As we mentioned in our article earlier this summer, the lines are blurring between file sending and sync services and cloud drives. The latest entrant into this field is ZipSend, from the folks that make the popular WinZip file compression utility. It is somewhat disappointing on several reasons, but gives us an excuse to recap the major players in the marketplace.

If you are looking for a quick and dirty way to get feedback to product plans or marketing campaigns, check out the latest additions to Napkin Labs' audience response service. These make it easier to collect information from a variety of sources and methods, and all for a very reasonable monthly price.

We have written earlier about ways to dress up your PowerPoints
with Zurb's Reel and Arctic Fox. There are several other players getting into the game with presentation apps and add-ons that go beyond just making your slides more attractive. New this week are tools from Zoho.com, and Trivantis' Snap by Lectora.

One of the more appreciated announcements to come out of last week's Microsoft Build 2011 conference was that Hyper-V, the company's hypervisor and virtual machine manager for high-end servers, would be coming to the Windows 8 client. (While we heard the words "every Windows 8 client," we'll reserve judgment on whether it gets included in the lower-end SKUs.)

The story was covered as "Virtualization Comes to Windows Client." Well, anyone who uses Windows 7 on a regular basis knows it was already there, at least in some form: Microsoft had already integrated its Virtual PC system into Hyper-V since its earliest betas. But Virtual PC is not Hyper-V, for reasons any administrator can tell you: The virtual machine (VM) configuration files in Hyper-V are far more detailed than those of the consumer-grade Virtual PC (WVPC).

If you are a teacher or speaker and have your sessions videotaped, until now it wasn't easy or inexpensive to produce a complete record of your talks. As someone who speaks frequently, I have been through the process of hiring a professional editing crew to mix the live video of my events and combine that with the materials that I use for my presentations.

We last wrote about secure file email and exchange products in May and next week there is a new entrant to the field with the launch of the RPost Cloud service. Like Voltage and PGP Universal, it sets up inside your existing Outlook or other email program the ability to send registered and encrypted emails to others who may not have any such security software installed.

The release of a new tool from DigitalPersona shows that the evolution of endpoint protection and management software is evolving from traditional client/server to hybrid approaches that make use of a cloud-based control and management console program.

A blue-ribbon US government panel co-chaired by Marc Benioff and Michael Capellas released their report today, a summary of which can be found here.

The Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2), a collection of 71 industry executives, has been meeting over the past several months and has come out with its recommendations on ways to move towards cloud computing.

If all you want is a bunch of people to see your latest video, go ahead and post it on YouTube. If you want a lot more people to see that video or you want to embed it in your Web site or use it to bring mega-traffic to your site, you need to look at other hosting services, not just YouTube. And if you use multiple video hosting sites, you'll want a super-fast, simple way to upload your video to multiple sites. No problem. We'll show you how to do that, too.

A new ebook to help users of Rackspace setup and manage their cloud-based servers is out this week. Called Managing Rackspace Cloud Servers and written by Jacek Artymiak, it is a very practical and useful guide, and seems to be unique.