Gizmo all set to take on Skype

Michael Robertson of the MP3.com and Lindows/Linspire fame is all set to take on Skype with his Gizmo Project as part of his new venture SIPPhone.

How Gizmo compares to Skype is yet to be seen. A couple of links from the Gizmo site suggest that the argument leans slightly towards the Gizmo camp at the moment.

Where Gizmo does score over Skype is that it uses the open SIP Protocol in comparison to the proprietary technology used by Skype.

Though Gizmo is unlikely to make any immediate dent on Skype, its definitely likely to give Skype a run for its money on the long run.

Ojos : Revolutionizing Image Search

A product thats likely to be launched very soon, Ojos may revolutionize image search on the web.

It certainly does not sound like a new concept, with many sites like flickr, Picasa already offering services that let you upload, organize and search images.

The key differences seem to lie in the way Ojos is going about doing it. They are relying on two main technologies :face and text recognition. The software according to a couple of blogs that i did get to read, lets you tag your images. It then searches/recognises other pictures of yours and tags them for you.
Aptly named Ojos, which is spanish for "Eyes", it seems to be doing a great job of recognising different pictures of the same person, according to early demos.

It certainly sounds like a product many of us would like to use. What remains to be seen is how much of whats been said is actually going to be made available?

You can catch the latest on the Ojos front on Munjal Shah's blog(the founder of Ojos), which he calls recognizing Deven(his son), seemingly suggesting what ojos is capable of doing.

AJAX

Internet based applications are here to stay, some of them competing and outperforming their rival desktop based applications.

Innovations in web designing have thrown open platforms to developers that have no relation to the underlying OS’s. This is pretty much in line with Jason Kottke’s ideas.

Asynchronous Javascript and XML, a programming technique that’s more commonly referred to as AJAX has tremendously improved the way these web based applications interact with data, thereby dramatically improving the performance of these applications.

With AJAX, some of the major limitations of traditional web based applications, like page refreshes in order to update data on the page, can be avoided.

Some of the applications that have been creating waves, like Google’s Gmail, Google Maps etc run on AJAX.

Microsoft will soon be making an entry into this playground with its own AJAX toolbox, which is called Atlas, for ASP.net users to build web based applications. However we can expect Atlas to be hooked up to the Windows OS.

Yeh Dil Maange More!!!

Not being able to use the Google Talk service through my office firewall, I could barely wait to try it out on the weekend.

And when i did get it working at home and a friend with whom i could try the service out, i felt absolutely handicapped with many of the basic features that we've been used to in IM's missing in Google Talk. It has a neat interface and the works. But it does leave you a tad disappointed.

And "Yeh Dil maange more" also from the English Cricket team. We want one more!!!
The Ashes has come live again after a long long time.

The way this series is going we are likely to see yet another mock obituary:

In Affectionate Remembrance
of
AUSTRALIAN C R I C K E T,
which died at the Oval
on
12th SEPTEMBER, 2005,
Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances
R.I.P.
N.B. - The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to England.

For the uninitiated. It was this mock Obituary in 1982 which led to the legend of the "Ashes"!!

Clean Bowled!!!

With Australia being asked to follow-on in the Ashes Test, a first in the last 17 years of Ashes, the crowds werent exactly enjoying their Saturday night party. With plenty of booze in the air and some added adrenalin thrown in thanks to the state of affairs on the circket field, we were trying to make ourself as scarce as possible as we made our way back home from Vinayak's place.

As we got onto Exhibition Street from Bourke Street, two aussie girls walked past us discussing some dance steps. They walked past us and the next thing we heard them sing left us absolutely speechless.

"Ude jaise hawaen Sanan sanan, ude jaise parinde gagan gagan...." ... In pretty much flawless hindi!!!

Where is Google headed?

Over the last few weeks we have seen quite a lot written about Google and Microsoft.

Google Eath Vs MSN Virtual Earth
Google Homepage vs MSN Start Page

Google and Microsoft seem to have their own views of the internet world of tomorrow.

While Microsoft has been consolidating its position in the PC market by bundling a variety of information organisation/management tools along with its OS making the entire package extremely attractive, Google seems to have its own plans for tomorrow.

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And in keeping with its mission statement it has been coming out with applications that do just that and have been providing these for free. For every application that MS bundles along with its OS, Google seems to have on offer an application that does exactly that for absolutely free.

In doing so, Google is gradually sucking the life out of the Microsoft OS. What it aims to leave behind is just an OS that manages the hardware. With all other services being made available for free by Google and others like Yahoo, Mozilla etc, MS would find it difficult to make the entire package look like an attractive proposition.

Robert Young in a guest post on Om Maliks blog GigaOm, explains in detail what he thinks is Google's Strategy to make Microsoft obsolete.

Jason Kottke in his blog talks about OS Mutations that are likely to happen in the near future.

He talks about an OS based on the Web which he refers to as WebOS.
The System would have 3 main parts

1. A Browser
2. Web Applications and
3. A local Web Server : which would serve content from the local machine to the browser.

So apart from the web browser and the web server, all applications will be coded for the WebOS and not for any specific OS like Windows or Linux.

With Yahoo's acquisition of konfabulator and Google's release of its Desktop Search, we certainly seem to be heading in this direction!!!