Cozi was co-founded by Robbie Cape and Jan Miksovsky after the two of them left Microsoft. Most of the company’s employees worked previously at Amazon.com, Expedia, or Microsoft. The company’s first product was called Cozi Central and released on September 25, 2006, and includes a family calendar, shopping lists, family messaging, and a photo collage screensaver. Cozi was relaunched as a web-oriented company on June 3, 2008.

Corporate Culture

Cozi uses Tupperware-style events called Mom’s parties to conduct market research.

The company is unusual among technology start-ups in that it employs a roughly equal balance of men and women.

From Cozi Website

Cozi is a free web service that helps families manage crazy schedules, track shopping and to do lists, organize household chores, stay in communication and share memories—all in one place.

People have accused us of being fanatically family focused, and you know what? They’re right. From our very beginning in 2005, we’ve been all about families. When we started Cozi, we were just a small group of Microsoft, Expedia, and Amazon veterans—all with kids of our own—looking for a way to balance our busy schedules and create more harmony at home. So we pooled our collective knowledge and experience to create something special. Something that would make it easy and fun for families to juggle everything they have to do. Not just our families, but families everywhere.

We know every family is different, but we all have one thing in common: we’re crazy-busy. Cozi is designed to make it easier to manage everything we have to do. Cozi tracks appointments and activities, simplifies shopping lists and chores, and makes it easy for everyone to communicate with each other. Even when schedules change, Cozi is there making sure all the moving pieces fit together at the end of the day.

phpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name “phpBB” is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is a free software.

phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela joined the development team after phpBB’s CVS repository was moved to SourceForge.net, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully functional, pre-release version of phpBB was made available in July.

phpBB 1.0.0 was released on December 9, 2000, with subsequent improvements to the 1.x codebase coming in two more major installments. The final release in the 1.x line was phpBB 1.4.4, released on November 6, 2001. During the lifetime of the 1.x series, Bart van Bragt, Paul S. Owen (former co-manager of the project), Jonathan Haase and Frank Feingold joined the team. phpBB 1.x is no longer supported and virtually no websites continue to use it.

In February 2001, phpBB 2.0.x began development entirely from scratch; the developer’s ambitions for phpBB had outgrown the original codebase. Doug Kelly joined the team shortly afterwards. After a year of development and extensive testing, phpBB 2.0.0, dubbed the “Super Furry” version, was released on April 4, 2002, three days later than intended.

Work on phpBB 3.0.x began in late 2002. It was originally intended to be released as phpBB 2.2, and the first planned feature list was announced on May 25, 2003.[4] However, as development progressed, the developers realised that phpBB 2.1.x (the development release cycle for 2.2) had eliminated virtually all compatibility with the 2.0.x line, the version number for release was changed to 3.0.0, in keeping with the Linux kernel versioning scheme. In September 2005, Paul Owen resigned as the Development Team Leader and Meik Sievertsen was promoted to the role.

In March 2007, the phpBB teams had planned to undergo a short round of server maintenance, however the server crashed during the outage, suffering a double-disk failure and causing phpBB.com to be down for the full week. (The phpBB teams indicated that phpBB, the software, was not the cause of the outage.) However, due to the unexpected outage, the teams decided to change their original plans and launch their brand new website, powered by phpBB3 and the new prosilver theme. This was a big surprise to most, as the theme had been a heavily guarded secret, never before seen by the public, and was originally not intended to be revealed until the final release of phpBB 3.0.0. Initial feedback was split, with many applauding the new theme and others criticising a number of new design decisions, particularly the decision to display the user info on the right side of the viewtopic page (phpBB2′s subSilver theme had displayed it on the left).

On April 30, 2007, phpBB founder and co-Project Manager James Atkinson officially resigned from his duties towards phpBB, citing personal circumstances. With the announcement also came the announcement that phpBB was now newly independent, and that the team leaders would be collectively taking charge of the decisions in the future of the project. At the end of May, an announcement was made that Jonathan “SHS`” Stanley, the other co-Project Manager, was stepping down as well for personal reasons.

On July 7, 2007, the teams announced that phpBB had been nominated as a finalist for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in the category of “Best Project for Communications”. At the end of the month, SourceForge.net announced that phpBB had won the award for “Best Project for Communications”, and in honour of the award, SourceForge.net donated $1000 in phpBB’s name to Marie Curie Cancer Care. phpBB also won a “Thingamagoop” from Bleep Labs, and “bragging rights for a full year.”

On September 6, 2007, the teams launched an official phpBB podcast. It was recorded by a rotating group of phpBB team members with occasional guests, and discussed a number of phpBB-related topics, as well as answering questions e-mailed in from listeners.

The first beta of phpBB3 was released in June 2006, and the first release candidate was released in May 2007. The phpBB3 codebase received an external security audit in September, which was done by SektionEins. Finally, phpBB 3.0.0 “Olympus” (also dubbed the Gold release) was published on December 13, 2007.

The teams launched a new phpBB weblog in July 2008. The blog is written by phpBB team members on various topics related to phpBB and provide users with a unique inside look at the activities of the phpBB teams.

The phpBB teams held their first-ever phpBB users conference in London on July 20, 2008, which was titled “Londonvasion 2008.” Londonvasion featured presentations by phpBB team members on various topics important to the phpBB community, MOD authors, and developers. Londonvasion provided a unique opportunity to socialise with members of the phpBB teams. The event also represented the first time that most members of the teams had a chance to meet each other in person.

More on PhpBB

• phpBB2 was the predecessor of the present-day phpBB3. Developed during 2001-2002, the source code was written primarily to run on PHP 3.0 and 4.0 (version 2.0.13 upped the minimum requirement to PHP 4.0.3 due to a necessary security fix), and by the time that phpBB3 was released in late 2007, …
• phpBB3 is the current stable version of phpBB. Following over three years of development and an eighteen-month beta/release candidate stage, it went gold on December 13, 2007. Some of phpBB3′s major features include: Modular design for the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel, and User Control Panel Support for multiple database management systems, …

Other Information

• Developed by The phpBB Group
• Stable release 3.0.4 (December 12, 2008)
• Written in PHP
• Available in Multilingual
• Type Internet forum
• License GNU General Public License

Links

• Website http://www.phpbb.com/
• Downloads
• PhpBB Mods
• PhpBB Knowledgebase
• PhpBB wiki
• PhpBB powered-by.org

SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl-based ancestor software YaBB[citation needed]. At the time, YaBB was attributed to causing resource allocation problems on many systems. YaBB SE was written as a rough PHP port of YaBB, and had many of the same resource and security problems of the older YaBB versions. Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis of Lewis Media Inc., the owners of YaBB SE and the original owners of SMF, made the decision to convert to a new brand and name.

SMF started as a small project by username “[Unknown]” (one of the YaBB SE developers) and its main intent was to add more advanced templating to YaBB SE. The project then slowly grew to address common feature requests, efficiency problems, and security concerns. A rehaul of YaBB SE had been in development for several years, but was superseded by this then competing project. Popular interest in the new YaBB SE fork sparked a complete rewrite of the code, with security and performance in mind. This eventually became today’s Simple Machines Forum.. The first SMF release was SMF 1.0 Beta 1a, released on 30 September 2003 to Charter Members only.

On the 23rd of October 2006, Simple Machines LLC was registered in the state of Arizona, and the transfer of copyrights from Lewis Media to Simple Machines LLC was completed on the 24th of November 2006 during a three-day retreat in Tucson, AZ. This was done for the “[solidification of] the team’s commitment to continuously providing free software, without the perceived risks of corporate influence”

Future

On 8 April 2007, Simple Machines announced the introduction of their next version, SMF 2.0 [8]. SMF 2.0 has been in development alongside SMF 1.1 since December 2005. This version will have many new features, including:

• Database abstraction – with support for PostgreSQL and SQLite planned alongside that of MySQL.
• Automatic installation of packages into themes other than just the default.
• Email templates to simplify customization of forum emails.
• Moderation center including post, topic and attachment moderation – to allow approving of user content before it is made public.
• User warning system.
• Additional group functionally including group moderators and requestable/free assignable groups.
• WYSIWYG editor to provide an intuitive user interface to those users not familiar with BBCode.
• Permission improvements such as group inheritance and permission profiles to further reduce the complexity of the permissions system.
• File based caching for a performance increase on all forums regardless of whether an accelerator is installed.
• Mail queuing system to stagger the sending of emails to improve performance on large forums.
• Advanced signature settings to allow the administrator of a forum to more tightly control the contents of users signatures.
• Personal messaging improvements including ability to automatically sort incoming messages and a variety of display options.
• Improved upgrade script with better timeout protection and simpler user interface.
• Custom profile fields to enable administrators to add additional member fields from the administration center.
• Use of OpenID.

The first public beta of SMF 2.0 was released on Monday, March 17 2008.

Localization

SMF is available in over 38 languages[9], including Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian. It can be translated to other languages by volunteers. UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 encodings are available for all.

Modifications

SMF has a modification base repository for free modification hosting and tracking via the Simple Machines main site. Many modifications, or “mods” as they are usually called, have been created and distributed free of charge, including an arcade, profile additions, gallery, RPG system, spam filter, various SEO features, and many more. Before being listed on the SMF Mods site, the mod is validated by the SMF Team, to ensure that it complies with the SMF Coding Guidelines.

The Package Manager included in SMF is one of the flagship features. It allows an administrator to install modifications and updates to SMF without having to modify the code of the script, usually with only a few mouse clicks.

The SMF team

The Simple Machines team includes graphics, documentation, customization, localization, marketing, and management divisions. The SMF support staff and users also provide free support on the official community forums. Their duties include helping forum owners with troubleshooting and optimization.

Charter Members

People who wish to support Simple Machines with a donation of 50 USD yearly are rewarded with a Charter Membership. This grants access to a hidden section on the forum and advanced beta versions to test before they go public. Advanced support for SMF including installation and upgrades by the staff are also provided. Charter Members also get access to a private Helpdesk staffed by the Simple Machines Support Team where Charter Members can receive one-on-one support outside of the public forum.

SMF and free software

SMF is occasionally criticized for not being available under a free software license; the developers acknowledge this. Redistribution of the software, even unmodified, is not allowed without written permission. The source code is not redistributable either, although it is allowed to distribute instructions on how to modify it.

Minimum System Requirement

To run SMF, the webserver you’re hosted on must meet a few simple requirements. These are not terribly high, and as such most hosts meet them.

• Any webserver that properly supports PHP, such as Apache or Internet Information Services (IIS).
• PHP 4.1.0 or higher. The following directives are required to be set correctly in php.ini:
  • the engine directive must be On.
  • the magic_quotes_sybase directive must be set to Off.
  • the session.save_path directive must be set to a valid directory.
  • the file_uploads directive must be On.
  • the upload_tmp_dir must be set to a valid directory.
• MySQL 3.23.4 or higher.
• at least 512 kilobytes of storage space in the database, although more is highly recommended.
• about two and a half megabytes of storage space on the web server, although more is recommended.

Recommended System Requirements

However, for best performance and use, a bit more is suggested. This includes the following:

• Linux or another Unix based operating system.
• The GNU Aspell and its dictionaries for spell checking support.
• Apache with AcceptPathInfo set to On (Apache 2 and later only) for queryless URL support.
• PHP 4.3.0 or higher, with the following set in php.ini:
  • the max_input_time directive is set to a value of at least 30.
  • the post_max_size and upload_max_filesize directives are set to the size of the largest attachments you wish to be able to upload.
  • the session.use_trans_sid directive set to Off.
  • the memory_limit directive is set to at least 8M.
  • the max_execution_time directive is set to at least 15.
  • the register_globals directive is set to Off.
• MySQL 4.0.15 or higher with query caching enabled.
• GD Graphics Library 2.0 or higher.

Links

• Official Website
• Download SMF
• SMF Mods
• SMf Themes
• SMf – Powered-by

osCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Harald Ponce de Leon as The Exchange Project. While osCommerce is still officially in its development stage, the current Milestone 2.2 release (Release Candidate 2a) is considered stable. As of August 2008 the osCommerce site says that there are over 14,000 ‘live’ websites using the program. This number is almost certainly conservative, given the inclusion of osCommerce in hosting panel application installers such as Fantastico (web hosting) and its dependency on osCommerce users linking their sites into the osCommerce Live Stores listings.

The planned Milestone 3.0 is expected to be a major re-write of the program to incorporate an object-oriented backend, a template system to allow easy layout changes, and inclusion of an administration-area username and password definition during installation . An early release candidate of osCommerce 3.0 (osCommerce Online Merchant 3.0A4) has been available for download since Mar 31 2007, 03:11 AM

On 29th of October, 2008 it was announced by Harald Ponce de Leon (Project Leader) that the goal is to get v2.2 finalized and to release v3.0 Alpha 5 as soon as possible.

Oscommerce v2.2 was finalised released by oscommerceproject.org on the 11th of December 2008 due to a lack of progress by the original projects founder. Milestone 3 core seems to be considered out of date by the project & a version 4 is being discussed.

Other Information

• Developed by Harald Ponce de Leon
• Latest release 2.2 RC 2a / 2008-01-30;
• Preview release 3.0 Alpha 5 “Vanillekipferl” / 2009-03-14;
• Written in PHP
• OS Cross-platform
• Type Webshop
• License GNU General Public License
• Website http://www.oscommerce.com/

Input formats:

• avi, asf, mov, rm, rmvb, flv, mkv, mpg, 3gp, m4v, vob, YouTube videos and more

Output formats:

• avi, mp4, wmv, flv, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, mpg (PAL or NTSC), mp3, wma, ogg, aac

Other Information

• Risnow Software
• License : Free

Links

• Website

Download

The following is a list of available Videora Converters sorted by device type.

Mobile Phones

• Videora iPhone Converter
• Videora iPhone 3G Converter

Portable Media Players

• Videora iPod Converter
• Videora iPod classic Converter
• Videora iPod nano Converter
• Videora iPod touch Converter

Portable Game Systems

• PSP Video 9

Video Game Consoles

• PS3 Video 9
• Wii Video 9
• Videora Xbox 360 Converter

Other Information

• Developer : – Red Kawa Inc.
• License : Freeware

Links

• Videora Converter

Downloads

Avi2DVD is a freeware tool that converts Avi, Ogm, Mkv, Wmv and Dvd to Dvd, Svcd or Vcd. This program has the support of multiple audio streams, the capture from digital video cameras and others. It’s a tool for the creation of semiprofessional DVD’s.

In this software you will get multiple tabs for the configurations of the files: the input, output, encoders, subtitles and also the DVD menu. It provides the support of three external subtitles and the configuration of the DVD menu with the inclusion or manages for chapters, audio, subtitles buttons with great facilities.

Is a 100% freeware utility that uses other freeware softwares to complete the package, totally free of malwares.

The author made an important note about the functionality of the software, mentioning that the program is a codec dependant, saying that the codec package could be affected the functionality of it. Some of the softwares that could affect its functionality are the Morgan Splitter and the Nero filters. In the case that you have been installed any of this programs the author let you know it required to uninstall this type of softwares and reinstall the program.

Other Information

• Developed by TrustFm
• Latest release 0.4.5 beta / June 28, 2007
• OS Microsoft Windows
• Type DVD authoring
• License Freeware

Links

• Avi2Dvd
• AutoGK

Download

Having done a great amount of development on MediaCoder in past years, we are looking forward to providing better products and services for commercial and enterprise customers, in addition to personal users. Right now we have following products and services on the shelf.

Features in Brief

• Converts among many audio and video compression formats and re-mux into various container formats, on the fly, in batches
• Give you the control over the transcoding process and all the parameters of your converted file, so you can learn about, compare among and play with various codecs
• A flexible device plug-in infrastructure brings specific interfaces for specific devices
• Fully standalone, no need to install any media player, filter or codec, no registration of any components into your system
• Extensions to expand custom features and user interfaces

Typical Applications

• Improving compression / reducing file size
• Converting for audio/video portable devices (digital audio player, MP4 player, mobile phone, PDA, PSP, VCD/DVD player etc.)
• Extracting audio tracks from video files
• Ripping audio/video discs CD/VCD/DVD

Supported Audio & Video Formats

• MP3, Vorbis, AAC, HE-AAC, HE-AAC v2, MusePack, Speex, Windows Media Audio, AMR NB/WB, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
• FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio (APE), OptimFrog, Audio Lossless Coding (ALS), WMA Lossless*, True Audio (TTA)*, WAV
• H.264, Xvid, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, H.263, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video (WMV)
• AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, ASF, RealMedia*, QuickTime/MOV*, OGM*
• CD, VCD, DVD, Cue sheet

* supported as input only
* not all combinations of audio/video/container formats are supported

Links

• Official website: http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/
• Official support forum: http://forum.mediacoderhq.com/

Download

Version 2.0 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.

Other Information

• License: Free
• Operating Systems: Symbian, Java
• Additional Requirements: JAVA, MIDP
• Limitations: No limitations
• Date Added: December 28, 2008

Links

• Author Site
• CNET Download.com

• Download

On 31 May 2006, the website’s servers, located in Stockholm, were raided by Swedish police, causing it to go offline for three days. The Pirate Bay has also been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as the plaintiff and as the defendant. The website sued several media companies after emails from anti-piracy company MediaDefender were leaked online which revealed that the company engaged in illegal methods to take down The Pirate Bay. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is “one of the world’s largest facilitators of illegal downloading”, and “the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright—or pro-piracy—movement”. On 15 November 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that it had reached over 25 million unique peers. The Pirate Bay has about 3,400,000 registered users so far. Registration is not needed to download though, only for writing comments and uploading torrents.

The Pirate Bay website allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain metadata necessary to download the data files from other users. The torrents are organized into categories: “Audio”, “Video”, “Applications”, “Games”, “Other” and “Porn”. The “Porn” category though is only visible for registered and logged in users and if they explicitly tick the “show porn” radio button in their settings page. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents. Downloading data files from other users is facilitated by the BitTorrent trackers that also run on The Pirate Bay servers.

The website features a relatively efficient browse function which enables users to see what is available in broad categories like Audio, Video, and Games as well as more specific categories like Audio books, Highres – Movies, and Comics. The contents of a category can then be sorted by file name, number of seeds or leechers, dates posted, etc.

Initially, The Pirate Bay’s four Linux servers ran a custom web server called Hypercube. An old version is open source. On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of the four web servers, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd and PHP on its dynamic front ends, MySQL and MySQL-proxy on the two database back ends, Sphinx on the search system, Memcache for caching SQL queries and PHP-sessions, and Varnish in front of Lighttpd for caching static content. The Pirate Bay consists of 24 dedicated servers including six dynamic web fronts, two databases, and eight BitTorrent trackers.

On 7 December 2007, The Pirate Bay finished the move from Hypercube to Opentracker as its BitTorrent tracking software, also enabling the use of the UDP tracker protocol for which Hypercube lacked support. The Pirate Bay also announced that their servers would support SSL encryption, in response to Sweden’s new wiretapping law. Opentracker is free software.

On 19 January 2009 The Pirate Bay launched IPv6 support for their tracker system, using an IPv6 only version of OpenTracker.

Funding

Petter Nilsson, a candidate on the Swedish reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), donated 35,000 SEK to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers. As of June 2006, the website is financed through advertisements on their result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about US$75,000 per month.

In April 2007, a rumour was confirmed on the Swedish talk show Bert that The Pirate Bay had received financial support from right-wing entrepreneur Carl Lundström. This caused some furor since Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna and Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish). The size of Lundström’s contributions is unknown, as are his motives. During the talk show, The Pirate Bay spokesman Tobias Andersson acknowledged that “without Lundström’s support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start” and claimed that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.

It has been suggested that the website is extremely profitable, and that The Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people’s rights. The website has insisted that these allegations are not true, stating, “It’s not free to operate a Web Site on this scale,” and, “If we were making lots of money I [Svartholm] wouldn’t be working late at the office tonight, I’d be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan.” In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding $3 million made by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), Peter Sunde argues that the website’s high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss. It is possible to make donations to the Pirate Bay and the site also runs a fund intended to buy Sealand, a platform with micro-nation status.

Links

• The Pirate Bay – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Official website