Dan Khasis, Cto, Oosah

[Web 2.0] Today, Oosah was launched (and we published about it), so tonight they are celebrating at the Sir Francis Hotel, in San Francisco. I finally met the CTO, Dan Khasis, who told me that he is pretty happy with the launch: They got good feedback and some good traffic.

Demonstration driven by Steve Repetty (Chairman and CTO)

[Web 2.0] Zude.com is a social networking service that let one create content a little like MySpace, except that its more recent architecture allows it to be more flexible and receive more “modules”. Zude announced today that it will feature shopping, ringtones and widgets, thanks to a partnership with Shopit, Myxer and Widgetbox. The strong point of Zude is that users can build their pages by simple drag & drops.

The application that interested us is SocialMix. It than can pull data from Facebook, Bebo and other high-profile social networks into Zude.com. The SocialMix widgets can display the photos of all your friends, comments and much more! Integrating information from all these networks into a Zude gives Zude a shot to become a “personal social network portal”… come back to this site to learn more. Can they pull this off? I don’t know, but the technical fundations are very interesting.

Web 2.0 I just got to the moscone center for my first meeting at the Web 2.0 conference. I met with Raju Vegesna from Zoho to talk about their recent announcements. The lobby is deserted as you can see in the photo and the sessions are not so well attended. Tomorrow will be better as the showfloor will open, and I am sure the crowd 2.0 will be there.

Yesterday, I was invited to a book party at the Metreon in San Francisco. Jon Swartz and Byron Acohido of USA Today launched their new book: "Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity." This party happened during RSA, THE IT Security conference in the country… the one I do not attend because I do not want to come back home completely paranoid about identity theft or having all my data hacked…

I did not read the book yet, but it seems very interesting, if you want to know more, check out the book here. More photos of the event after the jump (shot with my BlackJack in the dark, kind of dramatic/artsy style, in sync with the topic).

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We were at the Mozilla’s 10 years anniversary party a few hours ago. The party was fun and full of nice people. Check out the photos (shot with my BlackJack) in the full article.

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[Microsoft TechFest 2008] Measuring people’s reputation is one of the trends of the Social Web, and this web application ranks the news according to political blogs opinions. The number of links is displayed for each article on the left side (blue) for the Liberals and on the right side for the Conservatives (red). The level of emotional charge is also displayed using small squares, from one to four (low level to high level). The emotional charge is determined by analyzing the natural language used in the blogs. This could be the next generation of aggregators, or an Uber-Digg. Arnd Christian Konig from MSR in Redmond, presented me the project. You can find more info on the project web page.

[Microsoft TechFest 2008] Ramachandran Ramjee and Prashanth Mohan from Microsoft Research Lab in Bangalore, India, showed me a demo of their “Mobile Sensing Platform” (I renamed it because the title is too long!). Each sensing enabled phone can detect a honk, a bump or a brake, and the data collected from all users can provide the traffic status or the road condition (bumps and holes) to servers in real time. Note that honking in traffic is specific to some countries and this has been developed to be applied in India. If it works and if the majority of drivers use it, it could improve the accuracy of the real time traffic info.

[Microsoft TechFest 2008] Patrick Baudisch gave me a demo of the LucidTouch prototype that he is developing with his colleagues from Microsoft Research. Instead of the regular touch screen experience of the iPhone, the LucidTouch enables people to browse a map by touching the back of the device and seeing theirs fingers as a translucent overlay on top of the graphics that they are navigating. It prevents the fingers from occluding the graphic elements users are browsing, it would be useful for small screens.

The prototype (photo) is bulky and not very practical, the Web cam located on the back make it even worse, but we can imagine better designs for future mobile devices using this concept. According to Patrick, a possible application could be a watch that users could browse by touching the watchband with one finger on the other side of the wrist.

We already published about the LucidTouch a few months ago. For more information check the project page.

10:40 - Trident Scientific Flow Workbench

This is a project of the University of Washington and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

They are setting the world's first plate-scale undersea observatory. They will observe the two tectonic plates that touch along the Pacific coast. To do so, the labs placed several sensors undersea and Microsoft helps to automate the data processing pipelines to support, for example, real time visualizations.

10:41 - Berkeley Water Center

Microsoft Research collaborates with the Berkeley Water Center project to understand the regional hydrology by enabling rapid scientific data browsing for availability and applicability. The impact of the project is the maintenance of the Environmental Data Server, www.fluxdata.org that serves 921 site years of carbon-climate field data from over 160 field teams. Multiple projects are now leveraging same SQL Server database enabling 100 universities to collaborate on hydrology (CUAHSI consortium).

10:19 – CoSearch

Co-Search allows several people to collaborate on… web searches, using computers and cellphones. link: CoSearch paper (pdf)

[DEMO 2008] Today, Livescribe unveils the Pulse Smartpen, a computer embedded in a pen that captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio, synchronizing it to the writing. This is particularly useful for taking notes during a class or a conference! To replay what was recorded while writing a specific word, users simply tap on the word - they can’t miss anything from a presentation. I need to buy one, which would be so useful for tech conferences and interviews!

The Pulse Smartpen is equipped with an ARM 9 processor and a high speed infrared camera with a Dot Positioning System (DPS) that works with the Dot paper Notebook; the micro dots printed on the paper tell the Pulse Smartpen where a user is writing or taping. The Paper Replay Notebook cost around the same price as a regular notebook, and users can print their own dot paper for free on their personal printers.

The pen comes with a 3D recording headset especially designed for far-field recording, each earbud has an embedded microphone to record in large room or noisy environment. The goal is to record exactly what’s coming into both ears.

[DEMO 08] Leapfrog is coming at DEMO with its new reading system, the Tag Reading System. This pen-shaped device interacts directly with real books: by simply touching the Tag reader anywhere on any page of a specially printed book, children can hear words and stories read aloud.

The Leapfrog Connect Application (PC/Mac) allows users to download and manage audio for each book, and with 16 MB build-in flash memory, the Tag Reader holds up to five books.

An infrared camera placed in the tip of the Tag reader reads dotted media and works as an imaging system to recognize letters, words and symbols printed with micro-dots. This technology seems similar to the one used in the more advanced Pulse SmartPen also launching today at DEMO.

The Tag Reading System will be available this summer 2008 for $49.99, Tag books and Activity books will be $13.99 each. We have seen a similar device at CES from the Chinese manufacturer Aigo. Learn more on the Tag reader website leapfrog.com/tag. This article will be updated with the link to the demonstration video in the next few days.