Broadband Advisor

This week saw the battle of the Web 2.0 conferences, with 70 entrepreneurs presenting their ideas at Demo Fall 2008 in San Diego and 50 more making their pitch at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Some of the ideas are little more than a glimmer in a coder's eye, but others are already doing business, are in private beta, or are soon to launch. Here's a selection of our favourites.

You know the old cliche, a picture is worth a thousand words? Turns out that pictures have been deeply undervalued: A single photo can cost you your reputation, your job, even your freedom -- if you post it online.

Google's Chrome is a stripped-down, no-nonsense browser. Unlike Firefox, there isn't an array of add-ons available to change its behavior. So at first glance, you might think there's not a lot you can do to hack Chrome or bend it to your will.

Google's just-released Chrome takes the same approach to browser design that Google takes to its home page -- stripped-down, fast and functional, with very few bells and whistles.

The US Air Force is using Web 2.0 technologies to better support its missions despite wariness about security, a civilian technology official of the service said last week.

Yahoo's Flickr unit reported yesterday that the latest update to the photo sharing Web site went live with 9 changes made by three of its developers. The "deployment" was the 36th new release in a week where 627 changes were made by 21 developers.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

Given the short history of mashups in the enterprise, IT departments likely don't entirely understand the technology's role in the business. Organizations can fall victim to mashup mistakes given the markedly different approach necessary to deploy and maintain them across the organization.

Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all.

With the impending retirement of Bill Gates from Microsoft comes an obvious question: How will history view him? As a founder of the world's most influential software vendor and one of the biggest creators of wealth ever? Or as a monopolist and digital robber baron?

Canada may have been the first industrialized country to reject funding a drug that treats the severest form of the most common type of vision loss in the developed world, were it not for a quickly-assembled Web campaign from the Canadian Institute for the Blind (CNIB).