inCampus, Inc., a Seattle-based company led by an established group of technology veterans looking to promote social and economic change among college students, announces the launch of a new online marketplace, offering a revolutionary gateway for Student-to-Student commerce. 3,800 universities and community colleges across the nation are represented on inCampus, connecting students who are looking to buy, sell, trade, or find anything - from a salsa partner to a blender. In addition to products, the Web site also allows students to find housing, books, jobs and more. The company ultimately plans to connect students across the world.

“There is so much potential for students around the world to take advantage of the Internet and connect with each other through commerce.” said Phuc Vu, CEO of inCampus. “We plan to empower students through this revolutionary concept we call student to student commerce.”

inCampus co-founder Aqib Rasool conceived the idea as a college student who found that Web sites like eBay and Craigslist were helpful for buying, trading and selling but there was no place to connect with other college students. He saw the potential to connect students from all over the nation looking for anything from housing options to used text books.

Unlike other marketplaces that are crowded with buyers and sellers of all ages and interests, inCampus offers a community-based Web site, developed exclusively for each college campus. As the first e-commerce community specifically created for college students, inCampus is an intersection of social and e-commerce Web sites. The site only features categories specifically of interest to college students ranging from travel, carpool, tickets, roommates and books.

The company’s mission is to empower students around the country through online commerce. To further this mission, inCampus has established the inCampus Foundation, a non-profit organization that was created with a portion of the co-founder’s company equity. As the company grows, the foundation’s funds will grow exponentially, ultimately creating a significant amount of resources that will be used to provide financing programs for college students around the world.

Tags: student, campus, college

The computer security experts at Agnitum Ltd. today unleashed Spam Terrier, which protects users of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express from spam.

The software is free.

“Spam Terrier is your new best friend,” said Mikhail Penkovsky, global vice-president for Marketing and Sales at Agnitum.

“Are you sick and tired of email offers for generic sex drugs and replica watches, profile updates from ‘Paypal’ and security and unpaid item reminders from “eBay” that demand your passwords, Nigerian bank scams, the millions of dollars liberated from Iraq by “men who prefer privacy” - and the fortune you won in yet another lottery, even though you have absolutely no recollection of ever traveling to Spamistan to buy a ticket?

“Research indicates that 90 percent of all email is junk you don’t need or want. Don’t just accept this as an unfortunate fact of life. Spam is dangerous. Spam wastes your time. Spam invades your life and your privacy. Spam infects your computer with Spyware and Trojans that steal your identity,” said Penkovsky.

Spam Terrier’s pedigree traces back to the team that develops Outpost Firewall Pro, award-winning software that provides home, small office and mobile users with powerful protection against Spyware, keyloggers, Trojans, hackers, identity theft, wireless network hijacking and other security threats.

Agnitum also licenses its firewall technologies globally to Novell, Sophos, Lavasoft, Bullguard and CAT, among others.

Who says anti-spam software has to be difficult to use and complex? Spam Terrier features a friendly, easy-to-user interface with convenient, intuitive controls. With built-in heuristics-based anti-spam tools, it collars junk email by training itself. As a user selects what he or she considers spam, Spam Terrier “learns” to identify behavior patterns of spam, instead of relying on users to block specific keywords and phrases.

The more you train Spam Terrier, the better its nose gets for inappropriate email. It remembers “spam scores” that classify a message as “not spam,” “probable spam” or “definite spam.” Accuracy increases over time.

“Spam Terrier is a smart assistant that bites into unwanted correspondence,” said Penkovsky. “It saves you time and inbox space. It defends against malicious and fraudulent messages, identifies messages from friends and peers, and defines white and black lists.”

Download Spam Terrier here.

Tags: spam terrier, agnitum, anti-spam, spam, email, outlook, outlook express

More than 20 million licenses were sold in the opening month of general availability for the new operating system, as new tools and programs ease the transition for consumers.

Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP. These initial figures reflect the broad interest in the security and usability enhancements in Windows Vista.

“We are encouraged to see such a positive consumer response to Windows Vista right out of the gate,” said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president of the Windows Business Group at Microsoft. “While it’s very early in the product lifecycle, we are setting a foundation for Windows Vista to become the fastest-adopted version of Windows ever. Working with our partners, we are helping our customers leverage new tools and programs to accelerate the transition and provide a great user experience.”

Windows Vista license sales after one month of availability have already exceeded the total of Windows XP license sales in the earlier product’s first two months of availability. In January 2002, the company announced sales of Windows XP licenses had exceeded 17 million after two months on the market.

The more than 20 million copies shipped represent Windows Vista licenses sold to PC manufacturers, copies of upgrades and the full packaged product sold to retailers and upgrades ordered through the Windows Vista Express Upgrade program from January 30 to February 28.

Microsoft’s PC-maker industry partners confirm consumer interest is strong. “Since the launch of Windows Vista, Dell consumer customers have overwhelmingly chosen premium versions of the operating system that enable them to have a richer experience with music, video, photography and other computing applications they choose,” said Neil Hand, vice president of Dell’s Consumer Product Group. “Customers’ initial experience with Windows Vista has been quite positive, and we will continue to try to deliver the best customer experience possible,” Hand added.

“HP worked extensively with Microsoft to ensure that our Windows Vista-based PCs offer consumers our easiest, safest and most satisfying technology experience yet,” said Mark Sanchez, vice president and general manager, consumer PCs, HP. “We are pleased with the customer acceptance of our Windows Vista offerings, including our innovative new TouchSmart PC.”

Microsoft has made several new tools and programs available to help customers get the best experience with Windows Vista. Windows Upgrade Advisor is a downloadable tool offered online at WindowsVista.com that helps consumers determine whether their Windows XP-based PCs can be upgraded to Windows Vista, and also helps choose the edition of Windows Vista that best meets their needs. The tool scans the computer and creates an easy-to-understand report of all known system, device and program-compatibility issues, and recommends ways to resolve them.

The “Certified for Windows Vista” logo program is designed to make it easier for consumers to recognize products that deliver premium experiences with Windows Vista. Hardware devices and software bearing the logos at retail help consumers make educated choices when purchasing devices and software to use with Windows Vista. There are more than 4,500 “Certified for Windows Vista” products to date - 2,500 of which were certified just since the January 30 launch event.

Windows Update keeps customers’ computers up-to-date and more secure by providing Windows Vista software updates from Microsoft. In Windows Vista, the update process is designed to be less disruptive than in previous versions of Windows. Users can elect to automatically receive new updates, and updating occurs in the background or may be scheduled for a time convenient to the user. If an update requires a restart to complete installation, a user may complete the restart at a more convenient time. On occasions when an update applies to a file in use, Windows Vista can save the application’s data, close the application, update the file, and then restart the application. In the initial phase after launch, Windows Update has delivered new drivers at a rate of more than 1,600 per month, bringing the total number of drivers above 27,000.

Tags: vista, windows, microsoft, operating system, os

Attensa, Inc., the leading developer of RSS software for businesses, announced a free public beta for Attensa for Outlook 2007 today. The new beta version builds on the integrated RSS capabilities in the new version of Microsoft Outlook 2007 by optimizing Outlook performance and adding a complete set of tools for receiving and managing critical business information while helping to cut through information overload with AttentionStream processing. Attensa AttentionStream processing continuously analyzes behaviors as RSS subscriptions are scanned and articles are read. It automatically pulls the articles and feeds the reader finds to be most important to the top.

Consumer social media sites have been the driving force behind the early adoption and use of RSS. Microsoft’s integration of RSS in Vista, IE7 and Outlook 2007 drive the further adoption of RSS by opening the eyes of business users to the advantages of using Web feed workflows to get the right information to the right people at the right time.

Attensa for Outlook is the first RSS reader designed specifically for enterprise use. The Attensa for Outlook 2007 feature set and functionality were developed using in-depth feedback from IT professionals and corporate information workers in organizations where tens of thousands of desktops are using Attensa for Outlook.

The Attensa for Outlook 2007 beta is free and can be downloaded here.

Tags: attensa, outlook 2007, beta, rss

From an OpenOffice.org press release:

The future of OpenOffice.org extends beyond the office suite. With the creation of our new ODF Toolkit Project, which we are announcing today, we are inviting developers everywhere to take the source of the world’s leading Free and Open office productivity suite in bold new directions. These may include technologies that engage tools for collaboration, communication and content creation of every kind; tools that will complement and even transcend the already powerful productivity suite. The anchor of this new project is the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the ISO and OASIS standard format for office applications and the most flexible and adaptable format for the future.

Any application can be engineered to express its files in the ODF and any application can open and edit ODF files created by another compliant application. Vendor lock-in, in which the user must continue to use expensive and proprietary software only because the files created using it are unreadable by other applications, has been the bane of governments, businesses, and individuals for at least the last twenty-five years. With the ODF users reclaim their works and vendor lock-in is eliminated. It is for this reason that governments and businesses are looking to the ODF and OpenOffice.org. The stakes are too high.

The ODF Toolkit Project takes that freedom even further. Developers are not bound by the legacy constraints of the office suite; they will be able to more easily include ODF in their applications or create new applications that use ODF. It does not matter whether it extracts, manages, creates, or integrates information. The ODF Toolkit Project lowers the barriers to working with and implementing the ODF for all.

–The OpenOffice.org Team

About OpenOffice.org
The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org\’s leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc. to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300), as well as legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in over 90 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial. The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies. Users will obviously benefit, and almost immediately. To give just an example: The future of collaboration and communication, not to mention much of commerce, depends on applications that can exchange files without the hassle of incompatibility; the future depends on truly open and flexible standards and formats. But much of what is created today and almost all that is exchanged uses proprietary formats, effectively limiting collaboration.

With the ODF Toolkit Project, any suitable application, large or small, will find it easier to implement the ODF, allowing users to create and exchange, collaborate on or simply save their files as they please, without the fear of vendor lock-in or file obsolescence.

Developers and others interested in contributing are invited to join us now and make something new!

To learn more, go here.

Tags: openoffice.org, free office suite, open source, bill webb, bill’s web, office alternatives, open document format, odf

NewsGator Technologies, Inc., the leading RSS platform company, today announced a new RSS plug-in for the Yahoo! Messenger with Voice real-time communications suite. NewsGator for Yahoo! Messenger with Voice allows users to access audio and video podcasts as well as other content from around the Web through an IM interface. Thousands of people have already downloaded the plug-in since its beta release last month.
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Samsung Woos Technology Lovers With MP3 Players, Portable DVD Players, Sports Camcorders, LCD TVs And Home Theater In A Box Systems.

Valentine’s Day, the holiday when family, loved ones, and friends shower each other with gifts of affection, love and admiration. Candy, cards and jewelry may not be enough to satisfy the technology enthusiast in your life. Samsung’s innovative electronics products offer tech aficionados the most unique ways to show that special someone you care. Some of the most distinctive and hottest gifts for your “techie” at heart include:
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FirstStop WebSearch, LLC has announced the addition of a “Social Bookmarks” search category within FirstStop WebSearch, its award-winning meta-search engine software product. With a single search, users can now obtain an aggregated list of search results from popular social bookmarking systems such as LookSmart’s Furl.net, CiteULike.org, and Zniff.com, a search engine for the Spurl.net. The new search category will be pre-installed in all new downloads and will be available via update for the existing users of FirstStop WebSearch.
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Today we got The Word in the form of an “Executive e-mail” from none other than Bill Gates himself. No, there was no $10 attached. Sorry.

While in some instances this might be viewed as a press release, when it comes from Uncle Billy and Big Red, it’s more like a set of stone tablets from you-know-where. As usual, it’s not about particulars, but more of what we would call ‘glittering generalities’ in the political arena.
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The spam problem could be entirely eliminated if e-mail users were willing to spend less than one minute a month responding to automated messages used by “permission-based” or “challenge/response” software to verify that they are legitimate senders, according to an analysis by anti-spam vendor DigiPortal Software, Inc. The worldwide cost of spam has been estimated to be as high $20 billion a year, mostly in lost productivity.
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Microsoft has created the Windows Feedback Panel Program to allow our customers to get more actively involved in helping to create the world’s best software. By participating in the program, you can help us focus our work on the features that you use most often, tell us where to simplify our software when it is too difficult and introduce new capabilities that increase your productivity. Basically, being a part of the Windows Feedback Panel helps us help you.
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(PRWEB) December 14, 2004 - The holidays are here, and with them comes lots of gifts - and all the stress of assembling them and learning how to use them. Most gifts this year will be technology based, from digital cameras, iPods and other MP3 players through to computers, peripherals and software.
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MINNEAPOLIS, Oct. 6, 2004 - Although natural disasters have recently wreaked
havoc on valuable data stored by businesses nationwide, it is everyday
occurrences such as human error or software problems that most frequently
cause data loss. According to Ontrack Data Recovery, the largest, most
experienced and technologically advanced provider of data recovery products
and services, most organizations are unsure of what constitutes a “data
disaster,” and do not know when, or how, to implement an appropriate crisis
plan. To help them minimize business disruptions, Ontrack has created a
Data Disaster Scale that grades the severity of IT calamities and defines
appropriate crisis management steps to support business continuity.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, to request a review copy, or to schedule an
interview, contact Patricia Witkin (patricia@nostarch.com or
415.863.9900)

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Experts agree that the worlds of mass data storage and entertainment are evolving fast to DVD technology, which is providing new outlets for entertainment, personal productivity, video, and recording.

Now Shop4tech is making DVD media more affordable than ever before. For example, Shop4tech offers Matrix DVD-R 8x (DVDminusR) at $0.41 in a bulk pack of 100 and DVD-R 4x (DVDplusR) media at a per-unit price of just $0.35 in a bulk pack of 100.

Also, Shop4tech offers Sonic DVD in a variety of formats to suit your recording needs for a remarkably low price of $0.25 cents apiece as part of a 100-pack of the DVD-R 4x, and DVD+R 4x at of $0.32 apiece for a 100-pack - a price that is half of what is offered by some other dealers.

We invite you to visit us at www.shop4tech.com/lockernome to take advantage of our 10% off coupon code ” lock10 ,” free shipping, everyday low prices, and an exceptional selection of DVD/CD recordable media.

“The program consists of 12 interactive ‘mind games’ that can be played in various permutations to enhance memory and related skills. It also includes a feedback tool that compares the player’s performance to norms adjusted for age, gender and educational level as he or she completes each exercise, plus a performance profile that recalculates the player’s overall strengths and weaknesses after each session to monitor progress.

“One game involves memorizing a list of 25 words and then picking those words out of lists that have been mixed up with other words, in the process teaching categorization as a memorization strategy. Another exercise requires players to remember the configurations of different medieval shields with assorted colors, shapes and themes. A third tests players’ ability to compute the number of moves necessary to place basketballs in a net in certain combinations, improving problem-solving as well as short-term working memory.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Secure IE 2004 Suite is the most secure Web browsing tool

BOSTON - July 19, 2004 - Winferno Software today announced its Secure IE 2004 Suite with new features that increase web-browser security and privacy, acting as a first line of defense for web browsing, much like anti-virus software does for e-mail. The suite protects against inadvertent malicious downloads like keystroke logging and spyware from websites. No other software suite provides users with all the features they need in one integrated package to make the Internet experience safer, faster and better every time they browse.

The Suite’s new security features include BrowserShield, which filters out prohibited content, limits ActiveX to a safe list and routes all file downloads through the user’s virus scanner. As a result, risks from keystroke loggers, password loggers, Spyware, ActiveX, and JavaScript are greatly reduced. Users also get features like the Internet Security Advisor for safely and easily surfing the web without the need to regularly set and update security settings on a computer. The new weekly AutoUpdate feature keeps users current with Winferno’s latest security software.

New privacy features include automatically clearing private information such as cookies and browser history from non-trusted sites at the end of every Internet session. Productivity features include tabbed web browsing; the ability to save multiple sites as a single file; and an integrated download manager that monitors multiple website downloads.

The suite bundles three stand-alone programs: Secure IE 2004, Private IE 2004, and Rapid IE 2004. Secure IE maximizes security and protects the computer from hackers and restricts what websites can and cannot do to the user. Private IE removes sensitive personal information from the computer and enables users to browse without a trace. Rapid IE significantly boosts Internet speed.

Secure IE 2004 Suite Pricing and Availability:
Winferno Software’s Secure IE 2004 Suite is available immediately at a retail price of $49.95. Current users of Secure IE may upgrade to the new version at a 50% discount. Stand-alone components of the Suite, like Secure IE, are available for $29.95. A free, fully functional, 15-day trial version is available to all users. The Secure IE 2004 Suite may be purchased from www.secureie.com. All Winferno software comes with a 30-day, 100% money back guarantee.

About Winferno Software:
Founded in 2000, Winferno Software is a privately held corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. Winferno developed Secure IE™, the first Internet security software tool, to protect consumers from web browser security threats, a menace not satisfactorily addressed by other products on the market. In addition to safeguarding users from Internet-based dangers, Secure IE enhances productivity and can speed up downloads faster than other web browsing tools. Winferno is also dedicated to providing research professionals with a powerful suite of research tools, offering Research-Desk, a productivity application that has been inducted into the Microsoft Windows User Group Network’s Hall of Fame. The company has patents pending for the technology underlying its core products, Research-Desk and Secure IE. For more information on Secure IE visit www.secureie.com. For more information on Winferno visit www.winferno.com.

Winferno Software Contact:
Ilene Adler, PR@vantage, (415) 984-1970 x102, iadler@pr-vantage.com

Secure IE, Fast Forward, PopSmart, and ActiveX Adapter are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Capital Intellect, Inc. in the United States and or other countries. Other product and company names herein are trademarks of their respective owners. Internet Explorer and ActiveX are registered trademarks of Microsoft. Microsoft in no way endorses or is affiliated with the Secure IE 2004 Suite.