Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.
Microsoft's Live Labs has been the source of a few interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth, a bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month). Typically, the UIs have been slick, but user adoption has lagged.
HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."
The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations.
Employers all around the world are wrestling with whether employees should be able to access Facebook and Twitter at work - but some businesses are explicitly requiring that job applicants feel comfortable using Twitter.
Just for fun we did a search across Craigslist job postings in some cities around the US to see how many listings mentioned Twitter in each location. The top city this month? New York City, with 196 jobs welcoming Twitter use. If you live in Bismarck, North Dakota though - no one on Craigslist is looking for Twitter users on the clock.
A subject of interest to us ReadWriteWeb folks this year has been smart grids - a method of delivering electricity to users' homes in a way that has been the cause of many green technologists for some time.
Smart grid tech uses digital means to control appliances at users' homes to save energy, cut costs, and increase reliability. However, some experts are beginning to wonder how safe and anonymous this data is and how much end-user privacy could be compromised.
American Express just announced that it plans to acquire Revolution Money for $300 million. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval. Revolution Money, which was founded by AOL's co-founder Steve Case, launched in 2007. The company offers a number of services, including a payment and ATM card that offers discounts at participating retailers and the Revolution Money Exchange, which enables online person-to-person money transactions. It seems reasonable to assume that American Express made this acquisition to get a foothold in the online e-payment market and to challenge eBay's PayPal.
Long-time blogger and tech executive Anil Dash announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo New York that he's leaving publishing software company SixApart and will head a new technology incubator called Expert Labs. Expert Labs will be dedicated to connecting technology innovators ready to build tools with government officials who can put those tools to use in the public interest. It's a vision that differs from what some other technologists are focused on with regards to the government.
Dash is best known as a blogger for his articles like this 2007 explanation of LOLCat grammatical structure and this 2009 explanation of the real-time web. Can the man who's explained so much to the rest of us help the US government adopt new online technology? That's quite a task.
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, announced this morning that he's closing down his Twitter client Ginx early next year and instead focusing on an online local news project. We reviewed a "private pre-alpha" version of Ginx in February and called it a dud. Ginx had some nice ideas but wasn't terribly innovative and it's finest points have now been reproduced in Twitter's own Lists.
Little is known yet about Peer News, Omidyar's next project, but an editor is being sought for hire. The project will begin in Hawaii, where Omidyar lives, but is intended to rock the journalist world.
Microsoft just announced that it started work on Internet Explorer 9 three weeks ago. Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, showed an early build of IE9 during his PDC keynote today. In this presentation, Sinofsky announced that Microsoft will focus on support for new standards like HTML5 and CSS3, as well as developing a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky candidly acknowledged that IE8 did not do well on the Acid3 test, though this early build of IE9 only scored a few points higher than IE8 (24 vs. 32).
It only took 3 years to go from HTML2 to HTML4, but the HTML4.01 specifications were published 10 years ago and even though today's web looks very different, we are still waiting for HTML5. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group started preliminary work on what is now known as HTML5 in 2004 and the W3C HTML Working Group was adopted this draft as the basis for the HTML5 specs in 2007. Some modern browsers already offer partial support for HTML5, but there are still quite a few issues that need to be resolved before we will see the finalized version of the HTML5 specifications. One area where there is still a lot of discussion is support for video in HTML5.
A backlash against anonymous commenters and trolls seems to be underway. Only last month, a court case was settled where anonymous commenters ended up having to pay big fines to the women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on an internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now the latest scandal in this new trend of "giving the trolls what they deserve" is causing a controversy all of its own. And this time, the nasty comment didn't just lead to an embarrassing reveal or a heavy fine, it cost someone their job.
