If you’ve been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google’s efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed squarely at business users.

One of the new improvements, flexible reminders, seems like the most minor–but it’s not. Setting up reminders in the previous system had presets on when you’d be able to get the message. The new system is far more customizable and lets you drop in whatever time you want, complete with an option for days, which means you could set a reminder years in advance. You can still set whether you want it as a pop-up, e-mail or SMS message, the last of which I find to be the most useful if your mobile phone doesn’t sync up with Google Calendar.

The other major improvement, which is more business-centric is the option to selectively e-mail meeting attendees. Like Outlook you can now get a separate list of people who have replied yes, no, or maybe and e-mail specific groups without perturbing the others. In both the business and social world, this is a great way to send notices and reminders without spamming the in-boxes of people who have already responded.

Alongside these two features is a slight upgrade to the event creation tool which now allows for overlapping events, as well as a new two-click calendar subscription shortcut that lets you subscribe to someone else’s calendar without having to deal with special invites or permissions.

One of the updated features is the option to create new draggable calendar events over other ones. Previously you'd have to create it elsewhere then drag it over–making it a two-step process.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

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Logitech of Fremont, CA (DEMO 95 and DEMOmobile 04) today introduced the Squeezebox Boom, the latest addition to its Squeezebox line of streaming-audio products that brings iTunes music and streaming Internet audio into rooms and onto nightstands without any external speakers. It features an integrated amplifier and speakers, and will be available in September for US$300.

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What it does

Anyone with a website knows that having a place to upload your pictures and then directly link to them is a lifesaver. If you need this type of thing, then you should check out Imgpict.com. Through this site, you’ll be able to quickly upload pictures and then get a link through which you’ll be able to see them. There is a 1mb file limit. While this might bother some users, that’s enough for most of us. If you want to, you can make your images private, so only those you want to can see them. If you want to check out what others have uploaded to the site, you can browse through the Gallery section. This will let you see what other people are sharing with their friends through their sites or blog. The aforementioned privacy setting will make it so that your pictures don’t show up in the gallery. In short, this site is an easy and quick solution to the image hosting problem.

In their own words

“best free image hosting.”

Why it might be a killer

There are thousands of sites like this. While this one doesn’t particularly stand out, the privacy feature should appeal to some.

Some questions

Why choose this one? Is the privacy thing really necessary if you’re uploading pictures on the internet?

Link: http://www.imgpict.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/imgpict-com-simple-picture-hosting

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Sony’s Blu-ray player continues to help pay the bills for patent lawyers. Orinda Intellectual Properties is the latest to file a case alleging that Sony has violated some Blu-ray related patents, says gaming website Edge. Sony has allegedly infringed on…

		Adobe® AIR™ -enabled web apps are written with Ajax and HTML or ActionScript® to run on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops. Download the free Adobe AIR SDK and get started.
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Starting tomorrow, Radio Shack will be selling the Samsung Instinct to new Sprint customers for $99. If you’re an existing Sprint customer looking to upgrade, it’ll cost you the normal price of $129. The sale is going on through Labor Day, so if you’re going to Radio Shack anyway, why not pick up a new […]

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How much does an old Web 1.0 startup go for these days? Well, here’s an indication. Pub listings guide BeerintheEvening.com - running since the late 90s - was for £30,000, confirms Chris Hughes of new owner Neransk, a UK-based communities operator. The sale actually happened about a year ago but Neransk only just got back […]

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While Apple’s television ads show off brawny and multilingual applications for the iPhone, the vast majority of those available in the much-ballyhooed app store seem to be glorified four-function calculators. Of course, just as the modern computer emerged from the simple electronic adding machine, many of these apps hold the potential to grow into something […]

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Read almost any blog or forum dedicated to the free, open-source operating system Linux and its diaspora of distributions, and you might assume that the users are almost exclusively haters of Microsoft or, occasionally, Apple. A system crash or price concerns might have led to a few “switches,” but the truth must go much broader and deeper. So we ask our open-source switchers (and dual-booters): What made you pick up that first installation CD and give Linux a go? Was it an experiment with some older hardware? A killer app or idea you saw in action? The principals of open source? Or were you truly escaping from a restrictive system, like Mark Pilgrim? Post your story in the comments below, and we’ll review them for a future post.

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If there was ever a Jedi hippie, this is the lightsaber he would use. Let’s face it, CFLs last a lot longer than energy blades and they are much cheaper to operate. Plus, they help protect the galaxy. Think about it. Available for $26. [Redbubble via Geekologie]

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Photo credit: John Pastor/Flickr The rumblings in the ground are pointing to an imminent Kindle 2.0, a successor to Amazon’s loved but flawed e-book reader. The current-model Kindle has effectively dropped in price to just $260 (although you’ll to sign…

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We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don’t necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Installation

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It’s a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron’s directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn’t handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the “Boxy but Good” one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn’t seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don’t mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky’s list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

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A lousy quarter for Dell: The computer maker reported higher than expected sales, but profits missed by a long shot as gross margins dropped. And Dell said conservatism in I.T. spending is spreading beyond the U.S., extending into Western Europe and “several countries in Asia.” Shares dropped 10% in after-hours trading.

Dell laptops continue to sell well — unit sales increased 44% — but revenue only increased 26%, meaning people are buying cheaper computers. And Dell shot itself in the foot by dropping prices too aggressively in Europe — or as it calls it, taking “advantage of strategic growth opportunities in advance of cost improvements.”

CEO Michael Dell and CFO Brian Gladden took a lashing from analysts during their conference call: One wondered why they were bothering to grow market share with no regard for profitability; another compared the current Dell administration to an old HP executive team. Ouch.

Key Stats:

Revenue: $16.4 billion vs. $15.95 billion consensus
EPS: $0.31 vs. $0.36 consensus

LIVE Conference call notes:

5:06 Know we can improve performance on profitability. Many concerned that growth initiatives will come at expense of long term profitability. Took strategic pricing movements in EMEA ahead of cost improvements, shift to retail.

5:07 Excluding acquisitions, headcount was down 8500 from last year. Will reach goal of 8900 this quarter. Over time, will continue to scale headcount and improve productivity.

5:09 About $5 billion left in current share repurchase authorization.

5:10 Rev increased 5% on 7% unit increase in Americas. More numbers from release.

5:13 Storage revenue up 11%, improved profitability.

5:15 Designing to value! Pricing to value!

5:18 Going over look-ahead from release. Working aggressively on cost initiatives.

5:19 More nonsense about innovation and value. Will update when something of substance.

5:20 Strongest solutions portfolio in history!

5:24 Q&A to begin.

5:25 Gross margins: How much GM decline came from deferrals vs. pricing. Europe deferrals forced us to defer more. 2-3 cents per share impact in quarter. How play out rest of year? As continue to grow services business, some continued impact. A potential issue for us.

5:26 Why so aggressive interest in EMEA in July? Whenever restarting growth, imprecise process. See some parts of business where probably a bit too aggressive, modulating for that now.

5:28 Would have to say problems more self-inflicted than competition-driven.

5:32 Dramatic falloff in July? Aggressively pricing, tactfully to accelerate growth rate? One possible thing you left out: Dell has high share of commercial space in Europe, very low share of consumer. Gained share in commercial segment in Europe. Biggest difference relative to industry is we have small consumer business, not participating it in Europe. Prioritizing Asia, U.S.

5:35 Going forward answer a combination of better pricing and execution.

5:38 Holy hell! Analysts are GOING NUTS on this call about going for market share over profits. Just compared Dell to old HP administration. Consumer profitbility “in the next four quarters,” Dell says.

5:40 What management system putting in place? Look at every week as leadership team. Sometimes hard to judge when pushing it too far.

5:44 $3 billion commitment between now and 2011. You’ll see more in second half than first half. Accelerating and momentum is good.

5:57 Focused on executing strategy, focused on improving profitability over time. Expect more to happen in second half of the year. Expanding solutions portfolio.

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Filed under: Internet, Analysis

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80’s? I read a report this morning about a UK band called “Show of Hands” who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn’t much different than Trent Reznor making his music freely available online (and my wife reports the show here in town didn’t look any smaller than the ones in the 90’s — possibly even bigger since Reznor has a new legion of fans younger than us). But the music industry sticks by the mantra “a download is a lost sale, and that is theft.” Or, as TorrentFreak puts it, “there is no such animal as ‘piracy as promotion.’”

Oh really? This sad, antiquated logic continues to do one thing and one thing only: bolster sales of the top-paid performers while creating a chilling effect on artists who would love innovative promotion but fear free samples will incur the wrath of the mighty RIAA, or worse. It’s one thing to send the FBI after some poor schlub who leaks some Guns N’ Roses tracks, or sue the bejeebes out of hundreds of college kids, but it’s quite another to threaten fair trade when artists (who own their own content, thank you) decide to market in ways they see fit.

The only ray of sunshine could be recent rulings regarding Creative Commons which might allow savvy artists to provide music in the manner they see fit, without the RIAA calling fans of the artists a bunch of pirates. Arrr, matey. At the end of the day there has to be some middle ground, but it’s a pity the RIAA and other enforcement agencies see the world in black and white and tend to pull their concepts of ownership from the days when TV’s were also monochromatic.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “A California copyright infringement case brought by an adult video maker against a video sharing web site, Veoh Networks, has been thrown out, based upon the ’safe harbor’ provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (’DMCA’). In a 33-page decision (PDF), the Court concluded that Veoh was covered by the DMCA, and had carried out its duties to comply with takedown notices in a reasonable manner. The Court rejected the plaintiff’s arguments showing possible ways that users could do an end-around, saying that the law requires ‘reasonable’ compliance, rather than perfection, and noted that the DMCA is ‘designed to facilitate the robust development and world-wide expansion of electronic commerce, communications, research, development, and education in the digital age’.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Filed under: Design, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Sometimes you want your mouse to be zippy as possible, allowing you to scroll back and forth across a screen for a quick game of Pong or Arkanoid. But when you’re trying to make precise movements in an image editing application, precision might be more important than speed. If your mouse is too fast, you might have a hard time drawing straight lines, for example.

That’s where SlowMousion comes in. This free Windows utility allows you to select a hotkey on your keyboard or your mouse to hit when you want your mouse cursor to move very slowly. When you try dragging your mouse with the hotkey depressed, no matter how quickly you drag, the cursor will move veeerrrry slooowwwly.

There does not appear to be a way to make the slow movement the default and hti a hotkey for faster motion, so it doesn’t look like SlowMousion will do you much goo in the practical jokes department. But if you need all the help you can get trying to draw straight lines, this little app could come in handy.

[via Lifehacker and Freeware Genius]

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