Google already embeds YouTube videos in search results, however now
it has launched a built in music playback on search results.
Just search for an artist, an album, a song or even a few words from the lyrics and you get song previews in the search results.
6% of all searches on Google are for music or music-related information and now
when you get the results you can play a preview of the song and buy it right there with one of
Google's partner music sales sites.
This will leverage enormous impulse buying of music tracks.
Here's info from Google about this new feature:
At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft announced that their search engine Bing.com had social media search capability (using Twitter and Facebook) and Google replied with details of its "Social Search" option which has been made available on Google Labs.
When you search on Google a section on the bottom of the search results, shows Social
Search results, from content produced by your friends and contacts in blogs, Twitter, Facebook
and other social media sites listed in your Google Profile.
So if you searched for a new camera, as well as seeing results from the manufacturer,
the retailers, and the review sites, you might also find a blog review of it by one of your friends or contacts,
which is an enormously more powerful recommendation.
Wired.com has an article and video about Obscura Digital, a marketing media lab, which has developing a 360 degrees fully immersive interactive video installation for a party penthouse.
The videos are projected on all walls of the room giving a sensation of being transported to various locations and it picks up on conversation in the room and modifies the video to reflect it.
The system uses 10 computers, 11 projectors, has panoramic scenes and includes videos of dancers.
A research team at the University of Utah has come up with an inexpensive method to see inside a building. Currently some radar units costing over 100k have made this possible but hardly used because of the expense. Now, using inexpensive radio technology its possible to take a different and more accurate approach.
Looks like the fantasy of superman's X-Ray vision may soon be a reality.
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a prototype contact lens
which incorporates display and radio components, allowing communication directly to
the eye. Obvious future applications of this are displaying the name and other information
about the person you're looking at. Read the full article on
The Economist site
The previous article provided two videos to explain "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Well SaaS is one example of what you could run using Cloud Computing and other uses for cloud computing include peer-to-peer applications, web applications and "Software And Service" applications. This video explains Cloud Computing concepts:
The first video explains, in two minutes, what Software as a Service is. The second video is an interview with Stan Swetw CTO of Workday, who explains the benefits of SaaS in more detail:
Sorry this was a re-post from 2 years ago...
Microsoft is showing off its new table surface technology and this video demonstrates how it could change the way we interact with computers significantly. However this technology is not expected to be available in mass production for 4 or 5 years.
The text service from Knowledge Generation Bureau (KGB) boasts that it will answer any question you text to it (for 50 cents) (This service is also available in the UK) The company routes the questions to thousands of Agents who find the answer and text you back. Read more on time.com.
Technology / Science
