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Competitors were quick to respond to Microsoft's latest plans for hosted CRM.

Microsoft's pricing was clearly aimed squarely at Salesforce.com, which was quick to dismiss Microsoft's entry into the market, noting that the company has been talking about its plans for sometime without actually releasing the product.

"I think that Microsoft has announced this service more often than Roger Federer has won Wimbledon," Bruce Francis, Salesforce VP of corporate strategy, said in a statement.

Another rival, SugarCRM, took issue with the notion that rivals don't offer the option of moving from a hosted … Read more

DENVER--Microsoft on Tuesday detailed the pricing for its Dynamics Live CRM product, the hosted version of its customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The professional version of the software will list for $45 per user per month, though during 2008 it will sell for $39 per user per month. The higher-end enterprise version, which includes offline data access, will sell for $59 per user per month.

Microsoft will offer the professional edition of the product at no charge, starting this quarter and through the end of the year as part of an early access program.

In an effort to keep its … Read more

Admist some of last week's hullaballoo regarding Flickr's censorship on some of the photos of its German language users, it's timely that the creators of The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent tracking site, have recently launched their own censorship-free image-sharing service called BAYIMG. It's similar to other image-hosting services like ImageShack, TinyPic, and DivShare, with one exception--the only person who's able to remove uploaded photos is you. That is, assuming you don't forget the secret removal access code you picked when uploading.

Despite this well-advertised stance on free speech, the service claims that if … Read more

Some things never die, especially notorious photos on the Internet. Just ask Bill Gates, whose infamous pie-in-the-eye shot was posted by a hacker on a Web site hosting information on Microsoft distribution licenses.

The hacker posted the embarrassing 1988 photo on a sub-page of ieak.microsoft.com, which is designed to allow users to select a distribution license for an Internet Explorer Administration kit, according to a SANs Internet Storm report.

Microsoft is not alone in having its content defaced via a hosting partner's site. Take Kevin Mitnick, for example, whose hosted site was hacked and defaced last year. … Read more

Social networking and content-hosting site eSnips has rolled out a new feature in time for Web 2.0 Expo: eSnips Multi-Channel Radio plays music uploaded to the site by users.

Currently the channels are organized by music genre, but eventually users will be able to create their own personal radio station, which can include material across multiple genres of music.

All original material hosted on the site is eligible to be played on the channels. Users can "favorite" a song and rate whether they liked it or hated it. Each channel in a genre plays the 40 most … Read more

Video hosting and sharing service Viddler has undergone a facelift this morning just in time for the Web 2.0 Expo. Embedded videos now have Viddler branding, and a new drop-down menu filled with sharing and embedding options. Users are also now able to comment on video clips, not just certain moments of a video.

What's neat about the update player is that it takes the community experience that you get on Viddler, and puts it on any site where a player is embedded. Anyone with a Viddler username and password can login from the embed, and add or browse comments, tags or notes. Pretty neat.

I've embedded an example video below. Previous Viddler coverage here.

Related: divShare adds video to file hosting service

UPDATE: Added Viddler's self-made explanatory video after the jump. We see quite a few screencasts here at Webware, and this is one of the better ones out there.… Read more

File-hosting service DivShare quietly launched a video-hosting service this morning. Designed to help users share short video clips, DivShare is taking a slightly different approach, letting people upload video files, up to 200MB, which can then be shared on social networks, blogs, and Web sites. Users can upload files anonymously or register so they can keep track of every file they've ever uploaded to the service. (Those file, according to DivShare, will "never" be removed.) Each time you upload a file, you're also given a direct download link that can be shared with others.

I wouldn'… Read more

After I covered Weebly, I got a note from the creator of Jimdo, another easy-to-use Web site creator tool. I took it for a quick spin, and I'm somewhat impressed. It has a lot of very strong features, it makes pretty sites, and it's free.

The service is especially good at handling photos. It does a great job displaying photos that you upload to it, and it also integrates beautifully with Flickr. There are good options for how the galleries are displayed, and when you zoom into a picture, it displays over the page instead of taking you … Read more

Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service with advanced and powerful features. It supports an active and engaged community where people share and explore each other's photos. You can share and host hundreds of your own pictures on Flickr without paying a dime. There's also a pro service that gets you unlimited storage and sharing for about $2 a month, making it one of the cheapest hosting sites around (more on that later).

Flickr was created by a small Canadian development team in 2002 before being acquired by Yahoo a year later. Many other photo sites (including Yahoo Photos) are easier to use, but none offer Flickr's interesting features or its cohesive community of enthusiasts.

Adding your photos to Flickr

First step: Get your photos into the service. Flickr has a few options to get photos from your camera into your account, the easiest one being a little uploader app you can install on your PC or Mac (there's also a Linux version.) When it's installed on a PC, you can right-click on any photo and send it straight to Flickr. You also can use this uploader to create albums (Flickr calls albums sets) for your pictures. You can install software that lets you publish from any folder in Windows XP, without the need to use the uploading program. If you're using a Mac, there's also a plug-in for iPhoto.

If you're not keen on downloading a piece of software, Flickr lets you upload six individual photos at a time. This might work for some weekend shots, but if you've got more than 20 shots it's worth trying out the batch uploader. We recommend using the downloader software, or if you've got Yahoo's Widgets Engine installed, the latest version comes with a widget that doubles as a photo viewer and uploading tool.

Continue reading to learn how to tag and organize photos, add notes, geotag, create albums, find out if you need a premium membership, and our list of Flickr users worth checking out.

… Read more