ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

OmniDrive is an online file storage solution. However, it is still difficult for us to find out if it is the perfect online file storage or not. Omnidrive has setup enough expectation as Michael Arrington (Techcrunch founder) showed enough interest in this service and has recently invested in the company and now is among the board of directors of Omnidrive.

There are various online drives these days and the competition is really tough. Lets see if Omnidrive has something different to offer than others, so as to attract the enormous user group. With the looks of it the service is good but how good is it, lets find out in the review…

PROS of Omnidrive :

1. Free storage of 1 GB : Omnidrive is giving away free storage of 1 GB. This is useful for those users who want to deal with some really important documents and are not in need of enough webspace. There are paid options available too and prices vary from $ 40/year for 10 GB storage to $ 199/year for 50 GB storage (that’s under January special, prices will be more after removing the discount.)

2. Multiple ways of accessing the files : Omnidrive gives out two ways of accessing the files, web based and through a virtual drive on the computer. Web interface is really good and gives the feel of windows and thus any user will not find it difficult as they’ll have a familiar interface. The other way, i.e., the virtual omnidrive is also good as it gives easy access to the files and keeps them synchronized too. The virtual drive lives in My Computer (atleast in Windows, not sure about MAC) and so batch file uploading can be done through this and that too in a convenient way.

3. Integrated Media player, picture viewer & document writer : It also allows users to play media files (Mp3 for sure and if you find any other format while using this service, please let me know), it displays picture files in a slideshow and also lets users to edit word documents.

4. Live Folder : Well, I just loved this feature. This feature allows users to put a feed URL and Omnidrive will automatically look for files on that and will put those files in the Live folder and thus users will have to take less pains in keeping the files in one place. Consider that you can put the Flickr Photo stream in this and thus you’ll be able to access your photos in one single place with other files.

5. Various small but useful features : It has many small features, which make it different from an FTP server and thus will be able to attract many users on that basis. Resume supported Virtual Omnidrive and that will help lot of slow speed connection users, Access controls of files and folders, Online sharing and making the files public. API’s And few others…

CONS of Omnidrive :

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DesiMartini is the Indian social network (open for everyone but targeted on Indians by Indians) and last time I covered DM, it looked more obsessed with Orkut but after the update it looks a complete rip-off of Facebook. It is good that they’ve appreciated the excellent design of Facebook but does that really helps DM. I think the idea of original design always rocks. It will be good to see if any good web designer will help DM in making a cool and simple design like FaceBook and to be honest even the Facebook founder accepted the fact that Facebook’s simple design was inspired from the Google’s simple design.

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Konkan.Tv is the new venture of one of the famous Indian blogger, Rohan Pinto. Konkan is the name of the area in India and which is of around 30,000 sq. Kilometers in area and the reason Rohan kept this name was that he wanted to share the cultures, regions, traditions, lifestyle of people who have lived or share some roots in that area. Konkan.Tv is a video sharing website and which allows users to upload their videos for free. The fascinating thing about this service is that it is run and operated completely by one single person and that is Rohan himself. Isn’t that amazing and top of it the response time of the question asked to him related to the service is great. One will never complain about the customer service.

Now lets look at the positive and negative sides of the service and lets find out if it has the capability of becoming the YouTube of India. I know that it may be difficult but we never know that when a service gets popular in some part of the world. We can always take example of Myspace in U.S.A. or Orkut in Brazil or if third example then Bebo in U.K. I know that all these are social networks but Video sharing is also part of social networking only.

PROS of Konkan.Tv :

1. File Size : Konkan.Tv currently allows 100 MB per video file (normally video of around 10 min.).

2. Supported formats : It has huge range of supported formats (MPEG 1/2 ES/PS/PES/VOB, RIFF AVI, ASF, WMV, WMA, QT, MOV, MP4, RealVideo, OGG, OGM, NSV, NUT, VIVO, FLI, CPK, PVA, RoQ, YUV4MPEG, MATROSKA and NUPPELVIDEO ) and I think that it is the biggest list of video files supported by any service.

3. Small but good community : The good thing is that Konkan.Tv is working very nicely on the community building aspect. It currently has very small number of users but it is showing good signs of becoming a stronger community. I’m sure that in future this community will help Konkan.Tv to achieve much more.

4. Safe for Children : The community takes care of the uploaded content and moderates offensive material. It targets more on cultural videos and thus it can be educational as well. And because the community is small then you can list Konkan.Tv in the list of safe websites for your children.

5. Future plans : Rohan is planning quite a few handful features and the features will certainly help in increasing the popularity of Konkan.Tv and the plans look good as well. Right now he has the file limitation but the limitation may be removed in future and thus people will be able to upload files which will be larger than 100 MB. At this point of time only registered users can upload the videos but may be soon people will be able to upload files of around 10 MB and that too without signing up for the service.
Other plans include the single sign-on feature and thus anyone with any Microsoft cardspace, openid, liberty and yadis ID will be able to login to Konkan.Tv

6. Instant release : Uploaded videos are released instantly or mostly in a gap 10-15 minutes and thus a user doesn’t have to wait too much as opposed to 24-48 hrs. in Google videos.

CONS of Konkan.TV :

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Hiding the files and folders is one thing which everyone wants to do at some point of time or the other. It becomes more important when the files are really important and you don’t want your children to delete them accidentally or mess up with those files in one way or the other. We all know one way of hiding the files and that is the traditional way of hiding the files or folders in windows (But is that a secret anymore?) But still if you are very new to computers or windows then let me explain that way as well :

Traditional windows hide files/folders feature :

1. Right click on the file/folder.
2. Tick the box “Hidden” & click on OK.
3. That hides it!

Showing the hidden files/folders :

1. Go to control panel.
2. Open Folder Options.
3. Click on View tab.
4. Under Hidden files and folder select Show hidden files and folders.
5. Click on OK. That’s it!

However, this technique is really really simple and most of the people know about it. And on top of it, any file which is hidden is slightly faded and thus everyone will come to know that it is hidden and has something important or suspicious (I’m sure you’ll love to open every folder which is hidden, won’t you ? human nature!!!)
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We all know that Wikipedia is displaying the amount of donation it has recieved till this date. While I was browsing through Wikipedia I just noticed that they have reached the 1 million mark!

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