Google Doing Real-time Translation

Google Talk Gets One Step Closer To The Ultimate Babel Fish:

(Duncan Riley) “…Google now offers instant machine translation in Google Talk, a step on the road to the ultimate Babel Fish. The new service is used by adding a translation bot to a Google Talk chat, for example adding en2zh@bot.talk.google.com provides a translation from English to Chinese. The bot can be used as a direct look up tool for a translation, or in a group chat for translation on the fly as part of a conversation. For a two way conversation two bots are required, one for the English to other language translation, and one for the other language back into English…”

Intel Kicks up the Speed…

Intel Readies Mobile Platform Refresh, Launches Solid-State Drive – Yahoo! News:

(Antoine Gonsalves, InformationWeek) “For video game and computer enthusiasts, Intel plans to release in the first quarter of next year the 45-nanometer Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Processor, a quad-core product with a clock speed of 3.2 GHz and a system bus of 1,600 MHz. Along with the processor will be the X48 Express Chipset. Also in the first quarter, Intel plans to release for computer enthusiasts an eight-core platform code-named Skulltrail. The platform comprises two Core 2 Extreme quad-core processors and four PCI Express x16 Gen 1.1 slots for up to four graphics cards…”

Vista Missing Projections

IT Pros Grapple With Timing Of Windows Vista Deployment – Yahoo! News:

(Nicholas Hoover, InformationWeek) “Windows Vista’s first service pack was released for another round of testing last week, with a final version due early in 2008. SP1 for a new Windows operating system has long been regarded as a green light for business adoption, a signal that the kinks had been worked out. This time may be different. Gartner recently issued a report saying that companies have “significantly delayed” Vista adoption–and warning that it wouldn’t be prudent to skip Vista altogether and wait for its successor…”

Live Stream from your Cell

Qik streams live video from cell to Web:

(Mike Butcher, TechCrunch) “Robert Scoble has gone wild for a new video streaming service for cellphones called Qik. It vaguely competes with Kyte, Seesmic and Ustream, but is perhaps closest to Kyte. Qik enables live video casting from a cell phone via any 3G/GPRS/Wi-fi Internet connection.”

Cisco Reaching Past the Router

A New Blueprint for Cisco:

(Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek) “Now, Ratzlaff, 47, Cisco’s director of user experience, hopes to borrow a page from his old employer. He and his dozen-or-so staffers have created a blueprint for how Cisco’s products should work together for customers. With the support of CEO John Chambers and other top brass, they are trying to impose it on the San Jose company.”

Google’s Grassy Knol

A Few Thoughts On Google Knol:

(Michael Arrington, TechCrunch) “News of Google most recent project, Knol, came out late last Thursday without, as far as I can tell, much in the way of press pre-briefings. All the major publications were late to the story. Blogs hit it fast, but had nothing to go on other than the brief blog post put up by Google’s Udi Manber announcing the project. Our initial story on Knol is here. From a product perspective, Knol is not much different than existing products like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine.”

Shared Web App Hosing

(TechCrunch) Making and hosting a web application just got a whole lot easier. Y Combinator’s AppJet has just launched a website where you can write and run hosted applications right in your browser. The system is currently pretty basic, but aims to add levels of sophistication in the coming year.