The idea for this article came when I heard about OpenOffice extension mechanism and I start looking for extensions. I got almost nothing in my searches and I tried to explain to myself why there are so few extensions for OpenOffice. On the other hand you can find numerous Firefox extensions. Below are the facts and possible some conclusions.
Last week Google launched Google Gears which allows offline access to online applications such as Google Reader. Most probably in the next months they will add offline support to all the other major services that they offer. And at that time Microsoft will start loosing revenues from the Windows Office combo which still is the milk cow for them.
Yesterday I noticed that Remember the Milk start offering offline access to their task management application using Google Gears toolkit. Most probably these guys will end up being aquired by Google and their software will be integrated in Google Calendar or will evolve into a competing solution for Basecamp software from 37signals.
The most interesting bit of information that I read yesterday was the fact that Google aquired PeakStream Inc, the guys which were starting to provide a middleware which leverage the power of GPUs, and multicore processors. Is clear that Google needs more computing power and more importantly needs more computing power per watt. On the other hand is somehow sad that the rest of the world won’t be able to use the Peakstream middleware anymore
Some time ago I played and wrote about Photosynth. Now a couple of days ago I watched a demo of the technology behind the software at TED 2007. You can see the demo on the TED site. The Microsoft employee mentioned there the code name for the technology “Sea Dragon”. Again another term that worth search it for on your favorite search engine.
It is amazing to see how easy they are playing with images which are big. And I mean BIG (tens of gigapixels, maybe even more). It is more amazing to see how easy and fast they are able to look (visual search) for all kind of visual features in the big image.
It is so easy to look for human faces in a video surveillance “tape” that is scary. Also the availability of video surveillance equipment especially in big cities is scaring. If you put these technologies together than makes sense for the conspiracy theorist in me to say that “they” and I do no mean Microsoft, were using this kind of technology for years most probably tens of years.
