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15 Fluid Apps You Can Build for Your Business - ReadWriteEnterprise
15 Fluid Apps You Can Build for Your Business
Written by Steven Walling / August 18, 2009 11:14 AM / 5 Comments
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fluid_logo.pngFluid is a simple application for creating site-specific browsers (SSBs) on your OSX desktop. Fluid definitely wasn't the first SSB project and was inspired primarily by the Mozilla Prism project.
The advantage with an SSB is that you can take almost any Web application you use heavily and get it out of your browser, reducing tab usage, avoiding crashes, and generally improving workflow. Fluid is really for anyone, but the low barrier to entry and the effect it has on productivity make it an attractive tool for getting things done. Though it's been around for a while, few businesses have really taken advantage of its full potential.
Fluid supports advanced features such as user scripting, but you don't need to be a programmer to get some decent apps up and running quickly. All you need to do is give Fluid a URL, a name for your app, a location on your machine, and an icon. That's it.
Email
Especially for Gmail and Yahoo Mail users, a Fluid app can be the answer to your woes. Programs like Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird are great, but they fail to replicate the true experience that Web-based email programs deliver.
It's super-easy to build and extend an email app in Fluid, and far superior to any of the AIR apps for Gmail or Yahoo. If you don't have the time to really trick it out, there's the shareware software Mailplane, which is also built on Fluid but has a few more bells and whistles. Correction: turns out Mailplane isn't built on Fluid, though it is an SSB.
Wiki
Giving you and your coworkers desktop access to whatever wiki you happen to be using is a definite win. You get the easy access (minus mobile) of something like Evernote, plus the infectious power of wiki linking and collaborative creation.
One of the real beauties of using a Fluid app for your wiki experience is that it works with almost any provider, from installations of free software MediaWiki
Everything You Need to Know About Microsoft Azure - NYTimes.com
Everything You Need to Know About Microsoft Azure
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By STACEY HIGGINBOTHAM of GigaOm
Published: July 14, 2009
Microsoft today unveiled pricing details for its Azure services platform — possibly because customers were reluctant to build an application on the beta platform without knowing what it may one day cost them. The platform is Microsoft’s leap into the clouds, and it’s an impressive first step, at least on paper, complete with competitive pricing and lots of concessions designed to get enterprise customers to shift over their IT operations. It also has the potential to become a platform as a service, which would enable far greater levels of control than current platforms, such as those offered by Google; or those tied to applications like Force.com, which allow programmers to build more apps that connect with Salesforce.com; or Quickbase, which does the same for users of Intuit’s software.
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What It Is:
* Windows Azure is a cloud operating system on which developers can build using .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Python and other languages. Doug Hauger, Windows Azure GM, said that in the future Microsoft will offer an admin model that will allow developers access to the virtual machine, although they will not have to manually allocate hardware resources as they might with a traditional infrastructure-as-a-service offering such as Amazon’s EC2.
* SQL Azure is Microsoft’s relational database in the cloud.
* .NET Services is Microsoft’s platform as a service built on the Azure OS.
What It Costs:
* There are three pricing models: consumption-based, whereby a custome
Online Backups Could Use Google’s Expertise - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Online Backups Could Use Google’s Expertise
By Ashlee Vance
Enterprise Computing
It’s all well and good that Google has promised a speedy, secure operating system designed for a Webby world. But why can’t the company — which buys so many darned hard drives — tackle a smaller project first and give consumers something they really want and need: easy-to-use, cheap data backup?
A so-called GDrive has been rumored for years. According to the speculation, this would be a service that lets people manage all of their files online – not just e-mail, photos and documents – and gives people access to their data from any computer with a network pulse.
It’s not a terribly novel concept, and there are ways to perform these types of functions today. Average consumers, however, certainly haven’t tapped into this type of technology in any meaningful way.
Even simpler than the GDrive would be an online backup service. And a number of people think that is where Google heads next.
“I see them getting into storage services now,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the former chief executive of Be.
There are a number of players in the online backup arena, including heavy-hitters like Symantec and EMC. Symantec claims that more than eight million customers store 32 petabytes of consumer data via its SwapDrive service.
Over all, the services are pretty easy to use and not terribly expensive. Right now, you can use EMC’s Mozy service to store an unlimited number of files for $5 a month. (Symantec’s SwapDrive comes in on the high end of the pricing scale at $280 a month for 10 gigabytes of space.)
Exactly what Google could do to beat that remains to be seen. It might, of course, opt for the free route as it does with so many services. And, if the Chrome OS ships as planned next year, Google would have a nice hook for promoting an online backup service. (Symantec has a similar hook today by attaching online backup to its security software.)
Over all, this market is begging for a company that
With Some Help From the Cloud, My 30-Minute PC Switch - NYTimes.com
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With Some Help From the Cloud, My 30-Minute PC Switch
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By OM MALIK of GigaOm
Published: July 12, 2009
Every so often, one (or more) of our readers chastises me for being way too Apple-centric in my view of the world. Frankly, I can’t help it. Why argue with something that looks great and functions flawlessly (at least most of the time)? That is how I feel about Apple, its operating system and its devices. Many of you also have complained that since I don’t use Windows, I don’t understand a big portion of my readers. Given that on any typical day about 65 percent of our readers are using some variant of the Windows operating system to access this blog, one can’t quite argue with the numbers.
So, I have decided to use a Windows OS-based computer for at least two days a week. I plan to go on an OS X diet on Friday and Sunday — not exactly super-busy days. I typically don’t like using my computer on Saturday. (However, since I plan to take the entire day off tomorrow, I am working this evening.) In order to be better informed about the Windows world (warts and all), I have turned to Lenovo’s ThinkPad X301, a 13.3-inch ultrathin laptop that comes with a built-in broadband connection — too bad it is AT&T, which makes it utterly useless. Instead, I am using Verizon’s Novatel Wireless EVDO USB 760 modem, which works like a charm. Lenovo was kind enough to install Windows 7 (beta) on the device.
Back in the day, when I used to own a PC (a Dell desktop, no less), I remember moving data from one machine to another was quite a chore, and it would take hours to get the files sorted out. Not anymore. In fact, it took me just 30 minutes to get set up and be productive. How did this happen? Call it the power of the cloud.
Given that I have a multi-computer life: iMac at work and Macbook for on-the-go computing, I am used to keeping my computers synced via Dropbox. I set up folders for each month
ScheduleOnce - Scheduling Software With Full Google Calendar Integration - NYTimes.com
ScheduleOnce: Scheduling Software With Full Google Calendar Integration
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By DARRELL ETHERINGTON of GigaOm
Published: July 12, 2009
We’ve covered a lot of scheduling software here on WWD. For example, I wrote about When Is Good, a lightweight solution that offered very basic, easy-to-access scheduling for busy folks, and there are many other services available, too, as apparent from the “Calendars and Schedules” section of this post. A new service, ScheduleOnce, advertises itself with the tagline “Find a time in no time” and claims to deliver “more scheduling power for your Google Calendar.”
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If I believed the hype from all of these scheduling services, I’d have to assume that we were all just careening around haphazardly, making and breaking so many appointments and meetings that we lose all sense of time and date. In practice, I think that most of the time the most scheduling software I need is my iPhone and its built-in Calendar application. That said, there are definitely times when scheduling using Google Calendar, which I already use for group-related activities, would make more sense.
Using ScheduleOnce’s Google Calendar Firefox Add-on, that’s exactly what you can do. Just install the add-on via the ScheduleOnce web site, restart your browser, and then log into your Google Calendar to get started. From there, you can use the ScheduleOnce control panel in your sidebar to pick Tentative Availability times which are then optionally connected back to your Google Calendar. Once you’ve chosen your available times, ScheduleOnce generates a link that you can email to
Heavyweights Google, Microsoft trading punches in digital face-off - The Boston Globe
Heavyweights trading punches in digital face-off
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | July 13, 2009
Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have been sparring with each other for years. This summer, the gloves have come off.
The two most powerful companies in digital technology are openly invading each other’s most lucrative markets: the office productivity software and computer operating systems Microsoft makes, and Internet search, which Google dominates.
Last week, Google declared an end to “beta,’’ or test status, for its online office software, Google Apps, as part of a new effort to sell the service to corporate users. Then the company said it’s building Chrome OS, a full-fledged operating system for personal computers that will compete with Microsoft Windows. It’s due next year.
Office software and operating systems happen to be Microsoft’s two core businesses, generating most of its $60 billion in revenue and $22 billion in profit in 2008.
But Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise services division, which targets corporate computer users, said Google Apps and Chrome OS aren’t about challenging Microsoft.
“That’s not how we think about initiatives and opportunities for the company,’’ he said. “We think about big unsolved problems.’’
Still, Girouard took a few potshots at Google’s giant rival, saying a stand-alone suite like Microsoft Office makes little sense in an Internet-linked world.
“Office is a fine product,’’ he said, but “it’s hard for me to believe that it defines the way people work in the 21st century.’’
In fact, Microsoft is working on an Internet-based version of Office and may reveal details today at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Microsoft executives were not available to comment.
Google said 1.75 million businesses now pay $50 per year per worker to use Google Apps, but most are small or mid-size firms. Large companies have proven more resistant, partly because until last week Google listed Apps as a beta product. “We were spending too much energy tryin
Why Bit.ly May Beat Digg - NYTimes.com
Why Bit.ly May Beat Digg
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By PAUL BOUTIN of VentureBeat
Published: June 30, 2009
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URL shortening services may seem trivial, but they’re a potential goldmine of information about what humans on the Internet, not automated bots, find valuable or at least interesting.
Compared to, say, Google Maps, the way a URL shortener works is blessedly simple: A human Web surfer or automated Web server gives Bit.ly a URL, for example http://www.verylongname.com/very_very_very_long_url.html.
In return, Bit.ly gives back a short URL that looks like this: http://bit.ly/YZLpD.
The user or server publishes the Bit.ly URL instead of the longer original, saving valuable space in a short update on Twitter or another social network.
At the same time, Bit.ly makes a note to itself that “YZLpd” should be translated to www.verylongname.com/very_very_very_long_url.html. Whenever a user clicks on the shortened URL, their browser sends a request to Bit.ly for, in this example, http://bit.ly/YZLpD. Bitly redirects the user’s browser to the long-form original URL on another site.
Earlier this year Bit.ly replaced Tinyurl.com as the service used by Twitter to automatically shrink long URLs inside its users’ tweets. Bit.ly’s auto-shortening lets Twitter users post links without overrunning Twitter’s 140-character limit.
Can you spot the potential business? As Twitter’s default shortener, Bit.ly collects an average 2 million new URLs per day — 100 times the number of URLs submitted to Digg. Bit.ly tracks 150 million clicks per week on its shortened URLs. The company wants you to think of those as votes, which would make Bit.l
Seven Apps Worth Buying Headphones For - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com
Seven Apps Worth Buying Headphones For
By Roy Furchgott
Mobile
With the death of Michael Jackson, radio has been deluged with all-day tributes. And no disrespect to the departed, but maybe you’d like to listen to something other than “Thriller” today.
Well, there are scads of apps for that. Of course, these virtual (and some not-so-virtual) radio stations often put up temporary channels linked to the day’s events. So if you want more Michael Jackson, there are apps for that too.
In general, these music programs sound and work best when connected to the Internet by Wi-Fi. They work O.K. on a cellular network, but just as with your phone calls, the audio quality depends on quality of the signal: At times music may not sound so good and dropouts can kick you off your station, something that’s really infuriating if you’re repeatedly dumped while tuning into your favorite show.
All of these apps are available for the iPhone, but some are available for other phones as well. Most are free, although some offer a premium service with extra features.
SiriusXM
Sirius and XM Radio: The satellite radio broadcaster has offered a iPhone app that is technically free, but it’s only usable if you have a satellite radio subscription costing $156 to $192 a year (there is currently a seven day free trial). While most of the Sirius and XM programming is available, the company has drawn fire over what isn’t, such as MLB Play-by-Play, NFL Play-by-Play, NASCAR Radio, and popular shock jock Howard Stern.
Wunder Radio: This $6.99 app claims to offer more stations than any other–rebroadcasting about 50,000 terrestrial and Internet stations–because it can handle music in a variety of formats (MP3, AAC, Windows Media or Real Media). Wunder has added a Twitter feature, so you can send song requests directly to the Twitter feed of station you are listening to.
FlyCast: Like Wunder, FlyCast rebroadcasts both Internet stations and terrestrial radio, with a total of about 1500 channels. FlyCast’s advantage is that it is less prone to dropou
Web Tools Leave the Cloud - Zoho Available for SharePoint - NYTimes.com
Web Tools Leave the Cloud: Zoho Available for SharePoint
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By ANTHONY HA, VentureBeat
Published: June 23, 2009
As online office software tries to move into big corporations, it’s starting to work more closely with entrenched solutions — which often means technology built by Microsoft. In the latest example, Zoho just announced plans to offer its collaboration services as an add-on for SharePoint, Microsoft’s server and software for collaboration and document management.
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Basically, that means you can use Zoho Office as the interface for collaborative editing of documents, while the documents themselves sit safely on the SharePoint server, behind the corporate firewall. The add-on brings a more web-like interface to SharePoint; rather than having to check documents in and out as they work on them, multiple users can jump into a document and edit it at once, and also send instant messages back-and-forth within their applicaiton using Zoho Chat.
This is a smart way to get Zoho into companies that wouldn’t consider making the full jump into online office applications, but want to experiment with these kinds of tools without sacrificing security or throwing away existing hardware. The financial investment is small, too — a 30-day trial period, followed by $2 per user per month if companies pay for a year, or $3 per user per month if companies pay by month.
Google is trying to accommodate Microoft fans too, most recently by integrating online office software Google Apps with Microsoft’s email program Outlook
30 Years After VisiCalc, Socialtext Unveils SocialCalc and Freemium Pricing - NYTimes.com
30 Years After VisiCalc, Socialtext Unveils SocialCalc & Freemium Pricing
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By STEVEN WALLING, ReadWriteWeb
Published: June 23, 2009
Disclosure: Socialtext is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.
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On the 30th anniversary of the original killer business application, enteprise platform Socialtext has brought wiki spreadsheet app SocialCalc in to the light of day.
Created in collaboration with VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin, the long-awaited app is the social successor to the Bricklin's original innovation. Begun in 2006 and now in public beta, its a more fully-functional enterprise version of the original conception of WikiCalc.
Along with the public beta of SocialCalc, the company has transformed its offering in to a freemium price plan dubbed "Socialtext Free 50." Socialtext is just one of a wave providers moving to a freemium model this year thus far, and the move by yet another leader in the enterprise 2.0 space would suggest the trend will only continue.
Social Spreadsheets?
Even with the genius of Bricklin at your side, why continue spend years developing collaborative spreadsheets when easy-as-pie alternatives like Google Apps exist already are available to the enterprise?
SocialCalc is more than just an online spreadsheet that a group can edit. It truly incorporates the design principles of wiki in to a spreadsheet for distributed teams; dynamic editing, wiki-style linking, and an easily accessible version history are all there.
SocialCalc also can smoothly integrate Socialtext "workspace" wiki pages in to spreadsheets an
Conduit Toolbars to Get More Content - NYTimes.com
For those of you who love browser toolbars, expect more options soon. Conduit, a company that lets web sites make their own, customized toolbars is letting its clients add a couple more features now. Sites can both syndicate their content to other sites that have Conduit toolbars, or include content from those sites.
Google, Yahoo and many, many other companies have their own toolbars, but these options might keep more people using Conduit. (Note: this form of toolbar is not to be confused with the in-browser toolbars used by Facebook, Digg and other services). Conduit already has some 60 million active users and 200,000 toolbars. And, the company says it’s profitable, via a deal with Google. It gets paid by Google to displays Google’s search box in every toolbar.
Here’s our previous coverage of the company, and some links to Conduit sample sites.
Are the Free Lunch Days Over for Web Apps? - NYTimes.com
Are the Free Lunch Days Over for Web Apps?
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By DORIANO "PAISANO" CARTA, GigaOm
Published: June 22, 2009
Editor’s note: With this post we wecome Doriano Carta to the WWD team. Doriano, better known as “Paisano” on Twitter and everywhere else online, has written for several blogs including Mashable, SarahLacy.com, PistachioConsulting and Chris Brogan’s Dadomatic.com where he is also the Editor-in-Chief.
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How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.
Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?
Proven Winners
Here are a couple of services that have found the right formula for success when it comes to charging their members. There might be some valuable lessons learned by examining these successful services to see how they managed to get their users to take out their wallets rather than their pitchforks and torches.
Flickr was one of the first sites to capitalize on the fact that its members needed its services. They knew that people love their photos and they would be more than willing to pay a small fee for the convenience of storing and sharing their precio
Online Stationery Company Gains a Fashionable Following - NYTimes.com
Your Invitation Is Not in the Mail
By CELIA McGEE
IN Washington, the same week Barack Obama took office, a young staff member for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice enlisted Paperless Post, a new online stationery service, to help put together a going-away party for her boss.
The interactive correspondence “was all anybody wanted to talk about,” said Sarah Lenti, who went on to work for Mitt Romney — the way the hyperreal envelope with the invitee’s name appears on the computer, how it reverses to the sender’s on the back, and then the pièce de résistance invitation pops out, so detailed you can see the paper’s grain. How intuitive it was to click on the RSVP and fill out the reply card. Zac Posen had used it for a benefit, as had some Diane Von Furstenberg folks, and the Young Friends of the Elie Wiesel Foundation were about to try it.
Paperless Post, which is in New York, is a venture of Alexa Hirschfeld, 25, and her brother James, 23. It enables users to design, send and track e-vites and other social summonses on the Web while maintaining easy correctness and a life’s-a-party air reminiscent of old-fashioned mailings. The siblings have handled 60,000 invitations since January, and 150,000 since their membership-based operations began last fall.
“The Internet has been a kind of vacuum in terms of aesthetics,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. “We wanted to leverage functionality with design.” So many people, she added, had gotten bored with such easy-virtue social tools as Facebook or Evite. The recession-related closing of Madison Avenue stationer Mrs. John L. Strong last month further suggests to the Hirschfelds that their customer base will expand.
The economic climate “definitely put the wind in our sails,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. “People say they would rather save $2,000 by not getting printed invitations, and invite four more friends to their wedding.” The fee structure for Paperless Post works on a sliding scale with the purchase of virtual stamps bearing the company’s carrier-pigeon logo, starting at $5 for 60 e
Take your garage sale to the Web - The Boston Globe
Take your garage sale to the Web
Auction sites and online marketplaces give sellers a way to unload unused items
By John Dyer, Globe Correspondent | June 7, 2009
Garage sale season is upon us. Time to surf the Web.
Sites like eBay and Craigslist have been popular among the technically savvy for years. But now, during the recession, anyone looking to clear their attics and basements to raise cash can consider hawking online.
Massive pools of buyers, secure online payments, and the convenience of selling from home make Internet commerce more efficient than planning a garage sale that could be rained out. To capitalize on those benefits, however, sellers need to take think about how to distinguish themselves, experts said.
Most do-it-yourself sales websites fall roughly into two categories - sites that enable you to pay a fee to list the goods you're selling, like eBay, and those that offer you a forum to hock you wares for free, like Craigslist.
Sites such as eBay operate mostly like an auction. The site offers items at a fixed price, with almost 90 million regular users shopping for everything from new computers to antique silver.
Amazon.com, Buy.com, and others follow similar models.
EBay's fees depend on the value of the item, with a $4 charge to list items worth more than $500, for example. And sellers also pay a fee if an item is sold. That fee is based on a sliding scale that would charge around $50 for an item sold for $1,000. Other charges are lower, like 15 cents to post more than one picture of an item.
Jim Griffith, a marketplace expert at eBay, said online sellers should take an afternoon to register an account and study the site, including watching an online tutorial at www.ebayuniversity.com.
"Take it slow and research first," said Griffith. "A lot of new sellers will make the mistake of rushing."
Before listing an item, Griffith suggested registering with PayPal at www.paypal.com, a company eBay owns that facilitates online payments using bank accounts or credit cards.
Sellers should al
Lexington-based VistaPrint Ltd.'s formula: Offer free business cards, then profit on reorders - The Boston Globe
For Internet printer, path to profit was free
By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist | June 7, 2009
At a meeting in 1999, Gwyn Jones pitched what he thought was a winning idea to the CEO of his Internet printing company: Why not offer first-time customers a box of 250 business cards, custom-printed just for them? And what if the business cards were free?
Jones and Robert Keane, CEO of Lexington-based VistaPrint Ltd., thought that if the deal could lure enough customers to their printing service, the volume would eventually drive their printing costs lower than any competitor's. While giving away business cards would cost the company about $20 an order at first (not including shipping, paid by the customer), if they could get to hundreds of thousands of orders, the cost would drop to about a buck or two.
"If the free offer could get customers to come," says Jones, a former VistaPrint vice president, "we'd get big and eclipse the other guys trying to do Internet-based printing start-ups."
It was exactly the same lose-money-on-every-order-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy that torpedoed hundreds of dot-coms. Yet in VistaPrint's case, giving something away for nothing built a profitable company that today has 1,600 employees and is expected to generate $500 million in revenue this year. And Keane, who has expanded beyond business cards and letterhead into digital services like website hosting and e-mail marketing, now talks about trying to follow the path of great business growth stories like Staples, FedEx, and Intuit.
One of the most anticipated business books of the year is "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson. Out next month, it delves into some of the ways companies have built businesses around giving their products away. (Google, which sells billions of dollars of advertising around its many free Web-based services, is one example.)
So how did "freeconomics" - a term coined by Anderson - work for VistaPrint? Keane admits that he was concerned about the cost of setti
CBS News to Let a Web Site Pick Up Its Live Coverage - NYTimes.com
CBS News to Let a Web Site Pick Up Its Live Coverage
By BRIAN STELTER
Seeking a younger audience more accustomed to watching the news on the Internet than on television, CBS News said Monday that it had joined with a live video Web site to simulcast its newscasts and special reports.
The Web site, Ustream, will show the “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric,” breaking news coverage and unfiltered news conferences and speeches. While CBSNews.com already shows many of those live streams, the news division says it hopes to expand its audience by providing video to third-party Web sites.
As their television audiences have stagnated, news providers have tried to connect with younger consumers on the Internet.
Reaction has been tepid to some efforts by networks in recent years, like afternoon Web-only newscasts. But some of Ms. Couric’s online efforts, including a YouTube channel and a Twitter feed, have been well-received.
CBS, which has tried mightily to make inroads as a top news destination on the Web, hopes it can make a dent by working with Ustream, which makes the video more interactive by allowing users to chat beside the live coverage and embed the video player on other sites.
“What we’ve realized is that, as opposed to just keeping all your content on your own Web site in a proprietary manner, we are better off pushing our own news content to as many sources as we can,” Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, said.
Mr. McManus added an important caveat: revenue. Media companies are increasingly willing to spread their video far and wide, but usually only if advertisements are attached. CBS said it would sell the ads on Ustream.
Local affiliates have expressed concern in the past about Internet simulcasts of network shows, but CBS has streamed the “Evening News” since 2006. On television, the newscast remains in third place behind competing offerings on NBC and ABC. In mid-May, the program averaged 5.4 million viewers daily, holding steady from that period last year.
CBS News’s Internet sites were visi
Bashing Bing, whacking Wave - NYTimes.com
Bashing Bing, whacking Wave
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By MIKE ELGAN, Computerworld, IDG
Published: June 1, 2009
Industry titans Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are getting rave reviews this week about innovative new approaches to Internet search and communications, respectively.
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Even Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak told a reporter that Microsoft's new Bing search engine looks "astounding" and that he's "a big fan, now."
There's much to like. In a nutshell, Bing does more to surface information you're probably looking for than Google does. For example, if you search for a company, one of the top results will present links to customer service, store locator -- that kind of information.
If you haven't seen it, go here to see the Microsoft pitch for Bing.
Looks great, right? What's not to like. Well...
Bashing Bing
If you'll notice, the URL for the video link above is: DecisionEngine.com. And that's exactly what Bing does better than Google. It makes decisions for you. Of more concern is that it makes decisions for all users. So what's wrong with that?
Well, nothing for you and me. For individual people, Bing is a nice alternative to Google and the other search engines. It can save you time and hassle for some kinds of searches -- no question about it.
The problem is how Bing might affect culture, especially if Google copies some of its features to neutralize Microsoft as a competitor. In other words, if search engines that made decisions for you is a trend, it's probably a bad trend, not a good one.
Decisions are -- and must be -- based on value judgments. To use Bing is to see the Internet through Microsoft's corporate values. For example:
* Bing brings "the best match to the top," not the most popular. In other words, Microsoft is overriding the democratic approach for an elitist, we-know-best approach.
* The demo vi
Q&A: Exporting Art in Google Docs - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com
Q&A: Exporting Art in Google Docs
By J.D. Biersdorfer
Question
I used the drawing feature In Google Docs to put a graphic in a document, but now I can’t export the thing as a Word file to get it out of the cloud. What can I do?
Answer
The drawing tool was added to Google Docs just a few months ago, but as with some new software, it can behave a little erratically. (For those who didn’t know it was there, open a Google Docs file, go to the Insert menu and choose Drawing; a box pops up that lets you make geometric shapes, lines, arrows and free-form squiggles that are then added to the document as a graphic.)
Google has made note of the exporting problem on its Known Issues page and offers a workaround for the time being.
The company suggests exporting the drawing as a separate Portable Network Graphics (.png) file first. To do this, select the drawing and click the Edit link that appears underneath it. When the image opens in the Drawing window, go to the Edit menu there, choose Export and save the drawing to your hard drive as a .png file.
Once the drawing file is safely on your hard drive, delete the image from your document and then export and download the file from Google Docs as you normally do. Once you have the two files outside Google Docs, use the Insert menu in Word to add the drawing back to your document.
Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price - NYTimes.com
Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies
Writers can sell their work via Scribd, encrypted against piracy.
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By BRAD STONE
Published: May 17, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.
The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.
In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.
Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and will introduce it next month.
Scribd hopes its more open and flexible system will give it a leg up on Amazon, which has become the largest player in the burgeoning market for e-books. Amazon sets the retail price for books in its Kindle store and keeps the majority of the revenue on some titles, which has publishers worried that Amazon is amassing too much control over the nascent market. Amazon also allows those books to be read only on its Kindle devices and in Kindle software on the iPhone.
“One reason publishers are excited to work with us is that they worry that pu
Digital Domain - Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door - NYTimes.com
Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door
By RANDALL STROSS
IF you try on a sweater in a department store dressing room, but choose not to buy it, a persistent sales clerk won’t pursue you into the street yelling, “Hey, are you sure?” Nor will you receive a call at your home the next day to check again if you want to complete the purchase.
But in the online world, visitors to Web stores who touch the goods but leave without buying may be subjected instantaneously to “remarketing,” in the form of nagging e-mail messages or phone calls.
A new Web service, called Abandonment Tracker Pro, is in beta testing and scheduled for formal release next month. Developed by SeeWhy in Andover, Mass., the service will alert a subscribing Web store when a visitor places an item in a shopping cart or begins an application and does not complete the final step.
What distinguishes Abandonment Tracker Pro from other services is its enabling of remarketing “in real time,” SeeWhy says.
The idea that a visitor isn’t entitled to leave an online store empty-handed without being pestered sounds distasteful enough. But having that contact start immediately seems a new form of marketing brazenness.
Abandonment Tracker’s remarketing depends upon knowing the e-mail address of the wayward prospect; knowing the phone number will make follow-up phone calls possible, too. (And if you’ve signed in, a store would be able to find you with the e-mail address you provided when you registered.)
Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy’s founder, says he advises Web sites to have visitors “put their e-mail address in at the first step,” to increase the likelihood that it will be captured.
When asked about possibly alienating prospective customers with overzealous remarketing, Mr. Nicholls said: “Tone and manner are important. The message should be something like, ‘Oops, was there a problem? Can we help?,’ versus an out-and-out hard sell, which will just wind everyone up.”
Technically, as soon as an address is typed into a box on a Web page, it can b
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