She's your mom. She's risen to every challenge, not the least of which was raising you to be the fine, upstanding PC enthusiast you are today.

Yet despite all of Mom's successes, you're still the go-to techie in the family. With Mother's Day just around the corner, it's your turn to streamline her desktop, protect her precious data, and put a smile on her face. Just install these apps and gadgets on Mom's computer, and surprise her with a much better PC experience on Sunday morning.

Mere days after the Skype announced plans to integrate video calling with the Outlook.com web service, Viber has delivered a counterpunch with a new desktop app that lets you make free calls from Mac or Windows PCs, including video calls—a new option for the popular, previously mobile-only service.

If you decide to give Viber a whirl, you'll have plenty of people to talk to. Viber's desktop programs were released to celebrate the 200 million user milestone. The company also released updated Android and iOS apps, which, like the desktop clients, are dubbed Viber 3.0.

New competition for entrenched services like Skype is great, but for the moment the Microsoft-owned communications platform has little to worry about from its upstart video chat rival.

Hands-on with Viber

Activating Viber for Windows was just as easy as using the smartphone version—as long as you’re a current Viber user. You simply enter your mobile phone number into the desktop app, and then submit an access code you receive on your smartphone. A few moments later your Viber contacts will appear on your desktop.

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An application near and dear to the heart of Twitter fanatics everywhere, TweetDeck, is now available as a Web application.

Twitter announced the new version (built with HTML 5) of the popular program Friday. A nice feature of the Web edition of the software is it will sync itself with releases of the program running on other platforms so accounts, columns, layouts, and settings remain consistent whether you're using the app on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Anyone familiar with TweetDeck should have no problem negotiating its online counterpart. Tweet streams, as well as Facebook feed, are organized into columns. Default columns include tweets from your home page feed, tweets mentioning you, and tweets in your inbox; but you can add or remove columns as you like.

A button for adding new columns is located at the top of the TweetDeck screen, along with controls for writing a new tweet, navigating among columns, and searching Twitter. When you perform a search, an "add column" button appears in the pop-up window of the search results, so you can quickly add a column to the main screen based on the search.

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Your smartphone can be a treasure trove of private data, with everything from your bank-account information to your email and social-networking passwords stored inside. To keep that info from being nabbed by a malicious app or a sticky-fingered thief, Trend Micro's Mobile Security App keeps your personal data under control in a number of ways.

The app is a free download from the Android Market, and it includes a basic malware scanner that checks if your phone or SD card are infected with any malicious software. You can upgrade to the premium version of the app by buying a one-year license (for $30) to gain access to features such as parental controls, the ability to remotely locate your device in case it gets lost, and a fraudulent-website blocker.

The malware scanner updates its definitions either daily, weekly, or monthly (based on the update schedule you select), and it scans each app as it’s installed onto your device. You can also manually scan all the files on your phone, though this can take anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes depending on the number of apps and files you've stored on your phone’s internal memory or SD card.

On my relatively empty Droid Bionic, I completed a scan in less than 2 minutes, while my Droid Incredible (which is bursting at the seams with apps) took closer to 19 minutes for a complete scan. Unfortunately, unlike other mobile security suites, Trend Micro's app has no option to automate the process: Whereas on Lookout you can set the app to scan your phone every day, Trend Micro forces you to manually run the app any time you want to check the status of your phone. The process is simple enough, but I hope an update brings automation to the scanning soon.

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Google Goggles (free) is an ambitious Augmented Reality (AR) app that uses your Android smartphone camera as input, then tries to match the captured image with relevant search results. When you see something interesting, such as a restaurant or a landmark, and decide you want to know more about it, you can whip out your Android phone and snap a picture. Google Googles then goes to work to serve up information about the restaurant or landmark--often, however, with very mixed results. But when it is used properly, Goggles can be quite useful.

Goggles does a fair job of recognizing text (it can even translate text), bar codes, and corporate logos in photos. For instance, Goggles could interpret the logo for the ATI Sapphire brand of computer graphics cards. It was also able to recognize the UPC code on the box and return a link to the manufacturer's product page--impressive. However, Goggles couldn't figure out what to do with the UPC code for a package of Staples photo paper. While Goggles could recognize the UPC for a 15.4-inch MacBook Pro as well as the box the MacBook came in, it oddly didn't recognize the distinctive Apple logo on the box.

The app can read QR or 2-D bar codes (which represent Website URLs) and properly registers them as hyperlinks, even when they're displayed on a computer monitor.

Particularly useful as a business card scanner, Googles lets you add scanned cards directly to your Contacts with all of the proper fields filled. This is a huge time-saver at trade shows or corporate events.

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Many people today have too many tasks to complete and too little time in which to do them. The complexity of all this multitasking often leads to forgotten details, missed deadlines, and duplicated effort. Wouldn't it be great to have your own personal assistant to take notes, help you keep track of it all, and remind you to do things as you go about your daily business? ReQall aims to be your virtual assistant with a combination of voice transcription and alerts that can be time- or location-based.

Unfortunately, the service is currently so awkward to use that you may find yourself spending more time trying to configure it than you save from using it. For example, one of reQall's most interesting features is the ability to add Locations that can trigger To-Do alerts when you approach those places--but the feature is poorly executed. You can add only your current Location or use previous Locations from within the Android app. And if you want to add a distant Location, you have to log in to reQall's Web page to do it. Generally speaking, if you have to leave the app in order to use or configure core functions of the app, then the app becomes a time-waster, not a time-saver.

ReQall has a lot of voice-enabled features. Good luck trying to use them. The voice recorder will stop as soon as you pause speaking even for a moment. It's a pain for slow talkers like me. I quickly gave up, and used the keyboard-based text feature instead. This works pretty well: You can set up alerts and even create entries in your Google Calendar. However, to activate Google Calendar integration, you will have to leave the app and log in to reQall's Web page to select that option.

You may like reQall if you are a very fast and articulate speaker, and if you are willing to invest a substantial amount of time and effort learning how to use it.

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ZumoDrive for Android allows your smartphone to access your ZumoDrive account, making it a valuable mobile tool for online backup and file sharing. You can access the ZumoDrive service via the Web or connect it as a network drive to multiple devices; the service offers 2GB of storage for free, as well as additional storage under tiered paid subscriptions.

The Android app lacks some of the features found in the desktop client version of ZumoDrive (automated sync and folder watching, for example), but it still packs in a lot of functionality. You can upload photos and videos directly from your phone camera, and if you install the companion file-explorer app AndExplorer, you can browse your device and SD Card for files to upload. You can also stream supported music and video files from your ZumoDrive to your phone, as well as download files and save them to your SD Card.

Using the app, you can share a file or folder as a link in an e-mail; the recipient may either download the file/folder from the Web page or register a ZumoDrive account and import the file/folder into their own ZumoDrive. Once they have imported the file into their ZumoDrive, all subsequent changes will cascade to their copy. For example, If you share a Word document with a colleague and then edit the document, the changes show up automatically in your coworker's ZumoDrive. This offers a great advantage over the common practice of e-mailing file attachments back and forth, because you have just the one file and not a jumble of e-mail messages carrying different versions.

Unfortunately missing from the app are functions for editing, deleting, moving, and renaming files. You can do all of those things in the desktop client or in your phone's Web browser via the ZumoDrive Web interface, but you may be confused by the interfaces' dissimilarity. People who use ZumoDrive only on their Android phone may become frustrated with its inconsistencies. I recommend this app primarily for people who already have a ZumoDrive account and use the desktop client on their computer.

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Augmented reality--an overlay of digital data over a real-world display--is one of the new technologies that will change the way we see and interact with the world around us. Layar Reality Browser for Android smartphones is a fun, useful location-aware app with a growing number of third-party plug-ins, some free and some paid, that let you view a variety of "layers" of augmented reality content. These layers offer information on local restaurants or apartments or let you see posts from Twitter or Brightkite that originated from right where you're standing.

The first time you use Layar you are prompted to create a free user account. Next, you see a home screen with tabs labeled "Yours," "Local," "Featured," "Popular," and "Search." Each entry on the "Popular" tab represents a content layer along with a brief description of what it does. Press the entry to go to a more detailed description, or simply launch the layer by pressing the "play" icon. This activates your smartphone camera and superimposes the content layer over the screen. As you pan the camera, different icons come into view. Pressing an icon brings up a pop-up with a brief description; pressing the pop-up brings up a window with a more detailed description, a Web page link, a map button, and a "call with phone" button.

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Pandora has grown to become ubiquitous on numerous devices, from set-top boxes and car dashboards to smartphones, tablets and even alarm clocks. It claims 100 million registered users, 36 million active monthly users and about 3.6 percent of the radio listeners in the United States.

Yet, by other measures, Pandora is a failure. The company has never turned an annual profit, and its much-hyped stock offering has languished since the IPO, unlike the 150 percent gains seen in LinkedIn's stock price. Pandora's business model has yet to gain solid footing, while smaller competitors like Rhapsody, Rdio and Mog offer everything Pandora does as well as music on demand. And let's not forget the huge elephant in the room -- the impending debut of Apple's iCloud service.

That's not to say that Pandora is going away anytime soon, but rather an illustration of the environment that forced it to do something - anything -- to keep up, and a redesign was the most obvious place to start.

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With Hulu Plus debuting this week, online video fans will soon have another alternative to the overpriced programming bundles offered by the cable and satellite companies. While Web-based services that stream movies and TV shows to the home can't yet match the immediacy and depth of traditional pay TV, they're edging closer.

Price and Features

Hulu Plus will cost $10 a month, and will let you watch every episode from the current season of popular shows from the major TV networks, including ABC, NBC, and Fox. (Sorry, CBS fans, you'll have to get your Big Brother fix elsewhere.) In addition, you'll be able to watch entire past seasons of classic shows such as 30 Rock, The Office, and The X-Files. In theory, you'll never need to buy a boxed DVD set again for your favorite shows--well, unless your tastes veer toward the eclectic.

Netflix costs a minimum of $9 a month and has a very extensive catalog of movies and TV shows. There's one big drawback, however; you won't find episodes from the current season, and some past seasons are available only on DVD/Blu-ray. Overall, though, Netflix is better for movie buffs, while Hulu Plus is best for network TV fans who want to keep up with current shows.

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