Besides media sharing (usually an afterthought when the hangover wears off), the core part of the service–inviting and adding friends, is all handled through Plaxo, which lets you plug in your e-mail credentials and nab contacts without having to create an invite in each e-mail service. Pretty standard stuff really, but Coordinatr is smart enough to let you create custom groups of friends from those contacts that you can send out quick invites en masse.

While MyPunchBowl was one of the first of these services to really embrace that people using these services share their party media elsewhere, Coordinatr takes the process a step further by giving everyone with access to the event page a special tag to use. Adding that tag to photos (on Flickr) and videos (on YouTube) will automatically add them to the community page without requiring anyone with administrative access to the event to have to link up content manually.

Coordinatr is a new events communication service that’s been designed for creating spontaneous get-togethers among tight knit groups of friends. The setup is similar to MyPunchbowl and Crusher, with just a few form fields that need to be filled out to create an event. What makes the service particularly useful is its integration with high profile media sharing sites and a great mobile service that lets you send quick distributed messages to the rest of your party friends.

Your party start page has your events, plus events your friends are taking part in. (note: we'd never have a Webware party on a Monday)

At first glance I was quick to dismiss Coordinatr as a late entrant to the events planning game, but it brings to the table a few handy features that innovate the space. Whether that’s enough to push it into people’s minds when they’re planning events might be a stretch. I often run into a lot of resistance urging some of my friends to try out some of the newer events services we write about. Many are simply ingrained in old systems such as Evite, with too much fear to try some of the next generation planning services like Socializr, MyPunchbowl, and Crushr to avoid confusing their guests.

The best way going forward may simply be a convergence app for all of these events services, similar to what we’ve seen with tools like FriendFeed, Profileactic, et al. People want one place to view all this information, and there’s still not a service that does it.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Those same people on your quick lists can also elect to sign up to a mobile notification service that lets you send out SMS notifications, be it a quick location change or other important information. If I were to go back in time to my high school days, I could see this being a helpful way alert the rest of my fellow partygoers if the cops had just shown up.

This week I take a look at the HP 2009m and the LG Flatron W2053TQ. Both are 20-inchers. Both include a 16:9 aspect ratio, which translates to 1600×900 resolution. Both also transform into kid-size robots and battle it out for your entertainment.

OK, the last one was a fib (”Transformers” on the brain this week), but if you really wanna know what I think of these two check out the reviews. Also take a look at the LCD computer monitor hub, for all things, well, LCD computer monitors.

A couple of months back, I asked what I thought was a pretty good question about the need for a 16:9 aspect ratio on a 20-inch monitor.

While I still feel there’s little need, if any, for 16:9 on such a small screen, that doesn’t mean said monitors can’t be useful in their own right.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $149.97
View the latest prices for HP 2009m

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET)

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On January 2, 1978, Software Arts was founded by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to create an electronic spreadsheet. In June of 1979, the product of their collaboration, VisiCalc, made its official debut, and the personal computer was transformed. VisiCalc has faded into software history, but it was the clear ancestor of Microsoft Excel.

]]> http://www.raytravelclub.com/index.php/2010/08/dan-bricklin-from-visicalc-to-wikicalc/feed/ 0 http://www.raytravelclub.com/index.php/2010/08/reasons-to-like-baidu-but-whose-reasons-are-they/ http://www.raytravelclub.com/index.php/2010/08/reasons-to-like-baidu-but-whose-reasons-are-they/#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:11:11 +0000 admin http://www.raytravelclub.com/?p=407 This wouldn’t bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: “Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what’s the deal guys?

After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won’t likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they’re still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that’s not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish’s public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I’d still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I’ve written about.

I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China’s leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).

On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge’s coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell “develop” while saying “men from the east” aren’t that smart.

They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent’s traffic.
They have advertising solutions that can be tailored–as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you’d only take less than 8% of their market share…
They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don’t have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me….
They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases….

Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there’s a “next week” below that doesn’t work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here’s the list:

The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge’s name on Rick’s Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an “upstart” engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu’s music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)

It uses the same print engine,which takes the same eight-ink/seven-color Vivera ink system (seven color because you’d never use the matte black and photo black simultaneously), and runs at the same speeds–I won’t bother quoting the useless draft-mode numbers the company publishes.

You won’t find a lot of differences between the B9180 and the B8850: most significant, HP dropped the Ethernet port for the cheaper model. There are some design tweaks around the control panel–no LCD text display on the B8850–but otherwise it’s the exact same size and weight.

HP Photosmart Pro B8850

The printer is slated to ship this April for $549.

These days, the $500-$550 mark seems an oddly expensive place for a consumer photo printer to live, but for printing your digital SLR shots larger than 8×10 or churning out those digital scrapbook pages, that’s how much you’ve got to pony up for quality output. Not that there’s a huge choice. The field consists of the relatively old, dye-ink-based Canon Pixma Pro9000 (admittedly, with some street prices that dip below $400), the not-quite-shipping pigment-based (but recently reviewed) Epson Stylus Photo R1900, and the newly announced, also pigmented, HP Photosmart Pro B8850.

The company also is announcing Cisco SAFE, a security reference architecture organizations can use as a guideline for deploying security solutions, and Cisco Information Technology Governance, Risk Management and Compliance consulting services.

The company uses what it calls “SensorBase,” a massive threat-monitoring network overseen by 500 workers in its Cisco Security Intelligence Operations center. The center collects data from 7,000 devices and hundreds of millions of client computers, providing snapshots of activity at different times and locations that can indicate if a large attack is going on, said Ambika Gadre, director of product marketing in the security technology business unit at Cisco, during a briefing on Monday.

“They are the Bill Gates of cybercrime,” because they are tech savvy and have an innovative entrepreneurial sense, he said.

“There’s been a rejuvenation of security at Cisco. They’ve had a hard time dealing with big picture things,” said Peter Christy, principal of the Internet Research Group. “Their long-term vision is that security migrates with you” through the cloud.

The new products include Cisco Security Cloud Services, Cisco IPS Sensor Software 7.0 for intrusion prevention, and Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance 5500 Series 8.2 software with a botnet traffic filter for identifying infected clients and remote access capabilities.

Patrick Peterson, a security researcher at Cisco, described some of the threats facing corporations, including cybercriminals based in Russia and the Ukraine.

In addition, Cisco is introducing the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud for software-as-a-service, a network to provide high performance and security for conferencing, instant messaging and other enterprise work group activities. Also new is the Cisco WebEx Node for ASR 1000 Series, which allows the edge router to act as a point of presence in a corporate network for online meetings.

As confusing as it may be to keep the separate announcements straight, one analyst said Cisco’s overall security strategy is a good one.

However, the maturing of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, the move to the Internet as a platform, has problems, O’Reilly noted. The market values centralization and consolidation. It values big winners who can dominate a market. O’Reilly cautioned that this situation could lead us back to the world of large, centralized players like Oracle and Microsoft, which could stifle innovation and openness.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

So, the Internet is important and revolutionary, and harvesting collective intelligence is core to Web 2.0 and a way to make more money, according to the pied piper of Web 2.0.

“The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything,” he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. “It’s an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities,” he continued. “It’s a huge change in the way the world works.”

The paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), he said. He advocated building in an interoperability layer to reduce the harmful effects of having a few companies with enormous power and leverage.

From the high-level view of the Internet revolution year, O’Reilly telescoped down to the exhibit floor, which is populated by more enterprise players, such as IBM and Oracle, than the previous year. It’s a sign that Web 2.0, with technologies such as wikis, blogs, tags, social networks, and collective intelligence, is maturing.

SAN FRANCISCO–Tim O’Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

But O’Reilly also recognized that just making money on Web 2.0 or acknowledging the transformative powers of the Internet is insufficient. He challenged the audience of several thousand attendees to have big goals, such as making governments responsive to citizens and building a global immune system through Internet-based efforts. It’s not always about the money or augmenting human intelligence.

There is real money to be made by developing Web 2.0 products for enterprises. Harnessing collective intelligence can lead to the promised land of profits. (O’Reilly’s company recently started an enterprise consulting practice to take advantage of the trend, and he also shamelessly touted Wesabe, one of his investments, in his remarks.)

Web 2.0 evangelist Tim O'Reilly addresses the crowd at the Web 2.0 Expo.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

What makes the tool particularly interesting is that each of the 18 drawing tools are tied to your mouse in a different way. Some tools will follow it around, while others do their best to escape your pointer–creating some genuinely gorgeous effects. Some also take advantage of where your pointer is, either changing in size or color based on what part of the screen you’re on. It’s also just plain fun.

Bomomo is a wonderful Flash-based art application that runs in your
Firefox or
Safari browser. Instead of giving you some simple MS Paint-like tools like a paintbrush, bucket, and eraser, everything in Bomomo is dynamic and moving, leading to some kaleidoscopic creations that you can either e-mail to friends or squirrel away to your hard drive. I spent about 15 minutes layering effects on top of one another, and while the results aren’t nearly as professional looking as SXSW Interactive winner Viscosity (review), if you know what you’re doing you can create some really gorgeous abstract creations.

We’re talking big differences here, but it’s your money and you get to choose–slick style or good sound. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Samsung's state of the art home theater in a box.

Samsung’s brand spanking new HT-BD2 home theater in a box put me through some changes. It’s the world’s first Blu-ray HTIB, so sure, it’s got picture quality to die for, and even boasts state of the art Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio surround 7.1 channel processing. The HT-BD2 also looks pretty hot, the Blu-ray player/A/V receiver’s curvaceous, high gloss style is drop-dead gorgeous, and the super-model thin tower speakers and chunky subwoofer are likewise designed for eye appeal.

But the HT-BD2’s hefty price tag, $1,500, put me off. The Samsung sounds merely OK, not bad, just painfully average for a HTIB–clearly the product designers know that features and looks sell, and sound is a low priority. I’m sure Samsung will sell a ton of these things, but if you care about sound you can do a lot better for your $1,500. How good, let’s see.

But just that, the HT-BD2’s sonic splendors are in short supply, or to put it another way, it’s all show and no go. I’ll get into more detail about the sound in my CNET review that will appear early next month.

The Samsung Blu-ray, Pioneer receiver, and Atlantic Technology or PSB Speakers based system will sound awfully nice on music and movies. Bass will be deeper and tighter, with freewheeling dynamics, an open sounding midrange and yes, actual treble extension.

Speakers? I have two favorites in this price range, Atlantic Technology’s sweet sounding System 920; you can read my CNET review here. PSB Speakers’ Alpha Series is a little pricier, but truly excellent. Four B1 bookshelf monitors, the Alpha C1 center speaker, and SubSeries 1 subwoofer would bring us in on budget. OK, maybe a little over, depending on the deals you score.

I didn’t want to forfeit Blu-ray for this $1,500 dream system, so I selected Samsung’s BD-P1400 Blu-ray Player (street price, $350). It duplicates the HT-BD2’s video capabilities. Pioneer’s VSX-817 receiver typically goes for around $200-250, and would be a good match for our $900 speaker/subwoofer package.

(Credit:
Samsung)

It’s practically a no-brainer: the Zen has a larger screen (2.5 inches), an FM tuner, twice the storage, and an SD card slot for adding even more storage. On the other hand, the Nano is way slimmer and sexier, and iTunes offers a much broader selection of TV, movies, audiobooks, etc., than Amazon Unbox (the main place to get such content for the Zen).

(Credit:
Creative)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

That headline is my offhand way of mentioning that Creative just dropped Zen prices: You can now get the 8GB model for just $150, the same price as Apple’s 4GB Nano. If that’s your budget for a portable media player, which one should you choose?