pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/toucan.png" width="760" height="450" style="display:block;float:none;" / Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets. Similar to SyncBackSE but smaller and portable, Toucan is a nice option for making sure you've got everything on your thumb drive. Toucan is a free download for Windows only./p div class="related"a href="http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/toucan/"Toucan/a [PortableApps.com]/div br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=fbb27650f1f10c3460c19d241ef4ed9ep=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=fbb27650f1f10c3460c19d241ef4ed9ep=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=fbb27650f1f10c3460c19d241ef4ed9e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=VtyMx6nT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=pjFc8OSu"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=JSeY5ix3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=JSeY5ix3" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=Mk1HqoEu"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=Mk1HqoEu" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/SmGFk29p-QY" height="1" width="1"/

Live Nation and Blockbuster announced a three-year contract that will put the promoter's large-scale ticketing system exclusively in 500 or so brick-and-mortar Blockbuster locations.

As part of the deal, blocks of tickets to shows ticketed by Live Nation will be available only at Blockbuster locations for the first four hours that they're on sale. The plan will go into effect after Live Nation's Ticketmaster contract expires at the end of the year, as part of the rollout of its own ticketing system.

"Our research definitively shows that the vast majority of music fans who prefer to buy their concert tickets at a retail location find Blockbuster to be the most convenient choice," stated Nathan Hubbard, head of ticketing for Live Nation. "Blockbuster's huge national footprint provides Live Nation with a powerful marketing partner to help drive incremental ticket sales to our events and an incredible opportunity to develop other product lines centered around music for Blockbuster customers."

Live Nation has record deals with Jay-Z, Madonna, Nickelback  and Shakira and a merchandise deal with U2. For its part, Blockbuster has been shutting down locations across the nation for the past year or so while doubling down on its video-on-demand strategy, and recently reported a quarterly loss of $20.6 million, so it has ample reason to sign a deal that would bring more people to its remaining locations.

"Not only will this agreement drive hundreds of thousands of customers to our stores, it represents another step in the transformation of Blockbuster into a brand that offers the most convenient access to entertainment," stated Blockbuster chairman and CEO Jim Keyes."We want customers to know that whatever their entertainment needs -- from DVDs and games, to accessing tickets to some of the biggest concert events -- they'll find those needs answered at Blockbuster."

We've asked Live Nation about what sort of convenience fees they plan to charge after the Ticketmaster contract expires, but so far haven't heard a definitive response. It's unclear whether the Blockbuster deal holds any implications for the sorts of additional fees show-goers might be expected to pay. But at the very least, the urge to snap up hot tickets should have many music fans trying to remember the location of the nearest Blockbuster.

If tickets are still available after that initial four hours, they'll continue to be sold at Blockbuster, which "will be responsible for managing and operating all aspects of the ticket transactional experience." In addition to early ticketing, the deal involves Blockbuster-only access to unspecified exclusive "concert products and promotions."

See Also:

• The Rolling Stones Deny Rumored Live Nation Album Deal
• Can Blu-ray Save Blockbuster?
• Live Nation Exits Car Racing to Double Down on Music

Photo: Bobasonic

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"Zoho, maker of an on-demand suite of business and productivity applications, announced on Tuesday CloudSQL, a new service that lets developers use the ubiquitous SQL to connect Zoho data with other cloud-based or on-premises applications./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"SQL is a quot;pretty oldquot; language but is also quot;pretty awesome,quot; said Zoho#39;s director of marketing, Rodrigo Vaca, in a a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.zoho.com/general/cloudsql/"blog post/a Tuesday. quot;It is by far one of the easiest and most efficient ways to query and interact with structured data. That#39;s why it remains by far one of the most heavily used languages for business applications.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the a href="http://www.infoworld.com/testcenter/?source=fssr"InfoWorld Test Center/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/07/15FE-cloud-computing-reality_1.html"Cloud computing/a #160;has ushered in new methods of data retrieval and storage, leading to quot;improved, faster, and more responsive Web applications,quot; Vaca added. quot;But while there are some SQL-like approaches for cloud computing out there, they tend to be fairly limited and not as powerful as the full-blown SQL.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"CloudSQL supports a wide range of SQL variants, including ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and MySQL./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The service quot;serves as the bridge between the external application and the data stored inside Zoho. It receives the query in SQL, interprets it, delegates queries and aggregates results across the Zoho services,quot; Vaca wrote./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The company has also developed a JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) driver and is working on an ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver. This means developers quot;can just continue using SQL drivers and statements as they already regularly interact with their premises-based databases using JDBC or ODBC drivers,quot; Zoho said in a statement./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Initially, Zoho Reports, a BI and reporting service, will support CloudSQL. Other products, such as Zoho CRM, will support it down the road./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Zoho#39;s announcement represents an attempt to win over IT specialists who haven#39;t been quite ready to embrace the cloud-computing model, one observer suggested Tuesday./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;CloudSQL simply represents an incremental move that will enable Zoho to grow, extending a comfort blanket to nervous DBAs seeking reasons to resist relinquishing control over their data,quot; a target="_blank" href="http://cloudofdata.com/2008/12/zohos-cloudsql-another-step-toward-the-data-cloud/"wrote/a Paul Miller, a blogger who tracks trends in cloud computing and the semantic Web./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"For now, CloudSQL is available at no cost. Zoho, which is a division of the Pleasanton, California, company AdventNet, will monitor usage and decide whether it needs to begin charging for it, according to a representative./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"CloudSQL is somewhat unusual in that it lets users connect their Zoho apps and others in a free and broadly compatible manner, instead of forcing them to use a proprietary tool that carries a price tag, said Redmonk analyst Michael Cot#233;./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Access to data is the key problem for all these [cloud-based applications],quot; he said. quot;That#39;s where the lock-in is, it seems, in such offerings. Whoever controls access to the data can control pricing.quot;/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=59937bc81042088da29a9b236fcdc5c6p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=59937bc81042088da29a9b236fcdc5c6p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=59937bc81042088da29a9b236fcdc5c6 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3

Chances are your Thanksgiving holiday (or plain old half-week) was not spent obsessively refreshing your PlayStation 3's "System Update." Chances are your spirit did not diminish with each passing day that firmware v2.53 was not released. Chances are you forgot all about it.

We happily report that the latest incremental update to leave your PS3 looking a lot like it did before the latest incremental update has arrived. Only ... what's this? Full-screen Flash videos in the web browser! It is a new PlayStation experience. Truly.

Better late than never: PS3 firmware 2.53 is here originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

pFiled under: a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/ps3/" rel="tag"Sony PlayStation 3/a/pdiv align="center"a href="http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/12/01/ps3-firmware-v253-update/"img vspace="4" hspace="0" border="0" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/12/ps3.2.53.upgrade.jpg" alt="" //a/div Chances are your Thanksgiving holiday (or plain old half-week) was not spent obsessively refreshing your PlayStation 3's "System Update." Chances are your spirit did not diminish with each passing day that firmware v2.53 was emnot /emreleased. Chances are you forgot a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/26/ps3-firmware-2-53-supposedly-coming-today/"all about it/a.br /br /We happily report that the latest incremental update to leave your PS3 looking a lot like it did before the latest incremental update has arrived. Only ... emwhat's this?/em Full-screen Flash videos in the web browser! It emis/em a new PlayStation experience. Truly.p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/02/better-late-than-never-ps3-firmware-2-53/"Better late than never: PS3 firmware 2.53 is here/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.joystiq.com"Joystiq/a on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:29:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./pp style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"nbsp;/ppa href=http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/12/01/ps3-firmware-v253-update/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/02/better-late-than-never-ps3-firmware-2-53/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/forward/1388775/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/02/better-late-than-never-ps3-firmware-2-53/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/azahjL9R9srfuBCiilrEGLvLGdw/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/azahjL9R9srfuBCiilrEGLvLGdw/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=H9d90o8g"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=H9d90o8g" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=tZk0Ra8u"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=tZk0Ra8u" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/da5g-O4Kz-k" height="1" width="1"/