Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

More tidbits on the new Comcast cap

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Thursday’s news about the upcoming 250 GB monthly cap for Comcast data subscribers left some questions unanswered. I shot a few of my own, as well as some from readers over to Comcast to get them answered. These are mostly items that did not appear in both the post about the amendment, or the otherwise […]

Napster won’t rule out a sale

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Beleaguered online music pioneer Napster announced to shareholders in a letter Friday that it’s still employing investment bank UBS, and may be positioning itself for “strategic alternatives” to keeping the company public–i.e. a sale.
The letter was sent on behalf of Napster’s board in order to urge shareholders to not vote for three activist candidates for […]

With ‘followers,’ Blogger gets–surprise!–more social

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Follow that blog!
(Credit: Google)
With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google’s Blogger did the same.

A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to display their “followers”–other Blogger members who have subscribed to […]

Yahoo Mash gets smashed, bashed, quashed

Friday, August 29th, 2008

My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.
(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the “ouch” category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.
An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, “Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun […]

Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband starting Oct. 1

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Starting October 1st customers of Comcast’s residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy that cap is now set at 250 GB per month, per account.

Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast’s customer service […]

Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Starting October 1 customers of Comcast’s residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy announced Thursday, that cap will be set at 250 gigabytes per month, per account.

Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast’s […]

The mob is my broker: Cake launching crowdsourced stock fund

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

The stock tracking and community site Cake Financial is getting some interesting new features, including its first branded financial instrument, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that rolls up the best stock ideas from the Cake communuty.
Cake CEO Steve Carpenter believes that of the approximately $100 billion that consumers pay for stock management services, “a lot […]

Digg town hall: Local news options, forums on the way?

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Digg has always made its message clear: it’s not social news, it’s democracy.
The company’s executive team–founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson–thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users “dugg” a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through “town hall” events webcast […]

Google Calendar gets more business savvy

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

If you’ve been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google’s efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed […]

Youtube gets closed captioning support

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

In a move to make videos easier to understand without volume or for the hard of hearing, YouTube has given users the option of embedding closed captions that show up as semi-transparent overlays. Caption files that have text dialogue synced up to the proper timestamps can be uploaded during the time of upload or afterwards, […]

Mozilla’s Google subsidy to last three more years

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Mozilla and Google have extended a search deal through 2011, providing some financial security to the backer of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

“We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income,” Mozilla Foundation […]

Why can’t they fix the Flash/Firefox bug?

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

An annoying and long-lived bug is preventing some users from viewing Web videos. There’s a workaround, but for many, the cure is as bad as the disease.
The bug is that Flash videos don’t play for certain Firefox 3 users on Windows XP or Vista, when using the current Flash player version 9. On YouTube, CNET […]

Get remote file access, management on your iPhone with Sugarsync

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Sugarsync, a pricey but excellent file syncing and backup solution has a new iPhone application that’s downright cool. It gives you access to all the files stored on computers linked up to your Sugarsync account. Better yet, it provides instant–and I do mean instant updates when a file has been touched by you or […]

Patents.com lets you search through ideas (good and bad)

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Got the next big idea floating around in your head but want to see if someone else has already come up with it? Digging through the mountain of patents on file at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Web site can be a bit daunting. To help in that search is Patents.com, which has an […]

Exploring Internet Explorer 8

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Robert Vamosi and I discuss the new features and browsing capabilities of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and how it stacks up with other browsers. The new release brings IE up to par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and even pushes Microsoft a little ahead of the competition in a few areas.
See also:
IE 8 beta gives […]

Accounting on the go: Quickbooks for iPhone and Blackberry

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Quickbooks, one of the leading accounting packages for small businesses, has just released web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone. The iPhone version, seen to the left, sports a very slick UI and allows easy, at-a-glance access to all of your financial information, entered into Quickbooks Online.
At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic […]

Kelley Blue Book launches site optimized for iPhone

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

KBB's new Web site optimized for iPhone and iPod Touch.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

Kelley Blue Book (KBB), the popular Web site that rates and provides information on motor vehicles, launched on Wednesday its new version that’s optimized for iPhone’s display (both the original and the iPhone 3G). The new site also works with iPod Touch.
iPhone users […]

Voice-activated text gets you to the Evite party

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

(Credit: Evite)
As of Wednesday, Evite’s Send-to-Phone text alerts–which let users get event details on their mobile phone–include a voice-activated directions service. Yes, the addition of direction texts means partiers have lost one of their top excuses for being late. That drawback aside, this free new feature could be quite helpful.

It works from any cell phone […]

Google gooses Apple’s Safari with Gears beta

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

As promised in May, Google has brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple’s Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline.

The company announced a beta version of Gears for Safari (DMG file download link) on the Gears users mailing list Monday.

“We would love for you to install it and […]

Mozilla Ubiquity, Microsoft IE8, and the fracturing of Web pages

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Mozilla on Tuesday released a public prototype of Ubiquity, a curious command-based interface to locating information on the Web and creating compilations of information from various sources. See: Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all.
At the moment, it’s most capable as a command-line browser. You press the hot key, ctrl-space, and you can just start typing […]

Agarkov IT news