Some useful links for the day:

• Temporary and Disposable Email Services: Sizlopedia is covering an interesting post on the Top 20 temporary and disposable email services.
• Online Photo Editing Picasa Style: TechCrunch has a post on a Beta service called Picnic that provides online photo editing.
• A sneak peak at YouTube’s new video player: This is still in beta.
• Corank: Another social news and bookmarking site.

This is a Sponsored Review for the History of Backup.

The History of Backup, written by Maxim Yurin of SoftLogica has put together a very nice web page which brings together in chronological order the evolution of computer data backup.

The web page will bring back memories of Punched Cards, Magnetic Tapes, and bring you to more modern day storage like Floppy Disks, Hard Disks, CD/DVD media. The site also captures the latest of technologies like the Blu-Ray Disks and HD-DVD. Not to forget, network based backup solutions have been mentioned as well.

The site will serve as a great source of information for students as well as those who would like to get a better understanding of how data backup storage has evolved over the years.

Do you know how much a Blu-Ray disc can store? Quoting from the site:

Blu-laser discs using organic dyes, such as the Sony Blu-ray format (between 23GB and 54GB) and Toshiba’s HD-DVD are the next step to further reduction of the cost of removable media along with capacity growth and improvement of usability. They appeared on the market in 2006 and are already considered as promising devices for data backup.

 

 

The completely advertisement-free web page is a must read for all. I spent a good 30 minutes reading thru the well-written content on the page.

For those staying in India, there is an interesting new service called mGinger, which has a unique business model where they pay you to receive SMS text messages on your mobile phone. Yes!! That’s true. You get paid 20p for every SMS they said and once your total reaches Rs. 300/-, a cheque will be sent to you.

Sounds quite interesting. Infact, I hope this service indirectly pays for my monthly phone bill. Lets see how it turns out.

If you’re not already on this service, go to the site, and signup now.

I had written a few days back on the rumour from TechCrunch that Google might be acquiring FeedBurner. Well…TechCrunch has confirmed today that the deal is thru. For a whopping $100million dollars.

FeedBurner started 4yrs back and had raised only $10million. This is a huge pay day for them.

There can be some interesting fallouts from this — Maybe AdSense ads on your FeedBurner feeds. Lets wait and watch.

This is a Sponsored Review of the Active@ File Recovery Software.

Active@ File Recovery for Windows provides the ability to recover lost files that you lost as a result of an accidental deletion, or a partition format.

Active@ File Recovery comes in 3 different versions - Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. There is a demo version available as well to enable you to evaluate Active File Recovery before you make your purchase decision. The software can be purchased by a credit card payment or a payment via PayPal. The pricing is quite competitive and is as shown below (for 1 license):

The documentation manual is very comprehensive and guides you step-by-step through the entire process of installation and usage.

Taking a quote from the documentation on how it recovers files:

The file recovery process can be briefly described as scanning a drive or folder to find deleted entries in a Root Folder (FAT) or a Master File Table (NTFS).  Furthermore, scanning for a particular deleted entry and defining the cluster chain to be recovered and copying the contents of these clusters to the newly created file.

Active@ File Recovery can recover your data if your system is not bootable. This is quite remarkable and very useful. It manages to achieve this by providing a bootable CD/DVD that can be used to boot up the system for the recovery process.

More screen shots of Active File Recovery can be seen here.

A high level summary of the features of Active@ File Recovery are:

• Recovers Deleted Partitions (Professional & Enterprise)
• Active@ Partition Recovery for Windows utility to restore data (Professional & Enterprise)
• Supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5, NTFS+EFS file systems
• Recovers deleted files like documents, photos from hard disks and flash media
• Windows Boot Disk (Enterprise)

I would recommend this software for all to use. You never know when it comes in handy.

I came across a very interactive website called Go2Web20.net that has a fancy Flash plugin that shows a list of Web 2.0 sites. Each of the sites listed in the directory are tagged and you can sort based on that. Also, you can click on the logo, and get more details about the site.

A snapshot of the website is shown below.

Its worth paying a visit as I got to know of a lot of new Web 2.0 companies after visiting this site.

Could you find some sites not listed in their directory? Let me know.

Megaglobe, a new search engine is on the way. Based on research done based on previously published articles, Megaglobe plans to bring in some innovations that Google too does not have in its arsenal.

Visit their website to add your blog/site to their index.

Megaglobe has signed an agreement with PayPal, which will enable it to come up with a two-payment system — credit cards, or PayPal.

Some innovations that Megaglobe will be bringing to the table are:

• Protection for advertisers from fraudulent click-throughs on sponsored spots. The patent-pending technology is called “Pay Per Valid Click“.

Some other relevant articles on Megaglobe include:

• Megaglobe: The Google killer cometh
• Megaglobe - a new search engine

There is a strong rumor going around that Google might be acquiring Feedburner. If this is true, the acquisition will enable Google to entire the growing RSS Feed Advertisement market. Feedburner is a leading player in the RSS market and it places them nicely for an acquisition of this sort.

Read more about this at VecoSys.

Whogets.com is an online sweepstakes community. The sweepstakes have a very different model though. The winner is chosen by the community itself. Members will pick the neediest contestant and the one who gets the most votes wins. As they claim on the site:

We’ll see but however it goes, YOU are in control.

Its free to register to participate in the sweepstakes. You have to be a resident of USA to participate.

Just create an account and make the best case to win! There are a variety of prizes to be won. Some that I could see were:

• Cell phones & Accessories
• Music CDs
• Toys
• Movie DVDs
• Household items like kitchen sets, and bedroom furnishings
• Flat screen Monitors/TVs
• …and many more.

MegaMeeting provides a web conferencing software solution. This solution ensures that there is no need to install custom software on your PC. This makes it easier to conduct webinar’s by just launching a standard browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer.

A free demo of the conferencing software is available on the MegaMeeting site.  One of many possible setup solutions is as shown below. This is taken from the MegaMeeting site:

The Alexa ranking for the site stands at 132,797 which shows that the site receives a lot of traffic.

If you are looking at a reliable and cost effective conferencing solution for your personal or office use, do evaluate MegaMeeting.

You can look at some additional reviews of MegaMeeting at:

• Internet MegaMeeting Web Video Conference Services Provider
• Mega Savings with Mega Meetings - Business Conferencing Services