internet

OK, I admit it: I'm not always the first to try out some great new technology.

Once in a long while, maybe, I'm a little behind. Like a year or two.

That's why it took me until today to finally try out Pandora, the Internet site that lets you create custom radio stations based on your music preferences.

And now I think I know something about instant addiction. I signed up, entered a single artist to create a radio station around, and about eight songs in, I'm just totally hooked.

I started playing around with the … Read more

While GrandCentral may have been stealing headlines lately, there's another suffix-sharing phone call management service called RingCentral that can make small businesses look and function like larger ones with some pretty neat telephonic tomfoolery. The service has been around since early 2004, and today is introducing a slew of VoIP plans called DigitalLine that give users the option to use VoIP instead of, or on top of their existing landlines.

So what can you do with RingCentral? Small business owners will love it, since you can set up a ridiculously extensive set of rules to handle incoming calls, or reroute them on the fly with a virtual phone call manager called SoftPhone. The idea is to take a single or multiline setup and spread it out intelligently, while putting all the options online for you to manage and tweak while away from your office.

Like GrandCentral, you can set up calls to be routed to different phones or line extensions, there are also handy business-centric settings to tweak the response people get when they call at off-business hours. For fans of GrandCentral's multiphone ring system, RingCentral has also gone the extra step of letting you add three-digit passwords to an incoming phone call to keep unintended pickups from happening. This feature actually stemmed out of users wanting to keep their children from answering a business phone call when they had forgotten to turn off the home forwarding options off, or couldn't get to their own phone in time.

The new VoIP implementation is fairly straightforward. All incoming calls can be set to be received via VoIP, letting you receive and manage phone calls while away from your landline. You can also get various minute packages to use VoIP to make outgoing calls, including an all-you-can-eat plan of outgoing VoIP for around $25/month. In contrast to consumer VoIP services like Vonage, Skype, or Comcast's DigitalVoice, RingCentral isn't aiming at cheap outgoing long distance providers, as much as the multi-line business crowd who's looking for a way to handle several lines without the hardware or staffing.

For a shot of the call log interface, click the read more link below.

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Under mounting pressure from their Republican colleagues, the Democrats on a U.S. House of Representatives panel have finally scheduled a vote on a bill that would extend by four years a soon-to-expire federal ban on Internet access taxes.

The House Judiciary Committee has placed a bill known as the Internet Tax Freedom Act on its lengthy agenda for a meeting slated to begin on Wednesday morning.

An existing law that generally prohibits state and local governments from taxing Internet access--including DSL (digital subscriber line), cable modem and BlackBerry-type wireless transmission services--is currently set to expire November 1. It also … Read more

I love wireless Internet.

I know, I'm hardly alone. There is no end to the number of road warriors and writers in cafes and rural professionals whose incomes and lifeline to friends and family depend on getting online on the go.

But after spending a few days away from connectivity, I'm really struck by just how vital Wi-Fi and other methods of getting on the Internet wirelessly are to me.

I noted the other day that I had managed, via an EV-DO card, to get a connection, albeit a slow one, while visiting my in-laws. This was ground-breaking, … Read more

It's a match made in Heaven.

Catholic Match announced Tuesday it acquired the assets of CatholicDaters.com. The parties, as expected, are gushing like newlyweds.

"It became clear, after some initial discussion, that an acquisition made sense," beamed Catholic Match co-founder Brian Barcaro. And CatholicDaters' founder, Andrew Weyrich, glowed: "Catholic Match embodies many of the values and concepts that were important to us at CatholicDaters."

But hey, this is America, where 50 percent of marriages end up in divorce. So Catholic Match has its work cut out for it in making the most of the … Read more

Microsoft has removed its Windows Genuine Advantage authentication system from the installation process for Internet Explorer 7.

For the average user, this means a quicker installation time. CNET News.com is reporting that Microsoft's decision was because of enhanced security fixes that replace the need for the WGA. However, some have speculated that Redmond's reasoning may have less to do with consumer protection and more with program distribution: Mozilla's Firefox 2 has eaten somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the browser market, depending on whose metrics you believe, and that has Microsoft's bigwigs deeply concerned. … Read more

VoIP and telephony service babyTEL is launching a new Facebook application this morning called Telephone that gives you access to a phone and answering machine without leaving Facebook. Instead of going the embedded route, like YackPack, babyTEL instead relies on a small Java runtime that sits in your computer's taskbar, or the dock if you're on Mac OS X. Once you fire it up, there's a simple authentication process to pull up your list of friends on the social networking service, and allow you to call them for free--assuming you have a headset or speakers and a … Read more

[IMPORTANT WARNING: What follows is satire. I'm NOT being serious. Except for one paragraph at the very end. See if you can spot that one.]

When I first started this blog four months ago, one of the first substantive posts I wrote was called "Bubbles on the brain".

In it, I attempted to use "logic" to explain the reasons we are most likely not in another dot com bubble.

Since that time, talk of a new dot com bubble or Web 2.0 bubble or Internet bubble has only escalated in volume and intensity.

OK.… Read more

Sometimes programs are born great, and sometimes they have greatness thrust upon them. There's a third tack, too: some program grow into their skins. Comodo Firewall Pro is one of those.

Living under the radar for too long, at some point out of the limelight it became a solid, state-of-the-art firewall with little reason left to ignore it. Providing a smorgasbord of information and options for advanced users, simple enough for beginners, and yet runs smoothly and silently in the background, Comodo is a prime example of what a program that mucks about with your Internet connection should be like.

… Read more