Here is a new video of the “Sugar” user interface. OLPC is working with Red Hat on a Linux kernel for the machine, but are opening up the design; it is inevitable that there will be several variants of Linux to choose from.

Now imagine is this is souped iwth with XGL, Beryl, Compiz and all the other good stuff. But again you have to think about the power restrictions on this machine. As it is, during daylight, the users switch to monochrome.

For the best part of this year and most of last year, the new buzz word is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has come to represent a new generation of web technologies to the developers and the social community alike. Web 2.0 while representing large fonts and bright colors and curvy corners, also ushers in a new age of standards such as CSS, XHTML, data transfer and sharing standards like XML and accessibility standards for the visually impaired(remember the Target fiasco). There exists this delicate balance between creativity and supporting standards and this is hard to achieve and for the longest time, one tool has dominated the web design and development world was Macromedia Dreamweaver. Adobe scooped up Macromedia and trying to drive the next generation web development through further upgrades of Dreamweaver. It seems that Microsoft got tired of relying on FrontPage and is actually going after professionals.Microsoft finally drank the Kool-Aid. Now, Microsoft has entered the arena with Expression Web Designer which walks the Web standards walk. But is it a worthy competitor or just a new technology out there? We at Askstudent looked at the latest beta release(CTP) of Expression web designer and perform a comparison of Microsoft’s product with Adobe Dreamweaver 8, the latest stable release of Dreamweaver.

Installation

You can download the latest Beta release of Microsoft Expression Web from Microsoft’s Expression Site. I installed this with my OS as Windows Vista RC2 and I was running the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh. The only thing you need to take care of is if you did not upgrade to technical refresh of the Office 2007 version, you might want to do so. Also, you need to download and install .Net Framework 2.0, but , if you have Vista installed, Framework 2.0 is already installed. Downside: There is no OSX version which is negative as most of the web design community tends to use an Apple machine. However, with Bootcamp, this problem can be mitigated on an Apple machine. Again, Microsoft’s expression is Windows only and according to Microsoft, there is no planned release for OS X any time soon.

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Yahoo! shopping is now easier than ever with the launch of its newly redesigned shopping site. While Google’s shopping site Froogle , applies the power of Google’s search technology to one very specific task: locating sellers that offer the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can buy it, Yahoo shopping is the much more traditional shopping site where people can search for almost 70 million products organized by merchant, brand, popularity or price.

This newly redesigned site boasts of a more snappier look integrated with lots of new tools and personalization features - just in time for the holidays. The improved interface helps its consumers to find and compare products easily, and features a new Bargains Center where they round up sales, coupons, free shipping offers, rebates and more from across the Internet.

Yahoo! Shopping has also added the integration of Yahoo! Answers throuhout the site, allowing buyers to tap into the experience and advice of other online shoppers for real world advice and other product recommendations to help them make more informed purchasing decisions.

“When we asked people, as part of our research, what they wanted from Yahoo! Shopping, it boiled down to three things: a great deal; learn from other people’s experiences before they buy, and find products quickly and easily,” said Chris Saito, senior director at Yahoo! Shopping. “Our new Bargains Center, Yahoo! Answers integration, and improved shopping search make it easier than ever for consumers to find the best product at the right price.”

A recent Yahoo! study found that 60 percent of Yahoo! Shopping users consider themselves bargain hunters. With the new Yahoo! Shopping Bargains Center, shoppers can easily find all of the gifts they are looking for at the best possible price, without having to visit multiple stores or websites. The Bargains Center is a one-stop shop where users can find sales, coupons, free shipping offers, rebates and more. Consumers can search by merchant, type of product or item popularity to find what they are looking for, as well as search coupons by merchants to find bargains from their favorite brand or retailer. In addition, users of My Yahoo! can add the Popular Products and Deals module available on Yahoo! Shopping to their My Yahoo! page.

So, dig in and check out what’s there!

The Apple community has, since the beginning of time or well… atleast since its inception, has largely been immunie to attacks that regularly plague the internet community. Remember Nimda, Blaster, Slammer… yup. While you spend your time cursing Microsoft or your not so smart Anti Virus solution so prone to failure from zero day attacks, the Apple fanboys respond — they don’t have to worry about such nonsense. Apple’s general lack of concern towards viruses and malware was based on solid grounds. Their core kernel, based on secure Unix components for its underlying Operating System foundation, in itself makes the mac less vulnerable to malicious code. The other significant factor was that the Apple base wasn’t simply big enough for hackers to devote their attention to. Hackers crave attention … they want headlines also if possible bring in some moolah through their efforts among other things. The Apple community comprised of less that 5% of the overall PC market,so why not spend as much time, maybe even less creating something that will affect the remaining 95%.

However that is all changing. The iPod craze is translating into more customers for Apple. According to Apple’s most recent earning statement, Apple sold a bit north of 830,000 Macs in their last quarter, up 6% from their previous quarter. Apple’s market share is still in the single digits, but I can say for a fact that Apple is back. Thus, the slow but steady growth in the number of Mac users, is starting to make it an attractive target for malicious hackers.

And, we are starting to see this happen. This interest is translating into the discovery of more system vulnerabilities. Security vendor Internet Security Systems found that there were three times as many vulnerabilities found for the Macintosh in May of this year as there. Security supplier McAfee found that the number of vulnerabilities for the Macintosh went up 228 percent, compared to a 78 percent increase for Microsoft Windows, from 2003 to 2005.

In February 2006, the first worm designed for Mac OS X appeared. Named “OSX/Leap.A,” it is an instant messaging worm capable of infecting Mac applications. In addition, a handful of other attacks, focusing on items such as the Apple’s Safari browser and the Mac’s Bluetooth connectivity, have taken place.

In November 06, we see the release of a new worm for Apple named ‘Opener’. As first reported on The Mac Observer October 25, security experts discovered the virus entitled ‘Opener’, or ‘Renepo’ (opener spelled backwards), disguising itself as a shell script.

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A sitemap is a simple XML file which webmasters place in the root of their site to submit their pages for spidering and indexing by search engines. A sitemap is not just restricted to information about the URL’s and the frequently changing pages at web sites, but also could include meta information about those URLs such as when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important a particular URL is , releative to other URLs in the site and also geo-location data, so that these search engines can more intelligently crawl and index the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Google was the first of the search engines to release Sitemaps almost a year ago. Now, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, in an encouraging act of parternship announced today that they will begin to use the same sitemap protocol to index websites around the world. The new parternship is based out of sitemaps.org, which has lots of instructions for web masters on how to generate a standards compliant XML file on their servers which all three engines can then use to track updates to webpages.

The protocol is offered under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, so it can be used by any search engine, derivative variations using the same license can be created and it can be used for commercial purposes.

Any time competitors agree on open standards, that’s an enabler of further innovation and something to celebrate. It’s also great to see Creative Commons receiving all the more validation.

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan wrote the following tonight about the move.

Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.

Several people have made early public statements indicating that the next move will be to develop meaningful standards support for robots.txt files. Imagine a future when these players agree on standards for user control of data, microformats or truly neutral party click-fraud tracking and prevention.

Shmuel Tennenhaus has just compiled an incredible video on his YouTube channel exposing some of the potential for fraud that exists on the YouTube platform.

Specifically, Shmuly has uncovered some of the dirt on this week’s #1 subscribed to YouTube channel, “SupermanReturnsDVD.”

While it’s not out of the realm of reality to suggest that the Man of Steel could rise to the level of YouTube stardom, realizing some of the tricks that Warner Brothers may be using to push the release of the Superman Returns DVD to the top of YouTube’s subscription list opens a rusty can of kryptonite on this whole marketing attempt.

Shmuly points out that there have been over 7,500 subscribers to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel just this week. However, there are only 9 videos in the channel, and there have been less video views than actual subscribers. In other words, more “people” have subscribed to the channel than actual videos viewed, which as Shmuly comments on, is simply ridiculous.

Additionally, many of the accounts subscribing to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel were created within the past week, have no favorites listed, have made no comments, have no friends, and are just linked to the SupermanReturnsDVD channel.

Perhaps even more disturbing in this context is the threats from Time Warner to sue YouTube for use of its material as copyright infringement. Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, said in October:

“If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along.”

For full article check out this article on costpernews

Established in July 2003, The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet. Firefox users and fans were always at the forefront in their effort to speak out for their favorite browser and express themselves in front of a worldwide audience.

The ad campaigns are usually promoted by Spread Firefox, a volunteer run Mozilla advocacy site, with over 50,000 registered members. During this phase of Firefox 1.0 promotion, community marketing into the mainstream was mainly through written testimonials.

#5: NY Times Spread Firefox Ad:

The Mozilla Foundation, places a two page ad in the December 16th 2004 edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to support the launch of the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

A year later after the NY Times Ad, Firefox 1.5 was released and during this phase, the Mozilla Foundation started a contest, promising prizes for users who submit the best homemade 30-second Firefox advertisements.

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Like.com promises to be the next biggest thing in search. So, how is like.com different than any other search engine. Like.com is a visual search engine, allowing us to search for items by their appearance, rather than just text. Their theme could have been ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and it would be so true.

A lot of you might have been well aware of Riya. Riya was one of the first darlings on the web 2.0 world. It lauched with the objective to make facial and object search as simple and easy to use as text search.

What Riya used to be? Riya’s original theme was to use face recognition to make personal photos identifiable without explicitly tagging them or using labels. Riya’s method proved to be so popular that to date, they have over 10 Million photos uploaded by users in around 7 months. Comparing them to the most popular photo management and sharing application right now, Flickr took around 2 years to hit its 10 Million photo mark.

So what algorithmic prowess powered Riya? Riya performed its image recognition tasks based on a learning system which probabilisticly just learns whether the face is right or wrong. Keep feeding the system examples and achieve a base line to determine whether or not the answer returned matches the query performed. It also used contextual recognition to identify a face based on their nose, jewellery, clothes etc.

The switch from Riya to Like.com: According to Riya’s CEO Munjal Shah, where riya.com represented the company web 1.0 effort, like.com is their web 2.0 front. One of the reasons for their switch was that riya’s customer base did not search their own photos everyday. An equally important reason was that riya1.0 did not allow them to make any money out of it. Hence when they switched to like.com, they are focussed on products which together constitute a $30 Billion online market.Imagine the power to be able to take this industry to a whole different level by allowing people to search for exactly what they want and not just describe what they want as they do through any other search engine.

Motive behind like.com and how Riya managed to acquire it. Like.com is being built as a visual search engine, looking for things that are similar. Like.com fits the bill perfectly. As expected, like.com was not a domain that was freely available. In order to acquire this domain, looking up the owner through whois or emailing him did not work. So they tracked him down to his address, left a nice bottle of champagne along with their contact info. That seemed to have done the trick as the guy calls Riya back and bought it out for $100,000. Other names which Riya considered for their new initiative was better.com which was being quoted at $450,000. In the end, like.com it was. This is a pretty smart move too with respect to search engine rankings as any query you type in say ” I really like the Halo Master Chief costume” and you can be sure, like.com would be right up there with an answer to your query.

So, what is like.com. What are the brains behind it.. and what about the people behind this brain? Like is a visual search engine, the first on the web, where you can submit a photo as your query. Right now, for their initial launch, the search works best for aesthetic products such as shoes, shirts, jewellery, handbags. This is a feature lacking in most of the search engines out there as it is something that can’t be described in text… stuff with designs, china patterns in anything less than a paragraph. They are launching with about 200 merchants such as Amazon, eLuxury, ice.com, ShoeBuy, Zappos etc and about 2 million unique products. However, expect this number to significantly grow within the next couple of weeks. They are launching with 1000 cores or 250 servers with 16Gigs of RAM on each of these machines to handle the tremendous amount of image processing. This huge amount of processing power is needed because like also lets you dig into more details of a picture which compare a section of the visual signature of each product and then compare it against other sections of each product. Say, you like the buckle of a handbag, you can then go search for other similar handbags which have that kind of buckle. Also, when people start uploading pictures for comparison, image quality does matter. The system also has a full text based search engine too, you can drill down by brand name too if you so desire.

Interesting facts about like.com

1. To perform all of this computation, Riya had about 14PHds to develop the core algorithm and another 20 Engineers to build the product.

2. All of their coding is done in C++ for the core algorithms and Java for the backend.

3. When Riya’s Software engineers tried to convert the math algorithms to Java, the speed was 6 times slower.. surprise. Apparantly C++’s math libraries and its ability to churn out matrix multiplications or linear algebra in a superior fashion did the trick.

4. Like.com is totally free and they get paid when you click through the item and purchase something or cost per action. They also make money through the traditional CPC or per click off a product. What this means is that they are making money as an affiliate of these retail sites, meaning it gets paid about a 10% commission on a sale to a customer it sent to an online retailer. So, Riya found its business model in fashion.

5. Like.com is advertising free… so you won’t find any Google or Yahoo ads in there.

6. Riya’s web crawlers indexed the highest resolution pictures from the merchants first so as to allow their customers to further drill down into a picture for any patterns they might be looking at.

7. Each picture uploaded into like’s database has an average size of 10k. So if you take at the 10Million pictures uploaded, that would be about 100,000 Gigs or about a 200×200 GB HDD on each server at least. And plus, you have to allocate for further growth.

8. Like’s face similarity operation failed while their algorithm performed extremely well for shopping. Hence they went with a focus on shopping where the user expections are such that they can succeed and through their user testing, they concluded that their face detection might never be good enough.

9. One of the company’s mottos: “Go where the ball rolls downhill “

10. Before like.com rolled out, 95% of the people who used riya.com were men. With like.com they are focussing on Jewelry, handbags and clothing a multi billion dollar business and targetting women between 20 to 30 years old.

11. At Riya, of the 45 people in the company, 38 code.

12. Riya came pretty close to bring bought out by Google

13. Munjal Shaw, the CEO of Riya, uses a MacBook.

An example Say I like Brad Pitt’s watch in this picture. Once you click on the ‘likeness search’, which is basically a search by appearance and it finds things that look similar.When a user performs this search, like looks at the Shape, texture, color and other 20 factors that are details like sheen, color gradiant, glossy or shiny.. all of which gets converted to a visual signature for the shoe which is encoded into a 10k vector for each shoe. All these 10k vectors are then compared within the limited time to produce the results for the user. Each of these 10K vector images consist of about 5000 numbers. The “likeness” algorithm determines the order of the results based on the shape, color and pattern. “We are extracting and computing the visual signatures and pulling out pieces for comparison,” Shah said. “The results will never be worse than a text search. We index all the metadata and even normalized some of it.”

Now, our search result for the shoes shown in Brad Pitt’s picture gives back over 5087 similar shoe results. You can then drill down based on what factors are more important to you. Using a slider, users can filter out the results to find the product they desire based on the color of the shoe,the shape of the shoe or the design of the original shoe in the picture. You can also pick based on your price range, a different color or a particular brand or from a particular merchant. Another neat feature is that you can drill down into something you particularly like in the original picture.

Negatives so far:

1. Like.com does not have an upload feature yet. So all you can do right now is browse through pre-determined images on celebrities and other products already uploaded and properly trained into Like’s algorithm.

2. Like.com is pretty good about finding what people want, but are they pretty good at finding the best deals. People go to sites such as woot, or pricewatch to find the best deals. A shopper online is a smart shopper. He/she wants to find the best deals at the cheapest price. Sure you can select the price range, but would Riya go out of its way to make sure its the best possible deal for their customer? I dont know about that.

What would be really neat to have…

1. The CEO of Riya and Like, Munjal Shah mentions that they are also working on a toolbar or browser extention, so that you can right click and submit it for a likeness search while you are surfing the web. A possible option would be work with browsers like flock which integrate photobucket and flickr into their browser. Working with these guys would give an added advantage besides building a cross browser web extension.

2. A smart phone/cell phone version or anything that is mobile and can take pictures and upload it and be able to find similar items like makes like the next killer application. A sample scenario could be you driving on the highway and see this really neat plasma tv on a giant bill board. You can always come back to your place and do a research on items you think might be that TV, but being able to take a picture of that plasma tv, and do a ‘likeness search’ for similar items with prices and opinions shown is killer.

More links to know about Riya and like.com’s launch and reviews

1. Video interview of Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya talking about Riya and like.com at Scobleizer

2. Product demo of like.com on Scobleizer

3. like.com review at TechCrunch

4. Google/Riya acquisition rumors 11/2005