In this talk at UC Berkeley, Google's Sergey Brin confesses (at minute 1:27) that he thought Wikipedia couldn't work. Most people wouldn't contribute, he rightly assumed, and it would never reach critical mass. He was in good company. In the...

Er is weer een nieuwe Elliance infographic. Deze heeft de bijzondere titel gekregen van People Strea[...]

Vorig jaar introduceerden Robert Scoble en Darren Barefoot de Social Media Starfish, een visualisatie van het snel veranderende medialandschap voor socials tools, services en netwerken (zie ook: Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook). Vandaag liep ik toevallig aan tegen een update van de visualisatie door Brian Solis: The Conversation Prism.

While web-based applications promise gigabytes of storage, anywhere-access, easy backup, and no software requirements beyond your browser to use them, becoming dependent on webapps can leave you high and dry when those services go out. Whether or not you were one of the countless Gmail users unable to access your email yesterday, an individual Google user locked out of your account for no discernible reason, a MobileMe customer whose me isn't very mobile, or an Amazon S3 customer whose data's trapped on a big old inaccessible disk in the sky—you know that using online services comes with its risks.

Has the rash of recent outages by big name companies shaken your trust in the cloud, or is the convenience worth dealing with occasional downtime? Does a few hours without Gmail completely disrupt your workday or can you just switch gears and wait till it's up again? Tell us whether or not you trust the cloud with your important data, and what kinds of syncing and backup systems you've got in place to keep on rolling even when the sky falls in the comments.

3-D images? Peshaw. Those are so 2007. What humanity needs now is what MIT researchers hope to provide very soon: super realistic "passive 6-D reflectance field displays" that not only look great, but also respond to stimuli, like lighting conditions. And, not only will these uber images do all that and a bag of chips, they'll be able to change over time as lighting conditions change, with "no electronics or active control" from we mere humans. Oh, and the displays will respond the changes in viewpoint, meaning these visual wonders will have a creepy degree of interactivity to them too (read: legitimate holograms).

The 6-D project is headed by Ramesh Raskar, who together with his MIT colleagues created the display using nothing but a series of lenses and screens. The prototype is due out at this week's annual SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference, but here's a few teaser details to tide you over until the unveiling on August 11:

By using an array of tiny square lenses instead of the linear ones, [those inexpensive postcard 3-D images] can also be made to change as you change the viewing angle up or down - making a "4-D" image. This reveals different views with horizontal as well as vertical movement of the viewer. The new "lighting aware" [6-D] system adds additional layers of lenses and screens to add two more dimensions of change. The image that is seen is then not only based on the position of the viewer, but also on the direction of the illumination.

Now the good news is this device will be on display in a raw, low resolution form next week. The bad news? A working, high res model, with all its interactive, true hologram goodness, is some 10 years away. My Princess Leia rescue fantasies will have to wait another decade, it would seem. [MIT]

An Intel, Yahoo, and HP initiative will use large-scale research projects to test a new Internet-based computing infrastructure.

Microsoft has high expectations for Windows Mobile, but it may have to rethink its strategy.

As the hotel heiress announces her faux run for the White House, she takes a jokey jab at a McCain campaign ad that called Obama a lightweight. Hilton's clip is a hit for Funny or Die.

Sinds deze week is het voor gebruikers op de GoudenGids.nl mogelijk om bedrijven en diensten die in de gids te vinden zijn te raten en te reviewen. Dat kan met een tot vijf sterren. Hiermee wordt, zo vermeldt het persbericht ‘GoudenGids.nl het centrale platform met consumentenervaringen en -waarderingen van bedrijven in alle sectoren.’ Bekijk hier het promofilmpje (wmv). Ratings en reviews spelen een belangrijke rol bij de aankoopbeslissing van consumenten. Dat blijkt uit dit onderzoek (‘Social Shopping Study 2007‘) van e-Tailing. Dat weet dus ook uitgever van GoudenGids Truvo. Ian Harrison, directeur van Truvo: ‘Op dit moment is deze vorm van digitale mond-tot-mond reclame verspreidt over verschillende gespecialiseerde websites. De focus van de meeste van deze sites ligt op de kwaliteit van producten. GoudenGids.nl biedt de consument een plek op het internet waar ervaringen kunnen worden gedeeld over de dienstverlening van bedrijven, zoals advocaten, aannemers en verhuizers.’ Lees Meer over: Gebruiker velt oordeel over diensten op GoudenGids.nl.

The launch of Cuil, a new search startup that claims having a larger-then-Google index, generated a lot of noise in the last few days. First the hype around the company for its large database and low indexing costs (1/10th of Google’s, they say), then the flood of negative comments soon after the launch for the [...]

MIT is in a twisted, propeller-capped knot this morning heralding a new discovery it says will unleash a solar revolution. However, the "revolutionary leap" inspired by photosynthesis is not on the glamorous front-end of energy collection, rather, it's related to a simple, highly efficient and inexpensive way to store that energy when the sun doesn't shine. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," says Daniel Nocera, MIT neomaxizoomdweebie who with Matthew Kanan developed the unprecedented approach to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using the sun's energy. The gases can then be recombined later inside a fuel cell. The key components to the process are a pair of catalysts (one consists of cobalt metal, phosphate, and an electrode; the other, platinum) which produce the O and H gases at room temperature and in neutral pH water (i.e., tap water). While similar solutions exist for industrial use primarily, these are very expensive and require specialized environments.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis at Imperial College in London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem." Nocera concedes that further engineering is required to commercialize the approach but hopes to see it implemented in household fuel cell systems within the next 10 years. Click through for the video breakdown.

Continue reading Video: MIT develops solar storage "nirvana": energy crisis solved?

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That's what SD Times is claiming, based on "internal Microsoft documents" that give more details on the skunk-works research project currently brewing in Redmond. The docs supposedly hint at a fleshed out platform for distributed concurrency—which entails moving what used to be core desktop OS functionality into the cloud for a partially or fully web-based platform. And while it almost certainly won't make Windows 7, Midori could be the first step toward severing ties with legacy Windows once and for all.

Says SD Times:

Midori’s design treats concurrency as a core principle, beyond what even the Microsoft Robotics Group is trying to accomplish, said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

Sure, it's a possibility that this could just be a technology that will be integrated into a more conventional desktop-based Windows successor, or that Midori will stay in the Research wing like many Microsoft projects tend to do. But with so many industry players jumping into cloud computing (and with the Microsoft lifers supposedly involved Midori "going back to their roots and writing code like they probably did in the old days," according to a previous rumor), the chances for something more ambitious are interesting to consider. [SD Times via The Register]

Door gebruik te maken van betaaldiensten van Amazon.com, kunnen andere webwinkeliers binnenkort beschikken over de gegevens van 81 miljoen klanten.

 

Where you sit in class (what it means)

Het bruto verlies van Microsofts Online Services-afdeling verdubbelde tot 1,2 miljard dollar. De omzet uit de Google-achtige diensten...