Software Free

The Simple Dollar personal finance blog posts a great idea for anyone looking for a deal on a particular item or group of goods who doesn't want to be tempted by other deep discounts at a place like...

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Free review-aggregating extension Pluribo adds a subtle tweak to Amazon product pages that can often have hundreds, even thousands of reviewers weighing in on a product....

One thing that's always been missing from the book-buying experience at mega-retailer Amazon is finding great books just by chance, or by clever cover design. Zoomii, a free book-finding interface...

Kindle owners patiently awaiting the arrival of our latest book, Upgrade Your Life, on the device: the wait is over! You can now purchase, download, and start reading Upgrade Your Life: The...

Alexa has been around since the dawn of Web time, well pretty much. This organization has seen it all.

Alexa was caught in the maelstrom of the greatest boom and bust since the Depression… and survived. The group enjoyed exceptional growth in a totally new business and technological environment, followed by a long and languid fall from eminence. It innovated like crazy, and its innovations reshaped the landscape of the Web. And it was subject to one of the Web’s first huge, headline-grabbing takeovers.

Latterly, Alexa has faced stinging criticism over its traffic measurement model, and has responded by going back to the drawing-board with a new model and a fresh attempt to resurrect itself as a relevant Web player.

The Alexa story is part cautionary tale, part glorious legend. This is that story in 26 letters.

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks. I don’t hate Microsoft Windows I just don’t have a desire to see any operating system dominate the market in such a way that the lack of competition stifles innovation and forces users into an endless upgrade cycle, offering progressively smaller incremental value.

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks. I don’t hate Microsoft Windows I just don’t have a desire to see any operating system dominate the market in such a way that the lack of competition stifles innovation and forces users into an endless upgrade cycle, offering progressively smaller incremental value.

Here's a piece about cloud computing that ask a pertinent question:

Why isn't the world's biggest and most powerful software company taking the initiative here? For all of Microsoft's chest beating about internet delivery as the next phase of its development, we've seen precious little in the way of action.

There are so many reasons that it's hard to pin down. Perhaps it's with Ray Ozzie, the successor to Bill Gates, who is still settling into his job. Or perhaps it's just the stifling bureaucracy of a corporation that stretches as far as the eye can see.

But there's also something missing from this analysis of cloud computing. Nowhere is it mentioned that an essential prerequisite for creating huge server farms to keep the clouds afloat is free software: if Google or Amazon had to use proprietary software, paying for each instance clouds would never, er, get off the ground.

You already love the one-stop convenience of shopping online at Amazon.com, but chances are you're not getting everything you can out of this feature-packed shopping engine. Did you know Amazon can...

Find and buy items from your cell phone with the new Amazon TextBuyIt feature. It works like this: Say you're out shopping and you see a book you want to buy. You figure you could save a few bucks...

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension BuyLater adds a Buy This Later button to Amazon pages that sets up a watch for the product on the BuyLater web site. The web site then checks...

I'm a big fan of Amazon - actually, make that a big addict. But when it starts throwing its weight around, I can't help thinking it is starting to act like a certain other large company that wants it all:

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

"POD" is Print on Demand, an exciting and increasingly popular way to publish books, especially those with small runs (most of them); Lightning Source is a big POD publisher, while BookSurge is Amazon's rival version.

Normally we leave gadget reviews to the crazy cats over at Gizmodo, but when reader Pete Riley told us he's "totally hooked" on Amazon's new reading device Kindle because of its time-saving...

"Business
leaders need to incorporate innovation, efficiency and abandonment as a means
for reaching greater success.

Jeff Bezos is
not one to let dust settle on his shelves. The founder and CEO of
Amazon, the world’s largest online reseller, routinely abandons operations and
ideas that aren’t yielding their intended results. He calls these “defects,” or
inefficiencies in operations. When these defects are eliminated, costs fall and
result in Amazon being able to offer customers lower prices and new frills."

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You've got an idea for the next great Facebook application, assuming Scrabulous and Vampires are not great enough, and you want the application to be available to all 55 million active (and growing) Facebook members.

What you don't have is a bucket full of money (or venture funding) to pay for a server farm?

What do you do, hot shot? What do you do?