Tech Force One is my web log related to technologies, I use day to day.
Microsoft’s hardwork in 2009 »
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- Mashable has an interesting article on Microsoft’s products in 2009 and how it corrected its course (with encarta, flight simulator etc). We saw some big products like Bing and Windows 7 in this year. Read more about it here.
10 painful Netbook and Laptop positions »
Gizmodo has an article showing ten positions of exquisite pain. I am sure we would have tried most of those positions.
We need lights that melt snow! »
Engadget has an article about how cold states in the US are complaining about LED lights not generating enough heat to melt the snow that covers them. I guess, incandescent light bulbs, despite being energy inefficient, had their own advantages. You can read more about the article here.
Vertical Search Engines »
With number of websites, blogs and microblogging sites increasing, how effective are broad search engines like Google and Bing? Even with great page ranking algorithms, over time, I believe search results will become diluted. For example, if you type, “Hospitals in Bangalore”, you will probably see results from Google Local first, followed by Google web search results. In fact, you will see almost all the results duplicated. In order for me to get more effective results like hospitals by their speciality or even by reputation, I will probably have to give more keywords to Google. Now let us move to the mobile world, where typing is a pain in the bottom. What I foresee is that more and more vertical search engines will come up in the future, focussing on a particular domain and region. Searching at WebMD will most likely give better search results about a particular medical problem than doing a similar thing on typical search engines.
Another challenge to search engines are “content farms”. You can read more about content farms here. Here is an interesting article on the impact of content farms to search engines.
Amazon’s CloudFront now supports audio and video streaming! »
Amazon CloudFront now supports streaming of media files stored in Amazon S3. You can now use CloudFront to improve access to your static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so forth) as well as your streaming content. You can read more about it here.
Bing is now on iPhone! »
Microsoft’s Bing app is now on iPhone. After all, we are all good friends! You can read more about it including some screenshots here.
Google Public DNS – OpenDNS »
Google, on 12/3/2009, announced a new DNS resolving service for the public. DNS (Domain Name System) helps in resolving the URL (website address) you type into a IP address. There are other players in this market, like OpenDNS, which is really cool. Google says that because of its infrastructure, its service is faster and more secure.
Google is also in the Advertisement business. So I am not sure what kind of data Google collects whenever we use Google DNS. I am sure it would be tempting for Google to log information related to user usage of the web, like what websites they are visiting etc. But I am hoping that Google will continue to follow its ”Don’t be evil” approach.
You can read more about Google Public DNS here.
