Bing from Microsoft - Changing the Search landscape?

Today, Microsoft announced a new avatar of its search engine – Bing. M$ claims that it's not just a search engine, but designed to help make decisions. 

In fact they are calling it a 'Decision Engine' and claim that It empowers people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to making the important decisions.

On the outset its pretty cool! The new snazzy design will have  a beautiful daily image on the homepage which will have  hotspots embedded in it to let you explore the picture in detail

 Bing launches globally on 3^rd June and some of the features will roll out in India in the coming months. 

You can check it out at www.bing.com.

Screens Round the town

GMail cross promoting Chrome and GMail outage on May 08, 2009

Customizing the Help Manuals

Often software products have different set of audiences and the challenge is not to write tutorials for each set but to help them locate the tutorial for meant for them. Mozy.com an online backup service has found a simple way to do this. 

Simply ask!! 

While it may not be so striaghtforward for most products, products can try different variants of the selection form above (like a stepwise workflow which helps you find your area). 

Google Groups Help also encourages you to search for your doubt before you fire a query and to "force" this habit on users it provides an auto complete of the subject line. :-) Clever eh? 

Have we heard this before?

Wowd, in its early stages now, is developing a platform that would help one find the best content online.

Source: http://www.businessworld.in/index.php/Markets-Finance/Enterprising-Repositions.html

CLEAN TECH DRIVE: VCs hope for big  successes in this industry, directed mostly at  fighting climate change. But since it is not  capital-efficient, VCs need to invest more to  make it a success (Bloomberg)

HEALTHCARE AND PHARMA PUSH:  Always sunrise industries, healthcare and pharma continue to interest VCs.  Healthcare reform in the US and  declining drug pipelines of large  companies will help start-ups  develop new businesses

How Our News Sources Changed in the Last 200+ Years

Our primary sources of information in the last 200 years - Timeline

In the early 19th century, the only way to get news was face-to-face
communication but that started to change with the advent of printed
newspapers and magazines in the 1900s.

Then came radio, followed by Television which still dominate the
medium but people are quickly moving away from traditional media as
Internet websites and social networks are fast becoming our primary
sources of news and information.

This shift in the way we consume information has been brilliantly
captured in these graphs by Thomas Baekdal who also predicts that
traditional media reporting on newspapers, Television & Radio will
disappear by 2020 to be replaced by social news.

"The traditional journalistic reporting is by now completely replaced
getting information directly from the source. Everyone is a potential
reporter, but new advances in targeting will eliminate most of the
noise. The journalists will turn into editors who, instead of
reporting the news, bring it together [from citizen journalists or
live sources like Twitter] to give us a bigger picture."

Read Detail: http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Management/market-of-information/

Educational Videos

Source: A Fabulous, Fabulous Resource

Salman Khan, a portfolio manager in California has created hundreds of free educational videos, available on his web site, the Khan Academy and on YouTube. These videos cover the basics of banking, finance and the current credit crisis — I saw a couple and they're quite good.

Even more importantly, there are hundreds of videos on mathematics (algebra, calculus, trignometry, probability and more) and physics. Salman has three degrees from MIT and one from Harvard, so he knows what he's talking about.

Anyone, anywhere in the world can benefit — all you need is access to the Internet. A good idea, fantastically implemented.

Thank you, Salman for investing all this time and energy.

Best presented election Results

Check out http://www.hindustantimes.com/election09/Map.aspx#

Presenting information well is an art - and HT has done a good job
here. For more on effective communication of complex information,
check this out:

http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/36_slides_that_.html

OpenID provider JanRain

Sane Advice from JanRain / RPX ... 

We recommend that you put the javascript at the bottom of the page because it will help the page load faster. Modern browsers block the page inline while loading javascript, so putting it at the bottom of the page will reduce the page load time.

Has any of you tried the RPX - single sign on / Open ID - tools provided by JanRain? Am Looking for some feedback.

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