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Have you ever hit the send button too soon? Sent a sensitive e-mail to the wrong person? Said something you wish you hadn’t in an electronic message? If so, you’ll be pleased with Google’s latest Gmail innovation: An unsend button.

Google on Thursday rolled out the new feature called Undo Send that aims to help erase embarrassing faux pas that hurried e-mail users sometimes stumble into. AOL once allowed its users to delete e-mails sent to other AOL members as long as they hadn’t been opened. But this is a different approach, allowing Gmail users to block the sending of e-mails to people who are not Gmail users.

The function builds on the Mail Goggles tool launched last October to eliminate the “morning after” regret of e-mail and the Forgotten Attachment Detector it debuted last September that offers an alert if you mention attaching a file but forgot to do so.

“Sometimes I regret sending a message the morning after. Other times I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake. I forget to attach a file or e-mail the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party,” said Michael Leggett, a Google user experience designer. “I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.”

The Five-Second Rule

Leggett tells the story of how an e-mail to “the wrong Larry” led him to develop Undo Send. He said he could undo just about any other action in Gmail except for unsend, so he started talking with his colleagues about the concept.

“My theory (which others shared) was that even just five seconds would be enough time to catch most of those regrettable e-mails. And now you can do just that,” Leggett said. “Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings, and…

iTunes movies in high-definition. That’s the word from Apple, which announced Thursday that customers of the popular online iTunes Store can now rent or buy movies in HD for a Mac, a PC, or a TV set with Apple TV.

The HD movies include such new releases as Quantum of Solace and Twilight. Prices are $19.99 for a download purchase and $4.99 as a rental within 30 days from release.

HD Evolution on iTunes

Each HD movie also comes in a standard-definition version for watching on an iPhone or an iPod with video. iTunes 8.1 or later is needed for downloading.

Eddy Cue, Apple vice president of Internet services, said iTunes customers have already made HD content on the service “a hit, with over 50 percent of TV programming being purchased in HD when available.”

Other new movie titles available in HD include Transporter 3, Punisher: War Zone, Bangkok Dangerous, Saw V, Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, Religulous and, beginning April 14, the action/comedy The Spirit.

The availability of HD movies is part of a high-definition evolution on iTunes. In January 2008, Apple introduced its movie rentals, which included HD versions that were only available through Apple TV. Last fall, with the release of iTunes 8, the company said customers would be able to download HDTV programs.

Some observers have speculated whether HD movies on iTunes and other online stores could be a problem for the Blu-ray format. iTunes can have an enormous impact on the entertainment industry, given its catalog of more than 10 million songs, 40,000 TV episodes, and 5,000 movies.

‘Minimal Impact’ on Blu-ray

But Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for consumer technology at the NPD Group, said HD on iTunes will “likely have minimal impact on Blu-ray.” He added, “We’ve seen HD offerings via online before,” such as with the Xbox, but…

Mozilla has announced a limited beta release of its new mobile browser, code-named Fennec. Testing will be limited to people using the Nokia N810 tablet, although emulators have been written to allow people to test the application on desktop computers running Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

“I’m super-happy to announce the first beta release of Fennec for the Maemo platform,” wrote Stuart Parmenter, mobile architect for Mozilla, on his Pavlov.net blog. “We’ve done heavy optimizations to our front-end code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve start-up performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work.”

Other improvements, according to the Mozilla release notes, include tabbed browsing, integrated Web search (built into the address, or “awesome” bar), access to multiple search engines, and both bookmarks and tags.

JavaScript and Add-Ons

One of the more interesting features of Fennec is the inclusion of TraceMonkey, an engine for JavaScript support. Parmenter said the inclusion of TraceMonkey will enable Fennec to take advantage of the JavaScript speed improvements built into Firefox 3.1.

In addition, like the desktop version of Firefox, Fennec permits the installation of add-ons that can extend the capabilities of the mobile browser. Not surprisingly, only a limited number are available right now, but testers are already playing with add-ons to access Twitter, fix typos in URLs, and enhance security.

Reviewers have also praised the new browser’s intuitive handling of menus, bookmarks, auto-fill for URLs, and other features drawn directly from its desktop big brother.

Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, said the release of Fennec is a notable development.

“It certainly is a milestone, but, as with all browsers, it will need to be widely available on the key mobile platforms to compete,” Gartenberg said. “Given the popularity…

San Jose, California and Zurit, Israel, March 17, 2009 — Real Intent Inc., the innovator in automating the intelligence of formal techniques for electronic design verification, announced today that it has signed Satris Corporation in Israel as its newest distribution partner.

Satris is providing sales and support for Real Intent’s prospects and customers in Israel, and is the newest addition to the company’s existing sales and support teams in North America, Europe and Asia.

“Automating design verification has become increasingly important to companies around the world in the face of the current economic challenges,” commented Carol Hallett, VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Real Intent. “We are pleased to partner with Satris as our representative in Israel. With their in-depth knowledge and background in design verification, they are highly qualified to support our customers in that region.”

Coby Hanoch, President & CEO at Satris Corporation, added, “Real Intent’s strong portfolio of automatic verification software is facilitating designers to increase productivity and achieve high quality by using verification tools early in the design cycle. We are eager to bring Real Intent’s automatic verification solutions to our customers in Israel.”

About Real Intent’s Verification Software

Real Intent’s automatic software products include Ascent™, for automatic functional verification without testbench; Conquest, for static, formal Assertion-Based Verification (ABV); Meridian CDC and Meridian FPGA for Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) verification; and PureTime for Synopsys Design Constraint (SDC) timing exceptions verification, such as false and multi-cycle paths.

About Real Intent

Real Intent is extending breakthrough formal technology to critical problems encountered by design and verification teams worldwide. Real Intent’s products dramatically improve the functional verification efficiency of leading-edge application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), system-on-chip (SoC) and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Over 40 major electronics design houses worldwide use Real Intent software.

Real Intent is headquartered at 505 North Mathilda Avenue, Suite 210,…

The much-ballyhooed press event Tuesday on Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus for iPhone OS 3.0 has generally been hailed as uniformly good news for iPhone users. Although it will be months before the upgrade is released, iPhone users will be able to download it for free, and iPod touch users will be able to purchase the upgrade for just $9.95.

Bundled into the new OS are numerous features for which iPhone users have been clamoring, including Multimedia Messaging Service capabilities, stereo Bluetooth, cut and paste, and push notification for applications.

But for iPhone application developers, the unveiling of the iPhone OS 3.0 specs was a classic “good news, bad news” scenario.

Surge in Game Revenues?

First, the good news. The iPhone OS 3.0 software developers kit (SDK) contains more than one thousand new application programming interfaces (APIs), substantially expanding the potential of the iPhone as a software platform.

Two features have attracted particular attention: The ability of apps to use CoreData, a data-handling tool developed by Apple as part of its Mac OS X, and GameKit, tools which enable applications to connect to other phones in peer-to-peer mode and chat in real time.

Zippy Aima, an industry analyst for digital media for ABI Research, said the new features give the iPhone a significant edge over other mobile devices. “The new updates on the phone will position iPhone as a device that has music, video and an advanced gaming platform,” Aima said. “It’s good news not only for gamers, but also offers new revenue-generating models for the mobile industry.”

Perhaps the most exciting feature of GameKit is the ability of game developers (and other app sellers) to offer in-app upgrades for new levels, character features, and so on. Some reports suggest that in-app sales could generate as much as $1 billion in new revenue within the first 12 months….

Six months ago, while gaming-console manufacturers Nintendo and Microsoft were busy trying to lure consumers with holiday discounts for their systems, Sony stubbornly refused to drop its prices. Kazuo Hirai, chairman and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, told reporters at the time that he thought the company’s equipment was “a very good value proposition.”

Six months of economic downturn — and increasingly cautious consumers — appears to have changed Sony’s outlook. “A major UK retailer” told the industry journal CVG (ComputerAndVideoGames.com) that retailers were told by Sony that a price drop was planned for both the PS3 and the PSP.

Details Pending

As is commonly the case, the precise timing and amount of the price cuts are still unknown, although the mystery retailer told CVG that Sony had been contemplating the reductions for some time. A logical time for announcing the price change would be the end of next week, when the Game Developers Conference is scheduled to open in San Francisco.

Numerous outlets suggested that Sony would drop the price of an 80GB PS3 from its current $399 price point to around $300. The price drop for the PSP would be less, but proportional to its lower cost.

CVG also published a photo of a new product that will go on sale March 29 at Target: a Sony PS3 with two bundled games, MotorStorm and Resistance: Fall of Man. That package, however, will not be discounted, and will sell for the current price of $399.

Sony Under Pressure

The possibility, even the necessity, of a price drop by Sony has been widely discussed in the trade press recently, with a number of analysts suggesting that such a move is inevitable.

Sony has been trailing badly in the console wars for some time, and the fourth quarter of 2008 was no exception. According to figures provided by…