Presentation on the web

In looking for a program to back up his Gmail account, programmer Dustin Brooks found a commercial program that instead copies username and password information, according to a blog on Codinghorror.com. Over the weekend, Brooks said in an e-mail to CodingHorrror.com that he was looking for a program that would archive his Gmail account onto his local hard drive. He signed up for a program called G-Archiver distributed by Mate Media of Miami, Fla. Brooks says that after installing the program, it didn't do all he was looking for so he decided to reverse engineer the source code using a program called Reflector for .Net. Inside the source code Brooks found the program author's e-mail address and account password for Gmail. ***

Preezo launched last week, bringing another new player to the online presentations scene. Meanwhile, Google Presentations is set to launch by the end of August - possibly as early as this week. With so many services in this market, we’ve rounded up more than 30 tools to create, host and share online presentations. Adiós, Powerpoint! — Ajax13.com - AjaxPresents is an online presentation editor that enables you to edit Microsoft PowerPoint files (.ppt) as well as Open source presentation files (.odp). It requires Ajax13 and does not require installation of any software on computer. ***

Zoho just launched yet another new web office tool - Zoho Show, a web-based version of Powerpoint. The AJAX-powered app lets you import Powerpoint (.ppt) and OpenOffice (.sxi) presentations, make shows that are public or private and pull in images from your Flickr account. Alas, it seems to lack an export function right now. Wisely, Zoho allow you to test the service without signing up - they also provide unlimited storage for your presentations. All in all, it’s a fairly average offering - it seems painfully slow, but all the basic features are there. Rival Thumbstacks is faster, slicker and easier to use, but they’ve had plenty of time to get it right. Zoho is throwing out web applications at a furious pace - the company’s free offerings include ***

Notes posted on company Web site after analyst presentation refer to "infinite storage" service. The story "Google lets slip talk of online storage" published March 7, 2006 at 4:55 AM is no longer available on CNET News.com. Content from Reuters expires after 30 days. ***

Hewlett-Packard plans to stop making e-business software after the products failed to catch on in the lucrative field, an HP executive said earlier this week. In a presentation to analysts Tuesday, Peter Blackmore, executive vice president of HP's enterprise systems group, said the company has suffered heavy losses with its own e-business software and will now partner with other software companies to offer HP customers the programs they need to take their business to the Web. "Many of the assets we have there we will retire, and we're going to move to a partnered strategy, because that is what the customer wants," Blackmore said. "We move to a partnership model and then make that part of the business, avoid the losses we have and make the overall software business profitable." While not being specific in his speech to analysts, Blackmore said the company is looking to retire its " ***