Cool Tech Reviews

theTechSage explains two ways to get the Standard Edition of Microsoft’s premier development product, Visual Studio 2005, for free or very cheap. The “very cheap” is for students only, but the “free” is a great offer from Microsoft where you attend 3 Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Webcasts (either live or on-demand) and get:

- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Standard Edition (Not for Resale)
- Five chapters of Programming ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference, by Dino Esposito
- A 30-day hosting account to try out your custom Web applications
- Microsoft Developer Security DVD with how-tos, white papers, tools, webcasts, and code samples that demonstrate how to write more secure code
- A 50% discount on a Microsoft Certified Professional Exam so you can add your new skills to your resume
- A voucher that allows you to buy Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with an MSDN® Professional Subscription at renewal pricing (a $400 savings)

Altogether, this complimentary package has an estimated value of $400.

The choice of webcasts look both interesting and useful . If you have any interest in Microsoft development tools, it’s a dynamite offer.

Is it nostalgia for the 90’s or am I caught in a time warp? Google has resuscitated the “build yourself a free home page service” concept with a spiffy AJAX Page Creator and mercifully without the annoying ads that were the hallmark of such services in the past. Chris Sherman has the details at SearchEngineWatch:

Google Page Creator is a web based application that uses a basic what-you-see is what-you-get style of interface, designed to allow anyone to create and publish web pages, regardless of skill or knowledge level.
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Google Page Creator is a web-based application that runs on any computer or operating system. To use it, you must have a Google account and a Gmail address. Pages that you create are stored on Google servers using a URL convention of gmailname.googlepages.com.

Each user is provided with 100 megabytes of free storage space, and while there is a limit on the amount of bandwidth a site is allowed, Rosenstein says he doubts most people will ever reach the limit. The limit is primarily in place to foil the efforts of spammers, he said.

There are few restrictions on the type of content Google will allow users to publish, though Rosenstein said there won’t be any mechanisms for ecommerce or interactivity.
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Pages hosted on Google Pages are ordinary web pages, and will be included in Google’s (and presumably other search engines) web index, though they won’t be given any special treatment in ranking.

Despite their best intentions, I think they are going to have a problem with various forms of abuse. However, a bigger question is, why? Google already has the free Blogger service for would-be webloggers, so the suspicion is that it’s market positioning against the wildly popular MySpace. If so, they are going to need more than a few generalized web site templates to play the interactive user community game.

As for the other players, Yahoo and Lycos still have those golden oldies, GeoCities and Tripod, complete with the annoying ads. The real question is if or how the big names are planning to compete with MySpace.

Coolz0r:

MonkeyBongo is about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen for mobile content. They have six tools available for free to help you customize your phone. The best of those six apps is without any doubt the ‘OneClickRingtones’

That particular application is claimed to convert anything from your MP3 collection into a ringtone. Visit MonkeyBongo for more details on that and the other five applications, but being a skeptic, my question is how they are getting paid. The press release claims:

“We are moving toward creating an online mobile community,” states Mark Cave, “So, we decided to start by creating what we consider the best set of ringtone tools in the world.”

Seems to be a good start.