The Chrome Web Store

I’m keeping one eye on my Wave box as I try to follow the Google IO conference while juggling a few other tasks. One significant product announcement that came out of yesterday’s keynotes was the Chrome Web Store.

Yes, it is very nice that Google is now creating a place for web developers to put up a shingle and sell under the Google banner. Google does make it very clear that these are ordinary web apps:Continue reading

iPad:Birth of New Device Genre

I saw the iPad last night for the first time at Apple’s SoHo store in Manhattan. It is an amazing thing. A bit of futuristic Star Trek-level technology that found its way into the year 2010:  a large-size  tricorder with great video.  (And to think that Spock struggled with that mouseless gadget!).

I watched a few videos (smooth, fluid ), tried one of the book readers (seductive),  and was wowed by a  location-sensitive astronomy app called Star Walk.

It is not a smaller this or a larger that. I remember similar dismissive talk about mini-computers and personal computers. It’s a new genre of touch-sensitive, location-aware multimedia gagdets that will create its own uses—many that we can not even conceive of at this point. With the Epicurious app, I already see the beginnings of a whole new market of kitchen countertop  virtual cookbooks.  If they can just hook in speech rec….Continue reading

Is CrowdFlower the Future of Work?

About two years ago while researching a blog post on crowdsourcing, I discovered Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. As a  crowdsourced labor solution, the Turk completely turns around the relationship between computers and people.  Instead of asking silicon to perform complex pattern matching (finding words or concepts in text documents), speech recognition (transcription), or image processing (identifying road signs in photos), why not have software call out for help? That is, we the humans become non-software subroutines that tap into our unique biological processing engines especially suited for CPU-stumping tasks.

Other companies have followed suit delivering what are essentially systems to manage piece-meal work for conceptually intensive tasks.  CrowdFlower is one of them.  They’ve taken the “labor in the cloud” model one step further.Continue reading

Freescale's $200 Tablet Supports Multiple OSes

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale was showing off what its chips can do. Freescale’s 7″ tablet reference architecture was meant to inspire manufacturers. And to my eyes, I think they’ll generate lots of interest. Since CES, they’ve added Chromium and Android OS to the line-up— at CES, they had a Linux mock-up. The expected retail price for a  Freescale gadget is in the  $200 to $250 range. Check out the demo after the jump.

Updated 3/23/2010: Read James Surowiecki’s article on why low-end (FreeScale-based) and high-end tablets (iPad) will dominate the market.
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The Twitterization of Google

About two weeks ago I became one of the small group of users who are currently trialing the new Google look. I was vaguely aware of a shift in the left margin, which I decided at first was a glitch in my browser. Then my search results jumped to life when I came across a box of automatically scrolling tweets.

Deep thought: will timeliness trump PageRank-ness?