share

The term mind share gets thrown around quite a bit these days and the essence of the term is, well, confusing. Some may say that mind share is the amount of mental time given to a specific topic, but I tend to disagree. To me, mind share is the amount of time a company dominates our minds during the buying process. Second to maybe only Apple, Sony commands such a significant mind share in this industry that corporate and device flops seem to be all but forgotten by all of those except the most techie among us.

I don't … Read more

Google has just announced the much-rumored acquisition of communications service GrandCentral. TechCrunch broke the news about the acquisition last week and is now reporting the deal is rumored to be somewhere in the range of $50 million. Details about final price and terms are confidential.

This is Google's latest move into the telecommunications market and one of their biggest. For current GrandCentral customers, service will go uninterrupted. For users interested in signing up, GrandCentral is now limiting sign-ups to invitation only.

The other big change in place as of today is GrandCentral's RingShare service. Previously, users were able … Read more

Kevin Rose, of Digg and Revision 3 fame, just launched an invite-only alpha of his latest project, Pownce. Pownce lets you share files, links, and other info with your friends. It's not an original concept. Yet Pownce makes an extremely good first impression. (Earlier, we had invites to give out--but we're sorry, they're all gone now.)

Pownce strongly reminds me of Tubes (review) and Izimi (review), and little less so of AllPeers (stories) and Pando (quick hit). It's also reminiscent of the file-transfer feature of various instant-messaging clients.

There's also a heavy dose of Twitter (stories) in Pownce. Every time you send a file or note, it's added to your running feed of activities that anyone can view; likewise, it's easy to see the public feeds of other users and the private items posted by your friends.

You can send items to individuals on your list, to everyone, or to groups you set up (for example, you can have a family group, a group for a project at work, and so on).

At the moment, Pownce lets you send plain text notes, URLs, files, and event invitations (and it tracks RSVPs). I would not be surprised to see audio or video recording functions built into the product, which would make Pownce an interesting alternative to Twittergram.

Pownce works through a Web page, and there's also a slick Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) desktop app.

It's easy to discount Pownce as a me-too concept. In fact, it's several. But it's extremely well put-together--capable yet easy to get into and use. And useful. And fun. Try it if you can.

… Read more

On Wednesday, CNET News.com checked in with Jeff Berman, MySpace.com's general manager of video operations, to hear more about the gargantuan social network's latest project: MySpace TV. The New York Times reported Tuesday that MySpace would be refurbishing its in-house video operations this week, creating a new video hub at myspacetv.com (site not yet active) to host a mix of amateur and professional media content. Berman filled us in on exactly what to expect.

"It's really just the next step in what has been a very busy few months for us on the … Read more

If the pirate community is any judge of movies, Michael Moore's Sicko is sure to be a hit.

On the day that the documentary about the health care industry is scheduled to debut, unauthorized copies continue to flitter across the Web. Illegal downloading of the film began gathering steam last week when copies appeared at The PirateBay, YouTube and Google Video.

What started with just a few hundred people a week ago, has mushroomed into the tens of thousands. A review of torrent search engines Mininova, TorrentReactor.net, The PirateBay, Isohunt and Torrentz on Friday showed that thousands of … Read more

AllPeers, the social file-swapping and file-sharing Firefox extension is adding a built-in BitTorrent client early next month. Users will be able to download torrent files right in their browser without the need for a BitTorrent software client. Similar functionality was introduced to Opera's browser in mid-2005, however the team behind AllPeers is giving users an added bonus to download torrents through their extension. If two or more AllPeers friends are downloading the same torrent, they'll get the benefit of faster sharing. The AllPeers team claims it's double the speed they'd be able to get through regular … Read more

The beta copy of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X handed to developers last week by Apple, is available on a file-sharing site for downloading.

Apple's legal department tends to frown on things like that. Or, at least they did when the same thing happened with a beta copy of Tiger, the current version of Mac OS X released in April of 2005. Crunchgear spotted the build, code-named "9A466" on a U.K. site called Oink, and it's currently on PirateBay.

Commenters on Crunchgear's site said the build had been pulled from Oink, … Read more

A company named Wyzo recently released the first public version of its flagship product, the Wyzo browser. Built off the open-source Mozilla Firefox base, Wyzo is notable for incorporating the ability to download torrent files directly from the browser interface without a separate BitTorrent application.

Wyzo offers the ability to download torrent files only because of an extension named FireTorrent that comes pre-installed with the browser. The FireTorrent add-on uses technology such as iP2P, STUNT and unP2P to translate a torrent file into the actual download that the torrent represents. Unfortunately, one big problem I had with Wyzo was that I wasn't able to kill/remove any torrent downloads that stalled because of a lack of peers.… Read more

LimeWire is an extremely popular, peer-to-peer file-sharing program based on the Gnutella network. The version 4.0 series ups the ante with a combination of feature tweaks, an updated interface, and better all-around performance.

In this First Look video, take a quick tour of the app and learn how to screen out illegally shared content.