Productivity and business

Ever tried to set up an event or meeting while trying to balance the schedules of others? That's been made easy with tools like Doodle, TimeBridge and Planypus. But what if you're having a dinner party, or a picnic, or going camping, or any other real-world situation where you're grouping together your resources?

That's where Divvyus comes in handy. It lets you manage some of the chaos of assigning to-dos, or things to bring ahead of time. There's no registration required, you just need to send out the URL of the Divvyus, and whomever you … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google says its ready to offer its online office suite to the U.S. government.

At a press briefing here at its headquarters, Google announced a new version of its Apps suite designed specifically for government customers. This tier will be sold alongside the existing version of Google Apps and priced the same as the company's premiere license--$50 per user, per year.

Google Apps for Government features all the same applications that can be found in other versions but comes with a higher level of security, which Google says meets the requirements set forth by … Read more

Mozilla's head of user experience for its Labs unit, Aza Raskin, on Friday unveiled a new project called "Tab Candy" that promises to dramatically change the way users manage open browser tabs.

Tab Candy is not an extension, but a new feature that Raskin and team plan to build into a future version of the Firefox browser. In essence, it creates a desktop-like workspace for users to separate and organize open tabs into groups. When opened, these groups act like their own instance of the browser. So, say you had grouped together 5 of 50 open tabs, … Read more

It was only a matter of time, but three months after acquiring Web-based photo editor Picnik, Google has gotten around to integrating the service into Picasa Web Albums.

Now, if a Picasa Web Albums user wants to make a quick edit to a photo, they can do so without leaving the photo page. Previously a user would have needed the software version of Picasa installed, or to use an external editor (such as Picnik)--both of which made for a disjointed experience.

While a seemingly minor move, it's the first step by Google to integrate the Picnik editor into … Read more

A new option for Amazon Web Services has arrived: the raw computing power of supercomputing clusters now widely used in research circles.

The service, called Cluster Compute, is a variation of one of the earliest services Amazon offered, EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. Compared with the standard EC2, Cluster Compute offers more processing power and faster network connections among the cluster's computing nodes for better communications, Amazon said Tuesday. The service retains the same general philosophy, though: customers pay as they go, with more usage incurring more fees.

The cluster service, which is available with Linux and a customer'… Read more

Video host Vimeo on Tuesday is rolling out a new feature that will users apply Creative Commons (CC) licenses to their uploaded videos.

In short, when a user applies one of the six standard licenses, which range from "attribution" to "attribution with noncommercial and no derivatives," it gives those who intend to use the video elsewhere a specific set of rules for what they can do with it--all without having to first contact the creator for explicit permission.

Creative Commons licensing has been available for some time on a growing number of video- and photo-sharing sites, … Read more

There have been a few third-party applications that provide some combination of remotely backing up, restoring, and locating an errant BlackBerry smartphone, but no in-house service crafted by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion itself. Not until now, that is.

On Monday, RIM introduced BlackBerry Protect, a free service that provides tools to remotely locate, back up, restore, and wipe the data from your phone with a system that's extremely similar to Microsoft's freemium My Phone service--introduced for Windows phones back in October 2009.

BlackBerry Protect is based on the BlackBerry ID that RIM revealed in late June (so, we're assuming this means that BlackBerry App World 2.0 should soon show its face). The service consists of a downloadable mobile app, and desktop and Web apps to control and manage the remote commands.

As with Microsoft's My Phone service, BlackBerry Protect includes the following remote commands:… Read more

Firefox has become the default browser for nearly 400,000 IBM employees, a big coup for the open-source project during a time of increasing browser competition.

"All IBM employees will be asked to use it as their default browser," Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux at IBM's Software Group, said in a blog post Thursday. "Firefox is enterprise-ready, and we're ready to adopt it for our enterprise."

Mozilla has said in recent weeks it believes nearly 400 million people use its software.

In particular, IBM will load Firefox on new computers, … Read more

As much as we'd like to say that we can do the same thing on a mobile phone as we can on a desktop, the truth of the matter is that unless you're toting a tablet like the iPad (and even then...), some tasks are just harder to do without some form of mobile-optimized view.

To that end, Google now optimizes its Google Docs Web site for iPhone, Android, and yes, the iPad. I speak from experience when calling the previous path to Google Docs from Android and iPhone arduous.

The new mobile version of the Google Docs … Read more