Microsoft has finally revealed what has been talked about recently as a mysterious project. It’s the World Wide Telescope, and it’s going to revolutionize the traditional approach to astronomy. The idea is to provide everyone with a way to look at detailed images from space, using a database of images collected from various resources around the world (observatories and telescopes on Earth and in Earth’s orbit).

Image from LiveSide.net

Oh my God, it’s full of stars!

Microsoft presented the new project and some of the functionality and interface which is still now available for download by the general public. When the time comes sometime during Spring 2008, everyone will be able to download the free application from worldwidetelescope.org and enjoy a never before seen gateway to the stars.

[Via: LiveSide]

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As part of their initiative to open-up their search platform, Yahoo! Search is opening its search platform to third party content providers and re-designing the way users will be presented with search results. So far the results were the standard title/description combination, but the new result format will soon include user generated data such as reviews and images, as well as other useful information such as map directions, contact information, price range of services and products (if available). They state that sites like Yelp and New York Times are examples of how additional data can be incorporated into search results. Any site that can offer additional information about a particular search result can take part in shaping it for the searcher. This way Yahoo! is hoping to deliver a richer and more useful search experience to the searcher, and higher quality traffic for websites appearing in search results.

Here’s a graphical comparison of what the changes will look like:

before

after

“We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved — site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users. And by the way, users will be in complete control of the experience and will be able to turn off anything related to open search if they so desire. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be talking more about how this platform will work and what it will enable.”

I think there’s plenty more to be seen before any final conclusion can be made about the new Yahoo! search result concept. It looks promising, but for now, it’s safe to say this is another example of the future of search and why it’s more important than ever to get a site/business listed and reviewed on portals, directories and content sharing sites.

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Great news for all hi-tech adopting professionals (smart phone oriented) who find LinkedIn a useful business social networking tool - LinkedIn released a mobile version of their service. It’s available at m.linkedin.com. The interface allows for any mobile internet enabled device (with Wireless Application Protocol) to access the service, although there is a special beta version for iPhone.

The team behind the new mobile LinkedIn is working on introducing more applications to the mobile LinkedIn platform, such as LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Experts.

The new mobile LinkedIn service is available immediately in these languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, but additional languages are to follow in the near future.

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It seems Apple is working hard on developing a new generation input interface. The new patent pertains to something called “multi-touch input surface” and is a step forward (or a few steps forward) from the existing solutions, implemented on iPhone for example.

There’s a lot of technical details involved, but basically it comes down to improved ergonomics. The new interface will allow multiple ways for users to use it - finger touch and stylus (pen) - but without having to make all the excess hand, arm and body movement that inherently leads to fatigue injuries over time. It will “provide tactile key or hand position feedback without impeding hand resting on the surface or smooth, accurate sliding across the surface.”

See in more detail on Apple Insider.

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NewsPond is a news aggregator that’s somewhere between TechMeme and Digg (okay, someone already said this, but I guess it’s a good description) - it aggregates news from different sources on the web using an automated AI algorithm while allowing registered users to comment on stories which then determines the stories “Buoyancy Rating” (kinda like thumbs up on Digg). The higher this buoyancy rating, the higher the story is in the “most popular mode”.

Registered users are given the option to save a story in their personal archive, which is useful for following a developing topic, and can comment on stories as well. The basic registration (naturally free) asks the user to choose the basic info (username, password), but the profile is further customizable by adding additional info such as location, homepage URL, age, sex and bio. I don’t see why this exists as an option now, since there is no visible purpose for this (sharing stuff with other members, searching other members, grouping …), so I am guessing the service will extend member interaction in the future, so this additional info will be useful then.

The interface looks nice (a very web 2.0 - ish interface), with effects that are moderately expensive as far as processing is concerned, but slower machines can by-pass any rendering problems by turning off “some” of the advanced interface features (requires registration). One thing that bothered me was the lack of feeds (or at least I didn’t find them). There are five categories - most recent, most popular now, biggest today, 1w, 1m - that could all have their own feed and make it easier to see headlines in a feed reader. I am hoping they will introduce this in the future. The graphics on the site are very impressive though, and so is the whole look and feel of the site. If NewsPond added video news as well, that would really make them stand out. Check them out!

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Just saw this on Engadget - HP revealed their new UMPC, the HP Compaq 2133. I must say I am very pleased with the design. The “lifestyle accessory” really looks good. Even though it’s more an ultra-portable laptop, such as the Everex Cloudbook and the EEE PC, rather than what we’ve been used to calling an UMPC, its size is indeed small. Plus, it looks way better than the two afore mentioned models. According to Engadget, the new mobile computer sports an 8.9” scratch resistant wide-screen format (1366×766px), ExpressCard/54 slot, Wireless LAN, an almost full-sized QWERTY (95% full size), integrated web cam, and optional SSD and all that in a 2.5-pound (1.125 kg) anodized aluminum casing. It will be running Windows Vista or Linux.

I don’t know about you, but me wants one. I’d carry it everywhere and call it “precious”.

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HitWise’s Heather Hopkins did a small research looking into an age and spend breakdown for Yahoo! and Google users. She gave numbers and charts showing Yahoo! attracts a bit more of the users in the younger age group (25-34). On the other hand, as far as lifestyle characteristics, Google seems to attract users who are willing to spend more online. See the charts here.

Even though these results should be taken with a grain of salt, it is interesting to see this kind of segmentation. It may correlate to the fact that Yahoo! is more a portal than a search engine, while Google is a pure search engine. Younger users tend to seek entertainment content (and seem to see Yahoo! as the place to go to for that), while Google users use it to find information about products and services, and purchase them. What do you think?

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This is an interesting idea. Take video content and ad an overlay with object that users can interact with (sound better than “click” ). The idea is to create a connection between the content shown in a video and for example a product on another site, by allowing the user the option to see a link and click if they find it interesting. The video content is the ad, and done like this, it makes the whole commercial side of things less obtrusive to the viewer.

What remained as a problem was how to identify things in the video that users may want to learn more about (for example details about a certain brand, or object that appeared in the video). No artificial intelligence available could do this properly, but Overlay.TV thought of a way to by-pass this problem by involving users directly. Here’s how:

“Users would be able to identify, classify, tag and comment on objects inside the content. Users could be professionals working for advertising companies with obvious access to product placement details or they might be outside the advertising world looking to monetize content on their own site. There could also be users looking to be paid to use their familiarity with snowboard gear or their knowledge of fine china in exchange for marking up content. Getting users to identify objects in video would be straightforward in the specialized world we live in. All they would need is an incentive and that was simple too. Since companies pay for referrals, especially when they result in a sale, sharing that money with the user would be the perfect incentive.”

Overlay.TV has signed deals with many marketing affiliates to provide users a way to earn money from their creations. These include companies like Apple, Amazon, Tiger Direct, WallMart, Macy’s, Office Depot, and more.

Their promotional video (via Mashable) is very “amusing” to say the least. I like the way they gave it the early 80’s touch.

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Yahoo! announced oneConnect in Barcelona (at the Mobile World Congress). Basically it’s their approach to aggregating mobile communications on a single platform. The service will provide features like socially-connected address book, integrated mobile messaging, pulse, favorites and a social contact card. It will also initially bring integration of the major social networking sites such as Bebo, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Wow, impressive!

“Last year we set out to reinvent mobile search with Yahoo! oneSearch, and today with 29 operator partnerships around the world covering more than 600 million subscribers, we believe we have certainly succeeded… Now, we intend to reinvent mobile communications through Yahoo! oneConnect, a revolutionary new mobile communications service that will combine integrated mobile messaging with a socially-connected address book.” (Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!)

More information about Yahoo! oneConnect here.

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Live Search introduced some improvements to their search bot, mainly concerning bandwidth usage and crawling issues. Two major changes have been introduced:

1. HTTP Compression - static files and applications responses are now being packed using HTTP compression which reduces network load
2. Conditional Get - the bot will not download a page again unless it has been modified since the last crawl session; this is regulated according to RFC 2616 specifications

The user-agent signature has been updated to show msnbot/1.1.

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