Had to take a series of breaks in order to re-do news on Upcoming.org, and now that that’s done, I can return to concentrating on the stuff going on at Etech.
Some of the morning presentations were interesting, including Ray Ozzie’s bridging prototype that enabled copy and paste of structured data through autodetecting microformats and allowing suction into and annotation within the operating system’s clipboard. I’m of the mind that this will provide bountiful functionality for MS to harvest into MS Office by running a clipboard enhancer by default in conjunction with IE7. I think that in order to compete, other PIM apps would also need enhancers running in your taskbar, which seems like a gateway into more taskbar hell. Good idea, but i’m worried about the implications.
The multitouch demo was pretty awesome. I especially liked the multiple video feeds being manipulated in realtime in an unlimited desktop.
Last.fm is doing some pretty awesome stuff, and I think we got a hint into some pretty complex deduplication and validation technology and know-how that these guys have in the area of music. Imagine all the different ways for the public to title and share their music… to be able to say that you’ve got about 8 million “clean” titles is a pretty impressive accomplishment.
I’m sitting in on the playsh – the Playful Shell presentation currently and will write more as time goes on.