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Microsoft chairman and soon-to-retire chief visionary Bill Gates has been touting alternative forms of computer-human interaction for years, such as tablet computing and voice recognition.

On Wednesday, the company said it will deliver on that promise by the end of the year with a device that presents information using an intuitive touch-screen interface based on a display embedded in a table top. The announcement, made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, came at The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference being held this week in Carlsbad, Calif.

Dubbed Microsoft Surface, the computer and its interface is the result of six years of collaboration between the company’s hardware and Microsoft Research (MSR) divisions. But far from being a research project never meant to see the light of day, the company announced four launch customers for the product.

The Surface. Source: Microsoft

That doesn’t mean you can look for them at your neighborhood computer store any time soon. Right now, at least, the devices are too expensive for the average household. While Microsoft would not reveal the actual cost to customers, they will likely range from about $5,000 to $10,000 each, a Microsoft spokesperson told internetnews.com.

Instead, Microsoft intends to sell the first versions to commercial enterprises. Indeed, Microsoft executives see markets for Surface in hundreds of thousands of restaurants, hotels and retail locations.

Ballmer announced that Surface’s launch customers are Harrah’s Entertainment, which is looking to initially install them as virtual concierge kiosks in its seven Las Vegas casinos. Similarly, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide will launch Surface at Sheraton hotels and resorts in its lobbies, including the ability to browse for music and download books with the use of a credit card.

International Game Technology will create gaming devices and systems via a development and distribution agreement with Microsoft – video poker on steroids anyone?

Finally, T-Mobile USA, owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, announced it is looking to use Surface devices as in-store kiosks where customers could compare phones and wireless plans simply by placing them side-by-side on the table top.

“Surface is one example of how we’re turning our stores into a playground where customers can comfortably explore exciting new products in their own personal way,” Bonita Inza, vice president of retail at T-Mobile USA, said in a Microsoft statement.

No Mouse, No Keyboard

First begun as a joint project between MSR researchers and Microsoft’s hardware group in 2001, it has evolved into a commercial product that some analysts say is viable – even innovative.

Surface features a 30-inch diagonal square display built into a table configuration. It consists of a computer running a customized version of Windows Vista, a rear projection screen and five cameras that look through the screen to recognize and read items placed on the surface, as well as to track hand gestures and touch. It has wired 10/100Mbit Ethernet and wireless 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 support built in.

It supports multiple touch points – Microsoft says “dozens and dozens” — as well as multiple users simultaneously, so more than one person could be using it at once, or one person could be doing multiple tasks.

‘Digital’ interaction digitally. Source: Microsoft

The term “surface” describes how it’s used. There is no keyboard or mouse. All interactions with the computer are done via touching the surface of the computer’s screen with hands or brushes, or via wireless interaction with devices such as smartphones, digital cameras or Microsoft’s Zune music player. Because of the cameras, the device can also recognize physical objects; for instance credit cards or hotel “loyalty” cards.

This ability to actually deal with physical objects is one of Surface’s unique capabilities. The idea, said Microsoft, is to bridge the physical and virtual worlds.

“It’s very intuitive to use [and] it’s not like anything else out there,” Matt Rosoff, analyst for consumer strategy and corporate affairs at industry newsletter Directions on Microsoft, told internetnews.com. “It’s a new category [and] I think it’s very innovative.”

Want to move digital pictures around on the tabletop? Use your finger to push them around so you can see them better. Need to resize a favorite shot? Grab two opposite corners with your fingers and drag them apart to enlarge it.

For instance, a user could set a digital camera down on the tabletop and wirelessly transfer pictures into folders on Surface’s hard drive. Or setting a music player down would let a user drag songs from his or her home music collection directly into the player, or between two players, using a finger – or transfer mapping information for the location of a restaurant where you just made reservations through a Surface tabletop over to a smartphone just before you walk out the door.

Plan a day out. Source: Microsoft

And whereas Microsoft usually doesn’t build hardware to sell – like tablet PCs or mobile phones – this time the company smells money.

“We see this as a multi billion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror,” Microsoft CEO Ballmer said in a statement.

When will all this transpire? Surface will begin surfacing at its four partners’ locations by the end of the year, Microsoft says.

Microsoft executives also see broader applications for surface computing, including in schools, businesses and homes and in several form factors, such as built into refrigerators, walls, or counter tops.

And make no mistake, Microsoft intends to sell a lot of Surface devices into consumer householders a few years down the line – hopefully, in three to five years, the spokesperson said.

“It’s what Windows Media Center [Edition] probably should have been,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at research firm Enderle Group told internetnews.com. “Even though it’s not initially slated for your living room, it would fit well there once the price comes down.”

Gates and Apple  CEO Steve Jobs were scheduled to share the stage Wednesday evening for an “unrehearsed, unscripted, onstage conversation” with Journal writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, according to the event’s producers.

Source:  www.internetnews.com

Google has posted a Release Candidate of Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.4, the latest version of its developer tool for building AJAX-based Web applications and sites. Bruce Johnson, technical lead on the project, announced the release candidate on a Googleblog.

GWT 1.4 RC is the first release of the toolkit to make heavy use of contributions from open source developers. Johnson wrote that “Many of the biggest improvements in GWT 1.4 RC came from ideas and patches contributed by the community,” and offered his thanks to the developers.

Johnson said that ImageBundle is the single biggest “have-to-see-it-to-believe-it feature of GWT 1.4 RC.” This feature makes it simple to combine dozens of images into a single “image strip,” like a slide show, so instead of an HTTP request for each image, only one HTTP request is needed for the entire collection.

Version 1.4 features optimized code that is 15 to 20 percent smaller, which should translate into faster load times. Optimizations to the startup sequence should reduce the size of startup script by 80 percent, and elimination of HTTP round-trips could reduce the load time for modules by 33 percent.

Also with this version the RPC is no longer tied exclusively to Java servlets. Developers can connect to their choice of Java back-ends. Cross-site script inclusion is now supported as well.

The library and widget collection have been significantly expanded and enhanced to add new functionality to applications, plus there’s a benchmark for comparing code performance.

Steven Yaskin, chief technology officer of Queplix, said his company has been using GWT to assist in building its services for migrating legacy CRM applications to a Web 2.0 world. After assessing a number of tools, he said he saw a clear advantage in GWT.

“What made us go with GWT was Google showed tremendous commitment to the open source community in general. Since then I think that was one of the greatest decisions we ever made, not just from being endorsed by Google but from a technology point of view as well,” he told internetnews.com.

With the new release, Yaskin has noticed the improvements in performance. “Some preliminary figures show a twenty percent decrease in load time, bringing it closer to or even superseding the desktop experience. The system definitely allowed our product to behave like an installed desktop app while running inside a browser. So we were able to leverage all of the AJAX technologies,” he said.

Google will demonstrate GWT on Thursday at its Google Developer Day conference. It has not set a release date for the final version of GWT.

Source:www.internetnews.com

SAN JOSE, Calif. — With the passing of each fiscal quarter, it’s increasingly clear Google’s got a good thing going connecting the world to the fruits of Web developer labor. And it’s not about to let up.

Today at its Google Developer Day event here, Google vice president Jeff Huber emphasized the search giant’s plans to help developers “integrate, reach and build.” In his keynote address, Huber brought out a series of company engineers to talk about the latest tools, Google Mashup Editor, Mapplets and Gears.

Starting with “integrate,” Google product manager Paul McDonald took the stage to help Huber explain Google Mashup Editor. McDonald said the tool is designed to help developers build mashups –the small Web applications that tap into Google’s various APIs–by providing server, hosting, data bases, and authentication and other Web services, all brought together in a single AJAX interface and coupled with an editing screen and easy access to Google-supported sandbox testing.

Turning to how Google can help developers with “reach,” Huber touted the over 500 million unique visits to Google’s site each month.

“The good news is we like to share,” Huber said. He pointed to the room Google makes for third party Gadgets all over its network. For an example of the kind of impact this sharing can have, Huber pointed to a pair of small, seemingly simple applications–a PacMan gadget and To-Do list gadget–and drew an audible reaction from the audience after telling them those application developers combined to draw over 11 million unique visitors last week alone.

The idea behind Google Mapplets is that it will make these sorts of gadgets easier for developers to combine with Google Maps, thus making them even more appealing to the millions of visitors to Google’s network. Examples Product manager Tai Tran demonstrated WalkJogRun.com, which makes a gadget available for those who want to use a Google Map in planning their exercise routes.

The last product manager to join Huber on stage was Othman Laraki, who detailed the new Google Gears, a Web browser plug-in that allows Web developers to add offline access to Web applications such as Google’s own Gmail.. Google announced it’s already used Gears to adapt its Google Reader application for use offline.

Huber stressed that Google hopes Gears will become an industry standard. Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch, joined Huber on stage and gave Gears a strong endorsement.

Source: www.internetnews.com

SAN FRANCISCO: Google announced Friday that it bought FeedBurner, a firm specializing in delivering podcasts, weblogs, news and advertising to Internet browsers.

Chicago-based FeedBurner is a “web feed” firm that lets online publishers constantly send updated news, commentary and other content directly to readers with tools such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

“We are thrilled with this acquisition,” Google vice president of product management Susan Wojcicki said during a conference call with reporters.

“We believe the two companies are very complementary and it will enable Google to bring hundreds of thousands of new sites into AdSense network.”

Buying FeedBurner lets Google expand its online advertising empire deep into the fast-growing world of direct feeds.

FeedBurner simplified the process by which users create drop-down boxes in browser windows to receive continuous updates from preferred publishers of news, blogs or other web content.

More than 763,000 “live feeds” run through FeedBurner daily delivering content from approximately 430,000 publishers including major news organizations, said co-founder and “new Google executive” Dick Costolo.

“The number of feed publishers continues to explode and the number of people subscribing has exploded,” Costolo said during the conference call.

“The spiraling complexity we are seeing in the world of media distribution is not over. FeedBurner’s focus is providing the right media to the right end-point.”

Along with news companies instantly updating Internet users merchants are increasingly using the technique to spread word of special offers, such as travel companies sending alerts about seasonal deals, Costolo said.

FeedBurner also excels at tracking what people are reading or watching and which ads are hitting their marks, according to Wojcicki. Google has a proven mastery of targeting ads to online search results.

“The opportunity it fills for Google is we have not been as active in providing a monetization option for feeds and that is what FeedBurner does,” Wojcicki said.

“We want AdWords advertisers to have access to the feeds and publishers on FeedBurner to have access to other Google services. We think this will be a win with users, publishers and advertisers.”

Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed. According to some reports Google was to pay 100 million dollars for FeedBurner, which raised 10 million dollars in venture capital since its launch in 2004.

Costolo and Wojciki said the companies were intent on quickly integrating FeedBurner into Google.

FeedBurner’s headquarters will remain in Chicago but its workers will spend a lot of time in Google offices worldwide to weave its technology into the Mountain View, California-company’s global operations, Costolo said.

“The overlap with the depth and breadth of services that Google provides is almost too perfect,” Costolo said. “The reason we are both excited by this relationship is the ability to make one plus one equal three.”