Plant Blog

Trailer for Project Re: Brief. More from Project Re: Brief.

Elevation Partners and Facebook investor Roger McNamee, who is also a rock musician, gave an amazing talk recently where he goes over some of the biggest trends affecting the technology industry.

(On HTML5):
HTML5 is going to change everything. “In HTML5, an ad is an app, a tweet is an app, everything is an app.” “It’s a blank sheet of paper, and creativity rules again.”

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Google is introducing a “Like” button. The +1 button. Check it out.

Some interesting talk about HTML5, video on the web and the development of web applications from the Google I/O conference held May 19-20, 2010. Check out Clicker.tv now for a great HTML5-based user experience.

Check out Googles Holiday Logo gallery

Google have once again released the years trends in seraches in the form of the Google Zeitgeist.

It shows the trends, issues, topics and other popular cultural phenomenon that occured throughout the year, and their relative impact on the search queries of Google users.

It’s a really interesting look into what was intruiging people throughout the year, and it’s great to see large companies like Google releasing this sort of information for public consumption.

Update (20/11/2008): Less than five months after launch, Google is shutting down virtual world Lively.

Original post:

3D chat is not dead even though Second Life lost quite a bit of its hype.

“Create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design” is the promise from Lively - a new service. Check out this blog post from LiveSide for the scoop on some 3D chat services from Microsoft, Google and others.

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Google have recently released a new API for working with different languages.

The 2 main functions are Language Detection and Translation.

With Language detection, a string of text is fed into the API, and the result is the language that the text is written. It even sends back a percentage value illustrating how accurate the results are. This is a nice feature, knowing that the same words can and do exist in multiple languages.

The translation feature simply takes a string in one of the supported languages and converts in to another language of your choosing.

The applications of this API could be quite intruiging. Educational, recreational and instructional uses come immediately to mind, so it will be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe some language schools could have some fun with it in their advertising campaigns? It’s easy to imagine a banner ad or microsite challenging potential students to test their level of knowledge of a particular language as a way of recruiting new schools. Perhaps even a as an automated tool to determine what class level a given student should be put in.

Sadly, Danish is not currently one of the supported languages, while Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish are missing also, meaning those of us working on localized versions of sites in Scandinavia are out of luck for now. Hopefully as the usage and development of the tools increase, so will the list of supported languages and thus possibilities.

Source: Google Ajax Search API Blog