NASA, in conjunction with the Internet Archive, has recently launched an online image gallery.
Nasa Images
The site offers public access not only to images but also to the video and audio collections from NASA.
iTunes U is a service, from the Apple iTunes Store, that provides access to a collection of educational course materials from hundreds of leading Universities across the world and is available to anyone with a Mac or PC (and of course iTunes). Users can download and play course content just like they do for music, videos and TV shows. Some of the courses are on-going and you can subscribe to automatically receive each new episode whenever it becomes available.
http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html
iTunesU
To date, this service has been used by many Universities in the US including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, amongst many others, to provide course materials and lectures to students.
The UK’s Open University has recently added more than 300 items of video and audio course material to the iTunes U service.
Open University on iTunes
Professor Brenda Gourley, the Open University Vice-Chancellor said:
The iTunes U project is an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to Open University courses. Our aim is to partner our established distance learning expertise with the power of the internet to provide as mobile, flexible and personalised learning as possible, whatever your current educational level, personal circumstances or technological abilities. We are delighted to be joining with leading institutions around the world to pool curriculum and content to suit your needs, and hopefully to offer you useful accreditation and recognition at every stage of your studies.
Other Universities to join iTunes U recently include University College London and Trinity College Dublin.
Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo has conducted a series of interviews with his people involved in the development of the Wii Fit.
Read the stories so far:
AT&T are bringing the Microsoft Surface™ to their stores in New York, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco on April 17.
The Microsoft Surface™ is the first commercially available computer from Microsoft that allows the user to interact with the device by using touch or gestures and the placement of other devices on the display surface. AT&Tare the first company to use the device in a retail outlet.
Customers will be able to find out the details of a particular mobile phone by simply placing it on the display surface or compare features of 2 phone by placing them side by side.
Other features will be provided that allow a customer to check the coverage in their local area using interactive maps that can be explored using simple touch and hand movements.
In the future, customers will be able to drag ring-tones, graphics and videos from a menu of options on the display and dropping them into the phone.
Details (press release) from AT&T are available at
http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=2604
Details of the Microsoft Surface™ (from Microsoft) are available at
I’ve recently added a list of links to various Research Labs so be sure to check them out from the Research Labs menu. But be warned, they can become quite absorbing and you could be hooked for hours.
Meanwhile, Microsoft have recently announced plans to create a new research lab in Cambridge Mass. that will be known as – Microsoft Research New England – and is scheduled to open in July 2008.
http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/labs/newengland/default.aspx
The lab, Microsoft Research’s sixth research facility worldwide, will pursue new, interdisciplinary areas of research that bring together core computer scientists and social scientists to understand, model, and enable the computing and online experiences of the future
A Press Release is available at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass…CambridgeLabPR.mspx
and an interview with the founding members is available at
http://research.microsoft.com/news/…/Chayes-Borg.aspx?0hp=n2
Sabeer Bhatia, famous for co-founding Hotmail and selling it to Microsoft for US $400 million, has recently announced the release of Live Documents, an online Office service.
Although not quite live yet, the site will accept requests for an invitation to join the private beta program of its technology preview.
Live Documents is a suite of on-line Office applications, built using technologies including Flash and Flex, which offer functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The applications allow users to edit and view documents using a web-browser on any operating system.
The suite is also available as a desktop client application that enables offline access to documents. Although not entirely clear from information available on the web-site, this appears to be provided via a plug-in to Microsoft Office applications which converts them to web-enabled smart clients.
There are currently at least 3 players in this market segment viz Microsoft, Google and Adobe. It remains to be seen whether, or by how much, this new entrant will create an impact.
BTW whatever happened to Office Live Workspace, which is the equivalent offering from Microsoft? Perhaps this will provide a spur for them to open it up a bit more . . .
A first look at Photo Gallery from the Windows Live suite.
This test is trying out the ability to upload images in Live Writer. If everything worked OK, you should see the image below.
I’m writing this using Windows Live Writer which I’ve just downloaded. This is one of the applications which is part of the Windows Live series and is available, at the time of writing, from
Other items include:
So far so good, although I would like to see an auto-save feature; it may already be included, I just haven’t found it yet.
Installation was relatively straightforward, although it did seem to take long time to complete.
In addition to Live Writer, I also installed Live Mail – which is a client email application and Photo Gallery – equivalent to Picasa from Google.
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