We're talking part one, the one with the hot version of Jennifer Love Hewitt. And oh yeah, that's who you were downloading last week, and we know alllllll about it.
A recent study by Cyber-Ark, who asked 300 IT Professionals about the topic of System Admins checking out what you're doing online at work, says that 1 in 3 IT professionals snoop on their co-workers surfing habits and stats.
I mean why not, right...all the info is right there! They're just "protecting the company from harmful usage".
Sheah, right.
IT Professionals download more pr0n than the entire state of Texas.
Even scarier? 47% of those surveyed said that they accessed info about you that had nothing to do with their job.
No wonder most SysAdmins have the password g0d. Oy!
What might be even worse, is that the other 2 in 3 surveyed lied out of fear that someone was snooping on them while they were taking the survey, thus uncovering the fact that they snoop on us. OMS our heads hurt!
SysAdmins, do you snoop? Worker folk, are you snooped upon?
You can hiphopanonymously write a comment here and let us know about it.
Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.
Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we'll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.
If these experts buy or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and choose if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You'll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.
So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?
Despite some recent competition from sites like Plurk, Twitter is hanging tough as the microblogging center of the web. Now stock-market investors are catching on to Twitter, too, with an add-on site called StockTwits. StockTwits collects tweets that mention a stock symbol, prefaces with a dollar sign. For example, $AAPL was very popular this week, with the Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC.
If you want to see what the Wall Street speculators on Twitter are talking about, head over to StockTwits and check out the info in tag cloud form, in stream form, or by searching. Each tweet is displayed under a graph of the recent performance of the stock mentioned. There's also a cloud of users, so you can easily locate your fellow investment junkies and connect with them over Twitter. Of course, we can't vouch for any of the advice you might get, but this looks like an intelligent use of microblogging technology.
Are you a freelancer, a student, or someone who just really likes to bill people by the hour? You might get some use out of Project Calculator, an OS X app that helps you keep track of how much time you put into each of your projects. It lets you run a timer or enter your hours manually, and then does all the calculation you need to send someone a bill. You can output your Project Calculator in a number of formats, including PDF, HTML and plain text, so your clients will never give you the old "I couldn't open the file" excuse.
We almost balked at the $20 pricetag for Project Calculator, but after trying it out, we realized that this app can save you a lot of time for the money. Keeping a spreadsheet from scratch is ok, but having everything set up for you and organized by customer and by client is a lot easier and less fiddly. Appropriately, Project Calculator frees up some time for you to actually work on projects.
The Facebook mini-feed continued its expansion on Friday, adding YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader, and your personal blog to the list of sites that can share data to Facebook. The import feature already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us. What's Facebook's goal with all of this? Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone speculates that Facebook is going to become the operating system of Web 2.0, sucking up the best features of other innovative sites.
Josh's idea makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that the new Facebook profile design, scheduled to launch shortly, won't let you hide your mini-feed when you're looking at your profile. Facebook says this doesn't matter, because hiding it for yourself never affected which stories others could see, and they want users to know what they're broadcasting. If it doesn't affect anything, why take away the choice to hide it?
We'll engage in a little speculation of our own: by expanding the amount of info in the mini feed, and giving users as much exposure to it as possible, Facebook increases the value of advertising in the mini feed. They haven't announced any formal plans along those lines, but their recent moves (think Facebook Chat) seem to be targeted at increasing the time users spend on the site, which in turn increases its value to potential buyers. Just some mini-food for thought.
Salesforce for Google Apps goes live today, which basically means that Salesforce.com users can integrate Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services with their Salesforce account.
Why exactly does this matter? Basically, it gives small business owners a one-stop shop for managing their workforce, customer, and marketing information. Saleforce has its own email application, for example, allowing you to keep track of business related emails from the same interface you use to manage contracts. But now that there's Gmail integration, you can send an email from Salesforce.com, Gmail, or a desktop application like Outlook linked to your account. All of your information will be viewable from the Salesforce web interface.
The folks at Common Craft put together a simple explanatory video which you can see above. We kind of like it better than the official video from Salesforce, but you can check that one out after the jump.
There are plenty of ways to find the nearest bar, coffee shop or book store. Mapquest, Google Maps, and Windows Live Maps all let you find and plot local businesses on a map. But none of those services let you know if a shop is actually open.
That's where WhatsOpen comes in. Just type in what you're looking for and where you're looking. For example, restaurants in San Francisco or coffee shops near Mountain View. WhatsOpen will bring up a Google Maps mashup with store information, phone numbers, and hours of operation. While WhatsOpen doesn't seem to include holiday hours, the site could come in handy if you're looking for a place to buy groceries in the middle of the night or if you have a sudden urge for coffee at 2am.
WhatsOpen recently launched a public demo that covers California. But you can also sign up for a beta account covering the US, China, and Europe.
SugarCRM has just posted a much-anticipated, much-tested update to its CRM software. Already one of the leading CRM clients in the field, Sugar also has the honorable distinction of sporting the majestic and rare feather of open source in its illustrious and award-laden chapeau. Management for the masses, if you will.
Sugar 5.0 includes improved security, the ability to easily create custom modules, an AJAX email client compatible with the POP3 protocol, and hot new dashboarding capabilities.
Following the old carpenter's adage of "measure twice, cut once," the Sugar CRM software was put through three beta cycles, and was tested over 30,000 times. In other words, if you think you've found a bug in the Sugar CRM software, it might be the one that splattered on your glasses as you cruised to work on your Vespa scooter.
SugarCRM is available as a free Community edition, as well as two commercial editions: Professional and Enterprise. Professional costs $275 per user per year; Enterprise costs $449. The Sugar website offers a wealth of demos, both hands-on and hands-off.
LinkedIn's new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?
People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google's OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.
Nonetheless it's great to see that LinkedIn is growing...mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?
Designers, what is the number one thing your customers ask of you when they see your mockups? "Make my logo bigger, please!"
Companies spend large amounts of money on ad runs and web developments and want to stand out. Well, there are now a few things on the market that can help businesses increase the size of logos online and in print materials, fix whitespace, easily create starbursts, make designs stand out with fluorescent colors and create emotional ads.
This suite of six products will ensure customers are happy with their designs, all for just 3 easy payments of $29.99. Check out the infomercial to see if it might work for you! Also makes a great stocking stuffer!
Along with pinpointing business locations on Google Maps, companies can also list coupons to draw traffic into their locations. However, what if we wanted to search deals in a certain area only, and the store location didn't matter much. That could be a little difficult to find, until now.
Mike Blumenthal has discovered a way to search through a unique Google interface that pulls up coupons that have been entered into Maps. This secret interface allows users to search for coupons in a city based location and get results back without a giant pinpointed map. Simply visit this link and type in a city for all participating area coupons, you will be presented with a listing of deals. Happy coupon hunting!
Microsoft has just acquired JellyFish, a comparative shopping engine.
The team in Redmond Washington has been working on shopping and commerce components for Live Search, and the recent addition of JellyFish to the Live team could mean some new improvements for the MSN Shopping space.
Jellyfish calls itself the "internet's first buying engine". The service pieces together the shopping puzzle with information and content relating to the particular item you might be interested in and presents you with trusted merchants to take your pick from. Jellyfish makes money by taking a share of the revenue associated with the purchase and actually split it with the buyer. Advertisers in the JellyFish marketplace compete by paying more to get higher on the listings. This in turn makes the end price lower. Everyone's happy. Customer got their product cheaper, and merchant got a sale.
What does this mean for users of Live.com search? We're sure a few more highly targeted and relevant product links will be appearing in the search results. But the real question is, will Microsoft continue the JellyFish revenue sharing model, or keep all that cash for themselves?
LinkedIn is planning to let users add profile images starting today. This is something that has been a long time coming, and is pretty much the standard for social networks of all kinds.
Other social networks are way ahead of the game, but LinkedIn is trying its best to stay on track and give its users what they want. The addition of images in personal profile pages might not be that important for the business community that LinkedIn attracts, but as LinkedIn's Adam Nash suggests, you may recognize the faces of people you once worked with without remembering their names. Will this be enough to pick up what they might have lost to Facebook?
With the Facebook competition heating up big-time, LinkedIn has started a fire under its development plans opening up an API and improving its Groups. LinkedIn has reported that 250,000 new users join each week.
Looking for an easy way to set up an email newsletter? Nourish will take any RSS feed and convert it into an email newsletter. The service is free to use, and relatively easy to set up and send out.
Want to keep customers up to date with your own newsletter?For companies that have a blog up and running, you can take that fresh content and easily package it into an email broadcast. Users register an account and presented with a campaign dashboard; four steps then stand in the way of your escape from the land of newsletter-less losers.
Choose a name, subject and to and from name and email address.
RSS Feed import - Paste the URL of your RSS feed, and grab posts from a certain date.
Scheduling - Daily, Weekly and Monthly newsletters can be created at certain times of the day.
Custom design (optional) - if you want your newsletter to better present your brand identity.
Subscribers to the newsletter are imported via a CSV file. When newsletters are sent out, Nourish will provide you with subscribers open rates, click through rates and the number of emails delivered. It's a great free service that has only one drawback, albeit a major one, there are currently only 10 subscribers allowed per account.
In urban slang, a rap sheet is defined as a history of criminal behavior. But online, a rap leaf is something entirely different. RapLeaf lets you keep tabs on your reputation and contribute to the online reputation of others. Ever use eBay to rate a seller or buyer? It's kind of like that, except no auctions.
Like eBay, RapLeaf's rating system includes a positive percentage and an overall rating number. The overall rating purports to include factors from social networking sites such as MySpace and is representative of more than just other RapLeaf user's feedback. There appears to be no upper-limit to this figure.
So how useful is this, considering we already have an accurate credit rating system and personal criminal history already available in an online search? We like the RapLeaf idea because it's somewhat self-monitoring like any good social site, and because it's independent of any single commerce site. RapLeaf is nearly about to release their API, too. So commerce site operators will be able to plug in the reputation tools easily. Now why didn't the stodgy old-schoolers at the Better Business Bureau think of something like this?
We're talking part one, the one with the hot version of Jennifer Love Hewitt. And oh yeah, that's who you were downloading last week, and we know alllllll about it.
In urban slang, a rap sheet is defined as a history of criminal behavior. But online, a rap leaf is something entirely different. 
