A consulting firm called IT4SmallBusiness has created a handy MailMerge template in the form of a Google Document that lets you quickly and effortlessly add more of a personal touch to each email of the mass/bulk mail you send out to a large group of people, so that every recipient receives a personalized e-mail.

Lately, Google has been revamping the look for Search, News, Maps, Translate, Gmail and a bunch of other products with the goal being to create a simpler and cleaner user interface. Now Google is ready to roll out its next stage of redesign – The New Google Bar, which is a new iteration of the current horizontal black bar at the top that will enable you to easily navigate between Google’s services, as well as share stuff with people quickly over Google+.

In case you want to send a short e-mail to someone and get it delivered to their cell phone as an SMS, all you need to know is the receiver’s mobile phone number, carrier and the correct SMS gateway address format to use.

The U.S. Geological Survey agency monitors earthquake activity around the world. It reports the geographic location and intensity of an earthquake to which anyone can subscribe via Twitter, RSS feeds and KML files for Google Earth.

PayPal has launched a Facebook application that lets you effortlessly send money either with or without an e-card to anyone on your friends list, who also has a PayPal Account.

There are lots of apps that allow you to send free text messages but those usually do not use your own mobile phone number messages or are limited to few specific countries only. While JaxtrSMS is an open texting smartphone application from Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, available for almost all the platforms - Android, iOS, Blackberry, Java, Symbian and Nokia, that allows users to send unlimited free text messages across the world, coming from your own mobile phone number, without requiring the receiver to have the JaxtrSMS application installed on their phone, which is why JaxtrSMS is completely unique and distinguishes it from other free mobile messaging applications where messages can only be sent within a closed network to people who also have the same app installed.

In case your computer gets infected with a virus that is preventing you from downloading security updates from the Internet or running any antivirus program, you should check out Microsoft Safety Scanner, which is a free, portable security tool, always updated with the latest definitions, requires no installation, and can be carried on a USB drive - all you need to do is copy the executable file msert.exe to the infected computer and double-click on it to either perform a thorough scan that checks every file and folder, or a quick scan that checks a limited number of files and folders only that are most likely to contain viruses, spyware or malware. On detection, the infected files will be immediately quarantined. But note that it won’t however scan your Outlook e-mails or your network drives for any possible threats.

Back in June, Skype added support for having instant messaging conversations (chat) with friends on Facebook and in July, Facebook launched Skype-powered video calling feature. Now, with the release of Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 for Windows, Skype has further deepened its integration with Facebook by adding the ability to conduct video calls with Facebook friends, right from within itself, without even having to open-up the web browser!

Over the past several days, Facebook users have been complaining of their News Feed unexpectedly being flooded with disturbing graphic content, including imagery showing pornography and violence. The company said on Tuesday that according to their security experts, a co-ordinated spam attack which exploited a browser vulnerability, was to blame for it, where in users were tricked into pasting and executing a malicious JavaScript code in their web browser’s address bar, causing them to unwittingly like and share offensive content.

YouTube is currently testing a new design and some clever folks have managed to discover a trick that enables the new interface right away by adding a cookie to the web browser. Note that you can clear the cookie at any point of time in order to return/switch back to the old interface.

Google+ has taken another essential step needed towards becoming a full-fledged Facebook rival by launching Google+ Pages, which allows brands, products, companies, businesses, places, groups, organizations and institutions to establish a presence on the social network.

Google India, in partnership with ICICI Bank, Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises and HostGator, announced on Wednesday, the launch of 'India Get your Business Online' initiative to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India go online with a free website in a move to boost Internet usage in Asia's third-largest economy and aims to get half a million of these businesses online in the next three years by alleviating the biggest concerns business owners have about building a website, that it's complex, expensive and time consuming.

Back in July, Google began testing a cleaner new look for its email service, Gmail, on which the team has been working during the summer to finally make it available to us now along with even more updates and improvements. In order to experience it right away, all you have to do is click on the message at the bottom-right of the page that says ‘Switch to the new look’. But note that all users will get the redesign soon after, regardless of whether they click the link.