|
Get your daily taste of the web, untouched by hand! |
Apple to advertise iPhone during Oscars — Apple will use the Academy Awards show on Sunday to feature a new teaser advertisement focused on the iPhone, Macworld has learned. The new ad was described as being made for the Oscars, although no further details on the content of ad were available.
Source: Macworld
Author: Jim Dalrymple
Link: http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/02/23/iphoneoscar…
Warranties can be somewhat mysterious, but the Federal Trade Commission has written up a practical fact sheet on exactly what to look out for. A few things:
- Read the warranty before you buy. When online, look for hyperlinks to the full warranty or to an address where you can write to get a free copy.
- Save your receipt and file it with the warranty.
- Consider the reputation of the company offering the warranty. Look for an address to write to or a phone number to call if you have questions or problems.
Good to know, since I'm sure we've all experienced various warranty horror stories.
Everybody hurts... sometimes — Here's the thing. A lot of people I respect immensely have written in to tell me that I screwed up, and after a point, it becomes impossible to avoid the truth. We banned Shoemoney originally to keep him from updating his list of User IDs on Wednesday night, which I think was the right thing to do.
Source: The MyBlogLog Blog
Author: Eric
Link: http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02…
Keep track of upcoming concerts in your area with BeeThere, a show tracker that lists events for over 800 cities in the United States.
You have a couple of options here; you can do a simple search by city or artist name, or you can also upload all your iTunes faves and create a watchlist for when they might be coming your way. I found over 20 pages of different artists that will be showing up in my local area in the next month alone, and selected artists also provide a quick listen right onsite so you can see if it's something you might be interested in.
Six Apart spins like a Whirling Dervish — I've refrained from blogging about Six Apart lately, because I have nothing positive to say about them or their products right now, but I'm afraid I can't let their latest marketing email pass without calling bulls**t.
Source: Strange Attractor
Author: Suw Charman
Link: http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/02/23…
Social Media Monitoring Firm Cymfony Being Bought By Taylor Nelson Sofres — You're reading it here first: Cymfony, the social media market intelligence and research firm based out of Watertown, MA, is being bought by UK-based research giant Taylor Nelson Sofres, paidContent.org has learned.
Source: PaidContent
Author: Rafat Ali
Link: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-social-media…
Stephen Mack is director of TiVoCast operations for, you guessed it TiVo. He's also a keyboard shortcut guru. As he points out, the less often you have to reach for the mouse, the less strain you put on the wrist, and the quicker you can get your work done at your computer.
After getting a few requests for keyboard shortcut tips from his coworkers, Mack went and set up a new blog. Sure, there are plenty of places on the web where you can find lists of keyboard shortcuts. But it's nice to just find one new shortcut a day to focus on. It's sort of like flipping through a word a day calendar. You don't become a wizard overnight, but by th e end of the year, you've expanded your vocabulary.
There's just a few tips up right now, and they might seem pretty obvious (hit the Windows key to bring up the start menu), but there's a few hidden gems in there. For example, I didn't know you could also bring up the start menu by clicking Ctrl+Esc if your keyboard doesn't have a Windows button.
Mack's list appears to be Windows only, but there are plenty of resources out there for Mac and Linux users.
The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover — Do you want to learn about the future of web applications? If so, when choosing an event, you might want to make sure it's one that cares about including speakers based on merit, instead of based on arbitrary gender qualifications.
Source: Anil Dash
Author: Anil
Link: http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/02/23/the_essentials_
Scrabble nerds everywhere, rejoice: you can play it online with Wabble, a fun multi-player Scrabble clone.
I must confess - I'm not a huge Scrabble fan, mostly because I'm a leetle too competitive for my own good. However, Wabble is great for anyone who wants to do a quick pickup game; you can start your own game, or join one that's already going on. Go on - improve your word power!
Computing award goes to female for first time … (AP) — One of the most prestigious prizes in computing, the $100,000 Turing Award, went to a woman Wednesday for the first time in the award's 40-year history. — Frances E. Allen, 74, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques …
Source: Associated Press
Link: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/02/22/computing.award.ap/
The Red Cross has a good fact sheet on how to prevent frozen pipes.
Most of us probably have a few tried and true methods that have worked well in the past. Personally, I've done the whole "leave the faucet barely running" thing; this year, we also got to experience the fun of crawling underneath the house to wrap exposed outside faucet pipes in insulation (long story). What are your favorite ways to stave off the dreaded frozen pipes experience? Let us know in the comments.
A Software Maker Goes Up Against Microsoft — VMware, a young Silicon Valley company, is the early leader in a fast-growing market for what is called virtual-machine software. And that puts it on a collision course with Microsoft, the industry's Goliath. — A virtual machine essentially mimics …
Source: New York Times
Author: Steve Lohr
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/technology/24soft…
What do you get for that person who is difficult to shop for? If the proverbial well of gift ideas has run dry, you might want to visit Surprise.com, a site that takes personality traits and suggests stuff they might like.
Is your intended receiver a movie buff? Try the list of unusual movie gifts. How about someone who's politically incorrect? Yep, they've got you covered. Everything from chocoholics to metrosexuals is here with a great list of corresponding gift ideas; this would be a good site to bookmark for upcoming birthdays, holidays, etc.
Once a week, we round up the cream of the Lifehacker crop in the Highlights feed. If you want to snack of the best we've got on a daily basis, try our top stories feed. This week's best posts include:
If you need some help unleashing that inner muse (or just want to have a bit of fun), try StorySquared, a community story-building site.
Basically, it works like this: you start a story, and others contribute...or, you can contribute to already started stories. This would definitely be a great way to get those creative juices flowing, collaborative-style.
The Dairy Council of California has put together an incredibly useful meal planner - and it's free.
Meals Matters includes a recipe planner, interactive shopping list, and meal ideas. Most meal planners with this much extra features charge you a subscription fee, so this is definitely worth a looksee. My favorite feature? The Personalized Pantry, where you are given a list (you can add your own stuff to it) of the "must have essentials" in your cupboards at home.
Are you a little stressed? The Counseling Center at Texas Woman's University came up with fifty two different ways to reduce stress, simply and practically. Here were a few that especially resonated with me:
- Do nothing which, after being done, leads you to tell a lie.
- Do one thing at a time. When you are with someone, be with that person and with no one or nothing else. When you are busy with a project, concentrate on doing that project and forget about everything else you have to do.
- Procrastination is stressful. Whatever you want to do tomorrow, do today; whatever you want to do today, do it now.
Would you add anything to this list? Thoughts in the comments.
Ugh, the dreaded writer's block! How do you get rid of it? Well, you might want to try a few writing games over at Language is a Virus, a site that's completely dedicated to helping you re-discover your writing mojo.
There's lots of fun little games and gizmos to try out here; anything from creative toys to author's shrines to specific writing exercises. I particularly enjoyed the Writing Prompts; you're given random topics to write on that are actually pretty intriguing (great possible fodder for blog posts or articles).
A magazine I would love to read — There's a magazine that I'd love to read if someone published it (yes, the print kind). Of course, it's about the Internet. It's about the stack that makes up the Internet, the platform or, as many people are calling it, the Internet Operating System.
Source: Matt McAlister
Author: Matt McAlister
Link: http://www.mattmcalister.com/blog/2007/02/23/143/a…
Digg Lets Banned Domains Back In — It seems Digg has unbanned a list of sites by letting them back in. From what I have noticed here are the sites that have been allowed back in.
Source: Pronet Advertising
Author: Neil Patel
Link: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/digg-lets…
Digg Upgrades Spam Armor, Unblocks Sites — Digg has started to unblock many sites that were previously banned for "bad behavior," which usually consisted of a suspiciously high number of stories making it to the home page. If too many stories were buried by people voting it down …
Source: TechCrunch
Author: Michael Arrington
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/23/digg-upgrades…
Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are: Boycott the RIAA in March — Alright, we've been following the RIAA's increasingly frequent affronts to privacy and free speech lately, and it's about time we stopped merely bitching and moaning and did something about it.
Source: Gizmodo
Link: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/putting…
Apple TV: Why It Matters — The real battle for the digital living room is about to begin. — At CES in early 2005, I hosted a Super Session panel entitled "The Battle for Control of the Digital Living Room" in which executives from Best Buy, Charter Communications (Paul Allen's cable company) …
Source: PC Magazine
Author: Tim Bajarin
Link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2097871,00.asp
MyBlogLog Snafu, Identity and Resurrection — MyBlogLog, Flickr's sister company at Yahoo, has gotten dinged for banning a community member who exploited a security hole, and then posted instructions of how to use the exploit to impersonate other MyBlogLog members, providing names of several members to use.
Source: Caterina.net
Author: Caterina
Link: http://www.caterina.net/archive/001042.html
Study: Consumers not willing to pay $500 for iPhone — San Francisco (IDGNS) - Consumers aren't willing to pay what Apple may ask for the iPhone, but if the price drops they'll switch their mobile service to AT&T in order to get it, according to results of a survey released Thursday.
Source: InfoWorld
Author: Nancy Gohring
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070223…
Nintendo's Wii a hit with the geriatric set? — No, we don't expect the vast majority of elderly folks kickin' it in a retirement home to honestly show any interest in video games (right?), but apparently, the Wii's at least making some minor strides in getting the geriatric set up and active with virtual sports.
Source: Engadget
Author: Darren Murph
Link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/23/nintendos-wii-a…
Listal is a social website for listing "the stuff you love", or categorizing your DVDs, CDs, books, video games, and listing the movies you've seen and TV shows you watch. In the traditional social networking fashion, you can tag, rate, and review items, see everyone else who has the same stuff, and locate similar member based on your ratings. The site launched back in August of 2005, but since then it has become quite robust, with a consistent stream of updates to enhance the versatility of the website. I haven't visited it in a few months, so I checked out some of the new features. Here's a brief rundown of some recent highlights:
Digg has started to unblock many sites that were previously banned for “bad behavior,” which usually consisted of a suspiciously high number of stories making it to the home page. If too many stories were buried by people voting it down, or too many users otherwise complained, a site was banned, most of the time [...]
The Travelite FAQ web site is a one-stop resource for packing and traveling light. The site is bursting with great packing tips, but my favorite gem is Travelite's method for compartmentalizing everything you need with a mnemonic, TRAVEL.
Standing for Toiletries, Reading Materials, "Aid" Pack, Vital Documents, Electronics, and Laundry, the TRAVEL mnemonic helps you organize your packing so that you remember not only what to bring, but also where you put everything. We've covered how to travel with one carry-on before, but the Travelite FAQ is another excellent packing resource for the light traveler. Thanks Craig!
Judge rules against Canon in nanotube TV case — A federal judge has ruled that Canon breached a licensing agreement with a small nanotechnology company, a decision that puts another roadblock into Canon's effort to come out with a whole new style of flat screen TVs.
Source: CNET News.com
Author: Michael Kanellos
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1047_3-6161591.html
Will you trust Google with your data? — IN FOCUS » See more posts on: Google Office — Update below: Phil Wainewright raises an interesting beef in his post on SaaS data worries. In a nutshell, Phil says it's strange that people are trotting out the "your data may not be safe" argument when talking about Google Office.
Source: Between the Lines
Author: Larry Dignan
Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4544
Skype petitions FCC for open cellular access — Skype petitioned the Federal Communications Commission earlier this week to force U.S. mobile operators to loosen controls on what kinds of hardware and software can be connected to their networks. — In a document dated February 20 …
Source: CNET News.com
Author: Marguerite Reardon
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1036_3-6161569.html
Netvibes2Go - All Mobile Net in One Place — I have almost never used Mobile Internet services on my cellphone. With the dismal navigation interfaces on the phones, Mobile Internet was just too hard for me. Until I tried Netvibes2Go. Now I use it almost every day.
Source: Unwired View
Author: Stace
Link: http://www.unwiredview.com/2007/02/23/netvibes2go-all…
Web TV's top-rated acts — Two-minute YouTube clips were just the start. As television comes to the Internet, dozens of companies are gunning to become the networks of tomorrow, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. — (Business 2.0 Magazine) — Wayne's World, it's not.
Source: Business 2.0
Author: Erick Schonfeld
Link: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2…
Advertisers may see high CPC and spend amounts — Some of our adCenter advertisers are seeing high cost-per-click (CPC) and spend amounts in their accounts. I will update this post with more information as soon as I have it, but I wanted to let you know that this issue is now resolved …
Source: adCenter Blog
Link: http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns…
Talking Exchange 2007 SP1... We're wrapping up our Beta of Exchange 2007 SP1 (to be released through TechNet plus this April), and as always we wanted to discuss it publicly here first. We are targeting final release with Longhorn Server 2nd half of this year.
Source: You Had Me At EHLO...
Author: Exchange
Link: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/02/23/435699…
Police, school get failing grade in sad case of Julie Amaro — Imagine you know next to nothing about computers. You're a substitute teacher for a seventh grade class. There's a computer in the classroom and, knowing you're going to be sitting there for a while, you ask a fulltime teacher if you can use it.
Source: USA Today
Link: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor…
More than a million volunteers have dedicated spare CPU cycles on their home and work computers to helping find signs of extraterrestrial life. So far, they've had no luck on that front, but the SETI@home project has at least helped one man find a missing laptop.
Software programmer James Melin's wife's laptop was stolen in January. It also happened to be one of 7 computers that Melin had installed the SETI@home software on.
Well, it turned out the thief never bothered to disable the software, and so within a week it shared data with the SETI@home server three times. Melin gave the IP address to the police, who were able to get a an address where the computer was being used from a local intenet service provider, and the laptop was returned.
Melin's wife was duly impressed.
[via Slashdot]
There has been a virus going around my office this week which hasn't been fun. I've got a much better virus that everyone will love spreading around your workplace -- except your boss. I'm not talking about the latest brand of crypto-zoological themed influenza, but rather about Virus 2.
[Thanks Jordan!]
Tuesday the good folks from the Yahoo User Interface team released version 2.2.0 of their much loved JavaScript framework. The exciting changes this time around include a browser history manager, a data table control, and advanced button control. These additions are all still considered beta and extend the huge number of components currently available in the YUI library.
The Yahoo User Interface, if you haven't played with it, is a massive open source JavaScript framework along the lines of Prototype or Dojo. The library is heavily documented and supported (featuring examples, forums, cheatsheets, and videos) and lets you easily bundle Ajax, calendar, tab, drag and drop, au to complete, and all manner of other cool functionality into your web applications.
More on the new version (including examples) after the jump.
Continue reading Yahoo User Interface gets a big update
Permalink | Email this | Comments
import sys, sha
h = sha.new(sha.new(sys.argv[1]).digest()[:9]).digest()
if h.startswith("abcdef"): print h[6:9]
REM copy here(REM lines added to make this easier to copy correctly)Permalink | Email this | Comments
regini HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer "NoLowDiskSpaceChecks" = REG_DWORD 1
REM end copy here
A federal jury has ruled that Microsoft has to pay $1.5 billion dollars to Alcatel-Lucent for violating two patents the telecommunications equipment maker held related to MP3 audio technology.
Alcatel-Lucent and Fraunhofer worked together to develop the nearly universal digital music format. Microsoft says it paid Fraunhofer $16 million dollars to license the technology for use in its Windows operating systems. The ruling could mean that dozens of other companies that did not license the technology from Alcatel-Lucent could face similar lawsuits in the future, although Microsoft obviously has some of the deepest pockets.
The $1.5 billion figure is based on a percentage of a ll Windows-based PCs sold since 2003. With Windows Vista and Zune sales slow, this is not a good time for Microsoft. Then again, if sales had been slow earlier, the fine wouldn't be so hefty, right?
Microsoft's lawyer says the company plans to seek relief from the court, or possibly to appeal the ruling.
In this issue of Googleholic we cover:
Julie Amero, substitute teacher and convicted porn-pop up purveyor, has finally gotten a tiny break in her favor. Connecticut criminal defense lawyer William Dow has stepped in and offered help to Julie Amero. The Norwich Bulletin -- the same paper that did such a terrible job of covering the case up to this point, convicting Julie Amero in print and circulating its uneducated drivel to a technophobic and Internet illiterate readership -- reports that Dow has offered pro-bono assistance to Mrs. Amero and will likely file a formal request for postponement of her March 3rd sentencing in order to review the facts of the case. Dow is a well respected criminal defense attorney who, according to Amero's lead attorney John Cocheo, has joined the team because, "he sees it as an injustice that this happened. I think it's a moral issue for him."
Speaking of moral issues; PC World's Steve Bass made a bit of a miscalculation and outted the partial identity of Fred F. a juror in the Amero trial. The email interview in which the juror's screenname was released was initiated by Fred F. who failed to follow Lincoln's famous rule, "It's better to keep your mouth s hut and be thought a fool; Rather than open it and remove all doubt." I'll let Fred F.'s own words and lack of punctuation speak the volumes that I dare not say.
Continue reading Porn pop-up teacher gets new attorney, PC World outs juror
Permalink | Email this | Comment s
A few weeks ago we brought you a roundup of 5 free music players for Windows Mobile devices. Now it looks like The Gadgeteer has gone and posted a pretty decent review of three music players for PalmOS, but they've taken a look at the top-of-the-line premium software packages.
Gadgeteer Mark Adkins took Aeroplayer 5.5, Busker MP3 Player 1.37, and Pocket Tunes 4 out for a spin. Th e verdict?
Aeroplayer is great for a cheap option. For $15, you can get a version that handles just MP3 or just AAC files. For a bit more, you can get both, and it's skinnable.
Busker lacks skins, but has a prettier default interface. It can also connect to the internet to download album info and art.
Pocket Tunes is the most powerful (and expensive of the bunch, with the Deluxe version running $38), offering advanced features such as a sleep timer, album art, AAC and WMA support, bookmarks and crossfading.
There doesn't appear to be nearly as many freeware alternatives for Palm as there are for Windows Mobile, but if you're looking for a no-cost replacement for the built in MP3 player on your Palm, you might want to check out DioPlayer or TCPMP for PalmOS.
Microsoft Office 2007 is big, bloated and brilliant. There is a plethora of new features for PowerPoint, Word, Excel (the jewel in the crown) and Outlook, my other husband. Microsoft recently brought the 2007 show local and I couldn't resist spending an intimate day with hundreds of other geeks. When the demonstrator's overloaded power laptop blue-screened, the crowd of small business owners cheered. We're a testy bunch when it comes to ROI on computer purchases.
Office 2007 runs on either Windows XP or Vista. The changes we saw were primarily cosmetic but productively important: when it takes employees a while to re-learn what they already know how to do, we lose money on the learning curve. (Using Outlook as a business contact manager was a large part of the demo and deserves its own post.)
The Ribbon
The most user-challenging feature will be the "Ribbon," which replaces the two friendly toolbars we know, love and customize.
Office 2007 is intuitive. The ribbon morphs unasked into the tasks it thinks you want to do next (called "contextual tabs"). If you're in a table, it moves to table commands in a disconcerting and resource-sucking visual blip. I predict we're going to lose monitors due to thrown objects caused by ribbon morphing, but right-clicking is a better alternative. Microsoft promotes it with '[T]he tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications.' Remember that the question of relevancy is highly individual with power users.
Going Home
The Home button provides easy access to the most frequently used Office commands. To new 2007 users, it's an extra click, a superfluous layer, another mouse move but in reality, it's the place to click to share, print, publish, and send documents.
Emailing files
Do you send Word or Excel files? Word 2007 saves in a new format (no more .doc) and you'll have to "save as" an "older" version (that'd be XP, which is lumped into Office 95 as an antique format) to share with those not yet blessed with Office 2007. A happy new feature is "save-to-PDF" and sending PDF files is the best choice anyway. Recommendation: send PDF files whenever possible.
Do you have the techno-horsepower?
Upgrading your current Office version might be cheaper than buying new, but it is time-consuming to load, resource-intensive and requires more RAM and better video (especially if you're considering Vista). Office 2007 is exceptionally graphical (and resource-intensive). In preparation, we upgraded our machines from 1Gb to 3Gb of RAM (older RAM costs less) and double-checked the video cards to make sure they had at least 128Mb of on-board RAM (we replaced only two because we knew it was coming 2 years ago). Call your IT folks and talk it all over before buying Office 2007 or Vista.
The money question
Does your business need Office 2007 with its bells, whistles, contextual tabs, galleries and Ribbon now? At the de mo, the leader pointed out that things the "geeks" could do are now available to "regular" users like 'us' (well, them). The quandary: those things were always available and regular users could rarely do them so what makes you think they're going to start doing them now because they're prettier?
The bottom line
The reviews are in. ZDNet advises that if your current version works, don't upgrade even though there are significant improvements to Excel formula referencing, pretty PowerPoint, and better document recovery. They note that the drastic design changes demand a steep learning curve and the new interface isn't intuitive.
If you've got power users, they're going to love Office 2007. Regular users will face a learning slippery incline (not quite a stee p curve). Your costs for both software and people frustration may vary.
Our friends at Engadget got a sneak peak at a new Samsung Ultra Messaging device, set to go on sale soon in the Asian markets. What makes this noteworthy is that the device is obviously running a version of Windows Mobile (check out the telltale soft buttons on the bottom, not to mention the Windows logo), but this is most definitely not Windows Mobile 6. Or if it is, it's one heck of a plugin that makes Spb's impressive Mobile Shell look like child's play.
The best way I can describe the new interface is a cross between Windows Mobile and Windows Media Center. Rather than tapping on the screen or clicking on buttons to go through a series of full menus for each program, you can choose programs by scrolling.
You can zip through your email, contacts, appointments, and music programs very fluidly. As the application comes into focus, you can flip between submenus, all from your devices main menu. I'm going to assume you can then open programs in full screen mode in order to do things that take up more screen real estate, like checking your email. No word on how long we'll have to wait to see this new interface in the Western hemisphere.
In order to get the full effect, check out the video on Engadget.
The Turing prize is arguably the most prestigious award in all of computing. It's given to high caliber computer science over-achievers, not business leading public stars. Francis E. Allen can now count herself as the first woman among the thirty nine man alumnus of the $100,000 prize.
CNN gives you the glossy details, but we're geeks at Download Squad, and we'll give you the hard facts. You know that dual core box you're so proud of? You've got Francis Allen to thank for early work done around parallelizing computing tasks to take advantage of the horsepower available in a second chip. In a very directly traceable way, she laid the foundations for the bleeding edge of today. Allen is also a pione er of the optimizing compilers, a technique we rely on heavily today. Optimizing compilers (The popular GCC would be an example) streamline the executable code produced by the compiler to be as efficient as possible on a given platform.
Ironic that according to Wikipedia, Allen was a teacher and deeply in debt when she joined IBM. She never planned to stay beyond the time it took to pay off what she owed, but ended up spending 45 years with Big Blue. We're glad she did.
One of the mobile Web companies in Charles Knight's 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit was a beta product called Text2store. Charles categorized it as a Mobile Shopping Engine, alongside a similar service called Slifter. Text2store enables mobile users to sign up for shopping coupons and offers from their local shops. The service is officially launching this coming Monday, in Chicago. Text2store has been in "limited beta" since late November/Early December and they have a small number of Chicago companies signed up currently. Several other businesses in other states have also signed up.
How does it work? Unfortunately I couldn't test it out myself (as it's a US service), but on the Text2store blog they describe the process: firstly sign up on the home page with your cell phone number and valid e-mail address, then within 2-30 seconds you will get a text message with a confirmation code on your cell phone. Then you follow the 3-step process outlined on the homepage, beginning with inputting data about products and services you're interested in:
The service is free for consumers. There is no upfront cost for merchants, who pay only for customers. Text2store is calling this "cost per text (CPT)" and it means that merchants "only pay for on-the-go consumers who we send (sms) text message or e-mail coupon/promotions to." They also have a cost-per-click model for website referrals.
The concern for consumers when receiving shopping deals by phone has to be spamming. Text2store however claims that it employs ‘User Controlled Technology’, meaning the user can control all aspects of receiving promotions/coupons. Users can set how often they get a sales deal, which day(s) of the week and even at what time. The company also has an editorial process, whereby they check all coupons/promotions (within 24 hours) before they are released to subscribers.
As of now, the Text2store website is still a little clunky and I wasn't able to test out the mobile side of it (any Chicago natives care to test it out and comment?). But the service itself is promising. Of course, shopping promotions being delivered via mobile phone is kind of the holy grail of personalized shopping - for both shoppers and vendors. Because ideally users will receive only relevant messages, that are localized to where they live and personalized to their tastes.
According to a Yankee Group study, 42% of mobile customers are open to mobile advertising if it is relevant, if they asked for it or if they will get coupons or free services; and the U.S Mobile advertising revenue is projected to jump to $150 Million in 2006 from $45 Million in 2005. Yankee Group also predicts that Mobile ad sales could total $2 billion, or nearly 1% of U.S ad sales, by 2010 and 5% by 2015.
So it's a potentially huge market and Text2store is wanting to grab a decent slice of it. They're not alone of course - Slifter and Cellfire are two similar startups, and it's safe to assume that the mobile carriers and Internet bigcos are also gunning for the mobile shopping market.
To finish, here are a couple of screenshots from the merchant's perspective:
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Music makes us happy. So happy in fact that we shake, smile and fork off billions of dollars every year on it. So it is not an accident that music is one of the most popular forms of media online.
Because the music market is large, there is an opportunity for innovation. We have recently seen a lot of new services such as Last.fm and Pandora jumping into the music market to compete with iTunes and more traditional music sites. In this post, we will discuss another newcomer - a mashup between a desktop music player and a web browser called Songbird.
Songbird is really just that - a mixture of a music player and the web browser. Built on top of the open-source Mozilla code base, this desktop application lets you manage your local music collection, search for new music online as well as instantly play any music on blogs and web sites.
You maybe thinking: So what? Why mix a music player and a web browser? We already have great applications that play music and let us browse the web. While this is true, we think there are good reasons to mash them up, particularly for music and perhaps for other things as well. The thing is: Songbird really understands music, understands the web and understands what people want to do with music on the web.
For example, the Songbird left pane contains a folder called Music Blogs, which comes with a few preset blogs. When you select a blog, the content loads in the central area, just like in the web browser. But in addition, Songbird displays a pane on the bottom that lists all tracks found on the current page. Below the pane, there are controls to play the selected song, add it to your playlist or library, download it or subscribe to the songs on this blog.
So Songbird is bringing semantics, or understanding of music, to the context of the blog. With the regular browser you would just see the page, but the music-aware browser is able to create much richer and much more meaningful experience. Even the common Subscribe action takes on a different meaning - you are asking to subscribe to new songs that appear on this page.
It is becoming more clear that the web is turning into a gigantic database. We explained this trend in our recent post about Yahoo! pipes. Songbird is another good example of this growing trend, because it treats the web as a music database. As shown in the picture on the left, Songbird replaces the standard search engines with the set of ones specific for music, making the music searches quicker and more relevant.
Songbird solves a problem of bringing together our local music libraries and vast amounts of music online. This clearly makes sense for music, but what about other sectors. In general, does it make sense to have desktop applications that interact with the web? Now, just like a year ago, I think that the answer is yes.
The main reason is that contextual, semantical, specific applications can always deliver additional value to the end user. The browser cannot have features that satisfy everyone's specific needs, and this implies the opportunity for a specialized application. Put it differently, specialized applications give the users another, more fine grained view of the same information that the web browser presents in a rather generic way. And that we know is a big business, because the nineties was the decade of Visual Basic on our desktops doing just that - showing different views of the same data.
However, there are challenges. While having more intelligence in the application about the data always makes sense, in the case of building web-aware desktop applications there are challenges. First, the web consists of links and people expect to be able to click. What value can Songbird add if the user navigates from a music blog to CNN? Probably none. Worse, because it has a music specific UI, it now takes up real estate on the screen - which just distracts the user.
Despite the challenges, we are likely to see more desktop applications tapping into the web. The amount and quality of the data is just too good to pass up. But these applications need not to be browsers. In fact, iTunes, has been basically doing this successfully for many years now. Its first secret: a complete UI that presents a meaningful view of your music data. The second secret is that links are handled within the application, so the users never have to switch around.
Coming back to Songbird, it seems that it has the potential to become popular. As it matures, it is likely to create truly a unique view and experience of online music. There are enough music fans out there to appreciate this sort of thing. What do you think about Songbird and other desktop applications that interact with online information?
The big news tonight is that Google has released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). I've been following the Web Office trend for a long time and, like everyone, have been particularly obsessed with Google's gradual progression towards a Web Office suite. Tonight is another step towards fully challenging Microsoft Office, but there is still a ways to go. More on that in a minute, but first a quick overview of what's in Google Apps Premier.
The new 'suite' includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page. New to the package is Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a significant edition considering that word processing and spreadsheets are mainstays of Microsoft Office. A comparison between the free edition and premier is here. Also new of note is APIs "to integrate with your existing infrastructure" and ability to integrate with 3rd party applications and services. 'Best of breed' web apps is another theme we obsess over here at Read/WriteWeb - so APIs and 3rd party features will go a long way towards making Google Office an attraction for external developers and startups. Google wants to be the center of the Web Office ecosystem, a very wise strategy.
CNET has a good summary of the other changes:
"The new Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50 per user account a year. It includes around-the-clock telephone support, and 10GB of storage per user compared with 2GB. The new edition also includes a guarantee of 99.9 percent uptime for Gmail and application programming interfaces that businesses can use to migrate data, enable single sign-on and do other integration. A free version targeted at educational institutions, Google Apps Education Edition, offers the same features as the premier edition except for the storage size. There is also Google Apps Standard Edition, which is free, but lacks the features of the premier edition."
Over at Techcrunch, Marshall Kirkpatrick waxes philosophical (for some reason I had Orson Welles' voice in my head as I read the following):
"Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion. Google's technological brilliance is only beginning to be recognized. What do I mean by that? I mean that with its powerful algorithms to analyze and contextualize information, combined with its growing catalogue of information to analyze - Google is an epoch defining company. Send the world's business communication through Google and the machine gets a whole lot smarter."
For now, I'm a bit more cautious about this news. I see it more as just another step for Google towards a full Office suite. There's still no presentations app, CRM.... or JotSpot for that matter! Google Apps is still a fairly loose package of web-based office apps, not as integrated as it could be yet. The strength of a Web Office suite is collaboration and other web native functionality - whereas desktop office suites have much more sophisticated functionality. There's also the small matter of offline functionality (which is starting to appear in web apps, but slowly) and whether businesses want to host their office with an external party like Google.
But the gap is definitely closing, no doubt about it, between Google and Microsoft in office software. I'm waiting with interest on Google's next step - which I'm guessing will involve more integration between their apps, a la something like Basecamp or Central Desktop. I'm also waiting to see some of the new web native features that JotSpot (a Google acquisition last year) had, plus of course missing apps like presentations.
Google Office: Image Gallery
How Google's Gmail / Docs & Spreadsheets Integration Directly Targets Microsoft
Microsoft vs Google Heats Up
Feedburner has released an interesting new report on web-based RSS Readers, prompted by the recent introduction of Google Reader into its stats (incidentally, for some reason R/WW only increased by around 20% after Google Reader was added to Feedburner; whereas most other tech sites increased by 40+%).
Feedburner is putting a lot of effort into enhancing the way it measures RSS feeds. I was talking to someone the other day about how RSS analytics is still very much a nascent industry - i.e. it's even more difficult to get reliable feed reader stats than it is to get reliable webpage stats (and I've written before about how easy it is to manipulate both). Feedburner itself points out one of my particular bugbears at the moment - how being a default feed in an RSS Reader like Netvibes or Pageflakes artificially increases your RSS subscriber number (in some cases by a large amount). R/WW has benefited from this behavior too, as we are a default feed in the bundles that Rojo provides. But alas, we're not a default feed on the other popular RSS Readers and startpages :-( Anyway, all of these things mean that a blog's RSS subscriber number should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.
Despite all these issues with RSS analytics, Feedburner is leading the way in feed management for consumers and in this new report they discuss some new measurements - focused on how people are reading feeds and interacting (i.e. clicking or 'viewing') with them. They call this "Audience engagement" and it seems to be a priority now for Feedburner, in order to counter the issues with straight subscriber counts (e.g. the default feed issue discussed above). For the record, I think this new focus on audience engagement makes perfect sense for Feedburner - as it will help move RSS analytics forward and remove some of the stigma attached to it, due to the current unreliability over RSS subscriber counts.
Feedburner has an aggregate db of 604,533 feeds and from that, they've come up with the following chart of audience engagement by 'views', for web-based RSS Readers:
It shows that Google Reader is now the number 1 web-based RSS Reader with 59%, well ahead of former king Bloglines (which has been cruising along with no major re-designs, living off its reputation, for too long now). Netvibes has shown amazing growth over the past year and is now in an enviable position amongst the start pages. Newsgator is probably more of a niche enterprise and high end consumer play these days, which may suit it just fine. In reality, it's a battle between Google and Bloglines (owned by Ask.com) for web-based RSS Readership.
Note that MyYahoo, one of the top 3 RSS Readers overall in Feedburner, does not figure in 'views', as it only displays content summaries - so users need to click through to the site to view the full content. This is reflected in Feedburner's graph of audience engagement by clicks:
A similar thing could be said about Netvibes and the other start pages, where users generally click through to view content. Interestingly, both of these charts suggest that Netvibes is 3 times larger than live.com, Microsoft's start page. Although I'm sure even Microsoft would admit that at this stage, Netvibes is a much more sophisticated product. Microsoft (and Google) both probably figure they have plenty of time to catch up, as start pages are still a niche early adopter thing. In fact, there's a very good chance Netvibes or Pageflakes will be acquired by one of the big 3 (Google, MS, Yahoo) by end of this year. My money's on Yahoo acquiring Netvibes.
Pheedo has also come out with some stats for web-based RSS Readers. Their chart for market share indicates that Newsgator Online leads in subscriber numbers (in Pheedo):
Note however that Pheedo's stats for Spring 2006 (PDF) showed that Bloglines was leading with 30% share then, against just 10% for Newsgator:
So what has changed since Spring 2006, to make Newsgator Online the leader amongst Pheedo publishers? I think that needs more explanation, if anyone from Pheedo is reading this.
It's clear that Google, Yahoo, Ask.com (Bloglines) are leading the way with web-based RSS Readers. Google and Yahoo have different approaches for now and Microsoft isn't bothered with a general web-based Reader - they will focus on email (Outlook), the browser (IE) and start page (live.com). Netvibes is showing impressive numbers and so must now be a prime acquisition target for one of the big 3 - and my guess is that Yahoo needs a strong 'start page' type technology moreso than the other two, who are doing it themselves (live.com and Google Personalized Homepage).
Disclaimer: I am an advisor to Nooked, which is an RSS marketing company.
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
Windows Vista is finally out and along with that Microsoft seems to have kick-started its Vista-Live joint initiative. This initiative aims to push Microsoft's new web properties in tandem with their dominant Windows operating system - and so become a leader in the web industry as well. Basically this means that Microsoft makes its Windows Live web properties the default in Windows Vista PCs, where possible - for example Live Search is the default search engine in IE7 on new Vista machines.
But the question is, will this strategy be enough for Microsoft to beat Google and Yahoo in the web race? Or will the average Joe and Jane User, with their new Vista PC, make the extra effort to change their default search engine back to Google again? In this article, we will analyze the early results of Microsoft's Vista-Live strategy, after the official releases of IE7 and Windows Vista this year. Our data source is Alexa, which is known to be not overly reliable - but it is quite adequate when making comparisons between leading sites like Google and Microsoft.
Before starting with the graphs, let's remind you of the official release dates:
Keeping in mind these dates, let's take a look at the following graphs. The vertical red lines roughly show Windows Vista's release date.
Live.com:
MSN.com:
The graphs above indicate a clear gain for Microsoft's Live and MSN. In both of the graphs, after the red line indicating Vista's release, traffic sharply rises - shown by the green tangents. And interestingly, both tangents have the same slope: Live's slope is 0.79, MSN's is 0.76. This hints that the growth in both Live and MSN are not by chance.
On the other hand, Google indicates a reverse trend. According to Alexa, there is a significant fall in Google's traffic after Vista was released. The blue line shows the resistance. Google's slope is a negative 0.5.
Yahoo seems to be relatively unaffected, although its Alexa chart has been sloping ever so slightly downward for the past year or two.
The Alexa graphs show a clear win situation for Microsoft's Vista-Live strategy (where Live products are the default on Vista machines). Although it may be too early to judge, history repeats itself and people who migrate to Vista seem happy with what is given as the default - i.e. the default experience is 'good enough'. Looking at this from Google's perspective though, even though Vista uses Live Search as its default in IE, making Google your default search engine is just one click away - and an alert will display when you visit the Google homepage with IE7.
Windows Live is crucial to Microsoft in their battle with Google, as proven by their big Internet marketing campaign for Live - even though they haven't nailed the branding yet. At the same time, Google's underlying technology PageRank is becoming a commodity; Yahoo and Microsoft are getting closer to Google's search quality. Also open source alternatives like Nutch and dmoz are beginning to blossom (similar in a way to Windows vs Linux). In other words, the quality gap is getting negligible between Google search and the competition.
Having said that, Gmail and Google Office are new(ish) tools that can help drive visitors back to Google - so the battle is happening on many fronts.
The reason why Yahoo seems unaffected is obvious. Yahoo is not in direct competition with Microsoft - they could even be considered allies. Yahoo is preferred by consumers for mail, finance and other portal products - and these products have never really been presented as defaults on the PC. Either you visited the sites by yourself or you installed a browser endorsed by Yahoo.
As a final note, Alexa competitor Compete's results are in parallel with ours. According to Compete, these giants all have an increasing trend in page views, but Google's slope is apparently lower than those of MSN and Live.
What do you think - is Microsoft's Vista-Live strategy already beginning to affect Google's dominance in search and other web properties, albeit only with a slight downturn at this point? Or has Google got too much of a lead on the Web for even Microsoft's OS dominance to turn it around and trend Google downwards long-term?
Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. David also covered the Future of Web Apps event [1, 2] in London this week. Photos from Route79, via Flickr.
I went down to the Mashup event in London tonight, which was organized by Vecosys and eTribes. The topic of conversation for the night was: "What's next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web". The panel consisted of Paul Walsh from Segala, Mark Birbeck from X-Port Ltd, Tony Fish, and Sam Sethi - who took the role of chair for the night. Sam started by talking about where the semantic web movement was at the moment and the emergence of Microformats. He showed us some examples of sites that are using formats like HCard and HCalendar. For those of you who are not familiar with Microfomats, a good example is a site called worldcupkickoff.com. They used the HCalender format to help users bookmark the dates of games in the World Cup, in their own calendar applications. Microformats are only supported in the browser at the moment through the use of third party browser plugins, but it seems almost certain at this stage that Firefox 3 is going to support them natively.
Mark Birbeck was first up and talked about his own products XPort and SideWinder. SideWinder is a platform that allows you to use web-based technologies such as JavaScript etc. on the desktop. You can put web applications in a wrapper and run them on the desktop. I'm not sure I really see the value of this product, but I don't think that he had enough time to explain its merits. Xport is a XForms processor... I wont go into XForms, but it's a technology that I'm watching closely, as it affects some of the things I work on myself.
Paul Walsh was on next, pushing the Content Labels format. His ideas generated most of the conversation for the night. Content Labels allow you to describe content on your website. You link to a Content Label in the HTML of your web pages, which is an RDF file that describes the content of your page. This is meta data and it serves a very similar purpose to the HTML meta tags of old. The difference with Content Labels is that you can have them certified.
So the idea is that lets say you have a website that talks a lot about football, has no adult content, is child safe and is in French. You can then create a Content Label describing all of these features, then you submit it to be certified. A third party authority will come along for a very small fee and make sure your content label is accurate, in relation to your site's content. The clear advantage of this is that, if it is widely adopted, we will for the first time have meta data relating to web content that is verified and can be trusted to a certain extent. Search engines can then use this to help rank sites, browsers can show only child-safe websites to children, french sites to french speaking people and so on and so forth. I talked with Paul about Content Labels for a long time after the show and I realize I have not mentioned a lot of the other possible uses and functionality of Content Labels, but I'm still trying to fully understand it myself.
Paul Walsh at Etribes Mashup; Photo by Route79
As with microformats, at the moment content labels are only visible by way of a third party browser plugin for FireFox, called Search Thresher. There are no plans to implement this into any major browser releases in the near future, but people are taking note of this technology. The W3C are about to accept it as a standard and Microsoft has shown an interest in a plugin for IE.
There were a lot of questions from the audience and a lot of people didn't feel that Microformats and Content Labels had anything to do with the semantic web. One interesting point that was raised is that these technologies only help make content on the web machine readable, but they don't make it machine understandable - which is what web semantics is all about. But in my opinion, the semantic web is a long way off yet and we can't make content machine understandable without first making it machine readable. It's going to be a long road, but I think these technologies are important stepping stones along the way - albeit very early ones. I like Content Labels and I hope to implement them on my own site.
Tony Fish talked last and, as far as I could tell, he disagreed with the importance of the semantic web. However I didn't understand what his points were, as his talk seemed a bit obscure.
I really enjoyed this mashup event, because instead of the speakers dictating to a mostly silent audience, the speakers were pretty much under the spotlight of the audience's scrutiny. Sam and Mike told me afterwards that a video of the event will be up on YouTube soon. If you're in London or near a Mashup again, go along - it's a very good experience.
Ed: Thanks again to David for covering the Web events in London this week. I've certainly enjoyed reading David's reports and so I'd like to 'open the floor' for other guest bloggers to do this - i.e. provide reports of web conferences and events, from anywhere in the world. Please email me on readwriteweb@gmail.com if you'd like to help keep R/WW readers informed of web events.
Following on from the New York Times Reader last year, made with Microsoft's rich presentation technology WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), three more big media companies have released Web/desktop News Readers built with WPF. Tim Sneath from Microsoft notes that the Daily Mail in the UK, forbes.com and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have all just announced WPF-powered News Readers that are similar to Times Reader.
Image: Nigel Parker, Microsoft NZ
Read/WriteWeb covered the NY Times Reader back in August, noting that it works online or offline - and is probably best suited to a portable computing device like a laptop or tablet. It also aims to be a mix of the print and Web reading experience. With big media publications, where content is read every day and often on public transport like trains and buses, the user experience is considered to be key. Microsoft believes the WPF technology provides a better experience than with browser-based News Readers (like Google Reader or Bloglines). Many people would debate this, pointing to the increased convenience and portability of browser-based solutions. Nevertheless, this news today shows that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into bringing big media companies on board and using WPF instead of browser technologies.
Tim Sneath argues that the new WPF News Readers provide "tremendous flexibility, control and customization over the reading experience". He also says the goal is ultimately to provide a toolkit to publishers "that any web content publisher can use to create their own custom reading experience." At the same time it will allow publishers to create branded News Readers, which again is important for big media companies. Currently the toolkit is in private beta, but Microsoft expects to open this up "in a few months time" so that anyone can build a similar customized News Reader. They will probably get a lot of takers too, given that most newspapers and big media companies will want to try and 'lock in' their customers with branded, standalone RSS Readers.
Nigel Parker from Microsoft NZ has checked out all the new readers and notes that Forbes is the only one not to ask for user registration. He says that registration enables newspapers to deliver targeted advertising:
"By providing a reader with a richer user experience the papers are able to request an identity (people are used to providing this for client applications like itunes, IM and email). The advantage here is that the papers are able to deliver more targeted advertising to their readers. Forbes appears to have gone against this trend and provide the data to the reader (no identity required)."
He also says that Times Reader is the most feature rich of the 4 current products - with advanced search, note taking, emailing and saving or articles. Although he points out a neat Daily Mail accessibility feature called "Speak this article".
Overall, desktop RSS Readers are a tough sell in the current environment - where Google Reader and others have proven that a lot of 'magic' can be done with the browser in web-based Readers. Microsoft's WPF news readers may well be just a white label solution for newspapers and big media, rather than showing the way for generic RSS Readers. Still, that is a big market in itself.
I'm participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this week.
The big news of course was Google releasing a Premier Edition of its Google Apps suite of office tools. The new-look suite includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page – plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a set of APIs and third party services, and a solid support and hosting package. We covered this on Read/WriteWeb, noting that it still falls short of a full office suite – missing is presentations, CRM, JotSpot(!) and other things. Also lacking is full integration and collaboration between the apps, a la Basecamp or Central Desktop. So Google Apps is a step forward, but by no means the final deal.
I was interested to read Zoho’s reaction to this – as Zoho is one of the small startups with its own office suite. In their blog they wrote that its aim is to be a best-of-breed solution that gets a nice little slice of the market:
“Our business plan is not based on us beating Microsoft or Google, it is based on serving customers well enough to earn a profitable share of the market. Business is not superbowl, though it often appears that way in a 24×7 news cycle."
Not everyone wanted to write about Google Apps this week ;-) Also check out Between The Lines' post, which warns us to read the fine print of Google Office.
Two in-depth office 20 articles this week worth checking out are: Dion Hinchcliffe’s Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets and Rod Boothby’s article about the recombinatorial web.
And two blogs that are doing a good job of covering office 2.0 startups are Rafe Needleman’s CNET blog Webware and Ismael Ghalimi’s IT|Redux. Catching my eye on Webware this week was Yackpack, a messaging tool “that lets you chat live as a group or swap recorded messages to group members, all within your Web browser". Also check out Ismael’s Desktop Roundup, which profiles “16 online desktop applications, from Clic!Dev to YourMinis".
Any other office 2.0 news or apps that got your attention this week?
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
Widgets are becoming increasingly important in sharing and displaying content over the web. Recently we chatted with two companies, Pickle and Cellblock, that provide photo and video widgets. Each service allows multi-user contributions to their widgets - forget user-generated content, these are user-generated widgets!
The widgets can be placed nearly anywhere on the web - blogs, social networks, etc. You can send photos and videos to your widget, directly from your computer or mobile phone - sharing your media with the world instantly. The kind of functionality these services offer is really taking viral media to another level; and what’s more both Pickle and Cellblock have launched some pretty important features in the past 24 hours.
Pickle has re-packaged several of their features, creating a widget media player that will operate on MySpace. It works by streaming photo and video content from users desktops or mobile phones.
"We've taken some of the capabilities that have been available with Pickle for a while, and recombined [them] to put some of those features more front and center", John Funge, CEO of Pickle, told Read/WriteWeb.
These features include:
Users can contribute content to a Pickle channel in several ways, depending on the privacy levels determined by the channel's owner. Users can click the "add to contribute" button found on the player, which opens up an upload page; or they can email their content.
Cellblock has been developing a multifaceted application for the sharing of media content. They recently released an embeddable widget, which has an offline desktop component as well. Their experience building social network Gloto, where users enjoyed real-time collaboration, encouraged Eric Conn (co-founder of Cellblock) and his team to create a specialized tool that enables real-time collaboration in widgets too. Cellblock’s widgets include:
Cellblock's drag-and-drop function was just released yesterday, and should make for very easy additions to users Cellblock widgets.
As the world of social networking has exploded in popularity over the past year or two, the viral nature of the Internet has taken hold of the world. YouTube took one huge aspect of social networking and made it portable, by allowing users to embed videos on other sites. Photobucket took another aspect of social networking and enabled users to import images from one huge site to another. Cellblock and Pickle are bringing the viral nature of media to another level, by making it instant and collaborative as well as portable and mobile.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
The launch of Google Apps Premier Edition was the big news this week. In our view, this represented a significant (but not earth-shattering) step forward for Google - in its bid to create a web-based Office Suite. Some comments from our readers:
jbradford noted:
"In the short term, lets be honest this is not going to have a profound impact upon the sales of ms office any time soon. i think 'docs and spreadsheet' is great but a huge mind shift."
not-so-fast commented:
"The styles of Microsoft and Google are going to become of utmost importance in defining the way people work in the next 20 years.
Microsoft=big, heavy, showy programs.
Google=light, focused, simple programs."
Juha noted that "a bunch of bought-in, loosely integrated web apps do not make for a full office suite..."
Also noteworthy this week was Microsoft WPF News Readers. Following the high profile launch of NY Times Reader in August last year, three more were launched this week: Forbes, Seattle PI, Daily Mail.
As usual here on R/WW, there was plenty of commentary on Web issues to keep you thinking. Check out Emre Sokullu's latest post, an illuminating analysis of how Microsoft's Vista-Live Strategy is already impacting Google. It studies the early results of Microsoft making its Windows Live web properties the default in Windows Vista PCs, where possible - for example Live Search is the default search engine in IE7 on new Vista machines. This post prompted some insightful comments from readers.
Bryan Jones noted:
"I think it is inevitable there will be some shift from Google to Microsoft Live. But how great a shift will come done to a perception of how good the search results are. In the past 2 weeks I 've noticed at least a doubling of visits to my site via Live. From a tiny base relative to visits via Google, and still small, but a very noticeable jump."
Ditty wonders...
"As Vista comes down in price and more people upgrade their machines to it the next few years, what is the likelihood that the less tech-savvy masses, many of whom use google but could just as easily use anything else, will take the time or have the knowledge to switch from Live, which will already be installed - and assumably, will be "good enough" and simple enough for their liking?"
Also this week Feedburner and Pheedo released some interesting stats about the Web-based RSS Reader Market. And check out Jitendra's analysis of why AOL created 63 Million new OpenIDs.
Finally, Charles Knight's 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit is a very useful resource for those of us still getting familiar with the Mobile Web!
There were a couple of Web events in London this week and David Lenehan (one of the developers of PollDaddy, which we use here on R/WW) kindly provided 3 reports for us:
We profiled the following up-and-coming web companies this week:
This week's poll asked: Do You Actually Use OpenID?
We asked this because OpenID is gathering a lot of momentum as the single sign-on mechanism of choice in the web 2.0 world. But are people actually using it? Here are the results, from 530 votes as of writing:
Yes I have an OpenID a/c and I use it frequently 10% (54 votes)
Yes I have an OpenID a/c, but I haven't used it much so far 39% (207 votes)
No I don't have an OpenID a/c 42% (220 votes)
What's OpenID? 9% (49 votes)
So 42% of respondants don't have an OpenID account yet - what's more, a further 9% still don't know what OpenID is. So over half of respondants either don't use OpenID, or don't know what it is. A lot of education and promotional work to be done yet - although you'd expect the bigco support to help a lot in that regard.
Just 10% have an OpenID account and use it frequently. A further 39% have one, but haven't used it much so far. As Miles commented:
"I have it (just signed up recently) but as of now, there are not many services that I am looking to use it on.. Until Digg, Yahoo, etc integrate it... I will not have much use for it."
So what we learned from this poll is that OpenID is nowhere near mainstream yet, in fact even the early adopters don't use it much (you could probably call the 10% who use it frequently early early adopters). It'll be interesting to run this exact poll again in 6 months time.
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone...
Got an idea? Willing to hustle for a summer to see it grow? Y Combinator just announced their summer application drive. Applications are due by April 2nd and by the 10th, a few will be selected to present in Mountain View on April 21-22nd. If selected, your team will relocate to work and learn in [...]
The day that everyone knew was coming has arrived with the announcement that Google has launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft. Michael Arrington posted this afternoon about a rumor of an undetermined major announcement from Google set for tomorrow, now the Wall St. Journal reports [...]
RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors. The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important - reader engagement. That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded [...]
Fox Interactive Media announced this morning that it has acquired the thrillingly named Strategic Data Corporation (Google cache of site). SDC offers ad optimization technology that it claims helps clients “typically see network-wide revenue increases of 50-150%.” Fox Interactive spans a large number of sites from AmericanIdol.com to AskMen.com but is dominated by [...]
Insider Pages, a user generated review site for local businesses, has been acquired by a public company, according to sources close to the deal. I also spoke with Insider Pages’ VP Marketing Anne Raimondi, who declined to comment. The company, originally founded by idealab, has faced heavy competition from Yelp and others. They closed a $8.5 [...]
After months of intense and very public debate, closely tied to the Google acquisition, YouTube is reported to have licensed copyright filtering technology from AudibleMagic. The San Jose Mercury News cites two unnamed sources as saying that Google will soon unveil filtering technology for YouTube from the leading third party filtering provider, Audible Magic. What [...]
San Jose based company Pramati announced its product Dekoh this week and gave me a look around the application. Dekoh’s goal is to bring the web and the desktop together and to give developers the ability to create applications on top of that platform. Those applications can be shared and deployed anywhere in the network. [...]
Yahoo!’s recent addition MyBlogLog is making news again — and not for another security exploit (that was last weekend) or spammer gaming. Well, it is related to those two topics — Shoemoney, a notable blogger in the affiliate marketing world with a fairly large following of readers that like his insight on all things related [...]
Digg users have begun calling with increased volume for the creation of a special section of the site designated for photographs and pictures. Two requests to this effect have received more than 6 and 8 thousand diggs in the past 2 weeks. It’s hard to imagine that some sort of photo section of the wildly popular news [...]
PBWiki is on a bit of a roll. After confirming a $2 million round of financing last week, they’ve just launched a partnership with 30Boxes that allows users to insert a calendar into a wiki. Actually getting the calendar into the wiki requires way too many steps, and I agree with 30Boxes founder Narendra Rocherolle [...]
About.com's guide to candle and soap making (yep, there's even a guide for that) details how to recycle your leftover wax scraps into new, usable candles.
I've got a lot of candles in my apartment that are all but used up, leaving me with all kinds of leftover wax that I don't want to see go to waste. Not surprisingly, recycling your candles isn't all that difficult. An interesting idea from another web site suggests using a birthday candle as a new wick, which seems like an inventive idea if you don't have your own wicks on-hand. Either way, recycling your old candles is a great way to save some money with a relatively quick and easy DIY project. Thanks Priyank!
We’ve all seen this before. Passionate users want more or different functionality for a given product, and they build it themselves rather than wait. Sometimes it is done purely for passion, other times there’s a profit motive. But the result is often a kick in the pants to the original startup. How the company responds [...]
Mac OS X only: Freeware application Slife monitors the applications you're using on your Mac, then presents you with a timeline of your computing activity.
To be frank, Slife is incredible. Not only does it keep track of the application you're using, but it also tracks the interactions - like web pages you visit and emails you've read. An application must be supported in order for Slife to track it, but you'll find that most of the good ones are; unsupported apps can be added to Slife through plug-ins and "scriptlets."
If you regularly find yourself wondering where the day went, just fire up Slife before you start working and you'll know exactly what you've been up to, sliced and diced in a bevy of useful views. I found Slife to be a little confused from time to time about how long I'd been using an app, but overall I'm very i mpressed. Slife is freeware, Mac OS X only. Thanks Wil!
Isn't everyone in the Web 2.0 blog-o-sphere starting a job board?
JobCoin takes just moments to set up and get running, and provides website owners an extremely easy solution to jumping on the bandwagon starting your own job board . Site owners set their job ad rate, and JobCoin skims 30% off the top for providing their unique platform.
JobCoin doesn't recommend charging for postings unless you have at least 2 million page views, but it doesn't hurt to experiment if you have a dedicated audience.
Setting up the actual job board service is simple, open a free account and drop in a single line of HTML code into any page on your website where you want the listings to appear. HTML or CSS code can be customized as you please so it fits in with your websites design. With other job posting locations demanding in upwards of $300 per listing, you might have a possible money making machine on your hands.
Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video [...]
We have a well placed but single source rumor that Google may make a major announcement tomorrow, possibly a statement of its “official” strategy around their small business focused products. If this is the case, it would likely involve bundling Docs & Spreadsheets with Google Apps for Your Domain into a single hosted offering. An [...]
Previously mentioned web site cl1p.net now lets users create quick, simple message boards on-the-fly.
If you're not familiar with cl1p.net, it was originally designed as an quick and easy way to post and share snippets of text online (it even has a cool Quicksilver plugin). However, if you don't see the point of copying and pasting text between computers with cl1p.net, you might see the utility of the quick and easy message board. To get an idea of how it works, try out the Lifehacker message board I just created. I know there are a lot of much better ways to tackle a message board if you really rely on one, but cl1p.net's message board offers a great throwaway option if you want to set up a quick poll or public point of communication.
Documentary film maker Steve O’Hear announced today that his film In Search of the Valley is now available for download using an innovative service called Streamburst - a move he hopes will raise the project’s sales after disappointing initial DVD sales. Streamburst offers a way to discourage and track piracy without limiting the use [...]
Google shuts hole in desktop product — Index, search capabilities open to cross-site scripting attacks — BOSTON - A potentially devastating hole in Google Inc.'s prevalent desktop search product could have exposed personal files on users' computers to data thieves.
Source: Associated Press
Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17256275/
In addition to the sweeping changes in Dell's upper management ranks to h
elp right its slide in sales, Dell is reaching out to consumers for input on products and services at a website called Idea Storm.
So far, the suggestion getting the most votes is the one that offers one of the 3 top free Linux versions pre-installed on all Dell PCs.
The second vote getter is having Open Office, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office pre-installed on your machine. My favorite idea on the list, though, was saying no to foreign tech support! What do our readers think of the people's choice so far?
Satellite Synergy — In all the very fine stories about the proposed XM-Sirius merger, there was one glaring omission. — The reason these two companies have 13 million subscribers willing to cough up $12.95 a month for something we all grew up thinking should be free is that commercial radio has self-destructed.
Source: Washington Post
Author: Howard Kurtz
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog…
Dual-Sliding Messenger Phone for Helio Spotted on FCC Site — A new dual-slider with Helio branding on it was seen on the FCC web site today. Internally called the Pantech PN-810, the phone features a three-layer design. The top layer holds the main screen and function buttons.
Source: Phone Scoop - Latest News
Link: http://www.phonescoop.com/news/item.php?n=2088
The Authentic Fake weblog points out how you can use previously mentioned Firefox extension Searchbar Autosizer to clear your Firefox search bar query terms as soon as you make them.
By enabling the "Empty searchbar when a query is submitted" option in Searchbar Autosizer, you'll never have to worry about a search term hanging around when you don't want it to. Since I rarely, if ever, use my previously entered search text when I start a new search, I really like this tip - if for no other reason than a dangling search can be compromising at times. In general, I'm thinking of when my girlfriend spotted a gift I'd be researching in the uncleared search bar. For the pervier among us, the auto-clear means your friends/parents/significant other won't stumble onto your latest Google query for anya "deal or no deal".
ESR gives up on Fedora — The following letter was received from ESR, who has sent it to a number of Linux-related publications and mailing lists. It is presented verbatim, except for the addition of HTML code. — After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today …
Source: Linux.com
Author: Eric S. Raymond
Link: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/1340237
Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility — The fragmentation of widget platforms presents a problem for developers, who need to develop and then maintain different versions of widgets for the various desktop widget platforms (Vista, Mac, Google, Yahoo) as well as online platforms …
Source: TechCrunch
Author: Michael Arrington
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/21/netvibes…
Japan's Hottest Cell Phone Straps — In Japan, dressing up a cell phone is almost as important as having one. The cell-phone strap is an indispensable accessory that lets a person express individuality without flaunting it, and often tells a little story about Japanese culture and history.
Source: Wired News
Author: Lisa Katayama
Link: http://blog.wired.com/wiredphotos36/2007/02…
Microsoft seems to have left out from Windows Vista the ability to log in to your PC without logging out another user. While this was something that was technically only supported on earlier Windows Server products, there was an easy hack that allowed you to replace a dll file in Windows XP.
Okay, so why is this important? Well, if you want to access files on your computer, or install updates, or pretty much do anything while someone else is using your computer, you're pretty much out of luck. For example, say a family member's watching a movie using Vista's media center functionality in the living room, but you need access to the computer? You're pretty much out of luck.
On the other hand, if you could login from a remote computer without logging off the first user, one user could c ontinue to use the media center while the other user performs tasks in the background.
Well, as tends to happen when Microsoft leaves a useful feature out of their operating systems, the user community finds a way to enable it. The fine folks at The Green Button are working on a hack. Unfortunately one of the primary developers had his computer (with the source code) stolen the other day, which could slow the progress.
[via Missing Remote]
While Mac users have iMovie, Windows folks have a less straightforward choice when it comes to novice video editing software. That's the gap Movavi hopes to fill, with its promise of an all-in-one video post-production suite for capturing, converting, editing, and distributing video over the web or for your iPod. Broken up into six miniature applications for each step of the post-production process, Movavi's list of touted features are pretty simplistic and no-frills, but for users looking for the most basic video editing solution, Movavi might fulfill that need for a price of $59. Intermediate or advanced editors need not bother. Check out the full list of features here, and give the demo a quick spin.
Mac only: Backup utility Carbon Copy Cloner makes a byte-by-byte copy of your Mac's entire hard drive, or backs up folders and files you choose on a schedule.
The key to a successful backup plan is to actually do the backups regularly. When left to a human, the task often gets tacked on to the end of a very long list of other things to do. When you eventually have a catastrophe, the data is simply gone. You know that feeling -- you just lost six years of family photos. Your kids being born, their first birthdays, their first everything. The answer to this is consistent and regular backups, placed on a schedule and handled automatically by your computer. CCC includes that functionality, and takes it even further.
Carbon Copy Cloner's stable release, 2.3, is a PowerPC binary; Version 3 for Intel Mac's is available for download and testing, too. CCC is a free download (though donations are encouraged.)
All platforms: Editorial service Active Voice offers several attractive templates for printing up your Hipster PDA - that is, stack of index cards - to organize your thoughts.
Similar to the previously-posted D*I*Y Planner (which, incidentally, also has HPDA sized templates), Active Voice forms include a grocery list, calendar, reminder captures (with neat icons for "to email," "to remember," "to file," etc), and book citations (with space for page, paragraph and quote.) The templates are a PNG files ready for printing onto a stack of cards, and they're a free download.
Tax time is right around the corner, and as the W-2's, 1099's, and countless other numbered forms gather in our mailbox, the perennial question raises itself again: Should I hire someone to do my taxes for me?
The Queercents money blog has a 9-point evaluation that'll help you figure out the right answer for you. One good reason for going for it:
Developing rapport with a tax pro now eliminates scrambling for reliable advice when your tax questions arise. This is crucial if you own a business or are self-employed. A trusted tax advisor can even save you money by alerting you to your eligible deductions and providing customized strategies for your success.
Having someone to ask tax questions throughout the year really is an advantage to plunking down the cash for a tax pro. How did you decide to hire or forego help with your income tax? Let us know in the comments.
If your toothbrush is looking grody these days, you're not replacing it often enough. Smart Money offers a list of common household items and how often they should be replaced.
Toothbrushes? Every 3 months. Cosmetics? Between 3 months and 2 years. Running shoes? Every 300 to 500 miles. This one will have you wondering exactly how long you've had those air filters in your heater after all. Thanks, Catherine!
Fashion phone with exclusive accessories to be unveiled at Paris Fashion Week — Espoo, Finland - Drawing upon the accolades of its highly regarded L'Amour Collection, Nokia has joined creative forces with talented fashion designer Giambattista Valli to craft the Nokia 7373 Special Edition.
Source: Nokia
Link: http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1106827
A new copyright battlefield: Veoh Networks — news analysis One of the last places you might expect to find copyright violations is on a Web site backed by Time Warner and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. — Nonetheless, Veoh Networks CEO Dmitry Shapiro acknowledges that only a week …
Source: CNET News.com
Author: Greg Sandoval
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-6160860.html
Google-CBS Deal Dead For Now; YouTube's Tough Going With TV Networks — The wide-ranging and widely-expected Google-CBS deal, supposed to have been announced at CES last month, is dead for now, reports WSJ in a long and detailed story on Google's difficulties on working with TV networks and other media companies.
Source: PaidContent
Author: Rafat Ali
Link: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-google-cbs-deal…
I would like to announce a slight shift in how we handle our image and design-related tips here at Download Squad. As a multimedia student myself, and with all the new talent we've been so fortunately gaining over the past weeks and months, we realized that we have a lot of general design talent to share with you readers that quickly surpasses the boundaries of mere 'imaging.' So as of today, our Imaging Tips series has evolved into a new, twice-weekly Design Tips series that will allow us to stretch our mice and expand our minds into video, illustration, web, motion graphics and a whole lot more. Look for tips, techniques, apps, plugins and linkage surrounding the whole world of design from here on out.
Web site Maximum PC describes how to add the latest service pack and a few drivers (like RAID or SATA drivers) to your original Windows CD to speed up the process of a Windows installation.
Although Vista is the way of Windows future, most of a us will be on XP for at least a little while longer. Next time you need to install or re-install Windows XP, this method should help you do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. It's somewhat of a complicated process, but the article breaks it down into detailed steps, so almost anyone should be able to do it. For another take, you might want to check out the unattended Windows install.
Google Velocity: Froogle and Local are dying while Video and Blog are surging — Google has been criticized for being unable to succeed beyond its core Web Search offering. Last year Forbes "graded Google" and didn't give the internet superstar high marks beyond the core web search products.
Source: Compete Blog
Author: Jeremy Crane
Link: http://blog.compete.com/2007/02/20/google-properties…
Yaplet lets you instantly chat with other people visiting the same web site as you with the click of a bookmarklet.
We saw a sprinkling of this kind of third-party chat app for web sites about a year ago (namely Gabbly, Yakalike, and Peekko), but Yaplet's simple bookmarklet is a new take. That said, I'm somewhat dubious as to the usefulness of these apps. In theory, I love the idea that you can quickly strike up a chat with other people visiting the same site as you. However, I'm not sure anyone ever does it, meaning you just end up in a lonely chatroom. If you've ever taken advantage of one of these applications, I'd love to hear about it in the comments (i.e., the more obviously useful place for web site discussions). Thanks Modzilla!
Better late than never, right?
For years, Sprite Backup been considered one of the best 3rd party backup applications for Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile Smartphones. There's just two problems. It costs more than pretty much any competing program at $30, and up until now, there was no free trial available. That's finally changed, with a free 10-day trial showing up on Sprite's web site, but I think waiting so long to provide a trial may have lost Sprite some market share.
I don't have access to their actual sales figures, but I know that when I'm looking for new software, I invariably gravitate towards free software or programs that I can try before I buy. I picked up Spb Backup last year after using the trial software for a couple of days first. Spb hadn't been around as long as Sprite, but it was definitely a step up over the backup client that came with my PDA, and it's worked great for me for the last year. And it was $10 cheaper than Sprite, to boot.
I doubt I'm alone in preferring to try before I buy. So let this be a note to software companies: don't wait until you have competitors before releasing free trials of your software.
[via Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine]
Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor.
Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled EditGrid last week and touted it as 'better than Google Spreadsheets'. We said in that post that EditGrid is a feature-packed app that is best in class, but that it required partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful. Already it's integrated into start pages Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google Personalized Homepage, plus Salesforce AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. Now Central Desktop has integrated EditGrid too.
I spoke with Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia to find out more about the partnership. Central Desktop is a collaboration platform, similar to 37Signal's Basecamp. It's focus is on small-to-medium businesses, as an alternative to complex, traditional groupware products such as Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes. Central Desktop has what Isaac referred to as a "team level focus" and its features include collaborative document editing, Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. The addition of EditGrid means that users can also now collaborate on spreadsheets, in real-time within the Central Desktop environment.
What I especially like about this announcement is that it's a great example of how two small 'web 2.0' companies can partner in order to grow. We spoke last month about the partnership between Zoho (a Web Office suite -- n.b. also a R/WW sponsor) and Omnidrive (online storage provider). I'm sure there are other examples, but in this world of best-of-breed web apps it makes total sense for small web companies to partner. It fits with the general Web culture of 'small pieces loosely joined' and is also an effective way for the small companies to compete with giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The bigcos have the advantage of being able to connect all of their various properties together, so one way for small companies to try and combat that is to join forces. I hope we see a lot more partnerships between small web companies, because it's good for the Web ecosystem to have many successful small companies competing adequately with the big guns.
To investigate that theme further, I asked Issac what advantages Central Desktop / EditGrid combo has over, say, Google Spreadsheets. Isaac said that EditGrid gives them real-time technology and that it's essentially an extension of Excel. He said that its use in Central Desktop means it's being used in the context of a fixed workspace, which gives it an advantage over Google Spreadsheet (which is being used - ironically perhaps, given what I just wrote - in isolation to other Google apps).
We’re seeing some smart people create very targeted web applications and flipping them just a couple of months after launching. First was MyBlogLog, which launched in October 2006 and was acquired by Yahoo just three months later for a reported $10 million. Confabb may on an almost identical path. The company, which has created a social [...]
DIY photography weblog Photojojo has posted a simple tutorial for creating fun pop-out versions of your favorite photos.
All you'll need is two or more copies of the photo (depending on how many pop-out levels you want to make), some foam core, a ruler, and an always-useful X-Acto knife. This is a very simple project, but the results look pretty good in that DIY kind of way.
US copyright lobby out-of-touch — Internet law professor Michael Geist takes a look at intellectual property protection in the US and finds it somewhat out of step with the rest of the world. — The International Intellectual Property Alliance, an association that brings together US lobby …
Source: BBC
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6379309.stm
Odeo, an early pioneer among podcasting sites, is up for sale. Odeo's creator, Evan Williams is aiming to be open and honest about the sale, and wants everything out on the table so he's blogging about it. The creator of Blogger and the founder of Obvious Corp who is the web development company behind Twitter, admits that Odeo has not gotten the attention it deserves.
Back in the day, Odeo did receive funding, but when things didn't work out; Evan bought i t back and was trying to rehash a business model. Twitter has taken off, and they must spend their time with that application, so Odeo is on the market. As an alternative to a buyout, Obvious is currently looking at looking at different investment situations as well, from a cash offer to equity. The full Odeo pot includes selling the odeo.com domain as well as the studio.odeo.com platform, including all code, the brand, and a database of three million MP3s. So, if you're interested, drop Evan an email.
[Thanks Jordan Running]
Viacom lands video deal with Joost — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Viacom Inc.., engaged in a public copyright battle with Google Inc.'s YouTube, has agreed to offer videos to Joost, the Internet video service created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa. — Viacom said on Tuesday hundreds of hours …
Source: Reuters
Author: Kenneth Li
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews…
Mac OS X only: smcFanControl is a free menu bar application that lets you monitor the temperature of your Intel Mac and customize the fan speed.
Basically, you can set default minimum fan speeds for your individual fans to help keep your notoriously hot Intel Mactop from burning through your blue jeans. smcFanControl allows you to set fan speed profiles that you can switch on-the-fly, and you can also set which profiles to apply under certain conditions. For example, when you're running on battery power, you might want to lower the minimum fan speeds to increase your battery life. All the while, smcFanControl sits in your menu bar and displays the current core temperature and fan speed.
As a safety measure, you can't set your fans to any speeds below your Mac's defaults, so don't worry about going too low. However, you probably want to be careful about just how high you set the fan RPM default, since, aside from being noisy, running your fans at a constantly high speed might cause a little more wear than is necessary.
We covered cooling down your Mac laptop in a previous post, but it involved diving into and editing a few system files and wasn't terribly friendly about making changes. smcFanControl, on the other hand, is very easy to use. smcFanControl is free, Mac OS X only donationware.
Viacom, Joost strike content licensing deal — update Entertainment conglomerate Viacom has announced a deal to license its programming content to Joost, the online-video start-up created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa. — The deal, announced Tuesday, is designed to bring television …
Source: CNET News.com
Author: Caroline McCarthy
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-6160506.html
Looking for a way to chat with people that are visiting the same website you are? Yaplet makes it easier to chat with people that visit the same websites, and have the same interests that you do. Started by two college kids as a hobby, this application has been garnering so much interest lately that their servers exploded last week. Through their no installation and registration magic, Yaplet adds a chatroom to every website on the internet. Visiting a website through Yaplet adds a frame on the left of the screen where the chatting takes place, or displays a pop-up.
There are three ways to activate chat on a website:
PC World publishes a laundry list of irritants in Windows Vista, including the "anorexic" feed reader for the Sidebar and User Account Control (an official Lifehacker Vista pest):
We often worry about Microsoft playing Big Brother, but now it's playing Big Mother, attempting to protect you from your own rash impulses to run new software. Try to download a program, and Internet Explorer will block it. ("It's for your own good. You can't be too careful, you know. Who knows where that program has been!") Unblock it, and IE will ask if you really, truly want to download the software. ("These programs can be dangerous, you know. I just don't want you to get hurt.")
Other complaints include the slow and constantly-scanning Network Places area (yup) and Windows' assumption you'll only be storing your data in the Documents directory Vista set up for you (indeed). Any other Vista-behaviors make you nutty? Air your grievances in the comments.
Excel user Jason shares a few of his favorite keyboard shortcuts for navigating spreadsheets:
- Ctrl-Space - select column
- Shift-Space - select row
- Ctrl-Arrow Key - depending on which arrow key you hit, it will move the cursor along a series of cells
- Ctrl-Page Up, Ctrl-Page Down - cycles through worksheets
The third one is especially scrumptious for lengthy sets of data: throw in the Shift key and it will select the range of cells automatically. What are your favorite Excel key commands? Post 'em up in the comments.
PHP Security From The Inside — Stefan Esser is the founder of both the Hardened-PHP Project and the PHP Security Response Team (which he recently left). Federico Biancuzzi discussed with him how the PHP Security Response Team works, why he resigned from it, what features he plans to add …
Source: SecurityFocus
Link: http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/432
FORWARD COMPATIBLE - 2004 — Turn your Wifi Router into a modem. — Video: — Forward Compatible (FC) is a parasitic object meant to be attached to a Wi-Fi or fixed network router. The device monitors network traffic and when packets are sent, they are converted to audio …
Source: mee.tcd.ie
Link: http://www.mee.tcd.ie/~bruckerj/projects/forwardcomp…
Adobe released its first look at the newly re-branded myFeedz.com social news site on Friday. The website learns what users like and keeps up with interests in order to serve content. It all started when InterAKT launched their public beta last August, and sold to Adobe a month later. The service is now located deep-within Adobe's Labs, who have been on a web 2.0 kick lately. myFeedz is aimed at finding what's important for the user out there in the crazy overpopulated field of content feeds from the web.
myFeedz helps users kee p track of and sift through the endless amounts of information and trends they are interested in, all the while offering relevant information as to their interests. Users begin by importing RSS feeds from favorite websites using OPML, dropping a list of keywords, browsing articles by tags, reading, writing, and rating articles. Articles can then be saved and archived for later reading, and RSS feeds can be exported for you topic of interest.
The site was extremely slow during my testing. Still being in the "lab" format, little issues can be expected. I just hope they get things sorted out fast; This seems like a great little tool!
Continue reading dotWidget your way to a cooler Windows desktop
Multi-Meter Dual-Core displays a dual-core system's usage stats much like the CPU Meter that ships with Vista. There aren't yet many friendly apps that cater to that dual-core behemoth you just purchased, but this is one Vista sidebar gadget to join the team.
Multi-Meter Dual-Core has a plethora of different background themes to customize the gadget any way you like. You can blend it with the your Windows Vista background or choose some other shiny motif to suit your whim. It displays real-time info on both your cores, as well as your current memory utilization too. It is fun to watch this gadget g o crazy when you load Photoshop or some other CPU intensive app.
Continue reading Multi-Meter Dual-Core: Today's Vista Gadget
In this issue of Googleholic we cover:
After approximately a year of beta testing, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is ready for prime time. Photoshop Lightroom is a software application that helps improve the digital photo workflow by providing a central point to organize and adjust digital images. It is a compliment to Photoshop, not a replacement.
If you thought it was cool when Microsoft began giving away free downloads of VirtualPC 2004 last year, check this out. VirtualPC 2007 has been released. And it's also free.
VirtualPC lets you run multiple operating systems simultaneously from within Windows XP or Vista. New features include 64-bit host operating systems, hardware-assisted virtualization, network-based installation of a guest OS, and the ability to run virtual machines on multiple monitors.
Heres' the list of supported host systems:
Just two weeks after they ordered YouTube to take down thousands of videos, Viacom has reportedly struck a deal with another online video site, Joost. A huge point of the deal being that Joost claims to be able to provide copyright protection that YouTube could not for their video. While no financial details of the deal were disclosed you can be sure that Viacom is more than likely walking away with a pretty big chunk of ad revenue as well.
Joost is a video site from the makers of Skype and KaZaa that mimics a television station more than a video sharing site. User created videos will not be shown on the site in order to make way for videos by W arner and now apparently Viacom. Last week the site announced the availability of a new Mac client and they have recently announced deals to show National Geographic documentaries, classic cartoons, films from IndieFlix, and much more.
Joost is still in private beta and is only available for invited beta testers. You can apply to be a Joost beta tester here. Beta accounts are currently pretty scarce. I applied almost a month ago and still haven't been granted clearance.
[via TechCrunch]
Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb and edited by Richard MacManus
Late last week AOL announced its support of the open identity system OpenID, for all 63 million of their AOL/AIM Ids (for those looking for a quick introduction to OpenID, click here). The details of the announcement, via the dev.aol.com blog, are as follows:
This is an interesting gambit from AOL, which has generally been shifting from a subscription model (as it was in the 90's) to a rich media content/ad based business model. One of the ways they're doing this is by leveraging their access to the Time Warner content library. Opening up AOL/AIM user names via OpenID adds another dimension to this strategy. With OpenID integration, AOL hopes to find more uses for AOL/AIM usernames and therefore drive more sticky and consistent traffic to AOL.
How does it affect AOL/AIM users? With the OpenID integration, an AOL user will be able to login to a service provider that accepts OpenID, using their AOL/AIM username/password, without needing to create a new service-specific username/password. This is a great way for AOL to try and retain its once formidable (and still significant) user base, by providing an OpenID-based solution to the knotty problem of web single sign-on. So AOL user names will potentially be an entry into hundreds of different web sites and services, thanks to OpenID.
For the OpenID community, AOL provides a significant number of users - which could force more vendors to accept OpenID as a sign-on mechanism. One issue to keep on eye on is that this announcement could cause 'premature mass adoption' for OpenID, before it is fully baked. This could potentially expose OpenID to user backlash, because of its well documented security issues (see our analysis of the OpenID security issues here).
Still, AOL opening up OpenID to its 63 million users is a great validation for OpenID. On the heels of the Microsoft announcement, the AOL announcement builds further momentum for the OpenID solution, as the answer to the long sought after goal of Web single sign-on.
Let's hope we continue with this torrid pace, towards a Web where users don't have to create and remember separate IDs for each service they use.
New Zealand's biggest newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, has run an article about me in Monday morning's paper. It's on the back page of the Business section and is entitled Kiwi blogger logs on to make a living. This is the first time I've had any mainstream media coverage, so I admit it is quite a thrill. The article notes that Read/WriteWeb is currently ranked the 51st biggest blog in the world, according to Technorati, and that around half our readers are from the US (less than 1% are from my home country). There's also some advice from me about how to earn a living from blogging. Nothing too profound: find a niche topic that you're passionate about, then work hard and be very patient.
Thanks Simon Hendry and Alan Perrott from the Herald for the great story, and photographer Mark Mitchell (who took the above photo for the Herald). And regular readers may be wondering... I actually use a Windows machine for work, the beautiful Apple PC shown there is my wife's!
As for NZ Herald readers who have clicked through or typed in the readwriteweb.com URL via the newspaper, welcome! Our About page gives more information about this blog and its writers. If you're interested in Web technology, then feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to a daily email digest (see email subscription form in top right). We're currently working on a 'Best Of' section for R/WW, but in the meantime you may want to check out the Top 10 Read/WriteWeb Posts for 2006 and also these two popular posts: 2006 Web Technology Trends and 2007 Web Predictions. Those posts should give you a feel for the kind of writing we do here. Also feel free to email me for more information at: readwriteweb@gmail.com.
Last month we reported that automated text-to-voice service Talkr was put up for sale, by founder Chris Brooks. Well Talkr has just been acquired - by a company who found out it was for sale via Read/WriteWeb! The buyer is LiveOnTheNet, a Huntsville-based digital media company which is developing a new social networking VoIP product. They decided to buy Talkr because of its synergies with their new product.
The sale price is not large, just $25k up-front plus a $25k earn out for a 100% buy-out of Talkr. The low price (by industry standards) probably indicates that Talkr was more of a 'feature' than a business, long term. We discussed in our previous post about how Talkr struggled to get a revenue stream going, a common affliction of 'web 2.0' startups. And Chris admitted to me after the sale: "I've come away from this experience with a new respect for the importance of focusing first and foremost on revenue generation!"
But still it's interesting to see how LiveOnTheNet will implement the Talkr technology. LiveOnTheNet has been doing streaming webcasts since 1996, according to its History page. For example they produced the webcast of the 1996 Democratic National Convention and they were the first official webcaster for the Cannes Film Festival.
I spoke to LiveOnTheNet CEO Roger Schneider and asked him about the deal. He firstly told me how blogs played a role in the decision:
"For the record, we did indeed learn about Talkr via your blog… and positive mentions of Chris and Talkr in other blogs also helped us reach our decision to buy."
Robbie told me that over the past 10 years, LiveOnTheNet has "generated close to $50 million in online revenue, and over $20 million in the last 3 years." So it is a thriving and growing online business.
So how will LiveOnTheNet use Talkr? Robbie told me they'll be integrating Talkr into their new "embedded conference call technology". It's basically a VoIP product that runs in the browser via Java (so it requires no downloaded software, apart from the latest version of Java). They're calling this an "embedded softphone" and it will support live, spontaneous voice chats among lots of callers.
Right now the service is not released, but Robbie said that it will extend on Talkr's current functionality. He explained:
"...bloggers can sign up for the existing Talkr services and do automatic podcasts of their content, for example. And very soon, they’ll be able to place a new “Talkr” on their blog and conduct conference calls with their audience on topics of interest. Or even just let the audience talk amongst themselves about the blog’s content.
Also, a group of Web 2.0 blogs can all place a Talkr on each of their blogs, all pointed to a common conference, and all the audiences can share a single conversation on Web 2.0 topics.
These conference calls can be password protected (optional) and other things, of course."
As well as blogs, the service can be used on social networks like MySpace and YouTube. Future functionality will include the ability to mash-up the softphone with webcams, Meebo, Flickr, etc.
The new softphone-Talkr service will be supported by audio advertising, "with a simple pre-roll audio clip inserted as each person enters a conference call." That advertising revenue will be shared with bloggers.
Which brings us back to the main issue plaguing web 2.0 entrepreneurs today. If Chris was unable to achieve an audio advertising revenue stream from Talkr, how will it be different for LiveOnTheNet? Robbie told me:
"… a vital step for attracting advertising, as we’ve seen in the past, is getting a critical mass of viewership (“when you get to 30K uniques, we’d be glad to place some ads”). So, we’ll be tackling this with 2 products instead of just one and hopefully, giving bloggers an exciting new way to interact with their audience and fellow bloggers."
However these revenue expectations appear to depend on how the big Internet companies move forward with the nascent audio advertising industry. In particular, Google's announcement in December that they are expanding from text-only internet ads to audio ads. LiveOnTheNet sees this move by Google as an indicator that audio advertising will become a viable business model in the near future.
Overall, it seems like a win-win for both Chris Brooks of Talkr and the buyer LiveOnTheNet. While it was by no means a YouTube-like lottery win for Chris (he probably only covered his time and cost expenses with the sale price), at least he got a reasonable payment for all his work on Talkr. And I'll be watching closely how LiveOnTheNet goes about trying to create a revenue stream from their new softphone-Talkr product. How do you think they'll go?
In October 2005 I reviewed a potentially disruptive search engine called ePrécis, from Syntactica. Unfortunately it got shut down by Google (they "nearly put us out of business", said Syntactica President Henry Neils). But there was some heavy duty linguistic theory behind ePrécis and the good news is that now Syntactica is back with a new product, which looks equally promising.
iReader is a browser extension (for both IE and Firefox, and on PC or Mac) that lets you preview the content of a link, before you click on it. It's similar to the web previews products we reviewed back in January - Browster, Cooliris, Snap, and Sphere. Our conclusion in that post was that previews are good, if implemented correctly - because previews can save us a lot of time over the long run.
iReader (full name: iReader 2.0 Web Previewer) is probably the most sophisticated previews products we've seen on the market yet, because it doesn't just preview a webpage like Snap, or relevant links like Sphere. iReader actually studies the semantics of the content behind each link, and pops up a preview of that content in the form of a short list. The best way to illustrate this is to show you an example. Here is what happens when I hovered over a link in an earlier R/WW post:
As you can see, the preview is useful because it gives me a bullet point list of (hopefully) the main content in the webpage behind the link. This is called an “intelligent summary” by the company.
However there are some rough edges to the app. Sometimes the preview content doesn't seem relevant, as in this example (also from R/WW):
The link previewed there was about Talkr, yet the pop-up displayed content about AOL (which was a whole other post). Perhaps this was pop-up lag, but I did notice some funny results elsewhere too. Another slight criticism is that the pop-ups tend to drive you crazy after a while. Every time your mouse passes over a link, up comes the preview pop-up. That's distracting when you're browsing the Web. But it is a beta product, so you'd expect some rough edges.
However when it comes down to it, there's something about iReader that is attractive. In the press release which will go out later today, it states that iReader "is based on linguistic technology the company has been developing for several years." And indeed, creating an on-the-fly pop-up summary of the content behind a link - in an easily digestable list - is a clever thing. So give it a bit of time. And for those interested in the technical explanation:
"The technology behind iReader 2.0 is Syntactica Web Services, which can be embedded into a number of computer programs that process English language text – including, for example, those for search output, search indexing, or book indexing.
The iReader 2.0 technology works by quickly digesting archived information of a web page and providing the essential meaning, or sense, of the text on that page. The technology can also be integrated into Internet search engines to produce relevant abstracts of text information in real-time. “In short,” said CEO Neils, “this technology quickly compresses massive amounts of electronic English text into meaningful short abstracts along with a reference index.”
What's more, the iReader 2.0 “macro” is being offered on an Open Source basis for developers.
I think this is promising product, albeit possibly too much of a distraction when browsing. But check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.
The company SimpleStar released a new version of its PhotoShow product Friday and brought the popular photo and video sharing service up to speed with a number of developments pioneered by early adopters you’re more likely to have read about here on TechCrunch. The service now supports the social sharing and online categorization that’s typical of [...]
TextMarks will announce a new product tomorrow that allows publishers to charge people to receive breaking news and other information via text messages. It’s available now under a new “monetize” tab on the home page of the site. To use this, a publisher signs up for a TextMarks account and chooses a price to subscribers (either [...]
A new social network named Trusted Opinion came out of private beta over the weekend. It has the single worst logo I’ve ever seen ( a circle with a check mark and some unreadable text), and a name that suggests they are a bland reputation based service like TrustedID. But actually they’re a new recommendation-based [...]
Jyte is a new service that leverages OpenID to allow users to start a discussion on any “claim” they care to make. Other users can then vote and discuss those claims. Users can give each other credibility points regarding any topic by tag. It’s a nice, full featured site that could come in handy for all [...]
Geeks are known to live, literally, at their desks. Their workspace can become somewhat personalized and cluttered. Sometimes massively so. If you think your workspace is one of the best (meaning worst), hop on over to CrunchGear and check out their workspace challenge. Whoever sends in a picture with the most ridiculously horrible workspace wins [...]
Last week we saw first Yahoo! and then Dell launch sites that were largely acknowledged to be Digg inspired. Digg may not have invented the vote-on-news motif but it may have been most important in popularizing the paradigm so far. Now LiveSide, a great place to follow all things Live.com, reports on three European Microsoft sites currently [...]
XM and Sirius have confirmed their merger plans. The companies have a combined 14 million subscribers. The merger depends on shareholders’ consent, as well as approval by antitrust agencies and the FCC. I can’t imagine there’ll be a hold-up on this — despite the creation of a “monopoly” on satellite radio programming. As wifi starts [...]
Evan Williams, the man who co-founded blogger.com foundation Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, has put his beleaguered product Odeo up for sale. Odeo is a consumer facing audio service that’s been remarkably high profile about its struggles over the past year; Williams discussed mistakes candidly and bought the company back from investors in October. The site continues [...]
VideoEgg and its content delivery network Akamai Technologies have announced this morning that the two companies have passed 3 million video uploads together. Akami provides the webcam capture and video uploading service for users of some AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others. VideoEgg says it’s now serving 15 to 20 million video streams [...]
Kevin Rose, speaking here at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, just announced that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform. Don’t expect this right away though - adoption will begin “later this year” according to Rose. It’s definitely time to declare OpenID a winner and the hope for a single-sign on [...]
Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free — It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin's big idea—that there are important human motivations beyond what he called "reckless individualism"—is very relevant these days.
Source: Time
Author: Justin Fox
Link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171…
Dick Costolo Re-Blogging — When I first met Dick Costolo - the CEO of FeedBurner (well before I had invested in FeedBurner), he had a blog called SomethingICantRemember that had a hysterical "what would I do if I was CEO of Disney" post. Over the last three years we've become really good friends and business partners.
Source: Feld Thoughts
Link: http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/002187.html
Alexa Traffic Improvements Galore! — A few moments ago we released some exciting changes to Alexa's Traffic Detail pages. We are very pleased with the results and we think you will be too: — Where are users coming from Geographically? — This one is a biggie.
Source: Alexa - Web Discovery Machine
Author: Geoffrey Mack
Link: http://awis.blogspot.com/2007/02/alexa-traffic…
Back in early January I wrote a post called Exporting iTunes playlists to non-iPods? - Ask DLS. At the time, it turned out that there wasn't a good replacement for the tool I had been using to move both playlists and the actual sound files to my non iPod MP3 player. Now there is.
Many readers suggested iTunes Export as the tool I ought to use to accomplish my task, but at the time it didn't support copying files. However Eric Daugherty, the author of iTunes Export, was monitoring our discussion and decided to add the functionality I'd requested. He requested a more complete description of the features I was looking for, then allowed me to test a beta version once he had it working. I have to say that although the beta version was not feature complete, it worked perfectly for my purposes straight away.
Now Eric has released a new version of iTunes Export that allows you to choose between the original functionality (simply copying playlists) and now the opportunity to copy playlists including all of the song files. It works great. Thanks Eric!
If emoticons are so 10 minutes ago for you and you like to express yourself through graphics, Zlango might be your new language of choice. Zlango is a graphical language with over 200 icons consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. The colors are bright and fun and the icons themselves are witty - especially if you compare them to their smiley face replacements. Right now, you can use Zlango for the web and email, but if you're in Israel, Poland, and the Caribbean, you can use it on your mobile device. The company recently raised $12 million to take the Zlango language global. You never know, Zlango might become as ubiquitous as :).