Zune Sector Launched

I finally managed to find sometime to launch my newest blog. Zune Sector it will have the latest information on Zune. Check out Zune Sector.

Reports: Yahoo to Buy Facebook for $1 billion

Looks like Mark Zuckerberg has finally decided to sell Facebook for 1 billion dollars. He refused to sell it last year for 750 million. Similar site, Myspace sold for 580 million just last year. Microsoft and Viacom had expressed interest in the popular website.

Read more at BBC

Online Storage Solutions

There are two new sites I found that offer large amounts of storage online. Mediamax and AOL's XDrive. AOL's purchase of xdrive.com features 5 GB of free online storage space. You can go to their site and log on with your AOL or AOL AIM screen name, or even create a new user name. So how can they give you free storage, well of course advertisements. They also offer a 50GB plan which is $9.95 per month or $99.95 yearly. Also some neat features it has is a built in personally music player, some photo features and allows you to setup automatic backups. XDrive also features a down loadable desktop application which allow your PC to map to it (like a network drive). A question that is posed is, is your data safe with AOL with you files? (referring back to AOL publicizing what users searched on their AOL search engine)

XDrive Online File Manager

Uploading a file

Mediamax also has similar functionality to XDrive but offers a whopping 25 GB's for free. It does have a few constraints, you can only download or share 1 GB/month and send files up to only 25 MB in size. They also have paid services. For 4.99/month (or 44.95 annually) you get 100GB of online storage, download/share 10GB/month and the ability to send files of any size. The Elite Plan gives you 250 GB and download/share 25 GB/month, for 9.95 month (or 89.95 annually). The last play they offer is Professional, which is 29.95 monthly (289.95 annually). This plan gives you 1 Terabyte (1000GB). It also is packaged with video playback, photo viewing, and built in music player.MediaMax File Manager

You can always settle for a personal hard drive and share it on your network and have available remotely, but to avoid that hassle these are free solutions to also consider. XDrive didn't mention any download/sharing restrictions. I liked XDrive's interface better too, but you can't go wrong with MediaMax's 25GB of space.

Zune Coming soon.

Yes Microsoft is working on an Apple IPod rival. It will be called 'Zune.' But will it have the functionality to pull current ipod owners to the microsoft product. There have been many speculations about 'Zune.' Microsoft has published a website pressroom related to 'Zune'. Check out the pictures posted on dedicated blog site to Zune at zunezome.blogspot.com.

Google Writely

Google recently purchased Writely in there continuing efforts to make office type applications available to everyone via the Internet. Writely is like Google Spreadsheets but appears to have progress much further in features. It has all the basic features that anyone would need to word process. I really liked the auto save feature (Office 2003 - sometimes lags when it auto saves) Writely Autosave is quick and doesn't affect the performance. So I actually typed this in writely. I also liked the fact how you could publish to your blog. While I am on blogger and Google own both products I think the post worked well. I didn't have a chance to test with another blog entry on Writely! The spell check is pretty accurate but said 'Writely' and 'Google' were misspelled. Just like MS Word you can use the right click button almost anywhere on the text area. You can save the file in popular formats such as MS Word, Open Office, and even PDF. Visit Writely to test drive the web application for yourself. Writely beta is 62% complete, I will post updates as they become available.