DigitMemo.com

The next evolution of labels

Back in the Paleolithic Era, the world was a very different kind of place. People were hunter-gatherers, lived in caves, and kept all their email in folders*. You can’t really blame them. Between tracking woolly mammoths, fashioning crude stone tools, and auditioning for commercials, having a highly tuned system for organizing email wasn’t their highest priority.

But people changed. We moved out of caves and into skyscrapers. We hunt for bargains at the corner grocery. And we play video games simulating ourselves playing video games.

Click for more on Coloured Labels Now Available on Gmail »

An interesting list containing the first 100 .com domains registered.

Many of the names you haven’t heard of, many you have. What was interesting to me is that it took 2 years just to get 100 domains on-line.

SYMBOLICS.COM   March 15 1985
BBN.COM         April 24 1985   
THINK.COM       May 24 1985     
MCC.COM         July 11 1985    
DEC.COM         September 30 1985
NORTHROP.COM    November 7 1985 
XEROX.COM       January 9 1986  
SRI.COM         January 17 1986 
HP.COM          March 3 1986    
BELLCORE.COM    March 5 1986    
IBM.COM         March 19 1986   
SUN.COM         March 19 1986   
INTEL.COM       March 25 1986   
TI.COM          March 25 1986   
ATT.COM         April 25 1986   

Click for more on The First 100 Dot Coms Ever Registered »

Google prepares to roll out its latest free service — where will the giant stop?

While Google has its critics, the company seems to be one tech firm that is constantly in tune with what the consumer wants.  In terms of service, Google generally doesn’t waste time and effort cutting back or restricting its service, rather it simply strives to give the customer more. 

Now Google is preparing to quietly launch a new service, which both legitimizes previously existing internet software and improves upon it.  The service gives users free online storage space and many are dubbing it GDisk for short.  In the past applications exploit GMail’s very high amount of free storage space and allowed you to store files on it like a hard drive (GMail currently features over 5 GB of storage).  Google’s Picasa photo service also has allowed users to store up to 1 GB of pictures and other files.

Click for more on Google to Offer Free Online Storage »

Pirate Bay officials think it is the overzealous Swedish government officials that will be walking the legal plank

The Pirate Bay’s enemies are circling it like a pack of hungry sharks, waiting for it to slip. First there is the Swedish government assault, led by prosecutor Håkan Roswall, who seeks to press charges against The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008.  The planned charges will be against multiple pirate bay admins for allegedly supporting copyright infringement on a massive scale.

Click for more on Pirate Bay Officials Respond, Laugh Off Lawsuits, Prince »

See what sort of tone a company’s acquisitions set

The LibraryHouse blog has a nice summary of recent acquisitions (July 2006 through June 2007) by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, roughly color coded by category:

Click for more on Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Acquisitions Compared »

High-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it.

Click for more on YouTube to Introduce High-Resolution Videos »

Canadian-hosted torrent site is the next to fall in a series of takedowns

The world-wide crackdown on torrent sites has brought down another major torrent hub. After being forced to close its doors to Canadian users in September due to pressure from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), Demonoid.com survived for only slightly more than a month before being having forced offline entirely today.

The previously bustling homepage has been replaced by a single line of text; bereft of much in the way of details, but leaving little doubt as to the fate of the website:

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

Click for more on Demonoid.com Shut Down Again »

The new data centers in Chicago and Dublin are being built on an accelerated schedule; Chicago will be up and running by April.

Prepping for growth in the Internet era can be costly, as Microsoft is finding out. The software company is ponying up more than $1 billion for two new data centers near Chicago and Dublin, Ireland, Microsoft confirmed this week.

These new investments only add to the hundreds of millions of dollars Microsoft’s already spending on server farms around the world to keep pace with online competitors like Google and to make sure it has the capacity to handle a growing online world, which daily checks millions of e-mails, downloads millions of software updates, and shares millions of photos. In each data center, there might be “tens of thousands” of machines, according to Microsoft. The Chicago facility will sprawl over more than 12 acres and draw tens of megawatts of power.

Click for more on Microsoft Spending $1 Billion On New Data Centers »

@live.com Email registration is officially opened and a new live suite launched. 

Windows Live received a comprehensive, Google-like, update to attract more Windows users and convince them to take some of their online activities to Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft itself calls the new Windows Live a “free and fun upgrade for the online and Windows experiences” and promises that the new services “simplify” the digital lives of Windows users. The company claims that more than 400 million users worldwide are using Windows Live already.

Click for more on Microsoft refreshes Windows Live »

Google has unveiled software it hopes will power a variety of future mobile phones and boost the web on the move.

The software could lead to cheaper phones as it is designed to speed up the process of making mobile services.

Google is working with four mobile manufacturers - Samsung, HTC, Motorola and LG - but a Google branded phone was not announced. The first phones using the so-called Google “software stack” will be available in the second half of 2008.

Click for more on Google pushes into mobile phones, codename Android »