Tech for Lunch!

The Search Engine world is a very competitive one and when something interesting is brought to the table, everyone usually follows. Combining search results for different categories is nothing new anymore. Google has had that for a while now and Yahoo! also offers the same thing. When you search for something, at the top of the results, you can switch between the traditional results and images, news, videos etc…

Some websites like Pageflakes offer the possibility to create your own homepage which gathers information from many places. These are called Mashups and some sites even offer the possibility to present results in the same manner. This is what Yahoo Glue is all about. When you run a search on Yahoo Glue, you get a results page that is far from the traditional text results we are used to. You get a complete break down of almost everything that is available on that subject.

You can try Yahoo Glue on Yahoo! India which is where the product is being tested right now. If you run a search for Britney Spears, you will get a bunch of different results and what’s really different is the presentation. You can see standard search results, along with a biography, images, videos, news etc… naturally the sources of the results are based on the keywords you enter. For example, Britney will return some Last.FM results which would not show for Katie Holmes. If you leave the celebrities alone and search for “Adobe Flex” ( yes I know… I can’t get Flex out of my mind), you will get results for Adobe’s Stock prices and job postings for Flex programming.

I think we should be seeing Yahoo! Glue get implemented in all other Yahoo sites pretty soon because the results are very impressive and become very useful if you don’t really know where to start on a new subject.

I’m sure most of you have heard of (and probably used as well) Napster. Napster changed the way we trade, discover and, most of all, download our music forever when it was launched in June 1999. After a very successful run and a whole bunch of lawsuits and pressure from the record industry, Napster closed in July 2001. It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Even though traffic was abundant and the sharing services were practically flawless, there were many other problems and Napster was not a very profitable business. In fact, after the final blow of lawsuits, it had to file for Chapter 11 and liquidate it’s assets.

One of the founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning has been hard at work on a new startup called Rupture: “All Games, All Platforms. Connect, Share, Achieve. Rupture builds a profile for you based on your game play. It’s not like other profiles, however. We automatically pull information from many video games. Did you beat the Drums Tour in Rock Band on Expert? All your friends will know”. Rupture has been in beta for quite some time and so a public release hasn’t happened yet.

It turns out that Shawn Fanning will finally get some payback for his hard work because Electronic Arts has been keeping an eye on the site. EA is buying Rupture for $30 million in a deal that should be announced soon. They are looking to integrate this technology in their business plan because the social networking aspect based around Massively Multiplayer games is something EA has been wanting to add for a while now.

Shawn will be working for EA once the deal goes through. Looks like setting up a few Internet Startups may eventually get you someplace cool!

Once again, I’ve come across a really cool online application that can be very useful to some readers out there. This one is called Presdo, which you can try for yourself at www.presdo.com, no need to register to see it in action.

Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. So basically, it is an online scheduling tool that you can use to invite people to an event (as simple as a cup of coffee to anything else..) and it helps you work-out the details so that the most people can attend without conflicts.

The thing that’s really cool about Presdo, and what makes it different from some of the others, is that it uses natural language to enter your events. When you get to the front page of the site, you are presented with a Google-inspired input box and not much else. You type in what you want to do using plain english, like “have lunch with Josee and yanick tomorrow at noon” and Presdo will take you to a screen with everything already filled out according to what you entered. At this point, you can modify what needs to be modified and enter the email addresses for the people you want to invite. If you have a sign-in, you would only need to do this once and you could re-use many of the things you’ve entered previously. You can use Google maps to find locations in your area and that map is included with the event to let everyone know where to go.

Once you send our the first invitation, everyone can confirm or suggest new times and locations to better accommodate them. When everyone agrees or you have the best date/time/location to get the most people, you can save the event directly in your calendar. You can export the event as an Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar items.

Presdo works extremely well and is a free service. Eventually, the founder would like to offer a premium service.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced “ Onesearch 2.0“. Onesearch is Yahoo’s search software for Internet connected mobile devices. The newly released version allows users to use voice commands to search the web.

Now you can use your voice to get answers on your phone. With Yahoo! oneSearch™ with voice, it’s fast and easy to search for anything you need when you’re mobile. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch, an industry leading mobile search product.

Onesearch is a pretty cool product because it allows you to find things faster than you normally would on your mobile phone. No need to browse to yahoo, search and then hope the results are relevant and well formatted for your phone. OneSearch runs directly on your mobile phone and lets you launch a search faster and returns relevant results that you can actually use.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007. The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

For those of you who have been paying attention, Microsoft is slowly moving towards using the internet as their platform rather than the actual machine you use to access it. Basically, in the long run, we should be able to access all of our stuff from anywhere, using any kind of computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac or even mobile devices. Techcrunch has a very complete article about it and I wasn’t quick enough to get into the first beta round so I’ll just write a summary of features here.

Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.

Live Mesh provides you with an online virtual desktop to which you connect your computers and any other device you want to use to control it. Right now, only Windows XP and Vista are supported but Macs and mobile devices should be added this year, as well as the capability to connect your xbox or even a picture frame.

The current product is definitely oriented towards developers and supplies all the necessary APIs to start building applications that will make good use of Live Mesh. Essentially, you could use it to not only sync files and folders, but entire applications. This would really take the desktop out of your local PC and move it online, allowing you to truly work (or play) from any machine you choose.

I can’t wait to see more of this product, but I will have to wait for openings in the beta which is full right now. In the mean time, the article I mentioned above is very thorough and has some screenshots.

While we are in this line of thought, might as well cover another application that uses the Adobe Flex framework and that deals with financial data. I spoke about Spiceworks.com and iexpenseonline.com in my last two posts, so this application is a bit more for developers, but could have some very interesting results for the end-users.

Intuit has just announced that they are joining the “Platform-as-a-service” band wagon with Amazon, Google and their closest competitor, Salesforce.com. The Quickbase development environment offers developers the opportunity to use intuit’s Quickbase as a platform combined with the Adobe Flex Framework to build applications for end-users.

Quickbase is not the new product, but the fact that it is going to be available for developers to use openly and to publish their own applications directly for all quickbase users to see, is new. One great advantage that Intuit has is that large user base for Quickbooks. The apps developed will be web add-ons for Quickbooks users sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Developers not only get the power and reliability of the Quickbase platform, but the visibility to Quickbooks users. Users are already familiar with quickbooks so a minimized learning curve is also important.

Take a look at the quickbase website; there are videos and some demos of applications that can be built using the Quickbase Development Environment.

Everyday I look around the web and find interesting applications. Today, I landed on iexpenseonline.com, and I thought this could be useful to many people out there. If you have been reading anything I’ve written lately, you know that I’m quite fond of well presented and practical applications, especially the ones designed with Adobe Flex. This application fits in all those categories.

IExpenseOnline (or IEO) is an online budgeting solution that helps you manage your budget by assisting you in tracking your daily financial activity. The concept is inspired by a humble notebook, full of daily expenses and income, used by most of us to track and control our budget. IEO is totally FREE and can be used by anyone who wishes to manage budget without a pen and notebook. The data entered into different features offered by IEO is 100% secure, with all the latest technological and manual security parameters in place.

I found the layout very intuitive and easy to use. The presentation is probably what got me hooked right away though. It is very clean and gets you going exactly where you need to go to get things done. There are a bunch of tools and reports you can use to help manage your finances, but I found that the only thing that is missing is the capability to get information directly from your bank account. I had an article about Mint previously and I think that this application might get a portion of users who just need to have a tool for daily management. Best of all, IEO is free!

Take a look at their website to get a good idea of the product and see the interface. You can even give it a quick try without registering if you want.

These days, I’m wasting/spending a lot of time looking around for a bunch of applications and components built with Adobe Flex. I have been reading up quite a bit on this very promising framework and talked about the release of the most recent version of the builder. It’s not very surprising to find some of the most amazing applications built by the company who created the framework, Adobe Inc.

Adobe Photoshop Express has now entered the public beta phase which means anyone can go ahead and give it a try to see what this application is all about. “Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.“

Although Photoshop Express is marketed towards the “photoshop impaired”, it still has much to offer for experienced users as well. It’s a great way to share photos without using your own bandwidth and enables advanced effects in just a few clicks. I like the interface but I did hit a couple of bugs(keep in mind this is still in beta) and the application and the effects respond well and pretty quickly.

I have not had time to give this a complete look, such as uploading many pictures to manage an album, but what I was able to do with the sample albums is a good indication that Photoshop Express might be a neat application for many users to enjoy. Give it a try!

We had an article not very long ago that discussed the importance of introducing your kids to technology at a young age. Parents know very well the importance of their kids’ safety on the internet and products aimed at this task have existed for quite some time. The inherent problem with many of these products, is simply the way that they approach the subject. Usually, a program gets installed on the computer and filters content and destinations using a blacklist which is updated by the product maker. But the internet and its “kid-unfriendly” content grow much faster for these filters to keep up appropriately.

This is where the newly launched Kidzui.com comes in:

“Built just for kids, the revolutionary new KidZui browser makes surfing the Internet fun and engaging for kids from ages 3-12. KidZui has all the sites and games your kids love and tons more. With the KidZui browser, your have access to over 500,000 websites, pictures and videos.” The idea behind this software, and the reason why it presents itself as being different and much more efficient than the others, is that instead of blacklisting the bad websites, it blocks everything and whitelists the good content. Everything gets reviewed by parents and teachers who are on the staff and they are constantly reviewing more based on requests, browser searches and current subjects. Everything is also categorized by age and by topic so kids can just browse through what’s available easily. Parents have the option of allowing sites which are not normally allowed by Kidzui and can also blacklist some sites which are approved by Kidzui if they need to. This could be useful if your kid is using a specific site too much, for example.

Here is a look at the interface which is very nicely done and colorful for kids to enjoy and keep coming back to. They should feel right at home and the browser gives them the opportunity to socialize with other kids who are using kidzui as well. Everything gets ranked and voted on by the kids so the relevant and most popular content will end up on the start page, making them easier to find and get to. Kids can set their own avatars and get points for being online and doing different things so they can show their personality to the world in a safe environment. They can share content with other kids, but no chat is enabled to keep things clean.

The introductory price is $4.95/month, but even at the regular price of $9.95/month, it’s a pretty good deal if you don’t want to have to check your kid’s every move on the internet. This is the only system that I know of which properly enables a safe environment for kids online. Kidzui comes in a PC and a Mac version.  Keep in mind that a lot of the competition is free so you may want to take a look at some other products if a monthly price is not your thing.

I’m always a fan of merging technologies because they are usually a great way to facilitate user tasks and make something available to a broader audience. This one is about a little website that everyone must have heard of: Youtube. Each month there is an average of 66 millions viewers who flock to youtube.com to watch 2.6 billion videos. That’s about 57% of all video viewers on the internet, which is estimated at about 116.7 million according to Nielsen Online.

The second technology involved in this news snippet is another well known broadcaster: TiVo Inc. “Founded in 1997, TiVo (NASDAQ: TIVO), a pioneer in home entertainment, created a brand new category of products with the development of the first digital video recorder (DVR).” The company has an approximate 30-40% market share in the DVR market, so it’s a fairly large audience to be able to reach and the TiVo box removes the requirement for a computer to watch Youtube videos.

The basic idea behind this move is to be able to broadcast Youtube videos to a larger audience, by removing - or at least, extending - the boundaries of the internet. Youtube videos are already available on some cell phones and via Apple TV to users who are not sitting in front of a computer. By the end of this year, TiVo users should be able to watch these videos directly on their television. This should be available to users of the TiVo Series 3 boxes, which also includes an HD model.

Although I’m not a TiVo user, I think it’s a pretty cool idea and this technology merge will allow many new users to get busy wasting a LOT of time watching Youtube videos. It’s like an addiction - Once you start watching, you just can’t stop and Youtube keeps suggesting more interesting ones to watch!