It was quite easy to connect to SQL Azure using IIS 7 Database Manager in my Windows 7 machine. Given the fact that the products are still in initial stages this is very reassuring.
The messages that comes from SQL Azure to IIS 7 Database Server’s interface are at best confusing but if you can sweat it out (Keep trying!!!) you will see some light. Other featrures(!) of the connectivity are slow response |No Response etc.
While there is often a lot of talk about the downside of URL shorteners being that if they go down, they take your links with them, the much more obvious and real problem is that they very easily mask potentially bad sites. We’ve been seeing this more and more in both public tweets and DMs, but luckily so far most of those have just been worms meant to replicate themselves, rather than really bad viruses. But security software company Symantec released a video today to show some very bad links in action.
As you can see in the video below, clicking on just one link infected a computer a dozen or so times in seconds. Obviously, Symantec’s intention is showing this is to sell their software that helps to protect against these attacks, but the point is still a good one to make. While URL shorteners like Bit.ly have begun warning users about potentially harmful links, others don’t bother. And let’s be honest, most of us click on links from friends regardless of what URL shortener they are using.
This list of web-based resources will point you toward web sites that will help you learn how to do new things, stay on top of current events, and learn about topics where your current knowledge may be lacking. And these resources will do all that in under 10 minutes each day. Do you know of any other sites where people can absorb quality, new information in under 10 minutes? Add them in the comments!
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5min bills itself as a “life videopedia,” which essentially means that it aggregates and hosts instructional and DIY how-to videos from sites all over the web. The site hosts tens of thousands of videos on everything from cooking to ethics, from fighting the common cold to living with cancer, from parenting to playing the guitar. Though the 5min moniker is a bit misleading — many videos on the site are longer than 5 minutes — most of the content is under 10 minutes long, meaning you can easily absorb educational nuggets of information during your lunch break.
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MonkeySee is another instructional video sharing site that invites experts to share both amateur and professionally created how-to and advice videos. Though many of the videos are over 10 minutes in length, they’re broken up into short 3-4 minute segments, allowing you to view them in chunks whenever you have spare time. The site is also unique in that videos come with printable transcripts, can be downloaded to mobile devices for on-the-go viewing, and include biographical information about the expert to help you determine if this is someone you’d like to trust to teach you something new.
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You may not immediately think of
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The just-launched iMinds publishes original, short audio podcasts about liberal arts topics (such as history, economics, current events, and business) that are approximately eight minutes in length each. The idea is to allow people to learn new things, from a credible source while on the go. The tracks are available via iTunes and Audible.com for 99 cents each, while longer, multi-track lessons are sold for $3.99 (6 tracks) up to $24.99 (72 tracks).
The iMinds concept of delivering short, high quality audio books is sound, and we think they offer an interesting way for busy people to absorb new information. The Australian-based company is adding one to two new tracks per week and plans to have several hundred audio books on a variety of topics available by the end of 2010.
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The Week is a printed current events magazine delivered, rather predictably, once per week. The magazine summarizes the news of the previous week by drawing on a variety of sources to present a short, but balanced, overview of issues. A recent summary of US President Barack Obama’s shifting policies relating to Afghanistan, for example, drew on information from articles and editorials in the Washington Post, Slate, Politico, and from the blog Hot Air.
On their web site, The Week does the same thing but without the 7-day delay, providing a great way for busy readers to learn about current events — with links original sources in order to dig deeper if they have the time.
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HowStuffWorks, which is now owned by the same company that owns The Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, is a great information site that endeavors to clearly explain how things work in layman’s terms. Articles are paginated, illustrated, and written in a format that makes reading and digesting them quickly very doable. Many articles are accompanied by videos that make understanding abstract or unfamiliar concepts even easier.
The site has a huge team of
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Instructables is a huge community of do-it-yourselfers who actively engage in creating and sharing well-illustrated, step-by-step how-to articles on everything from building robots to repairing torn clothing to creating 3D anamorphic sidewalk art (really). The guides are written by the extremely vibrant community, and all follow the same, step-by-step illustrated format that make comprehending the information quickly a snap.
Each guide can also be downloaded as a PDF file for easy offline viewing and printing.
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The ten-year-old eHow is one of the largest how-to sites on the Internet, with over 160,000 videos and a whopping 600,000 articles. The majority of the articles, which are often presented in a clear and concise step-by-step format, can be consumed in under 10 minutes, as can their how-to videos. Of course, the things they teach you how to do might take up more than 10 minutes of your day.
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wikiHow is the last “how-to” site on our list. It’s built using the familiar Wikpedia model: anyone can contribute a how-to article and anyone else can edit it and make it better by refining the steps, adding photos, or correcting mistakes. The site has over 61,000 articles and all of them are free and Creative Commons licensed.
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The oddly named Shvoong is a user generated summary site on which users submit summaries (and short reviews) of everything — from books to blogs to movies to news articles. For those who are in a hurry, but still want to be in the know so they can participate in water cooler discussions at work, Shvoong might be the site for you. Because the summaries are user submitted, they are of varying quality, but they’re all short enough to be read in under 10 minutes and the better ones are certainly edifying.
For those who prefer more professionally produced summaries, check out
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Brickfish, the social media platform, has announced its expansion into the business of licensing its patent-pending and award-winning social media tools to the broader online publishing community. These partnerships will enable other Web publishers, large or small, to leverage Brickfish’s proprietary technologies in order to add a powerful social media application to their advertising sales arsenal.
I’ve received emails asking me about how I’ve done a few things with my blog, so I wanted to share some of the WordPress.Org PlugIns that I use and have enjoyed. The following are my top 7 plugins that I’m currently using on my blog / website: 1) All in One SEO Pack - this one has to be one of my all-time favorites. It works within the pages and posts. You are able to assign a title tag, 160 characters for a description for the search engines, and keywords thus allowing you to optimize your search engine optimization for search engines.
Produced by
$1 Million Media Prize Winners
The big prize features $1 million worth of media placements, as described by DEMO:
“The multi-faceted media package will consist of a six-month advertising campaign promoting the launch of the selected innovations across the most relevant IDG brands including CIO magazine, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Network World, PC World and The Industry Standard, among others, as well as the DEMO and VentureBeat Web sites.”
Consumer Award Recipient: Emo Labs
When Emo Labs debuted their
In his review, Ben Parr writes:
“The concept: instead of sound emerging from giant speakers, they come from thin, clear membranes that could completely redefine how you watch TV or use a computer.
The technology they’ve developed is nothing short of impressive. Dubbed “Edge Motion,” (the long form of Emo), the technology makes sound with sideways forces on an invisible membrane. This vibration creates a full range sound that, from our vantage point, isn’t distinguishable from even the regular speaker.”
Enterprise Award Recipient: Liaise, Inc.
Though not quite as sexy as Emo Labs,
Clearly the idea and product were rad enough to wow the business productivity geeks in the crowd, Mashable included.
DEMOgod Winners
With the exception of Emo Labs, the following companies may not have walked away with the big prize, but each of them did get recognized with DEMOgod awards. These particular companies were selected because they showed “outstanding potential to succeed in the market while motivating and exciting the DEMO audience.”
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Mashable Coverage
Ben Parr and I teamed up to tackle the best of DEMO, and we were more than a little impressed by the quality of companies that took the stage. We picked our favorites to feature, but you can rest assured that in the coming months you’ll hear more from us about a few other great standouts that are bringing competitive products to the market.
In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of our favorite DEMO product launches:
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Fluther, a slick service that lets you outsource your questions to other members on the web, has closed a $600k round of seed funding from some of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors. Included in the round were Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Dave McClure, via FF Angel. Rounding out the roster are Twitter’s Biz Stone and Leonard Speiser (Bix, Twables founder), who are advisors.
Using Fluther is pretty straightforward: you visit the site and ask a question, then wait for other members to answer you in real-time (the site offers a reply system similar to FriendFeed’s that lets you view these responses immediately). Whenever you ask a question Fluther reaches out to other members on the site through Email and (optionally) IM alerts, channeling the questions to members it thinks knows the most about the topic.