Sep 15

Get a Hulu Invitation…

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

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

It wasn’t too long ago that Hulu launched into their private beta – October 28th to be exact.  Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp (Fox) which provides premium video content on demand. The only way you can try Hulu is by getting an invitation, and those invitations haven’t been available in abundance… until today!

What a Hulu invitation? Here’s how to get one. Hulu has set-up invitation sites for a few sites like TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable, and Read/Write Web. It looks like they all started out with about 2500 invitations and there are still plenty left to go around. So, pick a link… any link… and get your invite for Hulu!

Once you click on one of those links, you’ll be taken to a Hulu page where you’ll submit your email address. After you do that, you’ll be receiving an invite in the mail shortly and then you’ll be on your way to watching shows like Prison Break, House, Bones, Heroes, Scrubs, 24, and more. Just remember that this is a service available only in the United States.

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Sep 12

Yahoo Shuts Down Unlimited Music Service, Acquires FoxyTunes

Posted in: Music, Today's Chili, Web Sites, Yahoo

This article was written on February 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

rhapsody Back in May of 2005, Yahoo launched Yahoo! Music Unlimited, an on-demand online music service where users could pay a subscription fee to stream or download unlimited amounts of music for either $8.99 or $5.99 per month. While the unlimited services were a hit back then, they’ve slowly lost popularity as the ad-supported free music has become the way to go.  Yahoo recently made it clear that they were no longer focusing on their unlimited subscribers yet there was no word on how they were going to handle the situation. A recent partnership with RealNetwork’s Rhapsody music service is now the solution to their problem of what to do with all of those subscribers.

Rhapsody music service will now be where Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers will go to get their music on-demand. The switch will occur sometime in the first half of this year and Yahoo’s customers will be paying the same fee as they always had, but only for a limited time.  At some point if they want to continue their subscription service, they’ll have to decide upon a Rhapsody plan which start at $12.99 per month. Yahoo says this move will allow them to focus their efforts on the free ad-supported music market and other types of media which are currently popular.

Even though Yahoo Music Unlimited users have a place to go, my gut feeling is that those users are eventually going to start wondering why they are paying for a service when they could get an ad-supported music service for free. Given the changes in how people listen to music, my gut says Rhapsody music service won’t be around for long.

Also in the news and pertaining to Yahoo Music is the announcement that they have acquired FoxyTunes.  We know many of you are very familiar with FoxyTunes and use it regularly as your media toolbar, and/or a way to share music. Yahoo says that while this may be “a major strategy shift,” they are still investing in the music business.

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Sep 12

CyberNotes: Grooveshark Lite – A Pandora/Last.fm Combo

Posted in: CyberNotes, Music, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Weekend Website

It’s always interesting to see how many companies are up for the challenge of making a name for themselves in the online music industry. There are plenty of them with different business models and varying services, but the common ground among them are that they use the Internet to provide a way for people to listen to music. A fairly new service that we discovered thanks to Mashable is called Grooveshark Lite, made by Grooveshark.com (their peer-to-peer model) which some of you may be familiar with.

Today we’ll be taking at what Grooveshark Lite is all about.

grooveshark lite.png

What is Grooveshark?

Grooveshark Lite looks promising after testing it out. One thing that stood out was the interface – it simply looks good. But a site just can’t look good, it has to offer value to users as well. Grooveshark does this by offering a nice selection of music for users to stream from the Grooveshark library. You can search for your favorite artists, create playlists, get recommendations, and save songs you enjoy to a favorites list. It also has a social aspect as well by giving users the option to share songs with friends.

Mashable helps describe the service by saying, “If Pandora had a love child with Last.fm, it’s name would be Grooveshark Lite.” If you are familiar with Pandora, and you are familiar with Last.fm, you will have a decent idea as to what Grooveshark Lite offers.

Autoplay

The Autoplay feature is what makes this service remind us somewhat of Pandora. Once you add a song or two to your queue, you can click the Autoplay feature and it will start playing songs they think you’ll like based upon the songs that you added.

Like Pandora where you rate a song with a thumbs-up or a thumbs down, Grooveshark allows you to rate songs as well. Their system involves clicking a smiley face or a frown face if you like or don’t like one of the songs they automatically start playing for you.

Below is the guide they give you which shows what the various buttons are for if you are using the Autoplay feature.

Autoplay.png

Notice that you can also favorite songs which then get added to a Favorites list. If you don’t like one of the songs it automatically plays for you, you can skip the song. You can also delete songs from the queue as well.

Grooveshark Lite Features

Download the songs that you like:

If you come across a song that you like, they provide the link to download the song. If you decide to use this feature, you’ll be taken to their main site, Grooveshark.com. The log-in that you use for Grooveshark Lite is the same login you use for the main site. From what I saw, it looked like most downloads are around 99 cents, but you can also earn credit towards music downloads by sharing the music you have available on your computer. More details on that can be found here.

grooveshark.png

Search for your favorite artists:

When you perform a search by artist, for example, it will return all kinds of results like:

  • Songs that match your search criteria
  • Other artists
  • Albums
  • Playlists that others have created

I performed a search for “Daughtry” and by clicking on “songs,” I was able to see a whole list of songs he has recorded and then play them. Clicking on “albums” showed me the various albums he has worked on.

grooveshark list.png

The Playlists feature is also nice because it will display playlists that users have created which match your search, and then you can view which songs they included. This can also be a great way to discover new music. One of the playlists I came across for the “Daughtry” search had some songs by the group but other songs by artists I wasn’t familiar with.

Oh, and we can’t forget to mention that you can create your own playlists too, which is a must-have these days.

Similar Songs

Once you perform a search for a song and then click on it, you’ll see a whole list of Similar Songs. This is one feature that reminds us of Last.fm because they too have a “Similar Tracks” feature. Below is a comparison of the Similar Songs/Tracks Grooveshark Lite and Last.fm offered for the same song:

Grooveshark Lite-1.png

lastfm suggestions.png

Wrapping it up

Grooveshark Lite definitely offers a lot to their users, our only concern is whether they too will struggle with dealing with the music industry like some services currently are.

Check it out and let us know what you think…

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Sep 05

CyberNotes: Offertrax Inc. Will Use RSS to Link Retailers and Shoppers

Posted in: CyberNotes, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on July 21, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Free For All Friday

The entire concept of RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is growing in all forms as people are slowly becoming aware of such a concept. Offertrax, a startup Web 2.0 company is using RSS to connect consumers and merchants with trusted rules of engagement. Using RSS, consumers will be able to get information from stores about sales, inventory, etc. to give them a simplified shopping experience.

Offertrax

According to Ronald C. Pruett, CEO and co-founder, ‘Offertrax will make online buying for merchants and consumers a social experience, less time-consuming, and extremely targeted’ Additionally, ‘RSS technology will dramatically impact the way people buy and sell online because it enables consumers to control how they would like to be alerted by merchants. In addition, customers can post notes and reviews while commenting and sharing with their friends and social networks. Offertrax will help build an entirely new channel of online marketing that will enhance email, search marketing, and personalization systems currently implemented by merchants’.

Such a large percentage of Internet users are unaware of RSS and what it is. Those who have discovered RSS have found a great tool to simplify their lives. Few people really understand the power of RSS and how it will change the way we receive and sort through the information that is important to us.

Offertrax is using web-based services which allow merchants to offer ’subscriptions’ to consumers so that consumers are able to track only the items that interest them. Furthermore, Offertrax will allow consumers to share the offers that they have ‘tracked’ to lead others to the same purchases based upon their ‘trails’ via the web, mobile phone, or other handheld devices.

This would be a free service for consumers. They plan to generate revenue by charging businesses a fee to use the system. Offertrax is expected to release the first product in August and have announced their initial round of funding from private investors. CyberNet News looks forward to the release of Offertrax and will provide updates as Offertrax progresses!

Checkout their blog to get more information and updates!

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Sep 03

File Dropper – Easily Share Large Files

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

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

file dropper

Digg users were all over a new file sharing site that seemingly popped up overnight called File Dropper. It’s a completely free service that will let you upload as many files as you would like, and they can total up to 5GB each.

The whole point of the service is to make the process drop-dead simple, and they really do just that. You can’t create an account, remove files that you upload, or anything like that. There are no privacy options, encrypted URL’s, and for some odd reason no progress bar for your upload. So if you’re uploading a 5GB file you’ll have no idea how long it will be until it’s actually done.

One of the things that I do like is that you can upload a file from your computer or just provide a link to the file elsewhere on the Internet. After the upload process has completed you’ll be given a link to share with anyone that you want.

As of right now it looks like the service is completely ad-free, but it’s unlikely that it will stay that way. There’s next to no way that they could afford to foot the bandwidth bill every month without some kind of revenue coming in… just as we’ve seen with DivShare.

And if you go looking around the site you’ll see no mention of limitations, which means your files may stay online forever or they could be deleted tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll really be using the service, but I might if I have an unusually large file to share.

File Dropper Homepage

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Aug 29

HTML Signatures for Gmail 2

Posted in: Firefox Extensions, Freeware, Hacks, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on November 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Gmail 2 Logo We just wrote about how Gmail 2 breaks a lot of the Greasemonkey scripts that are available, and Gina from Lifehacker turned right around and released Better Gmail 2. As expected this version only has a fraction of scripts that the original extension had, and it still lacks some of my favorites: Google Calendar integration, Google Reader integration, and Folders4Gmail. None of those scripts have been made compatible with Gmail 2 yet.

One script that I have to have is one for automatically inserting HTML signatures into my emails. The script I used previously wasn’t all that complicated, and I decided to go ahead and fix it myself. I took it one step further, however, and made it work with both the new version and the old version of Gmail.

Note: This script is designed to insert your signature at the beginning of replies/forwards, instead of at the end.

Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Download and install Greasemonkey if you don’t already have it.
  2. Install the script
  3. You’ll need to have the HTML code for the signature that you want to insert. Once you have that just go to the Greasemonkey script manager and edit the script’s HTML signature. The code looks something like this (insert the signature where you see the green text):

    var htmlSignature = ‘<br>–<br>Ryan Wagner, Founder/Editor<br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”>CyberNet Technology News</a><br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/CyberNet.gif” style=”border:0″ alt=”CyberNet Technology News”/></a>‘;

    top.window.setTimeout(”top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML = ‘” + htmlSignature + “‘ + top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML;”,500);

    var allBody = document.evaluate(”//body[@class=’editable tr-field’]“, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
    allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML = htmlSignature + allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML;

This script does work with Opera, but only with the older version of Gmail. I used a special Firefox-only searching property to insert the signature for the new version of Gmail, and the reason being that Gmail 2 has some issues in Opera. In fact Opera users won’t even see a link to the newer version of Gmail unless they are masking the browser as Firefox or IE.

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Aug 28

CyberNotes:Farecast Predicts The Best Time To Purchase Airfare

Posted in: CyberNotes, General, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Weekend Warrior

Farecast

With airline ticket prices jumping around just as much as gas prices these days, you never know when the best time to buy is. It is so frustrating to buy your tickets one day only to find the next day or week later they’ve dropped in price. Airfare can become one of the most costly aspects of any trip or vacation, not to mention the hassle of constantly checking for lower prices. The site, www.farecast.com  is a great website that does a lot of the work for you and may even help you save some $$$ by telling you if they think the best time to buy is now, or if you should wait until later.

–How It Works–

To put it simply (although you can read the complicated version here), Farecast uses algorithms to make predictions based upon patterns. They will tell you how confident  they are on their prediction. Of course it’s not ALWAYS going to be 100% on the money, but they claim a 75% accuracy rate which gives you pretty good odds.  After you have searched for a particular fare, you will be shown a prediction of what the airfare will look like for the next 7 days.  This gives you a good indication whether or not to buy now or wait. According to their blog, the percentage of the time that they are right continues to increase.

–Track Your Airfare Using RSS–

I, like so many have found how useful RSS feeds are. It makes sorting through information that is important to me so easy.  I thought it was great that Farecast offers an RSS feed that will give you the ability to track airfares and predictions. You’re able to select your airport, a departure date,  the length of the trip, the number of passengers, and up to 3 destinations which will then be created into a customized feed to make searching for the lowest fare simple and nearly effortless.

–Other Information–

Farecast is in beta so there are a few limitations.  Currently they are able to make predictions for 55 home airports like Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, etc.  They have already had a great deal of success, and I can only imagine they will continue to grow and add additional home airports. Additionally, they’re only able to offer predictions for round trip airfare- again. They conveniently point out the limitations they think you may face using the product in beta which gives us an idea of what we can expect as far as improvements for the future.

–Overall–

Overall, Farecast helps you find the lowest price for many airlines (although not all) and from many departure cities. There are some kinks that need to be worked out, but that’s why it is still in beta. With airline prices changing in the blink of an eye, the RSS feed simplifies the process of trying to determine when to buy or when to wait it out. Hopefully they’ll be adding additional airports in the near future to accommodate more passengers. Unfortunately, I think I’ll be waiting a while for the Des Moines, Iowa airport where you could probably fit the entire airport into one parking garage at the Los Angeles airport :) .

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Aug 25

Clean Up Your Code With Code Melt

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 11, 2006 by CyberNet.

Clean Up Your Code With Code Melt

Web site programming can get frustrating at times and I notice that I start to write sloppy code when that happens. There are tools out there that will clean up your code (especially for those people creating a site in Microsoft Word…what a nightmare!) but many of them you have to fork out some money for. Code Melt is here to save the day because you won’t have to fork out a single penny and best of all is that it is completely Web based so there is no installation required.

So what’s the downside? You know there has to be one. A subscription to the service is $22 per month but you can use it for free as long as you don’t mind a 30-second delay before showing you the results. If you have hundreds or thousands of files you need to do then you might find it useful to subscribe but it lacks PHP support so I don’t have much that it can do.

It does work with HTML, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Putting it through a couple test runs gave some pretty good results at things that need to be cleaned up. After all of your code has been analyzed, beaten up, and drug through the mud it will pump out the cleaned up file for you to use. One of the coolest things that it does is show you a whole list of everything it fixed.

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Aug 24

As if We Didn’t Know the Wii Was Selling Well…

Posted in: amazon, gaming, nintendo, Today's Chili, Web Sites, wii

This article was written on December 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Wii Money If you tried to hunt down a Wii this holiday season there is a good chance that you walked away empty handed and with a pounding migraine. The Wii is essentially a money printing machine for both retailers and Nintendo, but a nightmare for consumers who were trying to find one for their kids.

Amazon just published a press release outlining some of the stats from the holiday season. The busiest day was on December 10th where 5.4 million items were ordered…that’s 62.5 items per second! And guess what, when they had Wii’s in stock those were flying off the shelves at an amazing 17 units per second. If you tried to call up one of your friends to let them know that Amazon had Wii’s in stock, about 250 of them would have been sold by the time you dialed and your friend answered. Every 5 minutes that they had Wii’s in stock equates to over 5,000 units. And you wonder why they were so darn hard to find!

Amazon posted a lot of other stats as well, but many of them were not all that interesting. One that did catch my attention was that they shipped 160,000 packages to APO/FPO addresses, which are army/military addresses.

Congrats to you if somehow you managed to snag a Wii this holiday season!

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Aug 23

Microsoft Does Image Search Right with Bing

Posted in: Microsoft, search, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 02, 2009 by CyberNet.

I’ve been playing with Microsoft’s Bing search engine over the last day to see how it stacks up to the others. The thing I always find when trying out a new search engine is that it’s so hard to find what I’m looking for because I’ve grown accustomed to formulating Google queries just right.

There’s one thing that I really like with Bing though, and it’s the image search capabilities. I remember trying out the image search feature on Live a few months ago, and it just didn’t stack up to the results Google Images returned. They must have tweaked their algorithm though, because now the results are excellent. Take a look at what I got searching for “Google Chrome logo” on both Bing and Google’s own site:

Bing image results for “Google Chrome logo”
bing google chrome logo.jpg

Google image results for “Google Chrome logo”
google chrome logo images.jpg

Bing displayed a lot more of what I was looking for, and I like the interface for filtering results a lot more than what Google offers. There were definitely a lot of design considerations taken into account with this…

For starters you can view image results in several different layouts/sizes. The page also lacks a “next” button… because it doesn’t need one! As you continue to scroll down the page more results will automatically be loaded so that you’re not bothered with shuffling through multiple pages of results.

And when you get to an image you want to see? Click on it, and instead of opening the site in a new window it opens it in a frame on the search results page. Not only that, but the left sidebar turns into a scrolling list of the image results so that you can shuffle from one result to the next without ever having to go back:

bing image search.jpg

All of these things might not be that big of a deal for some of you, but I search for images all of the time. Features like these can save me a good amount of time, and I have a feeling I’ll be using Bing for all of my image search needs from here on out. I just wish their web results were more like what I see on Google, but I’ll take what I can get.

Bing Homepage

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