We’ve helped you find online word processors and spreadsheet apps, now it’s time for presentations. We’ve gathered up 13 online presentation creators to make it even easier for you to forget about doing anything offline ever again!
(more…)
I finally did it. I deleted my Facebook account. New York Times had an article about this [link]. A little bit of effort and some waiting and I got it done. I am now permanently out of the house of Facebook.
For those interested, the process involves deleting all your content and then writing to Facebook support to delete the account. In my case, I got an email back in a day and a half from Facebook support confirming that they had deleted my account.
I found Facebook to be a drain on my time without commensurate benefits. This may be specific to me but Facebook did not do it for me. I don’t need a platform or podium - this blog serves that purpose and I also write on the Gridstone blog. My social network is in the real world and on my IIT and IIM batch social networks on Ning. In my opinion, Ning does a better job and gives the group more control over their experience. And LinkedIn does a fine job on professional networking.
My Facebook network was turning out to be largely a subset of my LinkedIn network. Almost every ‘friend’ request on Facebook was from someone who was linked to me on LinkedIn. Accepting friend requests was therefore a near 100% waste of time. On top of that there were these Facebook app requests. Damned if you respond to them, damned if you don’t. Facebook was never the right thing for me. Maybe it isn’t meant for regular business types over 40. Maybe I just don’t get it.
Facebook claims that on any given day people requesting reactivation of their accounts is roughly half the number of people requesting deletion of their accounts. Well, this account holder isn’t going back. That’s for sure.
Some of eBay’s sellers are angry. They’re angered over the auction giant’s planned changes to its fee structure and feedback system. A portion of sellers are so angered about the no-ifs-ands-or-buts-like method with which the marketplace is enacting the changes that they’ve coalesced and have threatened to strike. And now they’ve set a date, reports Lenora Chu of Fortune Small Business.
Actually, several dates. The whole five-day week of February 19-25 to be precise. Yep, they’re striking on President’s Day. (Those among them who are American citizens, anyhow.)
One can understand their collective grievance. It’s not so much the alteration to the auction fees. It’s that they will no long be given the option to deliver negative feedback and commentary to buyers, and thus affect their public user ratings.
Instead, if conflicts during the sales process arise, sellers will be required to file tedious complaints with eBay’s Security & Resolution Center, a process guaranteed to take more than a few clicks for merchants big and small to accomplish.
Why is this change being made? Well, there is likely to have been more complaints filed with eBay’s SRC by buyers than sellers. Far more. So one would suspect that site administrators have simply caved to popular demand and are making it more difficult for distributors of various goods to send criticisms the way of distributees.
But it must now be evident to the company’s executives that the very public dispute over the proposed amendments has reached a level of serious concern. It does not help eBay at present for the media to be giving the most vocal of sellers upset over the imminent move. (February 20 marks the date the new rules are to be put in place.)
Will eBay eventually be forced to alter course and perhaps reverse its controversial decision? Yes and no.
The company will likely not perform a complete shift to the past. But it will presumably be required to make further edits to its feedback system, following which all users may be forced to jump through several more hoops than is currently necessary to register disagreements and objections. I reckon this would be a reasonable negotiation for all site members to make.
The tech giants appear deadlocked in their takeover tussle, waiting for the other to give in. A look at the strategic picture at this point in the game
There are two primary things that make sites, services and applications successful. Marketing is one. Design is the other. Let’s focus on the latter here.
Mind you, I don’t necessarily mean to say looks are everything. (Though visual appearances are no doubt important.) Rather, I mean to highlight the code beneath the candy coat.
Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM today announced a $22 million fundraising effort by Coverity, a software company that offers businesses the chance to check their code structures for weak links as they are created. And, frankly, I can understand how the specialist has managed to net such an investment.
It all has to do with impressions and execution. There are a lot of businesses - startups and well-established entities alike - who wish to prove themselves to be of a class greater than the competition. Businesses willing to invest a bit more to stand out for both potential and existing clients, and perform the best they are able.
Look at me. I sound like a motivational coach or a corporate strategist.
In all seriousness, those businesses looking to move ahead are of course interested in getting as much help as needed to “get the job done,” as it were. And some - particularly those which rely on software to pay the bills - get help from companies like Coverity.
So much help in fact that Coverity, having just received financing from Foundation Capital and Benchmark Capital, are claiming to be on track to produce revenue of $25-30 million in 2008. Yep, the same year the check(s) got written. Ambitious, huh?
Yeah, a pretty nice level to aim at. Yet, having been in business for five years now, Coverity has likely shown its merit to clients time and time again, and so I would peg its chance of reaching its goal as something quite possible - if not probable.
As in the culinary industry, success is in how you meld and manipulate your ingredients. Software designers know this all too well. That’s why a number of those designers - Mozilla and Cisco, to name a couple - seek guidance from Coverity. And why Coverity has gotten the green it has sought.
The 58th annual Berlin International Film Festival is currently winding down, and with it will go the sixth annual Berlinale Talent Campus, a workshop for 350 up-and-coming filmmakers.
Sara P. at YouTube Blog is filling readers and viewers in on “Garage Studio,” an opportunity for the students to work on original productions with well-known filmmakers such as Mike Figgis, the director of Leaving Las Vegas. Besides the normal week-long seminar filled with lectures, classes and panel discussions, Garage Studio lets the aspiring filmmakers work with state of the art equipment to make short films made specifically for the Internet. All four of the final productions can currently be viewed at this YouTube channel.
With YouTube running their own short film contest recently, and situations such as this one in Berlin, it is fascinating to watch how the market for short films has grown over the past few years. Once relegated strictly to film festivals, and running between feature-length movies on pay cable channels, short films were always difficult to find, an many talented artists suffered from a lack of exposure. If it wasn’t for venues such as YouTube, who knows if sizable audience would have ever gotten to see these films by the possible future stars of film making? We’ve embedded one below for you to enjoy (It Could Happen To You by Juliana Block), and highly recommend you check out the channel for the other three, as well as some behind-the-scenes clips.
If you happen to be feeling especially brave, the Campus is taking applications for the 2009 seminar now.
We love to cover new and exciting application launchers because they can really improve the productivity of a user. When we came across the free sTabLauncher for Windows we really felt like this is something a lot of people would love.
In a lot of ways it is similar to RocketDock and ObjectDock, but there are some things that really distinguish it from the others. As you can see in the screenshot above sTabLaucher has a tabbed interface for your various applications. This is something that RocketDock can’t do, and ObjectDock can only do with the $20 Plus version.
In sTabLauncher there is a very extensive tab configuration tool that is applied on a per-tab basis. for each tab you can choose the color, font style/size, tab shape/skin, and much more:
(Click to Enlarge)
The tab bar can only be docked along the top or bottom of the screen, but it can be positioned anywhere you want along those edges. The nice thing is that when the tab bar is collapsed along the edge you can make it extremely transparent so that the space isn’t really lost. The amount of transparency can be configured in the options.
Here are some other great features offered by sTabLauncher:
sTabLauncher Homepage
Note: There is a no-install version available.
Copyright © 2008 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Related Posts:
Are social networks healthy? That is what is now being asked by an increasing number of analysts today in response to the growing number of violent crimes and suicides related to the world of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and other sites.
In a so-called “Freakonomics quorum” arranged with six “wise people,” Stephen J. Dubner at The New York Times recently questioned if social networking technology has “made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective? And in a guest post published earlier today on Center Networks, Matt Harwood picks apart the more basic and straightforward question: “Are social networks responsible for teen suicides?”
The general consensus among all viewpoints expressed in both instances mentioned above is that social networks are on the whole beneficial, but do have their downsides. A summary which I can agree with.
As with most things deemed “newsworthy” in this day and age, anything representative of a negative occurrence or development typically achieves greater notoriety than anything positive. This is true when considering events ranging from the political to the technological and far beyond. So there is something to be said for maintaining a sort of sensible view of things that, upon immediate glance, appear quite shocking. (In some cases, rightly so, I should add.)
What do I mean exactly? Well, on the whole, I can tell you that the stories referencing an alarming number of suicides by young people in a particular region of Wales are very disheartening. They show that the influence of connections made on the Internet can be much more impactful for some individuals than had been widely perceived many years ago. So there is understandably a quest now being undertaken by privacy and health advocates to emphasize caution to network users and push network developers to incorporate into member accounts more powerful monitors and controls to try to remedy the present situation.
But the subjects of convenience and unparalleled user empowerment - in both social and economic senses - that must also be given a fair shake. The good must be measured for what it offers as well as does the bad.
And in the social networking universe, the advantages outweigh the faults. Exploits must be addressed, absolutely. But networks are inherently great devices. Though a percentage of Web users find them useless, redundant, and banal, tens of millions have found such services to expedite tasks - for work or personal purposes - and essentially streamline their lives significantly. There is, after all, something important to saving time and energy. That is what allows for individual and societal advancement.
So, while social networks do need further development to prioritize user happiness and safety, it behooves us to take any disconcerting and unfortunate headlines extracted from the realm of “BeboSpacebook” and hold them in perspective.
Some advise to concerned parents: If the use of social networks online by your children worries you, don’t do the instinctual. Don’t restrict them from those sites. Instead, teach them (as well as yourselves) as much as possible about any and all networks. Knowledge is a fantastic repellant of ignorance and disastrous behavior.
In a highly unusual occurrence for Amazon, the company’s S3 storage service had an outage yesterday. It left many people scratching their heads. Late yesterday evening, the corporation has decided to take the open explanation path and let the public know what happened behind the scenes.
Nicholas Carr of Rough Type passed along the explanation that Amazon gave to everyone as to what caused this problem. It seems that at approximately 3:30 AM PST on the 15th, a user started sending a high volume of authentication requests through to one of the S3 data centers. Amazon saw this happening, but did not move more capacity through at that time. And when another customer slammed them with requests less than half an hour later, the downfall of S3 commenced. The authentication service was pushed over its maximum level, and it took them time to move more capacity into the right areas. Essentially they ended up with a denial of service attack.
Whether intentional or not, we don’t know. Considering the size of some S3 customers, one has to wonder how two customers could have suddenly needed to send that many requests through to the authentication server. (According to a supposedly leaked internal email that Mr. Carr shows on his blog, at least one Amazon executive wonders the same thing.)
As the S3 storage service is used by services as large as Twitter, this could have had some fairly serious ramifications if it had happened in the middle of the day.
While the questions are sure to linger for some time, Amazon is already taking steps to ensure things like this can not happen again. They are taking steps to up their capacity, build a service health dashboard for customers and add more defenses around the authentication systems.
It is refreshing to see a company being so forthright with their explanations and pointing out their systemic failings. What happened here should have been avoidable. Considering how they tout their service to be greatly scalable with superb uptime, they will have to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.
It seems comScore just can’t get enough of studying every aspect of your online life, and video is the latest target of their stat-crunching ways.
Leo Blanco of 901AM points us to their newest study about how users of YouTube engage the service and other video sites around the Internet. The heaviest users of the site, who spend an average of fourteen-hours a month browsing videos and make up 20% of their viewers, also seem to be the likeliest to head out to more niche-style sites, like MegaVideo.com and Youku.com, to see what they have to offer. In other words: online video addicts are addicts through-and-through.
The next level of users, who make up 30% of the audience, spend just over an hour a month on YouTube. Unlike their heavier using cousins, they tend to go to more destination-specific sites, such as ABC.com or CNN.com, for more focused video such as news or TV clips.
And the last group, who make up 50% of YouTube’s users, only spend a few minutes per month on the site. Instead, they spend roughly 13 hours per week watching ordinarily old broadcast television.
With the amazing breadth of content on YouTube, you have to wonder why people feel the need to go elsewhere to get more of their fix? True, competition in a marketplace is always nice, but what are these “power users” looking for that is so specific that they have to go hit up niche sites? Are they looking for better quality? Specific subjects? Or do are they simply so addicted to Internet video that they need more sources to satisfy their cravings?