Archive for: October 31, 2008

We have grown used to all-you-can-eat Internet. It wasn't always that way. Back when CompuServe (good grief, they're still around--who knew?) and The Source ruled connected computer communications we paid by the minute! The enlightenment came as competition ramped up. As a result the Internet economy thrived.

Are those unlimited days coming to an end? Telcos and cable companies are hoping so as they begin to tighten the reins on Internet use. Friday afternoon (the time many companies unveil distasteful news) Frontier Communications CEO Maggie Wilderotter talked with the AP about upcoming caps for high speed Internet customers. It's something that's been hinted at for a while and now addressed in Frontier's "Acceptable Use Policy."

"Frontier may suspend, terminate or apply additional charges to the Service if such usage exceeds a reasonable amount of usage. A reasonable amount of usage is defined as 5GB combined upload and download consumption during the course of a 30-day billing period. The Company has made no decision about potential charges for monthly usage in excess of 5GB."

Frontier serves mainly rural areas in a few dozen states. Their largest urban market is Rochester, NY where Frontier's cable competitor is Time Warner. As it turns out Time Warner is testing metered Internet in Texas.

The phone companies and telcos will gladly tell you how heavy users are subsidized by light users and that caps are the only way to level the playing field. In fact Wilderotter says, ""All networks are going to have to move to that paradigm in order to stay profitable." But there's more to this story.

Frontier is not a ...

What's the best way to recover from a Halloween sugar coma? A 30 percent discount on Windows Home Server software, of course.

"Beginning this Saturday, November 1, the System Builder SKU for Windows Home Server will retail at $100-110 - down from the current price range of around $150-160," Microsoft announced Friday.

The software will be available from online retailers like Amazon and Newegg.

WHS is a consumer version of Windows Server 2003 designed for homes with multiple PCs that made its debut in late 2007.

"Microsoft is reducing the price of the System Builder version of Windows Home Server to provide additional value to the system builder community and further promote the home server category," the company said.

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Apple hasn't exactly been transparent when it comes to letting third parties produce software for the iTunes App Store. Since the store's launch, the company has been a bit notorious for shutting out companies and making them sign all sort of strange nondisclosure agreements.

In an interview with The New York Times, Opera CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner noted that his browser had been shut out of the store. His reasoning? Apple's fear of competition for its proprietary Safari browser.

Mr. von Tetzchner said that Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Safari.

This morning I had to send out a last-minute update about a meeting I had scheduled. Because the room and conference number I reserved were both in use, I had to change the conference line and location of the meeting. When I sent the updated appointment, I had no real way of knowing that the attendees I had invited had even gotten the message, much less read it and knew about the change.

Notifu is a Web service that could have made that a little easier for me. The service allows you to send a message to a group via e-mail, IM, or SMS, and then notifies you if the message has been received and acknowledged.

Notifu can be useful in business situations where you have a meeting scheduled but have to change the location or the time at the last minute. It's also useful in social situations if, for example, you tell everyone to meet at a certain bar at 8 p.m. and get there only to find it's closed for a private event that night.

Notifu allows you to send a text message to all of your friends letting them know the bar is closed and suggest an alternate meeting place. The service will send your message to all of your friends at once and will let you know which ones received the message and confirmed it, and which friends you'll have to call individually because they didn't get the message. The service works just as well if you need to get a last minute change ...

OVGuide.com, a video search engine, has formed a special "Halloween Editor's Pick" Web channel that showcases the most popular horror movie searches as well as the best horror sites and videos. "Halloween wouldn't be complete without a good scare and there are plenty of free horror videos available online to get us ready," said Chad Cooper, OVGuide.com marketing and editorial content director.

The top five most popular Halloween sites on OVGuide.com in October were Zombie Cinema, Horror Cinema, Zombie Movies/Games, TerrorFeed, and FEARnet (my favorite horror site).

Click on one of the horror movie choices, such as "The Shining" or "Rosemary's Baby," and you'll be able to watch that movie on the Web for free.

If you really want to get into history, poetry, or classic literature but find it just too thick or intimidating, never fear, Shmoop is here. Developed by students and faculty at some of the country's top universities, Shmoop is revolutionizing the way readers interact with literature. The service is designed to provide students, teachers, and everyday readers with a resource to help them get engaged. Shmoop also aids in finding audio and video resources, and in finding study tips and paper ideas.

Shmoop offers a number of services for students and readers that are designed to make reading literature, poetry, or American history not only more engaging and interesting, but also more fun. If you're a student, you can benefit from the site's writing guides and study tips that can help give you a jump start on your research paper. If you're just an avid reader or someone who wishes they could get past the imposing nature of classic literature, you'll find discussion groups to join and analysis written by experts that can help you understand the themes and ideas behind the words.

The service is in open beta at the moment, and Shmoop developers are actively soliciting feedback on how well the service works. Additionally, Shmoop is giving out prizes to users that invite their friends to join the service and participate in its design. The service is designed to be an academic resource, and the analyses and summaries on the various books and poems can be cited directly by students writing research papers.

If you're reading ...

Scanned documents have been popping up in Google's search index for a while now. When you see them popping up, that's because Google has crawled the documents' metadata, rather than the documents themselves, which just appear as images to the search engine.

Google today, however, announced a new technology that lets the search engine perform Optical Character Recognition on scanned documents saved in Adobe PDF format. OCR converts the picture of words into actual words.

The new technology frees a lot of more information, from government reports to academic papers. For more information and to see the technology in action, check out Google's official blog.

Sure Google's not the first service to enable Web-based SMS, but there's certainly something to be said for the handiness of being able to text your friends' phones from the comfort of your Gmail account.

Google added the functionality today, though it's still considered "experimental," so users will have to enable it via the Labs tab in Gmail's settings. Once enabled, begin typing a phone number into your Gchat box and Gmail will ask you ask you'd like to send a text message.

All of the incoming messages will come from one of several thousand phone numbers owned by Google, all carrying the 406 area code.

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