Deviant Abstraction

Google has just released a new service. It allows you to create your search engine quite easily. Here is my test one.

This is technically impressive. I need to test it further though.

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Sonos is a very cool music system. I will own some when I will get rich!

Joel Spolsky describes why this product is great and how it is built. Pretty cool article. Pure excellent applied marketing.

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An excellent moves for everybody. Here is an excerpt from the emails they have sent us.

We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?
Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot’s team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.

What does this mean for JotSpot customers?
We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world’s best environment for delivering on it. We’ll be taking advantage of Google’s world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can’t share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can’t think of a better company to have been acquired by.
Will paying customers still be charged?

We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won’t charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

As you may know, I have started working on my master’s thesis for my company. Thanks to this enlightened company, the produced software will be open source.

If you care to know what this thesis is all about, here is a quick document about the system I am designing and building. I am waiting for your feedback.

This document is highly unscientific and quite general but might allow you to understand better what I am writing and why I like it.

I will update regularly this blog on the status and deliverables of my thesis, so stay tuned… Even better fetch my RSS feed.

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A must read. This blog is becoming better and better.

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If you want to get a glimpse of the future of information management, you should click here.

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We all know this chart is already obsolete and somewhat irrelevant. However, reflecting upon it is always useful.

What it really shows is the mainstream view of these technology. You can see VoIP or Web 2.0 but not P2P which is an emerging system trends (in the sense that a lot of its potential is still untapped). Some points are senseless (Grid computing: what does it mean? MPI is already there and battle-tested) and mix commercial application (VoIP), applied research (sensor networks) and fundamental research (quantum computing). In a way, this is good: it lays down some frontiers the academic community has artificially created.

Via JdN

In this post, John Battelle shows us a Microsoft slide showing how MS expenses outsells his competitor (mainly Google and IBM). John then states Google engineering department operates as a R&D lab.

This raises an interesting question, deeply rooted in today’s questions what is R&D? Should we separate (as we do in France) fundamental research and applied research? What is the best way to do R&D?

If we look at the past’s big names, we can see how much those questions are somewhat falsely named. For instance John Von Neumann invented both computer and game theory (and a lot of other research). Metcalfe invented Ethernet and founded 3Com… Basically, all those human beings have done everything and did what they wanted to.

On an organizational level, this question is way more complex to answer: how should R&D be handled, what is expected from it? Papers? Products? New way of understanding reality?

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It costs around $ 200 and allow you to remote control your PC.

Isn’t this totally cool?

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Via O’Reilly