Webware

As someone who just celebrated his first wedding anniversary, I know what it takes to plan a wedding. Everything from the venue to flowers must be accounted for. It's no easy task.

Realizing that, I thought I'd use this space to make it a little easier for those planning a wedding. We have included some well-known resources as well as some sites you might not have heard about before but that could help you save some cash--or stress.

Before we get started, I should note that there are a ton of wedding resources on the Web. This isn't an exhaustive collection of resources, but it is a collection of some of the best.

Get your wedding going

Flowers

1-800-Flowers: 1-800-Flowers is best known for providing users with delivered floral arrangements, but the site is also a fine resource for those who want to get flowers for their wedding.

1-800-Flowers' wedding page lists several flower arrangements, ranging from centerpieces to bouquets for the bride. It even offers boutonnieres for the men in the bridal party. Although flower pricing varies in different areas around the U.S., I do know that 1-800-Flowers' pricing is far better than those in my area. Even better, the flowers are available on the same day the order is placed.

1-800-Flowers has several flower choices.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Grower's Box: Grower's Box is an online wholesale flower retailer that provides a slew of wedding packages. It's a fine resource for anyone looking to find flowers for their wedding.

When you first get to Grower's Box, you'll see several listings available to help you find the flowers you might be looking for. When you click the Wedding option, you'll see a listing of several "Weddings in a box." Those items include the ability to buy everything from bunches of roses, lilies, sunflowers, or just about any other kind of flower the bride might prefer. Even better, they're priced well, since you're only paying the wholesale price. In many cases the Grower's Box beats local floral shops by a wide margin, according to one bride-to-be I know who checked pricing in my area. Grower's Box has a slew of packages to choose from. The site even has a wedding guide if you want some ideas. If you're looking to compare flower pricing, Grower's Box is a great place to start.

Grower's Box has several "Weddings in a Box" options.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Collaborative-storage provider Box.net on Tuesday announced that it had acquired Mountain View, Calif.,-based Increo Solutions, a company with two Web products: Embedit.in and Backboard.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Embedit.in, which was launched in June, lets users post and share their documents in the cloud using an Adobe Flash-based viewer. And Backboard, which is the company's only paid product, lets users get feedback and collaborate on projects using that same document viewer.

In a company blog post on the acquisition, Box's community manager, Sean Lindo, said these products will continue to run independently but that both would later be integrated into Box.net as added features.

Boxing's popularity seems to have been overtaken by such pleasures as mixed martial arts and American Idol over the last few years. This doesn't seem to have discouraged Facebook users from forming groups around their love of expressing hate for certain boxers.

According to the Telegraph, WBA World light-welterweight champion Amir Khan, a Briton of Pakistani heritage, has decided to threaten the social-networking company with legal action over some of these Facebook groups.

Together with his manager, Frank Warren, Khan has employed legal counsel after so far failing to persuade Facebook to take down so-called hate groups aimed at him. These groups, in the view of Khan and Warren, made racist and defamatory comments about the boxer.

Khan and Warren complain that they have so far received only standard acknowledgments from Facebook and have therefore employed the law firm Lupton Fawcett.

"The problem is, when you search for a celebrity on the site, you also come across pages using the celebrity's name and image that have no official link but in some instances are full of defamatory and illegal content," according to a quote in the Guardian of Lupton Fawcett's Stephen Taylor Heath.

Khan is a somewhat-polarizing figure in British sports. However, it is perhaps surprising just how many Facebook hate groups there are aimed at him. I counted more than 20.

Does he know there appear to be 1,600 "Hate MySpace" Facebook groups?

(Credit: Cc Deneyterrio/Flickr)

Facebook's terms of service are very clear about hate: "You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence." So perhaps it's hard to understand how the company can allow so many groups that claim they hate Amir Khan in their very name.

One can, of course, argue that you can say you hate a sportsman, in the sense that the mere sight of them arouses unpleasant thoughts (for some, David Beckham, for others, the German national soccer team). One doesn't necessarily wish that person or those persons harm.

Indeed, when one goes through the Amir Khan hate groups, the vast majority seem to dislike Khan for his attitude, for only fighting (in their opinion) boxers of a poor level and for his lack of boxing skill.

Much of the tone and content, however, is undoubtedly abusive, and there are suggestions of racist overtones in certain comments. Khan's lawyers say they are specifically focusing on material that they believe is defamatory or racist.

This case lends further indication that many interpretations Facebook makes of content on its site are highly subjective. In removing some Holocaust denial groups and one Muslim-hating group, Facebook made it clear that it made its own judgments on what should be considered hateful speech.

It will be interesting how far Khan's lawyers are prepared to push their case. It will also be interesting whether other sporting personalities will join together in attempting to remove potentially defamatory content from Facebook and other sites.

While it seems almost comical that there appear to be 1,600 Facebook groups that profess to hate MySpace, there are only 54 that claim to hate David Beckham, and only one Facebook group appears when you search for "I hate the German football team."

Storage provider and collaboration service Box.net is launching a mobile extension to its OpenBox platform of application programming interfaces on Thursday. The updated platform will enable iPhone app developers to make better use of the service's cloud storage, giving users access to their files across mobile applications on the iPhone and soon other platforms.

The idea is that users will be able to save whatever they're doing on the phone to Box's cloud storage service, as opposed to their servers or the device itself. It's similar to the way the smartphone can natively send some files to places like Apple's MobileMe service and Google's YouTube. Users can then make edits to those files using other applications, subsequently syncing back up the next time they launch the iPhone app.

As part of the new program, Box has already given a handful of developers access to the new APIs. These include Pixelpipe, JotNot, iRec, and iThoughts, all of which are releasing new versions of their apps that will be able to access and save to a user's Box account.

What's missing here are Box's servers, which are doing all the heavy lifting. But the idea is the same--your data flows freely between mobile and desktop apps, all through Box.

(Credit: Box)

Beyond productivity apps, the new APIs allow for any kind of data to be sent over, which opens up transfers from generic things like text files, photos, and videos into things like game saves and user settings. A Box representative told me that while gaming would not be a focus of the API, a developer's implementation of it would not be discouraged.

Considering the heavy saturation of cross-platform games on the iPhone, it could quite easily give developers a way for gamers to continue the game they were playing on another device, making Box a valuable storage locker.

Boxee, a New York-based start-up that makes "media center" software, announced Wednesday that it has raised $6 million in a Series B financing round led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated in the round.

Boxee raised its series A round, to the tune of $4 million, last November. With the new financing the company hopes to ink more deals with media companies and set-top box manufacturers, as well as hire more employees to keep building out its technology (which includes a developer platform). Currently in an alpha test phase, Boxee hopes to expand to a beta test in October.

More deals will also help Boxee gain some industry cred. It has still been unable to convince Hulu, now the big name in premium online video, to reverse a ban on Boxee's access to its content--which includes a huge library from NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney's ABC Entertainment.

"I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners," CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. "And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu."

"Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users," Ronen said.

RSS is great technology, but one of its shortcomings is that it doesn't always represent all of a site's content stream. Many times there are parts of a news or content site that change either through an editorial hand, or with items chosen by users. A new Firefox add-on called AlertBox helps track these "scraps" of content, and can be used to keep an eye out for any changes. This includes things like price changes, edits or updates to a news story, and the top stories on content sites.

To make sure it's not looking for activity on an entire Web page, AlertBox is designed to let you grab bits and pieces of any site--not the entire thing. Once installed, you can summon it by clicking the little bell shape in the bottom corner of the browser, or using a keyboard combination. It then pops up with a selection screen that, similar to Apple's Web clips widget, lets you pick what part of the page you want it to track. You can then choose how often you want it to check for future changes in increments of two minutes, up to one day.

The AlertBox in-box lets you keep track of all your alerts, and delete ones you no longer use.

(Credit: CNET)

AlertBox's way of tracking new content is an in-box-style counter down in the bottom of your browser. When clicked, it takes you to a page of Web clippings that are constantly updated with whatever the latest text is of the page elements you had selected. To be honest, this part of the add-on could use a little work, as it's just a text rip that loses all of the formatting on the page. And all of these alerts are housed not in the cloud, but on your local machine, which has two big downsides: One is that you need to have Firefox going at all times for it to alert you. The other is that you can only access those alerts on that particular machine.

Faults aside, I really like the idea of creating a simple in-box of changing content that does not rely on RSS. I think this, with a little bit of archiving to let you track changes in content throughout the day (like Web archiving service Iterasi does), would make for a very useful alternative to widget start pages and feed readers.

AlertBox lets you choose particular sections of a site to keep an eye on for updates.

(Credit: CNET)

Google's Quick Search Box

(Credit: Google)

Google has released a new Mac application that lets users search both their Macs and the Web in the same window as well as launch applications.

Google Quick Search Box was unveiled in January, but is now ready for a formal release, Google announced on its Mac Blog. It's a pretty lightweight application that Mac users can use as a universal search tool to find local documents, applications or Web sites featuring a certain term: for example, a query for "Wilco" allowed me to launch my iTunes library of Wilco songs, read news stories about the band, and find images.

It's basically a Googlized front end on Mac OS X's Spotlight search, according to a Web page explaining the difference between Google Desktop and Google Quick Search Box. The main difference between the two Google products is that you can launch applications from the Quick Search Box, which isn't possible in Google Desktop.

Techcrunch noticed that you can also use Google Quick Search Box as a Twitter client, because the world apparently needed yet another Twitter client. It doesn't appear that you can use Quick Search Box to actually do real-time searches of Twitter, however, which was the subject of much of the speculation regarding Google's potential interest in Twitter.

Web storage provider and collaboration tool Box.net has launched three new features aimed at giving its business users more customization, and simpler ways to set up collaborative workflow.

The first is tasks, which are action items you can assign to specific files. To start with, the service gives you three actions (approve, update, and review) that can be applied to yourself or someone else. Say, for example, I have an article I'm writing and saving in Box. When I'm done with it, I can assign my boss to either review or approve it. The same goes for updating something like a list of phone numbers or e-mails; I can send that out to multiple collaborators, telling them to add the information in the context of an action that can be kept track of.

You can choose from one of three premade tasks, or make your own.

When anyone finishes a task, the service gives them the option to add a customized response. That message gets sent to the person or group who assigned it, while crossing out the original task request that lets you track who did what during or after a project. What isn't saved, however, are any custom tasks you've created in case you want to reuse them on other projects at a later date.

Along with the addition of tasks, business users now have the option to brand Box's workspace with a company logo and color scheme. Any other users in your team will see this when they use the service, as will anyone you've given file-reading privileges to.

Secondary to this, Box is now letting business users create what it's calling "global" folders, which get their own URL that the creator can choose. Similar to what Dropio provides, this is a permanent place where anyone can get at whatever files are there, as long as they have the URL. They can also subscribe to the folder and get e-mail notifications as soon as new files are added. Unlike Dropio, however this cannot be done via RSS--you have to sign up for it using your Box.net credentials.

These new features continue to round out Box, which is smartly trying to break out of being perceived as a place for users to dump their files. With tasks, branding, and the recently released Web document editor, it's getting much closer to being a do-everything-in-the-cloud service.

If you're sharing a folder with its own vanity URL you can change the way it looks to others as well.

(Credit: CNET)

Box.net has added iSpeech to its OpenBox platform, which lets users get integrated text-to-speech conversion on any text document they have stored on the service. Users simply have to add it to their list of used OpenBox services and it becomes a part of Box.net's contextual menus, meaning you only need to right click on the document and choose the text-to-speech option to get it going.

You do have to be separately signed up with iSpeech to get this to work. It's not a free service when it comes to processing full length documents. There is, however a free tier of service that gives you 250 words per conversion, which amounts to a couple of paragraphs. If you feel like converting your doctoral thesis you'll need one of the service's premium plans.

While neat, I think a far more useful add-on to Box, or any other storage provider would be converting audio recordings into text documents. I've recently become hooked on this with my voicemail through Google Voice, and it would be great get a recording from an interview, or business meeting transcribed in the same place I'm storing it in the cloud.

A right click on any document file will let you convert it to speech using iSpeech. You have to be registered with that service to use it though.

(Credit: CNET Networks)