Latest development round up
| Latest development round up | |
19 April 2006
Lycos has launched a free blog editing tool that works with all major blog hosts including MSN, Blogger, TypePad and Movable Type.
Developed in conjunction with Qumana, the Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor incorporates an advertising module allowing bloggers to insert ads and get a share of click thru revenue. Available for both Windows and the Mac OS, the blog editor enables posting to multiple blogs and looks easy to use.
Send a lot of SMS text messages? You may save money by signing up for Hotxt, a new SMS by web service that costs £1 a week. But if you sign up right now, you can try the service for two weeks for free and get an extra week free for each friend you introduce. Check out the Hotxt web site for further details.
Google, meanwhile, have been be*vering away too. Google finance (http://finance.google.com/finance) is an early beta product that offers a broad range of information about North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data.
While this may be of limited interest, the appeal for UK users is the ability to research companies in the UK and across the globe. This, for example, is the snapshot that’s presented of Highlands and Islands Enterprise. Obviously, visiting a company’s web site is a good place to start, but Google finance potentially offers bullet-point info on a company drawn from a wide variety of sources.
Also new from Google is something that suspiciously resembles a Microsoft service pack - Google Pack, a “free collection of essential software” for Windows XP.
The pack rolls up into one download a raft of Google products, consisting of Google Earth, Picasa, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Google Pack Screensaver, Google Talk and Google Video Player. Also offered as optional third party products are Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE personal, Adobe Reader 7, a six month subscription to Norton Antivirus 2005 SE, Real Player and GalleryPlayer HD Images.
Creating a Restore Point prior to downloading and installing sounds like a good idea.
If you fancy taking a pop at Google, or wish to find a new way of getting your brand seen, why not try creating your very own web browser toolbar?
It’s not as daft as it sounds thanks to a new free toolbar creation site, VMN Toolbar Wizard (http://toolbarwizard.vmn.net/). It’s point and shoot stuff, and they claim users can have a professional toolbar ready for downloading from their own sites in about 10 minutes. In addition to own brand search functionality, toolbars can be customized with such essential toolbar features as RSS news, games, anti-spyware scan, popup blocker, translation, Autofill and more.
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