Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Expo TV introduce the 2006 Holiday Shopping Guide



Expo TV unveil the first-ever Holiday Shopping Guide -- an interactive video series co-created by the VIDEOPINIONSSM community and Expo TV producers!

The 2006 Holiday Shopping Guide offers a variety of gift related programming including:

  • Three magazine-style full-length shows
  • Five episodes focused on a specific gift recipient such as "For Her"
  • Dozens of individual gift-pick videos
  • A good dose of helpful holiday shopping tips
The shows are available on Google Video, AOL Video, YouTube, and will make their television debut on December 1st on our Video On Demand Network through partnerships with Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, and other cable operators.

Riverbed Expands Operations in North America

Opens Offices in Canada to Enable Global and Regional Enterprises to Speed Application Performance and Improve Collaboration.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD) announced today the launch of operations in Canada with the opening of offices in Toronto, Ontario. Riverbed's new Canadian office will allow Riverbed® to best meet the needs of distributed organizations throughout Canada as they seek to solve the problems associated with application performance over wide area networks (WANs).

Riverbeds first customer was a Canadian company, said Jerry Kennelly, CEO and president of Riverbed. Riverbeds decision to expand operations in North America is driven by customer and partner demand, as organizations recognize the importance of optimizing WAN performance for a broad range of applications and services, including IT consolidation, backup and disaster recovery, and application acceleration. We look forward to working with our Canadian partners to meet the needs of distributed enterprises.

Riverbed has developed relationships with leading reseller partners across Canada, including British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. As part of this release, Riverbed is announcing Canadian customers SECOR and Wardrop Engineering, both of which worked with partners to deploy Riverbeds Steelhead® appliances.

SECOR was founded in 1975 and today is the largest independent strategy consulting firm in Canada, serving prestigious clients in North America and Europe. In addition to its Montreal offices, the company has operations in Paris and Toronto. The company is organized into three groups: SECOR Consulting assists top teams of large North American companies with strategic and global expansion concerns; SECOR Europe focuses on top teams of European companies; and SECOR-TAKTIK specializes in mid-sized Quebec companies that must constantly adapt to the changing realities of the market.

SECOR deployed a Microsoft SharePoint Intranet to enable collaboration between its three sites, including the ability to quickly and easily share large PowerPoint and Word documents. However, downloads of typical files of 25-30 MB often took 10-12 minutes to open and file replication was nearly impossible. The company turned to Montreal-based NOVIPRO for a solution. NOVIPRO is a rapidly growing company and registered Riverbed reseller that has, since 1993, successfully implemented IT projects for small, medium and large sized businesses. NOVIPRO has developed a unique approach that capitalizes on the skills of its team to address its clients' challenges in areas that include technological infrastructure design, software solutions, IT recovery, archiving and other IT issues. NOVIPRO recommended that SECOR consider Riverbeds Steelhead appliances to enable collaboration between the companys North American and European sites. Following installation of the Steelhead appliances, the same files that once took 10-12 minutes to download now take 10-12 seconds.

Riverbed has delivered performance beyond our expectations, said Joanne Couture, Director Service to Professionals at SECOR. Our users in Paris are now working as if they were in Montreal. Riverbed has delivered LAN-like quality over our WAN.

In addition to improving application performance, the Steelhead appliances have reduced the amount of traffic traversing the network from 1.34 GB to 291 MB, a 5X decrease, freeing bandwidth and allowing the company to delay a bandwidth upgrade indefinitely.

Wardrop Engineering has also deployed Riverbeds Steelhead appliances. Wardrop is an award-winning international consulting firm providing innovative solutions through integrated multi-disciplined engineering, environmental, and information technology services. The company has a team of more than 850 from which to draw expertise, and was recently named, for the fifth time, to the list of Canadas Top 100 Employers. Wardrop specializes in the forest products, infrastructure, product development, mining and minerals, nuclear, oil and gas, and power sectors.

Wardrop has sites across Canada and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Teams often work collaboratively, transferring a variety of documents, including very large computer-aided design (CAD) files, across the country. In addition, Wardrop has a centralized Oracle-based financial and project management application, located in its Winnipeg office. With a hybrid network that includes centralized, regional and local IT, the company needed a flexible solution that would allow them to speed both the transfers of files and access to its centralized database, while accommodating the design of its network. Wardrop attempted to overcome its performance issues across the WAN with raw bandwidth; however, performance was still unacceptable.

Working closely with Gibraltar Solutions, a registered Riverbed reseller and value-added solution provider, the company deployed Riverbeds Steelhead appliances as a solution. Gibraltar Solutions optimizes large enterprise IT environments, with compelling value, in the areas of infrastructure consolidation, virtualization solutions, access solutions, application distribution, security assessment/operations, as well as process/project management. To-date, Wardrop has deployed Steelhead appliances at 12 sites across Canada and in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Riverbed accommodates the flexible nature of our business where project teams are based in different parts of the country, said Bill Ip, CIO at Wardrop. In smaller offices, we have been able to reduce the number of email and file data servers. Employees remotely work as if local. Having the Steelhead appliances deployed at all of our sites gives us the flexibility to allow all employees access to all data, regardless of location.

Wardrop has also reduced bandwidth usage by up to 5X, allowing the company to reduce its current expenditure on bandwidth and delay future network upgrades.

Users are now able to efficiently and quickly get data from other offices, continued Ip. With the Riverbed-enabled performance, remote users are not even aware that they are accessing files over the WAN. Based on the performance, they assume that they are opening local files.

YouTube Goes Mobile

SAN FRANCISCO: Video-sharing website YouTube announced today its foray into distributing video clips on mobile telephones through a tie-up with Verizon Wireless.

YouTube said that from early December, a selection of its most popular videos would become available to US subscribers of Verizon Wireless's premium "V CAST" service.

"With the largest community for online video entertainment, YouTube's move into the mobile space will enable a new audience of mobile users to enjoy entertaining videos virtually whenever and now wherever they want," it said.

YouTube, which last month was bought by Google, has emerged as the web's hottest site for watching videos since its launch 18 months ago.

The company indicated that mobile tie-ups were likely after the deal with Verizon, which is the largest US wireless operator in terms of revenues.

"People want to be entertained in a way that fits their individual lifestyle," YouTube co-founder and chief technology officer Steve Chen said in a statement.

"We will roll out exciting partnerships and features for the mobile user over the coming year," he said.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

YouTube Viewers vs Google Viewers Survey Results

I have been running the same videos on YouTube and Google for the past 3 months and was interested to see which get the most views and why...


Steve Irwin Stingray Accident YouTube 86,861 Google 173,196
Beautiful Girl using a Cordless Hair Straightener YouTube 4,845 Google 585
Toast YouTube 77 Google 175
Canadian girls gone wild YouTube 328 Google 371

Results:

YouTube viewers really want straight hair, they were sad about Steve Irwin's death but not as sad as the Google viewer who was distraught in comparison, the Google viewer prefers toast over the YouTube viewer and both The YouTube viewer and the Google viewer are into Canadian girls!

Friday, November 17, 2006

Casino Royale - The Virgin of a new Bond


Just back from seeing the New James Bond movie Casino Royale, it's a blast from minute to end. This Bond is good he doesn't fool around he takes aim and fires. The Gadgets have gone they died with Q, but it's 2006 so we have enough gadgets in the world for any agent to use. Sony Ericsson (special silver versions of the K800 and K790 Cyber-shot™ camera phones) provide the cell phones and laptops by Sony abound. The cars are from Ford, with the new Aston Martin DBS, next to the old.

The planes are provided by Virgin and I do believe you see Richard Branson being searched at the airport security in Miami, not a 100% sure but I would bet on it!

Monday, November 13, 2006

Riverbed Awarded Patent on Core WDS Technology

Proven Technology Speeds Application Performance at Remote Sites by up to 100X and Overcomes the Limitations of Geography for Global Businesses

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) announced today that the company has been issued U.S. Patent 7,120,666 for its Transaction Accelerator for Client-Server Communication Systems, which is becoming core technology in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions.

Riverbed® was founded with a vision to create integrated and intelligent solutions to the networking, application, and storage issues that together slow the performance of distributed networks and cause remote sites to suffer painfully slow application and file transfer speeds, said Steve McCanne, chief technology officer at Riverbed. This patent reflects our technology leadership in WDS and related solutions and our willingness to protect our intellectual property.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Zune™ is almost here

Zune.net went live today. Check it out to learn more.

Plus, Coming Zune is evolving into Zune Arts. Go see it at www.zune-arts.net. It's a place for creative expression around the idea of sharing from some of today's most progressive artists, animators and designers. Play around. The gallery is constantly growing.

Come back to Zune.net on November 10 for some exciting information about our launch plans.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Who will buy Zillow.com

Zillow.com is an online real estate service dedicated to helping you get an edge in real estate by providing you with valuable tools and information.
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Who will buy Zillow?

Perhaps IAC/ Interactive Corp their list of compatible properties includes LendingTree, for real estate loans; RealEstate.com, with its branded and powerful Find-A-Realtor service and Domania, a text-based database of actual home sales, drawn from public records.