As I said in my post yesterday, things are moving fast in the business of blogs. Strong rumours yesterday, confirmation today. In a press release dated today, Six Apart announced that it has acquired Danga Interactive, the owner of Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount of stock and cash. The press release says that, with […]
Category: Software
Skype to introduce voicemail
Skype, the company behind the flourishing internet telephony network, has begun to experiment with a voicemail service, hoping to introduce new paid offerings to capitalize on its success, eWeek reports. The company confirmed on Tuesday that it was testing voicemail, which a spokeswoman said was scheduled to be rolled out in the first half of […]
Corporate governance fuels boom for enterprise software vendors
Business Week reports on the success of enterprise software vendors and their ‘corporate governance programs’ to fix internal accounting problems, which have become hot sellers in a booming new market: […] It’s a growth business in a mature industry: Market researcher Gartner expects spending on corporate-governance software to hit $6.9 billion in ’06, more than […]
New BlogJet version released
BlogJet is a very good offline editing application for your blog. I’ve been using it for some months (I reviewed it in comparison with ecto for Windows, which I also use, in September). Yesterday, version 1.5 was released (download link). I’ve just downloaded and installed it, and I’m writing and will publish this post with […]
New Skype for Windows released
Skype has launched version 1.1 of its internet phone application for Windows: Skype launches v1.1 for Windows and introduces the new Chat feature, allowing Skype users to hold multi-person or forum-style conversations with groups of people. Chat expands the existing one-to-one chatting and other instant message features in previous versions of Skype, and allows groups […]
New Yahoo desktop search, but I’ll pass on this one
Another entrant into the crowded desktop search market debuts today – Yahoo Desktop Search, available in beta for download now. I’m going to give it a miss. I’ve tried out just about all desktop search tools in the past few months – Google Desktop Search, Blinkx, X1 Desktop Search, Copernic Desktop Search, MSN Toolbar Suite. […]
Skype saves you money, period
I know I evangelize the Skype internet phone service a great deal as a highly cost-effective communication tool, and I make no excuses for that! I just concluded a call with a business friend where we both use Skype. I’m here in The Netherlands, he’s there in the UK. We chatted for 45 minutes, totally […]
Caveats with new Microsoft AntiSpyware
I’ve been using the new free Microsoft AntiSpyware tool released in beta last week. What impressed me in particular is it’s real-time preventative approach. Not only does it do what products like Ad-Aware do – searching, finding and killing nasty stuff on your PC – it also sits there in your system tray monitoring what’s […]
Blogging or ‘horrendous journalism’
My post last Friday with caveats about Microsoft AntiSpyware has drawn the ire of one person who read that post here as well as the one republished by WebProNews. An email today from Anthony Shields begins: Your article, which is also found in an email from WebProNews at their site, is horrendous journalism. That got […]
Always present with passion
In taking a quiet break from working on the PowerPoint presentation I’ll be using in my workshop at the New Communications Forum 2005 next week, I was reading the Financial Times online when I came to an article by FT columnist Jonathan Guthrie yesterday entitled Don’t be seduced by PowerPoint (paid subscription-only access). Guthrie says: […]
Linux: A very different business model
For its 31 January edition, Business Week has an intriguing story online about Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the Linux Unix-like operating system. The story has insight commentary on how the Linux open-source developer community works in conjunction with big-name ‘establishment’ companies, and the real threat Linux presents to Microsoft and its Windows family. […]
Skype is getting very interesting
A few weeks ago, I joined the Skype beta testing program for their planned voice messaging service. It is good! In case you haven’t heard of Skype yet, in a nutshell it’s an internet phone service that enables you to speak with other Skype users anywhere in the world for free, and optionally call normal […]
Maybe this is the future of search
Yesterday Microsoft announced the release version of its new MSN Search tool, and, as reported by CNet News, gears up for a marketing and advertising blitz to imprint its offering in consumers’ minds: As expected, MSN, a unit of the software giant, has taken its Web search technology out of the laboratory, and placed it […]
Getting generous with Gmail invitations
Is Google preparing Gmail for general rollout? Today I noticed that I have this little box in my Gmail account saying that I’ve now got 50 Gmail invitations. When I looked yesterday, I still had the link saying I had 3. And I noticed from a post by Josh Hallett that he’s also got 50 […]
How to use iPodder
This is very neat – a simple audio-visual guide on how to use iPodder, a program that enables you to manage your podcasts and, optionally, synchronize them with your iPod or other digital player if you have one. Lisa Williams has put together an entertaining 4-minute video that explains how. I followed the video and […]
Firefox NYT ad poster delays
As one of the contributors to the ground-breaking Firefox double-page ad in the New York Times in December, I ordered the poster version from the Mozilla store expecting to receive it in early January. A couple of emails in early January reported on delays finalizing and shipping the poster as corrections were being made (name […]
Skype has a problem with SkypeOut
My wife is a big user of SkypeOut, the paid-for part of the Skype internet phone service. Using SkypeOut for making international calls to normal phones saves a small fortune on our phone bill (see this example). We have family and friends in Costa Rica, so using SkypeOut to call there makes great sense for […]
New version of Feed Demon available
Via Chris Pirillo, news that version 1.5 of the Feed Demon RSS reader for Windows is now available. I’ve been testing pre-release betas for the past few months and can say it’s a terrific program. If you want a program that manages all your RSS feeds and, with this version, includes some superb tools for […]
Handling the email guilt trip
For me, managing email is one of life’s little chores that I never seem able to really keep up with. Outlook is my email program, but what I use as an indispensable tool to really manage it all is the excellent NEO Pro, a shell program that runs on top of and in tandem with […]
Use VoIP and go to jail
Last week, I posted commentary on problems using SkypeOut, the paid-for service offered by the Skype internet phone service. I used the example of my wife’s unsuccessful efforts to call numbers in Costa Rica, where we have family and friends. Since that post, something happened. All of a sudden, calls to the numbers concerned have […]