Symantec to buy MessageLabs for $695M

Symantec is acquiring MessageLabs, a maker of online messaging and Web security services, the company said Monday.

The deal is valued at approximately $695 million in cash, with Symantec paying 310 million pounds sterling and $154 million.

Symantec said the deal will help it strengthen its position in the software-as-a-service market. Symantec will focus on cross-selling and up-selling its existing SaaS offerings of backup, storage, and online remote access into the MessageLabs customer base.

MessageLabs generated approximately $145 million in revenue during fiscal year 2008, ended July 31, the companies said. The deal is expected to close by the end of the 2008 calendar year.

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Listen to Music from Computer on your Cell Phone with Didiom

  Didiom is a new service that may interest music fans who want to stream songs and iTunes playlists stored on a PC on to their cell phone over the Internet, for free.

 download a desktop application  and select folders containing audio files that you want to listen on your mobile phone.
Next install the Didiom app on your phone and once authenticated, you can browse music libraries on your computer and listen them on your phone wirelessly anywhere as long as the phone and the desktop are connected to the Internet.

Didiom is available for most smartphones including BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices. It can also stream music arranged in your your iTunes music library.

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Disable auto completion in Firefox

Firefox 3 has a “feature” that auto-fills a website that you wish to go to as you’re typing in the Location bar.
I wanted to turn this off, but without turning off other auto complete functionality:

• I want to retain the autocomplete in forms (which can be managed from Tools -> Options -> Privacy)
• I also want to retain the autocomplete in the search box on the right (which can be turned off by right-clicking inside the box, and then checking off “Show Suggestions”)

But the Location Bar is a somewhat more involved beast. After hunting in the innards of “about:config” I discovered that this was possible. Just follow these steps:

1. In the location bar, type about:config. The location bar is of course the place where you type URLs. Note that this is your internal Firefox configuration. Don’t mess with it.
2. In the text box that appears at the top of this page, enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults as the preference name.
3. Set the value to 0 if you wish to disable the auto-complete altogether. I have it set to 2 so I get some suggestions but it doesn’t crowd up the experience.

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Bypass Youtube Age Verification

Youtube uses a flag system that allows users to report videos as inappropriate which according to Youtube means any violation of the Youtube terms of service. A flagged video will be reviewed by an administrator who has numerous options at hand including setting the flag for age verification which requires users to login before they can view the video. Age verification is pretty basic and anyone who cheated on his birthday can watch the video after logging in.
The message that gets displayed when a user who is not logged in loads a video with age verification is the following: “This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community. To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by signing in or signing up.” 

Numerous ways to bypass that age verification check have been posted which included using caches and proxies. The Firefox extension You Old Enough provides users with another way. The experimental add-on will check if the video on Youtube is flagged for age verification and open it immediately in a popup window.

This means that it is possible to watch all videos on Youtube that require age verification without having to login to the system.

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Firefox URLBar Extension (UrlbarExt)

UrlbarExt is an experimental Firefox add-on that adds a few interesting functions to the Firefox location bar. Users who do not have an account but would like to install the add-on could use one of the available logins from Bugmenot  It adds six new icons to the right side of the Firefox location bar which look a lot like the icons that the Tagmarks extension is adding in that place. Users with the Tagmarks extension enabled might run into troubles. This has not been tested and is just an assumption.
The icons provide easy access to the following functions:

• Copy URL
• Create Tiny URL
• Search Site
• Up One Directory Level, Double-click for Root
• Tags
• Anonymous Surfing   

click here 

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Turn your mobile phone into a remote monitoring camera

MultiEyeVision,  has launched a tool called Observer that turns mobile phones into remote monitoring cameras. The camera’s images can be viewed from any internet connected device. You need a GPRS enable smartphone for this, or you can buy a pre-configured mobile phone from them

How does it work?  You need to download and install the Observer software on your mobile phone (or use the pre configured mobile phone sold by the company). Once thats done, just start the application and point it where you want to shoot. The streamed images are viewable from your account on their website; you can also control the settings of the observer (capture frequency, picture resolution, capture timings) from the web. The images can be stored for viewing later or even get emailed to you at specific times. The tool/software can run continually for 48 to 72 hours after which it needs to be restarted. On battery, it runs for 4-8 hours. 

What the Observer does not support is video streaming, due to the limitations of GPRS (which requires higher transfer speeds). It can however transmit image streams upto a rate of 3 images per minute, which is adequate for many situations. The Observer is aimed at a variety of consumer or business use cases.

The pre configured phones are based on Nokia & Sony-Ericcson models (Nokia 3500, Nokia 6300 & Sony Ericcson W810i) and cost between 8K-12 K INR. For using the software with your own phone, you’d need to pay 2.5K INR.
In fact, if there are unused mobile phones lying with you, they can be configured as well for this application. Details here.

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Group SMS messaging solution

Tagg is a free web & mobile based mass messaging platform that you can use for any of your purposes. This could be for (seemingly) noble causes like group SMS, micro-blogging etc, or for less noble ones like spamming users with unsolicited SMS (by users, not by Tagg).

 

 

 

The way it works is fairly simple. You can start a group (called Taggivity) which others can subscribe to. You can send out updates that will get forwarded to all the subscribers. This can be done from the web interface or from the mobile usings SMS. Their revenue model is based on advertising - text/banners ad on the website and a short ad that is appended to SMS’s being sent out.
Group SMS is actually a valuable service. I can imagine lots of people wanting to use this - organisations, schools, teachers, salesmen etc. The ability to send our free SMS to all subscribers (who could be students, employees, friends, family members etc) is fairly useful. Specially when its free. And SMS is a proven winner…. no GPRS, EDGE, 3G hangovers there.
SMSgupshup is a similar service and I believe, it has a fair bit of traction as well. So how is Tagg any different from SMSgupshup? Well the Tagg team insists that they are more focused on user experience- as a result they have a normal number 9980199801 as opposed to a shortcode, which also means its cheaper for user to post through their service. Not entirely convincing, I would say!
The web application could do with better layout & design, specially on the landing page for an individual group.

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