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Microsoft is again trying to convince the partners that sell its software that they can make money in a world in which customers are getting their software as a service directly from Microsoft.

At its annual partner conference, which is taking place this week in Houston, Microsoft offered more details on the finances that buttress that claim. For example, partners that sign up customers for the new $15-per-month bundle of hosted SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server can get a 12 percent referral fee. The partners can also get a 6-percent cut of renewal fees provided they continue to be … Read more

Tired of the same old marshmallow on a stick routine when you're camping in the woods? Had it with yet another frozen burger off of yet another one of those ubiquitous squat little grills? Well, next time try cooking up a treat with a portable flattop grill. With its retro look, this line from Evo might just be onto something new.

Some people just aren't any good at outdoor cooking. When camping their marshmallow falls into the fire every time. Or you take them to a tailgate and the shish kabob they brought slips through the grate and … Read more

Just about anybody with a little computer experience can put a bunch of photos together onscreen and print them out. But what if you want something a bit more exciting? Maybe something that gives you the flexibility to control the layout, add captions, and upload your work to the Web so your friends and family can enjoy it. JAlbum, for both Windows and Mac is one of my long-time favorite programs. JAlbum just got a major upgrade, so if you're looking for a way to get your photos out to family and friends, it's definitely worth checking out.… Read more

Too cheap for a Flickr pro membership and scared of Zooomr? Check out TinyAlbum, a super simple and minimalist photo-hosting service that will let you upload as many photos as you want (at up to 8MB a file) into slick little albums.

The UI shares a lot in common with Flickr, and incorporates a handful of really user-friendly features like drag-and-drop reordering, on the fly rotation, and links to various sizes for download. It's missing an open API, something that makes Flickr so incredibly useful in conjunction with third-party services, but the speed and ease of use are top … Read more

Calameo is a new service for publishing documents from your computer to the Web. Like Scribd, it's dead simple to use, and will slurp up all sorts of documents of up to 100MB in size. What makes the service noteworthy is that you can take documents online and offline with a click of a button, without removing them entirely--which could be useful to business or education users who want to upload many items, then make them public at a later date.

Of course, the strong suit with any of these document-hosting services is the viewer. Calameo's iteration is … Read more

MSPmentor is reporting that Red Hat has quietly been adding positions that indicate increased attention to the hosting and managed services market. Red Hat, which does 54 percent of its business through its partner channel, looks to be trying to increase that ratio further.

Red Hat...has created two staff positions to serve hosting partners. Plus, Red Hat is evaluating a strategy to work more closely with managed service providers, MSPmentor has learned....

In recent months, Red Hat has received a growing number of inquiries from hosting and managed services partners, according to Mark Enzweiler, vice president of channel sales at Red Hat. Attune to the trend, Enzweiler created a new management position at Red Hat last year, in order to better serve hosting partners.… Read more

Looking to take on more demanding customers, Amazon Web Services on Thursday rolled out two paid-support plans that give customers access to its engineers to resolve glitches.

The company said it will offer two levels of support--gold and silver--for a fixed annual fee or a percentage of customers' total usage of its services. The support plans are available for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). For more details on the terms, click here.

Right now, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its hosted services. Customers pay for how much they use … Read more

Right now, some may look like the online equivalent of a quaint corner store. But catalogs of online applications are the front lines of a brewing battle among platform-as-a-service providers.

Start-up Coghead on Tuesday plans to launch Coghead Gallery, an online store where people in small businesses can hunt for applications.

The applications, written with Coghead's visual-development tool, run on its hosted platform. The platform, built using Adobe Systems' Flex, runs on Amazon Web Services.

At the start, there will be about 30 partners listing their business applications. Coghead's software is aimed at small development shops or tech-savvy businesspeople. … Read more

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) … Read more