Sampa

Founded by a Microsoft veteran, Sampa has been on the rise by making family website creation and maintenance super easy and secure. Sampa is a free hosting site which lets you create a blog, photo site or a bunch of personal pages and securely share them with friends and family. It supports videos, photos, RSS feeds, etc. There are also standard features such as inviting friends from your address books in Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and Live to name a few.

We are impressed with the fast performance, intuitive UI and customization capabilities. Your personalized Sampa site can also be used as a social networking site where other Sampa users can comment and the comments can be displayed on your site after you approve. You can also create your own web address.

Sampa is definitely worth giving a try. You might be pleasantly surprised in this crowded market with Blogger, et al.

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts whether you are looking for Blu-ray player or not.

Happy Blogging!

This first major milestone supports a bunch of drivers, interrupts, MMU, etc.  Touch Screen, Accelerometer, Wi-Fi and Sound are among a few others are yet to be ported.

Porting Linux OS is an arduous task and the amazing results are demonstrated in the below video.

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

If you are curious to give this a try, the instructions are available here, the files can be downloaded from here  and OpeniBoot SVN Repository files are available here. 

iPhone is paving the way for new business models.  Linux porting on iPhone is a great accomplishment and will pave way for a host of Linux applications on iPhone.  So, what is next?  Android on iPhone?  We are very positive it is in the near horizon.

Blu-ray

Sony’s Blu-ray is the undisputed HD format champion after having won the war against HDDVD. The price of Blu-ray player is attractive near the $200 mark. However, we are not sure if many cautious shoppers would pick up a Blu-ray player instead of a traditional DVD player in the current troubled economy.

As we see it, one needs these primary devices/components to fully enjoy the Blu-ray experience:

• Blu-ray Player
• 1080p HDTV
• Bunch of Blu-ray discs (which cost about 1.5 to 2 times the cost of a DVD)
• Home Theater system for a better audio experience and

In addition, one would also need great eyesight to quickly identify the difference between the qualities of DVD and Blu-ray (yes, it is not obvious to an average eye)

During the long Black Friday shopping at our local Costco yesterday, I noticed only a handful with Blu-ray players. This is even after Instant Manufacturer’s discount. May be more customers are leaning towards the streaming movies from the internet straight to their TV. May be it is because of the almost non-existent Blu-ray burners. I don’t know. The streaming movies might not be Blu-ray quality, but the streaming quality is good enough for me.

Blu-ray might be a great gift for younger generation with specific interest in a few action movies. For now, I am going to stick with my current DVD players. They suffice the current and short term needs in this economy.

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts whether you are looking for Blu-ray player or not.

Microsoft offers hosted Exchange service.  The company also sells software to hosting providers that deliver Microsoft applications using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.  Stability and functionality of the applications were said to be issues.

MessageLabs, McAfee, Symantec, Google’s Postini and Yahoo’s Zimbra also provide hosted messaging solutions.   Apptix and Navisite  provide managed applications and collaboration services.  Hardware vendor Cisco is also in the game after acquiring IronPort. 

We have heard some companies moving to 100% hosted email solutions for a nominal annual cost per user as it is cost effective compared to on site email solutions.   However, on site solutions might continue to be main stream for a while given the potential latency in recovering inadvertently filtered emails and the possibility of unexpected and long downtimes in hosted email solutions. 

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts.

Per Shop.Org’s press release, “83.7 percent of retailers will have a special promotion for Cyber Monday, up from 72.2 percent last year.” According to Scott Silverman, Executive Director of Shop.org, online retailers will be extremely competitive to offer the very best deals as shoppers focus on price this holiday season.

Here are a few useful sites if you are looking for great deals.  Signing up for newsletters on some of these sites might provide additional information.

GottaDeal.com
Apple Store (Free Shipping over $50 on Black Friday)
Overstock.com (Free Shipping Monday; 15% rebate on all purchases using PayPal)
Amazon (50% off for iPod Touch 16 GB on Black Friday)
SanDisk (Up to 60% off flash memory products. Free Shipping)
BestBuy.com
CircuitCity.com
TigetDirect.com (Pink Friday in support of Susan G Komen)
NewEgg.com
Dell.com
Target.com (Free shipping on 50,000+ items)
ToysRUs.com (Up to 60% off)
CyberMonday.com
Ben’s Bargains
Deal News
Fresh Bargains (Vertical search engine for bargains)
Tech Deals
Tech Bargains
Deals On The Web
Dealmac
XP Bargains

Online shopping has its benefits over traditional offline shopping, especially when many online retailers alert consumers to recalls as they occur. Amazon.com does a particularly great job with such alerts.

If you know of a compulsive shopper who is looking for more ways to shop, s/he might be interested in Top 100 Budget-friendly Cyber Monday Sites article.

Happy Holidays!

1. Attitude
2. Read the books
3. Code! Code! Code!
4. Try out tools and utilities that make your work easier
5. Try out new technologies
6. Look how other guys develop systems
7. Everything that shines is not gold
8. Participate in communities
9. Visit technology events

Happy Coding!

Zune has been in the market for sometime, but its market share is minimal compared to iPod (which is very evident if you look around in most of the Best Buy, Fry’s or Circuit City stores in the US).  It would be interesting to see how Zune Phone performs against iPhone and BlackBerry Storm. Hopefully, Microsoft has a few tricks up its sleeve to compete in an ultra competitive market.

The below Zune Phone Ad video has been out for quiet some time.  Hopefully, it gets released in 2009 as too many delays might undermine the reality of Zune Phone.

If this attempt fails after years of Zune Phone rumors, would Microsoft be better off buying an established mobile winner such as Research in Motion?

Have Fun!

MobuzzTV

MobuzzTV joins the International Layoffs club.  MobuzzTV was the online video entertainment startup and has been struggling to stay afloat for sometime.  The Madrid, Spain based startup has been soliciting donations and it finally closed its operations today.  Per its press release, MobuzzTV will return the donations to its users.

The vlog (video blog) site’s videos are designed for easy viewing on mobile phones and iPods.  It supported multiple formats including 720p HD.  Each video is offered in Spanish, English and French versions.  The archives are still available from YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and other community forums.

A few dedicated web sites such as F***edCompany, It Died and Timely Demise track the companies going out of business.  The intellectual talent pool is growing really fast given the latest layoffs.  PayPal and Google benefited very well during the last downturn.  May be some of the successful international companies can scoop up the newly available talent?

Another new feature in version 2.2 is that you can download podcasts over wi-fi or cellular network instead of downloading thru iTunes.

iPhone 2.2 is released for iPod Touch also. If you don’t have iPhone version 2.0 or later in iPod Touch, you are out of luck; you need to pay $9.95 to get the software. There is no such restriction for iPhone users.

Hackers' chatter in IRC channels. Source: Symantec

Bank account credentials were the most commonly advertised thing for sale on underground economy with prices ranging from $10 to $1,000 depending on the balance and location of the account. Ok, who are all these hackers? Where most of these guys operate from? Russia? China?

Wrong. Most of the people uploading pirated software to be sold were in the United States, according to the report from Symantec. The U.S. was home to most of the underground economy servers (41%) followed by Romania (13%) and North America had the largest number of underground economy servers.

If Symantec knows the server locations in U.S., can’t they just shut it down with the help of law enforcement?