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You are here in the archive: The Tomorrow Weblog > 2010 > March
Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb
You may or may not be excited by the acronyms OAuth and IMAP/SMTP, but the combination of them all together is very exciting news. Google Code Labs announced this afternoon that it has just enabled 3rd party developers to securely access the contents of your email without ever asking you for your password. If you're logged in to Gmail, you can give those apps permission with as little as one click.
Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar
Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet?
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, CNET News
A research project in Europe is bringing together a multidisciplinary team to create a robot, wearable smart sensor system, and alarm-and-reporting system in the hopes that together they'll enable more elderly people to live independently for longer.
Stephen Shankland, CNET News
Project X attempts to overlay the free-wheeling style of Second Life over a model of the real world.
Clare Cain Miller, New York Times
For many people, social networks are a place for idle chatter about what they made for dinner or sharing cute pictures of their pets. But for people living with chronic diseases or disabilities, they play a more vital role.
Matt Asay, CNET News
If the future is cloud-based applications, we still have a long way to go to realize that vision. Ironically, we may actually be getting ever further away from it even as the cloud assumes central importance in the computing landscape.
Running applications in the cloud is an ambitious dream, but one that keeps stumbling against the reality of dedicated, native applications, particularly those running on mobile devices.
David Carr, New York Times
At large events, people have always moved in groups to the next big thing. But at the interactive portion of the conference, the ubiquity of so-called ubiquitous presence — location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla — meant the hive suddenly knew what it was collectively doing.
Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review
Rolling out next-generation wireless networks can be painstakingly slow and patchy at the best of times, as the U.S. deployment of 3G has shown. But IBM researchers in China reckon that shifting the signal-processing requirements from base stations into the cloud will make it cheaper and easier to upgrade networks. Ultimately, the approach could lead to wireless networks that can provide better coverage by rapidly adapting to user demand.
Joyce Wadler, New York Times
There have been lots of articles about smart homes, but few that apply to someone who lives in a 970-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in New York City.
Brandon Keim, Wired News
By using a quantum device to control a mechanical object, researchers have linked the mind-bending laws of quantum physics to the tangible, everyday world.
Technology Review
If you have a smart phone, chances are good that you add to its functionality pretty often by downloading new software apps. But updating the computer systems built into your car usually requires a long visit to the dealership, where company technicians install new software using special interfaces.
Ford has begun changing that paradigm with its Sync and MyFord Touch systems, and by opening the Sync programming interfaces to mobile app developers.
Erica Naone, Technology Review
Advertising has been a killer Internet business model, making billions of dollars for Google and others. But a number of startup companies think there's a huge untapped market in providing automatically tailored display advertising to thousands of local businesses.
Matt Asay, CNET News
Google has proclaimed that the conventional PC will become "irrelevant" within the next three years, and it insists that it puts mobile first in development.
That's a bold statement indicating just how much Google is betting on the mobile Web. But it's also an indication of just how critical synchronization technology is going to become--especially syncing to an open web.
Caroline McCarthy, CNET News
A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off "hovercards" that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist's Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline.
Jenna Wortham, New York Times
Giving people more choices in revealing their locations with their cell phones is being popularized by the Foursquare service.
Matt Rosoff, CNET News
One of the interesting things about Windows Phone 7 is the way it integrates so many Microsoft services, including Bing search, Xbox Live, and the Zune Marketplace. But what about SkyDrive?
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, New York Times
The concept was simple: using digital pictures and audio to archive an experience like a weekend visit from the grandchildren, creating a summary of the resulting content by picking crucial images, and reviewing them periodically to awaken and strengthen the memory of the event.
Dylan F. Tweney, Wired News
Technology Review
Physicists have come up with a way to process information faster than the speed of light. But what could they do with such a hypercomputer?
Tom Krazit, CNET News
Curious about unemployment trends in your state cross-referenced against salaries? Google Public Data Explorer could make it easier to create a visual representation.
Erica Naone, Technology Review
A startup promises a painless way to move existing software.
Nick Bilton, New York Times
A man who long made his living from physical books says the arguments against e-book devices miss a key point: for most printed matter, the value is in the content, not the physical form.
Daniel Terdiman, CNET News
The Internet of the future is an intelligent network capable of proactively acting on our needs, following us wherever we go, helping provide us with focused health care, and possibly ushering in a new energy paradigm. This is the vision that James Canton, CEO of San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures think tank, shared with students in the executive program of Singularity University.
Tom Krazit, CNET News
Google's Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has begun exploring "education search," or ways to help students "get to where they are going," he said.
Claire Cain Miller, New York Times
The new news junkie looks very different from even five years ago. Now, she is likely to scan the headlines on her phone in the morning, check a handful of different Web sites over the course of the day and click on links that friends have e-mailed or posted on Facebook or Twitter.
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