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SAN FRANCISCO--More than a dozen executives from various Web video services gathered Tuesday in a small meeting room in the corner of Adobe Systems' Bay Area headquarters to discuss "the state of online video." The round table, which was organized by video news network Beet.tv, wasn't for an impending emergency, but there was a somber tone. Falling ad rates, crunched credit, and lackluster consumer spending have already started to take their toll on the Web video business.

NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes, who moderated the latter half of the round table, asked the executives how the current … Read more

Microsoft said Monday it is expanding online services to businesses beyond the U.S. borders.

Microsoft, which has long discussed selling online services to businesses, began offering hosted software services to U.S.-based companies of all sizes last fall.

The software giant will begin selling its Business Productivity Online Suite, which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting, in 18 additional countries beginning April 1.

The hosted service will be offered in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, in addition … Read more

IBM announced Wednesday plans to deliver its software via Amazon Web Services, in a move to push its software into the clouds.

IBM will use Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to offer its customers and third-party developers its software based on a pay-as-you-go system.

Under the arrangement, users will have access to IBM's DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system software.

IBM is also providing free Amazon Machine Images for development and testing purposes, which is designed to allow developers to quickly build pre-production applications.

Big … Read more

The words "free" and "Microsoft" don't often appear in the same sentence, so imagine my surprise at discovering this deal: a free custom domain name, free Web hosting, free e-mail accounts, and more.

As you might expect from the name, Microsoft Office Live Small Business has a decidedly business focus--but that doesn't mean you can't use it for a personal site.

The freebie account includes not only the domain (any available .com, .net, .org, or .info address), but also site-building tools, reporting tools, project and document managers, 100 e-mail addresses, and collaboration-minded online … Read more

Spring has come early at Salesforce.com.

The hosted enterprise-applications company on Tuesday unveiled Salesforce CRM Spring '09, offering up such customer relationship management features as content assembly, content delivery, content tracking, and "Opportunity Genius."

Opportunity Genius aims to connect a company's sales representatives who are working on similar deals.

Salesforce has also added three content features to its CRM Spring '09, one designed to let people create new sales and marketing materials by bringing together a variety of existing presentations from across a company.

CRM Spring '09 also adds a feature that enables sales representatives to … Read more

If you got an HD-capable digital camera or camcorder over the holidays, you might be wondering which Web sites can handle those massive files you've been recording. Over on Webware, we put six big video-hosting sites head-to-head to see which one handled HD video the best.

Included in the comparison is how big your files can be, how much each service costs, and most importantly, how pretty each one looked. The results might surprise you.

Read the story.

Correction, January 21, 9:14 a.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the scope of IBM's acquisition. IBM is acquiring only certain assets of Outblaze.

Computing giant IBM has announced its intention to acquire assets from a Chinese e-mail and messaging company.

Hong Kong-based firm Outblaze sells hosted multilingual e-mail and messaging services for other service providers, telecommunications companies, and corporations to operate under their own brands.

Outblaze intellectual assets, including code and staff, will become part of IBM Lotus' Bluehouse project, IBM's online-business and social-networking and collaboration service, IBM announced on Thursday. Bluehouse … Read more

It used to be that choosing Windows or Linux to host your Web site made a big difference in the kind of functionality or services offered. On Friday, as this informative article on KnockOutHost.com suggests, the choice between Linux and Windows has become somewhat less stark.

It's not that there aren't differences between the two. Security, programming languages, and more all differ between Linux and Windows. But it's a great coup for Linux to note that, if anything, the functionality available for Linux meets and often exceeds that provided by Windows, making one's choice less … Read more

Finally, we get to bring you, the listener, on to the show and tell you how cool you are. Today's co-hosts: Fordo, RogueTess, Gknee, and Dr. Karl!