Productivity and business

Microsoft updates Office Web Apps, Facebook Docs

Although officially only two months old, Microsoft's Office Web Apps is already growing up a bit.

To satisfy just some of the many user requests for new features, Microsoft this week updated its online version of Office with enhancements to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

One of the most requested features, according to a company blog post, was the ability to print from the Word editor. Previously, you could only print from the Word viewer. Clicking on the File menu in the Word Web App editor now displays a Print command that lets you send a document to your local … Read more

Monster swallows HotJobs, inks deal with Yahoo

Monster Worldwide has completed its acquisition of Yahoo's HotJobs for $225 million in cash and has sealed a three-year deal as Yahoo's exclusive provider of job and career content, the companies said Tuesday.

Although Monster already claims the title as the leading online job site, the addition of HotJobs to its resume is part of the company's drive to match up more working professionals with its business customers. The deal with Yahoo will place Monster on Yahoo's home page in both the U.S. and Canada.

With HotJobs, Monster said it expects to now reach about … Read more

Google's iOS search app gets push notifications

It's not quite the solution iPhone users might have been expecting, but Google has brought yet another way to get push e-mail on the iPhone. Kind of.

Users with the company's Google Mobile search app installed will now find an option to receive push notifications for new e-mails or calendar events within the app's settings menu, along with a very neat option to enable them only for certain parts of the day. This is a particularly useful feature if you want to keep your phone from buzzing or beeping during the times when you're usually asleep. … Read more

Firesay adds simple voice navigation to Firefox

Voice navigation is now commonplace on modern-day Android devices, but on the desktop, many of the accessibility tools that would bring voice commands to the end user still require special system level software or customized hardware.

That's not the case with a new Firefox add-on called Firesay, which brings hands-free voice controls to just the browser. Once installed as an add-on, it can pick up voice commands to do Web searches, open and close sites, and even pull up TV shows on Hulu.

The number of commands, and sites users can visit is extremely limited for the time being. … Read more

Meet Swingly, a Q&A tool powered by robots

While Facebook is busy amassing questions and answers from its 500 some million members, a new service called Swingly, which is coming out of stealth on Tuesday, is thinking a little bigger. Like the entire Internet bigger.

As described to me last week in a call with Swingly's managing partner Andrew Hickl, Swingly is a machine-generated answer engine that contains somewhere around 100 billion to 150 billion question and answer pairs. "It's the first one of its kind," Hickl said. "Our gimmick here is that Swingly uses our system and the Web."

What that … Read more

DeviantArt tries its hand at software

After 10 years of serving as a place for artists to collaborate and share their works, DeviantArt is now aiming to play a more central role in the creation process.

This week the Web site unveiled DeviantArt Muro, a free, HTML5-based drawing program. The program contains a variety of tools and brushes and also supports pressure-sensitive tablets, such as those from Wacom.

A DeviantArt representative said that the idea for Muro had been kicking around for several years, while the actual creation of the tool was a months-long project.

Though not aiming to match Photoshop and other tools in breadth, … Read more

Thousands of Evernote users affected by data loss

Online note-saving service Evernote on Monday acknowledged that it had suffered a hardware fault at the beginning of July that resulted in potential data loss for more than 6,000 of its users worldwide.

The issue was first reported by blog Techwave, citing a report from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. In a Monday note to Evernote users on the company's blog, Evernote CEO Phil Libin explained that the loss stemmed from bad server hardware:

"Every user's data is stored on a 'shard.' A shard is made up of a server together with a redundant fail-over server. If there is any problem with a server, the system automatically fails over to the second server in the shard. We currently have 37 shards. Shard 22 was the one that had problems last month."

Evernote's back-up system stores user data in up to six different places using both on- and off-site servers as well as locally on the user's copy of the software. Though in the case of the problem, which lasted four days, user data was simply being overwritten due to one of these systems not having a working failure routine. "Basically, the shard kept failing over back and forth between two servers over the time period causing some of the data created during that time to get overwritten," Libin explained.

In a call with CNET on Monday morning, Libin said that of the 6,323 users affected by the outage, approximately 70 percent were able to get their data back.

Evernote's software saves a copy of a work in progress before syncing it up with whatever was stored online, so the company was able to pull the complete copies of various files once the problem had been addressed and fixed. However, those who had been working purely on Evernote's site, and whose work was being stored on the faulty shard, had no such protection.

As an apology, Evernote has provided affected users with a free year of the company's $45-a-year premium service. Those who were already premium subscribers get an extra year.

As for whether this could happen again, Libin said it's extremely unlikely."This was a freak of hardware failures. But we've changed the fail-over process so it won't happen again."

Data loss on large-scale Web services is uncommon, but can be extremely hard to recover from. In 2009, social-bookmarking site Magnolia suffered a massive data corruption that resulted in the loss of all its user data. It has since started from scratch with a new version of the site. Prior to that, one of the most high-profile outages was a multi-hour downtime for Amazon's S3 cloud storage service, which many sites use as their built-in storage solution.

At a press conference three weeks ago, Evernote announced it has reached 3.7 million users since launching in June of 2008. In that time, its users have saved 145 million notes, which Libin said works out to 312 new ones every minute.… Read more

Fluther launches 'Federated': Q&A for any site

Questions-and-answers service Fluther is unveiling a new platform on Monday that lets companies integrate the Fluther community, and its real-time Q&A interface into their Web sites.

The platform, which is called Federated Fluther, can be skinned to match whatever site it's on, bringing the same feature set and functionality found on Fluther.com. Any questions that are asked on that site can then be answered both by its users, and those back over on Fluther. Likewise, the answers from either community end up in the same bucket--something that for sites with a smaller community can mean those … Read more

From feature to product the free-mium way

One of the struggles in developing software is figuring out which features are part of a bigger product and which ones may be products in and of themselves.

A case in point is Zurb, which makes the Notable application for Web site feedback. In June, Zurb launched a simplified version of Notable called Bounce, which it viewed as a demonstration of just one of Notable's features. Little did Zurb's team know that Bounce was not just a feature, but a new product that intrigued a broad user base.

Bounce saw these results:

The Bounce site went from zero to more than 30,000 links pointing to it in first seven days after launch. Bounce went from zero to about 150 countries using the tool in first seven days after launch. In its first month, Bounce made it to the No. 4 spot in Google search results for "bounce."

While these statistics will surely change over time, they are impressive. So what made this launch successful? … Read more