Online ad spending is due to out pace TV ad spending in the UK by the end of '09 according to a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the UK online advertising trade body, in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre.

Does your business want to use gmail, or other google hosted web services but don't want the @gmail.com or google.com domain suffix. Well a useful service from google allows you to use your business domain for google hosted services.

As many of you know VMware finally released Fusion for the Mac. Fusion allows you to run Windows within a MacOS. It is by far the most seamless way to run Windows within a Mac.

Fusion has all of the nice features that VMware Workstation for the PC has with some additional features. One of the nicest features on Fusion is the "Unity" feature which allows users to interact with Windows applications on Mac OS as if they were Mac applications.

Here is a video demonstrating its functionality.

The WSJ seems to put to rest the idea that Microsoft will sweeten its $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo! Microsoft feels that it can wait and is prepare to hunker down and battle till the end. They feel amid the turbulent economic times that their offer is more than fair.

Voltaic Systems Inc. will be releasing a solar-powered laptop bag that will charge laptops carried inside. The company already sells solar-powered bags that carry and charge cell phones, MP3 players and PDAs. This new bag called the "Generator" and will be the first bag designed to charge laptops.

CIOinsight.com published 12 ways to earn higher IT salaries. Really the title should read "How to Increase Any Salary in any Industry" because the suggestions outlined could be applied to almost any industry.

The list includes the following (I've added my own commentary to all of the bullet items):

1 Work for a Larger Company. Larger comanies (>$1B in revenue) consistently pay more than smaller companies.

Microsoft SkyDrive is now offering 5 GB of Online Storage Space for free. AOL XDrive is the only other provider offering this much online storage for general purpose files.

Now that it is out of beta it is available to many different countries.

Windows SkyDrive features include RSS feeds for folders so your subscribers will know when you upload new files. You can also embed files / folders in web pages for your readers to download files directly from your website.

More info can be found here:
skydrive.live.com

The Update Scanner Firefox extension monitors web sites and alerts you whenever the site updates its content. This tool is useful for sites that don't have RSS feeds. For example, many company job pages or pages on sites you'd like to know have changed for whatever reason (competitor's site, make sure no one is changing your site, etc...)

You can adjust scanning intervals and "change thresholds" so insignificant changes are ignored.

A free plug in from Firefox.

Stacynu

I have recently been testing OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Not knowing anything about openoffice and how it compares to MS Office I was shocked as to how MS Office hasn't sued OpenOffice yet for cloning its software.

Look, I'm not complaining here, but finally a competitor to MS Office has arrived. I wonder how this will span out for Microsoft's revenue's in 2008?