The main difference between the machine sold as the Sidekick by T-Mobile in the US, and the machine now being launched into Europe, is colour. Nothhaft is trying to keep it a low-key crusade, because it's not ready to launch back in America - not until stocks of the monochrome one fall anyway...
the HipTop technology isn't unique to the GSM community; it's a design that "grew out of the WebTV project, which the founders of Danger sold to Microsoft, and then moved on to do this."
... In two weeks, Danger will release the software developer kit (SDK) and within six months (we'd bet within two) the colour machine will be sold. But Danger will make no money out of sales of HipTops; it is a software company, and is interested in finding people who will build it.
App Compatibility Looms Large. Microsoft is purchasing Connectix's virtual machine assets to allow customers to run older NT 4 applications on top of Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2003 product. eWeek has more on what's behind the acquisition. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
3:48:20 PM
Ross Mayfield: This vision of an Annotated Web where people make editorial judgments on content has existed in blogspace for some time now. Every blogger develops a link-rich annotated resource. People still outperform technology in qualitative decisions. The problem is people don't scale and not all judgments are equal (Third Voice was an attempt at the Annotated Web, but couldn’t discern which annotations were relevant). Google knows how to scale and already uses weblogs as a source of dynamic link-rich judgment to inform PageRank. Tapping into the natural intelligence of people to enhance the relevancy and meaning of search results is low hanging fruit, but there is more to this opportunity.
What Pyra and weblog platforms (Moveable Type, Radio and others) do really well is make publishing simple and affordable. Creating a post is as simple as using a WYSIWYG editor and clicking a button. Posts are structured in reverse chronological order, easy for readers to comprehend and writers to recall. Each post is also formatted in an XML specification called RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), which allows other bloggers to subscribe to posts in a news aggregator that scans in P2P fashion for updates once an hour. This open innovation has spawned others bundled aggregators/editors, Topic Exchange for group forming and Technorati and Daypop.
At Kevin Werbach'sSupernova conference on decentralized technologies (including weblogs), Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded to an audience of bloggers by agreeing to work with weblog platforms to accept ping notifications of new posts. [This is big -- Micah] The potential to synchronize and syndicate annotation posts to a service like Google News is a timely service and a model for the Web to come.The Google/Blogger combo (Bloogle?) can also distribute annotations, relevancy and AdWords to the Blogger Weblog platform to put each post in context.Bloogle is becoming a platform for the production, marketing and distribution of micro-content.
Predicting what Bloogle evolves into matters less than how weblogs are engaging people in a two-way Web. Google may dominate search and publishing, and others with follow, but weblogs as communication and collaboration platforms still remain open opportunities.
Not all links are created equal.Links between blogs are also conversations within social and creative networks.This social infrastructure, denser and more purposeful communities than newsgroups underpinned by real relationships, is very different from the information infrastructure that is Google and Blogger’s core competency.When people are engaged in the Web beyond being consumers the real opportunities arise.
Slashdot: "Due to restrictions imposed by the rather broad Homeland Security Act, the hobby I suspect many Slashdotters, being technology buffs, grew up with, the Estes Model Rocket is now firmly on the endangered species list. The little cardboard rockets I learned science with in high school are evidently suspected of being potential weapons of mass destruction. Go figure. Perhaps by getting involved, we can stop this sillyness... Anyway, i hope so...."
This is so incredibly stupid, it's amazing. I loved model rockets as a kid. It was object that you could create that really *did something*. I would hate to see this fun, educational, and sometimes destructive hobby denied from future generations of kids. I'm going to write my congressman.
