Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

When Steve Ballmer walked away from the table on Saturday and withdrew Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo, was this all part of his tactic to ensure that he ends up with Yahoo in the end? Without knowing who said what, this whole situation has turned into a silly game of “well Ballmer said this,” and “well Yang said that.” Ballmer said Yang was the one that wasn’t willing to negotiate while Yang says he was in fact willing to negotiate and $37 per share wasn’t the lowest he’d go. This whole thing is getting crazy, and it’s about to get even crazier if the negotiating re-starts between the two companies.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock was authorized to call back Ballmer to re-start the negotiation process (why not Yang?). Tech Crunch’s Erick Schonfeld speculates that this could be why there was that small rally in Yahoo stock yesterday, which makes sense. Now that Microsoft has walked away, if Yahoo approached them to start negotiating again, we believe Microsoft would have an easier time of getting the price that they want at $33 per share, the ball would be in their court.

This fiasco has left Yang is in the hot seat and he needs to find a way to please some of the major shareholders who are currently upset that he didn’t reach an agreement. According to The New York Times, two of Yahoo’s largest shareholders were willing to sell for around $34 per share and they’re not happy with Yang. Gordon Crawford who is the portfolio manager for the largest Yahoo shareholder said, “I am extremely angry at Jerry Yang and the so-called independent board.” As you can imagine, he’s not the only one angry and there’s been speculation that litigation from some of the shareholders is coming. Yikes!

But now we turn to Bill Gates who in a press conference in Tokyo this morning, said “a lot of effort” was put into the talks with Yahoo and Microsoft has decided that the two companies would be better off if they pursued “independent paths.” Will Microsoft be able to take on Google independently or will they end up with Yahoo in the end anyways?

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Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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“Combined Surface User Interface” is a cool little patent application filed by Microsoft back in 2010, detailing the creation of a shared workspace stitched together by pico projectors attached to mobile devices. Users can interface with the projected area through motion captured on a camera. If the whole thing sounds a bit familiar, don’t worry, you’re not crazy. Earlier in the month, a patent application from Apple surfaced carrying the “Projected Display Shared Workspaces” title, detailed a fairly similar scenario. Interestingly, the two applications were filed a week apart, Microsoft’s on February 3rd, 2010, and Apple’s on February 11th of that year. It’s important to note, before jumping to any conclusions, of course, that the granting of patents in a case like this doesn’t hinge on the filing date.

Microsoft patent application details pico projected shared workspace, sounds vaguely familiar originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Aug 2011 07:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on May 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

It’s so easy to take hundreds of pictures these days, but what is someone to do with all of those pictures once they’ve been taken? With the increase in popularity of digital cameras has come an increase in online photo services for printing your photos and and sharing them with others. Today we’re going to be taking a look at three different services that offer the option for you to print your photos, but also do something a little more with them whether it be creating a poster, a book, or making a personalized calendar. The three services we’re looking at include Shutterfly, Winkflash, and Snapfish. If you have a favorite online photo service that you would like to recommend to others, feel free to leave a comment!

Shutterfly (link)

Shutterfly is a photo storage solution that has been around since 1999. Not only do they offer a storage solution but they also offer all kinds of options for getting creative with your photos and turning them into personalized gifts. You can also simply just print your photos for a reasonable price.

Below you’ll find their list of print prices, for example, a standard 4×6 photo will cost you around 19 cents each. You can also sign-up for a pre-paid print plan and you’ll be able to get those same 4×6 photos for around 12 cents.

What they offer:

• prints and posters
• photo books
• cards
• calendars
• t-shirts
• accessories (totes, purses, cosmetic bags
• photo DVDs
• frames and albums

They’re also smart because in the left sidebar you’ll see a “solutions” section. Father’s Day is coming up and Summer is a hot time for weddings, and so they provide links to gift solutions for those events.

If you decide you want to share your photos and projects, you can create a personalized web site through Shutterfly to share, connect, and collaborate with your friends and family.

Winkflash (link)

A couple of months ago I stumbled across Winkflash when they were having a fantastic sale on photo books. I decided to give them a try and I’ve been hooked since. One of the reasons I’ve been hooked is because of the promotions that they offer rather frequently. My only complaint is that sometimes their photo uploader has issues which can get frustrating. Other than that, they offer a lot and their customer service has always been fantastic. I emailed them with a problem once and received a response within an hour.

What they offer:

• photo prints of various sizes
• card and announcements
• posters
• albums and books
• miscellaneous things like calendars, mugs, mouse pads, coaster sets, t-shirts, tote bags, aprons, license plates, paper weights, baby bigs, key chains, and more…

Below is a chart of some of their print prices:

They also have a free sharing service with unlimited storage. This means you don’t have to worry about running out of storage space for your photos and sharing photos is simple. You can create folders, subfolders, and sub-subfolders if you’d like so that you can arrange your photos just how you’d like it. You can also move folders and the pictures within each folder around.

Features of their storage solution that you’ll enjoy:

• add tags to your photos to make searching in the future easier
• all photos are completely searchable
• download the high-resolution version of your photo for free
• add notes to your photos
• view your photos as a slideshow

Given that it’s a photo sharing service, they do offer a few different options for privacy settings. You can select to make your photos available to individuals, a group of people, or you can make them available to the public.

Snapfish (link)

Snapfish hasn’t always been a part of HP. They originally launched back in 2000 and then were acquired by HP in 2005. Here’s an interesting fact, as of last year, Snapfish is host to over 1 billion unique pictures and they have over 40 million members. That’s a lot of photos and a lot of members!

Like Winkflash, Snapfish offers 4×6 prints for just 9 cents each. Ordering photos continues to get cheaper and cheaper! They also have a promotion going on right now where if you’re uploading pictures for the first time, you get 20 free prints.

One of the really nice features about Snapfish is that they offer some editing tools like the option to crop photos, remove red eye, and adjust the contrast right from the site. This makes editing your photos before printing them easy and hassle free. They also provide various tips like how to shoot photos in the Winter and snow, and tips to avoid five common photography mistakes.

They too offer all kinds of different gift ideas including:

• photo jewelry
• posters and collages
• flip books
• photo books
• stationery
• mugs
• mousepads
• and more…

Wrapping it up

If you have photos that need printed or personalized gifts to give, Shutterfly, Winkflash, and Snapfish are great solutions. We know they aren’t the only solutions though, so where do you turn when you need photos printed?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I am a pretty organized person and I view hundreds of sites each day. Through all of those sites I find several that I will eventually come back to but I don’t want to clutter up my bookmarks when I will only view once more. That’s where notes come in.

For the past few months I have been using Google Notebook and it has been great. It offers me the ability to create notes on a Website and be able to retrieve them later. An extension is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer which makes it even easier to manage your notes without ever pulling up a Web page.

I have always used Google Notebook because I have never thought to search for another note taking solution. Heading over to the Firefox Extensions page helped me to find a few more that give Google Notebook a run for it’s money.

The first one that I came across was Scrapbook and it appeared to be very well put together looking at the screenshots so I gave it a shot. This extension is very unique because it will store your “note” directly on your computer. It does not send any information to a server which is good from a privacy aspect but may not be favored by people who constantly use more than one computer.

Scrapbook will also let you highlight text and even add your own comments. This is one of my favorite features of this extension because it will give you a floating window that you can move around and type your comments into. It even has a small amount of transparency to it so that you can still see the text located behind the sticky note. Very well done.

Okay, so maybe you like the idea of the floating sticky notes but you don’t want to store the site on your computer in order to use the feature. Then you need Internote. It allows you to place a sticky note on any site and you can choose from a nice range of colors for the background and text.

Internote also has a built-in manager which makes it easy to see all of the notes you have sprawled out over several sites. Then you can edit, print, or delete the them at your leisure.

Diigo is kind of a combination of all of the above. It has a Firefox and IE extension but they also offer a bookmarklet that makes it easy to take nice notes without ever installing a thing. Much like Google Notebook this service allows you to store your notes as either public or private. They are trying to become a large social network which means they really want you to store your notes as public so that their network will continue to thrive.

Unlike the other note taking solutions Diigo allows you to tag your notes. I definitely like that idea because finding that specific note later on will be a little bit easier. Another unique feature is the ability to simultaneously bookmark/note a site at multiple sources. Yep, you can bookmark a link at del.icio.us, Shadows, Yahoo, and more with just one click!

So those are the different kind of solutions that I had come up with. Browsers like Flock (demo available) and Opera (demo available) both have built-in note taking capabilities. That must mean this is a pretty highly requested feature. If you happen to know of another solution we would love to hear about it.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Back in May of this year, YouTube started the process of sharing the wealth and paying some of their top users for their unique video content.  More specifically, 100 high profile partners were accepted into the YouTube Partner Program and were able to make some decent money (reportedly thousands per month). YouTube has decide to expand the program and now more people will be able to haul away some Google cash.  Unfortunately it’s only open to those in the United States and Canada, and there is an application process that you’d have to go through and not everybody will get accepted. The good news though, is that those who weren’t a part of the program previously but receive many view on their videos will be able to start earning some cash.

In the announcement, YouTube says “we feel it’s important to reward our most dedicated community members: those who are regularly uploading original content to YouTube.” So if you regularly upload content and you’ve built a “significant audience,” there’s a chance that you’ll be accepted into the program. There’s no word on whether or not this will be extended to lower-traffic users in the future, but they have said that they will open it up to other markets in various countries soon.

Here’s a quick rundown on what you need to do to qualify for the YouTube partnership:

• You create original videos suitable for online streaming
• You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions
• You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users
• And as mentioned, you live in the United States or Canada

The whole application can be found here, and it just requires pretty general information. Given that Revver and Metacafe have offered similar programs for quite some time, it’s about time that YouTube gets this program movin’! It took them an awfully long time to get the program started, and quite a bit to open it up to more people. I’m curious how much money participants will earn, however, YouTube makes no mention of the specifics.

Thanks for the tip S!

Source: TechCrunch

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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