div>TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips.

Here’s the latest in TechConsumer news:

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div>Sophos, an internet-security company, released numbers on the amount of spam sent per country between this past July and September. And the United States is responsible for about 30% of it (see chart below). Despite legislation such as the CAN-SPAM Act, the U.S. hasn’t been able to do much to stop spam. And spam is getting more complicated: fake e-cards, virus-infected PDF attachments, and worthless MP3 files or ringtons are the latest methods. In fact, according to anti-spam company MXSweep, nearly one in ten spam e-mails attach MP3 files or ringtones.

I guess I wouldn’t know much about this. I use Google’s gmail and rarely see any spam.

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div>The latest info from our good friends those “people familiar with the matter” is that Google is in advanced talks with two U.S. cellphone operators: Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel. The talks, of course, are revolving around the two companies offering new Google-powered mobile phones. Google has to get some major wireless operators to sign on to this project if it’s to reach its rumor-generated goal of getting Gphones in front of consumers by the middle of next year.

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The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) is quoting “people familiar with the matter” in stating that within two weeks Google will announce plans to bring Google-powered phones to market by the middle of next year. Apparently, Google’s goal is “[T]o make applications and services as accessible on cellphones as they are on the Internet.”

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div>TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips.

Here’s the latest in TechConsumer news:

more…

div>There are a lot of sites that are beginning to tie content to information. Google Earth now lets you link pictures to location as well as Wikipedia articles and more. Google Maps does a great job of tying information already on the Internet to a location, although most of it is businesses with addresses. And there are other companies starting to look into this as well.

What I haven’t seen yet is a mashup of podcasting, or audio recording, and a physical location. Podcasting currently revolves around a particular topic. So if you’re interested in war gaming, you subscribe to a podcast about war games. If you want to know about the latest happenings in tech, you turn to a podcast like Twit. But audio about a certain topic is only one way to organize data. Just as you might organize a group of pictures by what is in them (for example, cats), you might also organize them by location (all the pictures of Riverside, Utah).

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div>My brother Tom noticed a difference when using Gmail yesterday. When he moused-over a certain email in his inbox, a popup-like box appeared with a preview of that email. It seemed pretty cool even if apparently not ready for prime time. Google pulled the plug on the new feature just minutes after he played around with it but not before he got a screenshot! See image below and click through for full screen version:

*Update* From the comments: “Sorry. False alarm. I just realized that this is a feature of “Better Gmail,” a firefox plugin I started using a few weeks ago. I must have right-clicked by accident on my laptop. Still, it’s a pretty cool feature for those who want it. Better Gmail also allows you to add your Google Reader onto the same page, if you want to.”

*Update 2* See this post over at Google Blogoscoped for screenshots of what’s being called Gmail 2.0.

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div>The video service Joost has finally reached 1.0 beta. As one of the people who were in on the Joost for Friends alpha testing, I decided to download the latest client to see what was new in the latest version. So far my experience has been that the new 1.0 beta isn’t as stable as the 0.19 alpha I used to have installed.

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SpeedBit Video Accelerator can help out accelerating web videos to eliminate buffering and congestion problems, and it actually works. It accelerates streaming videos from many well known video sites including Metacafe, YouTube, Dailymotion, AOL Video, MySpace Video and many many more.

It’s free and available to download here. And it takes only a few seconds to install. It makes videos stream faster and play smoother by reducing video breaks and pauses. There are other cool features to this product such as “bookmarks” for videos you’ve recently watched for easy replays, and it includes a search tab for finding the most popular videos around the web.

Check out these LEGO films and movies created with LEGOs today.

div>YouTube made popular the idea of video on the Internet even if it has always seemed to be pretty low on the list of options in terms of picture quality. But now certain companies have realized that just because computers can be another way to watch video doesn’t mean the general population is content with fuzzy, low quality in a tiny window. Today there’s news of at least two companies focusing on Internet video quality: BitTorrent and Move Networks.

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