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World wine web! Grow your vines on the web!

World wine web, that isn’t typo, bringing wine online! It’s new kind of online service provided by Crushpad. Crushpad helps its registered members to have at least virtual experience of running their own winery, which is just a mouse click away. If you’re a member of Crushpad, you can make at least one barrel of wine a year. It will cost around $5,000.00 to $10,000.00 to produce one barrel a year. Members can monitor their winery by e-mail updates, live chat and web cams provided by Crushpad’s staff. Members can also fly over to visit their winery during vacation. Crushpad even lets members decide what style of wine they want and what kind of grapes they wanna use.

This is a pretty cool and revolutionary idea of bringing wine online. On the other hand, one more interesting story is, an Australian winemaker, Stuart Bourne, has recently made use of the Internet technology for tasting his wine online. What he did was to have all his invited tasters sent with his wine samples and tasted the wine together with those tasters online using web chat and web cam. The bad side was he had to stay up to 4am in order be in sync with tasters in the United Kingdom and North America.

via [ShinyShiny], CNN News

Crushpadwine.com,Crushpad,Online vines,World wine web,Wine,Wine lovers

Technorati Tags: Crushpadwine.com, Crushpad, Online vines, World wine web, Wine, Wine lovers

Salesforce’s new ECM goes web 2.0

Salesforce.com, the leading hosted CRM service provider, has recently released a new content management platform, called Apex Content.

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It’s time for Google to steal contents or data from others!

Google is one of those well known and widely recognized by its originality? I’m not sure, you judge it by yourself. To me the Internet (especially on the blogosphere) are more or less flooded with similar content  and data everywhere, in order to achieve speedy productivity! Even no exception for Google. This time, Google is being attacked with an official statement, claiming that Google’s Chinese IME (Input Method Editor) is stolen from the word bank of Sohu’s IME. Word bank is the software component that recognizes “pin yin” and convert it into the correct Chinese characters.

How did Sohu prove that Google copied their product? That’s the trick within the IME software, where there is a script called “ME fingerprints” that predicts and converts what the user types at once into the characters. And the way Google’s IME does it for the word bank  fingerprint of “zhao li yang” is exactly the same as how Sohu’s IME does it! A coincidence or simply stealing?

via [GearFuse], source

Google,Sohu,Chinese IME,Google stole IME

Technorati Tags: Google, Sohu, Chinese IME, Google stole IME

Price rise 7% for domain name, Verisign will pocket $27 millions more a year!

The recent fuel hike would have resulted rises in prices in quite a number of sectors. The impact would be the increase of transportation fee, food and other commodities and also followed by the increase in labor cost etc. The domain registry for .com domain names (as well as .net and others), Verisign, also has taken this opportunity to adjust its price, a rise of 7%. So the whole sale price for a .com domain name now has raised from from $6/year to $6.42/year. Leaving those registras (companies that register sell domain names to end users) having only little margin to play. It’s expected that there would be same amount rise in selling price of domain names by these registras.

Currently, there are roughly 65 million .com domain names registered worldwide. The rise of 7% will also make Verisign to pocket at least $27 million dollars more per year. Verisign would probably take further action into a renegotiated contract with ICANN, to continue to raise wholesale prices 7%/year.

source

Price rise for domain name,Verisign,domain name registration

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Google’s April Fool jokes

So today is the April fool. But people surrounding me seem to be lacking some kind of sense of humor and they’re not making any jokes at all. Perhaps, they’ve forgotten that today is the day to fool others. But, anyway Google has never forgotten the April fool and has taken it seriously. The April fool jokes by Google are as usual, center around its product. They have two solid fake products this year, they are the Google Paper and also the Google TiSP.

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Whos.amung.us shows the number of concurrent users on your site

Here is another new kind of visitor tracking service for your site, it allows you to trace up to the number of concurrent users on your web site at a given time. A neat tracking widget, provided by Whos.amung.us. It’s pretty easy for you add it to your site. There isn’t a need for registration and setup. Just go to whos.among.us and copy the HTML code there and paste it onto every page of your blog/website. And you’ll get the widget on your site as shown below.

This widget is pretty useful for tracking the activities and behavior of users on your site. As you click on the widget above, you can trace up to the stats of the recently visited URLs and popular pages. It also provides a firefox extension that shows the total number of readers on your site at the bottom of the browser at all times. I’ve found a little glitch with this widget, it seems like it doesn’t differentiate the concurrent users by IP address. I’ve experimented using both Internet Explorer and Firefox accessing the page with the widget, it shows me two instead of one.

via [TechCrunch]

Site stats tracking,whos.amung.us,Concurrent users stats,Blog stats,web 2.0

Technorati Tags: Site stats tracking, whos.amung.us, Concurrent users stats, Blog stats, web 2.0

Yahoo Mail announces unlimited storage!

Seriously, I’ve not logged in to my Yahoo Mail account for a couple of weeks, after switching to using GMail. That is mainly one reason, or just my own bias. GMail is much speedier and provides better organization for my email, which the way they do it, getting email organized in threads, simply the way I love. Having emails grouped in threads is much easier for me to go through the list of emails in my inbox and easily to pick up only those wanted for reading. I don’t choose a web mail account based on the storage size they offer. I switched to GMail is not because of it offers bigger storage size than Yahoo does, mainly because of it’s greater in usability. To me, I do not need such a big storage size, as I normally kick out all those junk mails and also delete those emails that I’ve already read if they aren’t the important ones. I only keep those important ones in my inbox or in a special folder.

But it seems like now the web mail service providers are trying to compete in size. And Yahoo will give its users unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. The current Yahoo’s storage limit is 1 GB per account (2 GB for $20/year premium users). With this change, Yahoo leapfrogs Gmail (2.8 GB and growing) and Live.com Mail (2GB). According to Yahoo’s Vice President of Mail, John Kremer, the new unlimited storage affect all Yahoo mail users. I personally feel that having bigger storage just like encouraging users not to read their emails that often. You know, several years back when Hotmail offered a mere 2MB storage, was like an urge to push us to read and delete our emails more frequently. Of course, Yahoo’s users are subject to Yahoo’s abuse policies. Users to follow “normal email practices” and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage. Abusive accounts will not be summarily deleted – users will be notified by Yahoo and/or accounts suspended, but users will still have access to the data. What I can think of the kind of abuse would be getting friends to send you all the porn clips and store it on Yahoo forever.

The Yahoo Mail’s interface surely is great, it’s just like having an Outlook Express on the web. Perhaps, it’s only great for those connected with high bandwidth and PC loaded with high memory. As the overly loaded AJAX/DHTML effect somehow makes scrolling and fetching emails a bit sluggish. The unlimited storage offered by Yahoo will not be an attraction to me for switching back. I still prefer GMail, unless I purposely wanna abuse it, to use for storing junk mails or porn clips, till I get banned by Yahoo!

Source via [TechCrunch]

Yahoo Mail,GMail,web mail

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Popuri shows lots of stats for your site

As a blogger, you must be pretty concerned with your blog traffic stats, such as its Alexa ranking, Technorati inbound links, Googe PageRank and other incoming links etc. To check all these stats, it really needs some time to move from one site to another. What I normally do is to go googling for “page rank checker” and then get on one of the page rank checkers for checking page rank, and then drop by Alexa for checking my Alexa’s ranking and then again on Technorati for its ranking. Such a combination of tasks is really quite troublesome to me. But now, thanks to the newly launched web 2.0 service, Popuri, which has almost everything you need as mentioned above for the stats of your blog or website.

Popuri is making use of the web 2.0 concept. Which all the stats data are borrowed from other stats service providers. Furthermore, it uses the Ajax technology, which makes querying the stats bring no page refresh. What I like is it’s got the little Firefox spinner spinning when the stats data is being loaded. Similar to the idea that I use for building my little “tell-a-friend” page. Unfortunately, Popuri is currently having problems to provide certain stats, such as Technorati inbound links and del.icio.us bookmarks. This is due to the inmence immense amount of requests and got banned by some stats service providers, after TechCrunch made the buzz.

Website: Popuri.us

Popuri,Blog stats,All-in-one web stats

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The evil method of boosting Technorati ranking failed!

I was also attracted by the evil method offered by John Chow dot com, which John invited all other bloggers to write a review for his blog and especially have an anchor text “make money online” to link to his blog. And he will have link back to those reviews, which will have the effect of skyrocket boost for the Technorati ranking of the reviewers’ blogs. I did the review too and even twice, for some unknown reasons that my posts never picked up by John to be included on his blog. But, anyway, the method seems to manage to hold for the glory that lasted only for few days on Technorati. And Technorati has found out the evil intention behind, fixed their glitch and now all those reviewers’ blogs that were given a huge leap for their Technorati ranking, are now all reset back to its original or lower rank.

Other than this, John also managed to create the wave of crazy comments on his blog. As he offered those top commentators a link back on his blog, which will also have similar effect for the huge boost of Technorati’s ranking. I was also one of the impatient ones, joined the group and was actively posting comments for a few days. But due to my busy schedule, I failed to compete with those always hooked on the net. I never got the chance to squeeze myself into the top 10 commentators, so I had no luck for the linkback as the top commentator. Anyway, all these sound like “get rich quick” kind of method to boost your blog’s Technorati ranking seem to have failed completely. One of the John’s regular reader, Mark Robinson has covered on his blog that his ranking was reset back to 266,081, which he was ever boosted to 2,572 after being the reviewer of John’s blog and also the top commentator.

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The evil intention behind make money online review

I did have a thought yesterday that John’s intention of offering his linkback review, was to push his blog to be ranked number one on Google for the search of “make money online“. And John, you’re almost there! I remember that I did have a quick check and searched Google for make money online, before writing review post for John Chow dot com. It was still on the second page of the searched result. And I missed to capture the screen to show you guys here. It was only a few hours later, then John Chow dot com managed to squeeze itself into the first page, but was positioned near to the bottom of the page. But today, it managed to secure itself for the top 5 positions on first page. Anyway, John you’re kinda smart. Here is another little contribution from me to help you get to the top!

Make money online,John Chow dot com

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