Categories
Social Technology

Power of internet blogs

In the wake of recent happenings in the blogger world I could not resist the feeling of awe regarding the power electronic blogs have amassed. On May 1st Digg tried to suppress stories about an HD-DVD code which created significant turbulence at Digg and resulted in Digg owner having to give his opinion about the matter. Yesterday (May 15th), another turmoil was caused by an ‘accidental’ deletion of a post at Flickr regarding the selling of a user’s photographic material by an ebay store without her permission. This once again had to be handled by the owner of Flickr. Elsewhere, an Engadget story claiming that the release of Apple’s iPhone and Leaopard operating system was being delayed (as mentioned in an internal email to Apple employees) resulted in a sudden drop of Apple’s share price which wiped $4 bil off Apple’s market cap. This story was later reverted by Engadget in light of Apple’s notification that the email was a hoax. These incidents are just to name a few.

It seems blogs have surpassed the status Newspapers and TV held a few years ago, with the positive side being that unlike the latter, power has shifted in the hands of the common person. World is becoming a more democratic place, perhaps!

Categories
Business Innovation Technology

Paper-thin bendable display

LG.Phillips have developed the world’s frist 14.1 inch color electronic paper which display a crips picture even when it is bent.

SKorea’s LG Philipps develops first A4 colour e-paper

Categories
Innovation Science Technology

Mathematicians design a wormhole

“New calculations show how to make an electromagnetic “wormhole”—a tube that is invisible from the sides, allowing light to shine down the centre unseen” Original Source: /.

Envision This: Mathematicians Design Invisible Tunnel

Categories
Innovation Social Technology

Need not read, hear it

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.

BlueGrind

Categories
Business Technology

Microsoft unveils Silverlight

“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.”

Silverlight takes on Flash

Categories
Business Innovation Social Technology

Adobe video player takes video offline

“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

New Adobe player takes video offline

Categories
Business Technology

Is Copyright Violation Stealing?

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams on copyright violations

Is Copyright Violation Stealing?

Categories
Education History Science

Gravity ain’t a force as you were taught in school

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.

Einstein was right: space and time bend

Categories
Business Innovation Social Technology

Joost, a follow up

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).

Joost

Related Posts: Joost may make IPTV a reality?

Categories
Business India Technology

How India is changing IBM’s world

Yes, we’ve heard this before. But there is more… A deep analysis of the industry and fate of IBM.

Hungry tiger, dancing elephant