Multi-Touch G2

Multi-Touch G2 is a touch screen overlay that can be easily mounted onto any LCD or Plasma TV monitors. This simple, lightweight and low cost solution let you deploy Multi-Touch technology instantly to existing monitors without the need of any configuration. Multi-Touch G² is connected to the computer via a USB cable (No power cable is needed).

This is how it looks like..


Usage (Applications):

1. Gaming using your hands
   
2. Photo presentation
   
3. Syn. with mobile devices
   
4. Mapping
   
5. Illustration, design
   

Malaysian government will be buying a lot of these stuffs for:

1. Infrastructure (facilities, roads) planners
   
2. Tax agencies to figure out where are the high taxable area in Malaysia
   
3. Events organizers
   
4. Simulators
   
5. Security departments
   
6. Marketeers
   
7. Idealists for better multi-media presentation.
   
8. Enforcers like police, fireman and etc.
   
9. Engineers, architects, designers

This will give new life to many more software applications to come. Something to look forward to.

Stuff like this is cool because it is something new.

People will not hesitate to buy because it is new.

SearchWiki, Internet Search and Semantic Web

Not long ago, Google published their big vision on the Intelligent Cloud, which is their version of Artificial Intelligence for the future.

That was great and recently they announced SearchWiKi as one of the step moving closer to that vision.

It is not really a WiKi as in Wikipedia... it is a way for users to edit the ranking of search results but that is only relevant to the user themselves. Which means that right now, if you think certain web sites should rank higher for certain key words, you can do that for your own good.

But Google is actually going to leverage on human intelligence to help improve their quest for even better intelligence of search technologies. This is not a catch, it is just a strategy. Like it or not, Google knows who you are in terms of IP address when you are searching for some dirty stuffs, but who cares anyway, life is too short for that. For them (Google), it is more important to improve their technologies than knowing who you are and they are glad that you are part of the help.

Semantic web technologies hasn't been seeing a lot of breakthroughs for this year but there are progresses recorded.

In the general, semantic web technology is the next step of search engine whereby it is supposed to incorporate automation into your search. To make this happen, it requires complicated data analysis functionality and also the support of natural language processing as well as cloud computing as the platform. You can think of cloud computing as the CPU, the natural language processing as the keyboard and data analysis as the output (monitor).

Let's take a look at what is hot in the semantic web arena for 2008.

Companies	Descriptions
Freebase	Freebase is an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.
Calais	A tool for users to incorporate semantic functionality to the blogs
Powerset	Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.
Twine	Organize, share and discover information around your interests
Hakia	Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results.
Tripit	Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning.
AdaptiveBlue	the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about web pages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.
TrueKnowledge	UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge
Talis	A semantic web application platform.
Spock	A people search engine.
BooRah	It uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs.
Swotti	Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions.
Dapper Mashup Ads	New ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically.
Inform	Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher's own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published.
Siri	Personalized assistant that learns.
Evri	A search engine that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.
UpTake	aims to make the process of booking travel online easier.
IMINDI	is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine".
Juice	a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag.
Faviki	social bookmarking tool
Zemanta	Is a blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts.
SearchMonkey	SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.

Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for here and here and here.

So, now we know what the world is moving towards semantic web, still a very primitive step towards full fledged Artificial Intelligence. Personally, I am using Zemanta to help me with my blogging.The biggest benefit is the help of sourcing for relevant pictures into be included in the blog. Zemanta is available as a Firefox plugin which works well with blogspot. And it doesn't work well with Malaysia's very slow speed broadband connection.

This close for semantic web 2008 and let us plan ahead of 2009.

Nevertheless, SearchWiki not available to Malaysia yet.

Networking Leaders Announce Initiative to Develop 100 GbE Services

The development of standards for 100 Gigabit Ethernet is a key part of the process to support widespread cost-effective deployment of 100 GbE technology. The IEEE is currently targeting mid-2010 for industry agreement on a 100 GbE standard.

Internet2, ESnet, Infinera, Juniper Networks and Level 3 Communications today at the annual SC08 conference in Austin, Texas, announced they have agreed to work together to aggressively develop and test emerging 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) technologies. The initiative will build on fresh-from-the-laboratory technologies to create a 100GbE testbed on the Internet2 and ESnet networks with an operational network capability soon thereafter.

The initiative highlights the leadership of these organizations in ensuring the Research & Education community has the networking capacity and speed they need to drive advancements in fields such as high-energy physics, telemedicine and climate research.

In support of the development, Juniper Networks plans to leverage its industry-leading T1600 core router. As the only 100 Gbps-ready core router available today, the T1600 provides unparalleled investment protection and a seamless migration path to 100 Gbps. With 100 Gbps of capacity per slot, the T1600 ensures Internet2 and ESnet could quickly and easily deploy 100 Gbps interfaces.

Press Release:

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA, 19 November, 2008 – Internet2, ESnet, Infinera, Juniper Networks and Level 3 Communications today at the annual SC08 conference in Austin, Texas, announced they have agreed to work together to aggressively develop and test emerging 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) technologies.

The initiative will build on fresh-from-the-laboratory technologies to create a 100GbE testbed on the Internet2 and ESnet networks with an operational network capability soon thereafter.

This joint development effort brings together the technical leadership of Level 3 Communications, Infinera, and Juniper Networks, as well as ESnet and Internet2's unmatched experience supporting research communities with the most demanding networking requirements.

Check out here for full press release.

Google's Thoughts on the Future of A.I

A.I (Artificial Intelligent) has always been around, but ever since the emergence of search engines, its importance become toned-down. But it is always important.

Long time ago, we did explore the issues of A.I research, check out here. The conclusion then was the study of A.I is too broad for a subject and no one knows the exact boundary, rendering research seems forever.

Google recently published their own version of the boundary in the blog; The Intelligent Cloud.

In a way, I must say that the evolution of computer science is to make human obsolete that its ultimate aim is to program a human brain, we are still far far away.

Google's approach will be focused on searching intelligence couples with cloud computing. Pretty much a lot of semantic web. Check out the blog entry. It is always interesting to know what industrial leaders are thinking ahead, this is why we must read blogs.



Finally, I just want to conclude is that when the world has descended into the reality as depicted by the movie The Matrix, our foresight may be flawed; human may be the one who wanted to kill the 'live' machine and not otherwise based on one simple premise; life is at stake.

However, according to Google, we are still far far away.

Why must machine be the bad guy ?