Mind Infinity

Yahoo released a cool web application for your desktop to access several emails that includes Yahoo, Gmail or any POP/IMAP Client

One of the great thing is, you can save these mails for off-line usage. Setup if pretty easy.

It also allows you to integrate with other services from yahoo such as calendar which is a cool feature. It really competes with Google calendar in this application. Now I have to check how I can sync it with my iphone.

It didnt get my tasks/calendars/notes from my yahoo calendar, probably there is a way.

Running a website 100% of the time is very crucial for businesses. Even few minutes or hours, downtime affects business a lot, for small businesses percentage is much higher. Enterprises uses tools such as nagios for monitoring the services which includes web servers, database servers etc.

Another alternative is Open NMS which is first enterprise grade network management platform made under opensource license and there is Zenoss which is equally comparible to nagios written in python.  When you compare with Nagios, Nagios wins as it has lots of features as they promise and many things such as controlling dependable services etc are done which are very important for enterprises.

However, above tools needs lots of resources and setting up is very time consumable, there are many web alternatives mainly for small/medium businesses which can monitor the services.  These tools are quiet handy and ease of setup.

Host Tracker a web monitoring service, they have a free service with limited features and with a little pricing they have many other features which is quiet good.

Important thing in monitoring is alerts and many of the services has the email alerts and sms alerts with a little pricing.

Alternatively, there are many other web services such as SiteUptime and Montastic which have similar features with different features and pricing plans.

Recently I came across a nice monitoring service mon.itor.us which looks very promising and claim as free though they have bit of pricing for SMS alerts. So far it performed well with the tests and it doesnt send you annoying alerts which many other services do, It is getting popular and worth giving a try. It can monitor the website externally and also monitor CPU, memory, intranet etc internally. Easy to start.

Amazon S3 is a online storage service provided by Amazon. It is an internet storage system where you can achieve store images, web hosting, backup solution at a reasonable cost. It caters from small to enterprise business and it is widely popular.

The retrieval and pushing data is done using Web Services. they claim the service as high availability, highly reliably and scalable. Since it is using web services, web developers can extend the service to any platform easily and make services.

An example being a Image hosting service, a Travel Portal which contains lots of images, galleries etc can make use of Amazon S3 thus reducing the bandwidth costs, file serving requests to webserver.

Amazon S3 is made up of buckets and objects. All Objects are organized into Buckets and can assign a unique key and later can be retrieved by REST, SOAP or BitTorrent. Buckets and keys can be accessed by URLs.

To keep costs lower, many startups and small companies have embraced this platform thus reducing their costs. 37Signals.com uses S3 to store their data.

It can be used as a good backup tool for servers and also local machine and as it is internet based, can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Here is a list of amazon backup tools

S3 is very well documented. Smugmug a photo hosting service have posted amazon s3 savings in their blog. Amazon S3 can be accessed by web browser from this s3interface.com.

A popular service akamai is used for image hosting and many other types of storage, but when compared to amazon,amazon s3 is much cheaper in storage, when you have high bandwidth websites, you need to workout bandwidth costs against other services on the internet.

A new comer in Open Source World, a new ecommerce platform is released, It has been in beta for a while. Magento is completely modular and very flexible in its design and have lots of controls to tweak around.

It builds the a fully functional ecommerce website in minutes with nice templates and very easier admin interface unlike the other popular open source software such as OSCommerce/Zencart which usually needs lots of tweaking with admin interface and templates.

In my initial testing, I found Magento to run slow when compared to other, I believe it is due to the framework they have adapted. A tour is in their website

It can also run as a single CMS for multiple websites which is easier to setup.

There are lots of developers and community has been developed during the beta. It is going to fun implementing this new system. Lots of features were included in the system which should be easier to setup a basic portal and can be customized to an enterprise level.

Adobe Launched Adobe Media Player which allows you put all shows which are available in the internet and put it in your playlist and play at your convenience.

Adobe consolidated a catalog for leading media companies. It can automatically download the episodes in the background and let you view anytime you want.

Adobe worked a lot in designing the interface which has search and many other customizing features. This is another tough competition to itunes and Windows Media player. Due to Adobe’s partnership with media companies, it can have better content.

Content Owners can white label their content. Player works in both Windows and Mac as it is a browser based application, A powerful browser based application is launched by Adobe last month which is Photoshop Express is also a big step in web environment for media.