Ray-Deo

Viewscore aggregates gadget reviews

Say hello to the metacritic.com of gadgets. The cool technology here though is that the site normalizes numeric ratings across sites that use different scales (a number out of ten or up to five stars are converted to a score out of 100) and uses semantic analysis to determine a number for reviews that don’t use numeric ratings. All the reviews are averaged and viewable individually. You can compare prices and rate the quality of the reviews. There’s also basic information displayed about each product and a product comparison page for many gadgets.

From Techcrunch

Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

Google is adding a feature to its Google Books service today to allow PDF downloads of out-of-copyright books. For example, to download a pdf version of Dante’s Inferno, see the right sidebar of this page.

Until now, Google only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online (and only snippets of copyrighted works). To search the database of available full titles, go to books.google.com and click the “full view books” option when searching. This new move contradicts earlier statements by Google that scans of out-of-copyright books would not be made available for printing.

Many full view titles, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, don’t have the PDF option yet.

Project Gutenberg is already offering downloads of thousands of out-of-copyright books, although the formating is inconsistent and the interface is less than user friendly.

From Techcrunch

The New York Times reports that the communist government in the Indian state of Kerala is trying to remove Microsoft from its public institutions, as part of a campaign against monopolistic corporations. From the article: ’schools and public offices across the state are being encouraged to install free software systems instead of purchasing Microsoft’s Windows programs. “It is well-known that Microsoft wants to have a monopoly in the field of computer technology. Naturally, being a democratic and progressive government, we want to encourage the spread of free software,” M. A. Baby, the state’s education minister, said by telephone. “The government is not banning Microsoft, but it is actively encouraging all 12,500 public schools in the state to install Linux.”

Users who plan to upgrade their PC with more system memory could see some steep price increases over the next few weeks. The DRAMExchange, which monitors semiconductor spot trading prices, said that DDR prices have not only stabilized, but memory chips cost up to 20% more than earlier this year.

Attack of the B-Grade Games

The best games on the market are referred to as AAA titles. This refers to the cost required to make them, but it’s often used to indicate the quality of a game title as well. Not every disc you pop in a drive can be God of War, though. Games that honestly give their all deserve at least a little respect; B for effort, as it were.  Read here for the Attack of the B-Grade Games!

From Slashdot

After four months of private beta, Windows Live QnA (Question and Answer) opens to the public today. There is no shortage of question and answer services online, it’s almost becoming a requirement for portals. If the number of users is important in such a service, though, then the Live offering may be particularly appealing as it ramps up.

The service is a whole lot like the popular Yahoo! Answers, which is growing as much as 35% per month. The primary differences being that Live QnA uses tags instead of categories and offers more sophisticated alerts via MSN Alerts. Tags will make the site much easier to explore by clicking through other peoples’ terms of categorization instead of a stab in the dark full text query for terms similar to your own. The service is only available in English so far, but the Live team says to be patient - more languages are on the way.

From Techcrunch

In a move that could lead to some fascinating collaboration, Apple just announced that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined its board of director. As the battle heats up between Google and Microsoft for online services and between Apple and Microsoft for media (not to mention computing) this is an important move that signals an alliance between the companies. Schmidt is now the eighth member of the Apple board.

Google just unveiled its first formal move towards an online office suite Sunday night. Everyone is watching to see how Apple will bring new media content online through iTunes and the company already dominates the portable media market. Could close collaboration between online giant Google and Apple hardware pose the most viable threat yet to Microsoft’s long held personal computing leadership?

From Techcrunch

Microsoft’s long awaited contextual advertising platform, named ContentAds, sent out the first invitations today to prospective participants in its pilot program. Starting on “primarily” (their word) MSN owned sites, Microsoft says that ContentAds will place advertisements using not just keywords but also demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools. Sounds like AdSense plus some consideration of the demographics of various MSN sites’ readership - we’ll see what happens when ContentAds are released into the wild.

More big time competition for Google’s AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and the other players in the field should mean higher revenue cuts for publishers and more innovation in the way ads are served. That’s the theory anyway, though Microsoft’s late and safe entry into the game leaves open the question of whether there will be much innovation here. Come on Microsoft - surprise us!

From Techcrunch

I normally rely on sites such as Techcrunch , Lifehacker and Engadget to tell me what’s new in the world of technology. Acting as an aggregator of sorts, I prefer linking to the important tech happenings of the day. But I came across this interesting site that wasn’t covered by my sources, maybe they did it ages ago, I didn’t bother to find out. So junta here is the Star of the Day.
The site is Zapr.
What it does is create links to any file or folder on your computer and allows you to send these links to friends. They can now download these files through their browser. Security doesn’t seem to be a problem as you have control over the files that are being uploaded. However I haven’t delved too much into the app, why doesn’t someone take a deep good look at it and tell us How, Why, What.

P2P sharing has a new brother now and with increasing network speeds it will soon cease to be the other brother.

Edit This Wired News Story

Reporter Ryan Singel files a 1,000-word story on the wiki phenomenon. In keeping with its spirit, we’re throwing it on a wiki for collaborative editing by our readers. If you don’t participate you can’t complain about the results.

From Wired