Nokia launched a service on Thursday which it said would cut the time a GPS-enabled cellphone takes to pinpoint its whereabouts, opening new opportunities for location-based online services.

Nokia hopes the service, available for users of its flagship N95 phones, will cut the startup time to one minute, from up to three minutes currently. The slowness has so far hampered takeup of cellphone navigation. Handset makers see GPS-based navigation as one of the next big value-adding offerings and even at this early stage.

VITO Technology has released a Smartphone version of VITO AstroNavigator II, the GPS application that displays the sky map above you according to your current position, time and direction of movement.

VITO AstroNavigator II supports the latest GPS receivers with the digital compass and rotates the screen according to your heading to display the right picture of the sky above you. Learn everything you want to know about sky objects: VITO AstroNavigator II offers extensive information about stars, planets and constellations that can be easily looked up.

Even if you do not have a GPS receiver VITO AstroNavigator II can display the actual sky picture above you. All you need to do is to point to your place at the world map.

AccuWeather.com announced that it has launched a widget for Apple’s new iPhone that is also usable on the Apple Macintosh OS X dashboard. Early responses to the AccuWeather.com 15-Day Forecast Widget for iPhone have been very positive, earning it praise from third-party sources such as CNET and MediaPost’s Mobile Insider.

The widget is superior to the iPhone’s pre-loaded weather information in that it provides 15-day forecasts, detailed radar and satellite maps, three pre-saved locations, and access to weather information for over three million locations worldwide. It also provides severe weather alerts for all U.S. locations.

The BigDog, a robotic pack mule, has just won $10 million in Pentagon funding. The robot is designed to carry equipment for soldiers. The petrol-engined quadruped will supposedly run and jump with its load, negotiating obstacles up to a meter high and two meters wide.

Two-thirds of respondents to a recent survey mentioned missing email as a fear. Other nightmares for traveling executives include traffic problems, drained mobile phone batteries, IT breakdowns and even finding a stain on their tie when meeting clients.

More than half of the 511 workers surveyed by the U.K.’s BT Openzone said the amount of time they need to spend out of the office has increased over the past two years. And when asked what their greatest concern would be when out of contact with the office, 42 percent said it would be that they wouldn’t be able to carry on working while on the move.

Acoustica is proud to announce the release of Spin It Again version 2.1, a powerful yet easy to use program designed to convert vinyl LPs and cassette tapes to CD, MP3, and iPod. Spin It Again makes the process of recording your LPs and cassettes very simple, with fully automatic music track detection and noise reduction. It will clean recordings by getting rid of click and pop record noise, or by removing hiss and hum off old cassette recordings.

At the beginning of July, the new Seven Wonders of the World were announced. The new wonders were selected in a worldwide poll conducted by the Swiss-based nonprofit NewOpenWorld Foundation, which claims that more than 100 million votes were received.

So what are the Seven Wonders of the Modern Computing World? The UNIVAC? Unix? The x86 processor? The Apple II? Google? The iPhone?

What are your picks for the Seven Wonders of the Modern Computing World? Comment here. Extra credit if you explain why your pick deserves to be on the list.

HP quietly slipped out its first Windows Mobile 6 smartphone, the iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger, in June. What was unusual about this launch was the lack of an official announcement from the computer and printer giant. The version of the iPAQ 510 now available is an unlocked edition that can be used with the GMS operator of your choice. In the U.S., this would be either AT&T or T-Mobile.

The functionality of Agendus for Palm OS Version 12 has been expanded to include powerful journaling capabilities, a personal project manager, all new “at-a-glance” or Card views now more colorfully organized and streamlined, a new Contact View “Photo Dialer” mode, support for attaching items (documents, images, etc.) to meetings, tasks, memos and contacts and standalone alarms, just to name a few.

Version 12.01 is a maintenance release which reflects the feedback received through our user community, bringing a number of stability improvements and functionality refinements. The same applies for Agendus Mail 5.33.

Steve Jobs, the father of the iPod, was crowned Tuesday as the undisputed king of the online music revolution by U.S. music magazine Blender, topping a list of the 25 most influential people in Web music.

Themagazine’s “Powergeek 25” list was compiled to show the behind-scenes-players reshaping the way people listen to, buy and watch music.