With the launch of Bing this week, a new search service arrived to take on Google. And, unlike other small challengers, since Bing is from Microsoft, it actually has the potential to stick around long enough to make some inroads on Google.
But how is Bing as a search engine. Since it launched on Monday, I've been using Bing heavily for nearly all of my Internet search needs. And so far, I like much of what Microsoft is doing here.
In general, Bing is more attractive than Google and has a lot of nice interactive touches. Once you've entered a search, the results page in Bing provides a variety of information.
According to a recent series of tests done by Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 is the fastest browser available today. Of course, it doesn't take a lot of searching to find similar studies claiming that Google Chrome or Firefox or Safari or Opera or WebKit is the fastest browser available today.
So what do I think about all of these "fastest browser" tests? Which do I think is the most valid? Well, in the immortal words of Bill Murray in Meatballs, "It just doesn't matter!"
Click here to see screenshots When it comes to demoing a new piece of software, training users on a new application or teaching employees how to follow a business process, there's no substitute for showing them how to do these things directly.
But it isn't always feasible to be face to face in all of these situations. So the next best thing is to be able to create a video of how to use an application, Web service or process and make that available to anyone who needs to see it.
There have long been products, such as Adobe Captivate and Camtasia, that can capture a recording of an application session, record voiceovers, and add educational icons and directions to videos that can then be distributed to anyone who needs them. But these products aren't inexpensive and, since they are geared toward high-end training and testing, can be a little too complex for staff just looking to make a quick application recording.
The second day of Demo got off to a much better start than Day 1, with a couple of promising semantic Web applications starting off the vendor presentations.
Setting up a video monitoring system in your home, office or business can be a tedious and sometimes expensive task, often involving permanent server systems.
Avvak's Vue attempts to solve this problem through an inexpensive solution that uses small, easily mounted and deployed cameras, a central video router that requires no PC or server, and a Web-based service for video deployment.
At DEMO 09, I had the chance to talk with Avaak CEO and founder Gioia Messinger about the capabilities and features of the Vue video system.
For the upcoming Demo show, the key word is definitely change. The self-styled "launch pad for emerging technology" will see some of the most significant changes in its history.
By far the biggest change is the departure of the show's longtime executive producer, Chris Shipley. During this show, Shipley will be essentially passing the executive producer position to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat.
Click here to see the slideshow When looking at the current version of the Apple Safari Web browser, the description that comes to mind is "stripped down." The current Safari lacks many of the interface features found in competing browsers and seems to focus on simplicity and speed.
But based on tests of the recently released beta of Safari 4, stripped down won't be the main description of the next Apple browser.
With the beta of Safari 4, Apple has clearly focused on upgrading the interface of the Web browser, playing catch-up with other browsers in some areas and adding some unique and welcome capabilities of its own.
Ahhh. It's just a few weeks until the start of spring. I can't wait for all of the changes this brings, especially the return of all the green and growing things.
Of course, other, less welcome things also seem to be returning with spring. Among these unwelcome things is the return of incredibly stupid, shortsighted and dangerous laws from representatives in Congress.
The latest doozy to be put forth by our legislative representatives is the Internet SAFETY Act, aka, the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act. (Speaking of which, who comes up with these acronyms?).
Given the current "25 things you might not know about me" craze, there are a lot of people out there who have to tell you all kinds of things about themselves. This whole thing seems a bit nuts to me, after all, if there are things about me that people don't know, it's probably because I don't want them to know these things.
While I've tended to ignore these lists as they've ended up in my mail or Facebook updates, the one's I have read tended to be pretty positive and good natured. Again, this seems nuts to me. In my opinion, if you really want to know someone, you should find out the things that they hate, the things that really drive them nuts.
So to put my money where my mouth is, I've done just that. Without further ado, here is my list (in no particular order) of the Twenty Things about Technology that Drive Me Nuts.
Click here to see the video In this special eWEEK video, I take a look at the new JavaFX RIA platform from Sun.
While one can easily make the argument that Sun's Java was one of the first examples of a rich internet application platform, Sun hasn't been a big player in the recent rise of RIAs.
But with the release of JavaFX 1.0, Sun hopes to change that. JavaFX takes advantage of many of the benefits of Java while adding the ease of development and deployment common to most RIAs.
In this video I walk through some of the key components and features of JavaFX. Click here to watch my video walkthrough of JavaFX.
