Microsoft Synctoy is a must-have utility to help you synchronize files in different directories of the same computer or between a computer and external storage devices like the iPod and USB pen drives.
SyncToy supports wild-cards in file names (like *.exe or holiday_*.jpg) so you can decide what files are included or excluded during the sync process.Hi Everywhere! matches travelers to local guides in their destination city and then encourages both to record their experience in travel journals.
Many social networks or sites that rely on user created content face a chicken and egg problem -- you need content to attract users and users to create content. Hi Everywhere! definitely has their work cut out for them in this regard. The service can only be useful if there are a large number of people in many cities willing to be guides. The benefit for guides, according to the site, is that "touring with foreigners let you rediscover your home towns." (sic) That doesn't seem like it will be enough to attract a large pool of guides worldwide. How many people really have the time to show strangers around town pro bono?
Get an OpenID: Here's an easy way to get an OpenID that is the same as your blog URL:
Step 1: Visit myOpenID and create your profile - it will be something like xxx.myopenid.com
Step 2: Open the HTML source code of your blog / website and add the following lines of code:
<link href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" rel="openid.server" />
<link href="http://xxx.myopenid.com" rel="openid.delegate" />
Replace xxx with the user name that you created in Step 1. Save and you are done. Your blog URL is now your OpenID. Thanks Abhijit
Web Queries are simple but extremely powerful feature of Microsoft Excel that help you import live data from external websites into your Excel sheets - all you have to do is visually select portions of a web page in the browser and Excel will do the rest.
With Excel web queries, you can import information like Google search results, the latest CNN headlines, stock quotes, currency exchange rates or even monitor regular websites for changes.
Click the Yellow Arrows next to the tables that would like to bring into Excel and Import.
You can do a similar thing using IE - just navigate to the web page that has the data and select "Export to Excel" from the Internet Explorer contextual menu.
Once the data is inside Excel, you can do all sort of complex things like conditional formatting, sorting, create charts, etc. You can either keep that data static or set it to auto-refresh so Excel will automatically update the worksheet whenever the source web page changes.
Sourced from Digital Inspiration byRead the full article here: http://www.deeshaa.org/2007/12/14/the-new-education-landscape/
we are now living in an age where there is no shortage of content for learning. The challenge is therefore to somehow reduce the amount of information that a student has to internalize. This is a totally different challenge than what we faced earlier.So here in a nutshell is what we have to do. First, bring to the student only those bits of content that are the best. That means, we have to have a very efficient filtering system which rejects say about 99.99 percent of the educational content that is available. Whoever does that job is going to be very successful in the education business. The motto should be: Less is More.
I head the Delhi office of a Silicon Valley based startup called Uzanto. My professional energies are currently directed towards building a web based research software called MindCanvas.
Not too long ago, in a previous occupational avatar, I was a marketing professional. I moved through various positions in marketing, market research, business development & sales. My last stint was with PepsiCo (in their snacks food division). Prior to that, I worked with Asian Paints (India's largest paint company). Before my MBA, I worked for Godrej & Boyce (one of the largest Indian conglomerates) in their industrial division.
I hold an MBA (majors in Marketing) from the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), University of Delhi (batch of 1999) and a Mechanical Engineering degree from REC/NIT Jaipur (batch of 1996).
Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket.
The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers' needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks - entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions - Google's range of complements is expanding into ever more industry sectors.
Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, and giving away Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use.
To borrow a well-worn phrase, Google wants information to be free - and that is why Google strikes fear into so many different kinds of companies.
Virtual offices, where employees and co-workers can be located in any corner of the world, have become a reality. More and more businesses are keen on exploring the concept of "virtual office" because they save on office rentals, employee commuting costs and host of other "unnecessary" expenses.
While members of a virtual team do not meet face to face very often, they do frequently interact online for discussions, brain-storming and training sessions to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
The world's second largest stock photo firm, Corbis, will soon begin giving away free some of its high quality stock photographs to bloggers via a partnership with newly launched site PicApp. "We work with a partner so that those pictures are tracked, and if they're being used illegally, we can figure that out," said Corbis CEO Gary Shenk at the Reuters Media Summit on Tuesday, reports Reuters. "But as long as they are downloaded through this application, you're legit and you're ready to go."
Corbis has been making a major push this year to catch up to Getty Images, their chief competitor and the largest stock photography distributor. Getty is about three times as large as Corbis (in terms of revenue).
From WorkBook: Getting Facebook Ready for Work by Andrew McAfee
Worklight sells a server + software combination that sits behind the firewall, takes data from all manner of legacy enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, HR, etc.), and serves that data out "Web 2.0-style" to those who are authorized to see it (according to the company's existing policies). Web 2.0-style here means via RSS, Ajax, widgets, mashups, IM, etc. And now Facebook.
In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight's offering) just like he'd launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user's employer— let's call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers. A short description and screenshot of WorkBook in action are here.
Google did not announce it was delivering an actual branded phone, dubbed the Gphone. Instead Google is leading a broad industry partnership known as the Open Handset Alliance and is developing an open software mobile platform known as Android. Android is a fully integrated "software stack" that consists of an operating system, middlewear, a user-friendly interface, and mobile applications. (Intro video.)
Handset manufacturers who signed on are HTC, LG Electronics, Motorola, and Samsung. Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, and Research in Motion — are not involved as the so-called Gphones will compete with their own offerings.
Google's software will be freely available under "open source" licensing terms, meaning that cellphone manufacturers can use it at no cost and create their own features and apps to differentiate their products and services from others.Can different manufacturers, programmers, and third-party developers deliver Google-influenced phones that meet the needs of today's mobile, info hungry consumer? Or will Google phones be a mish-mash of user interfaces, half-baked applications, spotty networking, and other problems, which seem to plague Windows Mobile?
The world is waiting.
"Just like the iPhone energized the industry," Sanjay Jha, chief operating officer at Qualcomm, told the NYT, "this is a different way to energize the industry."
Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you've just made about last night's Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:
Source: Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube from Read/WriteWeb byYou should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags - two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!
Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections.
The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won't happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia
This Original Signal Web 2.0 frontpage is a human filtered content website. It shows only the best Web 2.0 related articles from the best Web 2.0-blogs.
Original Signal consists of two parts, the Single Page Aggregator pages and The frontpage(s). The SPA pages are made for fast headline scanning on subjects like Web 2.0, Technology and Internet. On the Web 2.0 signal, our visitors filter out the most popular articles which appear on this frontpage. So, are you fed up with your stressed out RSS-reader? This is the place...
And in case you didn't know yet: on OriginalSignal, we work with three colors for article-headlines: pink for new ones since your last visit, grey for articles that you already visited, and blue for the rest.
RSS Reader: Google Reader (with an ongoing interest in Bloglines Beta, Newsgator, and fav.or.it)
Google Reader has been my favourite RSS Reader throughout 2007, thanks to their continued innovation and experimentation. But the great thing about this space is that innovation is back: Google forced Bloglines' hand, but the Bloglines Beta is encouraging. Newsgator has never really stopped innovating and it's only the fact that I prefer a browser-based Reader that's prevented me from becoming a Newsgator fanatic.
One new RSS Reader to watch is fav.or.it , which is doing some innovative work including integrating comments. Also keep an eye on Streamy and FeedEachother (our review).
See 2007: The Year in RSS for more details on this market.
Start Page: Pageflakes, Netvibes
I use them both because they are fine products, well designed and always ahead of the curve in comparison with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo's similar offerings.
iGoogle does offer more gadgets, but the slick UI and constant developments in Pageflakes and Netvibes is what keeps those two at the top of my list of start pages.
Tech News: Techmeme, Original Signal
Techmeme is well known amongst tech bloggers and readers, quite simply because it's second to none in keeping up with tech news. Aggregating news on a single page, ordering it and having it constantly catching scoops as they happen - it's very hard to pull that off. Many have tried (TailRank, Megite, etc), but none have become daily addictions like Techmeme has for me.
Original Signal is another that I use a lot. It is a useful aggregation service of popular links, in a variety of categories. It's a very simple idea, but nicely implemented (with previews, ability to re-order, etc).
Social News: Digg, StumbleUpon
I use Digg a lot to monitor tech news - and of course it is an important traffic driver for tech blogs such as RWW. StumbleUpon is something I'm still getting used to, despite having been a user for a while now. By design it favors serindipity over tracking, which makes it different from most of the news services I use (digg, Techmeme, Google Reader, Pageflakes, etc). Still, it has an attraction to it - why else do I have the StumbleUpon toolbar on my browser? :-)
del.icio.us is something I use a lot too. Another one to keep an eye on is Sphinn, a small but influential social news site focused on search. And there is a new design coming for Propeller (ex-Netscape). Mixx is another getting rave reviews. So these may become regular visits for me in '08.
Reddit is another social news product worth mentioning, although I've always found its popular stories to be a bit on the frivolous side. Just my opinion.
From: www.readwriteweb.com
Overall, Zoho Show 2.0 is slick and compares well with Powerpoint; and has added collaboration features. Plus, not for the first time, it's one-upped Google - whose online presentations software is basic by comparison.
The UI changes focus mainly on improving the editing of presentations, which Zoho says now "matches that of its desktop counterparts" (by which we assume it means Microsoft Powerpoint). Also importing presentations has been upgraded.Social networks reach a much wider audience than blogs. The reason for this is that social networks are publishing systems where the content is produced automatically as the consequence of social interactions. For example, writing on a Facebook Wall is a form of personal publishing, but we just don't generally look at it in that way. We think of it as a message sent to a friend, but an aggregate of all the messages that we leave amounts to a chunk of our online personal publishing. Posting a photo or a video is no different, as it is an act of creating personal content.
Mixx was clearly built by people paying attention to user demands at Digg. Its popularity algorithm is said to be a simple one, according to Matt Marshall's coverage of the LA Times deal today, but there's a lot that's interesting about the site.
Here's my list of favorite features that you'll find at this very compelling site...
Yesterday, Yahoo! released the top 10 del.icio.us tags for 2007, and with they exception of "music" at #4 and "travel" a #8, they are exclusively related to technology (with slight license taken to include "photography" and "games" in with the tech crowd). Below is the full list:
While the list did include search staples like video, music, and travel, the inclusion of a Linux distribution as the 7th most tagged item of the year is telling: del.icio.us is still not mainstream.
Notably absent, of course, are tags about celebrities/gossip, sports, health, and major world news items. Those sort of things, which are massively popular each year among mainstream searchers, need to be present before anyone can seriously start to think about social bookmarking sites as a good basis for a search engine.
Of course, for those who wish to try, you could check out deliGoo ( review) or 50 Matches (review).
We've been working with and on Rails for the past four and half years here at 37signals. The sum of those efforts just got a new label today: Rails 2.0.
It contains a ton of good stuff. Lots of things regarding our love of all things HTTP. The RESTful angle. Multiviews. Security improvements. Lots of speed tweaks.
It's been a joy extracting all these features from their origins in Highrise, Basecamp, and the rest of our applications. Deriving frameworks from production code really is a pleasant way of arriving at something useful.
NoseRub is a protocol. Applications with the NoseRub protocol keep information about profile data for each of the contacts. These profiles get synchronised between the applications/social networks ... and can be used by any other NoseRub service.
NoseRub uses already available standards like OpenID, RSS and FOAF to provide the goal of having a truely decentralised social network.
Decentralised means, that people may be able to store their social network on their own server and those servers to interact and synchronize automatically. One company doesn't own your data and social network anymore, you own and control it.
From: http://www.nenonline.org/weeklyStartUp.do?method=fetch&businessFn=weeklyStartUp&weeklyProfileId=26
Brewhaha, housed in 1,500 square feet of sub-prime space in Bangalore, is not a coffee shop so much as a colorful, comfortable lounge where people come to hang out, meet other folks, and grab a lazy bite over a board game. Occasionally there's a band performing or a quiz competition going on. The menu ranges from pasta and lasagna to a variety of Indian snacks. But yes, there is coffee. Lots of it.
Sreeraman and Mansur bootstrapped the business with their personal savings and some loans from family and friends. "Our initial investment was about 22 lakhs," says Sreeraman adding that he was saving up for the business while working at Microsoft. The money went mainly into décor, equipment, and various other fixed items. "We hope to break even on the initial investment in two and a half to three years."
"The problem is that our opportunity cost is huge. I have not worked in a job for a year, so the niggling concern of whether this activity is worth the time pops up once a while," he says, adding that it is a concern shared by his parents as well, who were initially very concerned over his career choice. "Once they saw the finished result, they were a lot more OK with it," he adds.
What keeps you awake at night?"Funding," he says, almost immediately. "I think that's the primary concern. Whether we'll get funded soon or not, if so how and how soon, because these things are not entirely in our control," he adds.
Send us your information and contact details at info[a]nenonline.org
Your company should be founded in or after the year 2000 to qualify. NEN has final say over which startups get profiled.
All Weekly Startups are eligible for the Annual "Coolest Startup" Award, voted by NEN members. Award winners will be recognized at the Annual Entrepreneurship Week NEN Closing Ceremony and announced to the press.
How do staffers from a large hosting company unwind? A recent Thursday night found the staff at SoftLayer participating in an unusual group activity: a cable labeling party. Managers, developers and staffers from the sales, accounting and marketing departments got together after hours to sort and label all the cabling for the company's new Seattle data center expansion. Mary Hall has more at the Inner Layer.
It's an innovative approach, but perhaps more productive than other recent data center team building strategies, like playing Halo 3. And there were no reports of anyone trying to label cables using the Gravity Hammer. One thing's for sure: data center culture is never boring!
