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A technology blog for The Economist Group IT team

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Compare Google and Yahoo! graphically 

This is very neat.
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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Windows Live Mail Beta - A.NAXed 


Screenshot of Windows Live Mail Beta

I got access to the Windows Live Mail Beta today. It's impressive. It's AJAX-like (it's really Asynchronous .NET and XML) and is really slick - it has a preview pane, allows use of drag and drop to organise messages and has 2GB of storage.

As well as bringing Hotmail bang up to date from a customer experience perspective, the ongoing project (Kahuna) was intended to showcase the use of .NET as a scalable robust development environment. As Hotmail is the biggest e-mail system in the world, it will certainly achieve that when it comes out of beta.
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Data replication becomes affordable 

Techworld reports that the European HQ of 3Com was damaged by the fire at Hemel Hempstead, but operations carried on with minimal impact. BakBone, with immaculate timing have announced very reasonable pricing for NetVault: Replicator.

As you'll know we replicate much of our data offsite too.
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Monday, December 12, 2005

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo! 

Oh dear. I'm not so sure about this. Yahoo! made a complete mess of the registration when they acquired flickr. Hopefully things will go smoother with del.icio.us.

So, the tagging phenomenon goes on. Now that Google is dabbling with tagging with GoogleBase, the battle of the taggers is really underway. What's interesting with GoogleBase is that Google formerly relied on computers to do the analysis.
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Friday, December 09, 2005

ITV takes a big punt 

£175m for Friends Reunited? From a company formed from the ashes created by ITV digital this looks risky. When you compare the amount to the $580m paid by Rupert Murdoch for Intermix, owners of MySpace.com, the deal does look poor value. Initially Charles Allen was reported as saying that the premium paid reflected the fact that Friends Reunited "know how to manage complex databases". Well I know a few people who can do that, but I don't think they'll be seeing a windfall.

In a more refelctive interview in the Telegraph, however, Allen revealed that the market that he's going after is classified advertising. He still maintained that the systems he'll inherit will be core to an integrated offering from ITV.

One to watch and certainly a good deal for Michael Murphy who used to run FT.com and failed in his bid to buy FT Business publications before being taken on by Steve and Julie Pankhurst.
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