Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, July 19, 2010

Publish your own Paid Newsletter with Letter.ly

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/create-paid-email-newsletter/13966/

While alternate channels like Twitter and RSS feeds have grown in popularity, the good old email newsletter still has its charm. Provide a newsletter with relevant and well-written content and they'll come for sure.

Email Newsletters – Where the Provider Pays

Like everything else, there're plenty of email newsletter services on the web to choose from.

For instance, if you are business owner looking to connect with your customers, you can go with Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact – these services will not only deliver your emails but will also help track the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Web publishers (including bloggers) can deliver RSS updates in the form of email newsletters using services like FeedBurner, AWeber or FeedBlitz.

Email Newsletters – Where the Subscriber Pays

Some of the service discussed above are free while others are paid but they all have one thing in common – the email newsletter is always delivered free to the subscriber. The service costs, if any, are borne by the newsletter provider and not the subscriber.

If you're however planning to launch a subscription based newsletter where people will have to pay a certain fee to receive your email, a service that you should explore is letter.ly.

With letter.ly, you can offer subscribe a one-click sign-up page (see example) – they simply have to share their email address and pay with their credit cards (through Amazon Payments) to become a subscriber of your email newsletter.

You get a unique email address and any email that you send to this address will be forwarded to your subscribers as a newsletter. So you get decide the format of the newsletter as well as the frequency and time of delivery.

It can't get any simpler than this. Thanks Mathew Ingram.

Publish your own Paid Newsletter with Letter.ly

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/KeDLaiJcO8E/openstack-rackspace-and-nasa-n.php

Rackspace and NASA are open-sourcing its code and technology for people anywhere to create their own cloud environments.

Called OpenStack, the initiative is one of the most substantive effort to support interoperability in the cloud. As part of the initiative, Rackspace is donating the code that powers its cloud files and cloud servers, the foundation for its public-cloud offerings. NASA will contribute technology that goes to power its Nebula Cloud Platform.

Sponsor

Twenty-five companies have signed on to support OpenStack. These include Intel, Dell and Citrix. Discussions have started with companies like Microsoft. The goal is to create an ecosystem of open-cloud environments.

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files.

NASA Nebula is one of the world's most powerful cloud computing platform. For instance, Nebula is processing the images from a camera that is orbiting Mars and taking images of the planet for use in the WorldWide telescope, a project of Microsoft Research. Nebula processed - and now hosts - more than 100 terabytes of high-resolution images, the equivalent of 20,000 DVDs worth of information.

This level of computational capability makes Nebula viable for any enterprise or government agency.

Rackspace representative said the lack of interoperability is slowing down adoption. Customers are asking about how they can move data around. As a result, customers are having to make technology and architectural trade offs.

Those trade offs should not be an issue. If all the cloud providers used the same core technology then customers could shop around based on the value of the different cloud services. It would create a market where the core technology is not the core differentiator.

All the cloud providers use open source components. The need is for a Cloud OS that ties it all together.

Coming into this week at OSCON, we were starting to speculate if the open-source movement had lost a bit of its clout or its will to protect the cloud as much as it had the open Web.

It had been a tough week. The Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems is proving to be a brutal blow for OpenSolaris. And the future of MySQL is still a question mark.

Further, there have been few if any effort to make interoprerabilty a high prirority.

OpenStack looks like it is a step in the right direction.

Discuss

It's a Trap! Atom Corral Is a Major Step Toward Quantum Computing

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-07/its-trap

This maze of electrodes, known as a surface-electrode ion trap, brings us closer to building quantum computers—that is, computers that could manipulate the quantum-mechanical states of atoms to process data millions of times as fast as today's most powerful supercomputers do.

Whereas computers now use transistors to crunch 0s and 1s, a quantum computer could theoretically perform dozens of calculations simultaneously by zapping charged subatomic particles, called ions, with a laser.

One of the first steps in building a functional quantum computer is trapping the ions in order to zap them. That's why physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have created this ion trap, a web of electrodes that produces an electric field to hold the ions in place. Once in place, the ions hover just above the trap's surface. Project physicist Jason Amini says there's still much work to do. For example, he and his group would like to build a trap that can hold hundreds of ions instead of the two or three it currently manages. If they can pull it off, the traps could outperform conventional computers on certain tasks within the next five years.

Verizon's LTE rollout is imminent, computers updated for 4G SIM cards

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/18/verizons-lte-rollout-is-imminent-computers-updated-for-4g-sim/

We just got some alleged (but very convincing) internal documents on Verizon's 4G plans, and it's mostly stuff we've already heard -- 5-12Mbps down, aircards before smartphones, and plans to roll out in 30 cities in 2010. That said, documents dated this week show the company's still on track to serve up 100 million connections by the end of the year, and a pair of independent tipsters have just sent us pics of Verizon computers ready and waiting for those precious LTE SIM cards. Furthermore, the docs also claim that the planned LTE isn't just fast, it's got a lag-destroying 30ms latency too, and fans of wider wireless computing can expect 4G tablets of some sort in 2011 as well. See all the goodies in our gallery below.

Gallery: Verizon Wireless alleged internal 4G plans

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Verizon's LTE rollout is imminent, computers updated for 4G SIM cards originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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First official Droid 2 pictures spotted in teaser site code?

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/18/first-official-droid-2-pictures-spotted-in-teaser-site-code/

Astute reader Dominic was just minding his business, hunting for hints in the Droid Does website source code, when what should he allegedly discover but an entire Droid 2 spread inside a Shockwave Flash file. To our knowledge these may be the first official images of the Motorola A955, though of course we've already seen it a number of times before. We just need Verizon to leak an official announcement with price and release date now -- we're hearing August 23rd -- and perhaps a nice Hollywood trailer to round things out. See a larger version of Dominic's discovery right after the break.

Continue reading First official Droid 2 pictures spotted in teaser site code?

First official Droid 2 pictures spotted in teaser site code? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:! 57:00 ED T. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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