Websites that went away in ’09

This is another story from Cnet, and it concerns 15 websites that shutdown during the year.  As you might expect, there are a lot of sub-site from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, but there was one that was from a smaller company called Splashcast that was initially a way for people to share, legally, multiple media types.  What sunk them was a lack of funds as they got into publishing content and allowing users to chat during hosted TV shows.  It’s almost like they were trying to provide live video casting solutions. Guess they should have waited until they had more solid sponsorship or customer base before expanding.

Top 10 Downloads of the year

This list comes from Cnet.com and is the top 10 downloads from the past decade.

  1. ICQ
  2. Winamp
  3. Napster
  4. Firefox
  5. WinZip
  6. iTunes
  7. Ad-aware
  8. Skype
  9. RealPlayer
  10. Adobe Acrobsat Reader

While most of these are choices that I would not argue with, I do have to take issue with Napster being #3.  Considering the backlash from the music community and the subsequent lawsuits, Napster is a bit of a black mark.  In my opinion, to be on this list, the download should be one that introduced something new to the internet and had enough staying power to be useful and popular to the present day.  Napster’s concept was improved by iTunes.

So what’s to come?  What’s the next big thing for the internet?  What will become world wide necessities during the next decade?  Will live video streaming services be the next big thing we think of as not that uncommon in the year 2020?  Time will tell.

Gifts on a budget pt. 2

I was doing some more looking and found this webcam for $99. webcam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This camera captures images and broadcasts them in high definition.  So, if you want to use Skype in high definition, this is probably right up your alley, but if you’re looking for technology that will help you with live video streaming services for large events, you might want to think bigger.