Microsoft Search Appliance In Response to Google Search Appliance

The upcoming Microsoft Search Appliance (picture above) will help enterprise customers enable Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 search capabilities without requiring any complicated set-up.

Mike Pallot of Microsoft says that Microsoft Search Appliance is "not a ploy to go head-to-head" with the Google Search Appliance or the pizza box shaped Google Mini.

Yet, both the Google Search Appliance rack and Microsoft Search Appliance for SharePoint Sever are designed for very similar needs - that is to provide search for common enterprise repositories including file servers, web sites, relational databases, CRM and other business applications.

More on TechNet.com, IT Week and Office Online.

FaceBook Should Accept PayPal and International Credit Cards

FaceBook is no longer limited to campus students of US universities - there are over 27 million active users on FaceBook now and a good portion of that based may be located outside the US. [I know so many Orkut fans here who are slowly shifting loyalties to FaceBook.]

FaceBook has several paid services like FaceBook Polls, FaceBook Gifts and the more recent FaceBook flyers which require members to pay in order to use them - the only problem is that FaceBook has limited payment options.

FaceBook Flyers looks like a very effective medium for advertising - you can show up an image ad with a good 200 word description on various Facebook profile at the fee of $10 per 5000 impressions which is like $2 CPM - pretty decent rate considering the size of the banner and that it also allows images.

Unfortunately, if you are outside the US, there's no way for you to pay for advertising via the FaceBook Flyers service - it won't accept international credit cards - you have to be residing in US with a Visa, Mastercard and American Express credit or debit card to use this service.

By limiting the payment options, FaceBook may be limiting the number of advertisers. The day they add Paypal or even Google Checkout, the growth in small advertisers will be massive.

FaceBook Flyers | Thanks Orli

Convert Family Photos into Great Videos with Walmart Movie Maker

Walmart has launched a Mini Movie software that converts your still digital pictures into very impressive movies with music soundtracks and Hollywood style image posters - it's like a mix of Microsoft Photostory, Windows MovieMaker and Muvee Autoproducer.

Mini Movie is a web based service though you need to download a storyboard software to select pictures and the theme of your movie - the movie theme could be a vaction, wedding, family outing and more.

Once a theme is chosen, you have to select six pictures from your hard-drive, and give a title to your movie. It will become immediately available on the Walmart photo center for viewing online or sharing with friends. There's however no option to embed your personal mini movies on web pages.

Going forward, Wal-Mart will launch this in all their stores allowing customers to create DVD movies from their personal pictures using Fuji kiosks. Walmart Movie

Related: Turn Video Clips & Personal Pictures into Stylish Movies

Blogger Kicked Out of Stadium for Live Blogging the Game

This is unbelievable but true - a blogger had to leave the stadium because he was posting live updates of the NCAA baseball tournament game on his newspaper's website. Even his press credentials were revoked for the crime of "blogging."

The argument was that live reporting of a "game in progress" violated the broadcasting rights which were sold exclusively to ESPN and CBS.

The NCAA says bloggers can write about the game before it starts or after it's over. In between, they can blog about "the atmosphere, crowd and other details," but not about the game itself.

What's the next restriction for such college sporting events ? No carrying cameras or cellphones inside the stadium. No calling friends from the stadium for giving ball-by-ball updates. Wonder if the sporting associations can control the dozen mediums through which information can flow out of the stadium in real-time. 

"If I buy a ticket to a game and my brother calls my cell phone and asks what the score is, should I tell him that it would infringe on the NCAA's rights? "

Source: Chicago Tribune [behind registration firewall]

Upload Large Files to YouSendIt from Desktop, Resume Broken Uploads

Sharing large files on the internet just got more convenient. Popular file sharing service YouSendIt now comes with a desktop uploader software that will allow you to upload large files from the desktop without using the web browser.

What's exciting about the new YouSendIt software is that it can resume uploads - you know the frustration when you are uploading a 100 MB file from the web uploader when suddenly the internet connection breaks or the browser crashes for some reason.

With the new YouSendIt uploader, that problem may be a thing of the past as it will resume file upload from the exact point where it broke earlier. Once the file is successfully uploaded and sent to the intended recipients, you get an email confirmation automatically.

For free YouSendIt accounts, the download link will expire in 7 days and the file will be available for 100 number of downloads. The max file size that you can upload is 100 MB while the limit is 2 GB for paid accounts.

YouSendit earlier released an Outlook add-in to help you email large file attachments directly from Microsoft Outlook.

Your Email Address Is Also Your Phone Number with Yoomba

Yoomba is a new web service that lets you call or text chat with anyone in the world who has an email address (that means practically everyone) - no registrations or complicated setup required.

When Yoomba spots an email address on your screen, it will add two icons - one for making voice phone calls and the other one for instant messaging. (see a screenshot from my GMail inbox below) - this works for Outlook, GMail, Yahoo and other web pages.

Here's how Yoomba works - you provide your email to Yoomba and download a small client which is pre-activated and won't ask you to setup an account or login. When you click the Yoomba button near any email address, an invitation request is sent to the other person - he or she can download Yoomba and connect with you almost instantly over voice or text messaging.

Yoomba is based on P2P technology very similar to Skype. The one very advantage here is the ease of use and it bypasses the need of creating a separate id for chatting / web calling - the email address is id of you and your online friends.

Currently there's option to import contacts from other IMs like Yahoo, Skype or Gtalk but you can add your Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express contact in a click. You can also see the online status of your contacts inside Outlook. A promising service for sure.

www.yoomba.com [via email Press Release]

A Great Day for Blogger Users Or Those Who Migrated to WordPress

Ex-blogspot users have a reason to rejoice - if you have migrated from Blogger to another platform like WordPress or TypePad, you no longer have to worry about your lost feed subscriber base.

Blogger now lets you redirect your Blogspot feeds ^# to any other feed service ^# in one simple step. Goto Blogger Settings -> Site Feed and type the new feed address. That makes this popular tutorial more or less irrelevant.

Basically if someone is subscribed to your old feed address, he'll automatically be redirected to your new feed which could be on WordPress, Feedburner, etc. Therefore your move from Blogger to Wordpress will be transparent to the subscriber base.

Positive Effect on Feed Count:

If you are using Feedburner, expect the Feedburner Chicklet to show higher numbers very soon. [Related: Count The RSS Subscribers Of Any Blog]

Blogger vs WordPress:

Google owned Blogger is fighting back to remain the top blogging platform. Here are some amazing things they have done recently to fend off competition from the excellent Wordpress.

1. Blogger Users can add polls which is impossible to do in Wordpress without the help of external plug-ins or widgets.

2. You can directly upload video clips from the web based editor of Blogger and that goes straight to Google Video - again not possible in WordPress.

3. Like WordPress, Blogger also provides comments feed per blog post or the entire blog.

4. Blogger can parse XML files directly - that means you can have Text Link Ads or RSS feeds on Blogger without installing any plugins or sidebar widgets.

5. The new search box of Blogger will help visitors search across all blogs / websites that you have ever linked to from your blog posts. Internally this uses the Google Custom Search engine but you can integrated this with Blogger in a click so anyone can make use of the Google Custom Search engine without having to worry about HTML code.

6. Google Adsense in also tightly integrated with Blogger dashboard making it easy for not-so-geeky users to add adunits if they using the default blogger templates. [Don't think WP allows advertising yet.]

The game is on. Blogger team have launched a Draft Blogger website to showcase more upcoming features in Blogger.

Disclaimer: I am a big fan of WordPress [site 1, site 2]  but still find Blogger more convenient to use and easy to maintain - atleast I don't have to worry about security issues or installing frequent upgrades.