Blender movies have always amazed us all with its interesting little stories and sophisticated visual graphics. While Elephants Dream was of sci-fi kind with mind-bending ideas and graphics, Bug Buck Bunny was a light-hearted comedy. The third one, Sintel, also had splendid graphics to back-up its unique storyline. Tears of Steel is different though. It is not a full-fledged end-to-end animation movie per se like its predecessors. Tears of Steel is more like a normal movie with impressive visual effects.

Tears of steel: Fourth Official Blender Movie Released

Google is on a roll. Few weeks ago, Chrome had already surpassed IE to become world's most popular web browser and now this. According to official Android blog, Google Play Store has just hit the magic 25 billion downloads mark and to celebrate the occasion, Google is now offering a number of top Apps from Google Play Store for just 25 cents for the next 5 days.

top android apps on sale for 25 cents
All you Linux aficionados can breath a sigh of relief. Steam is coming to Linux and no, you don't have to wait till 2013 since Steam for Linux is coming next month!

Steam for Linux
Based out of China, ZTE Corp is world's fourth largest mobile phone manufacturer and fifth-largest telecoms equipment maker (based on 2011 statistics). And when such a big player decides to go ahead with something entirely new and unknown, things can get interesting. For starters, Firefox OS is an open source operating system for smartphones and tablets being developed by Mozilla. With the project, codenamed Boot to Gecko (B2G), Mozilla intend to enable the open web as a platform for mobile devices.

ZTE to launch Firefox OS based smartphones
As always, the brand new edition of Humble Indie Bundle is packed with surprises. The latest Humble Bundle marks the introduction of 6 brand new games which didn't had a Linux version prior to this. We had introduced you to some of the hottest Linux games for 2012 recently, but the latest Humble Indie Bundle 6 takes everything a notch higher.

humble bundle 6 - games for linux
While Facebook and Twitter is the core of the Internet’s social networking world, some companies and organizations may have reasons to set up their own social networking applications. For some companies, setting up their own social network is a good option because the public Internet may not be secure enough for certain conversations concerning sensitive proprietary information or customer contact information.

5 Best Open Source Social Networking Software

Top 5 Open Source Social Networking Software
Deploying your own uniquely branded social media tool with open source software could be a good choice especially if you plan to differentiate your product through custom development built on top of the open source tools. There are many open source social networking toolsets available and it can sometimes become quite overwhelming and cumbersome even to find out which one best suits your organization's requirements.


Here's a list of 5 good open source social networking software which we think are the very best among the lot.

Dolphin: Built on the PHP platform, Dolphin is a fully scalable and customizable social media application. Dolphin is perhaps the most popular open source commercial social media application in the market today. Dolphin’s success is due to its development company’s long experience with creating social media applications.

BoonEx has been around for more than ten years and began creating online dating software. Today, their flagship social media software, Dolphin, offers an entire suite of social networking tools that offer similar functionality as sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Match.
xoops with yogurt social networking module

XOOPS: Xoops is a free and open source full-fledged content management systems (CMS), written in PHP, that allows you to build sites based on your needs. XOOPS stands for extensible Object Oriented Portal System. While the original code base was written for corporate portal applications and has matured into a full content management system. The backend database is powered by MySQL. [Tip: Yogurt Social Network module for XOOPS]
elgg - best social networking software

Elgg: Elgg was voted by Infoworld as the best social network platform in 2008. Elgg is especially popular in the education space as it is used by several colleges and universities, as well as high schools, as a campus wide social networking platform. Elgg boasts of an extensive plugins gallery and has a robust API set. Elgg also has a robust data model that is flexible enough to accommodate whatever your specific social media needs may be.
BuddyPress - Top 5 Open Source Social Networking Software

Buddy Press: Buddy Press was built based on the WordPress MU project in 2008 and 2009. With the PHP base of WordPress, Buddy Press has grown from a simple Wordpress mod to a full blown stand alone social media application. Buddy Press can be used as a campus wide social media platform or a niche media tool for your new product or service. It can also be used as your company’s internal communication tool.


The unique aspect of Buddy Press is that it can be used as an all inclusive social media platform or it can be used as an extension to your current social media tools. By using the administrative console, you can disable and enable as many features as you need in order to integrate it into your current social media platform or through a public platform such as LinkedIn.
anahitapolis social networking software

Anahita: Anahita is an open source social media development framework that is the most customizable and flexible of all of the development environments reviewed here. As a framework, it requires some technical expertise to get it off the ground, but it provides the most reliable and advanced feature set for developers to use. The privacy model is very extensive and utilizes a social networking graph structure for management. Data storage is leveraged through the use of the Amazon E3 framework.
About the author: This post is written by Jason Phillips. He is a freelance writer and often writes for rounds webcam chat. Apart from that, he is a social activist and is involved in many local social activities.
NexPhone concept is a new kick-starter like project where the promoters intend to build a smartphone that becomes your tablet, laptop and PC, all at the same time. Might sound familiar since ASUS has a similar project called ASUS PadFone. The interesting thing about NexPhone project is that, they intend to use Ubuntu for Android as their preferred desktop OS. It all looks very promising (video below), but there are some suspicious bits too.

NexPhone - Android Smartphone that Becomes a Tablet, Laptop or PC using Ubuntu for Android
The sheer pace of changes in world of technology sometimes scares me. Four years ago, Google Chrome was a nobody. After the initial surge, which helped Chrome gain nearly 1% market share quickly in the fiercely competitive browser market, things went down a bit and everyone was busy writing away Chrome already. After 4 years of stupendous growth, latest Statcounter stats shows that Chrome is now the world's most popular web browser dethroning mighty Internet Explorer comprehensively.

Chrome is World's No.1 Web Browser

Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Wi-Fi connection has become a pain in the neck. In my laptop, though the network-manager detects my router and easily connects to it through Wi-Fi, internet connection itself was really slow and erratic. On the other hand, Wi-Fi connection itself started dropping very often in my netbook.

howto fix slow or erratic wifi issue in ubuntu 12.04
Reddit clients for Android already exists in every size and shape. But things are a little bit different for desktops, especially Linux desktops. A few Reddit apps popped up during Ubuntu App Showdown contest, but even those were not good enough. Looks like Reditr, a new Reddit client for Linux, will be filling that void very soon.

Reditr Reddit Client for Ubuntu