Web 2.0 debates internet's future: BBC

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Opening up internet programming was a central theme of Web 2.0

San Francisco's Web 2.0 Expo conference brought together thousands of people responsible for crafting the future direction of the internet, and the world of applications - or apps - was front and centre.

Everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo to MySpace was on a mission to woo developers to create exciting applications for their devices.

Jennifer Pahlka of Techweb, one of the conference's co-chairs, said the carrot these big Silicon Valley companies were dangling to entice developers to get involved was that of openness and allowing people to devise programmes without constraints.

"Yahoo was talking about opening up advertising platforms, Mozilla was talking about opening up the mobile web and John Zittrain from Oxford University was talking about openness to drive innovation and creativity so we don't go into this closed system where every application has to be approved by someone else," said Ms Pahlka.

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Semantic video analysis, Finding the right picture: Economist

Apr 22nd 2008

From Economist.com

"Engineers are making progress with the old problem of getting computers to recognise what they are looking at

A PICTURE may be worth a thousand words, but as far as a computer is concerned it is worth exactly none. One of the biggest impediments to the web-video revolution has been computers' reluctance to understand images. To a microprocessor, a photograph of James Bond might as well depict a cat in a tree. That can make tracking down a video on the web or searching through a film archive a painstaking task, unless someone has written a full and accurate description of each item being examined. Anyone who has tried to find a clip on YouTube will know how rare that is."

For more please click on the following original link: Finding the right picture