sharing

Flickr adds video to photo sharing services

Flickr announced today that they now support video sharing to go along with their popular photo sharing services. The option is only available to "Pro" accounts, however, so those using the service on the free level will not have the option. Adding video support not only encourages the upgrade to the pro account, but it also takes an obvious swipe at YouTube.

Says the announcement on the Flickr Blog, "If you're a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream...90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary … Read more

Ubuntu and the coming Linux popularity contest

It's just a matter of time before Ubuntu is crowned "enterprise ready" by one of the major ISVs. Will it be able to maintain its popularity once it is popular with enterprise buyers?

Ubuntu plays an increasingly important role within the larger Linux market. According to a new white paper from IDC [PDF], Linux is big business and is ready for prime time, with IDC forecasting overall spending on hardware, software, and services for Linux to increase 25.2 percent annually through 2011, particularly at the expense of Unix:

Increasingly, deployments of the Linux server operating system are expanding from infrastructure-oriented workloads to more commercially-oriented workloads such as database, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and other general business processing, workloads that historically have been the domain of Microsoft Windows and Unix. Where once Linux was seen by customers primarily as a low-cost infrastructure solution, it is now increasingly viewed as a solution for wider and more critical business deployments.

The question in my mind is therefore, "Which of the big-three Linux vendors is going to dominate the market?" Red Hat is the obvious first choice, but I think there's a serious spoiler in the Linux market, and its name is Ubuntu.… Read more

Can Sony get 50% market share for Blu-ray this year?

Maybe that price cut in Blu-ray players is coming sooner than we think because Digitimes is reporting that Sony has set some very ambitious goals for Blu-ray in 2008. And by ambitious I'm talking a 50-50 split with DVD.

The short article, which carries the headline, "Sony looks to 50% global market share for its Blu-ray products in 2008," says that "Sony will offer Blu-ray Disc (BD) devices in a wide range of product lines and prices and aims to increase the global market share of its BD products from 20 percent currently to 50 percent … Read more

Wildscreen TV lets video creators cash in, not sell out

Wildscreen TV is a video host for film or clip makers who want to make some money off their work without having to build their own sites. Content creators who put up their videos get 100 percent of the ad revenue and access to a great video player that converts source footage into DVD-resolution streams. It's not as pretty as some of the "HD" quality streams from providers like Vimeo, DailyMotion, or Motionbox, but if your source content is good it looks simply fantastic.

As with other broadcast video hosts, content creators can make their own channels. … Read more

Linux desktop market share is up as much as 61 percent, study finds

It's possible that the Linux desktop will never be anything more than a fad among geeky enthusiasts. If so, a growing swell of people appear to be much more faddish of late, as numbers from W3Counter.com appear to indicate.

Looking at the data, Linux clearly has a ways to go. But consider just how far it has come:

Linux went from 1.25 percent in May of 2007 to 2.02 percent in March of 2008. That is 61.6 percent increase in market share in nine months. [Put another way,] that is 82 percent annual growth in installed computers.… Read more

Canon loses SLR share, as Nikon surges

When it comes to the strategically important and fast-growing market of SLR cameras, Canon remained No. 1 worldwide in 2007 but lost share to Nikon, new statistics show.

Canon sold 3.18 million single-lens reflex cameras in 2007 compared with Nikon's 2.98 million, according to a study released Tuesday by market researcher IDC. That represents a 42.7 percent and 40 percent share, respectively, of the 2007 SLR market. It's a much narrower margin for Canon than in 2006, when it had 46.7 percent of the market, compared with Nikon's 33 percent.

Nikon SLR shipments … Read more

Simplify Media adds options

One of the most promising freeware programs of 2007 was Simplify Media, a plug-in for iTunes and Winamp on both Windows and Mac that lets users share their music collections with friends and themselves via the Internet. The application is expecting an official release in June, but until then you'll have to appease your appetite for music with these beta builds.

The program still eats a voluminous amount of virtual memory--near the 100MB range, on average--but if you're not using a lot of other system processes it makes for an attractive way to get your tunes across the … Read more

Firefox reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops

Mozilla Firefox's share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report noted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

This number will seem low to those who have seen higher numbers elsewhere (for example, as high as 30 percent in Europe). This simply reflects the bias of the report toward formal enterprise adoption, a route that Mozilla has explicitly not taken. Basically, Firefox is not an alternate universe into which you will be banished.

Forrester's report states:

Mozilla's share of the browser market rose steadily throughout 2007, only slowing for the quarter directly following the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) in late 2006. Adoption in the enterprise nearly doubled to 18 percent by the end of 2007, but large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox....

And yet it's getting them, all the same.

Why?… Read more

Survey: Office 2007 demand aided by server software

Microsoft's plan to drive Office adoption in big companies by linking the software to server-based products appears to be working.

More than 40 percent of 243 companies responding to one specific survey question plan to deploy Office 2007 within six months, Forrester Research reported Tuesday.

One major driver of Office 2007 demand is SharePoint Server, Microsoft's Web-based software for sharing and managing documents created with Office. Forrester says that 41 percent of the 233 companies that responded to a separate survey question plan to implement or upgrade SharePoint Server within six months.

Also, the release of Office 2007 … Read more