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I get requests to review and/or promote products on a fairly regular basis, like everyone else with a technology-based website. My typical response is "OK, I'll look at the product, and if I like it and think that it's something my readers will be interested in I'll write something up on it". Usually these items are things that I don't believe are really relevant for my readers, or aren't very far along in the development cycle, or are just bad products. For whatever reason, I usually don't feel that I should waste your valuable time with them. However, every once in a while I'll bump into something that I get genuinely excited about. This service, Mozy Remote Backup, is one of those products. And while on-line backup services are nothing new, free ones can be pretty hard to find.

Details:

• It's in beta, so expect some bumps (although I have to say I didn't have any real problems)
• Windows XP only, 1.5 MB client download (Mac client in development)
• NTFS required to backup open or locked files
• Broadband connection required (may be self evident, but uploading gigabytes of data over dialup is not feasable)
• 2 GB storage is free, 30 GB available for $4.95USD per month
• Referral program, 1 GB additional storage for every 4 people referred
• Limited to 5 restores per month
• Local drives only

From the MSN Shopping Insider Blog:

Today we launch the brand new Windows Live Shopping site!
What is it? It is the beta launch of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 shopping experience, featuring one of the world’s largest product catalogs, user-created content and an easier-to-use interface built on 100% AJAX technology. It uses a unified shopping engine to search or browse almost 40 million products from 7,000 stores ranging from many of the country’s leading retailers to eBay. Results are displayed in an order that is not affected by advertising; merchants cannot pay to have their items show up closer to the top. Users will be able to drag-and-drop items to a shopping list and share lists with friends; see user reviews of products and sellers; and read and create public shopping guides on any subject.

OK, sounds like it's worth checking out. So I go to shopping.live.com and this is what I get:

We're sorry. Windows Live Shopping Beta does not yet support Firefox.
We're working to correct this as soon as possible.

So I happen to be looking around over at eLearningSource (another great learning resource on the web) the other day and come across a little article with information about a plug-in for PowerPoint 2003 called Producer, which allows you to add multi-media (video and audio) to your Powerpoint presentations, then post that information on the web. I have to confess I got very excited when I first looked at this, it is certainly something for which we have a tremendous need at my real job. We have hundreds, if not thousands of presentations locked away in our internal servers, containing a wealth of technical, sales and corporate information, information that we should be sharing with our customers, partners and even ourselves. What we really need is a simple way to get that information into something that is easily viewed in a web browser.

Unfortunately, after downloading and looking at this package I can see that we're not going to be doing it using Microsoft Producer.

I know that Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview has been out for awhile, but I just got around to installing it and I thought I would take her for a little test drive. I'll include the relevant links at the bottom of the post, but before you rush out and install it remember that this is a beta preview, so at this stage it can still be tough to tell the difference between the bugs and the features. According to Microsoft this preview will only load on computers running Windows XP with service pack 2 installed, although they say that the production version will run on Vista (the next OS due out later this year), Windows XP Pro x64, and Windows Server 2003 in addition to XP. It's not going to run on anything prior to XP with service pack 2, so you may be looking at an OS upgrade if you've got an older OS.

I think that it's easy to tell from looking at it that Microsoft has heard the footsteps of other browsers coming up from behind, and has tried to take the best features from some of those other browsers and incorporate them into this version. Some of what they've done will be old hat for users of the more advanced browsers, but it looks like they're trying out some new things, too. They get an advantage with the hooks they can build into the OS, and they've already got the installed base. They flip the switch on it and they instantly get market dominance, it's a good place to be. Still, it's good to see that some good old-fashioned healthy competition can make the giant jump.