Google Gears, a technology created by Google to allow developers to create offline Web applications, was released today.

Google Gears comes as a browser extension.

It is a very significant move, because most applications until now have worked either entirely online, or entirely on your desktop — not both. Microsoft has moved to make applications like Outlook work on and offline, and has upgraded its efforts with its Silverlight project. Adobe, too, recently introduced Apollo, a similar technology. However, these are nascent efforts.

Google move is particularly noteworthy, though, because Google has no legacy paid software to protect. Its products are for free. Most people have resisted switching to Google, because of the unreliability of online-only applications. This latest move will assuage those concerns, and could eventually gouge a big portion of Microsoft’s business.

Wondering what direction Microsoft’s stock price heads tomorrow?.

While Microsoft hasn’t pushing its own online-offline products aggressively, Google is about to. Today, for example, it released an RSS reader, which works both offline and online. It will likely to do the same soon in word processing, spreadsheets and other applications.

Notably, Google Gears will be open source.

So not only will Google create offline web applications, it is encouraging others to do so too. In its statement, Google said it hopes to help the industry move to a standard for creating such applications.

The Gears API will also be available in Apollo. Google Gears offers new JavaScript APIs for data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features.

Source: VentureBeat, Blogforward

LiveScribe, an Oakland, Calif. company, releases tomorrow one of the more wondrous communication features we’ve seen lately.

It has developed technology that lets you take handwritten notes from a lecture or interview with a high-tech pen. The pen will remember everything that was being said when you took the notes.

So if you’re looking for a portion of the conversation you didn’t quite understand or remember, you simply tap your paper notes, and the spoken interview will play back for you.

The technology is all stored in the pen, which has an audio recorder, but which also has sophisticated visual sensors that tracks tiny dots on the paper you’re using so that it remembers which spot in the lecture matches which notes you took.

More profoundly, the company’s software lets you build applications on the paper. So you can email your article directly from your notes, or even post an article to your blog from your notes! Without logging on to the computer.

LiveScribe requires special paper - the tiny dots spaced out at particular unique intervals — but otherwise the paper looks quite normal.

This is remarkable stuff, best understood by a demo which we will load shortly (hopefully by end of Tuesday eve). It unveils tomorrow at the D5: All Things Digital conference.

I got a personal demo of the technology from Jim Marggraff, chief executive of the company, and I was immediately sold. As someone who takes copious notes and would like to find the vocal version instantly, this is quite the journalist’s nirvana. Moreover, it lets you hook up to a computer, so that you can see the spoken version of your notes unfolding on your computer screen (it uses translation technology, to translate the voice into text). It shows you where you are in the lecture, and the parts that are still to come — in a different shade of color.

This is not snake oil. Marggraff is a leading visionary in the area of new ways of learning. His breakthrough was at the well-known children’s education company Leapfrog, where he helped build its paper-based popular multimedia products — books with paper that spoke — and which became the top-selling toys in the U.S. Leapfrog sold the technology in 60 million books, reaping $1 billion in five years. Marggraff later moved on to a Swedish company called Anoto, and continued his experimentation, but left last year, to build out what is effectively a mobile computer in a pen. His goal: To take the technology to adults.

In his demo for us, Marggraff showed how to create little applications on a page, letting us write on the paper, and then tap on them to do arithmetic. For example, tap on the figures “2&Prime, “+”, and “2&Prime and “=” and then a speaker in the pen answers with “4&Prime.

To be clear, it wasn’t completely bug-free. There were moments where we had to pause or press again in order for the pen to register what we were doing.

We weren’t able to test filing a blog post to our blog from the piece of paper, but Marggraff promises to let us do that soon.

That can work because the paper application sends a signal through the pen to an Internet connection — which allows you to file the post. The pen will be docked with the computer, for the first release. However, in a second release, the pen will carry WiFi, so you won’t need to have your computer with you.

A life-size version of the pen is seen below:

More on the technology: LiveScribe licensed the dot paper technology from Anoto, when that company decided to pass on investing in Marggraff’s ambitious portable computer-pen idea (Anoto has been focused on its own financial turnaround).

The micro-dots in the paper are part of a unique grid system developed by Anoto. The camera in the smartpen sees these dots and tracks the pen’s location to enable digital indexing of content. Dot paper may also be printed on certified home or business printers.

The Anoto technology licensing allowed Marggraff to start building LiveScribe beginning last year. He set out to raise $22 million in venture capital from investors. VantagePoint Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley firm, is a backer, and Marggraff is looking to close the round.

The note-taking feature is called “Paper Replay.” The pen records the conversation and digitizes the handwriting, automatically synching the ink and audio. By later tapping the ink (twice, just like you click twice on a mouse), the smartpen replays the conversation from the exact moment the note was written. Notes and audio can also be uploaded to a PC where they can be replayed, saved and searched. The search tool is pretty impressive — you can search through a lecture for a particular word.

Source: VentureBeat, Via BlogForward

Ajaxian: When I first saw the new Street View functionality that has appeared in the Google Maps preview I was obviously impressed.

We have seen other companies taking photos of the content, but being able to walk around the Map was very cool. If I am visiting a new building, or area, I find myself checking out the area before I drive there, as it is a lot easier to find the end point if you have seen it, and walked around the outside.

There was also a release of Mapplets, which are embeddable Google Maps mashups. You are able to overlay multiple mashups onto the one map, which means that you can combine the old favourites: HousingMaps.com and ChicagoCrime.org to make sure you get your new home in a decent area!

What is exciting about these new features is that we have more tools to play with (writting Mapplets), and a nice showcase of using Flash within an Ajax application (Maps).

Bruce Willis is still sad

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The wait is over. No more speculation and no more rumors. Just a few hours ago, Blizzard announced Starcraft 2 at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul. This will be the first sequel to one of the most popular PC strategy games ever. The Terrans, Protoss, and Zerg are all coming back, each with their own unique style of play. The game’s trailer was already up on Youtube by midnight and got almost 27,000 views in just over four hours.

Starcraft 2’s release date hasn’t yet been announced, but it won’t be alone when it hits stores. Supreme Commander and Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars have been out for a few months already, and both are very hot strategy games in their own rights. By the time Starcraft 2 comes around, these other two games might be getting stale, or they might be getting even more popular, perhaps with new expansions. Considering how long the original Starcraft stayed at the top of the charts, I wouldn’t discount either option. Blizzard has a lot of work to do if it wants to reclaim the title as king of the real-time strategy game. We’ll just have to watch what happens as the screenshots and preview videos come pouring in.

Via: ExtraTech

Games Digest  reports that a Russian design company has announced its intention to ship a revolutionary keyboard to the world in 2006. Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a small OLED display. Meaning each key can be reconfigured to display icons for game controls etc

Now its first announcement with a price tag of $1564 for the PC keyboard with an OLED display on every key. Admittedly, it isn’t cheap - but if you want a keyboard with customisable keys and graphics, you’ll have to pay for the privilege.

Apple’s iPhone took one step closer to launching Wednesday, as the company received permission from the Federal Communications Commission to sell it in the U.S.

The iPhone’s ready for prime time, according to the FCC.

It’s not like that permission was ever really in doubt. But the FCC requires anyone who makes a phone or wireless device for use in this country to pass some basic tests that ensure the device isn’t putting out harmful radiation, or death rays, or other emissions that could cause problems. The FCC also publishes those documents on its Web site, which has led to the discovery of unannounced products in the past. That’s part of the reason why CEO Steve Jobs preannounced the iPhone in January.

The iPhone is known as the “A1203,” at least for testing purposes. All those years of homework must have paid off, for the iPhone A1203 passed the tests with flying colors. An Apple representative told Reuters that the iPhone remains on track for a late June arrival.

Via ExtraTech, Source: CNET

In the U.S., the promise of the future in accessing mobile information via WAP or a rich client application casts a shadow on SMS, better known as text messaging or “texting”.

According to conventional wisdom, WAP and downloaded client applications are the holy grails of mobile, with their ability to deliver splashy, colorful landing pages, images and videos to consumers on their mobile phones. Companies like AOL are snapping up WAP advertising startups like Third Screen Media with the belief that, as devices and networks improve, increased consumer adoption will follow.

But SMS is no underdog. It has huge adoption now, is very versatile and useful and is going to persist, even if the handsets and networks catch up to the hype being created around WAP and clients. It’s not like the industry is slamming text messaging, most just ignore it for the razzle-dazzle of newer technology. But some are realizing where the real volume is. Maybe more importantly, SMS has the highest overall usage rates in the US (37%) compared to WAP (14%) or rich clients (6%).

Why are people going to keep using SMS?

1. My mother can use SMS

SMS is simple. My mom can text message, but she doesn’t have a clue how to go to a website on her cell phone or download a client application. As much as people think they want the cutting edge technology, when you want information right now, you’re going to go straight to the quick and easy feature that you know how to use, which is text. Answers come quick, efficiently, and on any device, not just the newest and hottest.

2. People (including my mother) are using it NOW

I think the market’s default assumption is that it will eventually be able to replicate the web or a desktop experience on a cell phone. That assumption overlooks the widespread adoption of what’s already in most people’s hands. Unlike the new, and more expensive technologies, text messaging works for almost everybody, right now. People don’t change when they have a tool that already works. Eighty-eight percent of US Internet users said they used text messaging; WAP and clients didn’t even make this list.

3. SMS is asynchronous

That’s fancy talk for being able to do the following (not possible with WAP or a client): You can send an SMS, then turn off or put away your phone and get the response later. You don’t need to keep your phone open to wait for a page to download. You can also store the information from an SMS permanently in your inbox

4. Check out Europe and Asia

Take a look at how SMS has taken off in Europe and Asia. In the UK, you can get local election results via SMS. You can order a pizza or a taxi via SMS. Despite access to faster networks and more advanced handsets, in Asia as much as 72% of mobile revenue comes from text messaging.

5. Pushing the Possibilities

The fact that SMS is the only true “push” mechanism for mobile information makes it quite powerful. Want sports updates or traffic information sent to you automatically? The only mobile medium for this type of service is SMS. Although users can visit WAP sites or receive email on their phones, SMS has both the simplicity and the immediacy to encourage ongoing usage and wide adoption. Also, anyone can receive a text message alert. They can set it up on the web and still get the value of staying in the know on the go. They don’t even have to know how to send a text message!

Today, SMS accounts for approximately 75 to 80 percent of non-voice service revenues worldwide. Despite all the noise around WAP and the latest technologies, most of the action is in SMS. Traditional media companies (online, print, TV) and advertisers are taking notice. I’m not saying that browsing the web on your phone isn’t going to become better and that new handsets won’t continue to offer great experiences. You absolutely need to be able to browse for some things. Just don’t overlook SMS: this technology isn’t going away.

Via blogforward money

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