Although Google+ is still in the beginning stages of its life, it has captured the attention of some major companies and social media lovers.  When branded pages were finally launched at the beginning of November, brands such as Pepsi, Cadbury, and Jet Blue were quick to jump on board and create some really interesting content.  Because the few people using it are so social-media-savvy, they have been asking for real engagement and conversations from these companies.  The brands who have experimented with the features offered by Google+ have been quite successful and have caught the attention of their customers.

One brand that has been especially successful is the American Red Cross.  Although they don’t have the flashiest page, they have been engaging really well with their customers.  Most of their posts are about real issues going on in the world and reason why you should care.  From there, they have created real conversations with their followers without just telling them to give blood.  They are focusing more on developing a dialogue rather than “selling,” which has been quite successful.

Linux is succeeding on many platforms other than computing desktops, but it’s still true that many Microsoft Windows users are either switching to Linux or choosing to run it as a secondary operating system.  In many cases, Windows users are unaware of the benefits they can get from Linux, or don’t know where to start in experimenting.  However, there are a number of free resources available for Windows users who want to take the Linux plunge. In this post, you’ll find our updated collection of several of them that can make moving to Linux very easy.

PC World is out with a good Getting Started Guide for Windows users who are interested in Linux.  The guide discusses benefits of Linux, what you need to get started, and how to turn a Windows PC into a dual-boot computer, which can be one of the best ways for Linux newbies who are used to Windows to get started. Users can also brush up on the most popular Linux distributions here.

I always like to investigate a new topic with a good book as a guide. Test Driving Linux: From Windows to Linux in 60 Seconds is a free online book that can get you started with both Linux and several open source programs. Beginners will find it approachable, and it covers everything from basic Linux commands to user interface conventions that differ between Linux and Windows. The chapters of the book are online links, so you can just peruse the Table of Contents to go straight to the kind of material you’re interested in.

It’s always instructive to hear from other Windows users who have immersed themselves in Linux, and there are complete stories about this type of switch available online. In this post, we covered a die-hard Windows user’s immersion in Ubuntu, which includes lots of good information about going from Microsoft’s OS to Linux.

As all of us spend more and more time with our mobile phones, it can be easy to be lulled into believing that all the great mobile applications have already been invented. However, many mobile analysts predict that one emerging application class for mobile phones has yet to come to full fruition: medical diagnostic applications. The concept of the phone as doctor (where the doctor is always with you) may still be questionable for some people, since there aren’t many applications to point to yet. But at the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, the first steps toward the phone that could detect cancer, diabetes and more are being taken. As this story plays out, open source medical diagnostic applications could have a bright future, too.

As The Register reports:

“The work is being done in South Korea, where researchers at the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have been spitting and bleeding onto capacitive touch screens to see what details they can extract from the samples using standard touchscreen tech…It is early days, but the researchers explained that they can spot the presence of biomolecules and must now attempt to identify what they are using a touchscreen…”

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Creating a quality blog design can be a significant challenge, because the design should add to the usability of the blog and should not overpower the content. Browsing through examples of beautiful blog designs can provide inspiration that can be put to good use in your own design work. In this post we’re showcasing 25 outstanding blog designs from various designers for your inspiration.

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Mandriva users have been anxiously awaiting word from corporate whether the first user-friendly distribution would be forced to cease operations. The decision, which has been postponed twice in the last week, has finally come down. Too bad it’s really a “good news, bad news” situation.

Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, today blogged that the bankruptcy has been averted for now thanks to the Paris Region Economic Development Agency. This agency appears to a consortium of business owners and consultants, tax and regulation experts, and investors who work to promote investment in France. Mandriva has become the recipient of their support which will buy the troubled company time to construct a Plan B.

Croset said the original issue with the “minor shareholder” could not be resolved. He continued with the good news, “Fortunately, the financial situation – far better than expected – allow us to search for a new way to solve the current issue until mid-February.”

So, while the company will carry on with its daily grind, users are still in a bit of limbo waiting until mid-February for the worst-case scenario. However, like a critically ill person on life support – everyday they continue breathing brings higher hopes they’ll someday recover.

Mandriva users have been anxiously awaiting word from corporate whether the first user-friendly distribution would be forced to cease operations. The decision, which has been postponed twice in the last week, has finally come down. Too bad it’s really a “good news, bad news” situation.

Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, today blogged that the bankruptcy has been averted for now thanks to the Paris Region Economic Development Agency. This agency appears to a consortium of business owners and consultants, tax and regulation experts, and investors who work to promote investment in France. Mandriva has become the recipient of their support which will buy the troubled company time to construct a Plan B.

Croset said the original issue with the “minor shareholder” could not be resolved. He continued with the good news, “Fortunately, the financial situation – far better than expected – allow us to search for a new way to solve the current issue until mid-February.”

So, while the company will carry on with its daily grind, users are still in a bit of limbo waiting until mid-February for the worst-case scenario. However, like a critically ill person on life support – everyday they continue breathing brings higher hopes they’ll someday recover.

Among open source tools for business, Business Intelligence (BI) platforms are rapidly increasing in popularity. These applications are used to better understand historical, current and future aspects of business operations. The tools typically offer ways to mine database- and spreadsheet-centric data, and produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations. Among the big players in this category, Pentaho is a leader, and now the company is open source a number of new tools.

According to a Pentaho announcement: 

“Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all of its big data capabilities in the new Pentaho Kettle 4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License, Version 2.0.”

The world of digital music is now dominated by lots of useful proprietary tools–with Apple’s ruling the roost–but there are also many free open source tools and applications worth looking into. Of these, Rockbox, an open source firmware replacement for MP3 players from manufacturers ranging from Archos to iRiver to Apple, is easily one of the most popular. Lisa originally covered Rockbox in this post, and we covered it again here. Now, in an interview, several of Rockbox’s developers are weighing in on its benefits, its user base and its future. 

Rockbox has been around for over a decade, and especially if you have an older MP3 player that you would like to add functionality to, it can greatly improve your digital music experience. It’s essentially like having a more robust operating system on your digital player, and you can even play Doom and other games on it.

Rockbox’s creator, Björn Stenberg, told TechWorld:

“I and a few Haxx friends bought ourselves Archos Jukebox 6000 MP3 players in 2000. Since it used a non-standard USB protocol, it required a custom Windows driver to transfer files. Since I prefer using Linux, I started working on a Linux driver for it which was eventually included in mainline Linux 2.4.8….While we enjoyed our newfound ability to bring our record collection in our pockets (a radical notion back then), soon we started getting frustrated by the limitations and slowness of the Archos jukebox firmware.”

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jQuery sliders, slideshows, and galleries are extremely common on a variety of different types of websites. Portfolio sites, blogs, e-commerce sites, and about any type of site can make use of a jQuery slideshow. Fortunately, there are a number of great plugins already coded that make it easy to add a slideshow in a matter of minutes. Each one offers different features and has it’s own style. In this post we’ll showcase 20 jQuery plugins that you may want to use for adding a slideshow in your own projects.

Slides
Slides is a jQuery slideshow plugin built for simplicity.Features include captions, multiple slideshows, and more.

As noted here at the very beginning of this year, while Linux becomes more firmly entrenched in businesses, and as cloud computing advances in general, Linux will become a huge part of cloud infrastructure. While Microsoft hasn’t made a lot of direct statements on the topic, Mary Jo Foley, who usually has a good bead on the company’s projects, has been steadily writing about Microsoft’s intent to enable Linux on its Azure cloud platform. Now she’s uncovered additional signs that these are the Redmond giant’s plans, and the whole idea makes a lot of sense for Microsoft.

According to Foley in her original post:

“What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux “durably” (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so…The new persistent VM support also will allow customers to run SQL Server or SharePoint Server in VMs, as well. And it will enable customers to more easily move existing apps to the Azure platform.”