Hiya Robert. Since you joined PodTech I have visited it few times now on different occasions. Nice colors and all, crowded site, Distracts me are some of my observations. ( I asked some of my friends online as I wrote this and they have to tell something similar about the site as to what I wrote ).

Although I have been to “About Us” page and read it ( I assure you that I can read English). My main question to you is, why should I as a user care about PodTech.net ? What will they be doing extra special that I should come to the site/Subscribe to the site ? What is the site doing different?

Why this questions you ask? Well because I am following you. You took me inside of Microsoft and made me a better customer of their. Now I am following you to PodTech and trying to become a customer there if they have anything new to offer me/anything that is innovative/anything that can change my perspective of how I see the technology world/improve my understanding of things. What value will it provide me in long term as a customer who still does not understand the power of podcasts completely.

First of all congratulations to Tara Hunt on getting a further stay visa in US to pursue her dreams. I am sure you are a happy person and you will be more happier when you get what you want. While going through Riya’s blog today, I found that Tara Hunt’s blog is still listed as an employee!

Anybody at Riya listening?

One more thing to guys at Riya, make your blog interesting for your non technical users too and don’t fill it up with just technical garbage. Looks like you guys have forgotten how you got the initial traffic on Riya! (please, spare me by not telling me as to how much you guys have been busy with development stuff)

This is such a good news. Now if I want, I can just have one IM running at a time and I can chat away with all the users on both of my IM’s. I wrote more about it on S&T.

Consumers are winners in this Internet economy. Microsoft announced that Virtual PC 2004 with SP1 will be made free to the public. Users can now download Virtual PC 2004 for free and install and try out different guest operating systems on top of the supported host OS.

May be now might be a good time to install that Vista Beta 2 on Virtual PC and test it out without installing it directly on your hard disk!

More news will be updated on Software And Tools later.

Robert Scoble posts that Podtech.net has bought Geek Entertainment TV. I have never heard of them before. By linked posts on Robert’s blog it seems that these guys did not have a huge budget and may be were doing Video reporting on a partime basis and now they will work for Podtech. I love these stories of small startup’s or ventures making it big. Keep it up guys!!

I don’t do a lot of things and text messaging is one of them. I am just not into it, as I find that calling someone to give the message might be easy if not cheap all the time. Ah, on thinking I think that none of my friends into text messaging here! So there is no one who ideal at text messaging for me.

Liz Knight has created posted a nice version of short text messages that can be used by geeks and can be fun. Give it a try! OK, I am 410 now, check you tomorrow.

I am planning on buying a Dell product for myself for the first time and at the same time I see that they have a blog now where Dell intends to communicate with their customers. At the moment it looks more like “see our products” but I am hopeful that it will get better as they go along.

It’s always good to hear to some insider voice coming out of a corporation.

So far I was not too deep into neither music nor podcasts and so never bought a IPod or similar devices. Actually did not find much use of it till now as work is very close so very less time commuting and everywhere else I have access to Internet and computers.

I see that Microsoft might soon be coming out with a portable wireless player. I hope that this player does a bit more then just playing music which will be an added bonus when buying compared to just buying an IPod. Another positive to consumers might be that with added competition there might be price wars where consumers might be overall winners.

Why backup DVD’s you ask? Do we back them up for increasing piracy? Do we back them up to seriously have backup copies of the media or do we back them up for shrink the size of the media? I have few of my reasons. Normally I backup to save backup copies of expensive DVD’s that I own, so incase the original gets scratched I still have a copy of the media. I also back up DVD’s when I want to shrink the media files to a small manageable size on my computer.

The two software I have used in the past are DVDShrink and DVD Decrypter. DVDShrink is no more into development so it makes it hard to rip off some of the copy protected DVD’s. But it still works.

The other recommended software are DVDFAB and Rip4Me.

Via: – Digg

I woke up today with the findings on the Internet about Google’s Gdrive. I am sure in the coming days we will hear more about it until the product gets released!

Talking about which, I haven’t heard anything about Microsoft’s Live Drive. What is happening with it and when is it expected to be out?

I am looking forward to all the innovative things in Gdrive. I don’t think I trust Google with all of my personal information, but we will see when it comes out.