wavelinks

Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. – Jason Kolb re: the Future of the Internet

Jason Kolb talks about XMPP and Google Wave as “the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture” and goes on to explain how Google will unleash the the full power of the XMPP protocol throough it’s “Sexy” Wave client.

So here’s the deal with Wave: If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you’ll miss the boat. And it’s a big boat. If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture. Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code. I haven’t done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you’re going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

via Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. – Jason Kolb re: the Future of the Internet.

Office Web Apps : Demo of the Office Web Apps

Microsoft Office Web Apps enter technical preview stage (by invite only), offering better file integrity between the desktop and the web with no loss of data in the process.  Spreadsheets & Powerpoint presentations are now editable in the browser while Word online-editing is not yet ready.

Spreadsheets keep their functions and charts, Powerpoint delivered over the web, with extra functionality if SilverLight is installed though it’s not a requirement.

Office Web Apps will be delivered throught Windows Live Workspace.

Click below for a video demo from Chris Bryant.

Office Web Apps : Demo of the Office Web Apps.

Get Access to Web-based Microsoft Office Apps Now!

In the coming months, Microsoft will unveil a Google Docs like product that will let users create and edit Office documents in the browser itself without requiring a copy of Microsoft Office software.

The product, known as “Office Web Apps”, will include online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Like Google Docs, Office Web Apps will be available for free and you can use it from all popular browsers on Mac or Windows PC even without the Silverlight plug-in.

How to get Microsoft Office Web Apps

Microsoft is expected to ship Office Web Apps alongside Microsoft Office 2010 sometime next year but here’s a simple hack that will help you access the preview version of Office Web Apps right now…

via Get Access to Web-based Microsoft Office Apps Now!.

Your Google docs: Soon in search results? | Webware – CNET

Users of Google Docs and Spreadsheets accustomed to publicly publishing their documents might want to rethink exactly how publicly available they want to them to be.

Google on Thursday wrote in a blog post that “in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines…This is a very exciting change, as your published docs linked to from public Web sites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

via Your Google docs: Soon in search results? | Webware – CNET.

Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run

It’s true to say, without a hint of hyperbole, that 25 year old Daniel Ek’s Spotify has taken the global music industry by storm, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Even in markets it hasn’t launched in yet including the US, Spotify is generating a lot of attention and is now valued at €170 million. Music lovers have discovered ways to circumvent regional limitations on the software and are already using the service heralded by some as the future of the music industry. And that suits the music industry just fine, especially since they’ve invested in it. At a Glasshouse event at the Royal College of Physicians in London last night, an assembled throng of the tech business community listened to Ek’s thoughts.

“Despite making every mistake in the book in my previous companies,” says Daniel Ek, “with Spotify things seem to be working out. It’s true that we underestimated how long it would take the labels to come in, though: we started the company in 2006, but didn’t launch a product until 2008 because it took so long to get the labels on board.”

via Daniel Ek: Spotify will kill file-sharing, be a European home-run.

Inside Google Books: Books Digitized by Google Available via the Espresso Book Machine

I’m a sucker for a cool piece of technology. The Espresso Book Machine, which can print a book in minutes before your eyes, fits the bill. If sentient robots ever succeed in taking over the world, this is how they will print their books.

We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We recently made available over a million free public domain books for viewing and download from our web site. Reading digital books can be an enjoyable experience, but we realize that there are times when readers want a physical copy of a book. To that end, I’m excited to announce that we’re partnering with On Demand Books to allow readers to purchase public domain books digitized by Google from any Espresso Book Machine at bookstores and libraries around the world.

Here’s some video footage of the Espresso machine in action:

via Inside Google Books: Books Digitized by Google Available via the Espresso Book Machine.

Social NetWok for Google Apps

SocialWok lays a social network on top of your email, Calendar, Docs, Sites and so on – something that the Google Apps suite was missing when being used as the main infrastructure for an organisation.

Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

via Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA.

Apps.gov brings cloud computing to the Federal government | CTOvision.com

The Federal government embraced cloud computing today with the launch of the GSA operated Apps.gov which promises to bring efficient cloud computing services and infrastructure to the U.S. government agencies. As noted on the Apps.gov website:

“Cloud computing plays a key role in the President’s initiative to modernize Information Technology IT by identifying enterprise -wide common services and solutions and adopting a new cloud-computing business model. The Federal CIO Council under the guidance of the Office of Management and Budget OMB and the Federal Chief Information Officer CIO, Vivek Kundra, established the Cloud Computing Initiative to fulfill the President’s objectives for cloud computing.”

via Apps.gov brings cloud computing to the Federal government | CTOvision.com.

Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream

As more of us around the world join the web, a lot content is going to start to be produced in non-English languages. This hasn’t been a factor for a lot of us, but I suspect it will as we begin to discover content-rich resources and individuals we want to interact with.

Case in point. Recently I started reading a German blog that covers technology. It has a lot rich content, like for example the latest build of a portable version of Google Chrome – but it’s all in German.

via Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream.