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Crusher takes fresh look at online invitations

There's yet another new invitation service emerging: Crusher. In many ways this service is the antithesis of MyPunchBowl, which we've recently covered. Crusher's design is super-clean and simple, and it doesn't have the over-the-top feature set of MyPunchBowl. We like MyPunchBowl. But we also like Crusher.

The site does the things you would expect from an invitation service: You can invite friends and track responses. You can use the service to find a good date for an event, too, if you've got some flexibility. It's clean and light and very Web 2.0.

What … Read more

E3 2007/Update: Does performance drop in 'F.E.A.R.' point to larger PC gaming problem?

UPDATE: Well, we just met with Monolith, developers of the original F.E.A.R. and we don't have much new info to provide. We were told that Monolith heard from Logitech about the issue and Vista, but that Monolith never heard back when it asked Logitech whether the glitch happened in Windows XP. Even if it had, it would still be up to the hardware vendors to dig up the problem and point to a specific place in the F.E.A.R. code. The developer theorized that it could be due to something going with DirectInput, the … Read more

In the trenches with...Jonny Brown of rSmart Group

Most people aren't aware of how vibrant the open source community is in the Higher Education vertical market. Sakai, uPortal, and other Higher Education-specific open source projects thrive in the academic environment. Oddly enough, two of the premier open source vendors in this space hail from Arizona, not normally known as the center of open source. Something in that heat must generate school-bound open source....

One of the strongest commercial open source vendors in this market is rSmart, which provides commercial support for the Sakai project, among other things. Jonny Brown hadn't taken Open Source 101 before he joined The rSmart Group, but as you'll read below, he has clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Jonny Brown, Senior Information Architect, rSmart Group. In the very narrowest sense, my job is to find, create, and distribute to our subscribers and the open source community information about using Sakai software. For the most part, this means that I'm a technical writer - a role I played for many years quite some time ago and have never had much desire to revisit. For sure, it wasn't the nature of the meat-and-potatoes work I do (which is very detail-oriented and tends to be boring) that brought me to rSmart. Neither was it the pay check that lured me - I was happily self-employed, reasonably well compensated, very busy, and quite challenged.… Read more

Resolving the chicken-and-egg dilemma in Purchasing's inefficiency

I had a great lunch with associates from rSmart, Unicon, and MIT today at the JA-SIG Conference, and we talked about a vexing issue that plagues software, open source and proprietary alike (though it hurts the open source vendor more): the high cost of sales. (I credit John Lewis, Chief Software Architect, Unicon, for any intelligence in my musings, and take full blame for the inane shrapnel that is my personal contribution to the thread.)

The proprietary world's P&L operates much like the VC's: high, upfront return (license) to cover the expense that Purchasing puts vendors through to earn its business. (Repeat visits, RFPs, etc.) In other words, the proprietary vendor spends five figures on five deals to hopefully get a "home run" return on one of them to subsidize and exceed the costs.

Open source vendors operate differently, as Larry Augustin pointed out at OSBC. [PDF] Open source vendors are about volume in leads, with the leads finding their way back to the company to purchase. Four figures (or less, often) to close a deal, with the intention being that more deals within the pipe will close.… Read more

Hot laptops you can't get yet

Not one, but two of the upcoming laptops we're most excited about made unexpected appearances on the Interwebs this morning.

The Dell XPS m1330--rumored, leaked, and then finally half-confirmed by Dell (in their infamous "23 Confessions")--showed up again today on Engadget, with several new photos and a rumored ship date (from a "trusted insider") of July 10.

This extra-thin 13-inch looks like a real step in the right direction for Dell in terms of laptop design; leaked images have been circulating online for a while.

Perhaps even more exciting was an Akihabara News story … Read more

SoonR

Category: Mobile

Need to access a file on your home or work computer while out of the office? If you're using SoonR you can grab it while on the go and move it to a shared storage box. You can also check your Outlook in-box, and using SoonR's new AnyTime feature, you can do all of this even when your computer is turned off.

SoonR also has a chatting application called SoonR Talk that lets you access and talk to your Skype buddies on your mobile phone for free, or you can call real phones via SkypeOut. This … Read more

H&R Block CIO discusses benefits of open source adoption

Marc West, CIO of H&R Block, keynoted this year's Open Source Business Conference, and gave excellent insight into why a multi-billion dollar financial services company has turned to open source to deliver innovation and better service to its customers.

InfoWorld just uploaded all the videos from the event today, which you can access here. Marc's keynote is available below.

Turtle Beach AK-R8: USB-ified Ear Force gaming headphones

When CNET reviewed Turtle Beach's Ear Force HPA headphones in 2005, we found that they produced a very convincing surround sound effect, thanks to the presence of four drivers in each ear cup--effectively mimicking the front, rear, center, and subwoofer channels of a 5.1 surround system. But there was a big catch: the PC-only headphones required a tangle of wires--including an AC power adapter--in order to connect to the necessary outputs on a computer's soundcard.

Now, Turtle Beach has gone back to the drawing board and delivered a more streamlined version of the headphones. The Ear Force … Read more

Toshiba's new ultraslim ultraportable

One of the few laptops that has really grabbed our attention with eye-catching industrial design this year is the Toshiba Portege R400, a slim convertible tablet we saw back in January. The just-announced follow-up, Toshiba's Portege R500, is even more impressive.

We got a chance to play around with one of these a few weeks ago, and it was literally one of the thinnest, lightest 12-inch ultraportable laptops we've ever seen. It's got all the requisite ultraportable features, from an indoor/outdoor backlit LED display to a superthin 7mm DVD drive--similar in some ways to the 13-inch Dell XPS m1330 … Read more