Fifteen minute presentations on what’s going on in labs…

Rick Rashid, Microsoft Labs. “SenseCam” is a wearable recorder, presumably part of MyLifeBits, the Gordon Bell project. He takes us under the hood. E.g., they wait for stability to take a photo in order to avoid blurriness. “The ultimate blogging tool,” he says [if you’ve confused blogging with living]. He says there are 12 operational units so far. They’re building a new generation: Smaller, GPS, continuous audio.

He also talks about “surface computing” that lets you manipuate images on a surface. [It’s very similar to a concept video Bruce Tognazzini did for Sun at least ten years ago. But this is an actual implementation.]

Gary Flake, Yahoo. He talks about Y!Q that does contextual searching. He also talks about aggregating opinions into markets. He announces a joint project between Yahoo Labs and O’Really. It’s an artificial market on questions related to emerging tech trends. It’s a contest. E.g., you purchase shares in OS X Panther vs. OS X Tiger — when will the search queries for Tiger overtake Panther?

They’re also introducing today a new type of auction called a Dynamic Pari-mutuel Auction. “If this doesn’t revolutionize auctions, it will revolutionize gambling.” He doesn’t have time to give us any details.

Peter Norviq, Google. He points to Google Suggests. It was done by a single engineer as his one-day-a-week project. It looks like autocomplete but it’s not: Every keystroke is a request to Google which is then put into a box drawn by javascript.

He also talks about Google Maps. They use iframes because there’s a history object you can go back to. [Hmm. I thought I knew what an iframe is, but I don’t understand that sentence.]

He shows a personalization slider . [I’m just not as impressed by sliders as I’m supposed to be.] And Google Sets. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

Categories: Uncategorized dw