Skype is jumping on the World Cup marketing bandwagon by offering free land-line phone calls for month in several countries across the globe. If you have friends or family in other parts of the world you may want to take advantage of this offer and save a few bucks on your international phone charges. Check out the countries available and the specifics of this deal at gizmodo.com

This upcoming summer, if you plan on taking a vacation or two, make sure you don’t find yourself with an armload of junk from with the name of the amusement park or oddities museum your kids made you visit. The “World Touristiness Map” may save you aggravation – and money – this summer by helping you avoid the most “touristy” places on the planet. This Google Maps mash-up has analyzed images from photo site Panoramio.com to help you avoid those places overcrowded by your fellow main. To find a great location that’s not overrun with khaki shorts and Hawaiian shirts take a look at this great use of Google Maps via Lifehacker.com.

With a heated up browser market, more and more makers are touting their speed as the big reason to make the switch to a new browser. One of the big benchmarks is how fast can the browser process JavaScript – client-side code used in some fashion by most websites that can drag a page down if your browser can’t process it quickly. The new lightweight king – Google’s Chrome browser – touts a small footprint with quick load times and fast script processing. But according to techcrunch.com, Google’s own JavaScript speed benchmarker, Sputnik, reveals that currently both Opera and Safari are beating Googles browser. Read the full article here.

Engadget.com reports that LG mobile has confirmed that a 12 megapixel phone will soon be produced. Sony Ericsson was the first to demonstrate they could put a 12 megapixel camera in a phone, but LG is the first provider to officially announce one is coming. Don’t get too excited, though, as LG’s UK head of marketing, Jeremy Newing, admitted, “it’s important that people realize when taking 12mp images, they’ll be using huge amounts of data, and it will be more difficult to do things like send such files”. Plus, as lifehacker.com has pointed out, megapixel size is not directly proportional to picture quality. While you’re waiting for over an hour for your phone to send that picture of a daisy to your mom, don’t expect the end result to look nearly as good as your DSL with less megapixel resolution but far superior optics and sensors.

Despite all the hype, at $360 the upcoming Kindle 2 is still going to inhabit a very small niche market. Of the 50% of Americans who read books at all very few are ready to make a digital switch. Just like the visceral pleasure we experience from holding a newspaper keeps them in print, a fair amount of the literary class enjoy perusing a bookstore, reading back flaps and skimming contents. But for those who are ready to adopt the digital model, the Kindle itself, or even Sony’s $300 Reader Digital Book, are not the only game in town. A more affordable option may be Indigo’s Shortcovers – a digital ebook app that will run on iPhone, BlackBery, and Android operating systems – devices that many potential Kindle buyers already own. Shortcovers lets users read the first chapter of a book without charge with the option of buying additional chapters individually or the entire book at rates comparable to Kindle and Sony. The difference between Shortcovers and other ebook readers already available on many mobile platforms is the relationship Indigo has with publishers. Shortcovers will initially offer over 50,000 titles, only a third of which are public domain titles. Indigo will also offer news and magazine articles – ala Kindle. Until prices drop dramatically – which may depend on advances in thin displays – the Shortcovers model may make more inroads in popularizing digital formats than Amazon and Sony can only dream of.

I like to think of myself as someone who is painfully aware of their own foibles and therefore restrains from pointing out others – at least as much as I can. But this is one story I just can’t resist. According to techcrunch.com, a woman broke her children’s Wii by repeatedly inserting different credit cards into the DVD drive slot. Why you may ask? Because she had been told to “put in her credit card when prompted”.

Peter Bright has posted an article on ars technica reporting that the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft will default to “standards mode”. Though not exactly fully W3C compliant, IE8 will be a huge leap from earlier versions of IE. This is good news to frustrated web developers who have struggled with developing web pages that work and display equally across the major browsers. IE has notoriously not been standards compliant in the past and Microsoft has tried to muscle they’re own “standards” into the development community. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft continues down this path, or succumbs to the temptations of the past.