Sharemixer www.sharemixer.com is a Youtube clone (video sharing solution) developed in Zagreb, Croatia by a company having over ten years of web development expertise and currently moving to media market.

It has a ton of features too long to be listed here so you can look on their website here.

Sharemixer license cost $199 with one year support, $299 with two years support, $499 with lifetime support and there is special $100 offer for Clipshare owners to migrate to Sharemixer. The license can be also purchased as subscription service for $39 per month.

Their additional services pricelist is long so seems that this company would like to make more money selling services rather than from their software licensing.

Installation and Setup
To use Sharemixer, the hosting service should have Linux, BSD or Apache server with MySql 4.1 running, PHP 4.4.3 and up (including PHP 5) and access to CGI-BIN directory. It should also have FFMpeg with Lame, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder-MPlayer, Rubby on Rails and flvtool2 installed (this extra server-side software is required, to inject meta-data to the converted videos – key-frames, tags, title, etc. FLVTool2 is used for that and it depends on Ruby On Rails to work.). To checkout details of the server requirements please look here.

The MySQL database must be created manually from provided script and the configuration parameters should be configured manually in several files, including assigning proper directory rights so some technical knowledge will be needed to install it.

To migrate from Clipshare you should run a different database script, configure the files and delete some older directories.

Sharemixer user forums are providing exact step to step instructions for the installation and there is also possibility to ask their technical support help.

Their help will be very useful, as I encountered several problems with their installation. The first problem was with license which they had created to run only in particular server and was not transferrable. So, they had created their own testing environment for it where their technical personnel got the product work.

From the Sharemixer control panel, beside site parameters, the administrator can setup which features will be switched on and off. Thos includes showing random video on main page, now playing in main page, video of the day, featured videos, random videos, top video categories and channels, promoted videos, cloud tags, site stats, etc also user rights settings, like who can upload the video, who can view the video, e-mail activation, complete profile registration, etc.

They had even automatic nudity control in Avatar pictures implemented which should be set off, when you want to run an adult site.

Sharemixer seems to support even Arabic language which was unique in the marketplace and is now available in French.

Sharemixer allows unlimited level of paid packages. Those are limited by bandwidth, disk space and optional number of videos for certain subscription period like Year, Month. It integrates only with PayPal payment processor.

Videos can be collected to the user channels and those channels can be featured by administrator. Channels can be public, private or protected.

Video categories can have unlimited depth of subcategories, which was unique but not very useful feature for small portals and can have photo descriptions.

The polls module allows to setup polls appearing in lower right corner of the main screen. Polls can be setup to be active for certain period and only one active poll was allowed.

There was also a limit to setup, how many times one user can rate the video and vote the poll. This could be set as once or unlimited.

The ad management module allows setup Banner (text) ads and Video ads. Banner ads can be setup currently in eight different places in the screen and you need to enter banner ad code, rather than uploading an image.

Video ads can be setup to each category, channel and to each separate videos. Those will play at the begging of the clip.

The Users module will allow seeing their country, last login, package, number of videos, and their status, edit their profile, delete a user and send email to users. Administrators are able to search users by their ID and username.

The video management module will sort videos by public and private, manages feature requests and inappropriate video reports. Administrators are able to delete (not ban) inappropriate videos and either delete requests or change video settings.

Usability
The main page contains your stats, inbox, Now Playing video, last watched, last added, top watched, top rated, top favourites and top discussed videos, Featured Videos, Editors Choice, What’s new, recently used tags, Top video channels and categories and last users online. It was very clean and nice design.

The signup procedure is asking your e-mail address, proposed username and password and image verification. There are no check boxes to check, only the text telling “Upon registration I certify that I’m over 18 years old and agree with terms of service”.

Besides the profile basics info, you can talk more about your school, Interests and Hobbies, Favourite movies, favourite music, and favourite books and write more about yourself using Rich Text editor.

When you are familiar with HTML and CSS you could have possibility to give your page unique look and feel.

Besides uploading your own video, users are able to embedded videos from other video sites such as Youtube. Somehow it didn’t want to accept my Youtube video code but embedding video from OsTube went well. So you can store your videos in different sites to show those in Sharemixer based sites.

After upload users are able also to add additional information to the video, like date, location and country recorded and each video will get their own permalink.

Each video page shows statistics, users are able to rate and comment the video, share it to friends or copy the permalink, bookmark it to blink, del.icio.us, digg, furl, google, simpy, spurl and y!Myweb; feature the video, report abuse, post comments and add to favourites. The page shows related videos and member other videos.

All videos can be listed by Most Recent, Most Viewed, Most Commented, Top Favourites, Top Rated, Recently Featured and adult category from Video page. Those can be viewed as basic or detail view with the description, stats and the screenshots of the video.

The categories section allows sorting by same criteria’s for each category, but had also the category most active user’s box and tag cloud, which was missing in Watch main screen.

Members are able to create their own channels with unique URL. Channels can be public, protected which request the channel owner approval to join and private. Channel can belong to multiple categories. Channel is like a group, which allows forum postings and video uploads. You can select videos from your own uploads to your channel.

The community section allows search from member list which can be sorted by name, date joined, last login, gender, most active and most popular. The list can be limited for members currently online and members with pictures only.

From the community section you can jump to member profiles, showing statistics and last uploaded video, with the options to subscribe user videos, rate user, add to friends and send a private message. User can also see what videos this member has been subscribed, what channels the member is watching, who else are tracking the member videos, the favourite list, friend list, subscriptions and watched videos.

The user interface was little bit funny as some of those functions where tabbed from member profile, some of those where in upper menu options.

The friends section allows seeing your friend list, their videos and favourites. It also allows sending Rich Text email invitations to your friends which were duplicated from the menu option Share.

The main search box will execute keyword search from videos, users and channels by your choice.

Conclusion
Sharemixer is alternative to Clipshare and even sometimes I found the user interface duplicated and confusing, it was nice and clean design. I first evaluated this product around a month ago and lot of promised features (like polls, banner ads, subscription services, etc) where not then implemented in the administration panel.

This company has done lot of work within a month to provide working and leading video hosting platform and have succeeded to convince me at least. Their main market strength is to provide different language versions, which is unique in the marketplace. French and Arabic is currently available, so I would expect Spanish, Polish, Slovak, Italian, etc to be followed soon.

And to see for yourself Sharemixer in action go and check their demo.
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

osTube www.ostube.de is a social networking media platform allowing the sharing of music, video, pictures and documents. It has been developed by AUVICA GmbH in Munich, Germany. Their other product lines are MyRadio, Reisepanne, and VIMP.

osTube is available by three product editions: Community, Professional and Enterprise. Community edition is free but you can’t run any ads and social networking communities with it. The Professional edition allows banner and video (priced differently) ads as Enterprise edition is a not priced solution for commercial projects which can include Live Streaming, Mobile payments, etc.

Professional edition costs $149 to manage Google AdSense ads with some extra templates and you should spend $299 when you want to run video ads and have more templates included.

Installation and configuration.
AUVICA promised us a test environment and without their help, I would not have been able to get the product running at all. The upload and distribution of files went quickly but afterwards I ended up with list of Apache Linux settings errors that I was unable to change without a console access besides modifying directory rights using ftp. Even I downloaded the English version of the software, the installation and error messages where in German. So seems that not all installation messages where yet translated. I also encountered several spelling mistakes in English language version further.

When finally I was able to complete installation routines, I ended up “Insufficient Rights” SQL error when trying to access the administration module. Finally when they had fixed it I was able to use the administration module when logged in as “admin”.

When logged to the administration module, the first page shows all developers news and you re able to login to developers forum to seek help.

The users section allows to manage users, including a modification of their profile, lock users, give users administration or moderation rights, modify groups and configure the minimum length parameters for passwords, usernames, group names, etc. You can get a list of those users who have missing address data or e-mail address not verified.

From the module configuration settings, besides site parameters the administrator can setup the language (English, German) which sections (video, audio, pictures, documents) are in use, is member address required, is it visible, is birthday data visible, maximum upload size, notifications when media item has been reported, will the uploaded media and new users to be approved by administrator. There is also possibility to setup site metags, paths and video conversion settings.

The Layout section allows changing the templates, uploading site logo and changing portal objects colours. The administrator is able upload watermark supporting only PNG format.

The modules section allows configuring which kind of modules will appear in first page, including the news module where the administrator can enter a separate message for each section.

Banner management section in Professional edition allows to setup banner campaigns as “superbanner” (horizontal banner over the screen which can be shown in top, below the header or in bottom), “skyscraper” (vertical banner in the right side of the screen) or Extended. Using extended setup, I was able to setup Google Adsense which can be shown in all mentioned sections. The campaign options management allows defining the priority of banner ranging 1-100 scale, duration and which pages this banner will be shown. There where no possibility to setup certain amount of views or clicks. The banner statistics gives campaign views and clicks information including click thru ratio.

Site statistics shows top users, top media, top videos, top music, top pictures and top documents.

As the administrator I was able to design elements in home and community page, including setup the element width by dragging and dropping them. The screen seems to be divided to four columns. However those boxes somehow didn’t want to stay in the place where I wanted them to be.

Usability
The home page has sections Featured Video, Las added and Video Top 3, New Users with Picture, Latest messages, Chat, Top rated, Icon Description and Tag Cloud. The chat box button says “Send Mail”.

After the confirmation, new member is able to edit profile, upload media, edit friend list, manage groups, empty history or delete profile.

Besides the basic information such as birth date, gender, address, sex, relationship status, a member can upload the avatar picture, give the general about me description and talk more about the occupation, school, favourite movies, favourite music and favourite books.

Member can setup also the e-mail notifications for new messages and comments.

When uploading the avatar my picture where cut from the bottom and changing my profile background and text colours changed those only for my profile part of the page, but not guestbook, recent activities and on actions box.

From the profile page user can relate the guestbook entries with person media but there where no integration between comments on media and guestbook entries.

Members can upload Videos, MP3 files, Pictures and Documents. Each media can be tagged and categorised having multiple categories for each media.

The media can be private or public. Document types I tested were PDF, MS-Word and MS-Excel. Those where opening as Windows objects allowing document modifications but I wasn’t able to save them back to server.

After the media file upload there is possibility to go directly to media page or upload another media. Somehow the system didn’t make a screenshot picture from my FLA test videos.

From media page the owner can make it private or delete it. Everyone can rate it, comment it, report abuse and bookmark it either to your bookmark list or to oneview.de, iq.lycos.de, del.icio.us, digg, mister-wong.de, yigg.de, blibklist.com and webnews.de.

There is a possibility to copy the embedded link for each media type.

The media page shows category playlist, statistics, related tags, WebPages referring to this media, page visitors and related media with same tags.

Users can browse the media by type and categories, sort them by most recent, by rating and by views.

The search box allows also keyword search from members, groups and blogs.

Groups must be setup also by categories and can be private or public. The group creator can setup the media approval and new media notifications to the group. Each group will be given their specific URL address.

Besides your group and media, site member can write a blog. The blog entries were not showing up in profile page but users are able to attach media files with blog entries and use simple formatting (Bold, Italic, Underline, Link and Link to Image) within the entry text.

Same Rich Text options where also available when creating blog comments, including the possibility to include additional media files for comments.

Each blog entry must be accepted before it appears in the blog list.

The blog page shows all blog entries which can be limited to 10/25/50 in page and latest messages. Blog entries can be sorted by date or latest comments.

Community page shows Top rated users, new users, most active users, new guestbook entries and latest comments. User is able to list new members, most active users, top rated users and switch to groups.

The group messaging allows only short one line topic header which can be related to your media file and can be commented. The commenting button says “Send Mail”.

Conclusion
osTube is commercial alternative to phpMotion (both being social networking media platforms with common characteristics). I found their staff quickly reacting to problems even the product I tested was official release and not beta as phpMotion. So instead asking license fee for commercial use of their software maybe this company should consider support and hosting services. The site setup features where more powerful, compared to phpMotion and it can be seen everywhere that this product is in active development. Of course they should hire an English speaking person to get a German product properly translated to the English speaking markets.

The software being a media portal platform, I didn’t see any need for the document sharing in a way they have implemented it.

Despite the problems I actually liked the software and the fact how committed their creators are to the product, I would consider it as a good commercial alternative (and the free edition too).
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

PHPMotion is a truly free open source media social networking platform supporting video and audio social networking.
It’s downloadable from www.phpmotion.com website after you had registered to the software support forum.

Latest stable version was 1.2 but I tested and evaluated version 2 beta which worked without any crashes and with only small inconveniences.

The product installation was quick however you must have lot of open source modules pre-installed to your server, including LAME MP encoder, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder and MPlayer, FFMpeg-PHP, GD Library 2, etc. which was taking a week of my time to get those running afterwards to find out that my service provider does not support background processes and MP3, MPEG files download.

So you should consider the hosting service where those modules are already installed. PhpMotion website lists four of hosting ready service providers, where the starting price $2.99 was per month.

The administration panel allows setup the site basics and paths for ffmpeg, flvtool and mencoder, maximum sizes and parameters for conversion, auto approval, commenting options and several limits.

General system messages where customizable so I assume that the system can be setup to use any language.

It also shows general statistics, such as how many videos have in the system separated by private and public and how many videos were played today many plays. It also shows member statistics, such as how many joined today, waiting approval and how many suspended members; group and video comment statistics.

I was lacking the true site statistics about number of visitors and bandwidth usage per day, week, and month.

The member’s panel allows approving, suspending and deleting members.

Administrators are able to manage advertisements in top, bottom, left, right and in home page which all should be entered as HTML code.

The module also manages media approval, media categories and comments.

There was a possibility to send HTML or text newsletters to all site members.

The system shows biggest groups and you are able to set groups as featured and videos as featured with both have also separate management option.

Featured audio was not yet implemented.

Pictures can be set to be approved and the approval process will be done by the site administrator.

Videos and comments can be also flagged.

I found also that there was additional look for the site already available called Zer0One Darkbase which I installed to my service. However this was not working with version 2, so hopefully more web designer will be interested to develop their own themes to newest version.

Site outlook can be customized easily by modifying the CSS files and HTML templates.

Usability

The main page shows most recent and most popular videos.

After the login you will be redirected to the page where selections are: Continue to watch video now, Listen my audio now, Go to my favourites, Complete/Update my profile, Upload/manage my videos now, Upload/manage my audio now, My friends and Privacy notification settings.

Profile features where not customizable by the administration module so user is limited to picture, basic information like gender and birth date, location information and boxes for “More about me”, “Interest and hobbies”, “Favorite movie”, “My type of music”, “More about my high school”, “College/University”, “Work Place” and personal website/blog.

Those information boxes were not customizable using the administrations module, which could have given site owners more customization possibilities to separate target groups.

When uploading new video, besides the title, tags, category and description, there was a possibility to specify the location recorded and does this video allow comments, embedding and will it be a private or public video.

After the upload video goes to be processed in background instead immediate play so you should wait until this process completes.

As video upload process started from description screen, audio upload starts from uploading the file first and then you are able to enter (or modify) the artist, track, description and tags; play length, year published, Album and location recorded. As for the videos, musicians are able to specify the comments, embedding and public options also to your audio files.

After the upload all audio files will be processed again which was odd as there should be not much converting to be done for MP3 files.

The videos section lists featured, most viewed, most recent and most discussed videos. User can bookmark the video to Blink, Digg, Furl, Deli and Google, report abuse, Add to your favorites, Download video, Add to your playlist, Create new Playlist and Share with friends.

Creating a new playlist had a bug because the dialog didn’t close even the playlist was successfully created.

Add to playlist worked fine without any pop up window, the selection of playlists opened in the main screen same way as Share with Friends, where the friend email address should be entered.

Allow comments and Allow embedding parameters in video uploading seems to be not working as I tested the beta version, so everything where open even I restricted so.

When creating a new comment, instead of showing my comment immediately I just got a message that my comment was successfully created and was showing when I next time visited the page.

Each video page lists a member other videos somehow I wasn’t able to get anything listed in Related videos box.

Rating a video was done by clicking appropriate star in rating scale and took me little bit to figure out.

Audio page can be sorted also by Featured, Most played, most recent and most discussed. You can filter your search result using tags, which where classified as popular and more tags.

Audio files can be also bookmarked in Blink, Digg, Furl, Deli and Google, you can report abuse, add to favorites and download audio file.

There wasn’t any Playlist options yet implemented to Audio files but I was able to add comments. Commenting and embedded code options used when uploading the audio file wasn’t working yet, also related audio box was always empty. Member other audio was showing properly.

The Categories tab was listing videos by category, having also options to sort them by featured, and most viewed, most recent and most discussed.

Somehow the upper menu in this page where changing from my media options to group options as when selection Groups tab it was again media options.

Hopefully this was a bug…

The group’s page starts with group listing which can be sorted by Featured, Created today and all. Members have also the possibility to create a new group.

When creating a group you have option to set group as private or public and each group will have their own URL.

The group members should be able to upload videos to the group however I wasn’t able yet to upload group video, neither to create a group comment.

Private groups where not listed in the group search page.

There is a possibility to jump group member profiles from the group page however member list was implemented as Combo Box, which could be not suitable for groups having huge amount of members and report this group as abuse to the site administrator.

From People tab I was able to search member profiles by First name, Surname, username and country.

From upload tab I was able to upload only new videos at the moment, but not yet audio files.

Conclusion
PHPMotion was well developed media networking platforms and even in beta, worked well. The audio possibilities besides video will allow it to be truly a media portal rather than an Youtube clone (like Clipshare).

And the main issue is that it’s free, however you should consider suitable hosting provider and website designer for your site.

From the feedback in their forum, the most issues have been media type and download configuration issues rather than bugs. Sure, there are those small issues to fix before they can launch their product.

I didn’t miss any functionality and even was considering it as a platform to launch music and video download portal for mobile phones. Even this site does not work as XHTML-MP compatible WAP pages, adding a web trigger for WAP push message should work on this platform. However, those videos must be converted to mobile 3GP format in this case and I wasn’t aware any freeware UNIX modules to do so yet.
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

ClipShare www.clip-share.com is online community building software for sharing videos similar to YouTube. It runs on Linux and Apache Web server, demands PHP version 4.3 or higher and MySql 4+. It also needs several additional applications like GD Libary 2+, Mplayer and Mencoder, Flv2tools, Libogg and Libvorbis and LAME MP3 encoder to be installed which can be downloaded from other sites free of charge.

The installation should take some hours as besides unpacking the software modules you should create your MySql database and run script manually, parameters in several files and change directory rights. After that you should be able to access Admin module to setup the site video channels, the site subscription and advertising parameters (integrated support for Google Adsense and Yahoo Publishers Network).

I assume that when starting to install all requested modules, the process could take several days. However, the company can provide you the installation service or you can host your site in their server starting $2 per month. For the quote and ordering the installation service you should submit them a ticket having root access server administration username and password ready. So this product is not suitable to install for shared hosting services where you are unable to get access to the system root so maybe their hosting could be better solution to anyone considering their product.

Within a week I didn’t have any answer to my open ticket so I assume that their technical and marketing support wasn’t much online (live support was showing always Offline) however they have Client Area so maybe answers can be found from there. They have published FAQ section of installation problems and they are running online forum. Based on Hot Scripts portal feedbacks their technical support problems seems to be come across recently (2008) with probable expansion as previous comments has been always positive.
Their End User agreement says that ClipShare Product is registered trademark of ScriptXperts however either the EUL or their website didn’t had any company information and their liability maximum is $5.

Usability

Clip Share registration was extremely simple one page questionnaire, where I was able even to upload my avatar. You can edit your profile any time but it’s not much customizable from the administration side. From your profile you can click to My Videos, My Favorites, and My Playlist and to My Groups.
You can search videos by Tags, view most recent, most viewed, most discussed, most favorites, top rated, recently featured and random.
In each video page you have possibilities to Rate it, Flag it, Bookmark it to favorites, Comment it and even download it. Video page shows simple stats how many times it has been played, the length of the video and number of comments. You can bookmark the page to your social bookmarking sites supporting Spurl, Digg, Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Furl, Yahoo MyWeb, Simply and Google.

Page shows other videos of same author and related videos and tags, including the download and embedded code to link it with your website or blog.
You can upload your videos with title and description texts, video tags and category is essential. After upload you can submit additional information, like date and location recorded and the video was held in the conversion queue even I used default Adobe Flash format for my upload.
When creating a group you should specify this group unique URL and which categories this group belong. Even I did not had access to the Admin module during my evaluation; I hope that categorized can be setup from there.

There is a possibility to setup following Group moderation parameters: Anyone can Join / Join by founder approval / Join only by founder invitation; Group Videos are posted immediately / Group Videos should have founder approval / Only founder can upload videos; Forum postings are visible immediately / Founder should approve posting / Only founder can create new topic; Automatically create group icon from last uploaded video / Founder should choose the group icon.
There can be only one founder-moderator so this product is not suitable for Groups having huge amount of members with several moderators.
From community tab you can just search members and you can filter your result members “with avatar picture” only. When in member profile you can send a friend request, send a message or subscribe his/her videos.

When moving to friends section, user is able to send email invitations to your friends by manually submitting their email addresses separated with comma. At least this software doesn’t upload your full address book which I have been seen a problem to get SPAM messages.
From friends section you are able to access friend videos and their favourite videos. The system includes also simple messaging functionality and the bottom of the page always shows Latest Videos, Random Channels and Recent Tags. I hope this can be setup from administration module however all the sites I visited running on their platform was bottom of the page showing same way. Maybe it needs some programming skills to modify the template files.
Their website claims that besides running ads you are able to setup membership plans integrated with PayPal shopping cart to earn money.

Conclusions
Compared to YouTube it was much simple version lacking contests, blogs, etc. I didn’t found any bugs using the software so at least it was working product however without purchasing their license you have no idea what kind of source code quality they provide. I would at least hope to see more technical description of the product architecture.

Clip Share comes with two versions – Pro and Lite costing $199 / $99. Customer can order several services, like Script Installation Service, Server Setup Service, One year free updates or lifetime free updates priced from $25 to $99. Seems to me that newest version has been declared as Pro version as it contains Avatars, Cloud Tag, Social Bookmarking, Advanced Flash Player, Signup Image Verification, Video Approval, Statistics, RSS feeds, Background Video Compression and Video Compression Settings.

If your need is to run or earn money from Video Social Networking and or do not like Google policies the ClipShare does its job and their one tier affiliate program offering to share 20% of revenues when becoming their reseller. Their low cost hosting offer will be an alternative to YouTube video hosting.
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.