Microsoft Search Appliance In Response to Google Search Appliance

The upcoming Microsoft Search Appliance (picture above) will help enterprise customers enable Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 search capabilities without requiring any complicated set-up.

Mike Pallot of Microsoft says that Microsoft Search Appliance is "not a ploy to go head-to-head" with the Google Search Appliance or the pizza box shaped Google Mini.

Yet, both the Google Search Appliance rack and Microsoft Search Appliance for SharePoint Sever are designed for very similar needs - that is to provide search for common enterprise repositories including file servers, web sites, relational databases, CRM and other business applications.

More on TechNet.com, IT Week and Office Online.

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FaceBook Should Accept PayPal and International Credit Cards

FaceBook is no longer limited to campus students of US universities - there are over 27 million active users on FaceBook now and a good portion of that based may be located outside the US. [I know so many Orkut fans here who are slowly shifting loyalties to FaceBook.]

FaceBook has several paid services like FaceBook Polls, FaceBook Gifts and the more recent FaceBook flyers which require members to pay in order to use them - the only problem is that FaceBook has limited payment options.

FaceBook Flyers looks like a very effective medium for advertising - you can show up an image ad with a good 200 word description on various Facebook profile at the fee of $10 per 5000 impressions which is like $2 CPM - pretty decent rate considering the size of the banner and that it also allows images.

Unfortunately, if you are outside the US, there's no way for you to pay for advertising via the FaceBook Flyers service - it won't accept international credit cards - you have to be residing in US with a Visa, Mastercard and American Express credit or debit card to use this service.

By limiting the payment options, FaceBook may be limiting the number of advertisers. The day they add Paypal or even Google Checkout, the growth in small advertisers will be massive.

FaceBook Flyers | Thanks Orli

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Convert Family Photos into Great Videos with Walmart Movie Maker

Walmart has launched a Mini Movie software that converts your still digital pictures into very impressive movies with music soundtracks and Hollywood style image posters - it's like a mix of Microsoft Photostory, Windows MovieMaker and Muvee Autoproducer.

Mini Movie is a web based service though you need to download a storyboard software to select pictures and the theme of your movie - the movie theme could be a vaction, wedding, family outing and more.

Once a theme is chosen, you have to select six pictures from your hard-drive, and give a title to your movie. It will become immediately available on the Walmart photo center for viewing online or sharing with friends. There's however no option to embed your personal mini movies on web pages.

Going forward, Wal-Mart will launch this in all their stores allowing customers to create DVD movies from their personal pictures using Fuji kiosks. Walmart Movie

Related: Turn Video Clips & Personal Pictures into Stylish Movies

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Blogger Kicked Out of Stadium for Live Blogging the Game

This is unbelievable but true - a blogger had to leave the stadium because he was posting live updates of the NCAA baseball tournament game on his newspaper's website. Even his press credentials were revoked for the crime of "blogging."

The argument was that live reporting of a "game in progress" violated the broadcasting rights which were sold exclusively to ESPN and CBS.

The NCAA says bloggers can write about the game before it starts or after it's over. In between, they can blog about "the atmosphere, crowd and other details," but not about the game itself.

What's the next restriction for such college sporting events ? No carrying cameras or cellphones inside the stadium. No calling friends from the stadium for giving ball-by-ball updates. Wonder if the sporting associations can control the dozen mediums through which information can flow out of the stadium in real-time. 

"If I buy a ticket to a game and my brother calls my cell phone and asks what the score is, should I tell him that it would infringe on the NCAA's rights? "

Source: Chicago Tribune [behind registration firewall]

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Upload Large Files to YouSendIt from Desktop, Resume Broken Uploads

Sharing large files on the internet just got more convenient. Popular file sharing service YouSendIt now comes with a desktop uploader software that will allow you to upload large files from the desktop without using the web browser.

What's exciting about the new YouSendIt software is that it can resume uploads - you know the frustration when you are uploading a 100 MB file from the web uploader when suddenly the internet connection breaks or the browser crashes for some reason.

With the new YouSendIt uploader, that problem may be a thing of the past as it will resume file upload from the exact point where it broke earlier. Once the file is successfully uploaded and sent to the intended recipients, you get an email confirmation automatically.

For free YouSendIt accounts, the download link will expire in 7 days and the file will be available for 100 number of downloads. The max file size that you can upload is 100 MB while the limit is 2 GB for paid accounts.

YouSendit earlier released an Outlook add-in to help you email large file attachments directly from Microsoft Outlook.

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Your Email Address Is Also Your Phone Number with Yoomba

Yoomba is a new web service that lets you call or text chat with anyone in the world who has an email address (that means practically everyone) - no registrations or complicated setup required.

When Yoomba spots an email address on your screen, it will add two icons - one for making voice phone calls and the other one for instant messaging. (see a screenshot from my GMail inbox below) - this works for Outlook, GMail, Yahoo and other web pages.

Here's how Yoomba works - you provide your email to Yoomba and download a small client which is pre-activated and won't ask you to setup an account or login. When you click the Yoomba button near any email address, an invitation request is sent to the other person - he or she can download Yoomba and connect with you almost instantly over voice or text messaging.

Yoomba is based on P2P technology very similar to Skype. The one very advantage here is the ease of use and it bypasses the need of creating a separate id for chatting / web calling - the email address is id of you and your online friends.

Currently there's option to import contacts from other IMs like Yahoo, Skype or Gtalk but you can add your Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express contact in a click. You can also see the online status of your contacts inside Outlook. A promising service for sure.

www.yoomba.com [via email Press Release]

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A Great Day for Blogger Users Or Those Who Migrated to WordPress

Ex-blogspot users have a reason to rejoice - if you have migrated from Blogger to another platform like WordPress or TypePad, you no longer have to worry about your lost feed subscriber base.

Blogger now lets you redirect your Blogspot feeds ^# to any other feed service ^# in one simple step. Goto Blogger Settings -> Site Feed and type the new feed address. That makes this popular tutorial more or less irrelevant.

Basically if someone is subscribed to your old feed address, he'll automatically be redirected to your new feed which could be on WordPress, Feedburner, etc. Therefore your move from Blogger to Wordpress will be transparent to the subscriber base.

Positive Effect on Feed Count:

If you are using Feedburner, expect the Feedburner Chicklet to show higher numbers very soon. [Related: Count The RSS Subscribers Of Any Blog]

Blogger vs WordPress:

Google owned Blogger is fighting back to remain the top blogging platform. Here are some amazing things they have done recently to fend off competition from the excellent Wordpress.

1. Blogger Users can add polls which is impossible to do in Wordpress without the help of external plug-ins or widgets.

2. You can directly upload video clips from the web based editor of Blogger and that goes straight to Google Video - again not possible in WordPress.

3. Like WordPress, Blogger also provides comments feed per blog post or the entire blog.

4. Blogger can parse XML files directly - that means you can have Text Link Ads or RSS feeds on Blogger without installing any plugins or sidebar widgets.

5. The new search box of Blogger will help visitors search across all blogs / websites that you have ever linked to from your blog posts. Internally this uses the Google Custom Search engine but you can integrated this with Blogger in a click so anyone can make use of the Google Custom Search engine without having to worry about HTML code.

6. Google Adsense in also tightly integrated with Blogger dashboard making it easy for not-so-geeky users to add adunits if they using the default blogger templates. [Don't think WP allows advertising yet.]

The game is on. Blogger team have launched a Draft Blogger website to showcase more upcoming features in Blogger.

Disclaimer: I am a big fan of WordPress [site 1, site 2]  but still find Blogger more convenient to use and easy to maintain - atleast I don't have to worry about security issues or installing frequent upgrades.

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Simple Tweaks to Improve the Performance of your Windows PC

Here are four simple tweaks for your PC that will help improve your overall computing and internet browsing experience.

Step 1: Change the IE Concurrent Download Limit - Internet Explorer's default settings only enable you to download up to two downloads at the same time. Optimizing the download settings enables you to download up to 16 files concurrently from the same server.

Method - Open registry editor and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

Right click the right pane and select New->DWORD Value. Type MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and give it a value of 16. Add another DWORD using the same process - call it MaxConnectionsPerServer with the same value - 16.

Step 2: Disable Windows Indexing Service - The indexing feature consumes system resources, and may adversely affect your system's performance. By disabling the indexing feature, you free up disk space on your computer and may improve its performance.

Method - Goto Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Find the Indexing Service, right click and select "Disable".

Step 3: Resize your Internet Explorer Cache - The default cache settings of IE are configured to hold a large number of cached temporary Internet files. However, storing many small files on your hard disk consumes valuable disk space and can cause disk  fragmentation. Reduce the maximum size of IE cache to 128MB for optimal performance.

Method - Start Internet Explorer, Select Tools -> Internet Options ->General. Under Temporary Internet Files click the Settings button and type the amount of disk space to use.

Step 4: Windows Menu Display Speed - Menus are displayed on your computer according to Windows' default settings. By optimizing these settings, you speed up your computer's ability to display (and hide) these menus.

Method - Goto Start -> Control Panel -> System. Click the Advanced tab, and under Performance, click the Settings button. Clear the Fade or slide menus into view check box, and then click OK.

These excellent suggestions are based on a local optimization report generated by a tuneup utility that's available for Dell machines.

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Digital Still Cameras for Capturing YouTube Video from Casio

Camera manufacturers have found a smart way to get people to notice their new camera models - make them compatible with YouTube Video - atleast that's what Casio is doing to market their new range of EXILIM Digital Cameras.

Casio has introduced two new digital cameras (they are still cameras with movie mode, not digital camcorders) that record movies in Quicktime format (mov/H.264) ready for uploading to YouTube or any other video sharing website.

Like the standard Portrait, Night, Beach mode in normal cameras, these cameras have a unique YouTube Best Shot mode that captures and saves video in a format which is most optimized for sharing on YouTube.

The YouTube cameras from Casio will also ship with a YouTube uploading software that makes it easy to upload captured videos to YouTube especially when you have to upload multiple video clips in one go.

Detailed Specs for Casio EXILIM Card EX-S880 & Casio EXILIM Zoom EX-Z77 are available in the Press Release at Casio's official website.

Related: No-Frills YouTube Video Camcorder [Flip Video]

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Software Piracy Prevents Global Warming

This is a funny poster advocating software piracy to help prevent global warming. The logic is that you waste fuel when driving to the nearest computer store to buy software.

Instead of driving to get CDs, buying pre-packaged software from mega-corporations and wasting energy, you can help fight Global Warming by using P2P.

Most software companies now offer a download version of their software packages or you can order them by postal mail, why should you drive down to get the CDs. But do turn off the computer screen at night to combat global warming.

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Decrease the Boot Time of your Window PC

Does your Windows computer takes ages to boot up ? Here are some very simple "speeding tips" to reduce the Windows startup time:

Step 1: Remove program entries from your start-up programs list that no longer exist. Occasionally, uninstalling a program from the system does not remove its entry in the startup list, so that when the computer starts -up, it tries to load a program that does not exist.

Step 2: Defrag your hard-drive - When you start up your computer, Windows automatically starts up a number of applications. If these startup applications are fragmented, your computer's startup process will be slower. Therefore you may improve your computer's startup time with the regular use of disk defragmenter.

Step 3: Get Soluto for Windows. During the bootup process, Windows may try to load all programs listed in the startup folder simultaneously which could adversely affect the startup time. Soluto lets you decide the load order of various programs in the startup menu and you may also delay the loading of individual programs.

See: Make your Windows Start-up Faster

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Smart Pricing and Multiple AdSense Accounts With Different Names But Same Address

I had an interesting conversation today with the Adsense support team regarding Smart Pricing and opening multiple Adsense accounts. Here's a summary:

One Adsense Account Per Physical Address

AdSense publishers in certain countries (like India) can have only one Adsense account per physical address. For instance, if any of your family member creates a new website, they will have to use your existing Adsense account to monetize the site - Google will not accept Adsense applications from individual who have the same postal address as yours.

Maybe this rule is not applicable in all countries but if you're based in India, never create multiple Adsense accounts for the same postal address. Here's an excerpt from the Adsense rule book:

Multiple accounts held by the same individual or entity are subject to immediate termination unless expressly authorized in writing by Google (including by electronic mail).

I was searching a popular Adsense forum and saw the following questions which probably hint why Google has such a rule in place:

Q1: Can I open second account in GOOGLE ADSENSE after being banned?

Q2: I'm Legitimate and Google Banned my Adsense Account- So how can i create another Adsense account.

Smart Pricing Remains a Concern

If you share your Adsense account with your family member who has just launched a new website, there are chances of of getting smart priced. Here's a reply from the Adsense representative when I raised some concerns related to smart pricing:

I'm sure you know that Smart Pricing affects on an account level rather than affecting a particular website, based on it's performance.

Your website is an established blog, with quality traffic, and the chance of it getting Smart Priced is very low.

However, if you associate a new blog with your account, there is no guarantee on how it is going to perform, and based on that your account may or may not get Smart Priced.

Please factor in both these points, before you make a decision. If you are confident that the new blog will be akin to yours i.e. it will have great content, have quality traffic, and as a web property, it will be beneficial to our advertisers, then chances of it being threatened by Smart Pricing are very low.

As an Adsense publisher, you'll never know if the Adwords advertiser is getting the expected ROI for ads that show up on your site. Adsense numbers like eCPM, CTR or CPC are no indicators of Ad performance. So it's kind of a gamble but a consoling factor is that smart pricing is re-evaluated every week or so.

Would you comment about your experiences on sharing the same Adsense account across multiple web properties ? Did you ever feel the Adsense Smart Pricing effect ?

Related: Google Adsense Sandbox Tool (Web based)

The picture shows the Google Adsense team with the Long Tail dragon costume for Halloween - Google's AdSense team honors its advertisers and the publishers who host its ads; they are the epitome of the long tail - Credit

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Internet Typewriter - Write Distraction-Free in your Browser

WriteRoom is a popular writing software that provides a full screen writing environment so you can write or blog without any visual distractions. All you see on the computer screen is plain green text (that you have typed) on black background, there are no icons, tool bars or menu bars to distract your attention.

Related: Turn Microsoft Word into WriteRoom

Inspired by WriteRoom, John Watson has created an online version of WriteRoom that works solely inside the web browser - cross platform and requires no downloads or installation. Just write.

Press the F11 key to enter the full screen mode and start typing. Internet Typewriter will auto-save your work every few minutes. The font settings, colors and line-heights can be customized from the Preferences.

Update: You can also use Google Docs for distraction free writing.

There's a neat option to publish the text to your blog without leaving the Writer interface. Or you can save that as a text file to your hard drive. bighugelabs.com [Internet Typewriter] 

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LiveSearch from Yahoo! Better Than Google Suggest for SEO

AllTheWeb LiveSearch is a smart search service from Yahoo! that saves you a few clicks and shows relevant search results while you are still typing the query. There's no need to press the "Enter" key for executing the search query.

For every keyword that you type in the search box, LiveSearch will show (in real-time) related queries and spelling suggestions which may be very useful information from the SEO perspective.

For instance, type "iphone" and you'll immediately know that people on the web are searching for iPhone prices, reviews, accessories, launch date, unlocking iPhone, troubleshooting iPhone problems and places/stores where they buy the iPhone - this is so useful information especially when you have a blog website that covers all things about the iPhone.

While Google Suggest can also show similar information, there are two advantages with Livesearch. First, LiveSearch displays search results without you having to leave the current view so the suggestions are not lost even while you navigate the search results.

The second advantage is that while Google Suggest will only show alternative spellings that begin with the letters you already typed, LiveSearch suggestions may also include queries where the word you just typed could be anywhere. For our iPhone example, LiveSearch suggested phrases like "apple iphone" and "buy iphone" whereas all the phrases recommended by Google Suggest began with the word iPhone.

AllTheWeb LiveSearch | Google Suggest [Thank Nirav Bhaskar]

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Screen Sharing with File Transfer Inside CrossLoop

Crossloop, an extremely simple yet powerful software for sharing desktop screens, just got better. [If you ever wanted to fix mom's computer over the internet, all you need is CrossLoop.]

The new release of CrossLoop 1.10 has added a file / folder transfer feature allowing participants to transfer multiple files (and folders) of any size across computers via the CrossLoop interface.

[Say some issue on mom's computer is related to corrupt or missing .dll files, just transfer them through CrossLoop - no need to wait for email attachments or third-party sites like YouSendit.]

If the connection breaks during the file transfer, CrossLoop will remember files that have already been transferred and skip them when the connection is re-established.

The new CrossLoop has a view mode that will disallow the participant computer from gaining control over the keyboard / mouse of the host computer. Alternatively, the host can swap roles and become the attendee himself in one click.

CrossLoop is only available for Windows. Though the new  Crossloop release will work with the previous version, both parties need the latest version 1.10 is in order to use the above features.

Related Screen Sharing Apps: Yuuguu, MarraTech, Microsoft SharedView

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PageViews are History, Engagement Level is the New Mantra for Ranking Websites

Nielsen/NetRatings has decided to drop page views as a measure of site traffic and site popularity - they will now report the average time spent by a visitor and average number of sessions per visitor for each site.

Currently page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site, are an important metrics for attracting advertisers to a websites.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them.

This maybe bad news for Google Search as their main task is to "send visitors away" but should further boost the rankings of YouTube and other video websites. According to AP:

Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.

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Game On! TechCrunch Ex-Editor Launches BlogNation to Rival TechCrunch International ?

Sam Sethi, who departed ways with Michael Arrington following the Loic Le Meur (Le Web 3) controversy, has launched a new blog called BlogNation that will cover Web 2.0 technology startups from across the globe particularly Asia and Europe.

Understandably, BlogNation will not cover any startups based in Silicon Valley but they do have an army of technology bloggers to cover the start-up scene in most other non-US regions including China, Japan, Australia and Brazil. [content will be in English]

The TechCrunch UK site has been lying defunct ever since the departure of Sam though Mike did promise a June 1 relaunch which never happened. Ironic but maybe TC UK is headed to the deadpool and Sam has big plans to fill that void - he also has VC's to back the venture.

In related reading, Michael Parsons at Times Online has a good analysis of challenges faced by bloggers when they try to expand from being a one-man army to a media empire managing several writers bloggers.

Blogging is a performance art, like juggling. Some people can do it very well, but have you ever tried to manage a troop of jugglers? If the bloggers Arrington attracts are as good as him, they can quite easily set up on their own and tell him to go swivel. If they're not as good, we'll just keep reading Arrington.

And when Arrington is in meetings to discuss the page layouts for additional blogs and settling the awkward personality conflict between two people in his team, he won't be writing great stuff or networking with people to inform that writing.

This is probably applicable to all bloggers including Arrington, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore, Richard MacManus, Rafat Ali and now Sam Sethi who are expanding their blogging empires by adding more heads.

Related:  Former TechCrunch Writer Natali Del Conte

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African Elephants Spotted on Google Earth

This group of ten African elephants was spotted inside Google Earth.  In another satellite shot of Australia's Bondi Beach, they say the Google Earth pictures are so clear that you can almost read the designer labels on the bikinis.

Also see: God Sighted on Google Maps?

Related: Apple iPod Mine in Australia

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Save Any Blogger Blog as a PDF Document

There are several advantages of saving a blog website as a PDF file - you can read the blog posts offline, text search in PDF is very fast when compared with web search and above all, PDF will act as backup copy of your Blogger blog posts preserving even the blog images.

Related: Blogger Backup Software

To publish any blogspot blog into a PDF document (for free), we'll use a service called Blog2Print which is actually meant for converting blogger blogs into printed books - type the blog address, select all blog posts or the dates of the entries that you would like to include in the book, and choose whether the posts should appear in reverse-chronological or chronological order.

Though Blog2Print is a paid service, it generates a PDF preview copy of the selected blog entries that opens up inside the web browser - you just have to save this PDF file from the browser's cache to your hard drive. 

Internally, the Blog2Print services using the Blogger Data API requesting blog posts created or updated in a given date range. Blogger feeds are generally public so querying them does not require authentication.

Related: Print Blog as PDF with HP Printing Widget

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Find Why Your Website Slow to Load

"4 seconds" - remember that magical number ? If a web page doesn't load within 4 seconds, lot of visitors are likely to leave the website.

Related: Tricks to Make Your Webpages Load Faster

Now several elements of a web page (like CSS, Iframes, Flash, Javascript, graphics) can increase the page loading time but how do you pinpoint the exact culprit that slowing the site?

A normal HTML web page may have ad scripts being served from Google Adsense servers, Flash video player from YouTube, images from Blogger Photos and so on.

WebPageTest is a useful tool that mimics a web browser and generates a nice interactive graph detailing the load time of different objects (like CSS Files, Javascript, etc) which are included in the web page.

You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file. Objects that fail to load are highlighted in red.

See: Test the Speed and Performance of your Website

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