boxes

Category: Data

Box.net is an online Web storage provider. Users can store 1GB of whatever they want or pay a little extra for more space with the service's premium plans. What really makes the service stand out is its slick-looking file-sharing widgets. Users get instant previews of images, music, and text documents. The files reside in your Box.net storage area, and as the widget owner you can even upload files through the widget.

The newer and more advanced widget enables group sharing for members with premium and professional accounts. Users can password protect a shared folder, which … Read more

Boxed wine: it's the punchline of so many jokes and the drink staple of so many low-budget sorority parties. Once you're a "real" grown-up, it's more than a bit gauche to actually serve this stuff without some kind of forced hipster irony--and in case you didn't get the memo, that faux-cheapo attitude is so out. Nevertheless, if you're on a budget and need to serve a lot of beverages to a lot of people, boxed wine is still a tempting choice. So how can you make it a little bit sexier?

Leave it … Read more

Regular Webware readers who have been playing around with Facebook's new platform will likely recognize many of the sites and services that are offering their own applications. At almost 90 apps (and growing), there are a lot to choose from. After spending the better part of a day experimenting with many of them, I've chosen five of my personal favorites that I think people are bound to use, and come back to in the long haul because they're useful, and that's ultimately what makes repeat users.

Note: The bold links below won't take you right … Read more

Box.net is beta testing a new plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets users save Office files to their Box.net storage folders. The plug-in works for both Office 2003 and 2007 on Windows XP and Vista, provides users a new "Save to Box.net" button, and gives visual notification when the file is uploading and then successfully sent. Users can then access that file anytime on their Box.net Web storage folder.

The new plug-in was built using Box.net's developer API, which the Box.net team says can be used to add this functionality to … Read more

If you're explaining an "Out of the Box" video to someone, it sounds kind of silly.

You take a brand-new, sealed product and proceed to unbox it and take out the contents for the very first time in front of a camera, with a running commentary. I'm a purist in this respect, not allowing anyone to sneak a peek inside or practice the unboxing before actually taping it.

So yesterday, when fellow NY editor John Falcone told me an Xbox 360 Elite made its way into the offices, I was all over it. After all, this … Read more

I covered the 30 Boxes online calendar briefly last September (see story). But the world's changed a bit since then, and 30 Boxes has as well, so I recently took another look at this interesting (and experimental) app.

The easy part first: 30 Boxes is a nice little online calendar. It's got a special trick, in that instead of clicking on days and times to enter appointments, you can type in its single entry box something like, "Lunch, noon Friday with Frank," and it will create the appointment based on that. (Related: Stikkit.)

But 30 Boxes is more than an events calendar with a rudimentary understanding of scheduling grammar. It's also an aggregation service for time-based updates from your social sites and for those of your friends. For example, 30 Boxes will put your blog updates, Twitter messages, Upcoming.org calendar items, and Flickr photos on your calendar, as well as those from your friends. Facebook integration is coming soon. 30 Boxes reminds me Jaiku (review), another personal feed aggregator, except it's oriented around the calendar scheme rather than the discussion-based scheme Jaiku is based on.

Everyone who uses 30 Boxes, and everyone who is added into a 30 Boxes stream, gets their own profile page (here's mine). All you need to know is a person's e-mail address to add them in to your calendar. The system will find their updates on Twitter and other services, and add them to your calendar. They'll also get an invitation to join 30 Boxes, of course, and if they do they can have more control over what information that's associated with their e-mail address.

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Remember when you were in fourth grade and wanted to stop other kids from copying your stuff? You'd erect a fortress of open books around your paper, blocking it from prying eyes and creating a little courtyard in the middle for your work.

That's what the "Office Collar" essentially wants to do for your head, except in reverse: It's basically a horse blinder for humans, aimed at keeping you from getting distracted by your surroundings. Textually.org notes that this self-imposed isolation device, the brainchild of designer Simone Brewster, could also be used to help … Read more

Box.net, the online storage service, has updated their embeddable widget with a new group sharing feature for members with premium and professional accounts. Users can password protect a shared folder, which can then be accessed privately by others with the code. Storage owners can opt-in to allow user uploading, which lets anyone with access add files. The company is gearing it at businesses, whereas its previous widget incarnation was aimed at users with social networking profiles.

For group users to keep track of updates to shared folders, each share gets its own RSS feed. Once subscribed, the name and … Read more

This group of presenters at Under the Radar is focused on tools that let regular people (read: not coders) create Web sites and tools to make things easy for site visitors and customers.

My Payment Network provides small-businesses and education payment systems aimed at cutting administrative costs and the hassle of paper checks. For schools, it's a chance to add an online payment system for things like sports enrollment fees, and equipment costs. For small businesses, it's another way to handle payment processing. My Payment Network is comparable to PayPal, but offers customizable controls for those in charge … Read more