FolderShare - FolderShare Accounts

I paid for FolderShare’s premium service and now you are only offering the free service. Will you refund my money?
Yes. Paid FolderShare customers will be contacted and advised of the changes and next steps with regards to the refund.

How much money will I get back if I am a paying customer?
Paying customers will be refunded their pro-rated subscription fee the week of Nov 7th. Customer can expect the refund to show up on their credit card statements in approximately 60 days.

It looks like FolderShare is now free. Give it a try!

Hey PC Vendors (you know, Dell, Soyo, ASUS, Apple, HP, etc):

As you may (or may not) know, VOIP is absolutely taking off. Products like Skype and, my preferred, Gizmo Project are exploding in popularity. Other products from Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Google are jumping into the fray. Cell phone buyers are asking if phones come with WiFi so that they can use VOIP.

Cool! More reasons to use a computer, and more reasons to buy hardware!

So here’s my idea that will help differentiate your product (for a little bit anyway): make it easy to use VOIP on your hardware. How? Either add a RJ-11 port so that landline phones can be connected to it, or add a headphone jack that has a separate path from the regular speakers.

Typically if you plug a headset into the PC (and headsets are practically essential for VOIP), regular music and etc is routed to the headset as well. A skanky hack that I use is to have a USB audio adapter and tell my VOIP apps to use the USB audio channel - this doesn’t seem to work well on all my machines. Why not have a separate audio channel (with drivers) so that the software can dedicate that special jack to VOIP? And while you’re at it, please put the microphone jack in front.

Why not go one step further and add a RJ-11 phone plug so that people can connect their existing landline phones to your computer. Bundle some nifty existing software so that people can dial from their phones, and out through the computer. See? Adding more value to the PC!

On top of it all, you could bundle software with your computer so that your customers can call your customer support with the click of a mouse. If that’s what you want.

Just a thought.

Got 2 Extra Hours for Your E-Mail? - New York Times
EVEN in his sleep, Stever Robbins, an executive adviser, could not escape his e-mail. “I was buried under a pile of e-mail,” Mr. Robbins, 41, said. “I can’t remember ever having a nightmare. For my first nightmare to be about e-mail, that was pathetic.”

In his waking life, at the consulting company where he worked, Mr. Robbins sometimes had to troll through 120 e-mail messages a day, many of them from his boss. “By the time I got done triaging the e-mail, I didn’t have energy to do the rest of the work,” Mr. Robbins said.

A pretty interesting piece on the ongoing battle of managing e-mail.

Bungie.net : Top Story

First things first: Thank you for supporting Bungie, Halo and Halo 2. You guys rock, and we love you. It’s the anniversary of Halo 2, the game that launched on November 9th, 2004 and forever changed the way we curse.

A year after Halo 2 arrived in stores, and almost four years since the original Halo, it seems only logical that we should make them prettier right? Although that prettiness has a relatively high entry point – the arrival of a new generation of hardware in the shape of the Xbox 360.

A while back, Microsoft announced that the 360 would have some level of backward compatibility. A handy feature for folks with big Xbox collections moving into the future. We worked closely with that team to ensure that Halo and Halo 2 both performed according to plan. That meant a lot of work for our test team.

To clarify, the “new” version of Halo or Halo 2 is simply the disk you have already. Pop it into your 360 and it’ll load up just like before. You will have to log into Xbox Live to enable Halo 2’s online functions, but both games will work immediately.

But here’s another bonus – the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn’t look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they’re running on a PC at those resolutions.

Holy cow!

News&features - October 6, 2005

Headquartered in San Francisco, the stripped-down Web site eschews banner, text and pop-up ads as well as any attempts at self-promotion. Operated by just 18 employees, the company earns an estimated $10 million in annual revenue by collecting below-market rates for employment ads in just three locales: the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City. It has steadfastly refused to charge for the vast majority of the classifieds on the Web site, forgoing millions of dollars in income.

Wow. That’s simply amazing.

Wow the U2 concert tonight was a blast. In fact, my ears are still blasted and I couldn’t even hear my phone ring before.

Here’s a quick post of a photo of Bono and their drummer Larry Mullen.

Ah yes, floor tickets are awesome.

Richest Cities In The U.S. - Forbes.com

No. 1: San Jose, Calif.
Median Household Income: $71,765
Median Home Price: $625,000
What This House Costs: just under $2.5 million

For California comfort in the heart of Silicon Valley, this residence offers 4,500 square feet of living space on a private cul-de-sac in luxurious Bel-Aire Estates. The five-bedroom home has a rotunda entryway, a formal dining room and a family room with a fireplace and triple sets of French doors. The one-acre lot is planted with flowers and trees, includes a swimming pool and waterfall, and offers views of downtown San Jose. It is available through Thao Dang at Century 21 Alpha.

Congrats to San Jose! Especially for beating San Francisco!

No. 3: San Francisco, Calif.
Median Income: $60,031
Median Home Price: $726,900
What This House Costs: $4.25 million

This elegant, full-floor condo is in San Francisco’s desirable Russian Hill neighborhood. The home includes three bedrooms, three and a half baths and a living room centered around a fireplace that is sandwiched between floor-to-ceiling windows. The 11-foot ceilings only enhance views of San Francisco Bay, downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. There are three terraces, including one on the roof. It is represented by Pixie Coolidge at McGuire Real Estate.