.

Other topics included Populism and participatory democracy, Civil-military relationship in Africa, the Mobilization of telecom power as well as Climate Change and Food Security.