News.com reports Google has launched a test of its new mail service, Gmail, and invited 1000 guests to participate.
Hotmail presently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit.
Update: Gmail has an About Gmail page, including a form field for signups.
The Segway Robotic Mobility Platform is a modified Segway Human Transporter designed as a base for your robot. The Segway receives commands through a dual CANbus interface. 100 pound payload, 8 mph top speed, 8-10 mile range. Available in April.
San Francisco Giants' SBC Park will become the first stadium with wireless Internet access, according to a press release yesterday. Fans receive free access for the 2004 season, but SBC plans to begin charging its standard $7.95 daily fee or $19.95 monthly fee starting in 2005, according to the San Jose Business Journal.
The Giants, along with partners SBC and Nortel Networks have installed 121 802.11b Wi-Fi access points to provide continuous universal coverage to all concourses and seating areas.
[A]ll ballpark suites will be equipped with HP computers, flat-panel displays and wireless accessories that provide internet access coupled with more exclusive content from the Giants Digital Dugout, including archived video footage and in-suite food ordering"
I was not able to find any documentation for resetting my MSN Direct watch to its factory settings, so I will post my findings here just in case another user would like to reset his or her watch in the future.
I have a Fossil FX3001. Two buttons on the left and three on the right. Press down all three buttons on the right side. Wait for the watch manufacturer's logo to appear. Keep doing this until the time resets to 12:00. The watch is configured to reset to factory settings if you reboot the watch ten times within five minutes. Cycle through the channels once you see the time reset. You should have time, register, messages, and calendar channels.
You can login to the MSN Direct site, click on "My Account", and remove the watch from your account. Note that you do not remove the subscription, just the watch associated with your subscription. If you buy a new watch with support for MSN Direct services you can associate the new watch with your existing yearly subscription.
Ice-Link hooks up to your car stereo's CD changer port and connects to your iPod's audio out and FireWire ports. Charge on the go and have access to all of your songs!
Last night's 60 Minutes featured a segment on DC United player Freddy Adu. Ben Olsen was interviewed as the veteran of the team. Why was Peter Nowak, his coach, and who also started his pro soccer career at a young age, not interviewed?
"Freddy's $500,000 salary from D.C. United dwarfs even the game's veterans. It has become a cliche that every rookie with a big contract buys his mama a house. Freddy may be the first one ever to do it...and then go home and live with her."
Tonight was the Corporate Blogger's Dinner. The attendees, starting to my right:
Venture Frogs had a strong wireless Internet signal. The conversation did not focus on corporations or weblogging but instead flowed, as it should, from one topic to the next. I learned that Microsoft showed off some new mobile weblogging software today at Mobile DevCon. Rodney Brooks has a robot summer camp for kids. We also discussed the weblog echo chamber, what do readers expect, do we care about those expectations, and what are the next big steps in software?
Saul Hansell writes about phishing scams in today's New York Times.
Brightmail of San Francisco, which filters e-mail for spam, identified 2.3 billion phishing messages in February, 4 percent of the e-mail it processed, compared with only 1 percent of its messages as recently as September.
Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online charged users by the hour. Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish, or phish, for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else's expense. After AOL switched to a flat monthly rate, the same phishing methods were used to steal credit card information.
I have used eBay's toolbar, but there is no explanation why your toolbar turned green to indicate you are on an eBay or a PayPal site. The toolbar also sniffs logon pages just in case you are using your eBay username and/or password on any non-eBay site and warns you this is a non-eBay site and, if this site is legitimate, you really should choose separate user names and passwords for each site.
The European Commission has concluded, after a five-year investigation, that Microsoft Corporation broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players.
Fine of € 497.2 million. Jupiter Research has a first take on the decision. Microsoft must provide a version of Windows XP without Windows Media Player. They must also provide interface documentation for server interfaces.
What does this mean for Longhorn? Pushed back another year?
Tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 7 P.M. is the Corporate Blogger's Dinner at Venture Frogs in San Francisco.
I view corporate blogging as a marketing tool to a user base in search of something more trustworthy than a PR spin. Mark Cuban's blog is corporate blogging. Why? It makes you more interested in the Mavericks. You fee involved, part of the action. Even if you have never been to a NBA game. How do you put a face and a name to a product people love or will grow to love? Weblogs help establish a community around your product(s) or company and can be an engaging customer loyalty tool.
Corporate blogging may already exist within your company, even if you are not aware. Someone at your company might be blogging. It might be a positive and/or negative view about your company and its products. How do you nurture the right type of personal publishing culture? What company topics are off limits to inside bloggers, and what would you like the world to know more about?
We will discuss these issues and many more while surrounded by Asian fusion and free wireless Internet access.
Mary Williams Walsh wrote a long article in today's New York Times about the relationship between money managers, plan sponsors, and the consulting firms who represent both.
Pension consultants sort money managers into asset classes and build databases using their own criteria to help trustees compare and select managers. Some consultants also sell their databases and tracking software to money managers and even sell advice on how to achieve higher rankings.
True. Like an Internet search engine, products must be sorted into asset classes and sub-classes. Callan sells its database and tracking software in the form of PEP. Wilshire has Compass.
Many consultants hold educational conferences for pension trustees. The trustees pay a modest admission fee or none at all; the costs are borne by money managers, who pay tens of thousands of dollars for the chance to attend and meet the trustees.
Callan hosts an annual conference at Pebble Beach. You tend to get higher quality attendees when you hold a conference at one of the top golf resorts in the country instead of a hotel in downtown San Francisco. Callan used to hold these events as educational forums for its employees. Now few employees are allowed to attend.
I am currently employed by Callan Associates, one of the companies under investigation by the SEC.
This week's Software Development Conference & Expo featured a panel of software experts discussing the past and future of software engineering. Susan Lammers, author of Programmers At Work, chaired the panel. Panelists were Dan Bricklin, Robert Carr, Andy Hertzfeld, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, Ray Ozzie, Jef Raskin, and Charles Simonyi.
Scott Rosenberg has a pretty thorough write-up on Salon.com.
Jena McGreggor discusses corporate weblogs in the April issue of Fast Company. Some of the uses mentioned, such as project status, seem like candidates for a wiki instead of a weblog. The article makes Scoble seem like a marketing arm of Microsoft, in the same class as Macromedia blogs. I would have liked to see mention of Scoble having a Userland weblog and not a MSDN weblog.
Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond right now.
A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer users' questions, and the blogs have grown into online communities that give Macromedia valuable customer feedback.
HP announced the HP Rugged Tablet tr3000 today. Can withstand 26 three foot drops onto plywood over concrete. Rainwater resistant. Up to 3 RF modems. It has a 8.4 inch screen and weighs 3.7 lbs. Starts at $3500.
I am enjoying Mark Cuban's new blog. An inside look at the industry from a well known source. During his 60 Minutes interview aired February 15, 2004 Steve Kroft mentions that "his email address is posted on the Mavericks' Web site so he can get feedback from the fans. He answers as many as he can during halftime."
In today's entry Mark Cuban creates a 360 degree view of reporter and his subject, and invites the public into an otherwise private conversation.
I told them that rather than providing any commentary or quotes to them on this matter, or on any upcoming matters, I would be posting whatever I had to say on my blog. They were not happy. "How are we going to ask you follow up questions?" I explained that he could email me directly or from the site, but that I would most likely post his question and my response.
Bathroom Mania has a new urinal, Kisses, "shaped like a woman’s mouth, dolled up with red lipstick, wide open and ready for business." Fashion Wire Daily reported on these new additions to the new Virgin Airways Clubhouse in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport.
Heath Row of Fast Company posted a partial transcript of Jonathan Abrams' keynote at SXSW Interactive.
A lot of people want to create a viral service. Friendster goes beyond this viral marketing that people talk about. It's something I call viral nagging. People get peer pressure from their friends to sign up, improve their profile, and change their photo. That's more powerful than anything I could do. Instead of a site like Match.com where you build a site and hope your friends find you, you build your site with them.
MEMRI, The Middle East Media Research Institute, has translated the full text of the letter the Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigades of Al-Qa'ida sent to the Al-Quds Al-Arabi newpaper. Their conclusion is the "statement does not seem to be an authentic Al-Qa'ida document."
int instead of long.
Adobe Systems announced today the public beta availability of Adobe Designer, a new point-and-click graphical XML form design tool for designing and deploying intelligent forms in Adobe PDF or HTML.
David Beckham was at adidas headquarters in Germany this morning to announce his contract extension and unveil his new logo to appear in merchandise later this year. Similar to Michael Jordan's slam dunk, the free kick is Beckham's well known pose.
Pew Internet and American Life Project's latest survey covers content creation online.
Some interesting findings from a phone survey conducted between March 12 and May 20, 2003.
It is interesting to note what has happened since May 20, 2003 that has most likely increased those numbers. AOL launched its AOL Journals service. TypePad launched. Blogger Pro became free. Weblogs became a part of political campaigns.
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »