"Wordoids", which are words that are made-up, but sound right. They follow the rules of phonetics, and if done properly, roll off the tongue. The need to have an online presence has increased the need for unique product and company names and has led to these wordoids. Yet, even with a made-up name, it's important for the name to convey something about what the product or business actually is. Now you can do it very quickly using a website called, appropriately enough, Wordoid.

For example, I gave Wordoid the shortened acronym we use for Download Squad when talking on our internal mailing list, which is DLS. The first option Wordoid presented is dlsident, and it informs me that the related domain dlsident.com is available. While it doesn't look like much, if you spell out the first three letters as we do when using the acronym, this name actually rolls off the tongue quite nicely. It's like a subversive version of the name. Other options it came up with are dlsider, dlsidad, dlsidends, and dlsidanila. Certainly, they're not all winners, but I bet they're better than you expected.

You can tell Wordoid where to place your seed word - at the beginning, end, or anywhere including in the middle of the text string it returns. This gives you a ton of flexibility to guide your wordoid's creation to include useful information, but still come up with something unique, easy to say, and with an available domain name.

Seesmic have released their 'Seesmic Mobile' Twitter client for Android and Blackberry on their respective application stores. Available for download free of charge, the clients are slick, feature packed and refreshingly free of advertisements.

The Android client (pictured above) has a great design that utilises a standard tab-based user interface with a red accent, providing virtually every feature (bar multiple account support) that a Twitterer could desire. Included are the ability to scroll without limits back through your timeline, photo and video upload (either from your device camera or from the gallery) via a variety of online services, the ability to add your location to your tweet, URL shortening, saving tweets-in-progress as drafts, switchable full name / username display and very granular notifications.

The Blackberry application also features a native-feeling UI and adds lists and saved search support, albeit at the expense of video and location features.

If you give Seesmic Mobile a try, let us know how you get on and - of course - don't forget to follow @downloadsquad!

This week Cisco released a new iPhone app called Cisco SIO To Go [iTunes link]. The application is primarily focused on delivering security and threat information via a number of freely available online feeds including Cyber Risk Report, Cisco Threat Outbreaks, Cisco Security Blog, and even some of Cisco's Twitter feeds. This information is available on the app's Security Alerts page.

All of this could be done in your favorite feed reader, so it's a little disappointing that this is the focus of Cisco SIO To Go. The application also features a Lookup page, which allows you to look up a domain name to look up its Email or Web Reputation score. This screen has some interesting-looking red, yellow, and green flashing lights with interesting labels like "Virus outbreak in progress", but unfortunately they don't seem to actually mean or do anything. Maybe they relate to the domain lookup, but if they do it certainly isn't clear how. None of the domains I searched seemed to be color-coded in any way.

While it's hard to complain about a free app, at the same time Cisco is in a unique position to offer some unique functionality like maybe push notifications when virus outbreaks or serious security vulnerabilities are discovered. There's nothing inherently wrong with Cisco SIO To Go, but there's also not much right with it. Cisco could do better if they wanted to.

[via InSecurity Complex]

While most touch mobile devices like the iPhone render web pages surprisingly well, sometimes they are slow to load and difficult to read. Blogs, in particular, with their wide text areas tend to become difficult to read on small screens.

If you run a WordPress blog, there's an option available to you called WPTouch. WPTouch is a theme package plugin that allows your blog to render a completely separate and mobile-optimized theme based on the browser user agent provided by the device's browser. The WPTouch theme is much lighter than a typical blog theme, and it provides the option to strip out javascript-heavy elements, making the page load that much faster.

Of course, not all readers will want to view a mobile-optimized version of your site, particularly when their mobile device can handle the page's full functionality. In that case, there is always a link in the footer of the page that allows the user to switch to the full version of the site.

WPTouch is a free WordPress plugin that you can download directly from the Add Now plugin administration screen on recent WordPress installations by searching for WPTouch.

Opera have released version 10 of their browser, now with Opera Unite and Opera Turbo included.

Opera Unite gives your web browser the ability to deliver content as well as consume it. The standard download includes a number of Unite applications, with more available for download from the application directory. The bundled applications include a file sharing server that allows you to make files available to the world (as well as allowing the world to upload content to your machine), a virtual fridge door for you to share notes with friends and family (pictured), a media player that allows you to play content from your Unite equipped machine remotely, an instant messaging server, a photo sharing application and a web server for serving your own web content.

The inclusion of Opera Turbo in the new browser marks the migration to the desktop of a technology that has long been a key feature of Opera's Mini product. Opera Turbo speeds up your browsing session by compressing content at Opera proxy servers before delivering it to your machine - particularly useful for those on low bandwidth connections.

Opera 10.10 is available free from www.opera.com for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

We're intrigued to hear what you, our lovely readers, think about Opera's advancements. They have an excellent, solid browser base and some truly unique additional features... are you tempted to make the switch?

Most statistics packages focus on which pages or content are drawing people to your site. While that's certainly important, sometimes you want to know what's happening right now in terms of traffic on your site.

If you're running a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can install a plugin called WP-UserOnline to find out exactly that. WP-UserOnline gives you a summary of who is currently viewing your blog broken down by Members, Guests, and Bots. It then gives the details for each one below, including the member name, name of the bot, the page the user is on, and the referring page (if available).

It's certainly not as full-featured as a full stats package like Google Analytics, but there's no better way to know what traffic is viewing your WordPress blog at the moment.

It feels like it's been years since Microsoft released SyncToy 2.0. That's probably because it has been. But when you have a utility that's dead simple to use that lets you synchronize files between two folders, hard drives, or other storage media, why bother updating it? But SyncToy 2.0 wasn't exactly perfect, so Microsoft recently pushed out version 2.1 which features a handful of bug fixes and improvements.

Like earlier versions, SyncToy 2.1 lets you create folder pairs and decide how data will be synchronized between those two folders. In Synchronize mode, when changes are made in one folder they'll be reflected in the other. If you add a file to folder A, it will be added to folder B. Delete one from B and it'll disappear from A.

Echo mode makes sure that folder B is always up to date with folder A. But if you make changes to folder B, they won't be reflected in the first folder.

In Contribute mode, files will copied from A to B and any files that are renamed in A will be renamed in B. But no files will be deleted. So if you delete a file from folder A it will still live on in B.

All three modes are pretty handy for making sure you have a backup of your important data. You can backup your files to a local drive or a shared network drive for safe keeping.

Probably the closest thing to a new feature in SyncToy 2.1 is the ability to backup your folder pair configurations. Microsoft also says that version 2.1 features better performance, faster copy speeds, and more resilience against network and file system errors. A few bugs have also been fixed, including one that could lead to data corruption when using NAS drives.

SyncToy 2.1 is available as a free download for Windows computers.

[via Lifehacker]

Keeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

Have you taken the time to poke around your Windows 7 start menu yet? If not, you may have missed the "More Games from Microsoft" entry under the Games folder.

Click the shortcut, and you'll be whisked away to a web page offering some additional games you can download. Right now there are three: Peggle, Ranch Rush, and Bumper Stars.

Two more titles are coming soon. Tinker (the awesome puzzler you can see in action in the video above) and Hold 'Em (for you poker fans out there) are set to be released in the very near future.

Now, this news isn't going to make all Windows users smile. It's probably going to rub some Vista Ultimate owners the wrong way - since Tinker and Hold 'Em were two of the oft-talked-about-and-rarely-seen Ultimate Extras.

[via Paul Thurrott]

As expected, Amazon has launched a version of its Kindle eBook reader for Windows. The software is available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, with a Mac version "coming soon."

As an eBook reader, Kindle for the PC is pretty no-frills. It lets you adjust fonts, read books, and create bookmarks. And that's about it. But the software can also synchronize with other devices. So if you have Amazon's physical Kindle eBook reader or the iPhone version and you've created annotations on it, you'll be able to access them on the PC client. No, I have no idea why you can't create annotations on the PC version.

In order to download books, you'll need to connect to the Amazon Kindle store via a web browser. When you select a title, it will be downloaded to your PC and available for viewing in the Kindle software.

The Windows 7 version of the software also includes multitouch capabilities that allow you to zoom in and out by pinching your fingers if your PC has a touchscreen. A future version is expected to add support for page turning with a swipe of your finger.

The biggest problem with Kindle for PC? It's geographically restricted and won't work in most countries outside of the US. I haven't seen any official statement on this, but a colleague in Canada tells me that the software won't work in his country.

[via Engadget]

Panda Cloud Antivirus is one of the more talked about releases of 2009. Its new spin on the traditional antivirus model -- like many new programs which embrace cloud computing -- has been met with both praise and criticism. Panda themselves are bullish on Cloud AV, and I was fortunate enough to speak about it with CEO Juan Santana and Senior Research Advisor Pedro Bustamante.

To Santana and Bustamante, Panda's beta testing period was huge success. One way they measured is by taking a look at what Collective Intelligence -- the remote muscle powering Cloud AV -- has processed so far. "Right now, there is about 25 terabytes of data in the Collective Intelligence database," said Santana.

"About 60% of that," he continued, "is malware. We're receiving about 120,000 new files a day, of which 60-70,000 are malicious." In total, Collective Intelligence has processed more than 80 million files so far and generates about 150 gigabytes of log files per day.

On top of that, Cloud AV scored an impressive 99.4% detection rate in a recent round of testing. That figure put it ahead of free favorites like Avira, Avast, AVG, and even Microsoft's new Security Essentials.