Just ask Ms Dewey

In yet another attempt to compete with Google - Microsoft has launched www.msdewey.com - quite entertaining results sometimes - although way slow for notmal search use.

Try for example: "about ms. dewey"

Let us know if you find some interesting or surprising results

PayPal Virtual Debit Card - Beta

Paypal has launched a beta version of a new Virtual Debit Card. It generates a virtual card number every time you shop, everywhere you shop – so you never have to give out your credit or debit card number again!


You get all the convenience and security of PayPal, with a special advantage: Now, you can pay with PayPal anywhere MasterCard® is accepted online.

Check out all the benefits:
Fraud Site Alert: Warns you if you land on known or potentially fraudulent websites.

Privacy and 100% Protection: Financial information you provide is never shared with any merchant. And you get 100% protection against unauthorized payments sent from your account.

Faster checkout: The Form Fill feature automatically completes shipping and billing details.

The service currently only works with Windows and Internet Explorer (version requirements does not appear)

Check it out (you have to be logged in to view the page)

Pluggd to make podcasts chunkier, searchable

Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them. It’s more than just speech recognition.

This is one of the most compelling examples I’ve seen lately of a growing trend: making multimedia content more granular and letting users take even greater control over the media we consume. We don’t just want to consume what we wish, we want to consume it in the way we wish.

Try it out

Skype founders to launch P2P IPTV

According to the Financial Times report, Janus Friis and our man Niklas Zennstrom -- whom you may know from a little company called Skype -- are supposedly developing a peer-to-peer IPTV service with the intention of distributing video online the same way Skype and its P2P approach distributed VoIP calling online. Supposedly some six thousand users have already been in on beta testing (what, none of you thought to ping your old pals at Engadget?) this service, aptly codenamed the Venice Project probably after the community of streams.

The system is intended for use by copyright-holding content owners who no doubt intend to advertise on this new network; their video data is encrypted so the P2P here isn't the same kind of P2P you might be thinking of. Friis apparently demonstrated full quality full motion video to the FT at a local Starbucks -- where all new internet projects shown off before launch -- but there's no way of knowing how real world use will clog the proverbial tubes; right now P2P video TV might not work the smoothest considering that no matter what upstream bandwidth will never equal the downstream bandwidth necessary to sustain millions of viewers, but that will begin to change in the coming years.

Source: Engadget

Hotmail used to launch extortion scam

Hotmail user logged into their account this week to find that scammers had deleted all their e-mails except for one, which was from a hacker demanding cash in exchange for restoring the lost information, according to Websense.

Websense said this scam is a variant of ransomware, which is a malicious program that encrypts documents on the victim's computer and asks for a payment in order to decrypt the files. Had this been the owner or an employee of a small business, the company's intellectual property (IP) would have been at risk.

Source: ZD Net

Chat With Santa on Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft connects you straight to Santa from your Messenger:

Ho, ho, ho! This year there is another way for kids to share Christmas wish lists with Santa Claus. Using Windows Live™ Messenger, parents can spend time with their kids chatting in real time with Santa online. Customers can simply add Santa’s address, Northpole@live.com, to their Windows Live Messenger contact list and instantly open a conversation window to communicate with Saint Nick.

Kids will enjoy immediate responses from the jolly big man himself through an interactive online chat, and they can even visit Santa’s page on Windows Live Spaces at http://santaonspaces.spaces.live.com. Filling Santa in on Christmas wishes and asking all about how the reindeer are doing or what’s new at the North Pole are a few of the things kids can talk to Santa about. Santa can even tell kids where they stand on his list: naughty or nice.

Source: Microsoft

Half of American Business PCs Can't Run Microsoft Windows Vista

About half of the average business PCs in North America are unable to meet the minimum requirements for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, while 94 percent do not meet the system requirements for Vista Premium.

Within these figures, 41 percent and 78 percent, respectively, require RAM upgrades to meet the minimum and premium system requirements of Vista, says a new study by Softchoice Corp., which is expected to be released later this week.

In comparison, when Windows XP was released, some 71 percent of the PCs met its system requirements, Softchoice services consultant Dean Williams said in an executive summary of the report.

Source: eweek

Clearification

Microsoft has created a really hip site - there is so much content on this site. I strongly recommend you look around - if nothing else just open the front page and listen - it is really entertaining and very well done!

http://clearification.com/

iPhone 2.0

Yes that's right - Apple seems to already be working on the second version of iPhone despite the fact that the first one has not even been revealed to the public (which is expected to happen in Q1 2007).