The fact that Stephen Wolfram is a genius is beyond any trace of doubt; the fact that it takes a work of a genius to put up something like Google is undeniable. Are these two geniuses really on a collision course? We are witnessing WA as threat to Google but why Google only, WA imposes direct competition to Wikipedia also and so many other great things we regularly use. Within seconds when Wolfram Alpha went live amidst a storm on May 16 it started receiving 10 unique hits per second. Its not a coincidence when Stephen Wolfram was giving presentation on WA's beta, Google released their service on the very same hour which has a stark resemblance with WA interface and is based on Google's 2007 acquisition of Trendalyzer . Rumors has it that WA's curated data is 300 times the size of what Google's crawlers guzzle. So will we, the users at the totem pole of food chain, be forced to make a choice. Maybe I am exaggerating it too far maybe not. WA's present data in graphical format, charts, maps etc. It does have the potential to creative new advertising space, if that's the case Google will ferociously defend its territory and when a company with $131.8bn of war-chest is involved, the war will get dirty. Wolfram said in an interview "We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here. The types of things that people are currently searching for have some overlap [with Google], but it isn’t huge. What’s exciting is that we have a whole new class of things that people can put into a input field and have it tell them what it knows.” WA doesn't claim to be a search engine,it calls itself a Fact Engine or computational Knowledge Engine. Microsoft Bing went live on 3rd June and they claim it to be a Decision Engine. So we have here a search engine, a fact engine and a decision engine. Are you sure which engine is right for your digestive system? One more thing to note about WA is that requires some learning, Google rides on top of the fact user knows how to read and write type and users can put keywords in the engine without any training. WA requires more than that, user are expected to have some familiarity with any query language to exploit WA capabilities to its fullest. People who have used Mathematica back at the school know what I mean.
So another search engine called Bing showed up on web on 3rd June. Well, OK, they could have a better name for it but its Microsoft so we have tolerate the names. What if Microsoft had created ipod, well then it would have been named as Microsoft Ipod XP Professional Edition (SP2). Alright enough bad jokes, maybe Bing is just a recursive acronym like GNU: GNU's Not Unix or P.I.N.E: Pine is not Elm and Bing: Bing Is Not Google. It is rather trivial to figure out what Bing does. Its a decision engine by software behemoth which claims to help people in making buying decision. But why, aren't ebay or amazon doing its job well enough? Do we really need another product review, fare comparison, or travel planner site claiming it to be a search engine. Microsoft is using Powerset technology and it shows up in the result and some people say Bing's understanding of intent is fairly better than Google. I observed its only true when you search for US specific stuff. Maybe MS still needs to collect substantial data for the international audience. Comparing Bing and Google result on http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/ was really a funny experience. When I searched for the word sex, Bing didn't accepted it as a keyword, now this similarity between Wolfram Alpha and Bing puts a thought in my mind that both these engines can used in schools for kids with the offending content of the Internet being filtered out. But that can be bypassed if you change your country settings in Bing. Bing is surely getting positive reviews across the globe and its quite expected for a product with $100 million marketing muscle.
Is semantic web really an unfair advantage ?
In this edition lets talk about only Calais and how automated generation of rich semantic metadata will give your website an unfair advantage.We, the users, are accustomed to consume human generated content like blogs,scraps or tweets, engines like wolfram spew machine generated content.Now this kind content is equally consumable by humans and machine. This explores a new dimension of Internet of which machines can be dominant player in consuming or creating content. With Calais exposing its webservice to public it’s pretty simple for a user to generate rich metadata for her content: You hand the Web Service unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, your term paper, etc.) and it returns semantic metadata in RDF format. The metadata is generated using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, the Calais Web Service examines your text and locates the entities (people, places, products, etc.), facts (John Doe works for Acme Corporation) and events (Jane Doe was appointed as a Board member of Acme Corporation). Well we should be talking about it 10 years earlier but thanks to Jeff Bezos many of the great ideas got subverted by the fireworks of dotcom boom. But recently there have been lots of activity in semantic web. Calais being one of the serious effort.
"I saw that baboon whi
le driving at 70 mph." Does your laptop knows who was driving at 70 mph, you or the baboon (No offenses meant). Well that's one feature in Wave, it has server side semantic engine that can provide contextual suggestions if your spelling is right but grammar isn't. Wave is aimed at designing a co mmunication system that takes advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms. So you don't have to use different apps to mail, chat or share photos. Wave seamlessly integrates all this and more in single communication model in one smooth continuum called Wave. So on a single wave you can work on many things all when you are having chat with your friends. It not live yet but the API is released for the developers at the Google I/O by Vic.Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale. Once you are stick to wave you will be addicted to it and will find other collaboration suites rather trivial.Jaunty Jackalope is here and to stay.
So the long term support version of Ubuntu 9.04 code named Jaunty Jackalope was finally released on 23 April 2009 and heck I upgraded my intrepid right away on the same day and the improvements are rather glaring. C ombine jaunty with compiz fusion and you got the fanciest desktop you could ever imagine. For the interested ones Ultimate Edition 2 is now available.
A new “Netbook Remix” package optimized for the latest tiny laptops. So the cumulative effort in the direction of netbook seems to gain real momentum as google unveils it plans to launch a chrome based on OS later next year. Ubuntu now offers support for the Ext4 filesystem thanks to the new Linux kernel (version 2.6.28)and includes a new wireless package that should help those using newer wi-fi cards. But that nasty bug is still there that causes the wi-fi led to flash moronically. Maybe Karmic Kaola scheduled to be released on this november will fix it.Jaunty promises to push the OS toward hybrid “weblications" where desktop based apps interact more and more with web for their core functionalities to deliver eclectic user experience.
In a post to the Ubuntu mailing list Shuttleworth writes, “The bar is set very high, and we have been given the opportunity to leap over it… we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu, because many people will judge free software as a whole by what we do.”. So true.
Project Natal: Reclaim the control.
This is by far one of the most dazzling product I have ever seen coming out from MS stable, well I got bit dazzled with Silverlight also but never mind. When I first saw the launch on youtube (gaah, couldn't configure moonlight for my jaunty yet ) I was amazed at such a marvelous piece of technology, innovation and implementation, the last time I saw anything like that was BigDog from Boston Dynamics. Well people like Steven Spielberg don't show up to inaugurate AS/400 version of retirement planning game for kids. Project Natal is aimed for controller free entertainment on Xbox where user can do away with the controller and become the controller themselves. You see a ball kick it, have skateboard scan it and starting loafering around. It has highly advanced AI, you are playing and someone walks into the room and the game automatically goes multiplayer. Project Natal has far reaching potential unimagined by the design team itself. Enhance the vector dynamic precision and it can be used for space, military or medical use. I am running short of words for Project Natal now, go get a load of the launch video and you will know why.
FutureCast: Well, umm, maybe Google will buy twitter. Please don't beat me in the hallway if this goes wrong. ( By wrong I don't mean that Twitter will end up in buying Google instead.)
Further Links
Wolfram Alpha :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIOH80Qg7Q
Semantic Web : http://ow.ly/h0Gt
http://ow.ly/h0Gl
http://www.opencalais.com/about
Project Natal : http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U
Bing : http://www.bing.com/
http://ow.ly/h6TK
Wave : http://ow.ly/h6TQ
