BlueGrind is a useful service which converts text based blog/news articles into speech. Although, it is not a new technology, yet the presentation and the implementation is pretty neat. The service is primarily aimed at facilitating visually impaired people, however, the ability to download the converted audio files as mp3 means that you can carry your news around in your portable media player as a podcast.
“Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, unveiled on Sunday a new online media platform called Silverlight to challenge Adobe Systems Inc.’s dominant Flash player.”
“Silverlight, which will be demonstrated at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, allows content providers to deliver games, videos and animation over the Web in a dynamic way with advanced graphics.”
“Adobe Systems Inc. unveiled on Sunday video-player software that lets consumers play back video online or offline, a move that could help reshape an acrimonious debate over video-sharing. Adobe Video Player builds on the leading design software maker’s Flash player, already the dominant technology used to stream video online by sites ranging from YouTube to MySpace to MSN to Yahoo Video.” – PC Magazine
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams on copyright violations
Ninety years after he expounded his famous theory, a $700m Nasa probe has proved that the universe behaves as he said. Now the race is on to show that the other half of relativity also works.
I received a Joost invitation to test the Beta version after 2 months of signing up for it on its website. The first impressions of the website/application are great. The whole look and feel makes it a very pleasant experience. However, on my 1.2 GHz PIII Mobile Laptop with 510MB (available) Ram, and 4Mbps internet connection, the video is rather jerky and the application crashes very often. If you want an invitation to test it, drop in a comment to this post (update: more invites available).
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Yes, we’ve heard this before. But there is more… A deep analysis of the industry and fate of IBM.
The new LG Prada phone looks quite impressive. It is quite similar to the iPhone in functionality, big touch screen, easy to use interface, etc. However at 85 grams is considerably lighter than the iPhone which is 130 grams (the main reason why I might not get an iPhone) and more importantly being available in UK for £350 is a lot more wallet friendly than the iPhone which is expected to retail at around £600. Well, perhaps iPod owners/lovers will be more inclined to get the iPhone ofcourse (excluding me), not to mention that it will support iTunes content, will be easy to sync and has WiFi unlike Prada.
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