First there was FeedRinse. Some complained that they were stingy on the free feed filters. ZapTXT says true dat and offers the same service for nada. They screen your feeds for certain criteria and zing you an SMS, an e-mail or an IM. Great idea and they have a bookmarklet.
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Oops! Google accidentally deletes its blog
Google has admitted that it accidentally deleted its own official blog on Monday night. “We’ve determined the cause of tonight’s outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d’oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad,” Jason Goldman, Blogger Product Manager, wrote in a posting on the Google Blog. Apparently, the Google Blog was unavailable for a short time on Monday.
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Gates: five ways we’re service orienting
Bill Gates is pouring on the SOA sauce. Service-oriented applications will underpin Microsoft’s recently announced “Dynamics” product vision, which will start emerging over the next year. That’s the word from Chairman Gates in his keynote at Microsoft’s Convergence user conference in Dallas, as reported in Computer Business Review Online.
Microsoft is rallying the troops around its latest marketing theme of “People-Ready Business,” which emphasizes role-based interfaces to enterprise applications.
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Will virtual humans replace machines?
How many times have you been rebuffed by a machine, be it a vending machine swallowing your cash but keeping its soda, or a ticket machine refusing to give you a subway ticket in a foreign country? It happened to me, and I’m sure it happened to you too, and it’s very irritating. This is why German researchers are developing the concept of virtual humans to replace these annoying machines. These virtual humans, which will interact with you through speech and gestures could be used as ticket sellers, but also as teachers for students taking e-learning courses.
Several research institutions are working on this concept including the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD).
“The idea behind the virtual character is to design the human-computer interface as naturally as possible”, explains Christian Knöpfle, head of Virtual Reality at the IGD.
Open source community needs a haircut and to dress for success
Former Massachusetts Chief Information Officer Peter Quinn, who was deeply involved of the OpenDocument vs. Microsoft format debate, has some advice for the open source community. If you want to get traction in commercial environments, lose the sandals and ponytails, Quinn said.
“Open source has an unprofessional appearance, and the community needs to be more business-savvy in order to start to make inroads in areas traditionally dominated by commercial software vendors. (Having) a face on a project or agenda makes it attractive for politicians (to consider open source),” Quinn said speaking at LinuxWorld Australia. The “sandal and ponytail set,” Quinn said, contribute to the slow uptake of Linux in government and business, according to the story by ZDNet Australia reporters Matthew Overington and Steven Deare.
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Microsoft mixes software for business ‘mashups’
Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the line continues to blur between Office-like tools and programs that house businesses’ more formalized, or structured, data.
“Applications are changing in their architecture,” Gates said, speaking at the Convergence 2006 trade show here.
Gates said that much of the work in Microsoft’s Business Solutions unit consists of helping workers more easily traverse the boundary with other software, as well as connect to Internet-based data. “We’re taking the best elements of the online world, where we are seeing mashups,” he said. Mashups are hybrid software that combine content from more than source, such as real-time traffic reports and a map, and present them in a Web site.
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Google experiments with map ads
Google is adding graphical advertisements to maps on its local search site, foreshadowing the use of its pop-up balloons for various types of information and activities, an analyst said Monday.
Greg Sterling, managing editor at The Kelsey Groupsaid Google representatives told him several weeks ago that the company plans to let businesses add advertisements and logos to the mapping balloons that appear on Google Local.
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Big day for RSS on Windows
Talk about a one-two punch. NewsGator launched new versions of both their Outlook add-in, now called NewsGator Inbox, and FeedDemon, a desktop RSS client. The company has also completely redesigned their pricing to address customer concerns about the subscription model they adopted in the previous release. NewsGator founder Greg Reinacker, announcing the new releases on his blog yesterday wrote:
“And finally, as of these releases we’ve made good on our promise to abolish the subscription model as you used to know it. Now, you can buy FeedDemon or NewsGator Inbox (and soon NetNewsWire) for $29.95, and you’ll get a free year subscription which includes value-added services such as synchronization (and lots more to come). At the end of that year, you can choose to renew your subscription if you wish for $19.95. But if you choose not to renew, your software will continue to work forever – just without the online-specific features.”
45% of Internet users have registered at news sites
A frequent occurrence at an online news site is for a user to be asked to register at the site, which usually involves providing some demographic information and often requires the user to set up a password to use the site.
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Google’s market lead widens
Google is increasing its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft in the U.S. Web search market while a rebranded Ask.com is inching up, according to the latest statistics from ComScore Networks.
Google’s domestic market share rose to 42.3 percent in February, up from 36.3 percent a year earlier, ComScore said.
Yahoo’s search market share in the United States fell to 27.6 percent from 31.1 percent a year ago, while Microsoft’s MSN fell to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent and Time Warner’s America Online fell to 8 percent from 8.9 percent.
IAC Search & Media’s Ask.com, which unveiled a new brand and interface last month, rose to 6 percent from 5.3 percent.
Analysts predicted continued gains for Google and Ask.
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