Imagine sitting at a large round table over at AT&T trying to come up with ways to better your brand and service. Everyone is expressing their minds, and one individual says "" There's a slight chuckle in the room, and then everyone begins looking at each other with a slightly puzzled look on their faces. Finally, someone says ""

A few weeks ago we demonstrated an extremely simple backup solution called IdleBackup. It was nothing too fancy, and this time around we wanted to go to the other extreme with a freeware Windows backup application that will really knock your socks off. The program is called Cobian Backup, and I wouldn't have found it without Leland's help.

There's a new feature in Firefox 3 Beta 5 that I just came across yesterday when using the browser, and I'm not sure how long it has been there. What I did was I clicked on the icon for our site which brought up what would normally be security-related information for the page your viewing. Then I clicked the More Information button:

Compiz Fusion is quickly becoming an important part of many Linux distributions, and I don't think that anyone would argue that the cube effect for switching between desktops is one of the most hyped features. Well, the cube could very well be on its way to retirement thanks to the cylinder effect that was just added.

The robots have begun to invade the world, starting with Firefox 3! That's right, the next-generation browser may not be what we were expecting all along. They are trying to pose as friendly inhabitants of the browser, but don't get sucked into their evil spell. It's too late for me, but save yourselves by switching to Internet Explorer!

Both you and I have been complaining for quite awhile that Google needs to provide an updated desktop version of the Google Talk instant messenger, and it looks like they are listening after all. Over the weekend they released a new version called Google Talk, Labs Edition that is currently in testing. Sounds great, right?

I've been meaning to give Digsby a spin ever since the public Beta was released about two weeks ago. It looked like it was a well designed cross-network (and cross-platform) instant messenger, and it offered quite a few features that no other instant messengers have touched on before. And after having used it for only about 30 minutes I think I may have found myself a new messenger.

I definitely wasn't expecting to see this today, but it looks as though the WebKit team has pushed hard to get a public nightly build of the Safari browser out that gets a perfect score on the Acid3 test. This is hot on the heals of Opera's announcement yesterday that they currently have an internal build of their own browser that is successfully passing the test.

For those of you looking for a great desktop RSS feed reader I would put the free Feedreader 3.13 Beta at the top of my favorites. The new Beta that was just released yesterday adds a feature that I haven't seen in any other feed reader before: adding or editing articles. It sounds crazy, but I could see how this would be incredibly useful.

Fedora 9 is stepping forward with their first Beta, and it looks like it has quite a few quality enhancements that both GNOME and KDE users alike will appreciate. Being a KDE fan myself I'm extremely happy to see that the Fedora team has taken the time to integrate the new KDE 4.0 into the operating system.

Meebo has become an extremely popular online instant messenger, and with a status as prestigious as theirs comes clones. With Meebo you can communicate with friends and family from anywhere you have an Internet connection and a browser. And if you want to start your own similar service go checkout the open source version called Soashable (project page).

Earlier this year we wrote about two different solutions that could be used to backup your Firefox profile, but it's possible that you aren't looking to back up. One of the areas that is extremely valuable to most Firefox users is the extensions, and some of them really take awhile to get configured just the way you like them.

There is a lot of talking going around the Internet about Firefox 3 Beta being ready for mass usage. It's because of an article by Reuters where the creators of Firefox supposedly told them that the Firefox 3 Beta is ready for everyone to use after months of being in development.

You may have noticed in the Daily Downloads today that I mentioned an application called ESET SysInspector that is currently in the Beta stage. From what I gather it's not an incredibly new application (released late last year), but this was the first that I had heard about it.

One of my favorite Firefox extensions, Locationbar², has finally been updated to work with the recently released Firefox 3 Beta 4. It can be used to make the domain that you're currently viewing stand out more than the rest of the URL, which makes users less susceptible to phishing attacks.

We've always been a huge fan of the Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software that powers our forum, and I've recommended it to a lot of other people. This free forum software is about to get even better as they just made the first public version of SMF 2.0 Beta available, and after 18-months in the making it looks pretty darn nice.

One of our faithful readers, Alex, noticed our underlying plea for an invite to the Dropbox service that we wrote about earlier today. While Dropbox has no formal way to invite a friend they do let you share a folder with others, and if they don't have an account it will let them create one on-the-spot. So Alex shared a folder with us, and we were able to get an account!

Stardock has started to deliver the DeskScapes 2.0 Preview yesterday to anyone that wants to give it a whirl. Previously DeskScapes was a way for Vista Ultimate users to extend the functionality of Dreamscene, but now it works on any version of Vista without needing Dreamscene. It's a great way to have an animated desktop background on your Vista machine, oh, and did I say that it's free?

With the release of Firefox 3 Beta 4 the other day it is good to see how many extension developers have been providing updates to prepare the launch of the Firefox 3 browser. The extensions that need the most love and care are those that deal with bookmarks, and that's because the backend of the bookmarking system in Firefox 3 has been significantly changed.

Mozilla started creating an application last year called WebRunner that would allow you to run certain websites in a standalone version of Firefox. Eventually WebRunner was renamed to Prism, and thus was born a great tool. Prism 0.9 is the latest release, and it is really starting to evolve into a handy little application.