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Could a teenage girl undo what Microsoft hoped would be the Zune's iPod-killing feature?

Microsoft has long hoped that its MP3 player's wireless music-sharing abilities would help it gain precious ground on Apple's market leader, though that notion has hardly yielded any magic bullets. And now Kristyn Heath, a 16-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area, has reportedly come up with the concept behind a device called "SnoopTunes" that lets iPods beam their music as well.

Moreover, unlike the Zune, "this one doesn't limit you to three days or three plays," according … Read more

Collanos: Free sharing tool for teams

Collanos is a new and ambitious product that's designed to keep teams up to date on the files they're working on, and to provide a repository for discussions and other resources like Web links. It's got great potential. Which is a nice way of saying it's not ready for the real world yet.

At its core, Collanos is a peer-to-peer file synchronizing utility, sort of a scrappier version of Groove, or a buttoned-down version of Tubes (review). It is a free, downloadable (45MB) application. This goes against the grain of Webware's philosophy, but we're … Read more

Kodak's new ultrazoom, high-ISO, and budget cameras

Kodak just announced four new digital cameras at PMA 2007. The different models range from budget snapshooters to photographer-minded ultrazooms, and none of them cost more than $300.

The Kodak EasyShare Z712 IS is the company's newest superzoom camera. With a 36- to 432mm-equivalent, optically stabilized lens, the 7-megapixel Z712 IS offers a generous 12X zoom power. Like most ultrazooms, the Z712 IS is modeled more after digital SLRs than snapshot cameras, with many more manual controls and a much bulkier design. The Z712 IS's 12X zoom isn't quite as impressive as the upcoming 15X Sony Cyber Shot DSC-H7 and DSC-H9, … Read more

Izimi turns your PC into a server

Sharing files from your PC is nothing new. BitTorrent is all about sharing media files with the world, as Napster was before it. And file sharing products like Pando, eSnips, Titanize, Box.Net, YouBackItUp, and many others make it possible to share other files, or even entire directories and hard drives.

So when the team from Izimi pitched me on their new PC-based file publishing system as "the future of Internet publishing," I didn't really share their wonder.

I did try to find the spark of this product over the weekend. What I found was a tool … Read more

eSnips bumps storage, upgrades music sharing

eSnips, the social networking and content-hosting service, is quintupling the storage on users accounts to 5GB. The company is also adding new music-sharing features that let users create embeddable music widgets and playlists for use on eSnips user pages, blogs, Web sites, and social networking sites like MySpace. The service ties into the eSnips marketplace, which lets you buy and sell user-generated content like photos and music.

We covered eSnips last year and noted its similarity to social bookmarking site Del.icio.us mixed with content hosting like you'd find on social networking sites. Since then, eSnips claims to … Read more

Skrbl makes whiteboarding fun

Skrbl is a delightfully simple whiteboarding tool that lets you draw, type notes, and share files without a software download. Admittedly, my use for and experience with whiteboard products is limited, but Skrbl really impressed me with how quickly I was able to begin a whiteboard and share it with others.

Skrbl also allows you to host files and secure your session with attendees, as long as you register. What's nice is that any unregistered attendee can download your shared files; Skrbl only requires registration to upload. However, one thing to note is the limit on uploading, which is … Read more

BitTorrent's game downloads: A big hoax

Update: BitTorrent's Games section is misleading. First of all, game downloads don't necessarily use BitTorrent. What you may get via the BitTorrent P2P network is a small (298K) installer program, which in turn runs a proprietary downloader application that gets the game code from a central server.

Second, although games are listed in the B.E.N. catalog as free, they are nothing of the sort. You get a free preview period to try the game. If you want to play it past that period, you have to pay up. Gangland, for example, is free only for 60 … Read more

Jubii: e-mail plus everything else

Jubii is a new service that attempts to provide an all-in-one solution for Web communication and sharing. It combines e-mail, contact management, instant messaging, VoIP, and file hosting into one app. The big question is, whether combining these things together provides a cohesive solution that's better than individual Web services. In short, the answer is no.

Jubii centers around its e-mail platform, which uses a simple tabbed interface with two separate in-boxes. E-mails from people on your approved contact list automatically get sent to your private box, whereas others make their way straight to the public. Creating new e-mails … Read more

BitTorrent Entertainment Network hands-on: 10 pros and cons [updated]

The new BitTorrent media store, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, has been live for a few hours. It's a mixed bag, and these are my hands-on impressions. I wanted to come up with five pros and five cons. But I think the cons outweigh the pros, and this list reflects that. Update: The section on games has been rewritten and moved from pros to cons.

Pros:

It's fast. BitTorrent.com has big pipes. This morning, even on files that no one else was hosting (no one else in the swarm), I got 1MB/sec download speeds. An episode of … Read more