One of the limitations on laptop is the lack of USB ports in proportion to the number of devices we'd like to hook up. Chinese designer Gonglue Jiang has shown us an alternative plug on devices that kinda acts like a tag team - the Infinite USB.

It's definitely a cool idea, isn't it? The color coding on plugs will make it easy to identify which plug belongs to which device. Smart, but there are limitations to it, when one wants to unplug a device that is connected in the middle of the combination, you'll need to start safely remove all the device connected after it. and also a problem of overloading, one will easily blow the power adapter of the laptop if too many usb devices are connected. anyway, I'm glad that more and more Chinese designers are showing their talents and inspirations.

The Internet is a tidal wave that you will not be able to keep out. Like in China, who knows how long those firewalls will hold up – but not forever. We’re just realizing the promise of the Internet. It’s about democratization of information.

At SXSW in Austin, Texas. Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams did a keynote Q&A with Umair Haque. He said that notorious censorship firewalls in countries such as China will give way to online innovations. He also has spoken about a new feature for Twitter. It's @anywhere platform and allows other websites to link to Twitter feeds.

Cambridge UK-based startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with a photo, bio and social networking links. Then whenever you open an email, it cross-references the email of the sender and does some local caching for performance optimization, the service would ask you to login via secure Google Federated Login. You have to give it access to a minimum of information to get started. Some users may be wary to trust a third-party add-on with their inbox and feeling a little bit nervous. Don't worry, it doesn't have any access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email. So I don't think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this really awesome service, just go install it. Check out the screenshot:

The service pulls contact information from the Rapleaf database, so the amount of biographical information and links to social media accounts that are returned will depend on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie that contact’s email address to the various social media services. For some of my contacts it works very well, for others it returns little or no info, because some people don’t use their work email address for social media accounts.

Rapportive is developing a platform for the development of custom applets that other companies can integrate within their local data stores so you can look up an email sender on your own system as part of the Rapportive display. Co-founder Rahul Vohra says such integration takes minutes to set up and in the long term the company hopes to create a marketplace for those applets. Team collaboration so notes left on contacts can be shared is also in the works, as is integration with popular paid CRM and customer service systems.

No doubt Google will definitely not be happy a service is replacing its ads with any content. Sure it's all that we get Gmail for free, but those ads to the right of open messages are not really all that helpful. I have never once clicked on a Gmail ad. If Google can provide services like GTalk, Voice and private-branded Gmail without ads now, I think plain Gmail context ads might be on the way out soon as well. Many users see no value in the text ads or already block them with extensions like Adblock, Better Gmail, or various Greasemonkey scripts. I'd say I've been hoping to find something like this for a long time, having a simple note field I can use to remind me where things are in the relationship is great. People desperately need tools to be able to cope with hundreds&thousands of online relationships.

This plug-in is currently available for Firefox and Chrome only and only works with Gmail (If you're using the Better Gmail extension, make sure to uncheck the following option "Remove Ads. Fix Page width. Reposition print button."). If you have any questions, follow @rapportive