Canon and Microsoft Team for “Top 100 Photo Contest”

This article was written on May 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

microsoft contest.png

Canon and Microsoft have teamed up for what they’re calling the “Top 100 Photo Contest.” They’re offering a grand prize package worth $10,000, but they’re also offering other prizes including a 1st place prize and people’s choice awards. Knowing that many of you are interested in photography and you come from all over the World, we thought some of you would be able to take some pretty cool photos and might have a shot at winning.

Microsoft managed to incorporate Microsoft Virtual Earth into this by using it to point out their “100 ultimate photo locations around the globe.” They’ve divided the globe into regions which you can click on to view the locations, and then learn about different destinations. To enter the contest, you’ll need to take a photo that keeps with the “general theme” of the Top 100 Iconic Photo Locations around the World. They say this would include photos of historical locations, landscape and travel.

So what happens if you manage to take home the Grand Prize Package? Well, you’ll get $1,000 in cash, your photo will appear in the November 2008 issue of PCPhoto, you’ll get a pretty cool Canon 5D D-SLR Camera, Windows Vista Ultimate, Office 2007 Professional and Expression Media, and several other things. The main prize of the First Place package is a black and white filter, a tripod, Spyder3Studio from Datacolor and an Aero 80 bag from Tamrac. There are also People’s Choice awards which includes the Spyder3Studio software, an Aero 80 bag as well as a 16×20 print of the wining photo.

The only limitations for entering is that you must be 18 years or older, and live in the 50 United States or District of Columbia. You can submit up to three photos.

View the contest gallery here.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Walking Away All Part of Ballmer’s Tactic?

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

yahoo microsoft showdown.pngWhen 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?

Image Source

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CyberNotes: Online Photo Services

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

CyberNotes
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 logo.pngShutterfly 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.

shutterfly photo.png

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)

winkflash logo.pngA 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:

winkflash 2.png

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.pngSnapfish 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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You Got Comments Aids MySpace Addicts

This article was written on February 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

There’s no doubt that MySpace is one of the most popular social networks out there, in fact, it’s remained as one of the top 10 visited sites on the web for quite some time now. Some MySpace users visit many times throughout the day, often spending countless hours there.  Because of that, there are hundreds of web sites dedicated to providing backgrounds, themes, and other MySpace goodies.

Yougotcomments

One of the latest tools for MySpacer’s is a download called “You Got Comments.” In a nutshell, it monitors your account for you and checks for new comments, messages, friend requests, birthdays, and event invitations.  Essentially, many of the excuses people have to check back constantly throughout the day are eliminated with “You Got Comments.”

Yougotcomments1

You can customize the program by selecting the interval.  If you’d like it to check every five minutes, it will.  If you only want it to check once a day, it will.  This way you can keep up with all of the latest changes to your MySpace account.

So, if you find yourself constantly checking MySpace throughout the day, You Got Comments just might be a good solution for you.

Source: Mashable

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Sellers Can’t Leave Negative Feedback on eBay

This article was written on May 20, 2008 by CyberNet.

ebay negative feedback.png

eBay has really got their work cutout for themselves this time. They have decided, as expected, that it’s time to block sellers from leaving neutral or negative feedback for buyers. Oh, and to make matters even worse they are now counting neutral feedback left by buyers as a negative when calculating the feedback score, which is sure to drop the score of many sellers. A lot of sellers have turned the other cheek when eBay has jacked up their fees, but I think this move could very well be the tipping point.

I was reading through the eBay forum and sellers are already complaining about the negative feedback they are receiving. One instance in particular occurred from a new member who was going around purchasing things at random, and then instantly leaving negative feedback. That member was obviously suspended from eBay, and the negative feedbacks were removed, but this is the type of nonsense that sellers will now have to deal with. Plus there’s always the possibility of extortion, but eBay supposedly has that under control:

If a buyer uses the threat of negative Feedback to demand more than what was promised in the item description (e.g. wants overnight delivery but only paid for standard delivery) the seller should immediately report the buyer to eBay.

If there is clear evidence of extortion eBay will take action typically on a first offense. If a buyer shows a pattern of malicious behavior, eBay will most likely suspend the buyer. If we suspend the buyer, any negative or neutral Feedback the buyer has left for sellers will be removed.

I’m not a huge fan of what they’re doing here, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a large number of sellers looking for other alternatives.

eBay Feedback Changes Details [via Download Squad]

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OpenDNS Brings in $20K Each Day

This article was written on July 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

openDNS.jpg

OpenDNS is a service that many people swear by, and it’s become an integral part of the Internet for hundreds of thousands of users. With it you can filter content, protect against phishing, block adult sites, and even have it correct common typos in URL’s. For that reason we’ve seen businesses and schools alike flocking to OpenDNS as a central way to control the content accessible by its users.

According to TechCrunch they currently have over 500,000 registered accounts, but you don’t have to register to take advantage of their services. There are likely a lot more users than that since everyone doesn’t need an account, and OpenDNS has said that one particular school with a single account has over 36,000 different users.

OpenDNS serves up over 7 billion DNS queries each day, and they have to earn money one way or another. What they are doing is capitalizing on unrecognizable URL’s that are entered into the address bar by users. When that happens they show search results that are supposed to help users find what they are looking for, and along side the results are ads (highlighted in the screenshot above). OpenDNS gets requests for over 2 million searches a day, and for them that translates into $20,000 per day in revenue. That’s about $7.3 million per year. Not too shabby.

From what I’ve read most people don’t mind the ads intermingled in the search results, but what they would like to see is Google powering the searches. Currently Yahoo! is the provider they’ve chosen, and that’s likely because they offered more money than Google.

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Peepel: Microsoft Office 2007′s Online Twin?

This article was written on April 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Peepel
Click to Enlarge

I just got done playing around with a service called Peepel that is looking to revolutionize the way we use online documents. It is honestly the best looking online document manager that I have ever seen, but it looks all too familiar doesn’t it?

The entire interface is remarkably similar to the Office 2007 “Ribbons” that were introduced with the newest Microsoft Office 2007 release. For those of you who don’t have Office 2007 I’ll make the comparison for you…here you’ll see the Peepel tabs for a spreadsheet on top and the Excel 2007 tabs on the bottom:

Peepel vs. Office 2007

I guess Microsoft should be flattered that people admire their interface so much that they wanted to “borrow” some ideas from it, but they even copied the name of the labels for each section. I’ll go ahead and put the visual similarities aside for this comparison though, but I definitely thought it was worth mentioning.

Once you begin using Peepel you’ll quickly admire the hard work they must have put into designing the online suite. They have a spreadsheet, word processor, and calculator application that can all be tiled across the screen at the same time.  It is actually pretty nice being able to copy and paste things from one document to another without having to switch back and forth between the documents. It is the closest thing that I have ever seen to a normal desktop application.

Much like Office 2007 you can click on the oval Peepel icon in the upper-left corner to create new documents or cascade your open windows. Then there is also a task manager located on the left side that is extremely similar to the Mac OS X Dock where you can hover your mouse over the icons and they enlarge themselves. Clicking on any of the icons will then switch you to that specified document.

So what’s it missing? Well, surprisingly they don’t have any collaboration features yet so that multiple people can share and edit the same document. That is something most online Office services currently offer so I’m sure that will be coming shortly. Other than that it is a very well laid out program that is easy to grasp because of the Office 2007–like interface.

Here is a quick video demonstration that shows Peepel in action:

Source: Go2Web2

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CyberNotes: Extensive Free Flight Tracking With FlightAware

This article was written on August 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Weekend Warrior

Flight Aware is an extensive free flight tracking service that tracks flights live. Talk about impressive! Right now as I’m writing this, FlightAware is tracking 2979 aircraft with 27,215,352 total flights in their database. Just in the last 24 hours alone, they have tracked over 49,000 arrivals. It tracks both commercial and private traffic.
Flight Aware

FlightAware has only been around since March of 2005 and according to their site, they track aroud 600,000 flights per day or around 7 requests per second. Their website hosts arrival and depature “boards” for users who would like to participate in a discussion.  Besides the convenient way of tracking flights, FlightAware also has a few additional features worth mentioning.

First, for pilots they provide helpful airport information like airport diagrams or airport procedures.  When searching, you can either search by a flight number, airport code, or just browse flights. Another cool feature is that you can become a registered user (again, for free) but you get some extra benefits.  These benefits include flight data history going back 4 months (7 days for non-registered users), and you can receive flight status alerts via email, AIM, or Jabber.

I clicked on a flight that had just departed Chicago’s O’Hare International headed for Los Angeles.  FlightAware pulls up a map showing me the path it’s taken along with information like the duration of the flight (4 hours and 9 minutes), and the progress of the flight. At the time that I tracked the flight, it was only 12 minutes into the flight and had 1,718 miles left to travel.  Additional information it provides is the departure time along with arrival time, speed, and altitude.

Flight Tracker

 FlightAware is a great source to gather aviation data or just browse at the insane amount of aircraft that are up in the air at a time. They have a good visual analysis of a day in United States airspace. Clearly, between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm air traffic is without a doubt the busiest time to travel.  If you have a few minutes this weekend, check it out.

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My Way – Search Engine Without The Ads

This article was written on September 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

When I went to take a look at My Way, one of my first thoughts was that it looked a lot like the old Yahoo! I looked at it for another minute and realized it was really similar to any search engine but with one major difference…. there are no banners or overwhelming advertisements to get in my way. 

MyWay

They’ve partnered with some of the major search providers including Google, Ask.com, Yahoo! and LookSmart to form one compact search engine. They separate each search engine’s results into tabs. Talk about making good use out of tabs! My Way’s mission is to provide this service without the overload of advertisements. They compare the Internet as an expressway at rush hour — “slow moving and filled with obstacles, requiring that you navigate through the unwanted and the unexpected,” instead of a superhighway.

Another great feature about My Way is the simple customization. There’s  lots of customization you can do from colors and themes to the content and email set-up. You’re given the option to set up POP accounts so you’re able to send, receive, and compose email right from your “My Way” site. You can also add the My Way speedbar to your web browser so that you’re able to search from anywhere on the web (similar to Google).

Additionally, if you already use Yahoo or MSN, you can import your portfolio, bookmarks, and even email addresses into your new account.  Without the banners, it makes you wonder how they profit? They make money by identifying sponsored listings and text links.  In all of the searches that I made, they are very discrete and marked well.

Above all, the customization (one example shown above) and elimination of adds truly makes this a useful site that is starting to grow on me.  I also think the implementation of tabs is wonderful. Give it a few minutes, play around with it, and I think you’ll probably agree that My Way has started something good here. I’m anxious to see where they’re headed!

Thanks ffextensionguru for the tip!

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Read News At Work With WorkFriendly.net

This article was written on August 18, 2006 by CyberNet.

WorkFriendly

If you are at work then you should be working, right? Well, maybe not all of the time. Say you want to take a quick break and checkout the news, but you are afraid of those wandering eyes that might catch you. What you need is something that is more work friendly…how about WorkFriendly.net!

This is will transform any site into an all-text site and make it look like you have Microsoft Office open. It will also re-code all of your hyperlinks so that they open in the Work Friendly window. What do you do when the boss comes? Simply hover your mouse over the “Boss Key” and the site’s content will be replaced with an article about managing your time and overcoming procrastination!

This is pretty cool and I love how the developer copied the Office design, but wouldn’t you think that Microsoft will go after them for some kind of copyright infringement? It may be interesting to see if Microsoft decides to leave them alone.

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