This is a great story that 60 Minutes picked up on. Some really innovative thinking, exceptional design and for a very good cause.

Please take the time to read all the details on the site www.laptop.org.

Here are some highlights for you:

“It’s an education project, not a laptop project.” — Nicholas Negroponte

Hardware

The XO is a potent learning tool created expressly for the world’s poorest children, living in its most remote environments. The laptop was designed collaboratively by experts from both academia and industry, bringing to bear both extraordinary talent and many decades of collective field experience for every aspect of this nonprofit humanitarian project. The result is a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra-low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children’s learning.

Our goal: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.

Software

XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptop computers on their own terms. While we do not expect every child to become a programmer, we do not want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines. We are using open-document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children—and their teachers—will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content.

Video from Yahoo/60 Minutes, worth watching.

If you work for an ad agency, interactive shop or just have a ton of digital files you need to share, this is a tool for you. Even if you don’t, I’m sure you can find reasons to try the trial. Check out the V3 blog they set up, some interesting usage from the private beta.

The online product is called V3RSION. It’s a tool that lets you manage your assets and give access to others in an easy way.

With this handy tool, you sign up, upload your stuff and give access but what makes this really cool is that they have given the user the ability to add tags that are logical and searchable. Plus you get thumbnail views of the most common formats.

No longer do I have to send emails with attachments, my RSS feed (that my clients subscribe too) get pinged when I have added or made changes.

Anyway, check it out. I have already used it and love it.

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Second Life is a virtual world where users can pilot their avatars through scenes as varied as shopping districts, live concerts by real bands, BSDM dungeons, and feudal Japan.

People can (and do) buy real estate in Second Life with real money, and some respectable firms, like Dell, have set up showrooms for customizable hardware.  Users can create new objects, buildings, and avatars in the world with a proprietary scripting language.  On top of all that, the very concept is inspired by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Some companies would be satisfied by creating something so geeky it couldn’t even pledge Tri-Lambda, but Linden Labs, publishers of Second Life, decided it needed something more.  Linden announced today that the Second Life client will be released under the GPL, the software equivalent of hippie hair and a Unix beard.  It also looks like they’ll be changing their scripting engine to use Mono, so I guess scripts can be written in a CIL language like C#.  Super geeky fun.

Linden Labs may have made this decision because they were afraid of Second Life becoming too mainstream, but it was probably a strategic move aiming to keep the steam going on Second Life’s press buzz and cut the knees out from an effort to reverse engineer the client’s protocol.  Second Life has been getting all kinds of good press recently, for no good reason.  It was even featured in the New York Time’s Escapes section a few months ago.  Naturally the popular press glosses over the stickier details, such as the development of in-world worms; woefully inadequate server power, resulting in a lot of lag and downtime; and a duplicating program that can copy items from other users, revealing the fragility of an economy of nontangible goods.

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I’m only posting this Mac commercial to make one simple point; the statement made in this commercial is a fundamental difference between two (extreme) types of computer users and one that I think Apple should have though twice about highlighting.

* Making a photo book on your computer is called a ‘hobby’

* Working on GUI programming in C++ is ‘work’

I know that plenty of ‘work’ gets done on Apple products but I think their marketing department is doing itself a disservice, especially considering OS X’s roots, by ridiculing people that might be on the geekier end of the computing spectrum. Besides, that’s a lot of money to shell out for a hobby.

…and hey, what’s sexier than firing up GCC on a 30-inch Cinema Display?

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Widgets, gadget…whatever you want to call them are all the rave. No it’s not just Apple doing them. The open development is what makes these little apps fun. A new level of collaborative creativity will be needed from functionality, design and development.

What sets Yahoo! Widget Engine apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today’s advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X.

The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task.

Check out the Microsoft Gadgets site.

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SphereXP is a pretty cool little application that sits on top of you XP desktop and allows you to have dimensional control over your viewing area. It’s pretty fun to play with but not something I’m going to keep. To install the application you will need the latest version of .net framework, after that, it’s an easy install. Check it out.

Thanks Dane for the information.

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I have seen versions of this commercial from T-Mobile many times and it makes me smile everytime. I have felt the way they act many times when I get my bill.

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Better search, that is the goal of this young company. They were recently at Web 2.0 to show “search” can be made better, and that they are well on the way.

Kozoru showed up with half a dozen PSPs loaded with a brand video pre-installed. They handed them out to the people they wanted to talk too. The video does a pretty good job explaining what Kozoru is working on.

Some really killer stuff, making search less of a search and more of a found. I got a copy of the video sent to me today, which you can watch by clicking on the image below. It’s a big file so you might have to wait a few seconds for it to load.

When these guys launch Instant Answering, I hope that it does change how we currently search.  I for one, am personally tired of looking and not finding.

A little more from Om Malik and even more from Michael Bazeley.

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Google and Sun Microsystems are going to team up to try to get Sun’s Java Runtime Environment more widely distributed, and, with any luck, so Google can do cool things like turn OpenOffice into a web app.  Within a week of the buzz about the $100 laptop which would run most of it’s software from Internet servcies, it looks like Google is taking every opportunity to lock their market lead in the next generation of computing.

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I got a new computer awhile ago, and for some reason I couldn’t get MS Office to install on it.  I decided to install OpenOffice until I could figure out the problem, and I’ve never looked back.  I may not be alone.  The CIO for the Massachusetts state government has decreed that by 2007 all the documents it creates should be saved in the OpenDocument format, which is a portable, license-free, text-based format.

In one way, this is a great decision.  They will gain portability between software and operating systems, and they are protected from losing old data when a format is abandoned.  OpenDocuments are a set of XML files in a compressed archive, so they can be easily manipulated by scripting languages and tracked in revision systems.  The software to use the format, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice, is free, open source, and can be scripted in a variety of languages.

On the other hand, OpenOffice and StarOffice are not quite drop in replacements for MS Office, and the help system isn’t as friendly as MS Office’s (though more detailed).  The retraining could be costly.  In the worst case, some employees will continue to use MS Office to create content before converting it to OpenDocument, creating a mess of incompatible macros and procedure documents.  In addition, the CIO is getting a lot of pressure from Microsoft and other groups to reverse this decision.  My favorite quote from the linked article is

Melanie Wyne, executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a coalition of computer hardware and software companies, also disapproved of Quinn’s action. Wyne said that the new policy would force the state to switch from commercial software like Microsoft Office, to free ‘’open source” alternatives like StarOffice, a program that automatically saves all files in the OpenDocument standard. Wyne said that such a policy is unfair to commercial software developers, who should have an equal opportunity to win state government contracts.

If Melanie Wyne actually believes that she must be pretty stupid.  Going from a proprietary format which locks the government into Microsoft software to an open format which can be used by any company’s software creates opportunities for commercial developers.

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