Google Wave Video Demo

If you are interested in finding out more about Google Wave.  Then this video is for you.  The video demo is from the Google I/O developer conference.  You will need a good hour to watch the entire video.

[Google Wave]

Sync the Palm Pre with iTunes

Lately all you hear about is Palm Pre news.  Well here is one more story.  Fortune Magazine is reporting that the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes.  You will not be able to sync DRM songs.  It works exactly like the iPhone when it syncs.  So you will get your playlists and album art.

I have a feeling Apple is not going to allow this continue once the Palm Pre is released.  I am sure Apple will claim some type of patent or DRM violation.

It will be interesting to see how this one turns out. [Fortune]

The Break Up of AOL and Time Warner

The New York Times is reporting by the end of the year AOL and Time Warner will no longer be one company.  I think most people forget that AOL bought Time Warner.  The merger of these two companies never seemed to materialize.  This break up should be a good thing for both AOL and Time Warner. [NYT]

Microsoft "Bing"

Steve Ballmer earlier today confirmed Microsoft’s new search engine by the name of “Bing“.  It is planned to go live next week.  It will be interesting to see if people will leave Google and go Bing.

Press release below. [AllThingsD]

Microsoft’s New Search at Bing.com Helps People Make Better Decisions
Decision Engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload.

REDMOND, Wash. – May 28, 2009 – Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.

The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

A New Approach to Internet Search

Based on the customer insight that 66 percent of people are using Internet search more frequently to make complex decisions,* Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions. The new service, built to go beyond today’s search experience, includes deep innovation on core search areas including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.
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Great search results. Relevant search results are still a top priority for people, yet Microsoft studies show that only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page, minimizing the need for additional clicks.
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Organized search experience. More and more customers are regularly spending time with search engines, engaging in complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Respondents also said an organized search experience would be twice as useful in helping find information and accomplishing tasks faster. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results. Collectively, these and other features in Bing help people navigate their search results, cut through the clutter of search overload and get right down to making important decisions.
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Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isn’t optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

The new brand portfolio will include the following changes to existing Microsoft programs:
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Microsoft’s mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise. More information can be found here.
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Technology from Microsoft’s April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel. More information coming soon.
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Microsoft’s popular cashback program, now dubbed Bing cashback, with more than 850 merchants and more than 17 million products available, will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.

Microsoft is committed to building better tools to help people find the shortest distance from their initial search query to the point of making an informed decision. Bing is an important first step toward this long-term vision and a strong indicator of Microsoft’s commitment to move search technology forward for customers.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Catch The Google Wave

Google is releasing a new product later this year which will combine all the different ways you communicate online into one interface.

The goal of Wave is to improve real-time communication on the web.  Here is how Google explains Wave:

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document.
People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared.
Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live.
With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

[Google Wave]

What are you doing this weekend?

What are you doing this weekend? Anything exciting? How about staring a company? If you live in the Memphis area or can get here – Startup Weekend 2 is this weekend in Memphis.

Startup Weekend Memphis is an event where about 100 people get together in downtown Memphis to start a few companies. Usually this means a tech company like a website or application of some sort.

All are welcome – a mix of business skill sets are needed – from marketing to web design to software development.

Click here for more info.

Review Your Kindle Notes and Highlights Online

If you make notes and highlights on your Kindle will like this new option from Amazon.  You now have the option to see your notes and highlights from your web browser.  Sign in at kindle.amazon.com and you will see them.

Psystar = Chapter 11

The company by the name of Psystar that is installing Mac OS X on PC hardware has filed for Chapter 11.  Currently they are in a legal battle with Apple over installing the Mac OS X.  Under Federal bankruptcy protection laws, all cases against Psystar will be put on hold.  We may actually find out who the financial backers are behind this company.

The interesting thing is they are allowed to continue selling machines via their website.  I don’t thing I would purchase one of these machine.

LinqMax – A simpler way to share

I just launched a site that Tomorrow’s Trends followers may be interested in. It is called LinqMax.

If you are a user of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, or Gmail and like to share links then this may be a service you might be interested in. It is pretty basic and simple, but that is how I like it. Basically, you add a button to your browser bar. As you surf the web you can click on the button that adds a bar across the top of your web page. You can then share with friends on your favorite social websites and email. It also has voting and discussion capabilities if you choose to log in and use that functionality. It is integrated with Google and Yahoo! so that you can login using your existing login and password.

Check it out if you are interested.

LinqMax

Google Chrome 2.0

Those of you that are using Google Chrome will appreciate the added features and speed boost in version 2.0.

Here are the new features:

Full Screen Mode:  Now you can watch videos and give a presentation using the entire screen.

Form Autofill:  This feature will help you fill in information you have previously entered into the same form fields automatically.

New Tab Page:  You know will have the option to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page.

Google Chrome is a free download, Windows only.