Best Downloads of 2007


The year 2007 is coming to a close. For some, the year 2007 may have been well and good as they may have taken goals to accomplish and would have achieved, while others would have remained same and done no better. In my case, year 2007 was a good year as I faired pretty well. Set my goals and then did a couple more things to achieve.

In this post, I am listing a couple of downloads which I believe are the “Best downloads of 2007”, and I guess I am right. . These are from my personal collection, and so I thought I should share it with you.

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December 27, 2007 | Filed Under Downloads, Internet, Software | 3 Comments 

Facebook restores the new advertising tool

Facebook

Facebook Inc has renovated a new advertising system that can flicker private complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other corporations.

The 55 million people who use Facebook will be given control whether they want to join in for the three week program that movement’s responsive information about online purchases and other activities.

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November 30, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment 

UK TV rivals to launch online TV on-demand service

UK’s TV networks such as BBC, Channel 4, ITV are planning to launch a joint online TV on-demand service that will provide content from all channels. The unnamed new service is likely to be launched in 2008.

The new service will include free downloading, purchases through internet, streaming and more. Shows will be locally produced content and perhaps US and non-British content. According to reports so far, the new service is believed to be available to the residents of UK only.

BBC has described the importance of the new service as remarkable, To take the deal to a more viewpoint it ought to be like NBC,CBS and Fox holding together for a joint gateway where their shows would be available on demand, for download, purchase etc. But the biggest winner will be the British viewer who will have access to TV content on the net. Recently BBC had problems with its iPlayer service which had delays, then was attacked for being available to Windows users only.
The channels launching the service said that the new service will be first launched online and then it will be made available on other platforms as well. Viewers will be able to watch the content free. The venture will be owned similarly and will work as independent.

Broadcasters hope by aggregating their content into one service they will cover competition from the prior services provided by other Internet upstarts like Joost and others.

For more on the topic check Media Guardian

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November 27, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment 

Are you a part of the shopping season yet?

online-shopping.jpg

Retailers hope last week’s start to the holiday shopping season translates into a busy buying season online, which is officially to kick off on Monday. Retailers are busy hosting special offers. ComScore, research firm online has projected sales online may exceed $700 million on Monday.

ShopperTrak RCT Corp, which tracks total sales at almost 50,000 retail outlets, reported on Sunday that sales on Friday and Saturday saw a rise of 7.2 percent compared to the same 2 day period a year ago.

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November 26, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment 

Chinese become Web “addicts”

Web users

According to a study release on Friday, Chinese Internet users seem to depend on their web experiences, and see web as a key to socializing and sharing opinions compared to their U.S counterparts.

The study was conducted by InterActiveCorp (IACI.O) and advertising agency JWT, part of the WPP group. The survey was conducted in the age group of 16-25 years old both in U.S and China which showed that about 42 percent of Chinese users said they felt addicted to Web use compared to 18 percent of users in U.S.

The survey was conducted online in November, in English and Chinese. The study distinguished that about 10 percent of Chinese population used internet, with a higher proportion of them living in major cities.

Almost 25 percent of Chinese population held a view saying it was unable for them to spend more than a day without internet compared to 12 percent in U.S. About 76 percent of Chinese users said Web helped them in making new friends where as less than third of Americans said internet contributed to their social life.

The study also revealed that about three quarters of Chinese users were free to do and say things through internet which could not be possible in the real world, compared to 32 percent of users in U.S.

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November 23, 2007 | Filed Under Internet | Leave a Comment 

Will Youtube answer UN Aid agency’s call?

WFP

The U.N food aid agency has called on film makers to help it raise the awareness of hunger and bring the reality of poverty to the “You Tube” followers.

A contest was launched on Wednesday by the World Food Program (WFP) for 60 second video that geared at creating a buzz in the online community about global hunger.

The WFP communications director Nancy Roman said that for those among them who did day-in, day-out backbreaking work of getting food to hungry people, it was sometimes discouraging how people understood that hunger killed a child every five seconds. The agency has posted its own video which is available at its site www.youtube.com/hungerbytes. Towards the end of the video, a message goes on saying, in about 850 million people go to bed hungry every night.

The five best films are likely to be posted on WFP’s YouTube site, with an overall winner receiving a trip to one of the relief operations. WFP said that filmmakers had a better chance of winning if they get play on networking sites like Facebook or Myspace before the competition’s deadline on July 2008.

This isn’t the first time WFP has come up with an awareness programme using computer technology. Earlier in 2005 it launched a video game in which players could plan and distribute food drops to the people in need.

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November 21, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment 

Yahoo,Sony online video deal

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has come down to a licensing deal with Yahoo Inc that could make way for people to upload files with music, the companies said on Tuesday.

Yahoo said that the financial terms of the deal were not revealed. The agreement calls Sony to receive a cut of advertising revenue. The deal covers giving out of music videos through Yahoo player applications that users can place on other sites.

This agreement marks that Yahoo has reached a deal with a major recording company over licensing content in user created videos. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony Corporation and Bertelsmann.

The deal reflects the recognition of user created videos, which includes copyrighted content. Sony BMG also reached a similar deal with Google Inc last year. The agreement included Google subsidiary YouTube.

Major media and Internet companies issued a set of guidelines last month which required web portals that hosted user generated videos. Earlier, Yahoo said that it was deploying video identification and filtering technology early next year.

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November 20, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment 

Flickr’s up for a big hit

Flickr

Flickr, Yahoo Inc’s online photo-sharing site has planned to offer this week, a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location. Flickr will uncover a way for web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded to its site, flickr.

A service called “Places”, finds the latest hot-spots on the global map for photo contributions.

A senior director of product management at Flickr told that it was a new way to browse to know what was happening the world over.

Flickr’s service “Places” also allows users to search more than 100,000 geographic places in order to find photos that can get attention. Most of the global cities, countries as well as regions have their own quality pages.

Flickr drives in about 40 million monthly visits and there are about 2 billion photos that are stored on the site over the past three and half years. Almost 2-3 million photos are uploaded daily, categorized by users according to location.

The global map view lets users to see photos by theme. By clicking a category tag lets them to select photos, also giving a glimpse of what other users find interesting.

Places pages for about 100,000 locations including some local information such as weather and location’s current time. The senior director of product management at Flickr said that the site was adding in about 5000 new location pages every week.

The feature is mainly focused to give more local appeal to users, also attract travelers who seek to go beyond photos of landmarks and to places they plan to visit.

Flickr presently offers places in 8 languages- English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese.

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November 19, 2007 | Filed Under Internet, Tech News | Leave a Comment