An incredible offer from Microsoft

Free Domain and Free site Hosting - An incredible offer from Microsoft to Compete with Google

According to Microsoft, “In today’s business word having a website is as important as having business card”.

So here is what they are offering:

Microsoft offering you a free domain and free web hosting as a part of their Office Live small Businesses campaign.

When you sign up you will get:
* A free web site
* Free web hosting with start of 500MB space
* Free website design, professional and easy to handle, tools
* Site traffic reporting for free
* A contact manager from Microsoft to increase your business/sales
* Business branded emails

Additional affordable features are also available if you need this plan for relatively bigger businesses. Free hosting is available for first year and then you need to pay a reasonable fee of $15 per year. There is absolutely no fee for those who have registered for this service before 11 Feb 09.

Currently service is available in English, French, German and Japanese i.e. in countries Canada, U.K., U.S France, Germany and Japan. Coming soon for rest of the world.
I think this is an incredible offer for small businesses to set up their online presence with the help of professional service from Microsoft. This is great step.

  
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Cloud computing

What is Cloud Computing? ( Thanks Satyadev Singh (http://satyadev.wordpress.com/) for referring me this valuable subject.) It means Internet ('Cloud') based development and use of computer technology. It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services "in the cloud" without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. It is a general concept that incorporates software as a service, Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data is stored on the servers.

Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing (a form of distributed computing whereby a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks), utility computing (the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility such as electricity) and autonomic computing (computer systems capable of self-management). Indeed many cloud computing deployments are today powered by grids, have autonomic characteristics and are billed like utilities, but cloud computing is rather a natural next step from the grid-utility model. Some successful cloud architectures have little or no centralised infrastructure or billing systems whatsoever including Peer to peer networks like BitTorrent and Skype and Volunteer computing like SETI.

The majority of cloud computing infrastructure currently consists of reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers that are built on compute and storage virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers. Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of customers and typically offer service level agreements. Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing.

As customers generally do not own the infrastructure, they are merely accessing or renting, they can forego capital expenditure and consume resources as a service, paying instead for what they use. Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. By sharing "perishable and intangible" computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved (as servers are not left idle) which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. A side effect of this approach is that "computer capacity rises dramatically" as customers do not have to engineer for peak loads. Adoption has been enabled by "increased high-speed bandwidth" which makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.

The cloud computing "revolution" is being driven by companies like Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Yahoo! as well as traditional vendors including Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel and Microsoft and adopted by individuals through large enterprises including General Electric, D&B, L'Oréal, Procter & Gamble and Valeo.

View Satyadev Singh's profile

  
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Black Google Saves Energy..... Catch It!!!!!

A few months ago, TreeHugger Mark Ontkush wrote a post on his blog EcoIron titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year. The post lays out the following train of thought.

“An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.” Google, which has a white background and gets about “200 million queries a day” could reduce global energy use by 750 Megawatt-hours a year by simply changing the color of its homepage to black. (For more detailed calculations and assumptions check out the original post here.)

In response to this post a black version of Google emerged called Blackle.com. According to Blackle’s homepage at publication time, 4,408.917 Watt hours have been saved by. The site encourages users to “make a difference today [by] … Blackling "energy saving tips" or visit[ing] treehugger.com a great blog dedicated to environmental awareness.” Nice ideas. But how does the search measure up? Very well indeed. Give it a whirl yourself and start saving energy one search at a time. :: Blackle.com

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Anish Kumar

Web Designer - UI Designer - Graphic Designer