Jeff Donnici - Shared Items on NewsGator Online

Launch: Backpack Multiuser (and single-user)

Jason — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:12:00 GMT

Backpack Grows Up

Today we unveil the major updates to Backpack we’ve been blogging about over the past week. We’ve been working on these for months and are excited to finally let them loose.

The Intranet Is Back(pack)

Intranets were big five years ago, but fell out of favor because of they were too hard to use. Back when we did client work we were hired to “repair” a number of intranets. They were a mess.

No matter the company, people’s goals were similar: They just wanted to share common information across their organization, keep a simple shared calendar so they knew when their co-workers would be out of town or at a meeting, make an announcement or two, and grab a few important files here and there. Simple things, right?

But man, the systems they were forced to use would confuse Mensans. They weren’t intranets, they were mazes. Clicks to who knows where. Clicks to nowhere. When something is too hard to use people don’t use it. No one used these intranets.

Backpack brings the promise of the intranet back and delivers real value by keeping things simple. Now you can easily share information, files, and a calendar across your company.

And for those who don’t need a company intranet, Backpack remains the same familiar personal intranet it’s always been. A place to organize your thoughts, ideas, to-dos, notes, files, calendar, and reminders.

Here’s a list of what’s new:

1. Multiuser

Since we launched Backpack in May of 2005, Backpack has been a single-user product. You could share pages via email, but you were the only person who could log into your account to make pages, add calendar items, set reminders, etc. Backpack has been our only single-user commercial product. It’s time for it to grow up and branch out.

People have been asking us how they could use Backpack to easily share information and knowledge with their co-workers, group members, or organization. They’ve wanted to use Backpack as an intranet, but they were turned away because it was single-user. The answer is multiuser.

We have a new set of subscription plans that allow you to add from 3 to 100 users to your account. Now you can use Backpack as the small business tool it’s always dreamed of being. Or, you can stick with your current plan and keep Backpack to yourself. It’s your call. If you already have an account just log in and click the Account tab to see your upgrade options.

1a. What happens to existing customers?

There’s been a lot of speculation about what multiuser means for people who are happy using the good old single-user version of Backpack they’re used to.

The short answer: Backpack can still be used exactly the same way for the same price (or less). We appreciate the fact that you’re currently satisfied with Backpack. We want to keep you happy.

Here’s how the changes will work:

Backpack customers who were on the old $5/month Basic plan will be grandfathered on the $5/month plan (which will no longer be offered to new customers). Same price, same specs. Nothing changes. And now for just $2/month more grandfathered customers can upgrade to the new Solo plan. Just log in, click the Account tab, and upgrade to Solo or any other plan you’d like.
Backpack customers who were on the old $9/month Plus plan will be moved to the new $7/month Solo plan. It’s the same specs but you’ll save $2/month. More on the new Solo plan below.
Backpack customers who were on the old $14/month Premium plan will be moved to the new $12/month Home plan which includes 3 users. Old premium customers will also keep their 1000 page limit (Home is normally limited at 100 pages). Even though the Home plan doesn’t include SSL encryption, folks who were on the old Premium plan which did include SSL will also get SSL on their Home plan.

2. Flying Solo

We’ve condensed the old single-user plans into one new plan called the Solo plan. The Solo plan is perfect if you just want to use Backpack alone to organize your own stuff. The Solo plan includes a single user, 100 pages, the calendar, SSL, and 1 GB file storage. The plan is priced at only $7/month (this is actually $2/month less than the old Plus plan that it replaces). The Solo plan becomes the new entry level Backpack plan.

3. Calendar updates

If you have a multiuser Backpack plan you can now share the calendar with your co-workers. You can see each others schedules and who’s available when. The calendar is color coded to make it easy to spot each person’s appointments.

Also new in this update is the ability to toggle a calendar on or off. Just click the checkbox in front of the calendar name to toggle the visibility.

Finally, since you can share calendars you may also want to keep some of those calendars private. No problem. When you credit or edit a calendar you can decide who can see it.

4. Newsroom

When you have two or more users in your account you’ll see a tab called Newsroom. The Newsroom tab gives you an overview of the major activity in your account. You can see who created a page, who changed a page, who added a calendar event, etc. People on single-user plans (“Grandfathered” account and “Solo” accounts) will not see the Newsroom tab. Upgrading to a multiuser plan, and adding another user to your account, will unlock this feature.

Take a tour of the Newsroom.

5. Messages

Customers on Basic or higher plans will see a new feature called Messages at the top of the Newsroom. Emailing multiple people back and forth gets messy real quick. Backpack’s message board cleans up your communications by centralizing discussions. Post a message and other people can comment. Clean, organized, and all in one place. No more endless email threads.

Watch a video overview of the new Messages feature.

6. Multiuser Reminders

Folks on the multiuser plans will notice they can also assign reminders to other people on their account. Reminders also get a new “Now” option if you just can’t wait. And since Backpack reminders can be sent as text messages to mobile phones, Reminders become a great way to make a quick announcement to multiple people in the field.

Watch a video overview of the Reminders section.

There’s more to check out…

We’ve updated the examples page with some new inspiration on how you can use Backpack in your business. We’ve also updated the tour to include screenshots and videos of the latest features. And for those who’ve never made a Backpack Page before, check out how easy it is.

We hope you love it

We’re really excited about the new stuff in Backpack. Multiuser, an updated calendar, the new Newsroom and Messages section, updated reminders, and a pile of other small updates and optimizations.

We hope you find the changes useful and valuable. Thanks again for your support and happy Backpacking!

Special $5-off offer

Use coupon code SVNLAUNCH when signing up or upgrading your account to save $5 on your next Backpack bill.

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data | Wired Science from Wired.com

843links — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:55:21 GMT

Measure the Internet, Map the Internet

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:31:18 GMT

One area we’ve been paying particular attention to recently has been the internet traffic for different web site categories. Our friends over at comScore Inc. collect a wealth of information for “measurement of the myriad ways in which the Internet is used and the wide variety of activities that are occurring online.” Nice alliteration, guys.

Using some of the data they’ve allowed us to share with you, we had the bright idea to stuff it into our most favoritest charting type, the treemap. And what’s better than a chart? Answer: an interactive chart with a toggle button.

You’ll need to know a few things to really Juice the data:

The map is based on unique visitors by site for August 2007 and November 2007.
Red means a decrease in unique visitors over that three month time period and green means an increase. Black means there is no change.
You can click on the category headers to zoom into each category. Click on the category header again to zoom back out.
We provide two views of the data: the default shows just the top ten sites in each category. However, for nearly all categories, sites outside the top 10 account for over 50% of the visitation in the category (the exceptions were Search, Portals, and Auctions where the top players dominate traffic). A checkbox adds “All Others” and gives you a better sense of the size of each category. You can toggle these two views using the checkbox just below the map.
Due to some confidentiality restrictions that we’re under regarding the raw data, we couldn’t show other metrics that would really make this visualization sing—but I bet if you contacted comScore, they’d be glad to discuss with you.
A few tech notes. The treemap is adapted from Josh Tynjala’s capable open-source Flex Treemap component. Site images are provided by Amazon.com’s Alexa site thumbnail service.

So, without further ado, take a gander at our latest liberated data:

http://internetmap.juiceanalytics.com/

There’s so much information here, you won’t have any trouble drawing your own conclusions, but here are a few conversation starters:

Notice that there was a distinct increase in retail web visitors leading up to the holiday seasons.
Surprise! eBay owns auctions
Not too good of a showing for those online gambling sites; travel either.
Sports traffic is up… but not for the MLB.com site. Oh yeah, baseball season is over.

Enjoy.

Disclosure: comScore is a client of Juice Inc.

"Netflix: Friends"

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"The FNG-Spot: Downloadable Content Abstinence"

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One Laptop Per Child Should Think Small to Grow Big

Guest Writer — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:36:40 GMT

I am Carolyn Turbyfill. I believe the OLPC project is one of truly good intentions. It has also become a disruptive technology in a wonderful way.

OLPC target XO user

Now there are two issues floating around the One Laptop Per Child community that have legitimately engendered debate.

What is the proper product for the OLPC target customer?
What distribution channel is the best way to get laptops to the target customer?

The first question is epistemological question. Do you truly understand the target customer? What infrastructure does the customer have in his environment? I'd love to get some transcripts of first hand interviews with children who are using the laptops and what they think.

I'll make two points about product distribution based on my high-tech startup experience: You can compare National versus Local sales to Departmental versus Enterprise sales.

The first Enterprise sale takes selling to multiple levels of an organization, takes at least 9 months, and needs to translate into purchases in the millions to recoup the cost of customer acquisition. You are selling to multiple departments at a signature authority that exceeds that of any manager whose department will actually use your department, so there will be a CXO signoff required (CIO, CFO, CEO).

Furthermore, all the big guys are in there competing with you, and if you are a little guy, never never assume that your product will win because it is the best thing technologically, that you will win on price, or purity of essence.
Departmental sales can be achieved with the signature of one person (a director or less, and will be in the tens of thousands, and not millions of dollars.) You can be too small at first to attract big company antibodies (well funded sales teams, lobbyists, metoo buzzword compliant products rushed to market to fill a newly created market category).

When it comes to foreign aid and governmental decision making (Developed and Developing), I believe that small projects implemented with smaller targeted organizations with local contacts in regions receiving aid have much more impact than relying on any government (donor or recipient) to do the right thing.

I can recommend four sources more authoritative than my personal experience of eight years in developing countries:

"Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" Schumacher recommends smaller projects implemented locally with renewable resources as opposed to large bloated environmentally destructive projects that renders the "alleged" beneficiaries powerless to influence or be part of the change.
"The Ugly American" A timeless classic, as true today as when it was written in 1958. Talks about small projects that would make a difference versus politically motivated, ethnocentrically conceived pork barrel projects imposed from afar with no benefit to the impoverished people for whom the aid is ostensibly intended.
"The Tragedy of American Diplomacy" Williams was one of the first revisionists - who wrote history from government documentation as opposed to the official line. A relevant point in this book is that most U.S. foreign aid money actually goes to technology licenses back to U.S. companies.
"One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukouka. A major pioneer of sustainable agriculture who likes to say of himself that he has no knowledge, but his books illustrate that he at least has wisdom

CXO Signoff Carolyn Turbyfill Enterprise Sales OLPC Target Customer Ugly American XO Distribution Channel

TDD and Dependency Injection with ASP.NET MVC

eduardo.campano — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:41:03 GMT

bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by eduardo.campano to mvc tdd asp.net .net - more about this bookmark...

Amazon debuts Kindle e-book reader - CNET News.com

Google Inc. (news-feedback@google.com) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:10:42 GMT

dBTechno

Amazon debuts Kindle e-book reader
CNET News.com - 1 hour ago
NEW YORK--"Why are books the last bastion of analog?" Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asked an audience at New York's W Hotel Union Square as he unveiled Amazon Kindle, the online retail giant's new electronic book reader.
Amazon.com launches e-book device MarketWatch
Amazon Launches ebook Reader Wall Street Journal
PC World - ABC News - Forbes - Reuters UK
all 124 news articles

Create an Online Version of a Local Area Network–the Free and Easy Way

Samuel Dean — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:00:14 GMT

Do you regularly collaborate online with other web workers? If so, you and your fellow collaborators should look into the free online networking service offered by Leaf Networks. It lets you and a group of co-workers or friends instantly create your own private, secure network right on the web. It’s akin to having a LAN that you share resources on, except you can think of the Leaf Networks service as an online hosted LAN solution.

After you go through some easy steps to set Leaf’s application up, you and your co-workers can share files, photos and more with all the sharing going online. Additionally, if you frequently use public Wi-Fi hotspots, Leaf’s application essentially functions as a VPN (Virtual Private Network)—giving you private tunnels to communicate and share within.

Adding new people to your network is as easy as adding a Buddy to your instant messaging Buddy List. Another application I use Leaf for is remote control. If I’m traveling, I can access my home and office PCs because they’re part of my network. This last application points to one of the big differentiators between Leaf and offerings such as Tubes. With Leaf you can choose to not only share files back-and-forth with people you have on your network, but you can share your networked devices with each other as though they are shared devices on a local area network. Or, you might send print jobs to your home printer while you are on the move so that you can collect the hard copies later.

If Leaf’s application strikes you as going too far in allowing sharing of devices, note that you can select what to share with others and keep the sharing limited. For example, you might designate some folders as shared but not others. You can chat within Leaf’s application with others on your network, and work out with them directly what will be shared and what won’t.

With the ability to share devices, a group of co-workers can set up a shared, centralized place to store photos and files, share storage, etc. Note that if you are already running firewall or virtual private network software you should adjust them to allow Leaf’s application to run.

On my first try at installation I ran into a conflict because my firewall software didn’t see Leaf as a trusted application, but after specifying it as a trusted application, it installed fine. Also, if you use Leaf on an ongoing basis, remember to proactively manage who is on and off your network to prevent unauthorized access to your data and devices.

Finally, Leaf’s site currently offers a free Windows download and there is a free Linux download coming soon. It would be nice to see a version for the Mac added, to facilitate cross-platform sharing and collaboration.

Do you have any good tips on web collaboration applications?

Take Great Halloween Pictures in the Dark [Photography Tip]

Adam Pash — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Whether you're planning to take your minuature ghosts and goblins out on the town or dress up yourself, chances are you'll want to snag a few photos of the terrifying world around you this Halloween. And since a lot of Halloween festivities take place after dark, photography weblog Digital Photography School suggests adjusting your exposure for optimal night shots. For example:

Increase your ISO - the larger your number the more sensitive your image sensor is to light and the darker conditions you can shoot in without having to slow down shutter speed. On the downside you'll get more grainy/noisey shots.

The post also suggests slowing your shutter speed and increasing your aperture size—along with several other non-light-related Halloween picture taking tips. Photo by base10.

Follow the Periodic Table of Cleaning for the Definitive Cleaning Schedule [Household]

Adam Pash — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Keep your home spotless by following web site Real Simple's Periodic Table of Cleaning. The table organizes cleaning tasks by how often they should be performed, split up into weekly, monthly, three to six month, six to twelve month, or yearly periods. Of course the periodic guidelines aren't hard and fast, and you should feel free to adjust the schedule to your liking, but the table provides an excellent checklist and reminder—both for those household cleaning duties you should perform regularly and especially for those that come along only once or twice a year. Grab the PDF of the Periodic Table of Cleaning from Real Simple.

YourStreet Relaunches as Elegant Local News Site

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:21:15 GMT

YourStreet is relaunching this week as a local news aggregator and mapping service. It's simple but really well executed; getting to review nice, smart little apps like this one is a big part of what I like about my job here.

The site originally launched this spring as a neighborhood-based social networking site but this news service probably has a lot more potential. The company was founded by an impressive group of executives with backgrounds at CNET, Sony Music Connect and elsewhere. That's going to go a long way in an otherwise crowded local news search market.

There's no shortage of local news sites, but the big differentiators here are two: the discovery process and the quality of the site's execution.

YourStreet uses a proprietary algorithm to determine the geographic location of news stories, down to the specific venue an event occurred. That's impressive and so far it looks pretty accurate. When I looked the site said it had added 5,683 stories in the last 24 hours and there's an RSS feed available for any location you select.

There are a number of ways to interact with the site's search results; you can recommend a particular story, start a conversation about it or flag it as incorrectly located. You can add a story manually and place it on the map or request that your own local blog be added to the index. Account creation and login are as easy as they could be short of OpenID creation.

The new YourStreet is a simple web application on its face but it's something I can imagine many people coming back to again and again.

How Gmail Blocks Spam

Ionut Alex Chitu — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:48:23 GMT

While Gmail doesn't filters all the spam messages that could reach your inbox, it certainly does a better job than other webmail apps like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Gmail's filters are constantly improving and an important ingredient of their effectiveness is the use of community signals. Every time you click on the "Mark as spam" button, Gmail uses that information to block similar future messages not only for you, but for all Gmail users. But spam is also evolving and it's harder to block, especially when it uses images and literary texts.

"Many Google teams provide pieces of the spam-protection puzzle, from distributed computing to language detection. For example, we use optical character recognition (OCR) developed by the Google Book Search team to protect Gmail users from image spam. And machine-learning algorithms developed to merge and rank large sets of Google search results allow us to combine hundreds of factors to classify spam," explains Google. "Gmail supports multiple authentication systems, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DomainKeys, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), so we can be more certain that your mail is from who it says it's from. Also, unlike many other providers that automatically let through all mail from certain senders, making it possible for their messages to bypass spam filters, Gmail puts all senders through the same rigorous checks."

The spam in Gmail is also the subject of a promotional video that encourages to use Gmail if you want to "get back your time". The video reminded me of an old email account from my ISP: it received so much spam that it was almost impossible to find the genuine mail and the 10 MB of storage were insufficient to collect all this junk.

Maybe Google should make greater efforts to filter spam in other services, like Google Groups, Blogger or YouTube. The experience from Gmail could be useful.

OLPC India: A Twenty-Two Laptop Pilot in Khairat

Wayan Vota — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:08:49 GMT

A year ago, One Laptop Per Child was lambasted by India's Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee who called Nicholas Negroponte's idea of Constructionist learning through XO laptops "pedagogically suspect."

Now I suspect that a portion of that rejection was due to the MIT India backstory and India's own laptop fantasies. But not matter the reason, India has been a sore spot for OLPC. As Nicholas Negroponte says:

India has more child population than any other country and will benefit greatly from a creative society of them. India needs to take a role of world leadership in the concept of one laptop per child, even if it is ahead of its time and seemingly daunting.

And yet it has a massive education problem. A problem that OLPC now hopes to solve using an alliance with Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (R-ADAG) to provide logistics to the OLPC's India initiative:

Currently, the first pilot of the XO laptop is supposed to be in tribal village at Khairat (near Karjat, Maharashtra). By March 2008, OLPC Foundation with the Reliance network aims to cover over 25,000 towns and 60,000 villages.

Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, RCOM, stated, “We will facilitate this system by getting all the players together like Government agencies, NGOs, content developers, translators, teaching community and project managers to create successful ecosystems.

We plan to approach state governments who have an education agenda and see if any public-private partnership can be worked out for the mass adoption of these laptops.”

Now that sounds really impressive, eh? Like OLPC India is going to be a massive educational movement. A One Laptop Per Indian Child on the magnitude of millions that Negroponte has always dreamed of. Well, take a closer look at that dream, like Brian Bergstein has:

OLPC India's cow power plant

A pilot test began recently in which 22 children in first through fourth grades in a rural, one-room school in the Indian state of Maharashtra are using the computers.

Carla Gomez-Monroy, the education consultant who launched the test, said One Laptop Per Child has learned that working with local partners will be crucial in India, where dozens of languages are spoken.

Wait, OLPC India is starting with only twenty-two laptops? You mean like just one classroom of children in one rural school? In a country of 1.something Billion? I know I was hoping for OLPC to start local, small even, when I wrote about OLPC Mongolia but not 22 XO laptops small.

But I guess they have to start somewhere and 22 is greater than zero. Too bad it will only confirm Atanu Dey's Rube Goldberg thoughts about One Laptop Per Child and disappoint the hopeful OLPC India listserv.

Atanu Dey Carla Gomez-Monroy Karjat Khairat Maharashtra OLPC Foundation OLPC India Reliance Group Sudeep Banerjee

"Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : C#"

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:56:13 GMT

Coding Horror: A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins

stalkercz — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:11:51 GMT

bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by stalkercz to blog code database dotNET graphics guide howto programming reference sql tech tutorial useful SQLServer joins join visual - more about this bookmark...

[del.icio.us] wittytwitter - Google Code

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:53:10 GMT

Witty is a Twitter client for Windows Vista and XP that is powered by the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). You can download the latest version from the right panel under Featured Downloads.