Yahoo and MSFT join hands

Yahoo and MSFT entered into a partnership to improve the web search experience for users and advertisers.  A combined approach is seen as a big threat to Google’s search capabilities – where there is vendor competition, the consumers always stand to gain so this is a good change.  You can read more on this here:

http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx

Google Fusion Tables

Google introduced their Fusion Tables approach towards data management in the cloud.  You can read more on this from their Research Blog here:

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

And here is the infoworld article on the same topic:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/google-tests-revolutionary-cloud-based-database-290?source=rss_infoworld_news

Transparency and Data.gov

Yesterday, we had talked about the power of data and how it can be used to make intelligent decisions.  In these turbulent times, there is an evergrowing need for the companies to be transparent to their shareholders.  We had blogged about it before when we were covering the news about the possibility of the broker vote going away.  The Obama government has been taking a very similar stance to provide the public visibility into the &787 billion stimulus that it is providing to revive the economy.  There is an excellent article on internetevolution.com that talks about it in detail:

http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=176439

Read the article in its entirety.  It is very well written and talks about the different initiatives taken by the department of federal CIO Vivek Kundra.  One other step that the government has taken is to provide the information via their site data.gov.  This site is intended for the businesses as well as fellow US citizens to be able to search the large data sets of government information.   Right now though, it is not aimed at the casual home user.  The aim of the site seems to be to provide the raw data as well as some online tools for helping with the data consumption and analysis.  Their build by collaboration approach is excellent since it not only gives the much needed transparency and helps restore the faith of the people, it also will pave the way to incorporate the great ideas from the public.  Time will tell though whether it proves to be a successful project or another one where a lot of money is spent but returns are not as they were envisaged to be.  But the efforts that this government has taken and continues to take are indeed praiseworthy.

FreeStyle, anyone?

No, we are not talking about freestyle wrestling here   We are talking about Coke’s new RFID based freestyle dispensers.  The new dispensers will not only provide the consumers with more than 100 beverage choices, the real benefit of it is the business intelligence data that Coke will be able to gather based on the consumption of thosse beverages.  There are many more data points of interests as well – you can read more on it in the information week article here.

Plenty of new features in iPhone 3G S

There are plenty of new features in the new version of the iPhone.  Our favorite ones are internet tethering, find my iPhone, a much needed improved battery life and more storage and RAM.  You can read more on the feature sets in the apple blog here.  Though the phone is wonderful, the network that supports it is aweful.  You can read more on that on Om Malik’s blog.  And here is another post at gigaom which talks about how AT&T’s new network may not help the old iPhone users.  Maybe it is time for Apple to partner with someone besides AT&T.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing

On June 3rd, MSFT is all set to launch it’s new search engine called Bing.  The search market is really dominated by Google and Yahoo at this time.  As per this article on CIOZone.com, statistics indicate that close to 30% of the searches done by the end user fail to provide satisfactory answers to the end user and hence there is still a lot of scope in the search market.  Bing is being touted as a decision engine by MSFT and it will be more geared towards certain domains and the accompanying presentation tier, commercial content, ads etc. will thus be also geared towards those domains.  You can read more here:

http://www.bing.com/

Google Wave

A friend passed along the link to this article on TechCrunch about Google’s Wave which is essentially a new tool from Google for facilitating communication and collaboration over the web.  It is scheduled to be released later this year but there is a cool demo video available for us to look at.  Here are the links:

The techCrunch article – here.

The demo video – here.

Ten ways Twitter will change American Business

An interesting article at 24/7 Wallst – discussing the micro-blogging platform Twitter and how it can change the American Businesses – you can read it here.

Tim Berners Lee: Next web of open, linked data

The internet is the biggest database of all.  With so much data available, gleaning out meaningful information out of it and establishing the relationships between the data sets i.e. linking them to create a web of data is where the next growth is going to be per Sir Tim Berners Lee.  Here is his presentation and the video of his talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/#(1)

Kindle DX launches

Kindle DX was launched – you can read more on this here:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10234355-1.html?tag=rtcol;inTheNewsNow

Many of the features exist in Kindle 2 as well but there are some new additions as well.