Now’s your chance to play a game here that’s actually running over there somewhere. OnLive announced today that it’s opening a public beta of its game streaming service. If you sign up on their website you will be asked for “general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location” so OnLive can build “test groups” of users working under varied conditions.

If you are chosen, you’ll get an invitation and a Performance Test. If your settings pass muster, you’ll be part of a Test Group and playing games in no time.

This sort of thing would have seemed like magic to us many years ago. Imagine pointing your handset at an object, taking a photo of it and sending it to a database to get further information. It’s like a real life Google. It’s called Point & Find by Nokia. The beta version is now available in the UK and the US, and it will be expanded to other services and countries in the future.

According to Nokia Point & Find general manager, Philipp Schloter, “With Nokia Point & Find, businesses are able to target engaging experiences and calls-to-action to consumers. We believe that this first Nokia Point & Find-based service for movies will add something special to the cinema experience. Simply by pointing their camera phone at a poster for a new movie, people can watch the trailer, read reviews, and find the closest cinema where it is playing.”

Sotec’s latest netbook is Hello Kitty-branded, but don’t let that fool you. It packs some heat when it comes to performance. Powered by an Intel Atom N270 1.60-GHZ processor and 1GB of RAM, it runs Windows 7 with ease, as you’ll see in the video below.

The netbook performed decently with normal web surfing with data being transferred in the background and also when opening 400 pictures in Bridge. Need more? Even while editing in Photoshop CS3 with that 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU and 1 GB of RAM.

Google has decided to get into the browser business. Meet the Google Chrome browser. They will release the browser in beta, refining it as they go just like Gmail. Google’s plan is to simplify the interface while simultaneously improving it’s inner workings. Will it eventually take on IE, Firefox and Opera? It says Google doesn’t it?

It should be released by Wednesday, if you can believe the rumors and should be available on Windows only, while Mac and Linux versions will be available later. Some of the features include: A UI that places the tabs above the address bar, Incognito mode, which allows users to browse the web in privacy, without recording any your activity, and a new JavaScript engine for speed.

Apple has recently announced the beta release of the 5th version of the iPhone SDK, which contains the framework, tools and compilers for making your own custom applications for Apple’s iPhone operating system. It provides also provides a simulator to run your apps on, which represents both the iPhone and the iPod touch. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of changes to this kit other than bringing it up to the latest OS version, but the download is free and there’s no sense working with the older version.

iPhone Developers

Skyfire is a new mobile browser that promises a nicer browsing experience on your mobile phone as well as speed and simplicity. Right now it’s in private beta mode and just available to those with a US phone number.

According to the site, the browser can go anywhere and get anything, which would make it a nice step up in mobile browsing. Supposedly it just like browsing on your PC. Check out a demo of Skyfire after the jump. If it’s even half as good as they claim, users are going to be very happy indeed. At least it has a cool name. Things always sound cooler with fire.

Google late yesterday revealed it is working on what could easily be considered a competitor to the popular open-ended online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Google’s new offering is being called knol and it’s currently in closed beta testing.

knol, as Google describes it, means “unit of knowledge.” The idea behind knol is to let “people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.” Google said a knol on a particular topic is “meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” This seems to imply that when one searches on a particular topic the “knol” for that will appear as the first search result, though Google states it will “rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.”