More at http://www.sfetcu.com

Silence, forest, flowers and bugs

Film made by Dan Alexoae

R.J. Pittman, Director of Search Properties, showed some of the amazing advances Google made in image search, as well as how ads might work to enhance the user experience on image search. “There are over 300 million digital photos created each day,” said Pittman.

Carter Maslan, Director of Local Search Quality, talked about Google Geo products (Maps and Earth and their features) and the fact that they represent a considerable search problem. “Local search is a geographic lens to any place,” said Carter Maslan.

Johanna Wright, Director of Search Quality, emphasized on the search quality and the latest update on web search.

The Official Google Blog says that now Google Health is publicly available, offering to the users a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage their medical records and health information online. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, noted the challenges of dealing with myriad security and privacy concerns and making different record formats accessible.

Also, Google launched Go for Good campaign with the Cleveland Clinic.

TechCrunch has a very interesting overview with live notes on the presentations made by Google to the press to its headquarters in Mountain View.

Google has no immediate plans to monetize the Google Health site. “We don’t sell the information and we won’t share it unless asked to,“, said Roni Zeiger, a medical doctor and product manager for Google Health.

(See the video of the presentation by Google for their search properties)

Microsoft researchers has been developing an interesting astronomy application, now as a public beta, allowing you to see pictures from several observatories. The service is free of charge and uses high-resolution images from the world’s best land- and space-based telescopes.

WorldWide Telescope is a rich, Web 2.0 application allowing people to easily explore the night sky through their computers, a compelling astronomical resource for students and lifelong learners, and as a way to make science fun for children.

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. “By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe.”

WorldWide Telescope allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image environments and stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky. This way, people can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums.

“WorldWide Telescope brings to life a dream that many of us in Microsoft Research have pursued for years, and we are proud to release this as a free service to anyone who wants to explore the universe,” said Curtis Wong, manager of Microsoft’s Next Media Research Group. “Where is Saturn in the sky, in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? With the universe at your fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself.”

WWT uses images provided by Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope and many other observatories. It is possible to view the locations of planets in the night sky in the past, present or future, or the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy.

Download WorldWide Telescope

Press Release

Remember, this is in the middle of the desert…. The very HOT desert where temperatures get up to 120 degrees!

(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/glume)

(http://groups.google.com/group/funnypictures)

My neighbours has several trees in their garden where tens of little birds sit all the time and sing all day long. Some days ago, they bought a cat. And it seems that this cat like a lot to watch the birds (and not only!).

In the above image, the cat is mounted up in the top of the tree, trying to catch up to the birds sitting on other branches. The final is that the birds flew letting the cat alone. Another day, another try…

A bit too late for Microsoft, to enter on the sharing market. But they have enough power to push WebFives (ex Vizrea) through the first such centers. In fact, Microsoft is still the king of desktop applications, even if some of us deny it.

Here it is the message of Michael Toutonghi that can be found now on the homepage of WebFives:

WebFives to Close – Microsoft Buys Technology

I originally started Vizrea Corporation, now known as WebFives, in August of 2003 with a vision of making video, photo, music sharing, and blogging easy and accessible to everyone from any device. Since that time, we have worked tirelessly to develop and release an award-winning service, which thousands of users like you continue to enjoy and use. For a number of reasons, we determined this year that the best course of action for our company was to sell its technology to a larger firm with the vision and capability to take the best of our efforts and eventually make them available to millions, rather than thousands of users.

In November of 2007, we reached an agreement with Microsoft, wherein Microsoft has acquired all rights to WebFives technology, patents pending, trademarks, and software to incorporate into its products and services over time. In order to make our wind down process as easy as possible for our users, Microsoft has agreed to provide us with a license to continue operating WebFives until the end of the year, giving you time to copy any information you would like to keep to your own PCs or another service prior to the end of the year.

What this means to you is that we will be closing the WebFives service at the end of this year, after giving you this notice and time to download and copy any content that you may be storing on our servers. In order to copy content from our servers, you can click on the item you would like to copy and look for the download links on the left side when viewing the item. Use right-click (on a PC) and select “save as” to save the file on your PC.

When we do turn off the WebFives service after December 31, 2007, any content previously uploaded to WebFives user accounts will be deleted from our servers and no longer available online. While WebFives has pioneered some great technologies, including automatic upload of content from mobile phones and PCs, high-quality video sharing services, and automatic RSS feeds for everyone, our next challenge will be to help Microsoft incorporate the best of those technologies into its already comprehensive suite of products and services. I encourage you to look at MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live services as an alternative to WebFives for serving your video, photo, music sharing, and blogging needs on the Internet.

I want to personally thank you for using WebFives and for providing us with your feedback and support. We have enjoyed serving you and are excited to work with the world class talent at Microsoft to bring the benefits of our ideas and technology to millions of people worldwide. While operation of our service will soon come to an end, with every end is a new beginning. We, the employees of WebFives, look forward to the New Year and an opportunity to serve you through our work on other products and services at Microsoft, a company that shares our passion for innovation and excellence.

Thank you, happy holidays, and best wishes for the New Year!

Michael Toutonghi
CEO, WebFives Corporation

The company Corbis is offering for bloggers access to its stock photography, in exchange of some ads that it will be embedded into these images. The photos will either include an ad overlay on part of the image, or embedded advertising that pops up when a Web user runs a cursor over the picture.

The photos will be accessed via a web link from the site PicApp.com, now in a test phase.

Corbis says that the pictures are tracked and they are able to find out when the pictures are used illegally.

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