"DocVerse brings online collaboration / sharing of Microsoft Office documents to your office and mobile workers, allowing user level access, and single file management. The beta version of DocVerse only works with PowerPoint 2007 for the time being..."

This is neat. Work real-time in the same file in actual Microsoft Office, not a web-based imitation app that doesn't really cut it. Neat that it even works for those who don't have Microsoft Office. Can't wait for it to work in Word too.

"I was fascinated to discover the auction hybrid site swoopo.com (previously known as telebid.com). It's a strange combination of eBay, woot, and slot machine... Even when you win, you can lose. Remember that each bid costs you 75 cents, while only increasing the price of the item 15 cents. "

This is an interesting concept, and the figures, well, these guys must be rolling in it. Exploiting human nature the best way possible - without them knowing it.

"Co founded by, Alex Macpherson, Brad Down, Tim Murray, in 2007, BeamMe.Info is a web platform that allows website owners to add a Send to Mobile button alongside relevant and valuable content their visitors/users might be looking for... Rather than printing it out or writing it down, its a simple click and send function that sends the required info to your phone via SMS."

Simple idea, but very neat. I still haven't come across a website using this yet, but I can see it being very useful for a lot of things, e.g. addresses, times, phone numbers etc.

"Lakehead University in Canada was one of the first large-scale adopters of Google applications, but a storm has broken out after staff were told not to use it for personal or sensitive information. The problem arises because the information is stored on Google's servers in the US where authorities have the right to read everything Google stores under the Patriot Act."

Ah, the ugly side of cloud computing is emerging. And Google wants to get privacy standards unified? Fat chance, but with all of Google's resources, they should be able to built distributed datacenters in each country... they maybe open it up like Amazon has so ew can all benefit?

"While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide."

Good luck Google if you're bringing this to Melbourne. Unless you cater for our broken system, all Google Transit will do is remind us what public transport should be.

"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft."

Arrogant twat. Nice to see he conveniently forgets that we're actually giving Google all our data for free so they can effectively on-sell it and make more money at our expense. There's no such thing as a free lunch, people.

"Adobe Flex Builder 3 Pro is available for free to students and faculty of eligible education institutions."

Although Flex 3 is open source, there isn't a decent IDE out there for it apart from Adobe's commercial Flex Builder 3. Luckily, they've made it free for students here - just fill in the form and attach a scanned copy of your student card. Only takes a day or two to get the key. Pretty neat stuff.

"Ribbit, which is still in beta testing phase and set to launch in the coming months, is headed up by Silicon Valley tech veterans who plan to load their phone service with applications previously unavailable from a single phone network. Instead of simply displaying a caller ID, for example, Ribbit will create a mashup of relevant information culled from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, revealing what the caller is currently doing/reading/watching."

This is pretty neat, kind of like half-way between now and complete web integration on our phones. When will we get complete integration? Please....

"The Slashdot take on Blackboard’s setup is very informative - particularly this bit (cut down):
*It produces hundreds of megabytes of absolutely useless logs every day.
*The built in log archiving utility doesn’t work.
*It’s built primarily on Tomcat.
*Their support is nearly non-existent
*They use incredibly inefficient stored procedures which can bring down an entire system"

Read the linked slashdot thread. I'm just glad other people hated it and WebCT just as much and I wasn't just going crazy. And my new uni has it too (a slightly better version) - arrgh!