Drupal 7.0 is now available with lots of new features.

Announcing the launch, Drupal said, “We are proud to present to you our best work yet – Drupal 7, the friendly and powerful content management platform for building nearly any kind of website: from blogs and micro-sites to collaborative social communities.”

Mashable recently named Drupal one of the 10 websites to watch in 2011, in large part because of the improvements promised by Drupal 7. The CMS already powers approximately 1% of all the websites in world and we expect to see that figure only increase. More info: http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0

Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Lullabot on Vimeo.

The People’s Daily, the government’s official newspaper reports, the Chinese regulator has declared that only China Telecom and China Unicom will be allowed to provide Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services in China, leaving Skype, UUCall and other similar services unavailable in China.

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system.

Skype has also become popular for its additional features which include instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing.

Mozilla has announced the eighth beta release of Firefox 4. There is also a beta update for Android and Maemo mobile phones.

Firefox 4 beta 8 has more than 1,400 bug fixes, some improvements to the new add-ons interface, better syncing and more hardware-accelerated WebGL support.

Streamlined Firefox Sync Setup
Firefox 4 Beta now includes a streamlined Firefox Sync setup, making it easier to bring Awesome bar history, bookmarks, open tabs and passwords across your computers and smartphones. Based on your feedback, we’ve made it much easier to setup Firefox Sync while still securing your Firefox data with the same high-grade encryption. Ragavan Srinivasan, Project Manager for Firefox Sync, describes the new setup procedure for desktops, laptops, Android or Nokia Maemo phones and iPhones in more detail (and with videos!) in this blog post.

Increased Support for 3D Graphics
WebGL is an open standard for accelerated 3D graphic rendering on the Web that enables developers to build applications that until now required a user to install plug-ins. Firefox 4 Beta now supports WebGL for most modern built-in graphics cards, making it easier for developers to create interactive 3D games, vivid graphics and new visual experiences for the Web without the use of third-party plug-ins. For more information on WebGL, read this post from Principal Firefox Engineer Vlad Vukicevic.

Combined with our previous work to bring open HTML5 technologies for animation, video, and sound to the Web, developers can now create amazing experiences that are rendered directly in the browser, combining themselves with live data from the Internet. Watch the video of the “Flight of the Navigator” below, or better yet, try it on your computer (it requires a modern computer with recent graphics hardware). The live demo is rendered in your browser as you watch. As Professor and Mozilla Developer Dave Humphrey describes, this is not a video – it’s built using open technologies, pulls in data from Twitter and Flickr, and puts it all together as you watch.

Automatic Updates with new Firefox Add-ons Manager
The revamped Firefox Add-ons Manager is now available on Windows, Mac and Linux with an easy way to manage and discover add-ons to enhance and personalize your browsing experience. Now, add-ons update automatically with the Firefox Add-Ons Manager enables add-ons to update automatically so your add-ons are always up to date. For more information on the Firefox Add-ons Manager, see this blog post from Jennifer Boriss on the Firefox User Experience team.

Making Firefox Add-ons Compatible
We are working with the amazing community of add-ons developers to get the gallery of thousands of beneficial and fun add-ons ready to customize the features, look and functionality of Firefox 4 Beta. For more details on how to make your add-on compatible for Firefox 4, read this blog post from Firefox Add-ons Developer Relations Lead Jorge Villalobos.

The final version is still a couple of months away.

Beta download: https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Allot Communications and Openet, suppliers to companies including AT&T and Verizon showed off a new product, which included a PowerPoint presentation showing how it is possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix.

“For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube.

“Allot and Openet also have an idea for how the carriers can make more money off of movies, what they called “split billing” — a way of allowing internet service providers to get a slice of the money that online movies companies are being paid by customers.

In this case, a customer can watch a 15-minute preview of a movie for free. If she doesn’t order the film, the company that served up the film would pay the carrier for the bandwidth used. But if the customer pays to watch the movie, then the ISP gets a cut of the money paid to the online movie service.:

Full story: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/carriers-net-neutrality-tiers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Microsoft has released Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) 2.0 adding Windows Firewall integration and network traffic inspection.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. ISupported Operating Systems:Windows 7;Windows Vista;Windows XP

MSE is free for home users and free for small businesses with 10 PCs or fewer.

Download and info: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Dropbox 1.0 the file-sync tool, has been released with many bug fixes, vastly reduced resource usage, Dropbox 1.0 (“Rainbow Shell”) also offers support for extended attributes, selective sync, and a shiny new installation wizard.

“1.0 is a milestone for us, and with it we want to communicate our confidence that Dropbox is stable, high-quality software,” a Dropbox spokesperson said in a statement. “The service has grown from a simple sync app to something that’s changed the way lots of people work and communicate. But just because this version of Dropbox has a new number doesn’t mean that we’re anywhere close to finished. We have a long way to go before we realize our goal of making it easy for everyone to always have access to their stuff.”

Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers
Put your files into your Dropbox folder on one computer, and they’ll automatically appear on any of your other computers that also have Dropbox installed (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!). You can even download Dropbox apps for your smartphone or mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry).

Basic accounts are free with premium options.

Download: http://www.dropbox.com/install

Opera has released version 11 of it’s web browser for for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux which includes performance and standards compliance improvements in its Presto rendering engine, and other updates including a new extension system and “tab stacking” for easier tab management.

What’s new

Tab stacking
Tab stacking is a better way to organize your open tabs. Simply drag one tab on top of another to create a stack. Here is a short video to introduce tab stacking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqSGGk1YTI

Extensions
Extensions help you personalize your browser and enhance what Opera can do. More than two million extensions have already been downloaded from https://addons.opera.com/. Try the top five most-downloaded extensions for yourself:

NoAds authored by Lex1. The top ad-blocking extension for Opera.
LastPass authored by lastpass. LastPass is a free password manager and form filler.
FastestTube – YouTube Video Downloader authored by fastesttube. Download any video from YouTube.
Image preview authored by whochan. Displays a pop-up preview of an image.
Translate authored by neilj. Automagically translates foreign-language webpages.
Visual mouse gestures
With the flick of your wrist, mouse gestures let you navigate back and forwards, open new pages, close tabs and so much more. In Opera 11, you now have a handy visual guide to the wonders of mouse gestures.

Safer address field
We changed the address bar, so you can make better sense of the security levels of the sites you visit. Opera 11 now displays a clear badge indicating the security level and allowing immediate, one-click access to security and trust information about the site.

Opera Software ASA has redefined web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera’s cross-platform web-browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world.

Opera 11 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7jC1j9Is6o

Opera 11 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at: http://www.opera.com/browser/download/

Googel has introduced Google Maps 5.0 for Android with two significant new features: 3D interaction and offline reliability.

In order to create these features, Maps has been using vector graphics to dynamically draw the map as you use it. Building a vector graphics engine capable of achieving the visual quality and performance level you expect from Google Maps was a major technical challenge and enables all sorts of future possibilities.

More Info: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/12/under-hood-of-google-maps-50-for.html

Is there much point in having Chrome OS when Android is established and could easily be made to work on laptops, etc. Using Chrome OS will mean that Google have users data and a standalone laptop will not be much use unless it has a live net connection.

Sascha Segan writes on PCMag.com “5 Ways Android is Better Than Chrome OS” and points out that “Wireless networks aren’t reliable, “Living in the cloud” will bust your data cap, amongst other caveats.” Full article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374323,00.asp

Perhaps Android and Chrome OS will merge at some point!